[HN Gopher] Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industr...
___________________________________________________________________
Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on
the cassette
Author : rcarmo
Score : 198 points
Date : 2023-07-26 07:41 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openculture.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openculture.com)
| jacquesm wrote:
| "Home taping is killing music"
|
| The record companies did a fantastic job of killing music all by
| themselves, the quality has absolutely cratered and the
| occasional great artist that has made it through the long slog to
| recognition has done so despite the music industry, not because
| of.
|
| I spent a fortune on various formats and when streaming came
| along I simply refused to participate. I'm simply not going to
| pay a third time for music that I already legally own.
|
| Note that the following was written well before streaming came
| along, but it is an excellent article on the realities of the
| music industry from the artists perspective written by Janis Ian:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20070509181400/http://www.janisi...
|
| There is a fair chance that if you're under 40 that you've never
| heard of her, but I suggest you give her music a try as well, it
| is at least as good as her writing.
|
| And another one by Courtney Love:
|
| https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
| cubefox wrote:
| > The record companies did a fantastic job of killing music all
| by themselves
|
| It wasn't the record companies which ruined the music industry.
| It was us, the consumers. We ruined it with piracy.
|
| https://i.insider.com/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000
|
| We always like to imagine big organizations as the "baddies",
| and us as the "goodies". But the reality doesn't always follow
| this convenient narrative. Sometimes it turns out _we_ were the
| baddies all along.
| Vespasian wrote:
| It looks way different if you include data of the last 14
| years though (even inflation adjusted)
|
| https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/
| cubefox wrote:
| This isn't inflation adjusted as far as I can see. Even if
| it were, the revenue now should be _much_ higher than in
| 1999, given that the world economy grew a lot since then.
| Here is an actual inflation adjusted chart, which looks
| pretty damning:
|
| https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/06/...
| Kuinox wrote:
| You are trying to collerate loss of revenue with the loss
| caused by piracy, without any data of loss caused by piracy.
|
| Also, showing a graph without the last 10 years is making the
| data lying: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database
|
| The music industry earnings has never been that high than
| today.
|
| Also, actual studies shows piracy helped sales, not hindered
| earnings: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-
| finds-piracy...
| cubefox wrote:
| > You are trying to collerate loss of revenue with the loss
| caused by piracy, without any data of loss caused by
| piracy.
|
| The only explanation for the complete collapse of CD sales
| starting in 1999 is piracy. Napster & Co. Anything else is
| dishonest.
|
| > Also, showing a graph without the last 10 years is making
| the data lying: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database
|
| No, _this_ data is lying because it ignores inflation. Here
| is an inflation adjusted chart, which shows a massive drop
| in revenue:
|
| https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/06/...
|
| Moreover, even if revenue were on the same level today as
| it was more than 20 years ago, which it isn't, this would
| ignore the fact that in the meantime the global economy has
| increased substantially, such that the revenue without
| piracy would be much higher than back then.
|
| > Also, actual studies shows piracy helped sales, not
| hindered earnings:
|
| This is about video games and highly speculative. For music
| there is overwhelming evidence that piracy completely
| crushed the CD market.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| About a decade ago there used to be a site in the Polish
| internet called "Strata Kazika" (Kazik's Loss). At that
| time Kazik was one of the most vocal anti-piracy artists
| who equaled copying to stealing.
|
| So the site's shtick was to take Kazik's newest album and
| copy it. Then delete to make place for another copy. In a
| loop. The site then counted how much money has been
| already stolen from Kazik in the process, and you could
| also copy albums by yourself locally and report it on the
| site, incrementing the overall counter. I have to admit
| that I have participated in this highly unethical venture
| myself, and as far as I remember we have collectively
| managed to steal billions of dollars this way.
|
| We were supposed to split our loot and all get super
| rich. However, the site isn't available anymore. I
| suspect its author simply took the money and ran away...
| cubefox wrote:
| > About a decade ago there used to be a site in the
| Polish internet called "Strata Kazika" (Kazik's Loss). At
| that time Kazik was one of the most vocal anti-piracy
| artists who equaled copying to stealing.
|
| This is highly irrelevant. I didn't say anything about
| stealing. The actual music revenue collapsed starting
| from 1999. Due to pure magic apparently!
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Of course industry's revenue will collapse when you steal
| billions from them, duh. After all, we all know there's
| no other rational reason for these profits to plummet
| than piracy... It's not like people's habits and
| technology has significantly changed around that time.
| cubefox wrote:
| Yeah. The new habit was to illegally download music from
| the Web instead of buying it on CD or from iTunes. Or do
| you think that around the millennium, people suddenly
| lost interest in music?
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| I grew up during that time and I simply had _no proper
| options_ to get music in a convenient digital way long
| after it became technologically possible. When something
| actually appeared, it was either DRMed or unacceptably
| lossy for the price (or both). How can anyone be
| surprised that people stopped giving money when it was
| made so hard for them to give money?
|
| I ended up with a personal collection of CDs for other
| reasons anyway, but the music industry simply did nothing
| to meet the demand and gave up the playing field to
| Spotify and Apple on their own chord. Look at last.fm for
| what happened when someone wanted to step into the XXI
| century while respecting the music industry rules.
| Kuinox wrote:
| There is so much evidence you failed to source it.
| rawTruthHurts wrote:
| I'd say it was more like a joint effort. I agree with your
| points, but I was related to the industry for some time, and
| sometimes money was spent on things like renting a Concorde
| flight for some exec in France because he was making it late
| to a meeting in NY.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The number of consumers that pirated music increased mostly
| because the record companies missed the boat in the third
| round of being able to sell us the same music. They quite
| literally sat on their hands for years while there was huge
| demand for online music. iTunes finally served that demand
| and Apple made a bundle of money on that.
|
| Before that CDs sold for twice the amount that the original
| records cost when they came out ('they will last forever, and
| they're as good as the original masters').
|
| You seem to have a strong conviction that piracy killed the
| music industry but they didn't need our help to do so, the
| quality on offer went down, the back catalog is large enough
| to sustain you for a lifetime (or even longer) and given the
| choice between something modern and something old I find
| myself picking 'something old' more and more frequently.
| There are some exceptions, but these are happening with lower
| frequency every year. It's probably a function of getting
| older but I'd just as soon listen to an old record by Kate
| Bush, 10CC, or a classical recording from the 1950's or 60's
| than that I will listen to something new that doesn't
| register with me. I can't remember when I last had the radio
| on, the only one I have is in the car and I probably didn't
| even bother plugging in the antenna.
|
| Piracy had absolutely nothing to do with it - for me. I spent
| a small fortune on music and would have been happy to
| continue to do so. But the innovators dilemma is harsh and
| the music industry was too caught up in combating piracy to
| see that installing root kits on people's computers (Sony) or
| suing your artists (everybody else) is bad policy for a
| middle man. And so they faded. A bit late, perhaps, but I
| think it was inevitable. The ones (labels, not artists) that
| survive into the streaming era are doing well enough
| financially, but the music they put out just isn't compelling
| to me.
|
| To this day there is a levy on any storage medium that goes
| to the local equivalent of the RIAA.
| cubefox wrote:
| > The number of consumers that pirated music increased
| mostly because the record companies missed the boat in the
| third round of being able to sell us the same music. They
| quite literally sat on their hands for years while there
| was huge demand for online music. iTunes finally served
| that demand and Apple made a bundle of money on that.
|
| That's not true. iTunes or Spotify did not nearly
| compensate for lost CD revenue.
|
| https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/06/...
| jacquesm wrote:
| There is no 'right to revenue', iTunes or Spotify did not
| compensate because they are different media with
| different usage patterns and a different audience. It
| would be far more surprising if they did compensate it.
|
| You are making the same mistake that software companies
| mad(k)e when talking about revenue and losses due to
| piracy: not every copy made is a lost sale and depending
| on the price points and other business model parameters
| you can find sustainability or lack thereof in many
| different places of the parameter space.
|
| There is a pretty good chance that _if_ the record
| companies had not sat on their hands lamenting all this
| online piracy and _if_ they had provided a good
| alternative timely that those streaming revenues would be
| a lot higher today.
|
| I simply stopped buying music around that time, and I
| don't have a feeling I missed out on anything. The very
| few things I love that you could call modern are by
| unsigned artists who are more than happy to put their art
| out there because they love making good stuff, not
| necessarily because they are going for a huge commercial
| success.
|
| Record companies are very much like start-up
| accelerators: they are entirely optional.
|
| sidenote: I think posting the same link over and over
| again in a single thread is not a very nice thing to do,
| even if you believe it shows you are right (which it
| doesn't...).
| cubefox wrote:
| > There is no 'right to revenue', iTunes or Spotify did
| not compensate because they are different media with
| different usage patterns and a different audience.
|
| No, because they had to compete against music piracy,
| which is hard, as pirated music is free.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You seem to be stuck in a loop, I'm bowing out but much
| good luck with your frustrations. It's almost as if this
| is personal for you.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| I think we found Sony Music CEO in the disguise. He is so
| adamantly defending the record companies, without
| explicitly saying that, what it's almost funny. Except
| it's not.
| cubefox wrote:
| You are demonizing "record companies" when the people
| suffering from it are actual, living, musicians. It is
| always easy and convenient to not see the fault with
| ourselves, but with some big organization.
| cubefox wrote:
| You just didn't provide any argument that piracy didn't
| cause the observed collapse of the music industry.
| rini17 wrote:
| You just didn't provide any argument that piracy did
| cause the observed collapse of the music industry. You
| believe the business model based on selling overpriced
| media and feeding most of it into advertising instead of
| paying artists, was sustainable?
| cubefox wrote:
| The launch of Napster in 1999 is the most likely
| explanation for the massive drop in CD sales starting in
| 1999. Do you have any alternative explanation?
| rini17 wrote:
| It needs no alternative explanation. Napster was so
| successful because customers hated existing options. You
| imply it's wholly their fault?
| cubefox wrote:
| No, I imply it's mostly our fault. (Why "their"? You were
| part of us too, admit it.) The proof is that we didn't
| start buying music even when it was perfectly possible to
| do so. We kept pirating because it was free. iPods could
| hold thousands of songs. Who would buy them on iTunes?
| Almost nobody of course. Downloadable music sales never
| nearly reached dimensions of CD sales. Until Spotify
| offered impossibly low flat rate pricing so that pirating
| wasn't worth the inconvenience. For some people, at
| least.
| giantrobot wrote:
| That's ludicrous. The start of CD sales decline was after
| a decade and a half of massive CD sales. The market for
| new CDs was saturated.
|
| You assertion (and that of record companies) conveniently
| ignores the fact that through the 90s long out of print
| albums were re-released on CD. For a great many artists
| it was the first time their work had been in print in
| decades. So CD sales in the 90s had an enormous boost of
| nostalgia sales.
|
| Furthermore sales of new music through the 90s was
| further buoyed by new genres. Hip hop exploded was a
| footnote in the 80s and exploded in the 90s. Pop country
| (Garth Brooks etc) also exploded in popularity.
|
| Every Boomer that wanted a copy of Sgt Pepper owned a
| copy. If they bought their top dozen albums or some
| compilations with chart toppers they were basically set
| for music. When they bought iPods they took that
| collection of CDs and loaded them onto their iPods.
|
| The volume of music piracy was nothing compared to the
| size of the Boomer economic bloc.
|
| The piracy assertion also hilariously ignores the changes
| in media. In the 90s most music buyers in the US didn't
| have an option to buy singles. Most acts no longer
| released singles. So a buyer wanting one or two songs had
| to pay $15+ for a whole album of filler. Much to the glee
| of record executives.
|
| With the iTunes Music Store debut in 2003 buyers could
| suddenly buy just the one or two songs they liked for a
| dollar each. They might ultimately spend $15 but they got
| 15 songs they actually wanted. They also of course had
| their existing CD collection to source music from. This
| again led to saturation, most people don't buy tens of
| thousands of songs. If you have about 300 pop songs
| (~4min) you've got a playlist that can play all day
| without repeating.
|
| After 1999 CD sales started to decline once the nostalgia
| market got saturated and dropped even more once buyers
| could buy only the tracks they actually wanted. Most
| bands are lucky to produce an album worth of good songs
| over a half dozen separate album releases. The sales left
| after the nostalgia market dropped off was largely just
| new music sales.
| Karunamon wrote:
| That's not how it works. You didn't provide any kind of
| proof that it did.
| cubefox wrote:
| The launch of Napster in 1999 is the most likely
| explanation for the massive drop in CD sales starting in
| 1999. Do you have any alternative explanation?
| Karunamon wrote:
| Again, that's not how it works. It's your job to
| substantiate your hypothesis. Whether I can come up with
| alternatives or not it is immaterial to whether Napster
| caused it or not.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > compensate for lost CD _revenue_
|
| Oh poor, poor Sony/BMG/EMI CEOs who absolutely couldn't
| buy another yacht while lowering their expenses by
| literally making money out of thin air by literally
| _copying_ digital music. /me wets a handkerchief with
| the tears of compassion.
|
| You are spamming that graph, but only because you think
| it supports your opinion.
|
| Except it does not. Go to RIAA, select Adjusted for
| inflation and select _all years_.
|
| You would see what by 2017 the revenue is on par with
| 1981.
|
| What happened in 1990-1998 what skyrocketed the revenue
| levels to be twice of that period?
|
| The compact discs.
|
| What happened in 2001-2008 _what returned the revenue_ to
| almost 1981 levels?
|
| Nobody wanted the fucking compact discs anymore.
|
| They are bulky, you need a good player with at least
| 40sec anti-shock, you can't run with it, you need a fanny
| pack or something to even have it with you if you don't
| want to clip it on your jeans belt (if you don't even
| have a belt, eg track suit or skirt/dress) and god forbid
| you wanted more then one album (ie CD) with you, now you
| need to bring the CD bag with you.
|
| And why people didn't want CDs no more?
|
| Flash and for some time - 1"/1.8" HDD players.
|
| People tasted how it can be to have multiple albums (and
| with HDD players - your _whole_ library) on a small,
| compact device which is immune or way more resistant to
| the shock, doesn 't chew the batteries and hey! shows the
| artist and song title!
|
| 'Piracy killed music industry [revenue]' is the bullshit,
| it's just what by 2008 you could no longer sell a $0.10
| piece of polycarbonate for $19.99, people _didn 't wanted
| them anymore_. Of course your 200% profit margin doesn't
| exists anymore _and it shouldn 't had existed in the
| first place_.
|
| https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/
| cubefox wrote:
| > Oh poor, poor Sony/BMG/EMI CEOs who absolutely couldn't
| buy another yacht while lowering their expenses by
| literally making money out of thin air by literally
| copying digital music. /me wets a handkerchief with the
| tears of compassion.
|
| You are conveniently ignoring the musicians which are
| hardest hit by our piracy. They make hardly any money
| from Spotify.
|
| > You would see what by 2017 the revenue is on par with
| 1981.
|
| Apart from 1981 pretty much coinciding with the cassette
| piracy decline, you are also ignoring the fact that the
| world economy has grown massively since 1981. Saying
| there was no decline in revenue is like comparing car
| revenue from 1981 with car revenue today and claim the
| natural state of things for them is to be the same. The
| comparison is absurd.
|
| > What happened in 2001-2008 what returned the revenue to
| almost 1981 levels?
|
| Piracy. CDs initially prevented piracy. Then CD sales
| collapsed because of piracy. Napster & Co.
|
| > People tasted how it can be to have multiple albums
| (and with HDD players - your whole library) on a small,
| compact device
|
| That was possible with the iPod and other MP3 players
| together with legally acquired downloadable music. But
| the revenue never returned to CD levels because most
| people kept pirating. Then Spotify came with extremely
| low pricing and forced musicians to accept ruinous
| streaming revenues, because Spotify had to compete
| against piracy. That's why music revenue has collapsed.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > You are conveniently ignoring the musicians which are
| hardest hit by our piracy. They make hardly any money
| from Spotify.
|
| Bullshit. You are conveniently ignoring the musicians
| were ripped by the labels way, way before mp3s and still
| are. Go, read this[0] _from the musician itself_ , ffs.
|
| > Apart from 1981 pretty much coinciding with the
| cassette piracy decline
|
| LOLWUT?
|
| > The comparison is absurd
|
| The only absurd here is your stance on defending the poor
| labels from evil digital pirates, which stole all the
| profits. What are you? Sony Music CEO? Share owner?
|
| Why do you have the urge to paint labels as innocent
| here?
|
| > Then CD sales collapsed because of piracy. Napster &
| Co.
|
| Are you fucking serious? Napster became defunct by 2001.
| iPod came out in late 2001, iRiver came out in 2002 and
| iPod 3 in 2003. By 2005 NOBODY used CDs as a means for
| portable music. Nobody _needed_ CDs a primary means of
| _listening_ music. That 's why CD sales fell, not because
| some folks in Sovie^W Russia copied a bunch of mp3 of
| Kazaa.
|
| What labels _did_ provide the digital sales, except Apple
| with it 's PoS iTunes? No. Fucking. One.
|
| What they did instead? Whined and cried and lobbied
| bullshit laws and invented bullshit technology like DRM
| protected music files to be preloaded on SD cards _to
| fully mimic physical mediums like cassettes and CDs
| because old fucks at the labels knew only one way to make
| money - to rip everything from everyone_ and the new
| world where you did _not_ need the physical media didn 't
| fit in their rip off scheme^W^W^W sorry, revenue model.
|
| > But the revenue never returned to CD levels because
| most people kept pirating
|
| Do you have troubles with comprehension? You could never
| return to 'CD levels' because those levels literally had
| profit margins anywhere from 200% to 3000%:
|
| > In 1995, material costs were 30 cents for the jewel
| case and 10 to 15 cents for the CD. The wholesale cost of
| CDs was $0.75 to $1.15, while the typical retail price of
| a prerecorded music CD was $16.98
|
| And also you conveniently ignore what the physical media
| declined past 2001 precisely because people no longer
| needed nor wanted the physical media. "but muh pirates!
| Arrgh!"
|
| Oh, by the way:
|
| > On average, the store received 35 percent of the retail
| price, the record company 27 percent, the artist 16
| percent, the manufacturer 13 percent, and the distributor
| 9 percent
|
| Can you explain how come the label receives 27% while the
| artist only 16%? What about 'hardly any money from
| Spotify'? That is from 1995, not 2005 nor 2015. Explain
| how greatly the labels cared about artists what gave them
| only 16%?
|
| [0] https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
| [deleted]
| cubefox wrote:
| > Bullshit. You are conveniently ignoring the musicians
| were ripped by the labels way, way before mp3s and still
| are. Go, read this[0] from the musician itself, ffs.
|
| Piracy doesn't make this issue smaller, if anything, it
| makes it worse. Love wrote:
|
| > There were a billion music downloads last year, but
| music sales are up. Where's the evidence that downloads
| hurt business?
|
| This piece was published in 2000, and sales were not
| "up". Maybe he didn't have access to the latest figures.
| But they already started to go down. Over the next few
| years, CD sales would collapse completely, and digital
| music sales would not nearly make up for it. I posted the
| charts previously.
|
| > > Apart from 1981 pretty much coinciding with the
| cassette piracy decline
|
| > LOLWUT?
|
| I posted the chart previously. Around that time vinyl
| records had declined substantially, without cassette
| sales compensating for it. The most likely explanation is
| that cassette piracy was the culprit. CDs fixed this
| problem for a while, as they were initially read only and
| couldn't be pirated.
|
| > > Then CD sales collapsed because of piracy. Napster &
| Co.
|
| > Are you fucking serious? Napster became defunct by
| 2001. iPod came out in late 2001, iRiver came out in 2002
| and iPod 3 in 2003. By 2005 NOBODY used CDs as a means
| for portable music.
|
| Yes, because Napster was replaced with countless other
| music piracy apps. Gnutella, eDonkey2000, Kazaa, Limewire
| etc. People could legally buy music for their iPods, but
| they were rather using filesharing. This was free after
| all, if illegal.
|
| > > Do you have troubles with comprehension? You could
| never return to 'CD levels' because those levels
| literally had profit margins anywhere from 200% to 3000%:
|
| > > In 1995, material costs were 30 cents for the jewel
| case and 10 to 15 cents for the CD. The wholesale cost of
| CDs was $0.75 to $1.15, while the typical retail price of
| a prerecorded music CD was $16.98
|
| That's a nonsense comparison. Raw CD manufacturing costs
| have almost nothing to do with the price or value of
| music. With downloadable music, the "manufacturing cost"
| of transferring a few megabytes is likewise miniscule.
| But the fixed cost of making and advertising the music is
| not meaningfully different.
|
| > And also you conveniently ignore what the physical
| media declined past 2001 precisely because people no
| longer needed nor wanted the physical media.
|
| And you are conveniently ignoring the fact that legal CD
| music got replaced with illegally downloaded music. I
| posted the chart. Hardly anyone paid for downloaded
| music.
|
| > Can you explain how come the label receives 27% while
| the artist only 16%?
|
| Bad contracts have nothing to do with piracy, but the
| extremely low price of Spotify has. That Spotify and
| Apple Music are cheap doesn't mean that artists get a
| bigger share of the total revenue than in the past. But
| the total revenue itself got smaller.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > Piracy doesn't make this issue smaller, if anything, it
| makes it worse
|
| It doesn't make it worse. Record companies along with
| group managers chose to rip the artists and musicians and
| this was way even before the cassettes[0]
|
| > This piece was published in 2000, and sales were not
| "up".
|
| The musician herself says what the sales were up, yet you
| insist what they were not. Are you really sane?
|
| > This piece was published in 2000, and sales were not
| "up".
|
| Because nobody wants to buy obsolete _media_ with 2000%
| margin. You know, people aren 't stupid if they see the
| blank CDs for $0.20 _in retail_ they could do the math
| and find out how much the record company rips them off
| with a CD priced $19.99, manufactured with the best
| capitalistic methods.
|
| > I posted the charts previously.
|
| I already told you - the chart doesn't support your
| ideas. More so, it clearly shows what the minimal
| manufacturing costs of the CDs provided the ability for
| the record companies to have 100% _more_ profits than
| they would had otherwise. You constantly cry about
| 'streaming didn't provided the same amount of _revenue_ '
| yet you don't apply 'same amount of revenue' for CD
| sales, _you are quite happy they gouged the prices and
| ripped everyone_ , bothe the artists and buyers.
|
| > People could legally buy music for their iPods
|
| Just like they could buy CDs, and rip them to their
| _other than Apple_ players. Oh, iTunes TOO had (and
| probably still have, you just need to find Mac with an
| optical drive, lol) the option for CD ripping. But, you
| know, not everyone wanted to use iPods. And without iPod
| iTunes is useless piece of QuickTime shit.
|
| Which takes us back to the simple question: which record
| company provided a service similar to iTunes?
|
| Sony? BMG? EMI?
|
| The answer the same: NO. ONE. They strictly wanted to
| sell physical media, because this is the only way to have
| 2000% profits _on each sale_. You can 't sell a bunch of
| mp3s for $19.99, people would tell you to fuck off.
|
| It's quite amusing what you are fine with record
| companies to gouge prices for the CDs[1]:
|
| >> A market economy determines the value of goods by what
| people are willing to pay for it
|
| yet you cry like it's the _money taken from your wallet_
| when people don 't want to pay $19.99 for something which
| costs $0.00001 to distribute.
|
| > Raw CD manufacturing costs have almost nothing to do
| with the price or value of music
|
| Ha. Ha. Ha.
|
| There is a direct relationship with the _retail price_ of
| music - the cheaper the media the more profit you, as the
| record company, receive per the same $19.99.
|
| > And you are conveniently ignoring the fact that legal
| CD music got replaced with illegally downloaded music. I
| posted the chart. Hardly anyone paid for downloaded
| music.
|
| Because there were NO options to pay for 'downloaded'
| music, you record-company-shareholder freak. Bandcamp was
| opened in 2008 because till even then there was no good
| way for paying for digital media besides Apple and DRM
| shenanigans. You completely ignore this aspect because it
| doesn't fit in your '*sob* *sob* piracy killed music11
| *sob**sob*'[2] narrative. There would be no market for
| Bandcamp if there were online shops without DRM from the
| record companies - yet they decided to do the bullshit
| like slotMusic.
|
| > Bad contracts have nothing to do with piracy, but the
| extremely low price of Spotify has
|
| Ahahahahahahaha.
|
| It's amusing.
|
| Okay, cards to the table: how much did you 'lost', ie
| didn't receive a cut from 2000% revenue from CD sales in
| 2000-2010?
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_on_Two_Legs_(Dedi
| cated_t......)
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36875180
|
| [2] it's actually 'piracy killed the way for recording
| companies to have astonishing 2000% revenue per sale' but
| of course you don't say it out loud.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > They make hardly any money from Spotify.
|
| They make hardly any money from the record companies.
| cubefox wrote:
| No, from Spotify. You aren't paying enough for it.
| Because you would switch to illegal downloads otherwise.
| It is hard to offer a successful product when it has to
| compete against a completely free alternative.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Artists were getting royally screwed over by the record
| companies decades before anybody'd ever heard of spotify.
|
| (Personally I don't pay anything for spotify, I buy
| almost all my new music from bandcamp)
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I pay for streaming music because I've pirated all my other
| music, and it's convenient. Quality is subjective, I'm no
| audiophile and unless I'm using it on the go with low data mode
| on, I can't hear the difference... except the one time with a
| more obscure song, but I reported that and they fixed it. Maybe
| that was an accidental low data mode though.
| some-guy wrote:
| I'm someone who has a large FLAC collection and an obsession
| with my private music tracker. I do it because of an
| obsession of collecting music, but modern streaming is "good
| enough" for 99% of cases. And unlike video streaming
| platforms, most audio platforms have "most" content that
| people want to listen to.
| itintheory wrote:
| > And unlike video streaming platforms, most audio
| platforms have "most" content that people want to listen
| to.
|
| I'm worried about the potential for this to change. Netflix
| used to have a much larger catalogue, especially for
| movies. Nowadays the things I'm interested in may be spread
| across a dozen different services.
|
| Currently it seems that Spotify, and Youtube music
| (probably Apple music too, though I've not tried it) have
| almost everything I can think of. But I can certainly see a
| possible future where these services get much more
| fragmented.
|
| For instance, I know Apple is already pushing a classical
| only streaming service. Could/would they some day remove
| classical from their other streaming services and instead
| offer a higher priced bundle deal? I think it's possible.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I stream my own music, because you can do that now. It's
| $0/month, and I never have to worry about some cranky
| millionaire getting pissed at Spotify and yanking their music
| off of it.
|
| Nothing is so convenient that I'd ever pay an ongoing
| subscription. Those always feel like scams or ripoffs, and
| life in 2023 is so overfilled with subscriptions that they
| can't possibly be affordable to even you guys who make x3
| what I do. Can they?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Where do you get the free uplink?
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| Given that you already pay for an Internet connection,
| it's $0 marginal cost.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I'll be (justifiably) downvoted for this, but he may be a
| millennial that "doesn't have internet at home".
|
| Which, if it were true, is to my way of thinking like
| telling me that you don't have indoor plumbing.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I have internet at home, but saying it costs $0 is
| stretching it, since you have to have a decent upload
| speed on the connection you're paying for. Not to speak
| of the server, in this day and age when most people only
| have a laptop.
| antihero wrote:
| I buy stuff with bandcamp, then import directly onto my
| navidrome server in ALAC.
| Lacerda69 wrote:
| Buy music directly from the artist. Streaming services are a
| cancer.
| scblock wrote:
| Streaming services can be an excellent music discovery
| platform.
| ojhughes wrote:
| Rock/Metal/Punk is still doing really well with no shortage of
| great artists. Just check out the Radio 1 Rock Show with Daniel
| P. Carter - nearly every week there is something new that I
| like
| bazoom42 wrote:
| > the quality has absolutely cratered
|
| You just got old. It happens to everyone, and every generation
| says the same thing: The music I enjoyed when I was young and
| impressionable was great, but all the stuff they make nowadays
| is crap.
|
| People were whining about how Beatles destroyed music, how
| rock'n'roll was just monkey noise, how crooners like Sinatra
| wasn't real singing.
| yCombLinks wrote:
| This is the most banal argument. It's never possible
| something is worse than it was before?
| intalentive wrote:
| No it's objectively worse. The average complexity is at all
| time lows.
| starlevel003 wrote:
| > The average complexity is at all time lows.
|
| there's more than enough breakcore out there if you measure
| music quality like that. theree's definitely more than in
| the 20th century.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Complexity left to right may have gone down, but top to
| bottom has gone up. In a DAW people add way more tracks
| than ever and add all kinds of detail/texture/layers the
| weren't possible before so yeah, people search out the new
| and novel to experiment/have fun with. That happens all the
| time in music. No one used distorted electric guitars in
| music then all of the sudden music was over saturated in
| it. Just because you might not understand/recognize the
| current complexity doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
| lwelyk wrote:
| I wasn't aware there was an objective 1-to-1 correlation
| between the complexity of music to its quality.
| intalentive wrote:
| There's not but it's a good heuristic. In pop music the
| average entropy is much lower, not only because the songs
| are simpler, but because they are more alike.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| The only heuristic that matters the quality of pop music
| is "do people like it" and it's almost a tautology that
| pop music in any given time period passes it.
|
| If people preferred more complicated music, then more
| complicated music would be popular and more of it would
| get made.
| colpabar wrote:
| Okay, but you know that "good" and "worse" and
| subjective, relative terms? Just because you have your
| own reasons for something doesn't make them "objective",
| you just don't like modern pop music.
| stale2002 wrote:
| Ok, so since it is all "subjective" then you have to
| concede that a song which is just 1 hour of a single note
| being played is equally good.
|
| Or maybe, instead of devolving into absurdity we can just
| say that there are come qualities of being better or
| worse that most people can agree on.
|
| Of course, you can simply bite the bullet and say "yep.
| The song with 1 note in it is subjectively just as good".
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Are you quoting that "Measuring the Evolution of
| Contemporary Western Popular Music" paper? Anybody who
| knows about music disagrees with its methods. Here's a
| good rundown by a classical composer:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfNdps0daF8
| nradov wrote:
| Since you're not required to listen to pop music, the
| average entropy is utterly irrelevant. If you prefer more
| complex music there is a huge amount out there, probably
| more than you can listen to.
|
| Average artwork has always been garbage throughout human
| history. But I still found a few good paintings to hang
| on my walls. As long as you can get what you want it
| doesn't really matter what else is out there.
| ctoth wrote:
| > Since you're not required to listen to pop music,
|
| Is there a trick I'm missing to avoid this in {Ubers,
| grocery stores, bars, ...}? If so I'd love to know about
| it! Note: am blind, so can't constantly wear earplugs.
| math_dandy wrote:
| You're right about the average, but that single summary
| statistic is too coarse. There's probably much more great
| music being produced now than ever before, but there's much
| much much more crappy music. And recommendation algorithms
| aren't optimizing for quality.
| intalentive wrote:
| Specifically I mean pop music. What you find on the
| radio, what is most heavily promoted, what gets the most
| streams + sales.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| What an HN comment.
|
| "Is this song good?"
|
| "One sec, let me check how complex it is"
| dmonitor wrote:
| Look up King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard if you want
| complex music. Polygondwanaland especially if you want
| something really out there.
| some-guy wrote:
| What does "complexity" even mean here? Is modern music any
| less complex than "I Want to Hold Your Hand"?
| intalentive wrote:
| There are different ways to measure complexity: https://w
| ww.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0067...
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4281146/
|
| Modern music is less harmonically complex than even early
| Beatles, who used more chords (and more chord
| progressions) than are used today. Music today is highly
| repetitive.
|
| Timbre is also less complex thanks in part to the use of
| virtual instruments and sample packs. Synthesized sounds
| and samples are intrinsically less complex than sounds
| recorded in a room. Any two hits of, say, a hi-hat will
| yield different waveforms and our brains pick up on these
| micro variations.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| > Timbre is also less complex thanks in part to the use
| of virtual instruments and sample packs. Synthesized
| sounds and samples are intrinsically less complex than
| sounds recorded in a room. Any two hits of, say, a hi-hat
| will yield different waveforms and our brains pick up on
| these micro variations.
|
| You should see how much time EDM producers spend tweaking
| the waveforms of individual percussion hits. The idea
| that timbre in modern music is _less_ complex than in the
| past is just mind boggling to me, given the level of
| control that people have in sculpting waveforms and
| samples. There are entire EDM tracks that are basically
| just atonal explorations of timbre.
| cmgbhm wrote:
| I think it goes both ways. Some do spend insane amounts
| of time on individual hits or compositing sounds to
| various functional points.
|
| You can also get the same thing looped 4x that has no
| variation. Hard to fault either side. Musicians have to
| get work out rapidly and then occasionally something gets
| legs.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| I notice that the authors of that paper are two
| physicists and a data scientist. I wonder if they even
| consulted a musicologist or a composer with a background
| in research before publishing this paper. What would you
| think about a paper on programming that featured no
| computer scientists?
| MrDrMcCoy wrote:
| [dead]
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| [dead]
| yunwal wrote:
| > Modern music is less harmonically complex than even
| early Beatles
|
| The most popular genre in America (the world?) isn't sung
| and doesn't focus on tone, so this is hardly surprising.
| I bet if you measured rhythmic complexity or lyrical
| complexity it'd show the opposite.
| whycome wrote:
| We're running out of chords. They've all been mined. We
| can't make new ones.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Vocal harmonies for one
| [deleted]
| MrDrMcCoy wrote:
| [dead]
| pessimizer wrote:
| > You just got old. It happens to everyone, and every
| generation says the same thing
|
| I hate how people decide something is an inevitable eternal
| cycle that started in the 20th century. Recorded music hasn't
| been around long enough to think that platitudes like this
| actually have any meaningful content.
|
| I'm here whining about how you're using a Beatles example
| because your argument is literally a teenage Baby Boomer
| argument. I've got board games older than your eternal
| generational war over the consumption of recorded music.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| > I hate how people decide something is an inevitable
| eternal cycle that started in the 20th century.
|
| People were complaining about the loudness war in
| _classical music_ in the early 19th century, unfavorably
| comparing Beethoven to his predecessors, and how his
| imitators were ruining music. Human nature doesn't change,
| and the phenomenon of people having their taste in music
| frozen in their teens and twenties is not something that
| was invented with the phonograph.
|
| "It is not surprising that Beethoven should, occasionally,
| have entertained blase notions of his art; that he should
| have mistaken noise for grandeur, extravagance for
| originality, and have supposed that the interest of his
| compositions would be in proportion to their duration. That
| he gave little time to reflection, is proved most clearly
| in the extraordinary length of some movements in his later
| symphonies... His great qualities are frequently alloyed by
| a morbid desire for novelty; by extravagance, and by a
| disdain of rule... The effect which the writings of
| Beethoven have had on the art must, I fear, be considered
| as injurious. Led away by the force of his genius and
| dazzled by his creations, a crowd of imitators has arisen,
| who have displayed as much harshness, as much extravagance,
| and as much obscurity, with little or none of his beauty
| and grandeur. Thus music is no longer intended to sooth, to
| delight, to 'wrap the sense in Elysium'; it is absorbed in
| one principle--to astonish." Letter to the Editor in the
| Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, London, 1827
| ideamotor wrote:
| It's my lunch break, but all of you need to get back to
| work. None of any of this proves a damn thing.
|
| Do some coding where your words actually have meaning and
| impact. But stop assuming the real world works that way.
| ChoHag wrote:
| If you read that more carefully you'll see that the
| letter writer isn't complaining about Beethoven or his
| music but that his imitators can't do it as well as he
| does.
|
| He's not complaining that the burgeoning romantic
| movement sucked compared to the true classical music from
| his youth but that the quality of the music being
| produced has tanked because the new practitioners suck at
| making it: Beethoven, because he was a genius and could
| get it right, gave them carte blanche to break the rules
| that previously kept the music good.
|
| Although it's true to say that Beethoven didn't know how
| to stop.
| nkozyra wrote:
| > I hate how people decide something is an inevitable
| eternal cycle that started in the 20th century. Recorded
| music hasn't been around long enough to think that
| platitudes like this actually have any meaningful content.
|
| Maybe, but doesn't the same complaint exist about other
| media, too? 'Kids _these_ days and their
| [books|music|art|clothes|dance styles] '
| deepspace wrote:
| Watch this video, and tell me that there is no objective
| difference in quality between pre-2000 and post-2000 songs.
|
| With a few exceptions, modern music is autotuned-to-death,
| boring, indistinguishable crap.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uMW2XsMx8Q
| allturtles wrote:
| I have the same gut feeling that there has been a decline
| in quality, but I'm not sure that video makes the case.
|
| In the previous 10 years (2013-2022) years the songs that
| clearly fit your description are "Closer" (2016),
| "Sunflower" (2018), "Stay" (2021). I'd probably say "Old
| Town Road" (2019) is pretty bad also, with a very boring,
| repetitive bass track. And "Despacito" (2017) is catchy but
| has the same cliche beat as a million other songs in the
| genre.
|
| "Happy" (2013) is a fun song that could be compared to
| Bobby McFerrin's 1988 hit, "Uptown Funk" (2014) is a 70s
| throwback, "Hello" (2015) is a vocal fireworks show,
| "Blinding Lights" (2020) and "As It Was" (2022) are 80s
| throwbacks.
|
| On the other hand is "Never Gonna Give You Up" (1987)
| actually a good song? Is "U Can't Touch This" (1990)? Is
| "Wannabe" (1996)? No, they are fun but none of these are
| really good songs.
|
| I'm not sure just comparing the most recognizable song of
| each year gets you very far.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Very interesting.
|
| After 1990 it drops right off a cliff for me with a few
| exceptions.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > You just got old. It happens to everyone, and every
| generation says the same thing: The music I enjoyed when I
| was young and impressionable was great, but all the stuff
| they make nowadays is crap.
|
| Thing is, there are objective metrics about quality. One
| aspect is "loudness war" aka compression, where subjective
| loudness gets increased at the cost of dynamic range [1],
| another (in)famous aspect is the increasing use of auto-tune
| (both the software itself as well as the general principle
| after which it was named). Artists and especially producers
| _love_ that shit because similar to standardization in fast-
| food it provides a "consistent" performance even in live
| productions - which is seen as "cheating" in music by older
| people, and I think for good reason.
|
| On top of _that_ there 's an increasing tendency of producers
| to push for "bland" personalities as well instead of also
| taking risks, and it's not just music - it's movies as well:
| most movies aren't original productions any more, a lot of
| them is based off of prior IP (Harry Potter, MCU) or endless
| continuations (Star Wars, Star Trek) to recoup ever growing
| production and marketing costs.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
| taeric wrote:
| There really aren't objective metrics. There are
| quantifiable metrics, but turning something into a number
| doesn't make it fully objective.
|
| And nothing pushes for bland personalities near as much as
| people pining for the past.
| wizofaus wrote:
| That last statement might hold for "recent past" (last 10
| or 15 years, say), but the one recent top 40 hit that
| stood out for me has a 50s type vibe (Until I Found You,
| Stephen Sanchez). I'm not particularly a fan of that
| style (well before my time!) but it's surely not "bland".
| taeric wrote:
| There are nuances there. I am not claiming that older
| things are bland. I'm saying that the people that are
| constantly pining on the past are. Really, it is more
| that they often make choices that lead to bland results.
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| While the Loudness War is indeed a race to the bottom for
| the dynamic quality of audio, it would have occurred sooner
| if the medium for recorded music had allowed for it. Vinyl
| records simply cannot go as loud as today's modern records
| because of physical limitations in the medium.
|
| Nevertheless, for 70+ years producers, record executives,
| and artists have been using every sonic trick at their
| disposal to make their record "pop" and stand out from the
| competition. The advent of digital audio simply opened up
| more headroom with which to push the record.
| mjr00 wrote:
| Firstly, the loudness war largely died with Spotify. LUFS
| normalization means that pushing beyond -14 is an artistic
| choice and not necessary to compete with other tracks on
| loudness alone.
|
| Secondly, more compressed (less dynamic range) doesn't mean
| worse, or better. It means more compressed. In some genres,
| tons of compression is desirable; in others, less so. Is an
| orchestral Hans Zimmer piece that maxes at -10 momentary
| LUFS better than a Skrillex song that hits -4 during a
| drop? You could argue either song is better, but I don't
| think your argument would have anything to do with its LUFS
| measurement.
|
| Compression is similar to distortion. Too much distortion
| is generally seen as bad. But if distortion were always
| bad, people would use acoustic guitars and clean electrics
| and never run things through a distortion pedal. Same idea
| with compression. Too much compression will kill a mix, but
| not enough will reduce the impact the song has on the
| listener.
|
| In other words, trying to say that LUFS is an "objective
| metric of quality" is complete nonsense. To me that's like
| saying that lines of code written is an objective metric of
| quality of a software developer.
| aqfamnzc wrote:
| I generally agree, but I don't think your comparison
| between distortion and compression makes sense.
| Distortion (guitar pedals, etc.) is something the artist
| intentionally adds to the song, in a specific way,
| intensity, and time. Compression is something added after
| the fact, for transit and storage. The artist doesn't
| really have control over what sort of artifacts lossy
| compression is going to add, so I don't see how "not
| enough [compression] will reduce the impact the song has
| on the listener."
| mjr00 wrote:
| I'm talking about dynamic range compression[0] in this
| context, not audio compression (e.g. MP3).
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression
| biorach wrote:
| > Compression is something added after the fact, for
| transit and storage. The artist doesn't really have
| control over what sort of artifacts lossy compression is
| going to add, so I don't see how "not enough
| [compression] will reduce the impact the song has on the
| listener."
|
| This conversation isn't about file compression, it's
| about dynamic range compression. Very different.
|
| https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/what-is-audio-
| compression.h...
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| Agreed. LUFS as an "objective metric of quality" is
| nonsensical. I work as the assistant to a world class
| mastering engineer and we never discuss LUFS or aim to
| hit a target loudness. Such metrics (while well
| understood) are never a consideration.
|
| All we do is listen. Often the goal is to get the record
| to feel as loud as it can be, but the moment our choices
| start to degrade the feel of the record we back off.
| We're doing very little in the way of actual limiting for
| loudness. We have ways of making the record feel louder,
| and they don't always involve dynamics processing.
|
| Quite often no limiting is necessary because the mixes
| that we receive are mixed hot, which leads me to my next
| point:
|
| Where I'll push back a little - for the sake of
| conversation - is the assertion that the loudness war
| died with streaming services. I consider their automatic
| level compensation features to be a big plus for audio
| fidelity. For artists and mixers who are sensitive to
| this issue it relieves them of the pressure of feeling
| that they need to deliver super hot mixes. The record can
| simply be what it needs to be and not conform to a
| certain loudness standard. It's a positive step.
|
| Where my objection comes in is the reality that artists
| and mixers (who are well aware of the dilemma)
| nonetheless deliver us mixes that have been crafted for
| maximum perceived loudness. And they're really good at
| it. Even world class producers and mixers are sending us
| records that are squashed to hell, but very often they
| still sound good! The craft of mixing is evolving and
| people have become very adept at making an objectively
| loud record (-3 LUFS, etc) still work. HOW they do that
| is far too big of a topic to broach here.
| mjr00 wrote:
| Yeah it's true that people are still trying to make loud
| stuff. But as you say, people are so good at making it
| work now that's not really a "I'm making this -3 because
| I need to be competitive with other songs," it's "I'm
| making this -3 because it's a heavy bass record and I
| want this to _melt people 's goddamn faces_ when they
| listen to it." In other words, an artistic decision,
| rather than a business one.
|
| I think most modern EDM-pop now is at about -7 or so.
| These are world-class engineers doing the mixing, they
| could absolutely push it to -5 or -3 if they wanted,
| there's just no need thanks to LUFS normalization.
|
| Like when people think about the real victims of the
| loudness war, it's albums like Californication or What's
| the Story (Morning Glory), which really didn't need to be
| that loud except for sounding better (in the louder =
| better sense) on the radio. Something like Death Magnetic
| you could argue is both intentionally loud + a victim of
| the loudness war, but it's also just really poorly
| mixed/mastered in general.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Stadium Arcadium was a victim of this until the LP
| corrected the levels and is now considered the definitive
| version of the album.
|
| I'm not sure if the high-res audio version on Apple Music
| has corrected this sin of the original CDs.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It's hard to find a popular recording these days that
| hasn't had the vocal electronically altered. Autotune is
| just one of the effects applied.
| mhh__ wrote:
| You're saying Daft Punk don't sing like that in real
| life?
| jjulius wrote:
| >... popular recording...
|
| At the risk of being reductive, dig a little bit deeper,
| beyond popular music, and you'll find large swathes of
| fantastic music where this isn't the case.
| shagymoe wrote:
| Nothing about the "quality" of art, including music, is
| objective. These sound waves are better than those sound
| waves? No. Beauty and the quality of art is in the eye (or
| ear) of the beholder.
| msla wrote:
| > another (in)famous aspect is the increasing use of auto-
| tune (both the software itself as well as the general
| principle after which it was named)
|
| This is mostly subjective, not objective.
|
| (Is it being used more? Objective. Is that relevant to
| quality? Subjective.)
| lenzm wrote:
| I don't like the results of the loudness war either but it
| isn't objectively worse. Lots of people are listening to
| music on cheap speakers over the sound of road noise while
| driving or with generic earbuds on a train or any number of
| situations not conducive to high dynamic ranges. To these
| people in these situations, the highly compressed music
| sounds better.
| DropInIn wrote:
| Imo musicians need to make it a norm to release two
| 'correct' verions:
|
| The highly compressed versions for radio play/commoners
|
| And
|
| A 'hi-fi' version for audiophiles
|
| They need to be the same except for levels etc, and
| neither more official than the other
|
| If your song can't be enjoyed in both ways, then either
| your music is 'specialty' music catering to audiophiles
| and musicophiles (?) Or it's just garbage and shouldn't
| be released regardless.
|
| But that opinion may be a major cause for myself never
| releasing anything....
| jjulius wrote:
| >Thing is, there are objective metrics about quality. One
| aspect is "loudness war" aka compression...
|
| Eeeeehhhhh. I've heard plenty of beautifully-mastered
| tracks that were otherwise just crap pieces of music, just
| as I've heard plenty of music that was _so_ good I was
| willing to overlook the fact that it might be taking part
| in the loudness war.
| volkl48 wrote:
| Movies + Music aren't the same medium, though.
|
| Music doesn't have ever-increasing production costs, and if
| anything it's easier than ever to get something out there
| on the primary distribution mechanisms used by the public
| to consume media.
|
| It certainly has it's own business problems but I don't see
| any lack of interesting, risk-taking music out there. Even
| as a fan of genres largely far out of the mainstream I
| often feel like there's so much great new stuff that I
| can't keep up with it all.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Music doesn't have ever-increasing production costs
|
| It actually has. Venues are getting more and more
| expensive, and the effort to run shows has also increased
| - Rammstein is far from the only one requiring dozens of
| trucks to move their equipment around. On top of that you
| have Ticketmaster and their ilk on a brutal rent-seeking
| ride at the expense of both artists and fans.
|
| > It certainly has it's own business problems but I don't
| see any lack of interesting, risk-taking music out there.
| Even as a fan of genres largely far out of the mainstream
| I often feel like there's so much great new stuff that I
| can't keep up with it all.
|
| Yeah, indie stuff still works out fine these days, if not
| easier as Soundcloud has replaced physical tapes, but to
| achieve major recognition still takes an absurd amount of
| money, connections and luck. Or all three of them.
| filoleg wrote:
| Venues and their increasing costs have nothing to do with
| production costs. Production costs refer to what it costs
| to actually produce a track and release it out there to
| the public.
|
| Not even talking about insane amounts of good educational
| material available online for free these days, the
| capable equipment required to produce a studio-quality
| track fell down in price significantly, and most older
| equipment is still fully functional and compatible with
| newer offerings (thanks, MIDI and XLR). And newer
| equipment is still significantly cheaper than almost
| anything comparable from 20 years ago (if it was even
| available back then).
|
| Back then, you wouldn't be able to produce anything that
| could compete in quality with studios from your bedroom,
| and not on a reasonable budget. And even if you somehow
| were so rich you were able to finance a pro studio in
| your house, and you produced a decent track, now the
| question is how would you even distribute it to the
| public and get heard.
|
| These days? Thanks to affordability of what it takes to
| produce a track and the ease of getting your material
| released to the public, you can go from a nobody to
| someone with a hit track overnight. All for the price of
| a laptop, some decent speakers/headphones, and a midi-
| controller. And even that list is optional, as there are
| people who produce great stuff with less than this or
| even something entirely different.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > These days? Thanks to affordability of what it takes to
| produce a track and the ease of getting your material
| released to the public, you can go from a nobody to
| someone with a hit track overnight. All for the price of
| a laptop, some decent speakers/headphones, and a midi-
| controller. And even that list is optional, as there are
| people who produce great stuff with less than this or
| even something entirely different.
|
| But how many _actually manage_ to pull off that feat? You
| can probably count them on two hands. One-hit wonders
| yes, there have been a fair few of these that managed to
| hit the zeitgeist thanks to social media (Wellerman!),
| but a sustained career after that, from scratch and with
| no prior experience? I couldn 't name _one_.
|
| Everyone has the chance to strike a lottery jackpot, but
| only one person will.
| [deleted]
| belthesar wrote:
| Skrillex, Billie Eilish and Soulja Boy immediately come
| to mind, and they're not even on the list of these
| artists on this ad-riddled collection compiled 3 years
| ago - https://www.technowize.com/12-musicians-who-were-
| discovered-...
|
| Are they everywhere? Nah, music is a capitalist endeavor,
| and the market wouldn't support that. But there are a
| surprising number of artists that have gained success
| with their first endeavors produced out of their homes.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > Music doesn't have ever-increasing production costs
|
| "How much does it cost to make a hit song"
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/07/05/137530847/h
| ow-...
| nkozyra wrote:
| > One aspect is "loudness war" aka compression, where
| subjective loudness gets increased at the cost of dynamic
| range
|
| The interesting thing about streaming services is they
| really put a cap on this (often a hard one measured by
| LUFS) and we really don't have as much wall-of-sound
| compression like we did from the 90s through the mid 00s.
|
| https://hyperbits.com/ultimate-guide-to-the-loudness-war/
| ROTMetro wrote:
| I too agree that music was ruined once loud orchestra's
| were formed. The only good music was chamber music.
| Orchestras anonymized the musician and were basically the
| end of musicianship.
| samstave wrote:
| Sure, but one cant deny the music of the late 60s and 70s
| changed a lot of human culture.
|
| But we dont have revolutionary music such as led zepplin,
| pink floyd, etc in the current crop.
|
| none of the above sought facade public images as much as
| every single 'influencing' pop-stars today.
|
| Their influence was organic. Today's music trends are forced.
|
| Aside from some EDM style folks, such as ZHU - great music
| but hes not out there trying to push 'lifestyle' bs, as much
| as others.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > Their influence was organic. Today's music trends are
| forced.
|
| This is 100% purestrain revisionism.
| samstave wrote:
| Uh, I had to goog this...
|
| but this doesnt map. So explain thyself ;;
|
| " _this involve a significant revision of fundamental
| Marxist theories and premises, and usually involve making
| an alliance with the bourgeois class_ "
|
| -
|
| uh... explain me... to me?
| version_five wrote:
| I'm not sure. Music goes in cycles, like the 80s generated a
| lot of crap and then gave way to the explosion of the
| alternative music scene.
|
| For an actual semi-objective measure, think about how often
| you hear songs from the 60s and 70s, and from the 90s (and
| early 2000s for hip hop). And then think of all the crap
| that's gone by that has no staying power. I'm sure it's
| partially my bubble, but there were bands in the decades I
| mention that are going to be widely listened to for a long
| time, while in between there's a ton of throwaway. Basically
| you get original, defining music as new genres emerge then
| runs of derivative crap between them, it's not constant.
| asifgnionio wrote:
| [dead]
| stcroixx wrote:
| I like various music from the past 100 years or so, not just
| from when I was young, and agree quality of current pop is
| pretty low compared to that time period.
| nemo44x wrote:
| I'd give way to say that the music from your teens and
| before. It's much easier to appreciate music from before
| your time than after your time for some reason. I'd guess
| nostalgia in part and because when you first heard the old
| music it was new to you and part of your nostalgia. So you
| don't experience it the same way that teenagers did when it
| was released but you have a relationship with it that is
| meaningful none the less.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| That's a real thing but it's also real that investment in
| artist development cratered along with the market for CDs in
| the 2000s.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| Yeah, there's an insane amount of amazing music of so many
| different styles being produced. The nature of finding it,
| the gate keepers, what's cool, and everything else has
| changed though and if you haven't been keeping up with it, it
| might be somewhat invisible to you. Refusing to use streaming
| services out of principal definitely just sounds like being
| old and refusing to adapt though, you can always buy physical
| media to support an artist once you discover them.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Yup. Getting old is a tough pill to swallow. An early sign is
| when you don't care about new music.
|
| Face it, popular music exists for teenagers to claim their
| spot. Their unique identity from previous generations. The
| new and fresh - it's about today and they are today.
| deepspace wrote:
| > The new and fresh
|
| But that's just the point. New music all sounds the same.
| Half-spoken, mumbled lyrics- check. Autotuned to death-
| check. Forgettable tunes- check.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| That's weird, the stuff I'm listening to has good clarity
| and writing and inventiveness. I'm listening to people
| like cory wong, theo katzman, ariel posen, big wild,
| chris thile's various groups, john grant, louis cole.
|
| Maybe whatever you're using to find new music just sucks?
| blink twice if it's a clearchannel playlist.
| the_only_law wrote:
| It's also a sign you aren't looking. Yeah, music is going to
| be trash if you're just looking at what's popular on the
| radio/TikTok/charts. Spend some time on bandcamp going
| through what's been posted in your preferred genres.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| > _It's also a sign you aren't looking. Yeah, music is
| going to be trash if you're just looking at what's popular
| on the radio /TikTok/charts. Spend some time on bandcamp
| going through what's been posted in your preferred genres._
|
| There's more recorded music than ever, and I don't care
| what your tastes are there are - new and interesting
| artists are out there to discover.
|
| ... which is also, in its own way, a new difficulty.
| There's so much to sift through, finding what you think is
| "good" is going to be difficult. This is doubly so for
| people who grew up listening to the radio or watching MTV,
| where these decisions were made for them.
|
| The best advice I could give anybody is to find an _actual
| radio station_ that plays _what they consider to be_ good
| new music. This probably doesn 't look like a commercial
| station, and you may not even have any in broadcast range
| of you, but there are plenty out there that stream online.
| I'm partial to my local NPR music station, but maybe you'd
| have better luck with college radio or a local low powered
| station instead.
|
| DJs may be a rare breed these days, but try to find some
| you like and just let them do the work for you. The
| algorithms aren't going to cut it.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Yes! One of the many joys of the internet and cheap
| computers is that _anyone_ can produce music with very
| little upfront cost compared to before.
|
| If you trawl around through youtube videos with 100 views,
| obscure bandcamps, audiophile forums, niche discord and
| subreddits, etc, you can find all sorts of absolutely
| fantastic music.
|
| It obviously takes some work, but it's a lot of fun to
| discover as well!
| the_only_law wrote:
| Oh yeah, I forgot about YouTube, some of the best stuff
| I've found in recent years have been on channels that
| curate/promote music in particular genre. I have one for
| all sorts of punk genres, as well as one for doom metal
| and its related genres. They're great, because they have
| all sorts of stuff, old and new, and help cut down on the
| cruft.
|
| My only complaint about bandcamp is the mobile app. As
| far as I can tell, there's no way to change the sorting
| when you're looking through a genre, so it's usually
| filled with albums and artists I already heard years ago,
| but their website is much better.
| mbn404 wrote:
| Aslo go to rateyourmusic (RYM).
| sixothree wrote:
| On top of that there is vastly more selection than just 20
| years ago.
| dmonitor wrote:
| "what's popular on the radio /TikTok/charts" being gutter
| tier hogwash is exactly what they're talking about. Humans
| didn't lose the ability to create good interesting music,
| and nobody legitimately thinks that. The publishing
| industry prevents independent artists from reaching any
| kind of mainstream popularity. Indie artists need money and
| the publishers that decide the winners/losers by
| controlling all the traditional distribution networks have
| no incentive to signal boost independents.
| Spivak wrote:
| You have TikTok completely backwards. It's giving a
| platform and virality to independent artists at a scale
| that was simply not possible before.
|
| If your only association with TikTok music culture is
| "TikTok charts" then you're just falling for the same
| Billboard top 40s but with a new coat of paint.
| LanceH wrote:
| Where are the ugly singers? Music is represented my a
| disproportionately high number of hot women (and less so men)
| with no room for others. There is obviously a standard other
| than musical quality in play.
|
| Today, it's mostly true that everything is available. The
| music that reaches the masses, though, is defined by
| production over musical quality.
|
| Would we even see or hear from Cass Elliot, Janis Joplin, or
| Patsy Cline today? Producers would choose someone other than
| Patsy Cline for Crazy and twist Willie Nelson's arm to make
| him a ghostwriter on the song so the hot, autotuned, woman
| could claim she wrote it herself.
|
| There is more to it than just getting older.
| sspiff wrote:
| This is nothing new though, this has been true since the
| rise of TV and things like top of the pops. Because guess
| what? People prefer pretty people.
|
| Once artists became visible, this was inevitable. The
| pretty people were going to become popular regardless of
| whether the music industry got involved or not.
| agumonkey wrote:
| A french singer contest saw a normal/chubby girl winning
| by a wide margin. The tour after te tv show bombed
| horribly.
|
| There's a reflex in crowds to seek for some traits and
| physical "beauty" seems one of them. The rest seems the
| exception (and those singers have either very special
| skills or a super solid persona)
| blowski wrote:
| Lewis Capaldi, Adele, Meghan Trainor, Jay Z, Drake. I don't
| believe any of them made it because of their looks.
|
| On the other hand, the Beatles, The Stones, The Monkees,
| Stevie Nicks, Olivia Newton John - their looks were very
| much part of their appeal.
|
| Same as it ever was. Face it - you're old.
| jurimasa wrote:
| So, being old = opinion invalid?
|
| Nice ageism you have there, kid.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| They'd have a youtube channel and 8 million followers,
| whether or not you'd hear about them is debatable.
|
| Mac Demarco is not a handsome man. Lady Gaga isn't winning
| any pageants, Adele was mocked for her weight,and then her
| weight loss, Lizzo's whole thing is self love because she
| gets harassed for her weight.
|
| There will always be beautiful people produced and
| controlled for sale, and there will always be the talented,
| the weird, the outrageous that rise to public conscious -
| and some from all camps that do not.
| rz2k wrote:
| I don't agree at all. I've found the YouTube algorithms as
| good for discovering new singer-songwriters as when I used
| to see live music a few times a week in New York decades
| ago. Many, or even most, of the women that come up in my
| feed are no more conventionally beautiful than the people
| you cite.
|
| How mainstream was someone like Janis Joplin? She was on
| the radio, but she was also somewhat counter culture. The
| women (who don't deserve to be written about as evidence of
| success without beauty) have hundreds of thousands of
| subscribers just on youtube, many millions of listens, and
| I hear their music in stores, commercials and coffee shops.
|
| In addition to there being many more avenues for reaching a
| large audience outside of record labels, there are also
| quite a few mainstream performers who aren't conventionally
| attractive who became famous through pseudo-grassroot paths
| like television contests.
| amalcon wrote:
| Milli Vanilli was 30 years ago now. That act literally
| replaced the singers with better looking people for
| marketing reasons.
|
| A baby born the day The Monkees formed would be retiring
| now. That wildly popular band was literally created for a
| TV show.
|
| This problem has been going on for a long time.
| benreesman wrote:
| I'm knocking on 40 and the absolute best shit is on
| SoundCloud done by some teenager or 20-something on like a
| pirated copy of Ableton in a basement. There are like 2
| things you can do as the technology goes to infinity: make
| way more diverse awesome stuff, or just make the music one
| tiny part of the well-oiled Taylor Swift Corporation.
|
| There's more amazing music being made than ever, and the
| stuff with big money behind it is worse than ever.
| vondur wrote:
| I do think that the quality of the current Top 40 hits is
| certainly worse than in the past. However, there are good
| bands out there you just have to look for them on
| Bandcamp/Youtube or forums/sites dedicated to the genre of
| music you enjoy.
| adamc wrote:
| I've liked significant portions of most eras, but it's true
| that today's music is different and seems more limited. The
| average song is being driven down toward 2 minutes by the
| realities of streaming, songs use a lot more sampling
| (because musicians cost more), there is much less modulation
| than there once was, etc.
|
| Objectively, it seems like less sophisticated music, in part
| because there isn't the same kind of money there once was in
| the system to pay for studio musicians, producers, etc.
|
| Is it possible to create great songs despite that? Yes, but
| it involves a lot of "skating uphill".
|
| You can see that older music is still getting a _LOT_ of
| plays -- I think too many to make sense, unless we accept
| that the current industry is not healthy.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| I agree. People will tell you they have objective ways of
| proving the quality of music, it's emotional reactionary BS.
| It's an art that moves with culture and technology; the
| length of the song, the instruments, complexity - people are
| going to make what they feel and listen to what they like
| (and there will always be people making some version of
| something even if it's not popular - one of my friends is
| committed to metrical verse). With so many people making
| music (and art in general) now, writing off a generation's
| output based on what sold or showed up in commercial media is
| short sighted. "Music" is so much more than what's irritating
| the taste-keepers.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Yes and no. The problem current artists run into is coming up
| with something new. Disco, Hip Hop, Punk and even post-Punk
| were fresh and new then...but those sounds live on to this
| day in "new" artists. It's entertaining, but it's hardly
| something to get excited about.
|
| It's not a matter of getting old per se. It's a matter of
| having more context, more perspective. Yes, there's a lot of
| good music today. However, so much of it relies on what we've
| heard before, it rarely qualifies as great. Or, at best,
| great is relative to the current, which often is average at
| best.
|
| Do I want to listen to (e.g.) New Order, or a knock-off of
| New Order?
| scelerat wrote:
| Ehh. I was in high school and college throughout the '90s and
| still think pop music quality peaked sometime between 1966
| and 1986. It's not necessarily an age thing. I mean, I
| remember thinking that at the time too.
|
| There are still tons of great musicians and bands making new
| music today, but the stuff that most people are familiar with
| is dreck compared to what most people were familiar with
| fifty years ago.
|
| Among other things is that popular attention, once focused by
| a handful of local radio stations and three national
| broadcast networks (in the US), has been atomized by a
| billion channels. The stuff that gets shoved down the big
| expensive earball-rich pipes is pablum for broad but weak
| appeal, processed by self-affirming accountants and
| algorithms, to a degree it simply was not a generation or two
| ago. It's simply not the same.
| Spivak wrote:
| You weren't around for the garbage. You're getting the
| benefit of listening to only the best of the best music
| from an entire generation with ears untainted by it being
| overplayed. If I pushed you twenty years in the future,
| made you completely forget all music from 2010 on and
| played only the very best hearing it for the first time you
| would be convinced that it was a renaissance.
| nemo44x wrote:
| > I was in high school and college throughout the '90s and
| still think pop music quality peaked sometime between 1966
| and 1986.
|
| Pop music or rock music in particular? Rock is a type of
| pop music and it's arguable that it is past its prime and
| was better when it was newer.
|
| > the stuff that most people are familiar with is dreck
| compared to what most people were familiar with fifty years
| ago.
|
| Likely some survival bias here. There was tons of awful
| music that was quickly forgotten about back in the day too.
| I will grant that the cost of recording and distributing
| music is much lower today so there very well is a lower
| barrier to entry which means there's probably more garbage
| than ever.
| JambalayaJim wrote:
| >Ehh. I was in high school and college throughout the '90s
| and still think pop music quality peaked sometime between
| 1966 and 1986
|
| How much of that was influence from baby-boomer controlled
| music media?
| agumonkey wrote:
| I think what changed is
|
| The place of music in society. Availability doesn't mean
| wide impact. It often created smaller sub cultures.
|
| The place of music in people, there are more things
| capturing your mind now.
|
| The place of the industry, in the past access was granted
| through a tree of labels and record companies, it also had
| a weight in the inertia of styles and art. You went through
| more skilled eyes, it gives you a different legitimity.
| ok123456 wrote:
| > Beatles destroyed music, how rock'n'roll was just monkey
| noise, how crooners like Sinatra wasn't real singing.
|
| Agree.
| msla wrote:
| Plus, The Winnowing: We don't listen to most music from
| decades ago. We don't listen to most hits from decades ago.
| The Winnowing removes most works, in every medium, from the
| popular consciousness, leaving only the consensus favorites,
| also known as the canon.
|
| Here's an example: "The Ballad Of The Green Berets" by SSG
| Barry Sadler was number one for five weeks in 1966, tied with
| "California Dreamin'" by The Mamas And The Papas. That song
| is effectively gone now. It's no longer remembered. It didn't
| make the canon, because The Winnowing got to it, so now it
| isn't part of The Sixties as a consensus mass memory.
| "California Dreamin'" which was objectively just as popular
| by the metric of the charts, however, is pretty well
| remembered and is, therefore, part of the canon.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ballad_of_the_Green_Berets
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kj9qv6rmG8
|
| Newer music hasn't gone through The Winnowing. More of the
| chaff is still remembered. Therefore, it all looks worse.
| intalentive wrote:
| Digital audio killed the industry. Why buy an album when you
| can
|
| 1. Use Napster 2. Use Limewire or Kazaa 3. Download from FTP
| trading sites 4. Torrent from Pirate Bay 5. Listen on YouTube
| 6. Listen on Spotify
|
| Digital supply is effectively infinite so the price goes to
| zero. How to apply DRM to files ripped from a CD that can be
| compressed down to 3 MB?
|
| There are other factors, like changes in youth culture and
| competition from other forms of entertainment, but digital
| audio + distribution completely transformed the music
| ecosystem. In the 1990s it was possible for talented,
| intelligent young people to start a band and pursue music as a
| career because the expected return was so much higher -- not
| only monetarily but in cultural cachet and the excitement of
| the local "scene". But all that has dried up. Labels aren't
| giving out big advances, nurturing unknown bands, or paying for
| million dollar albums any more, because they won't recoup the
| costs like they used to. Meanwhile potential talent got a job,
| went to college, or stayed home and played video games.
|
| Once music lost its "goods-character", as Carl Menger would put
| it, all the upstream inputs -- like fancy, palatial recording
| studios -- withered away.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| > all the upstream inputs -- like fancy, palatial recording
| studios
|
| Digital audio from the listener end had its piece, but two
| other trends also converged:
|
| - Digital audio from the producer end continued to advance
| and become cheaper. You can make pretty good recordings on a
| laptop with the appropriate sound interfaces now, if you have
| a decent soundproofed room. That is assuming your music isn't
| digital synth based. Studios are a thing of the past or what
| a person who likes to produce music calls their bedroom or
| basement.
|
| - People started caring about the portability of music much
| more than the quality of it. That trend goes as far back as
| the Walkman. Regarding the quality, now no one cares if the
| SNR of your "recording studio" can accurately record all
| 20-20KHz band of a pindrop from 5 miles away at delta-sigma
| modulated 192Kbps. If it sounds good with headphones or a car
| stereo it's fine. This is why MP3 was successful despite its
| audio quality issues.
| macNchz wrote:
| The experience of Napster, Limewire and Kazaa was pretty bad
| at the time. Plenty of songs were low quality, mislabeled,
| skipping, incomplete, or radio recordings with announcers
| talking over them, which was especially frustrating when it'd
| take 5 minutes to download a single song.
|
| I was a teenager limited to summer job money, but I was happy
| to buy music on the iTunes store when it launched. I bought
| CDs as well, but my primary motivation for piracy was that
| record stores had a limited selection and often exorbitant
| prices (because the industry was engaged in price fixing^),
| and the record labels seemed to care more about stopping
| online music consumption and forcing people to buy CDs than
| actually providing a worthwhile paid service-their official
| channels were godawful, see PressPlay.
|
| ^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_price_fixing
| hulitu wrote:
| > 1. Use Napster 2. Use Limewire or Kazaa 3. Download from
| FTP trading sites 4. Torrent from Pirate Bay 5. Listen on
| YouTube 6. Listen on Spotify
|
| There is one thing i learned from Warez: If you like the
| game, buy it.
| fatnoah wrote:
| > Digital audio killed the industry. Why buy an album when
| you can...
|
| As someone that jumped on the Napster and, to a lesser
| extent, Limewire and Kazaa bandwagon, their value for me
| wasn't so much that I could get something for free that cost
| money at the local record store, but it was stuff that
| couldn't get at all at my local record store.
|
| That said, and much later on, the ability to legitimately
| listen to music on-demand via Spotify and its ilk pretty much
| ended my trips to the store.
| whycome wrote:
| The bands I love now are all ones that I discovered by
| downloading tracks. They weren't played on radio (or the
| songs that had airplay didn't really represent their
| catalog). I was a teenager with little ability to go to the
| store let alone afford to buy albums. I have no moral
| qualms about getting those tracks.
| crawsome wrote:
| What do you mean, the natural evolution of music wasn't meant
| to be face-tattooed, cough syrup-drinking suicide-flirting
| mumble rappers who all talk about the same shit?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Oh so you prefer the wealthy old white guys who were born
| with a silver spoon in hand pretending to be "down and dirty"
| rednecks who's woman left them, who's tractor won't start,
| and who does nothing but drink cold beer?
|
| Lyrics are dumb in popular music.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| Do you already own all of the music you are going to listen to
| for your life?
|
| My own music tastes change over time. I don't listen to the
| same things I listened to 25 years ago - at least, not often. I
| want new music from time to time, especially if I'm walking
| places often.
|
| That's the thing with streaming. I'm OK with paying an amount
| that is less than a CD was 25 years ago just to have a bunch of
| music at my disposal. A bunch of new-to-me music from various
| genres and from various places in the world. It isn't like I'm
| going to purchase physical media any time soon.
|
| Is the service forever? Nope, probably not, but that's an issue
| for later me.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I, personally, enjoy both.
|
| I like having new music when walking, or as a background when
| working. For this, the Spotify playlists are great. I
| wouldn't want to have to sift through hundreds of records,
| through multiple stores, multiple times a year, then rip
| those, all to set up a playlist with tracks that I'll listen
| to maybe a few times. This is music I _do_ enjoy listening,
| don 't get me wrong, but it doesn't have any "deep value" or
| whatever to me. If it disappeared tomorrow, I really wouldn't
| care. The "issue for later me" would be to find an equivalent
| service of "disposable / background music", not to get my
| hands on the exact same tracks again.
|
| But then, there are many albums, or even standalone tracks or
| custom playlists, which I would absolutely hate to lose. For
| those, I'm fine with going through the trouble of buying them
| and figuring long-term storage.
| bcraven wrote:
| >Do you already own all of the music you are going to listen
| to for your life?
|
| Statistically, yes!
|
| This was covered on a recent episode of 'Search Engine'
| (rising from the ashes of 'Reply All'):
| https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/how-am-i-supposed-to-find-
| new-...
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| I don't, that's why my local collection is still growing.
| kilolima wrote:
| I can see the value in the streaming services for this
| because it's easy and convenient. However, it's also fun to
| discover new music on your own ("pull" versus "push" for
| content discovery) by researching genres or musical
| influences/history (Wikipedia has really well organized tags
| for this) and then just downloading a few GB via your
| friendly torrent network. Sure, "piracy", but if the music is
| over a few decades old then it should be public domain
| anyways.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >I don't listen to the same things I listened to 25 years ago
| - at least, not often. I want new music from time to time,
|
| It sounds like you want new music all the time. If you don't
| listen to "old" music often and only listen to new music from
| time to time, what do you listen to? So technically, 25+
| years is considered classic. What is the definition of "new"?
| 1 year, 5 years, 10 years? What is newer than classic, but
| not new, modern? Is a song 15 years old modern? To me, good
| music is timeless. I enjoy stuff from the 1920s, 50s, 60s,
| 70s, the good stuff from the 80s, all the way through today.
| MivLives wrote:
| My interpretation of that is not they want recent music but
| they want novel music.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| Pretty much.
|
| My tastes have changed during adulthood - I've very much
| expanded tastes. Less rap, less grunge, more jazz and
| alternative metal. I like folks using traditional
| instruments in modern music (some metal is good for that)
| and I like folks mixing genres (electroswing, for
| instance). I try for more recent music (last 10 years or
| something), but I'll listen to whatever I find
| interesting. After all, there is a good deal of music
| that just wasn't available to me 15 to 25 years ago that
| is easy to find now.
| Lacerda69 wrote:
| Have you tried bandcamp? It's a great way to pay artists
| directly while having the convenience and discoverability of
| streaming services.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Do you already own all of the music you are going to listen
| to for your life?
|
| Probably not, but given that I spent until the end of the CD
| age to collect music I do have enough to last me for several
| lifetimes. I'm a bit strange in that I will listen to music
| over and over again until I have it internalized, and even
| after that. I don't need something new every day.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| _I don 't need something new every day_
|
| Neither do I, but I'm also not going to spend decades - or
| even years - listening to the same thing week after week.
| Not to mention that my music tastes are much more varied
| than they were years ago.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's fine, not everybody is the same in this respect. I
| can drive people absolutely nuts by listening to the same
| piece a few hundred times in a row.
|
| Recently: Miriam Stockley, Perfect day (1999, sorry).
| mbesto wrote:
| > That's fine, not everybody is the same in this respect.
|
| Which is incongruent with:
|
| > the quality has absolutely cratered
|
| You have no measure of music quality and everyone's views
| on quality are different, e.g. "not everybody is same in
| this respect".
| Semaphor wrote:
| > Is the service forever? Nope, probably not, but that's an
| issue for later me.
|
| I don't want to fuck over later me, so I'm still buying
| music. Probably not saving money, but I also get some music
| not on streaming services.
| zirgs wrote:
| What is not on streaming services? From my experience - if
| it's not on spotify then it's on youtube.
| antihero wrote:
| Streaming services can be compelled to remove your access
| to content at any point. I don't like giving that power
| to anyone when it comes to something I love so deeply.
| zirgs wrote:
| I treat streaming services like radio without ads. And
| it's always possible to buy music from sites like
| bandcamp and own it permanently.
| wwalexander wrote:
| Bootlegs, DJ sets, leaks, and many, many albums that
| streaming services don't/won't/can't license e.g.
| Switched-On Bach by Wendy Carlos.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Very little, nowadays, but most stuff from Eric Ravn
| (metal/rock, somewhat famous for Wuthering Heights) [0]
| is not even available to buy other than as CDs that you
| order via HTML form ;) A few years ago, German
| medieval/folk band Die Streuner also wasn't available on
| streaming services. Both have in common, that they have
| their own label.
|
| [0]: https://nagelfestmusic.com/shop/
| zirgs wrote:
| I suspect that they aren't getting many sales this way.
| thallian wrote:
| Ha, die Streuner were the original inspiration for me to
| write my own dumb and small music streaming service.
| Seeing them mentioned here might just give me the
| motivation to pick that project up again.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Hah, that's cool :D They are on Spotify, nowadays,
| though. But yeah, I own all their albums, though it took
| until last week for me to realize they had a 25th
| anniversary album in 2019. Without facebook it's hard
| keeping up with releases of bands not on Bandcamp.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| A lot of stuff is neither on Spotify nor YouTube. One of
| my musical special interests is a very popular Polish
| rock band from the 80s and even they don't have their
| whole discography on Spotify yet, and I had to upload
| some rarer stuff to the Internet myself. It improved over
| the years though - just a few years ago you only had a
| few albums of their discography on Spotify. Now it's just
| one studio album missing - although most of their live
| albums aren't there as well and that probably won't
| change anytime soon; and not even talking about songs
| that got only released as singles.
|
| Once you go "slightly less popular than one of the top
| bands in the country", stuff quickly becomes hard to find
| across the whole Internet, not just Spotify or YouTube,
| often even when CDs are still available to buy (which
| isn't a given either).
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Spotify routinely removes access to songs. Half of my
| "favorites" playlist, going all the way back to 2016, is
| just gone, off of spotify, and I'm unable to listen to
| those songs.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| Lots of old music is not there (I love collecting 30-40s
| jazz, many records are simply not on any streaming
| service because they were bootlegs/live recordings and
| weren't officially released)
| gumballindie wrote:
| Quality may have tanked but profits soared. Music, movies and
| any other corporate product are meant to appeal to as many
| people as possible. Therefore they have to be average.
| techdragon wrote:
| Corporate profits soared, but not the profits that get paid
| to artists.
|
| Wholehearted support for the efforts by the WGA, SAG, and the
| related unions, to stop "big corporate media" fucking over
| everyone in the arts even if it won't help the average
| Spotify streamer today or tomorrow, but perhaps eventually it
| will further into the future...
| gumballindie wrote:
| Indeed. As a side note i wasnt praising corporations, quite
| the contrary. Some of the things provided are good but
| overall corporations are detrimental to the society,
| environment, public health, security and the economy. Both
| in the music industry and outside.
| techdragon wrote:
| I didn't even for a moment think you were praising them,
| it's just so easy for people to forget the percentage
| breakdowns behind the PR pieces these companies put out.
| I'm sure I've done it myself too often enough.
|
| Corporations aren't inherently an evil concept... the
| rubicon was corporate personhood. The idea that
| corporations have equivalent rights to people unless we
| legislate that they don't... that's the mind poison...
| the rot that has slowly eaten into society and for more
| than a hundred years has been backing up capitalism and
| corporatism and all the greed and corruption with the
| subtle backstop of thought terminating cliches like
| "people have rights and corporations are people so they
| have rights" and normal people don't want to learn a
| mountain of history to unpack the lies and bullshit...
|
| And companies have the money to hire the best PR... so
| they have done a pretty good job convincing everyone on
| the sorts of subjects that are in the corporations best
| interests... sadly.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > the rubicon was corporate personhood.
|
| Agreed, big mistake there. And next to impossible to fix
| now.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I'd argue with digital distribution there's just more of
| everything. Within moments I can access rap music from France,
| Japan, etc. This was nearly impossible just 30 years ago. In
| the 90s I guess I could ask an importer to sell me a French rap
| CD, pay 100$ for it. Etc. Or I'd probably just give up.
|
| That said mainstream music is forced to the lowest common
| denominator to appeal to the maximum number of people
| menacingly wrote:
| I think the increasingly-impossible long slog is actually a
| mathematical certainty.
|
| It's actually a mistake of the goal, in nearly every field,
| because it's intrinsically contradictory.
|
| "I want to be at the top, but I don't want to make the stuff
| that isn't to my taste that the current people at the top make"
|
| There will be very few winners as the participation increases,
| the "winners" don't scale nearly as aggressively as the amount
| of people fighting to be one do.
|
| OnlyFans, YouTube, Twitch, Music, Acting. They're all headed to
| the same place. Look how intuitive it is when you apply it to
| something like Crypto then ask why the same logic doesn't apply
| virtually everywhere.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Looking forward to 20 years from now seeing the same posts about
| waging war on crypto
| toyg wrote:
| Can't believe nobody linked this masterpiece yet:
| https://youtu.be/R3jkUhG68wY
|
| "So put down that C90, next time we won't ask nicely"
| jacquesm wrote:
| Priceless, love all the spoofs, especially the Buggles one :)
| Neff wrote:
| And then there are sites like https://bt.etree.org/ where artists
| allow for free and open trading of live shows.
|
| Back in the day before high speed internet became common, you
| used to subscribe to mailing lists and send "B&Ps" (blanks and
| postage) of either cassettes or CDs to the person with the
| original copy and they would burn the copy onto your media and
| then mail it back.
|
| With bittorrent now it is a lot easier to get copies of live
| music, but it feels like the community that was there faded.
| praptak wrote:
| The content industry also waged war on computer media. It was
| supposed to be 100% forbidden to sell anything capable of doing
| anything without DRM. They were serious about this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital...
| whiddershins wrote:
| People laugh at all of this but Napster really did kill the music
| industry. No really. It did. And whatever it didn't kill, YouTube
| did.
|
| So. Haha. Stupid musicians and their stupid stuffed suit execs.
| Lol.
| decremental wrote:
| [dead]
| thriftwy wrote:
| Maybe we do not need that industry to exist anymore.
|
| You have more than hundred years of backlog at your fingertips
| as well as new stuff going out constantly. Music is abundant.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Eventually to be automated too, by the likes of musicgen.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Funnily enough there still seems to be a music industry.
| taffronaut wrote:
| The campaign also coincided with the rise of cassette-based
| portastudios for musicians. There was concern that any record
| industry levy on cassettes would unfairly hit (unsigned)
| musicians recording their own music for demos. I think it was
| Sound-on-Sound magazine which came up with the "Home taping is
| skill in music" slogan as a counter.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I have some nostalgia for most technologies.
|
| Tapes and printers, not so much.
| Sosh101 wrote:
| Tapes gave us the mix-tape - a beautiful thing for sharing.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| Tape is still amazing in terms of data density and storage
| longevity
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| Not analogue audio cassettes though.
|
| They would get tangled in the tape deck, and be ruined. They
| would sightly unspool themselves, get caught on something or
| twisted, and be ruined. They would stretch with overuse,
| distorting the audio horribly and/or comically, and be
| ruined.
|
| In my youth it seemed like every major roadside was littered
| with discarded audio tape. Clumps of tangled brown film
| dolefully flapping about in the breeze.
|
| This is not a format to be overly nostalgic for.
| ggm wrote:
| I could probably fit my entire MP3 collection as FLAC on a
| single DLT. Shame abou the seek times but some kind of lower
| bitrate forward coding across the entire dataset, a cache and
| seek times might not matter as much for long plays.
|
| It would be very silly to repurpose a DLT tape library for an
| audio jukebox: one which carried "lethal to enter if not
| disarmed" stickers and a ruinous electricity bill.
| jacquesm wrote:
| At a half decent compression rate it probably fits on a
| large micro SD card as well, unless you have thousands of
| records.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Why would you store MP3 as FLAC?
| ggm wrote:
| I would re-encode from the original or get flac. What I
| have digitally is compressed because of history, more
| than anything else.
|
| It was a figure of speech. The point is a single DLT is
| huge. Well .. LTO.
| Filligree wrote:
| It's just a pity they're so expensive.
|
| By rights I should be using tape for my backups, but even
| a single tape drive is...
| ggm wrote:
| For anyone who wonders a single LTO9 tape is about $250
| and holds 45TB. I'm holding about 15 to 20 years data
| hoarding at home on 6TB zfs. So for me, cold storage for
| life would be at this price point. As you say the drive
| is heinous too: $10k+
| coldtea wrote:
| Tapes where great - if you mean audio tapes.
|
| Printers are crap even today.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Yeah, thankfully we don't need them that often anymore. That
| said, is there a convenient, compact printer for documents
| (greyscale is fine) for the just in case times? I think I've
| seen a compact bar shaped laser printer aimed at laptops, but
| I'm afraid of the toner cartridges being overpriced or hard
| to find.
| soco wrote:
| It will probably still run with the same Windows driver
| written in late 90's in Win16 then patched and glued and
| slightly tilted to kinda work even today, kinda. Because
| here's where the real adventure happens, between buggy
| drivers and prehistoric spoolers.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| >Printers are crap even today.
|
| If you stay away from the cheap consumer printers that are
| designed to sell ink cartridges, printers are not so bad. We
| have a Brother multifunction office inkjet printer that's
| been great, ink is reasonably priced (cheaper than the laser
| printer that we replaced with it), and it reliably prints
| around 5 - 10,000 pages/year as well as scanning almost as
| many pages. (Wife works in a state regulated industry and
| they require a _lot_ of paper documentation, every year they
| promise to release the system that will reduce the need for
| so much paper, and it 's always 6 months away)
| dale_glass wrote:
| Audio tapes were crap for most people.
|
| There was good tape certainly -- reel to reel, metal tapes,
| etc. But most people used the cheap normal tape, and probably
| C120 which had a tendency to get tangled in the mechanism.
|
| Modern dirt cheap 44.1 KHz/16 bit audio is far superior to
| anything you could get in the tape era, except maybe a reel
| to reel tape set to the high quality speed.
|
| And even the best tape still had some wow and flutter because
| it's ultimately a mechanical device with imperfect speed
| control.
| jacquesm wrote:
| We did - briefly - have the DAT (digital audio tape)
| format.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| That got kneecapped by the recording industry [0], and
| the result was that consumer interest was near zero. Once
| recordable CDs and then MP3 and friends came on the
| scene, it was rendered irrelevant.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Copy_Management_
| System
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| "During the 1980s" was removed from the title.
|
| Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the Music Industry Waged War
| on the Cassette Tape During the 1980s, and Punk Bands Fought Back
| brianmcc wrote:
| Ha I do miss the whole "mix tapes" thing but my god the
| excitement and anticipation I had when CDs and CD players came
| along, to be able to play Track 6 by just... pressing the "6"
| button. Or a tap or two with the remote: "next"!
|
| No more rewinding/forwarding, remember counter numbers for tracks
| (0 -> 999).
|
| Just an amazing step up in UI but looking back "you had to be
| there" :-)
|
| Now though I just have about 600 CDs gathering dust on shelves,
| each one with memories from a time and place through the 80s, 90s
| and 00s, it's quite sad.
| acomjean wrote:
| >No more rewinding/forwarding
|
| You did get adept at looking at a record to figure out where
| the songs were based on the record track "texture". (our high
| school had a radio station, and records being the music mode at
| the time). To cue up the next song, we'd play the record into
| the song, take the payer "out of gear" and manually spin the
| record backwards while listening till we hit blank. We did this
| part off the air (most of the time..)
|
| We had this wierd cassette player boombox. It had 2 ff and
| rewinds, one of which would disable the pinch rollers, pull the
| tape head back a bit and fast forward the tape listening for
| blank areas, where upon it would stop. It worked but I'm
| guessing the wear and tear on the tapes must have been bad.
| Though we didn't notice.
|
| CDs were much better.
| brianmcc wrote:
| Oh wow that takes me back - "auto cue"?
| https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-cassette-tape-player-
| featu...
| acomjean wrote:
| That's it!
| 10729287 wrote:
| Why quite sad ? There's nothing like crawling a collection of
| physical records or books and remind "Oh, I remember when I
| used to listen to this like crazy" and being able to simply put
| the record in a player and listen it"
|
| That kind of serendipity is just not possible with digital
| collections, especially when records get deletted from services
| without notices, or you have to browse deep in a .mp3
| collection you afforded not to lose by not backing it up.
| brianmcc wrote:
| It's nice to have those memories, for sure, but my CDs
| themselves get completely neglected nowadays - between mp3
| rips, and streaming services conveniently tying in with my
| main hifi setup, the CDs just don't see active service any
| more. And my kids sure aren't interested :-D
|
| I used to love exploring friends' music collections, seeing
| where tastes overlap. "Everyone has everything via Spotify"
| completely eliminates this. And I don't see us going back in
| any substantially wider sense, the genie's out of the bottle.
| Ah the march of progress, eh...
| Jeslijar wrote:
| Is this really a problem?
|
| Revenue based on selling copies of a recording is down. The cost
| of reproducing copies is less than ever. The barrier to creating
| your own music and distributing it to everyone in the world is
| less than ever.
|
| All the middlemen cranking out wasteful copies of just one thing
| are not necessary since music is trivially reproduced with
| digital copies.
|
| How much should music make as an industry? Who should be making
| the money from the music that is made? how much money should you
| make off of a single song that is performed a single time?
|
| This is always a controversial issue. The loudest opinions
| typically say "they need to make more", which is the same opinion
| about nearly any profession in the entire world aside from the
| ones that make the very most money. Some musicians still fall
| into that category.
|
| At the end of the day the lion's share of revenue doesn't go to a
| performer anyway, it goes to middlemen who add no value to the
| actual performance - they just make it be distributed and decide
| the winners and losers based on arbitrary gatekeeping. The
| contracts are predatory and the whole thing seems f'd to me.
|
| I know many people with primary and side gigs as performance
| artists who don't make superstar money, there's no shortage. Live
| musical performance is all over the place and the ticket prices
| are outrageously high for any in-demand performance.
|
| Most of us don't have the option for income in perpetuity for
| work performed - we just get paid for hours worked. Is there an
| argument around payment in perpetuity vs pay for work performed
| that should apply across the board?
| pessimizer wrote:
| We've fallen into decadence, and with it has come the desire to
| freeze society as it existed somewhere around 1965, when baby
| boomers turned 20. I've had conversations with people asking
| how new _Marvel movies_ could be made if some political or
| legal change happened. Who cares?
|
| Don't care if no one ever writes a novel again, there's plenty
| to read. It'll never happen, though, because people will write
| novels for free, and people will sponsor people who create
| things that they want or that they want to be seen sponsoring.
| Don't care if there's never another piece of recorded music,
| and we're stuck playing music with each other or being in the
| same room with people playing music for us. Of course, this
| will never happen, because the vast majority of music is made
| for free, and the rest nearly for free after the record
| companies recoup.
|
| The state doesn't need to keep encouraging the production of
| art through police action. If the state wants to encourage art,
| give everybody a tax credit that they have to send to an
| artist.
| EGreg wrote:
| Yup! And the same can be said for your work also, if you
| produce digital content
|
| It will all become hobbies
| TimPC wrote:
| I think the big difference is some digital content has an
| exact audience and needs to be highly customized for them.
| For example, companies don't buy web apps and then modify
| them into the web app they want they program what they want
| from the frameworks they choose up. So while code is digital
| content, it's quite resistant to having its value lowered by
| copying.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Artists need to buy groceries and retire some day--almost none
| of them successfully pull this off, it's like one in a million
| --but every day there's a dozen posts on here about how greedy
| the arts industries are for trying to charge money for things.
|
| Well, no problem, in the near future you can just get a
| personal AI to make everything for you. The Arts will be wiped
| out completely. Time to celebrate? No human artist need ever
| get paid again, starting in 20 years, or will it be 50? Maybe
| it will take 75 and you won't get to personally enjoy it? All
| the money can go to amazon and to ISPs because they provide the
| REAL value, that of providing sharing or generation
| infrastructure
|
| Mix in the constant posts on here claiming that these tech
| companies get to make derivative works off of everyone's art,
| without compensating those artists, and, I don't know what to
| say
| yowlingcat wrote:
| I don't like the posts castigating artists for trying to
| charge for things, but I do think that the financial woes
| from artists don't come from their pricing model or
| unfairness from middlemen distributors. Rather, I think they
| come from simple supply and demand economic imbalances.
|
| Because of how many more people want to be professional
| artists than have the capability to competitively operate at
| a professional level (inclusive of both raw artistic and
| second order marketing talent), there will never be enough
| demand to support anything but the very best of the artists
| who would like to make a living off of their product.
|
| But I also think that conflicts with the idea you just
| mentioned, that of being able to get a personal AI to make
| everything for you. AI has shown the ability to make a
| mediocre product that one can tolerate, but not a great
| product for personal consumption that would lead you to
| become a loyal fan.
|
| If anything, I think AI will take the grunt work out of all
| the tasks a great work an artist has to do, and let them
| focus on the parts that cannot be outsourced -- coming up
| with and distributing a great, differentiated product.
| indymike wrote:
| > Artists need to buy groceries and retire some day--almost
| none of them successfully pull this off, it's like one in a
| million--but every day there's a dozen posts on here about
| how greedy the arts industries are for trying to charge money
| for things.
|
| I know a lot of artists, musicians, actors and even a painter
| or two who actually make a living from what they love. You
| know what none of them do? Make their living from people
| buying recordings or reproductions of their work. They all
| make money by playing gigs, performing and doing commissions.
| Some of them do really well, too.
|
| Oh, and AI is not going to replace the band on the patio, or
| the actress in a local production of "Crazy for You" any time
| soon.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > almost none of them successfully pull this off, it's like
| one in a million
|
| That's pretty much always been the case, no matter how art
| was distributed, though - yet people still love creating it
| enough to take the gamble.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| One in a million still implies over 8000 successful artists
| at any given time.
|
| Assuming an average tenure of 20 years in the limelight,
| that's 32000 over the course of a 80 year lifespan, which is
| probably more than anyone will bother to listen to in a
| lifetime.
|
| Not to mention the tens of thousands of historic and famous
| artists.
|
| When put in that perspective it actually makes total sense
| why no one will bother paying to listen to the 50 000th most
| popular artist, the chances of any given person being more
| interested in the other 49 999 at any given time is
| approaching 100%.
| cubefox wrote:
| The reality is that yes, cassettes really were responsible for a
| substantial downturn in music revenue in the late 70s and early
| 80s:
|
| https://i.insider.com/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000
|
| Then cassettes got replaced with CDs which (initially) were read
| only, which again saved the market from piracy ... until online
| piracy with Napster and MP3 players completely crushed the music
| market, but far worse than cassettes.
|
| Even 20 years later, the market still hasn't recovered to the
| level of peak CD revenue, despite the global economy growing
| substantially:
|
| https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/...
|
| Piracy may since have receded, but only due to Spotify / Apple
| Music dumping pricing.
| realusername wrote:
| The hole in revenue in the early 2000 was because pirating was
| the only real option to get music online, you had no other
| choice.
|
| The music industry was too stubborn to consider selling online
| and preferred to keep selling CDs, they were very very late to
| adapt and lost some revenue because of that.
| toyg wrote:
| By doing that, they also ensured that consumers went to great
| lengths to produce good-quality rips of their full catalogs,
| effectively establishing large libraries of content ready to
| be distributed for free. Thanks to reasonable streaming
| prices, my children will likely never have to know what a
| bitrate is, whereas I was forced to develop a full range of
| "pirate skills".
| cubefox wrote:
| > Thanks to reasonable streaming prices
|
| What you view as reasonable is so low that musicians hardly
| make any money from it.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| That's somewhat ridiculous if that is the reality. All of
| CD manufacturing, shipping, retail overhead is eliminated
| in streaming. In reality streaming should produce more
| money for talent, eliminate overhead, and put more
| pressure on recording companies profit margins.
|
| The height of the CD was ludicrous. A CD cost 15-20$ in
| the mid nineties, and cassettes, a more expensive and
| complicated medium, were half of that.
|
| So a lot of the collapse isn't EVIL PIRATES, it is that
| the industry was sitting on a massive monopoly and cash
| printing machine, and digital collapsed that profit
| margin.
|
| Music production used to require million dollar+
| recording studios that the labels had a semi-monopoly on.
| Even in the 1990s, you could get usable recording
| equipment and software from a PC and Microsoft Windows.
|
| Radio payola is mostly the last gasp of label control,
| although that seems to be going strong.
|
| The REAL killer of music revenue is the rise of video
| games and way more television/video accessibility. First
| of all, there isn't one TV in the home like it was up to
| the 1990s. TVs are cheap, and smartphones are ubiquitous.
| Video games. tiktoks/youtubes, and TV dominate the media
| of the youth, and music is a peripheral/decorative aspect
| of those.
|
| Essentially music filled the world of bored teenagers
| once upon a time, but boredom has been destroyed in the
| modern world (replaced with media saturation ennui).
| cubefox wrote:
| > Essentially music filled the world of bored teenagers
| once upon a time, but boredom has been destroyed in the
| modern world (replaced with media saturation ennui).
|
| Interessanting hypothesis. Do people listen to music less
| nowadays? It seems indeed not as dominant as in the 90s,
| I admit that.
| pixl97 wrote:
| If you're watching insta/tictok you're probably not also
| listening to music at the same time. Also kids these days
| listen to a much wider range of music then I was ever
| subjected to. We got whatever local radio stations could
| be picked up, or if your family had a collection and let
| you touch it. Now my daughter can pretty much pull up
| anything made on YouTube and play it from classic
| instrumental to whatever was released yesterday.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Everyone on spotify is free to put their music on
| bandcamp for $10 instead, and I in fact have bought music
| exactly that way, getting high quality lossless audio
| from a niche artist that probably doesn't make a cent
| from spotify.
|
| But artists largely don't take their music off spotify to
| exclusively sell alone, because if they tried that they
| wouldn't make a dime. Music is hard to "find" and your
| average music maker trying to go their own way (I know
| several) makes you zero dollars, so why not put it on
| spotify, make ten bucks, and also possibly find a fan who
| will buy your music on bandcamp for full price and
| essentially pay for your life.
|
| The modern creator economy has largely shown that the way
| you be an artist and make a living is by giving away your
| stuff mostly for free, making good quality stuff, gaining
| fans, and letting a small percentage of those fans
| literally donate you an $80k salary. This works for game
| makers, music makers, book writers, video producers,
| journalists, etc.
| cubefox wrote:
| I doubt it works for almost anyone. Who is making $80k in
| donations? More likely seems the following: People listen
| to music on Spotify and don't even begin to think about
| donating any money to the musician. They already pay for
| Spotify after all. And of course Bandcamp can't compete
| with Spotify pricing, let alone piracy.
| throwawaymobule wrote:
| It's probably not going to be the model they go with, but
| I can imagine epic games doing 'giveaways' of music from
| bandcamp.
|
| I think their current aim is to streamline licencing for
| video games, which would be smaller, but still real
| revenue.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Yet many musicians could receive a living wage if just
| one executive gave up their corporate jet. Enough about
| that though... let's chide the 'entitled' consumer and
| supply and demand!
| zirgs wrote:
| Well, before spotify they made zero money from me and a
| lot of other people. Spotify also allowed a lot more
| people to publish their music. Increased supply and
| higher competition leads to lower prices.
|
| 1999 with its overpriced CDs is never coming back.
| cubefox wrote:
| > Increased supply and higher competition leads to lower
| prices.
|
| The "supply" of music, including music sold on CDs, is
| equally unlimited. What leads to the low Spotify price is
| that they have to compete with music piracy. CD prices
| weren't higher because CDs were expensive to manufacture
| and therefore limited in supply -- they weren't. Instead,
| they were more expensive because they didn't have to
| compete against piracy.
| toyg wrote:
| _> they were more expensive because they didn 't have to
| compete against piracy._
|
| Bull. Any reasonably-sized town had at least one "dodgy"
| seller of pirated CDs.
|
| CDs were expensive because they were fundamentally a
| vanity item, with sleeves and goodies. That empowered
| middlemen and official distribution chains which, in
| developed countries, is typically where profit
| accumulates. Artists themselves, under contract with
| labels, couldn't buy CDs at cost to sell at concerts -
| labels were pressured to protect the distribution chains.
|
| CDs made middlemen rich, not artists.
| zirgs wrote:
| By "increased supply" I meant - more artists were able to
| offer their music on the service. So each artist has a
| way bigger competition now. It was much harder to release
| a CD or get your songs on radio than get on spotify,
| bandcamp and youtube.
| realusername wrote:
| You had more piracy during the CD era than anything you
| can imagine right now. Basically every town had a pirated
| CD shop, everybody knew somebody to call to get some
| pirated CDs, it was a full business.
| cubefox wrote:
| Not in my country. Our police apparently prevented such
| shops.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> The hole in revenue in the early 2000 was because pirating
| was the only real option to get music online_
|
| The Telecommunications Act of 1996, allowing the likes of
| Clear Channel/iHeartRadio to take over all the stations,
| shows to be the real culprit.
|
| At the time we joked, due to the steep decline in radio
| variety, that CD sales would crater because people would only
| get to know a small handful of artists, leaving few CDs to
| buy, and the numbers here confirm it was more than just a
| joke.
| cubefox wrote:
| > The hole in revenue in the early 2000 was because pirating
| was the only real option to get music online, you had no
| other choice.
|
| You had absolutely the choice to buy CDs and not pirate
| anything from the Web. And the "hole" never nearly got filled
| with legal online services anyway even when they existed.
| 1999 CD sales are still the peak of music revenue.
| realusername wrote:
| Napster launched in 1999, The Pirate Bay launched in 2003,
| Spotify only launched internationally in 2010 / 2011.
| There's been a decade without proper legal options to get
| music.
|
| Buying CDs wasn't a reasonable choice anymore in the
| digital age, CDs were outdated and not fit in the age where
| people could buy portable mp3 players.
|
| The music industry was beyond late, they were a full decade
| late to the party and paid the price for it.
|
| It was the same for movies for even a longer time until
| Netflix caught up, personally I couldn't buy the movies or
| series I wanted at the time, it wasn't available anywhere.
| cubefox wrote:
| > Napster launched in 1999, The Pirate Bay launched in
| 2003, Spotify only launched internationally in 2010 /
| 2011. There's been a decade without proper legal options
| to get music.
|
| That's simply false, iTunes launched in 2001.
| realusername wrote:
| Yes I know, I specifically avoided to talk about it since
| it did not really meet the demand at the time. The
| catalog was too small and DRMs were not removable at the
| time (until 2009) so it was pretty much useless for an
| mp3 player. I still give it to iTunes, it was the only
| legal place to buy music for the longest time even if it
| was limited.
|
| Also the Windows version and the music store only
| launched in 2003.
| cubefox wrote:
| Steam DRM (video games) is also not removable. And iTunes
| music did work on iPods. The main issue was that most
| people filled their iPods with pirated music instead.
| realusername wrote:
| But Steam games do work straight away on your computer,
| iTunes DRM music did not work on your average mp3 player
| everybody had. It's not like you could do something about
| it, it just refused to play it, I know, I had one.
|
| And if you're asking customers to pay money to get the
| legal music and then download a DRM removal software from
| some Russian website to be able to listen to it (that
| might existed at the time, I don't remember), well that's
| even more hassle than piracy.
|
| Even Apple themselves noticed the problem but a little
| too late, by then Spotify was already starting to spread.
| cubefox wrote:
| Even iPod owners filled their hard drives with pirated
| MP3s. And every smartphone can support any DRM music
| software just as much as every PC can support something
| like Steam. The admissable reasons for piracy have long
| ceased to exist, yet people still don't like to pay for
| music. The revenue is still not on 1999 levels. It should
| be much higher by now if piracy wasn't a possibility.
| zirgs wrote:
| iTunes only launched in 2011/2012 in Eastern Europe and
| many other countries. Before that the only way to get
| music digitally was to download it from P2P networks.
| cubefox wrote:
| And of course in 2012, Eastern Europeans started to pay
| for their music, right? No? Maybe they were pirating it
| because piracy is free.
| zirgs wrote:
| Piracy is a service problem. Back in the early 2000s
| pirates simply offered a better service. The gaming
| industry understood that and quickly created online
| marketplaces for games. The music industry didn't - and
| instead of creating Spotify a decade earlier - spent the
| 2000s trying to sue grandmas who filmed their kids dancing
| to copyrighted music.
| cubefox wrote:
| > Piracy is a service problem.
|
| Maybe for two short years until iTunes came out. Then
| there was no service problem anymore. But CD sales kept
| collapsing while digital sales were hardly worth noting.
| Which proves that people loved pirated music because it
| was free, not because they couldn't buy it.
|
| > created online marketplaces for games. The music
| industry didn't - and instead of creating Spotify a
| decade earlier -
|
| Spotify exists for quite a long while now and revenue
| still hasn't returned, despite the world economy growing
| substantially since then, which refutes your theory.
| Spotify is so cheap because of piracy.
| zirgs wrote:
| iTunes was not available everywhere. It was officially
| available in Eastern Europe only around 2011/2012. And in
| many other countries even later. Around the same time as
| Spotify which was a lot better service.
|
| Before that I could either buy ridiculously overpriced
| CDs or go to ThePirateBay which was available in my
| country from day one. So yeah - it absolutely was a
| service problem.
|
| Soon after Spotify appeared I stopped pirating, because
| Spotify offered a much better service than piracy sites
| and brick & mortar stores for a reasonable price.
| cubefox wrote:
| > Soon after Spotify appeared I stopped pirating, because
| Spotify offered a much better service than piracy sites
| and brick & mortar stores for a reasonable price.
|
| The fact that revenue still hasn't returned to 1999
| levels shows that the price is not "reasonable". They are
| forced to price it that low because otherwise people
| would just pirate the music. Many probably still do.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| Alternatively, the 1999 levels weren't reasonable. Or the
| 1999 level isn't reasonably today because there's a LOT
| more entertainment alternatives vying for attention.
| fipar wrote:
| That graph does not show cassettes were responsible for that,
| it just shows revenue numbers. There are other possible causes.
|
| As someone who lived through part of that (I'm from '78 but for
| a country that was lagging in media developments; we got CDs in
| the early 90s) I can say that cassettes were a lousy medium. I
| love them because I grew up with my Walkman and I loved the
| tape swapping scene (physically compiled and traded playlists,
| for those young enough to not have participated), but
| objectively they sucked. Even the best tapes eventually had
| hiss if you played them enough times. Yet they were not sold at
| a significantly lower price to compensate this. I mean vinyl
| decays too but a good pressing handled with care will outlive
| you (for real, I've got plenty of great-sounding LPs from my
| grandma, and she's been dead for 8 years), but after paying a
| high price for a cassette only to have it sound like crap after
| not that much time, you wouldn't fall for that trap too often.
| You'd make a copy right after buying, and then share more
| copies with others too.
|
| You say that cassettes were responsible for that drop in
| revenue and I disagree (though of course respect your opinion),
| but I say the climb once CDs came in could also be interpreted
| as people willing to buy music just fine provided it sounded
| good and kept sounding good. I mean it's not like cassettes
| went away as a piracy medium once CDs came in, yet revenue
| climbed anyway.
| cubefox wrote:
| > That graph does not show cassettes were responsible for
| that, it just shows revenue numbers. There are other possible
| causes.
|
| You don't mention any of these possible causes though.
|
| > interpreted as people willing to buy music just fine
| provided it sounded good and kept sounding good
|
| Yes, CDs replaced cassettes and records. They had better
| audio quality and were nearly as small as cassettes. But
| cassettes weren't much worse overall than records. The audio
| quality wasn't as good as vinyl (though that came mostly from
| cheaper tapes, good tapes has fairly competitive audio) and
| aged more quickly, but they were much smaller, which was a
| big advantage. So overall, cassette piracy was competitive
| with vinyl sales, but not with CD sales.
| geoelectric wrote:
| Think probably the most important quality was you could use
| a cassette or CD in a portable player, boom box, or car
| stereo.
| chx wrote:
| > You don't mention any of these possible causes though.
|
| What about
|
| * The rise of blockbusters. Jaws was the first in 1975.
| Domestic office boomed https://i.redd.it/7nmrszljbdda1.png
|
| * The rise of home gaming and computing. The second
| generation of gaming consoles is right around this time:
| Fairchild Channel F (1976), Atari 2600 (1977), Odyssey
| (1978)... In 1977 you had the Apple II, TRS-80, and the
| Commodore PET.
|
| * VHS got introduced in 1977.
|
| If we posit there are only so many dollars any one person
| is willing to spend on entertainment, perhaps it's not a
| stretch to think these have contributed to less dollars
| being spent on music?
| fipar wrote:
| > You don't mention any of these possible causes though. I
| did not, but I was responding to your "The reality is that
| yes, cassettes really were responsible" which to me reads
| like a statement of fact and not one of possible cause. The
| fact remains that the graph you shared does not proof
| cassettes were responsible for that.
|
| Another possibility is that music revenue around that 1976
| peak shown in your graph is due to wider reasons (e.g., '74
| and '75 had negative GDP growth, then positive for a few
| years, then negative in '80 and '82 with a positive '81,
| that actually matches the revenue graph to some extent, so
| I don't think it's an established fact that cassettes were
| the cause for this.
|
| As a disclaimer though, I'll admit my opinion is tainted by
| the fact that the record companies were pushing that
| 'cassettes are killing music' agenda, which I disagree
| with, so I'm certainly biased in my views.
| cubefox wrote:
| > I did not, but I was responding to your "The reality is
| that yes, cassettes really were responsible" which to me
| reads like a statement of fact and not one of possible
| cause. The fact remains that the graph you shared does
| not proof cassettes were responsible for that.
|
| It's an inference to the best explanation:
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ No
| empirical evidence conclusively proves its true
| explanation, but the best available explanation is the
| most likely correct one.
|
| > Another possibility is that music revenue around that
| 1976 peak shown in your graph is due to wider reasons
| (e.g., '74 and '75 had negative GDP growth, then positive
| for a few years, then negative in '80 and '82 with a
| positive '81, that actually matches the revenue graph to
| some extent, so I don't think it's an established fact
| that cassettes were the cause for this.
|
| But that seems a much less likely explanation. The GDP
| remained pretty steady during that time:
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-
| states/gdp-...
|
| Nothing there is indicating that the music market would
| suddenly contract by 30%.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| > It's an inference to the best explanation:
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ No
| empirical evidence conclusively proves its true
| explanation, but the best available explanation is the
| most likely correct one.
|
| This is gibberish, dude. If we don't know, let's admit we
| don't know. "the best available explanation is the most
| likely correct one" is not even close to reality.
| brightlancer wrote:
| > It's an inference to the best explanation
|
| You've not provided that explanation. You're telling us
| it's the best explanation but you haven't explained it or
| given any argument for why it's the best -- other than
| because it's what you've said is the best.
| ghaff wrote:
| As someone in college in the late 70s we did a ton of
| taping each others' vinyl onto cassette and pretty no one
| I knew actually bought prerecorded cassettes unless that
| was the only medium available.
|
| Of course, as with software, not every cassette copy
| represented a lost vinyl album sale but copying in places
| like colleges was very widespread.
| jacquesm wrote:
| If anything cassettes served as a music discovery service
| before we had the ability to share links online. Pretty much
| everything I ever bought I discovered because someone borrowed
| me a tape or sent me one from abroad.
| cubefox wrote:
| But they also lead to a substantial decrease in music
| revenue, as the chart shows.
| kzrdude wrote:
| How do you see that in the chart?
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| That juncture was a very distinct divide in pop music. The
| peak is likely around the peak of disco (Staying Alive:
| 1977). The post-peak of disco was kind of barren until the
| 1980s / MTV scene starting things going again.
|
| I think the collapse is due to the death of vinyl, which
| was probably associated with disco and older dying styles.
|
| CDs could always be recorded to cassettes. It was just an
| audio stream you could feed to the cassette player. So
| pirates and swappers wouldn't have cared that much.
|
| And the sales peak of cassettes is during the late 1980s.
| So that was well after the collapse of sales.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What you _think_ the chart shows.
|
| Commercial music had it's zenith and it declined. Just like
| everything else it didn't grow for ever and just like
| everything else there are reasons why you don't want to
| yank the chain of your consumers _and_ your producers too
| much. The fact that the two correlate timewise does not
| mean the one cause the other. In fact I think that the
| music industry missed an absolutely huge opportunity. By
| the time I had digitized my whole collection they had
| royally missed the boat, whereas if I didn 't have to go
| through all that who knows how much money I would have
| spent on new music by now. I used to spend a lot of money
| on music, now I spend none and not a dime of that
| difference was due to piracy.
|
| I have friends in the music industry and got invited to a
| meeting of BUMA/STEMRA regarding the potential of streaming
| and it was like watching dinosaurs discussing the price of
| swampland while in the background you could see a comet
| heading straight for the planet. I don't think I've ever
| seen such a disconnect between producers and consumers.
| Product market fit is not just good for new companies, it
| is also good for existing ones. Fail at that and you will
| fail.
| colonwqbang wrote:
| CDs used to be crazy expensive. They cost much more than what
| was reasonable. Today I have access to untold thousands of
| records for EUR10 per month. That money (non inflation
| adjusted) would have bought me only a single record back in the
| day.
|
| One could argue that the current price of music is too low. But
| the price they tried to extract back then was completely
| unreasonable and I think those excesses contributed heavily to
| the current situation.
| expertentipp wrote:
| > But the price they tried to extract back then was
| completely unreasonable and I think those excesses
| contributed heavily to the current situation.
|
| Yes that left incurable trauma. During late 90s to early 00s
| CD costed the same in Germany and in any post-communist
| country whose economies were in shambles. Something around 12
| EUR which would be 18 EUR inflation adjusted now. I was
| wandering between shelves like a pariah and asking shop
| assistant like a beggar to insert the CD into the player so I
| could listen it in shop for few minutes. Music industry
| worked hard to make enemies for life.
| zirgs wrote:
| Everyone pirated in the Eastern Europe back then. You
| bought a CD only if you were a big fan of the band. The
| rest was downloaded off the net. I've never bought a single
| CD in my life. Transitioned straight from pirating to
| Spotify.
| expertentipp wrote:
| Ha! the dial up internet was ruled by extortionist state
| monopoly and local ISPs were plagued with equipment
| thievery... the only way to acquire pirated music was
| physically exchanging hard drives with acquaintances.
| zirgs wrote:
| That was true in the late 1990s, but by mid-2000s
| everyone could get fast internet with no data caps.
|
| That's when Steam started taking off, but music industry
| was still stuck in the previous century.
| cubefox wrote:
| They weren't, iTunes (and other services before that)
| existed before Steam. The music industry was ahead of the
| games industry, not the other way round. The difference
| is that video game DRM (Steam) succeeded, but music DRM
| didn't.
| zirgs wrote:
| Steam was available in the Eastern Europe way before
| iTunes and Spotify. Music and movie industries really
| dropped the ball there.
| cubefox wrote:
| In the US iTunes was available earlier, but people still
| liked piracy better.
| myspy wrote:
| Yeah, it really was way too expensive. A single with one or
| two remixes or other songs did cost 5EUR. Linkin Parks
| Meteora did cost me 19EUR and Reanimation 16.50EUR. Double CD
| samplers were around 25EUR to 30EUR.
|
| I'm happy with streaming but I'm also happy to buy a vinyl to
| additionally support my favourite artists, even when it costs
| 30-40EUR.
| cubefox wrote:
| > CDs used to be crazy expensive. They cost much more than
| what was reasonable.
|
| A market economy determines the value of goods by what people
| are willing to pay for it. Apparently, halfing the record
| price would not have doubled the sales, so the vinyl/CD price
| reflected the value of the music pretty well. But nowadays,
| legal music streaming has to compete against illegal piracy,
| which is free and only a little inconvenient, so the
| streaming price is forced to a very low level. Musicians can
| hardly make money from music sales anymore. If you make a
| type of music that isn't well suited for concerts, and you
| aren't massively popular, you are screwed.
| colonwqbang wrote:
| That's true, but the music market is special in some ways.
|
| * Artificial scarcity. Recorded music is a scarce good only
| because the law says so. You wouldn't download a car and so
| on.
|
| * Non-fungibility. Music isn't all the same. Customers want
| a record with their favourite artist and not just any
| record of similar "quality".
|
| There was a very limited time in human history where
| musicians could get rich by only selling recorded music.
| The norm otherwise has been that musicians earn money from
| live performances and now we're almost back to that. I'm
| not sure I think that's a bad thing.
| cubefox wrote:
| > * Artificial scarcity. Recorded music is a scarce good
| only because the law says so. You wouldn't download a car
| and so on
|
| But this scarcity is good. It enables, or would enable,
| production of music which wouldn't otherwise be produced.
| If music piracy weren't so much an issue today, the music
| industry size would probably be several times its current
| size (it would have simply grown with the rest of the
| economy, as it did ik the 90s) which would mean far more
| musicians could earn a living with their work. Especially
| musicians which make a type of music which isn't well
| suited for concerts. As a consequence, a lot of this
| music simply doesn't get made today. Yes, we instead got
| impossibly cheap Spotify (I don't think cheap flat rate
| streaming would have ever become a thing if it wasn't for
| piracy making actually selling tracks near impossible),
| but we also got less music, and consequently, less good
| music.
|
| Compare this to the video game market, where piracy isn't
| as big of a problem as in music, due to much larger file
| sizes and better copy protection. Many of the great games
| we have couldn't have been made if video game piracy was
| significantly more common.
| zirgs wrote:
| There are more than 100M tracks on Spotify. More that one
| person can listen to over several lifetimes. Even if 99%
| of them are crap - that still leaves 1M of good tracks.
| The amount of available music is simply staggering
| nowadays.
| cubefox wrote:
| Yeah, but it would be even better if there was no piracy
| and thus significantly more money to be made in the music
| business.
| fluoridation wrote:
| It's not obvious that a larger market translates to
| higher quality supply. Certainly greater supply, but
| someone who's profit-motivated and is trying to capture
| more of the market would probably do better producing
| easy and diverse content in large quantities.
| zirgs wrote:
| This kinda explains the anti-piracy hysteria of the 2000s.
| uhmyeh wrote:
| And their resurgence with AI and Google's web integrity thing
|
| The web is just TV3.0, reserved for acceptable political and
| commercial content now. Eh I'm done with that; switching off
| to all of it. Will stick to internet for job and not use it
| on my personal desktop, just phone.
|
| Copyright rent seekers can do something useful for humanity
| or stick to making it about "the art" and perform local
| theatre
| EGreg wrote:
| You can't opt of it, your friends will make decisions that
| affect you, bother you with political opinions, share your
| photos etc.
| uhmyeh wrote:
| It's a good thing my friends also hate the web. I was
| pretty much the lone holdout
|
| "Opt out" from my references frame; I will use a gmail
| for government and services as expected, and do nothing
| else online but what my job asks. I'm done scrolling and
| collecting useless knowledge and anecdotes
|
| I literally just switched to shit tier ISP speeds
|
| Fortunately I deleted TwitFace a decade ago
|
| Will be blacklisting HN, Reddit on the router end
|
| Down to a stupid beefy ML machine through work, personal
| iPhone and old MacBook Air running Linux; feels good man
| dog
| mindslight wrote:
| > _not use [Internet] on my personal desktop, just phone._
|
| Then you'll be headed in the exact wrong direction! Phones
| are generally locked down corporate platforms, where
| Google's current attempt to lock down the web got its
| inspiration and start (see: SafetyNet). Even if you do
| repave and install an OS that represents your interests,
| the input/output capabilities are by default limited and
| the available apps still generally revolve around accessing
| centralized services hosted elsewhere. Whereas with your
| personal desktop, you can keep it _personal_ and install
| libre software that lets you escape the copyright cartel
| and big tech walled gardens.
| akino_germany wrote:
| If you need a legend for the second chart, here it is:
|
| physical music videos (yellow); CD singles (light orange); CD
| albums (dark orange); cassette singles (light blue); cassette
| albums (Carolina blue); vinyl LP/EPs (darker blue); download
| singles (purple); ringtone/ringbacks (periwinkle); download
| albums (dark purple); SoundExchange distributions (lime green);
| synchronization (light gray); free streaming (green); paid
| streaming subscriptions (dark green)
| SoftTalker wrote:
| In the 1980s there was a record store where I lived that sold
| "used" records and tapes. Their hook was that they'd take any
| record back within a week of purchase. I think they witheld a
| dollar or two on the refund.
|
| So you'd go in, buy a record and a blank cassette, go home and
| make a tape of the record, then return the record. My friends
| and I did this countless times. If there was a record we all
| liked we'd just buy more tapes and make a copy for each of us.
|
| If this was a common thing in other towns, I can see why it
| reduced revenue. Even if this exact model was unusual, you
| could still borrow records from friends and make tape copies,
| so only one of you had to buy the record.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Making copies of cassettes was just standard practice. A new
| album came out and we'd all chip in for one and then copy the
| rest onto cassettes using the double speed cassette copying
| that was standard in most stereos.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I'm a little doubtful piracy is the main driving force there,
| until digital music became common.
|
| They charged more for CDs, and they became cheaper to make than
| tapes, so naturally revenue went up.
|
| Music videos, and a few super successful pop stars, greatly
| increased interest in pop music for a period, but that tapered
| off.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| I mean the top musicians are still millionaires so I don't feel
| too sorry for them
| pessimizer wrote:
| The late 70s and early 80s was the dawn of tape trading, punk
| rock, rap, metal, and disco. 90% of it was _only_ available
| through tape trading (or runs of 200 singles) because everyone
| had been shut out of a stagnant industry that was resting on
| AOR, super-decadent and overproduced prog, and continuing to
| throw money at the people who made money in the 60s.
|
| As the 80s started, the record companies caught on and adjusted
| by hiring new A&R and getting into the clubs again. Then MTV
| happened.
| hbossy wrote:
| The sulfur mining industry never recovered from the drop in
| revenue after someone discovered a way to extract it on scale
| from low-quality coal. Poland had a massive drop in revenue
| despite being the one selling both products. Does it mean they
| should attach a coal burning license agreement prohibiting the
| extraction process to each container, or try to prosecute
| people selling filters?
| cubefox wrote:
| Piracy was illegal long before cassettes or Napster were
| invented. Sulfur extraction was always legal, and for good
| reason.
| Chiba-City wrote:
| [dead]
| EGreg wrote:
| So the laws were misguided. Why should someone be granted a
| monopoly on excluding others from using an idea (patent) or
| content (copyright)? To prop up a business model that
| cannot be sustained except if based on threats of violence?
| croes wrote:
| How could the CD save the market from piracy?
|
| With a simple cassette recorder with microphone or other audio
| input you could copy any CD.
| ben7799 wrote:
| You could copy the CD but the copy wasn't as good as the CD.
|
| Everyone bought CDs when they got popular because:
|
| - They sounded better
|
| - They didn't wear out from playing them
|
| - Small/Portable/Durable
|
| - Easy to move between tracks
|
| - No need to flip them to go to the other side (some cassette
| players eventually figured out how to do this without a flip)
| croes wrote:
| If you have the choice between a cassette copy, to which
| people were already used to, and no copy, people would
| choose the cassette copy.
|
| CDs made the source better because the sound was better
| than the sound of original cassettes.
| Ralfp wrote:
| Home taping is killing record industry profits! We left
| this side blank so you can help
|
| B-side on Dead Kennedys ,, In God We Trust, Inc"
| crucialfelix wrote:
| Home f**ing is killing prostitution
|
| Graffiti in a band practice space, written by a friend of mine
| vestrigi wrote:
| Responsible disclosure is killing the zero day industry
| taylodl wrote:
| More like 'When Gene Simmons Waged War on the Cassette Tape
| During the 1980s.' It was as stupid as Lars Ulrich attacking
| Napster in the early 2000's. In both cases their respective
| bands, Kiss and Metallica, took a considerable hit in their
| popularity.
|
| Treating all your customers as though they are criminals turns
| out to not be a very good business practice.
| cafard wrote:
| And the movie and TV industries wanted in on videotape back then.
| I remember reading a piece by one of the then big lobby shops,
| arguing that VHS tapes should be a tax, the income to be
| distributed to the studios.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| In Sweden there is still a tax on cassette tapes that goes
| directly to artists... So if you buy a cassette tape (any
| cassette tape for any use) artists in Sweden gets a cut... Not
| sure how many people today use cassette tapes for piracy...
| bondarchuk wrote:
| In the Netherlands there's a similar thing:
| https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/intellectueel-eigen...
|
| 2.60 eur for every tablet and PC
|
| 5.30 eur for every smartphone
|
| 80 cents for every hdd or ssd
|
| etc. etc, though I don't see CD-ROMs (nor tapes) in this list
| strangely enough.
|
| I wonder who actually gets this money in practice. 5 bucks per
| smartphone for some random non-profit is pretty huge!
| jacquesm wrote:
| > I wonder who actually gets this money in practice.
|
| The record companies and the top 10 or so of the artists.
| somat wrote:
| It would be interesting to see an audit on where the money
| actually goes.
|
| It is probably not "list occupation as drummer on your tax
| return and get a 25 euro buck credit"
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Piracy is bad but killing internet with yet another DRM in your
| browser, and stupid laws ("if you workaround a protection, event
| if it is stupid, you're going to straight jail") makes us slaves
| to big corporations.
| thriftwy wrote:
| What's interesting, 1980s was the heyday of Russian Rock tape
| albums.
|
| Soviet government did actually go after artists for doing live
| concerts (on the grounds of illegal enterpreneurship+), but not
| after tape recording stuff. You could duplicate as many tape
| albums as you wished in specialized tape copying booths, as well
| as at home if you had the hardware.
|
| + You are probably wondering whether there was "legal"
| enterpreneurship option in the late USSR. Basically, nope, not
| before Perestroika kicked in.
| citrin_ru wrote:
| Even before cassette tapes become available people in USSR
| recorded and copied music at home using reel-to-reel tapes. LP
| vinyl record was the most produced media back then but it was
| state controlled - even is some music was not outright censored
| it was not published in large enough numbers if state official
| though massed should not listen a particular music genre or a
| record.
|
| I wonder of people outside soviet block copied musing at home
| using reel-to-reel tapes (in non negligible numbers)?
| jesprenj wrote:
| > Attempts to levy a tax on blank cassettes didn't get traction
| in the UK.
|
| In Slovenia, we pay a tax for blank media and audiovisual
| recorders. The law was put in place in 2020.
|
| Source: https://www.uradni-list.si/glasilo-uradni-list-
| rs/vsebina/20...
| ftrobro wrote:
| Several countries have that tax. Here in Sweden we pay about
| $10 for every new computer, mobile phone, SSD etc just because
| we might store music on them. Quite absurd.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
| throwawaymobule wrote:
| Whenever I hear about these levies, I always wonder what's
| stopping someone from spinning up a 'record label' and
| attempting to claim the funds.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-07-26 23:01 UTC)