[HN Gopher] How the Music Industry Learned to Love Piracy
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       How the Music Industry Learned to Love Piracy
        
       Author : bookofjoe
       Score  : 76 points
       Date   : 2024-08-05 14:57 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
        
       | bookofjoe wrote:
       | https://archive.ph/P4TFy
        
       | politelemon wrote:
       | Some places such as Amazon and Bandcamp still allow downloading
       | the music files. Is there a similarly lopsided revenue model in
       | these cases, as there is for streaming?
       | 
       | Anyway it seems that the industry is pleased with where it ended
       | up, the link between then and now is a bit tenuous. However it's
       | also on us that we willingly handed over control to streaming
       | companies for the convenience. Think about the number of times
       | we've justified something by it being the cost of a few coffees a
       | month. TV, music, Adobe.
        
         | mrsilencedogood wrote:
         | >Amazon
         | 
         | Guarantee you these are lots of bootlegs and other-region
         | copies behind resold. So probably Amazon is worst for the
         | artists because even the labels are getting cheated there.
         | 
         | >Bandcamp
         | 
         | As I understand it, this is (was?) one of the few places an
         | artist could still get a good deal. Bandcamp positions itself
         | more as a marketplace and takes (iirc) 16ish percent. Let me
         | check that against their website:
         | 
         | "when a fan buys something on Bandcamp, an average of 82% of
         | the money goes to you"
         | (https://bandcamp.com/artists?from=footer)
         | 
         | So yeah, they get a lot of the niche weird music. I buy a lot
         | of NWOTHM music off there for this reason.
        
           | diggan wrote:
           | Also, Bandcamp has "Bandcamp Fridays" (or similar name),
           | where for the entire day, 100% goes to the artists.
           | 
           | I keep a list of music that I add to when I come across
           | something I want to buy, then when the Bandcamp Friday comes
           | around, buy everything on the list.
        
           | jay_kyburz wrote:
           | Hello fellow NWOTHM fan. (So much of it is so bad, but every
           | now and then there is something awesome)
        
         | hardwaresofton wrote:
         | I follow 2 rules:
         | 
         | 1. If an artist has a bandcamp, I buy.
         | 
         | 2. there is no second rule
        
           | freedomben wrote:
           | Indeed. I used to buy amazon mp3s, but they jacked around a
           | couple of times to make it harder to download whole albums,
           | at which point I stopped and won't buy on amazon anymore. I
           | know _currently_ it 's pretty easy to download whole albums,
           | but they torched my trust. On Bandcamp, I buy it. Not on
           | Bandcamp, nope.
        
             | skydhash wrote:
             | Qobuz has a pretty chill process too. I don't actually
             | trust their servers that much, (or anyone server) so I
             | download albums as soon as I bought them. What I wish for
             | when downloading digitally is getting the booklet (or liner
             | notes) of the albums. It's nice knowing who was involved in
             | the project and the thoughts/story of the artists.
        
       | _3u10 wrote:
       | Hopefully the times learns to love paywall blockers.
        
         | bookofjoe wrote:
         | https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/magazine/how-music-got-fr...
        
         | neallindsay wrote:
         | Presumably there's a reason they make their paywall so porous.
        
       | scelerat wrote:
       | Nelson's faming here pretty much sums up how I feel about the
       | whole ball of wax myself, a musician, and someone who started
       | their career working for a major national concert promotor,
       | worked for two streaming music services and who participates in a
       | local music scene as performer, supporter and occasional
       | promotor:
       | 
       | """
       | 
       | The problem isn't just the ever-decreasing viability of even
       | established, popular artists keeping food on the table. There is
       | also a cultural poverty that attends the streaming economy. There
       | is the ruthless profit maximization and the constant steering of
       | listeners toward the same music. There is the lock-step social
       | engineering and manufactured consensus. There is the escalating
       | -- and demeaning -- sense of music being treated as a utility
       | that need not be meaningfully engaged with.
       | 
       | """
        
         | johnny22 wrote:
         | > There is the ruthless profit maximization and the constant
         | steering of listeners toward the same music.
         | 
         | What is your reference time frame here? That's exactly how it
         | was in the 90s and before. Feels like there was a tiny bright
         | spot from the early 2000s to say 2010 or so, but then it was
         | over.
        
         | RiverCrochet wrote:
         | It's CHEAP to make and distribute music. Production costs are
         | low due to advances in PC and audio tech. Distribution costs
         | are at the floor where the actual distribution is practically
         | free and it is only the legal concerns that are a cost. The
         | whole industry currently doesn't have a better physical value-
         | add than the guy playing on the street corner with a money hat.
         | If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself, and
         | maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first place.
         | 
         | Many say the 60's and 70's were the best years in music, and
         | this was the heyday of the time where if you wanted to listen
         | to someone's song, you had to buy their record and you didn't
         | really have any other choice unless you fooled around with
         | expensive and bulky reel-to-reel tape decks[1]. Was that all it
         | was - inability for the masses to create and distribute media
         | without a middleman? Not that the middleman didn't perform a
         | valuable function, but it was performing it for everyone who
         | would buy records in the whole market. Now we get to choose or
         | be our own middlemen, and people who don't want to do that
         | kinda get what they deserve.
         | 
         | [1] I don't know when the compact cassette started becoming
         | popular - did people make mixtapes in the 70's?
        
           | phone8675309 wrote:
           | > If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself,
           | and maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first
           | place.
           | 
           | I'm not sure I follow the logic here. Could you please
           | explain?
        
             | RiverCrochet wrote:
             | A) If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself;
             | B) maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first
             | place.
             | 
             | Intended meaning: A can't be true so B therefore must be
             | true. I probably should have used 'or' instead of 'and.'
             | 
             | Music kinda always has been a utility. I reach for Happy
             | Birthday like I reach for tools in my toolbox - it's
             | birthday time, so let's sing it.
             | 
             | A hard truth about art is that, for "good" art, the artist
             | has often poured intense _personal_ energy into it, yet
             | there is no guarantee that that energy will transfer to
             | future experiencers of your art. When that transfer happens
             | consistently over decades or centuries, it 's awesome and
             | that speaks to the greatness of that art, of course (not
             | necessarily the artist). Business models around particular
             | arts such as music have little bearing on this phenomenon,
             | other than possibly giving more people the ability to
             | pursue art. But artists who can achieve greatness (which
             | they will have an innate need to do because it is a
             | personal energy thing) will manage it regardless of any
             | surrounding business model or economic/religious/political
             | system.
             | 
             | "Happy Birthday" is a utility, but also a great work of
             | art, because we are still singing it 100 years later.
        
           | QuercusMax wrote:
           | It was always true that anyone could make music, since the
           | earliest days of modern humans.
           | 
           | By "music" you really seem to mean the recording industry,
           | which is a very different beast than the concept of music.
        
             | jerf wrote:
             | I think the point is the recording industry _was_ a very
             | different beast. Now it 's not. What would pass as a high-
             | quality studio in the 1980s is now home hobbyist
             | accessible, with bits and pieces state of the art for even
             | the current decade like the digital processing. Anyone
             | willing to put in enough time to have music worth recording
             | can record it with only a modest percentage increase in
             | time and money.
             | 
             | The gate was never that music is hard [1], but recording
             | and distribution. Well, recording and distribution is now
             | very, very feasibly done without companies, and even the
             | process of making it is easier than ever. Why would we
             | expect anything but an explosion in supply?
             | 
             | Most of it will, of course, be crap. Sturgeon's law can not
             | be denied. But 10% of a 50x increase is still a _lot_ of
             | new good music, and 10% of 10% of a 100x increase is still
             | quite a bit of new _great_ music.
             | 
             | [1]: Music is, of course, hard. But it's hard in the way
             | programming is hard, accounting is hard, being a biochemist
             | is hard, plumbing is hard, etc. Many, many things are on
             | this level of "hard". It's the sort of thing that takes
             | enough investment that you are making a choice to pursue it
             | rather than other things, but it's well within an
             | individual's capability. No need to form a 1000 person
             | company in 2024 just to record some tunes, whereas if you
             | want to distribute your music nationally in the 1960s you
             | are looking at "1000 person company" sorts of tasks, where
             | the successful companies were larger than that.
        
               | QuercusMax wrote:
               | "If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself,
               | and maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first
               | place."
               | 
               | That's what I have a problem with. Music hasn't demeaned
               | itself. Music is just as meaningful as it's ever been.
        
               | jen20 wrote:
               | > What would pass as a high-quality studio in the 1980s
               | is now home hobbyist accessible, with bits and pieces
               | state of the art for even the current decade like the
               | digital processing.
               | 
               | The gear is accessible - but the acoustics of a studio
               | certainly is not.
        
               | tjr wrote:
               | True, but there's still a whole lot you can do with
               | virtual instruments, synthesizers, direct-recorded
               | guitars, and minimal (or even no) good room acoustics.
               | 
               | That does leave some niches open for the value of
               | recording live instruments in a sonically good space, so
               | surely some professional studios will persist, of course.
               | 
               | And just for recording larger groups, regardless of the
               | acoustics. Many home studios are fine for one person, or
               | two, or three, but if you want to record a band or a
               | choir or whatever you may just need more space.
        
               | jen20 wrote:
               | Indeed, virtual instruments open up a whole lot of
               | creative space. And not having to record everything in
               | reverse order of importance while burning the previous
               | version is a substantial benefit vs even professional
               | recording gear of the past!
        
           | mbg721 wrote:
           | There's also the instruments themselves, for a lot of 60s-80s
           | pop music. A guy on the street corner with a money hat today
           | can make any electronic sound that Kraftwerk blew people's
           | minds with.
        
             | bagful wrote:
             | The ease of obtaining such sounds on the cheap makes it
             | difficult to appreciate just how cutting-edge those sounds
             | were in Kraftwerk's time. Making electronic drums sound
             | good requires a lot of processing, and they did all of that
             | with analog equipment before we even had a complete idea of
             | how electronic drums "should" sound. And that raises the
             | bar for today's musicians -- doing "Kraftwerk" today
             | requires pushing boundaries like they did, not just making
             | the same sounds.
        
           | kmeisthax wrote:
           | The actual distribution is not free, management companies
           | take a huge cut both formally or informally. For some
           | reason[0], you can't just upload your music to Spotify or
           | Apple Music directly, you have to have a middleman, and that
           | market of "middlemen for unsigned artists" is just three
           | companies[1]. They all suck in different ways, but there's a
           | _lot_ of creative-class wage theft going on, even beyond
           | Spotify just underpaying indies on rights.
           | 
           | You _can_ upload music directly on YouTube, but they pay very
           | little on short videos and music streams. And there 's also
           | sketchy management companies and MCNs there _anyway_.
           | 
           | We also have to keep in mind that the music industry loves
           | complicated and unclear ownership structures over the music
           | being produced. Nobody completely _owns_ a music track; there
           | 's separate copyrights for melody and recordings, both of
           | which get separated and broken down in extremely opaque ways.
           | Remixes and sampling make the rights situation even more
           | complicated, and at best, mean that the person who made the
           | remix or used the samples has to share revenue. At worst, you
           | get to deal with all sorts of bullshit claims (or lawsuits)
           | from people who think they own more than they do.
           | 
           | Insamuch as cheap distribution _has_ flooded the market, it
           | 's often either in the form of attempts to launder money
           | through Spotify[2], or online advertising style click fraud
           | of some kind. The problem is not that there are too many
           | honest artists, but that nobody does proper KYC on indies.
           | Either they don't care if you're legit or they don't want to
           | work with people at the small end.
           | 
           | [0] In the case of Apple, long-standing trademark disputes
           | with The Beatles prohibit them from representing artists
           | directly, which is how management companies got their start
           | for self-published acts. However, this would not bind Spotify
           | or other streaming services.
           | 
           | [1] CDBaby, TuneCore, and DistroKid, if I remember correctly
           | 
           | [2] e.g. buy a bunch of Spotify subscriptions with drug
           | money, publish a bunch of nominally unrelated artists on
           | Spotify, listen to them 24/7, then the Spotify payments are
           | clean cash
        
             | bhelkey wrote:
             | > The actual distribution is not free, management companies
             | take a huge cut both formally or informally.
             | 
             | Spotify has a list of recommended distributors [1]. The
             | first one on the list, DistroKid, charges $22/yr for
             | unlimited uploads to Spotify, Apple Music with the artist
             | keeping all royalties[2].
             | 
             | $22 is not free but is very reasonable.
             | 
             | [1] https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/getting-
             | music...
             | 
             | [2] https://distrokid.com/
        
               | kmeisthax wrote:
               | YouTube is chock full of musicians with endless
               | complaints about DistroKid's practices and policies:
               | 
               | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x14kZTPA064
               | 
               | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuE3YQK1-Ng
               | 
               | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itYB2XSsLAc
        
           | bsder wrote:
           | > Was that all it was - inability for the masses to create
           | and distribute media without a middleman?
           | 
           | The difference in era was the ability to earn enough money to
           | exist long enough to "Git Gud".
           | 
           | Sure, music is cheap to make today. However, that just means
           | there are twelve zillion shitty bands that _never progress
           | past that_.
           | 
           | Many of the bands that are heralded as "awesome" really
           | weren't to start. They generally took years to gel and often
           | the members formed, dissolved and reformed several bands
           | before the one that caught fire.
           | 
           | Even the Beatles sounded like every other Merseybeat band to
           | start.
           | 
           | Without the ability to make money at their craft, artists
           | don't get better at their craft. It's that simple.
        
       | karaterobot wrote:
       | > What this means is that it is essentially impossible for all
       | but a glancingly small number of musicians to make meaningful
       | income from their recordings.
       | 
       | I'm not sure what's supposed to happen, honestly. With the
       | invention of home recording and all the attendant production
       | tools, the lower barriers to entry, broader exposure due to the
       | internet, etc., there was always going to be a vastly larger
       | amount of music than there was 30 years ago. If the old model had
       | not changed, we'd still be in a world with a glancingly small
       | number of slots on the radio charts for each genre--those are the
       | people the average person knows about, and spends money on--and
       | most other musicians would be broke.
       | 
       | I assume. I could be wrong. But my two points are that it's not
       | like the old model was friendly to artists either, and that it's
       | not actually very easy for me to imagine a coherent model for
       | music that would work be equitable for all artists in the world
       | today, given the other changes that've taken place.
       | 
       | I don't think it's just to pretend that if there are 4-5x more
       | people releasing music today, we would all would be spending 4-5x
       | more on records and concerts than we did in 1996. And I am not
       | saying that's what the author is saying, I'm just trying to work
       | through the consequences of what I inferred from this article,
       | the economics of which were a little hand-wavey.
        
         | codexb wrote:
         | It's also worth pointing out that, historically, a very small
         | percentage of artists live off the income from recordings or
         | reproductions of their works. This is true for musicians,
         | painters, authors, actors, or any other creative artists.
         | 
         | By and large, the only way to make a living as an artist is to
         | continuously produce and perform copious amounts of work, or to
         | have another source of income from a day job.
        
           | gamepsys wrote:
           | The entire concept of making a living off
           | recordings/reproductions didn't really start until the
           | invention of the printing press which allowed for mass
           | reproductions.
           | 
           | Prior to that anyone with enough time on their hands and
           | skills could legally reproduce any text, music, painting, etc
           | for profit. Artist where largely compensated for performances
           | or for original artwork. There was more relative demand for
           | live performances because of the lack of other available
           | entertainment options.
           | 
           | Now the primary issue with being a successful artist is the
           | attention economy is incredibly competitive, and the barriers
           | to entry are incredibly low.
        
           | philwelch wrote:
           | Recorded music was a viable business for maybe a single
           | century. That's a historical blip. If you wanted to listen to
           | music before the 20th century, your only option was live
           | music, so that's how musicians made money. In the 21st
           | century this is also how musicians make money. Also, it turns
           | out that even in the 20th century, the _real_ money was still
           | made on tour.
        
         | bongodongobob wrote:
         | You're right. I'm going to get bashed for gatekeeping I'm sure,
         | but Spotify is filled with low quality garbage. Not everyone's
         | band deserves to make it. As a former musician, it's incredibly
         | difficult to make a living and always has been. Most
         | bands/artists just aren't that good. Art is hard. There's a lot
         | of loud people yelling about how they can't sit at home and
         | make passive income by gaming social media and getting paid for
         | releasing a song on Spotify and never performing live. Get out
         | and play. Music is a social thing. If you can't book shows or
         | are unwilling to, too bad.
         | 
         | I know this comes off as get off my lawn, but that's just how a
         | performance art works. Only the best make it no matter what you
         | do.
        
           | javier2 wrote:
           | Not to be negative towards my musical friends, but the bands
           | that can make a living today are often putting out incredible
           | art.
        
       | cm2012 wrote:
       | It's a golden age for music. More than half of Spotify payouts go
       | to non-agency talent, IE small musicians. It's a great discovery
       | mechanism.
        
         | ysofunny wrote:
         | sure... until one realizes one has gotta pay the ripper if they
         | ever wanna get recommended by "the" algorithm of spotify
        
           | freedomben wrote:
           | "the algorithm" has got to be a tough one though. You can't
           | recommend very many bad fits for the user before they will
           | stop using it, and unknown/lesser known songs are a _huge_
           | gamble.
           | 
           | I badly want an algorithm that I can say, "Find me artists
           | that sounds like <example-song> that have less than 1,000
           | subcribers (or whatever metric)" but I can understand why
           | they don't do that (because there are very, very few people
           | like me out there). It sucks.
        
             | cue_the_strings wrote:
             | I'm afraid you'd be dissapointed if you got what you
             | wanted, because it'd likely be AI-generated money-
             | laundering-core.
        
           | cm2012 wrote:
           | It's the same story on every platform. No one is owed
           | attention. Building an audience is a grind.
        
           | ThrowawayTestr wrote:
           | "the" algorithm is constantly giving me new music from small
           | artists. If all you hear is top 40 hits, that's on you.
        
           | nsonha wrote:
           | As opposed to what? Pay the record companies, or, most
           | likely, never even to be discovered by them?
        
           | rightbyte wrote:
           | The recommendation algorithm works fine for me. There should
           | be some reset button though or some other levers though.
           | 
           | If you let someone else choose songs or choose song others
           | like too for a party it gets messed up.
        
       | legitster wrote:
       | > What this means is that it is essentially impossible for all
       | but a glancingly small number of musicians to make meaningful
       | income from their recordings.
       | 
       | I mean, if you look back before radio, the amount of money
       | artists made from recordings was $0 (Okay, maybe some money off
       | of sheet music or player piano sheets).
       | 
       | So in the grand scheme of human history, the primary income of
       | musicians has been from their performances. That was true before
       | recordings, and that is true again now. For a weird blip there
       | was a cartel propping up the value of their recordings (of which
       | the industry profited more than musicians). But this isn't a
       | collapse of anything more than it's a regression to the mean -
       | the marginal value of a copy of something approaches to 0 over
       | time.
       | 
       | When you hear about artists complaining about royalties from
       | streaming, it was a very, very, very elite group of musicians who
       | ever made money just from dropping albums. You are only hearing
       | from the winners of the Label system. Most bands ended up "owing"
       | money to their record labels.
       | 
       | (The way record deals worked, you got paid an advance for
       | songs/albums. But you only kept ~10% of album sales. From which
       | you had to pay back your advance + recording expenses + marketing
       | costs.)
        
       | pelagicAustral wrote:
       | When I was a teen I used to download all my stuff from torrent,
       | or DDL sites. Before that it was Limewire and other P2P
       | networks... These days, with a stable job, I've kind of gone into
       | a weird redemption ark that sees me paying for music from all the
       | bands I used to listed back then... I'm probably about 50% into
       | my collection and I now buy a lot from Bandcamp, but also
       | iTunes... I feel like I'm seeking absolution from the music
       | industry, or something like that...
        
         | giantrobot wrote:
         | > I'm probably about 50% into my collection and I now buy a lot
         | from Bandcamp, but also iTunes... I feel like I'm seeking
         | absolution from the music industry, or something like that...
         | 
         | Go see those bands live and buy something from their merch
         | table, they'll make a lot more money than if you just buy
         | albums.
        
           | s1artibartfast wrote:
           | I don't think that is true?
           | 
           | I would expect an artist to get a far larger cut off Bandcamp
           | than merch or tickets.
           | 
           | Artists get like 85% of a zero cost digital sale.
           | 
           | I can't imagine a ticket being close to that after
           | ticketmaster takes a cut, the venue takes a cut, and the band
           | pays all the expenses of touring.
        
         | bubblebeard wrote:
         | I can relate, and I think this is a great sentiment. Buying a
         | Spotify subscription was enough to ease my personal feelings of
         | guilt though (and subscriptions to some video streaming
         | services like Prime). This way I give back to the artist
         | community as a whole rather then a specific artist I may have
         | cheated in the past. Plus, I get a ton of new content.
        
       | kevinsync wrote:
       | Apologies if this feels off-topic and ranting, but it's all
       | connected:
       | 
       | I'm convinced (in particular by years of reading Bob Lefsetz's
       | punditry [0], as well as working alongside multiple successful
       | musicians, DJs, and industry agencies for many years) that
       | Spotify single-handedly saved the aging and out-of-touch record
       | business, that their payments to artists are fair, and that it's
       | more accessible now than ever before by an order of magnitude to
       | build a real, sustainable career as a musician.
       | 
       | You have to simply put in the work, and it is brutal, long,
       | thankless, isolating work, on top of the Herculean task of
       | creating something people legitimately want and connect with. And
       | you should be attractive (not beautiful persay, but charismatic
       | and authentic). And provide the illusion of access to you. And be
       | kind to your fans. And maximize all of your potential channels
       | (digital and IRL, from socials to tours to brand partnerships to
       | merch/apparel to unpredictable, serendipitous syncs in film and
       | tv (ex. Kate Bush "Running Up That Hill")), all the while
       | cultivating fans like plants in a garden.
       | 
       | You have to travel and perform, and be present, and be the
       | soundtrack to their lives, always meeting your fans where they
       | are, however they congregate, and and and and and! For years and
       | years. It takes a long time to enjoy a tree you've just planted.
       | 
       | People do not have the bandwidth, mentally or financially, to
       | support or patronize more than a few artists that mean something
       | significant to them. Just because the amount of people making and
       | publishing music has exploded doesn't mean that listeners have
       | available slots to add you into their mental playlist, until you
       | keep doing what you're doing long enough that you appear, almost
       | seamlessly, into a moment in their life that awes and delights
       | and converts them into a believer.
       | 
       | There is no "right place at the right time" -- you have to be in
       | the right place ALL the time, and eventually your random times
       | become other peoples' "right time".
       | 
       | If you never give up, if you're always there, you'll also
       | eventually be a staple on the scene -- you'll be, literally by
       | default, "old guard" that people look up to. You'll have earned
       | your respect, you'll have put in your dues, and the money / fame
       | / power will come as an after-effect.
       | 
       | Any other situation where it's overnight success, those acts are
       | created as nothing more than products to be sold. Both can make a
       | lot of money, but money isn't the goal. Craft, legacy, driving
       | culture, these are what artistry is supposed to be about. Money
       | is secondary, and always comes if you take the time to learn the
       | business and take your fan stewardship seriously.
       | 
       | The amount of shallow takes on Twitter, Threads, or god forbid
       | LinkedIn about poor musicians who "deserve a living wage", who
       | are "gamed by Big Tech", who are "slaves to the algorithm", who
       | aren't living the dreams they weirdly feel entitled to, they
       | don't deserve anything if their music and persona are nothing
       | anybody wants, if they haven't put in the work, haven't shown up
       | and met people continuously, haven't failed over and over,
       | haven't paid for it with blood, sweat and tears, haven't stuck to
       | their guns until they eventually get lucky -- not because the
       | universe chose them, but because they made sure they were already
       | all of what I wrote above when opportunity came knocking.
       | 
       | Like, sorry, the world has become hyper-connected, super
       | decentralized, insular, tribal -- MTV can't break you anymore.
       | None of us are paying attention to the same things as anybody
       | else. It's harder than ever to get attention, and what you're
       | selling had better be damn good -- but if you succeed, the
       | rewards are richer than they've ever been.
       | 
       | Most plants get choked out on the jungle floor by the canopy, or
       | end up adapting to quietly survive in their environment. Some
       | defy all odds and break through the top. Chances are you're not
       | going to the top, but you don't have to get choked out either.
       | 
       | Anyways.
       | 
       | [0] https://lefsetz.com
        
       | codexb wrote:
       | > "That path turns out to be streaming, a neat compromise between
       | letting consumers listen to whatever they want online and
       | collecting just enough money for it that big record labels are
       | satisfied with their cut."
       | 
       | I think it's a bit early to start claiming victory in a paradigm
       | shift to streaming that makes pirating obsolete. The price of
       | video and music streaming has quickly been increasing, and in
       | many cases, we've come full circle to being forced to deal with
       | ads again. It's entirely possible for the music business to price
       | their customers out of the market again to the point that an on-
       | demand pirate streaming service completely overtakes legal
       | streaming. I think we're already approaching that for video
       | streaming.
        
         | skydhash wrote:
         | I'd love streaming if the client software were actually useful.
         | All of them are disaster in UX if you do more than listening to
         | music in the background. Peak design for me was iTunes 10 and
         | Winamp 2. Which means control/status panel, a queue list and
         | customizable table views for the songs (optional grid view to
         | browse by album). Most streaming clients are click/scroll hell.
        
         | epiccoleman wrote:
         | It's not just price and ads either - the user experience on
         | most of the big streaming apps is absolutely dismal. I just
         | recently started using Stremio with a debrid plugin (basically,
         | it's just a nice streaming frontend for watching torrents,
         | without needing to download them to my LAN).
         | 
         | It is crazy to see just how good things can be. And Stremio's
         | UX isn't even great, it's just that it's not loading me with
         | ads and bullshit, and the thing I want to watch is just there,
         | and turns on with minimal fuss.
        
           | kelnos wrote:
           | [delayed]
        
         | tuetuopay wrote:
         | Fortunately the music industry does not seem to go the same way
         | as the video streaming industry: each platform having their
         | exclusives, fragmenting the offer, and making life hard for
         | customers. Music streaming services differentiate through other
         | means.
         | 
         | That's why I'm happily paying for Deezer and not for video
         | services.
        
       | zombiwoof wrote:
       | Ask any musician: they never made real money on anything but
       | licensing/publishing fees
        
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