[HN Gopher] A few things I've come to believe in my years in mus...
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A few things I've come to believe in my years in music tech
Author : legrande
Score : 148 points
Date : 2021-12-07 16:45 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| jasongrishkoff wrote:
| I started two music-related websites:
|
| 1) https://www.indieshuffle.com - a music discovery blog
|
| 2) https://www.submithub.com - a service that connects musicians
| with music curators
|
| I make my living off these platforms (primarily the second). So
| in essence, my discovery-centric services are viable products.
| That said, I'm not sure that's 100% what he was after in the
| Twitter thread this article was based on:
| https://twitter.com/jherskowitz/status/1466078600822677513
| noja wrote:
| Could you add Airplay to your Indie Shuffle app?
| underwires wrote:
| I appreciate the counter-take -- it seems like almost every
| take I read on the modern music business is coming from people
| who don't actually know what the reality on the ground is.
|
| And gd submithub is awesome, I have been sucked right in,
| making submissions, buying credits, rating songs. It's taken up
| my whole morning, well done!
| [deleted]
| steve-benjamins wrote:
| I'm a musician and Indie Shuffle was my first "break."
|
| It gave about 20,000 plays which BLEW MY MIND at the time.
| Nothing like waking up to a huge increase
|
| Today I'm a modest success. Several songs have 1-2m plays on
| Spotify and I make $800 / month from streaming. It's just
| something I do in my evenings for fun.
|
| I owe my success to outlets Indie Shuffle and SubmitHub--- I've
| found Spotify really privileges discovery for major label
| artists.
| nemothekid wrote:
| What I thought "Discovery" was is finding new music given some
| other music preferences - like Spotify's curated playlists or
| Song Radios. Submithub doesn't fit that to me - it's more like
| a social network (and I guess you make your money the same way,
| via advertising).
| usrusr wrote:
| Sounds like a perfectly fine mismatch between proper
| bootstrapping and the mindset of growing investment fueled by
| some hypothetical value proposition.
|
| Is submithub what I think I am seeing? Basically a solution to
| a spam problem by offering a channel that requires the
| equivalent of stamps so that senders rate-limit themselves,
| focusing a bit more on quality over quantity? If that's not a
| complete misperception I like it very much, great niche-
| spotting!
| codeulike wrote:
| This guy had senior positions in both Limewire and Spotify,
| pretty interesting
| pvarangot wrote:
| And on both of them Discovery sucks, I'm not surprised he
| thinks this way.
|
| Not sure if it's a problem of their engineers or executives
| sucking, quite the contrary, I think it's a problem that needs
| to first be solved at a smaller scale before it catches up.
| Music streaming was also a niche thing when not many of us had
| a portable device that was connected to the Internet.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Spotify discovery is just a way for them to sell ads. Artists
| pay to get onto spotify's curated playlists.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I think I used to work with this guy...a lamp fell like 20' from
| the ceiling and hit him on the head the first week he was in the
| office.
| samirsd wrote:
| i'm working on a niche electronic music streaming app for what
| it's worth
|
| nightly beta: https://mixtape.ai
|
| app store link:
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mixtape/id1391354414
| jakear wrote:
| Not much substance in the article so allow me a bit of a rant: As
| someone with both Apple Music and Spotify Premium subscriptions,
| I think the more accurate take is that discovery is not a solved
| problem, at least in the algorithmic sense tech companies want.
| Spotify's idea of "discovery" is dedicating more and more home
| page real estate to bullshit podcasts I have no interest in, and
| showing me endless "upsell" notifications when I've already
| bought their damn product. I have "Product News" and "Spotify
| News and Offers" notifications off, yet I still find that
| whenever I open their app I need to close out of some popup
| telling me about some new bullshit their PM's want to boost
| engagement on. They do have a dedicated "discover" tab on the
| app, but you can't stream the audio from it to a network speaker
| so it's basically useless for me. I will admit their "Daily
| Mix"'s are decent.
|
| Apple Music is better about keeping out of the way, but their
| generated playlists often feel either boring or stale; good when
| I want to listen to throwbacks but I can't recall the last time I
| heard a new artist I really liked from one.
|
| In my opinion, the best source for music discovery continues to
| be local radio, especially college radio. The good news is that
| having been a part of college radio pledge drives, I can pretty
| confidently say that the discovery service provided by
| local/college radio is indeed a viable product. Just not in the
| algorithmic world-scale sense tech companies want to see.
| luma wrote:
| I see a lot of replies about discovery not being a solved
| problem here, which it isn't, but that also isn't what the OP
| said.
|
| > Discovery is not a viable product
|
| I'm parsing "viable" as "commercially viable". You may solve
| the problem (for some definition of "solve" and "problem"), but
| can you make money doing so?
|
| I don't know, I have no experience in this field, but OP seems
| convinced that the answer is "no".
| mrweasel wrote:
| The algorithmic recommendation is broken, because it makes
| wrong assumptions. Every recommendation engine I've encountered
| appear to be based on the idea that I care about artists or
| genres, rather than the sound profile of individual tracks.
|
| I have no idea, but my take is that streaming services are
| trying to find other artists within the same genre, or using
| the listing patterns of other users to match you up with new
| music.
|
| This makes a weird assumption that I actually like everything a
| band makes, which is rare, or that because I like an artists or
| a few songs within a given genre, then I must like all music
| with in that genre. Mostly I listen to music from a wide number
| of artists, across generes. There a musicians where I like most
| of their work and some where I just like the sound of one
| particular track.
|
| What I want, is button, when I press that, "The Almighty
| Algorithm" will analyse the sound, the beats per second, the
| vocals, the instruments, the lyrics, anything that affect the
| sound and locate other songs with similar profiles. Bonus
| points for letting me input stuff like: higher tempo, less
| bagpipes, the singer has a high pitch voice which hurt my ears.
|
| The social stuff is easy and the streaming platforms can
| quickly implement something similar and put you out of
| business. Actually analyzing the sound profiles and using that
| to help you create playlists and discover new artists, that not
| something I've seen done and I bet it's because it's will
| require actual work.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Wasn't this the whole point of Pandora?
| NateEag wrote:
| Yeah, and as a result it's the one music service I pay for.
|
| It doesn't give me any control of which attributes I care
| about, which frustrates me to no end, but it does fairly
| well at turning up things I haven't heard before and like
| if I can give it a decent set of seed tracks.
| aceazzameen wrote:
| Agreed. Pandora is the only music service I've stayed
| with because of its discovery system. It's not perfect,
| but I've found countless artists and songs over the years
| at Pandora that I might not have known without.
|
| I also occasionally go back to Slacker/LiveXLive for it's
| fine tune controls, DJs and news. But it's discovery
| system isn't as good and it's had plenty of bugs (like
| playing wrong songs/titles). So I stick with Pandora for
| that radio experience tailored to me.
| peab wrote:
| I think so. Pandora actually hired people to manually
| annotate their corpus with various sorts of traits. See
| https://www.pandora.com/corporate/mgp.shtml
| rabuse wrote:
| "The algorithmic recommendation is broken, because it makes
| wrong assumptions. Every recommendation engine I've
| encountered appear to be based on the idea that I care about
| artists or genres, rather than the sound profile of
| individual tracks."
|
| Agreed 100% on this. I find I like a certain BPM and "type"
| of sound to songs I often have on repeat.
| nitrogen wrote:
| Also agreed. I've had days where I was in a really
| productive mood and wanted some really high tempo music to
| go with it, and end up searching for 30 minutes and only
| finding things that slow me down. And other moods and modes
| have their own vibe, that has nothing to do with genre and
| a lot to do with tempo and timbre.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _Every recommendation engine I 've encountered appear to be
| based on the idea that I care about artists or genres, rather
| than the sound profile of individual tracks._
|
| Spotify has the tech to do this, they've demonstrated it with
| a genre explorer tool, but they clearly don't use it in their
| radio stations and recommendations.
|
| As several other comments have mentioned, music companies
| inevitably end up being redesigned to match the desires of
| rightsholders, and not users. The only way around this would
| probably be some kind of legally mandated compulsory
| licensing, so that any streaming service or end user can play
| any content if they pay the predetermined price, removing
| contract negotiations from the picture.
| politician wrote:
| Do you want something that'll let you define a timespan (e.g.
| 2:45..3:12) and find tracks like that? I imagine that would
| be pretty fun from a discovery sense -- for EDM especially.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Every recommendation engine I've encountered appear to be
| based on the idea that I care about artists or genres, rather
| than the sound profile of individual tracks.
|
| And sometimes I don't even know why I like a particular song.
| This is especially true when it comes to the concept of
| _catchiness_. There is certainly some music theory around
| hooks, chord loops, etc. but I honestly haven 't found any of
| it anywhere near as explanatory or predictive as more well-
| established classical western music theory concepts like
| harmonic function or voice leading. So often it really just
| feels like "that song is super catchy just because it is."
| layer8 wrote:
| I believe we are very far from the technology necessary to
| really grok a person's musical tastes. What currently
| probably works the best is the "people who liked x also liked
| y" scheme (generalized to vectors in song space or
| something).
|
| However, that method has the property that the algorithm
| can't judge any new music, it always requires existing
| ratings from members of the platform before it can recommend
| a song to other people.
|
| Then there's the additional issue that a person's musical
| taste changes over time.
| bwanab wrote:
| I'd add Radio Paradise to the list of good discovery tools.
| nluken wrote:
| Great points. I'd even go a step further and suggest that
| "discovery" is not really a problem that can or should be
| solved in the manner that tech companies would like. I ran a
| radio show in college on my college's station, and from my
| experience most of that crowd is uninterested in further tech
| penetration of music.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| So many of the things in this comment section are things that
| were solved by Zune very well (e.g. the social features were
| great, if you knew anyone else who used Zune -
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune_Social)
|
| Zune had the Channels concept - essentially what Spotify-owned
| playlists are nowadays - but they partnered with radio stations
| and Billboard (among others) to provide content.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UmUU3R-Y21I
|
| (Notice how 10 years later that UI is still largely fresh and
| modern; I miss Zune)
| officeplant wrote:
| Was an original Zune adopter from the earliest days (30GB
| Brown Fat Zune). I ran into two people on my college campus
| with Zune's and each time we shared a song to each other.
| After a month I never used the song sharing feature ever
| again and never really had anyone bring it up.
|
| I really loved my Zune, the desktop software was some of the
| worst ever created. It helped pushed me towards eventually
| just getting an iPod to flash with Rockbox so I could just
| use common lightweight sane software on my desktop to manage
| the library on my devices.
|
| Things are so much better now that I can just load up 200GB
| of music on my android phone, manage it via a normal file
| explorer on desktop, and use the VLC app to listen and
| create/manage playlists.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Please help if you can - I seem to remember reading that
| the preferred verb for the song sharing on zunes, per MS
| marketing, was "squirt," as in, "to squirt a song."
|
| I doubt myself in this, of course, because it's patently
| idiotic. Is this anything you have the slightest
| recollection of?
| NateEag wrote:
| I remember that too, FWIW.
| officeplant wrote:
| https://www.newsweek.com/zune-should-go-beyond-
| squirting-107...
|
| I really didn't remember it being called that, but
| reading this makes me vaguely remember my assistant
| manager making fun of the feature name because she also
| had a Zune.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Thank you. I didn't mean to make you play LMGTFY, but I
| appreciate it.
| baran1 wrote:
| do you just Shazam the songs you like from the local college
| radio?
| joconde wrote:
| > In my opinion, the best source for music discovery continues
| to be local radio
|
| In my region(s) of France, they either suck or only play very
| big names. I envy people who live in range of a good local
| radio.
| zeku wrote:
| You might like this website then: http://radio.garden/
| [deleted]
| marstall wrote:
| > 1. Music is not "inherently social" - it is just as often anti-
| social
|
| but going to a record store was/is. if you could bend your mind
| to think of a record store as "music tech" this might suggest a
| possible place for other humans within finding-music 2.0.
| swalsh wrote:
| In the world of web 2.0, that's probably true. Paying people in
| hearts rarely translates to a viable business model.
|
| In the world of Web 3.0. It might not be true. Smart contracts
| builds a way for creators to realize a larger share of the value
| they create, and for listeners who discover them early to be
| rewarded as well. In web 3.0, you're not rewarded with hearts,
| but tokens which can be traded for dollars.
|
| This is a really cool project
| https://mirror.xyz/davidgreenstein.eth/3_TAJe4y8iJsO0JoVbXYw...
| giantrobot wrote:
| You see, it'll be this really large triangle shaped thing!
| Every level of the triangle will make money off the levels
| below it. The best place to be is the top of the triangle,
| you'll make money off every transaction. Obviously the worst
| place to be is the bottom where transactions just cost you
| money.
|
| It's all _really exciting_ and has never been done before! Just
| buy some of this Invigeron, the reverse funnel system!
| WhisperingShiba wrote:
| Who is going to host the actual content? This seems like a
| missed opportunity to create a decentralized music hosting
| platform, where artists get paid in proportion to bandwidth
| used. Something like file coin.
| [deleted]
| sprkwd wrote:
| Music coin? https://musicoin.org/welcome
| WhisperingShiba wrote:
| nice.
| claudiulodro wrote:
| What's the difference between a heart and a token? If tokens
| can be redeemed for dollars, why can not hearts?
| MathYouF wrote:
| YouTube, Facebook, TikTok already do convert things like
| hearts into money. The terms by which they do are very
| arbitrary and seemingly opaque to me, an outsider of that.
| One undeniable benefit of web3 would be the possibly for
| immutable and transparent rules for compensation (whether
| those would be enacted for any given platform is unclear).
| claudiulodro wrote:
| So basically the dream is decentralized "Buy me a coffee"
| buttons? I can self-host a WordPress site, install
| WooCommerce on it, and people can "heart" it using BitCoin,
| Stripe, or a variety of platforms. What's the advantage of
| web3 over that? (just trying to understand)
| timdaub wrote:
| Blockchains, NFTs and anonymous p2p file transfers gonna be the
| music industry's final nail in the coffin and it's because of
| people like that author. They've resistet innovation for to long,
| so inevitable they're gonna pay the price one day.
| setgree wrote:
| > 1. Music is not "inherently social" - it is just as often anti-
| social
|
| Or, as one of my favorite metal bands put it when asked about
| going on tour: "Our music is a solitary experience."
|
| From: https://www.invisibleoranges.com/interview-blut-aus-nords-
| vi...
| csours wrote:
| From the twitter thread at
| https://twitter.com/jherskowitz/status/1466078600822677513
|
| "5. Middlemen are not inherently evil - they are desired if they
| can provide more value than they extract"
|
| This reminds me of bureaucracy - people only call it bureaucracy
| when it fails or takes special attention or impinges on expected
| rights or privileges. When it works, there's not really a name
| for it (it's still bureaucracy)
| motohagiography wrote:
| The business of music essentially started as a way to sell
| preaching and alcohol, which in turn monetized real estate
| investments (bars), and then it was used to sell little blobs of
| plastic and cardboard with pictures on them, t-shirts,
| instruments and some lessons, and then maybe matchmaking at
| concerts and festivals. Music is the sizzle, not the steak. It's
| the sound of gross margin, but it's not the product. We just keep
| letting musicians believe it's a problem to be solved and they
| keep producing music more and more cheaply, while businesses find
| new tchotchkas to sell into the channel that a listenership
| creates. Digitization decoupled the attractive sounds from the
| merch, and now we're trying to find a way to couple them again.
|
| Bandcamp has done some very interesting stuff with merchandising.
| Same with the resurgence of vinyl records as a luxury item.
| Selling cosmetics and endorsements is the main play for making
| money with music I think. I looked into whitelablling cannabis
| products for bands (like the song? experience the complete vibe
| with X branded prerolls, etc) and this is explicitly banned in
| legalization legislation because it's such an obviously good
| idea.
|
| There was a dating site that matched people based on their music
| preferences and playlists, and that was one of the best
| hypoethesis I've seen tested in a product. I don't think it
| dominated the way one might have expected it to.
|
| I agree with the advice, that discovery isn't a product, and the
| big question is how to tie music back to merch, or move on to new
| artforms if that's not going to happen. Otherwise it's like
| trying to sell math.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| I'm not sure if it's still true today, but it used to be the
| case in Mexico that playing recorded music in a business
| required paying considerable royalties.
|
| This has interesting side-effect: hiring a live musician or a
| small band became an attractive alternative, and so the
| restaurants and bars are filled with live music on the
| weekends.
|
| I think live music is probably something we should get back to.
| Musicians would obviously be on board because they get to make
| a few bucks, customers are happy to get some live entertainment
| with their drinks / meal, business owners are happy because the
| customers stick around longer.
|
| In the digital era, recorded music wants to be free, but it's
| absolutely an inferior substitute to live performances, and I
| strongly feel that anything that helps musicians support
| themselves via performances is good for our culture.
| burkaman wrote:
| Does anyone have historical sources that can back this up?
| Right now it reads like an extremely strained attempt to find
| the most cynical possible perspective without any evidence.
|
| The idea here seems to be that until churches and bars started
| hiring musicians in order to attract clientele, nobody had ever
| tried to make money from music. And since then, no significant
| portion of the music industry has ever been about a pure
| exchange of money for music, it's always been driven by
| ulterior motives.
|
| Is there any reason to believe any of this? What about the
| history of classical music concerts? Operas? Broadway? Buskers?
| Mariachi bands? I'm sure I'm missing many non-western examples.
| watwut wrote:
| Of course not. Music was business every single period
| musicians were free and not serfs or slaves or something like
| that.
|
| Music is fun, people like fun. That being said, there were
| almost always churches of some sort who would tend to play
| music too.
| frenchyatwork wrote:
| High quality source? No. But if you're looking at famous
| European musicians before the 1800s, almost all of them were
| employees by sort of church or powerful aristocrat.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| "Court" music is about being a display of power that doesn't
| threaten your neighbor into thinking they need to start
| building an army. That's why the music itself epitomizes
| precision and control. Classic soft power.
|
| It's conspicuous consumption. You keep musicians on staff to
| demonstrate that you are so rich and powerful that you can
| afford to blow it on something so frivolous that it doesn't
| even feed anybody, it doesn't stick around, and you're either
| there to hear it or you're not. See Haydn for the very best
| example of this model.
|
| Sheet music then becomes the "advertising" so that people can
| be aware that it's happening.
|
| However, I think sheet music eventually became (and later,
| records/CDs) mostly a pure exchange of money for music.
|
| I guess what I'm trying to say is something in between: the
| exchange itself can be pure on both sides
| (creation/consumption), but music is "of" society/culture and
| almost always serves many other purposes in the power
| structure of societies.
|
| In its very purest form, buskers have almost always been very
| poor.
| burkaman wrote:
| I agree with your characterization of court music, but
| again I don't understand why it should represent the entire
| history of the music business. At the same time that
| European royals were commissioning symphonies as a status
| symbol, musicians were holding independent concerts where
| people paid money to hear some music and then went home.
|
| I don't think it's really relevant that many musicians are
| poor. Most writers in history have been poor, but the
| history of the book business is still mostly about people
| paying money to read a book.
| unbanned wrote:
| >most cynical possible perspective without any evidence.
|
| Are you new here?
| analog31 wrote:
| A music history textbook I read identified movable type for
| printing music as the start of the "music business" on any
| scale.
|
| Sheet music was a sizable industry before the phonograph.
| dejj wrote:
| I think your view on music is shockingly nihilistic. Thank you
| for letting me see this perspective (music's "gritty"
| backstory).
| texasbigdata wrote:
| I believe, but can't cite, for medium to large artists that
| streaming is <15% of revenue. Restated, selling merch at a
| show (back in the day) is so much powerful it overwhelms.
|
| That's why Taylor Swift has such extensive and stadium sized
| concerts for example. Assuming she's a normal human being on
| the road for 9 months straight sounds pretty miserable. The
| financial return must outweigh it.
|
| Edit: it's also shocking to see how large the song writing
| teams are for certain artists. I tried counting (across all
| verticals so songwriters, mixers, mastering engineering's,
| etc etc) how big the teams publicly acknowledged were for two
| vanilla pop artists: Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran. Now this
| is across multiple albums so perhaps overstated, but after a
| tedious tally I stopped after getting to 200 FTEs. For each.
| Music might be beautiful but it's borderline impossible to be
| "big" without a gigantic team behind you.
| CPLX wrote:
| This is patent nonsense. You think selling merchandise at
| the show creates more money then selling the actual tickets
| to the show?
|
| That's ludicrous. The most successful product people who
| make music have, by _far_ is selling people the experience
| of listening to that music, either in person or via
| recordings.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| Sorry I apologise. Everything non-streaming vs streaming
| alone by itself. That's a good catch on your part, my
| bad.
| wins32767 wrote:
| It makes more money _for the artist_. The promoter
| generally pays a fixed fee to the artist to play, rents a
| venue, and bears the risk on ticket sales. The band has
| to pay the road crew, etc. and pay for food and buses,
| and what have you. The label gets by far most of the
| money from album /streams.
|
| The merch table is one person (maybe 2-3 for big bands)
| selling stuff with margins of hundreds of percent.
| CPLX wrote:
| None of this is true. For reference I worked in this
| business for about 15 years and represented dozens of
| famous musicians you've heard of. I also was a touring
| musician myself in a band nobody ever heard of, and have
| also worked on the talent buyer/promoter side of things.
|
| Did you know that outside of tiny bar level gigs nearly
| all deals for bands to play live involve a split of the
| actual ticket sales between artist and promoter? Did you
| know that above the bar level the venues actually handle,
| and take a substantial percentage of, the merch sales?
|
| And so on. I don't know what it is about music but for
| some reason there's like a tradition in online forums of
| people going on and on about the nuances of the financial
| deals in the music industry by people who have absolutely
| no idea what they're talking about.
| hexane360 wrote:
| >I don't know what it is about music but for some reason
| there's like a tradition in online forums of people going
| on and on about the nuances of the financial deals in the
| music industry by people who have absolutely no idea what
| they're talking about.
|
| I suspect this is 2 factors: 1) music is something people
| care about, therefore they have opinions on it (whether
| or not these are justified). And 2) Gell-Mann Amnesia:
| You're familiar with music, so you quickly spot the
| bullshit that, in reality, suffuses almost all online
| discussions.
| slothtrop wrote:
| > Did you know that above the bar level the venues
| actually handle, and take a substantial percentage of,
| the merch sales?
|
| You're referring to large amphitheater and arena shows,
| for big artists. This isn't (necessarily) true of most
| touring acts.
| CPLX wrote:
| It's true of basically every concert that has actual
| tickets, like where you can buy a ticket, rather than a
| simple bar with a cover charge.
| pvarangot wrote:
| For all it's worth, I've arranged bar level gigs where
| there's a ticket at the door and it's split between the
| bands and promoter/band, bar takes a small percentage of
| merch sells and band takes a small percentage of drink
| sales (this one is the hardest to negotiate on my
| experience). So you are even more in the right and the
| account you are replying to is even more in the wrong,
| from my experience.
| finnh wrote:
| > I stopped after getting to 200 FTEs
|
| Where are you getting FTE? The specialties you reference
| (mixers, engineers) are not full-time employees of the
| artist. Not by a long shot. They are gig workers,
| basically.
| furgooswft13 wrote:
| > That's why Taylor Swift has such extensive and stadium
| sized concerts for example. Assuming she's a normal human
| being on the road for 9 months straight sounds pretty
| miserable. The financial return must outweigh it.
|
| For reference, she pulled in $100 million in 2018, the year
| of her last major concert tour. In 2020 she made just $23.8
| million, only 10 of which was from streaming [1]. She is
| consistently one of the top streamed artists in the world,
| and was ranked as the highest paid musician in both 2018
| and 2020.
|
| So yes, touring is a huge revenue generator for music
| artists, even beyond just merch sales. It's even more
| important for artists that cannot rely on top tier
| streaming or physical sales numbers.
|
| > it's also shocking to see how large the song writing
| teams are for certain artists.
|
| When the songwriting and production credits for a track
| look like a laundry list of names pulled from a hat, that's
| good evidence of Song Factory writing with little to no
| involvement from the performing artist. This is very common
| in the popular music industry but there are exceptions,
| such as with Taylor Swift. For her and other artists that
| emphasize "singer-songwriter", you are likely to see only 1
| co-writer, whom also serves as producer, for several
| tracks.
|
| Besides the character of the music itself, this has
| consequences for compensation, as there are less people to
| split the earnings to. Then there is masters ownership. One
| of the reasons Taylor eeked out the top spot for highest
| paid musician in 2020, is because she now owns the masters
| to her recent albums (which are also her most streamed).
| This entitles her to a significantly bigger cut. Most music
| artists do not own their own masters (on top of often not
| writing their own songs).
|
| > it's borderline impossible to be "big" without a gigantic
| team behind you.
|
| This is certainly still true but maybe less so than in the
| past. At least, artists can "get big" (be discovered)
| without much of a team because of the likes of streaming
| and TikTok. Staying big, and musically relevant, probably
| still does require a big team. Making a living from your
| music, much less becoming actually rich (and staying that
| way unlike the likes of M.C. Hammer and TLC), is some kind
| of voodoo magic.
|
| 1. https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/news/taylor-
| swift-to...
| tomaskafka wrote:
| Why is it so hard to get a t-shirt out of the bands I love?
| I'd absolutely love to pay $15 for an album again, only
| this time I want a cool t-shirt instead of the CD :).
| hinkley wrote:
| Most of the money in the music industry goes to nihilists,
| not the musicians, so yes, you've successfully described the
| situation.
|
| That's why established bands often have incorporated. They
| can keep some of the overhead for themselves by doing the
| work or paying someone a salary, which establishes a
| healthier power dynamic than "we'll cut you a check with
| whatever is left over after expenses."
|
| Bands are poor because It's All About the Music means they
| get fleeced left and right. They don't call it the Music
| Industry because it's all roses. They call it that because
| something is being chewed up at one end and spat out the
| other. The Grist Is Made of People.
| scelerat wrote:
| Don't conflate "music" with "music business." GP is talking
| about the latter.
|
| As a musician who has toured and recorded, and someone who
| has worked for multiple concert promoters and streaming
| services, I think GP frames it extremely well. it's not a
| nihilistic view, simply a realistic one. If you love music,
| don't get involved with the music business! At some level it
| becomes unavoidable, but they are separable things.
| watwut wrote:
| GP is talking about history. It starts with "The business
| of music essentially started as a way to sell preaching and
| alcohol," which is literally making up the history.
| scelerat wrote:
| Pray tell, which version of music business history elides
| the countless musicians worked for peanuts playing --
| inventing -- ragtime and jazz to fill bars and brothels;
| the jukeboxes run by the mob as a pivot from their gaming
| machines; the revival tents, be-ins, and desert
| festivals?
|
| Music has always been in partnership with other passions
| and vices, and since the time cynics and nihilists have
| been able to capitalize on that relationship, they have.
| gmadsen wrote:
| I'm pretty sure he is describing the business surrounding
| music in our western capitalistic tradition, not music as an
| art form
| nkrisc wrote:
| Does it not capture the essence of modern music industries in
| capitalist societies?
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| > There was a dating site that matched people based on their
| music preferences and playlists, and that was one of the best
| hypoethesis I've seen tested in a product. I don't think it
| dominated the way one might have expected it to.
|
| Hilariously, it's because women just don't care about this. [1]
|
| Excerpt from a study:
|
| > Men were more strongly attracted to women with whom they
| shared musical tastes than to women with whom they did not. The
| sharing of musical tastes had only a negligible effect on
| women's attraction to men, however.
|
| Many men place a huge emphasis on musical compatibility, but
| very few women do, and IIRC it's a fairly poor indicator for
| relationship compatibility. Young single men would probably be
| better off letting this one go.
|
| [1]
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/009365089016002...
| officeplant wrote:
| So what you're saying is we need a men for men dating site
| based on music preferences.
|
| Anyone out there into long walks in the dead winter woods
| listening to Lustmord, hit me up.
| pvarangot wrote:
| I think you are caught in thinking the status quo of the music
| industry and its history determine what all "valid" potential
| markets for music are, according to I guess some economical or
| political belief you have. That Discovery isn't a product right
| now doesn't mean that if done correctly it can't become a
| product that changes the music business even just a bit, you
| need a stronger argument to convince me of that than just "it's
| not the way it is because it's not how the current business
| made history".
|
| I think there's a lot of people DJing, producing or jamming
| that would be ok with just getting pennies from their music
| being streamed or downloaded or whatever. Not every artist
| needs or wants to live from their art. For a lot the extra
| money is welcome specially as an incentive to do all the
| mastering and release work that's involved in releasing digital
| files or being on a streaming platform, which is not zero.
|
| I agree it's similar to selling math, but for some reason no
| one completely understands people "bond" to "brands" of music
| more often than to "brands" of math. From my perspective, at
| least until there's thousands of festivals across the world per
| week to share proofs and formulas and programs, I think it's
| deceiving to think selling music is like selling math if you
| uncouple the music from the merchandise.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Not to over comment on the thread, but this idea of people
| performing math at festivals could very conceivably happen,
| and the economics would be precisely same. It's just a
| question of the artform. Hacker conferences get pretty close
| to punk math, and blockchains are the repetitive noise your
| parents don't understand.
|
| A bit into the handwavy, but there's two famous quotes, one
| from Goethe about architecture being 'petrified music,' and
| another about how 'nobody can dance to architecture' which
| were just as quirky as what I'm saying, but when you view
| skateboarders as, literally, dancing to architecture, with
| festivals everywhere around the world, the ideas of music,
| architecture, math, and what dancing to them all might mean
| suddenly becomes plausible and conceptually much closer to
| one another.
|
| The economics of skateboarding (as essentially a dance form)
| are pretty much the same as that of music, and math. It's the
| dismal aspect of Economics that provides this kind of
| indifferent nihilism between the concepts, but when you're
| trying to create a product, the economics are the necessary
| lens. Though I will admit it's a different frame of mind.
| pvarangot wrote:
| Those are good points, but the pervasiveness of music as a
| means to connect socially is so out of proportion vis a vis
| hacker conferences that most hacker conference include one
| or multiple musical events, and sometimes music leading to
| some of the "big numbers". I think Discovery becomes a
| viable product when there's so much of something out there,
| and for math and hacker conferences it's not much of a
| necessity and no one with benefit from it. For music
| because of a matter of scale I think Discovery is ripe for
| innovation and there's viable products that should do well.
|
| I wish I had more time or contacts to actually put my money
| where my mouth is, so unfortunately so far I just have an
| opinion.
| yesbabyyes wrote:
| This gets me thinking of something an old friend wrote
| recently, contrasting music with sport in eg a bar setting. A
| backstreet pub can easily shell out PS2200/month (almost $3000)
| for football (that's soccer for you across the pond), but will
| pinch pennies when it comes to paying for music. It is indeed
| kind of weird how music is so highly valued, and gives rise to
| such feelings on one end, and is yet so commoditized and valued
| so low in eg bars and shops.
|
| A music catalog is transferred for pretty much the same fee as
| one football player, AFAIK.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| Music is, to some degree, fungible. Sure we all have our
| favourite bands, but as far as a pub is concerned, there are
| tens of thousands of good enough bands that can provide
| atmosphere.
|
| Whereas with football, supply of watchable players is highly
| constrained. Nobody is coming to your pub to watch the local
| five aside on the TV. Plus there's the gambling aspect...
| munificent wrote:
| _> A backstreet pub can easily shell out PS2200 /month
| (almost $3000) for football (that's soccer for you across the
| pond), but will pinch pennies when it comes to paying for
| music. It is indeed kind of weird how music is so highly
| valued, and gives rise to such feelings on one end, and is
| yet so commoditized and valued so low in eg bars and shops._
|
| You can't treat information products like fungible commodity
| goods. Thinking that way leads to all sorts of nonsensical
| results.
|
| A backstreet pub isn't paying for "football" in some general
| sense of "video products of football matches". They are
| paying for *the specific currently-occurring matches that the
| patrons want to watch". That is a very rare product that
| commands a high price. If you put on "Australian footie
| highlights from 1987", you aren't going to have a full bar.
|
| Sports games are almost completely non-commodity and non-
| fungible and the pricing reflects that.
|
| Music is semi-fungible. Patrons have strong associations with
| particular songs and love to hear them. But there are
| generally enough songs that meet that criteria, and enough
| patrons that don't really care, that a bar just needs a bit
| mostly-interchangeable bucket of songs. The price reflects
| that.
| yesbabyyes wrote:
| Right -- this makes sense, and you put well into words some
| of the thoughts going through my head.
|
| But where does this leave players vs bands'/artists' whole
| catalogs? A club paying for a Ronaldo/Messi/Zlatan has to
| make that up pretty fast (disregarding brand value/brand
| management), whereas a Beatles/Dylan/Rihanna catalog will
| keep bringing in revenue for ages. As (I believe) you hint
| at, music has a whole different staying value compared to
| (many/most?) other forms of entertainment.
| hibikir wrote:
| How close are you to soccer fandom? As far as merch sales
| for a player, players might lose value quickly, but fan
| retention is very sticky: You aren't going to find a lot
| of people that suddenly root for a new team once a
| decade. So when in 1996 Barcelona spends about 20 million
| for Ronaldo de Lima, they were getting young fans that
| stay with them for decades, and who get their children to
| root for the same team, as arguing with dad about soccer
| every day is exhausting. Hell, having a great team also
| makes your school-level teams more attractive, and gives
| you more talent: Does Messi move to la Masia just because
| Barcelona paid a bunch of money, the school quality, or
| also because there's a great chance to face great
| competition in a top club?
|
| Barcelona is still getting value from Cruyff, Maradona or
| Ronaldo, and will still make money from the Messi years
| for decades to come, even if the merch sales for his
| shirts drop to zero. Fandom leads to more fandom, and
| that comes from good results. A team like Manchester City
| has put top money into their team for decades, but the
| team's value lags a bit not because their short term
| results: They've been great for over a decade. It's the
| residual value of decades of good performance from other
| teams that they have to compete with.
| CPLX wrote:
| What the fuck are you talking about?
|
| Music is one of the most powerful elements of the human
| experience. It's common to all cultures across all periods of
| history and it has the capacity to inspire people, enrage them,
| and cause them to fall into tribal affiliation with each other.
| A large percentage of the largest mass gatherings of humans
| that have ever occurred have had music as their draw. Entire
| generations are defined by their music choices, or even a
| single music festival.
|
| It's something our soul needs, it's as essential to to being
| alive as love, or sex. Pretty sure the business of music is
| driven by that need.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Important disagreement, thank you.
|
| I make music. What we do isn't a commodity business, it's an
| art we practice and explore, like math. Products are totally
| different. Extending your simile of music being as essential
| as sex, the way people make that a business is with porn and
| services. Music may be the porn and services of what are
| essentially math noises instead of sex.
|
| I had also looked at white lablling some, er, intimate
| products to go with albums but was too bourgeois to pursue
| it. Basic idea was a crossover between music and firmware for
| the, um, device. Immersive experience. There is a future in
| which a Trent Reznor of vibrators will emerge. We will look
| back and laugh that people just used to put things in their
| ears. Insane, but this is the kind of thinking it's going to
| take to make music a viable living.
| CPLX wrote:
| > I make music. What we do isn't a commodity business
|
| So do I. Yes, it is. An incredibly popular one:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=aerial+photo+of+woodstock+f
| e...
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=areal+view+of+glastonbury+m
| u...
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=aerial+view+of+Donauinselfe
| s...
|
| I could post 100 more of these of course. The product being
| sold here is people coming to hear and see the performance
| of music. It's one of the most popular things there is.
| Millions and millions of people spend time and money daily
| just to be in the proximity of people making music.
|
| It's also art. It's also a hobby for many. It's many
| things. But my point that it is, all by itself, a
| tremendously popular product for people, seems inarguable.
| motohagiography wrote:
| I'd say the disconnect is about what a Product is, which
| is the eternal question on HN and in startups.
|
| Music isn't really a product unless you are on the
| publishing/licensing side, and even then a license is
| just an insurance policy against being sued. Spotify and
| Apple Music sell distribution services, not music.
|
| Further, artist compensation on streaming services is so
| poor that most artists lose more money from inflation
| against their savings in the time it takes to choose and
| listen to their album than the platforms pay out for
| listeners. This is not an economic characteristic of
| something that is in high demand. It's a different kind
| of economic good.
|
| I agree that music is beautiful and universal. What I'm
| saying is, a Product is something else, and the business
| practically depends on musicians not understanding it
| because it trades in them.
|
| Business doesn't run on truth and beauty, it's a trade in
| desire and money. This is even harder for writers and
| journalists to accept, but it's the same dynamic.
| CPLX wrote:
| > Music isn't really a product
|
| Yes it is. It's a business transaction that's about as
| simple as it gets.
|
| I go to a place and play the music. You pay me money to
| be allowed to come to the place.
|
| This thread is profoundly confused.
| rimunroe wrote:
| As has been pointed out already, some people don't feel the
| need for sex or love. Also some people don't care much about
| music. I'm one of those people. Music doesn't generally do
| much of anything for me. It always feels really weird when I
| see people declare such strong feelings about music. I
| commented [1] about this a while back after someone (the
| person I'm replying to) pointed out that musical anhedonia is
| a thing.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17926998
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Can you buy/sell/monetize love?
| rabuse wrote:
| What is love?
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Baby don't hurt me.
| katbyte wrote:
| Pretty sure this comment is as hyperbolic as the one your
| replying to. Not everyone has the same feelings toward music
| you do, some are quite indifferent because we are all quite
| different. Case in point people who are asexual.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"Case in point people who are asexual."
|
| Whole 2 of them (relatively speaking of course)
| jjk166 wrote:
| That some people are asexual does not invalidate the
| immense importance of sex. Likewise that some people are
| apathetic towards music doesn't render music any less
| important. Certainly none of those people who don't care
| about music are spending oodles of money on merch either.
| katbyte wrote:
| yes, however I was responding to a comment which treated
| it as a universal thing for everyone with phrases like
| "It's something our soul needs" and pointing out that not
| everyone feels the same way they do.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Which was in turn responding to a comment saying that
| music is a sideshow to selling pieces of plastic. Yes,
| not literally every single one of the 8 billion people on
| this planet will die should they go an extended period of
| time without music, but that's clearly not what the
| comment you were replying to meant. To claim the two
| statements are equally hyperbolic is absurd. You brought
| up asexuals as an example of how if you're sufficiently
| pedantic the need for sex is not really universal, and I
| was reaffirming that the comparison was apt.
| beebmam wrote:
| Yeah, and to extend on this: simply because music has been
| used in capitalism to make other industries more profitable
| doesn't imply that music isn't valuable on its own. Music is
| life enriching for an uncountable number of people, no matter
| its profitability. Same with Free Software, for that matter.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| And to come full circle back to the original topic: that
| capitalism itself can enhance discovery. I was introduced
| to Etta James's music through a Jaguar commercial. In fact,
| there are quite a few artists I'd never heard of before
| their music was featured in a commercial, or a TV show or
| movie.
| not1ofU wrote:
| The first time I heard Imagine (Beatles), was in an
| advert for Natural Gas. John was probably spinning in his
| grave.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| But just because it's valuable doesn't mean that there are
| straightforward and reliable business models available for
| profiting from its creation/curation/maintenance/whatever.
|
| Air is that way too.
| eggsmediumrare wrote:
| I think both what you said and what the op said can be true
| at the same time.
| Juliate wrote:
| Parent is talking about the "business of music" which is an
| entirely different thing.
|
| The crux for artists that want to live from their art
| practice, is to know the difference, accept it, and control
| as much as they can of the two activities.
| obstacle1 wrote:
| I would exercise a little humility and allow for the
| possibility that you don't understand what parent is saying,
| before slinging obscenities.
|
| You are absolutely right about music being fundamental to the
| human experience, universally. But parent isn't denying that
| at all.
|
| Parent is talking about the BUSINESS of popular music -- not
| music full stop. The business of popular music absolutely
| _has_ co-opted music itself as a means of marketing other
| products. That's how the money is made and it's the only
| reason you are aware of any popular music artists at all.
|
| Yes people listen to popular artists because the music makes
| them feel certain ways. But from the business' perspective
| that only matters insofar as it enables the business to
| capture the attention of the listener, to sell things. Are
| you aware of how many product placements litter nearly all
| popular songs? Why do you think country music -- which is a
| massive market -- is hyper-focused on getting drunk, drinking
| beer all day, driving pickup trucks, etc.? Do you know how
| much money there is in that?
| CPLX wrote:
| I think I understand it fine. The comment said this:
|
| > The business of music essentially started as a way to
| sell preaching and alcohol
|
| That's nonsensical. The business of music essentially
| started as a way to sell music. Music is staggeringly
| popular and people have shown a willingness to pay vast
| sums for it. It's a core human need.
|
| It's like saying "the food business essentially started as
| a way to sell airline tickets" or something, it's just word
| salad.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| It isn't. Churches and bars would comission people to
| perform in order to attract patrons/contribute to
| ambiance. This is before record stores.
| tessierashpool wrote:
| yeah, that's not when "the music business" started,
| though. that's one particular subcategory, thousands of
| years after it started.
|
| calling that the start of the music business was just
| ludicrous. it's an overly specific example for an overly
| general topic. it's incoherent.
| renlo wrote:
| "Music" has been around for a long time, likely from
| hundreds of thousands of years ago. The "music business",
| where people can own music, the distribution and modern
| incarnation of "the music business", has only been around
| for a a little over a century.
| foldr wrote:
| People have been buying sheet music for a lot longer than
| that.
|
| Of course it's true virtually by definition that the
| "modern" incarnation of the music business has not been
| around for very long.
| burkaman wrote:
| When did this start? The first paid admission concert in
| history was apparently held in the 17th century at the
| home of a violinist:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert#17th_Century. I'm
| no expert, but it looks a lot like people paying money to
| hear music without any ulterior motives from anyone
| involved.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Honestly the grandparent comment reads like a bunch of
| learned wordbabble. It's easy to understand why parent got
| it wrong. I think the thrust of the violent reaction to GP
| is that it is clinically picking apart a thing which is
| fundamentally about human expression in music, which is
| primal and precedes capitalist notions of "selling
| yourself" or optimizing some crap "vertical" that could
| only be uttered by a business and economics graduate.
|
| My favorite band, Crystal Castles, didn't become a global
| success because some brand-guy figured out how to sell
| weed-pops emblazoned with "CC" logos. They were playing
| shitty dives in Toronto and smaller venues and almost
| suddenly became a global success because they made
| something that was really fresh and much needed by the
| disaffected youths of the time like me.
|
| My love for that band was never tied up in any kind of
| notion other than the one that spoke to my heart. Any
| attempt to dismantle that in verbiage is going to make me
| angry too.
| tessierashpool wrote:
| yeah, the top comment in this thread is just utter
| nonsense and meaningless trash. try telling Skrillex that
| you can't make a living with music and all your revenue's
| going to come from your side hustles. side hustles are
| great, but revenue from live performance has gone up
| during the same era that revenue from recordings went
| down.
|
| Skrillex is a dated example, maybe, but that fits,
| because this happened a while ago.
|
| this whole discussion is just filled to the brim with
| people with no serious background in the topic, saying
| wildly inaccurate things. this is usually what happens
| when HN talks about any kind of show business, no
| offense.
| [deleted]
| xikrib wrote:
| Things are always changing. In the early days it wasn't
| possible to record music so it made sense to monetize
| indirectly. When it became possible to actually record music it
| was hard to distribute it until radio. Later the digital
| revolution made recording and distributing music so easy it
| collapsed the market value of recordings. Today, decentralized
| networks are the next technology poised to shape society and it
| seems that those who can create digital assets are leveraged to
| succeed
| kingcharles wrote:
| Confusingly domained web site. I thought this was a link to
| TikTok predecessor, Musical.ly.
| reggieband wrote:
| I must admit I am a bit surprised that a social network based on
| music never really took off. If you really squint at it, TicToc
| kinda sorta is.
|
| Instagram made photos social in a way that Facebook never really
| did. I think taking a photo and applying a filter as a way to
| express mood/personality is just an easier thing for the average
| person to do. It also requires almost no license. The user took
| the photo with their phone, no one else owns it. Even if a short
| snippet of a commercially created song is a perfect explanation
| of my current mood, I can't widely share it on a social network
| without license.
|
| I think that revolution could come but it requires something
| fantastical. It would require a music making device as easy to
| use as a mobile phone camera. Some method of expressing
| mood/personality using sound that is effective.
| baran1 wrote:
| Historically I think licensing has been the biggest hurdle.
| Nowadays music is moving towards being commodified and
| licensing is less of an issue. Still to be determined whether
| or not it's possible to build a community around a fractured
| space, I'll report back when we launch :)
| Minor49er wrote:
| While there isn't a social media network based on music, there
| are countless Discord servers, message boards, and other online
| communities that post onto sites like Bamdcamp and Soundcloud
| to share their work woth each other. Given the diversity in
| music creation processes, related interests, openness, etc, a
| social media network based on music would be pretty limiting
| unless it catered heavily to a niche.
| baran1 wrote:
| are you on any of those?
| [deleted]
| Minor49er wrote:
| Yeah, I'm on a few. They mostly cater to
| industrial/experimental electronic, but there are a couple
| that talk about theory and technique that are really
| welcoming. If you're interested, shoot an email to info at
| moonmusiq.com
| 13415 wrote:
| You mean Napster? It did take off...
| nafey wrote:
| Maybe YouTube fills that niche. However comments section on any
| song is utter trash. Maybe music can be anti social as the
| article said...
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| SoundCloud and Spotify both have social networking features.
| SoundCloud especially you could see as akin to Flickr, where
| users shared content (but don't do their creating/editing)
| dillondoyle wrote:
| Personally I think it'd be tough to listen to a bunch of moms
| and tweens singing for 15s trying to go viral ;0
|
| Could be cool to see some simple generative music like pick a
| genre, a beat, hum a melody and ML composes something.
|
| Or a quirky fun karaoke social app. Add remix, duet, group
| lives like tiktok IG have.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I'm surprised Spotify has never really expanded their social
| features, it seems like such an obvious thing to do and could
| give them an advantage (it already does a little)... but I
| guess it's an expensive advantage they don't need. It might
| have kept me around a bit longer.
| cmehdy wrote:
| TikTok is a social network based on seeing people in portrait
| mode. There are entire subsets of it where music isn't the
| focus at all, and the fact that so many people do exactly the
| same dance on exactly the same song should hint at the
| differentiation being the person shown. TikTok for the music
| industry is where the ads need to be because the youth is
| there, not because music is there.
|
| Youtube is closer to being "the" social media for music:
| concerts are published on it (sometimes live even), special
| events and channels like Cercle/Colors/etc, performances of
| artists self-published (covers included), music videos get
| posted there and being a "billion view" video is still a bit of
| a marker, "radios" appealing to very specific descriptions of
| all kinds exist with 24/7 activity, multi-million views
| channels aggregating new artists acting as discovery (Chillcow,
| Koalacontrol, and thousands more), etc. "Discovery" on youtube
| alone is pretty poor I'd say, but as mentioned in the tweets
| it's not really a viable product in itself anyway.
| reggieband wrote:
| I think everyone's TicToc experience depends on how the
| algorithm sorts you. I know that if I open it up right now
| (which I won't since I should be working and the app tends to
| distort time and fast-forwards 2 hours of my life) I am
| almost certain to get a person with a guitar, banjo, piano,
| accordion or whatever in a 1-2 min snippet with them saying
| "I just wrote this little tune this morning ...".
| Alternatively, I almost never get any dancing at all, maybe 1
| out of 100 videos. I also get a lot of music recommendations,
| like a "best 20 indie albums you've never heard of"
| compilation.
|
| On the subject of the songs not being a differentiator, I
| completely disagree. The songs themselves are memes. People
| use them to signify the type of video you are watching (or to
| attempt to subvert your expectation).
| pvarangot wrote:
| > music making device as easy to use as a mobile phone camera
|
| The technology is kiiinda there, look at the iPad music
| production stack. If you have what it takes you can put up a
| complete track only in your iPad.
|
| I think there's at least two big issues:
|
| - Iterating on music until "it's good enough" is not as fast as
| iterating on a picture or video where you can do multiple takes
| and check exactly what's going on in your screen.
|
| - Conveying your feelings with music is kinda like learning a
| new language, and then becoming a poet. Like for example
| everyone has access to sharing text now, with your friends or
| with the world, yet not everyone is making poems or short
| stories that convey their emotions effectively.
| reggieband wrote:
| Those kind of issues are really the tip of the iceberg IMO.
| Writing a 140 character tweet or taking a photo with a modern
| mobile phone has a higher average quality with minimal
| effort. Yes, not every tweet is poetry but a huge volume of
| average tweets are consumable (if not entirely palatable).
|
| What I mean to say is, the average person is certainly able
| to write a better Tweet or take a better Insta snap than that
| same person could reasonably create a pleasing snippet of
| audio worth sharing. That would be true even if they took the
| time and effort to learn to use even the simplest iPad music
| production stack.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| I've been working on an IDE for music composition
| https://ngrid.io.
|
| Launching soon.
| scelerat wrote:
| For myself and a lot of people I know, discovery is nearly as
| much a reward as the music itself. And there is no comparison
| between the one- or two-dimensional "discovery" offered by social
| media and streaming platforms and the rich discovery experiences
| of any of the following:
|
| 1. listening to records with a friend 2. going to a dance club 3.
| attending a live performance 4. listening alone while reading
| liner notes 5. pawing through a stack of records at a flea market
| 6. reading a book
|
| So for "discovery" to be a viable product I think it has to
| somehow be at least as engaging as any of these more traditional
| ways.
|
| That's not to say that various curated playlists and algorithmic
| suggestions are useless. But it's rare that I'm introduced to
| something new that I like.
|
| The algorithms are good at guessing that if I like the Zombies,
| I'll like the Turtles (which is true) but it never jumps to (for
| instance) current, contemporary indie/DIY stuff that is
| influenced by '60s rock and '70s punk. I make those associations
| all the time. Indie/college radio DJs do it all the time, but
| Spotify never does.
|
| But again, Spotify is trying to sell millions of subscriptions
| for people who just want something to listen to in the car or put
| on at their dinner party. For the "hands-off" experience, it's
| fine. But discovery by its very nature is not hands-off.
| Paturages wrote:
| On the topic of engaging and active discovery, a good portion
| of my music library has been built through playing Guitar Hero,
| Rock Band or Clone Hero, funnily enough.
|
| I may look into pursuing a side project next year along the
| lines of rhythm gaming and inspiration from current music tech:
| discovery might not be a strange goal to pursue in that domain.
| In any case, that Twitter thread couldn't have come at a better
| time for my own brainstorming.
| kirse wrote:
| I use https://everynoise.com/ and randomly spam clicks until I
| hear a category worth exploring.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| https://radio.garden is a fun way to discover music around
| the world. I found one of my favorite songs on the Faroe
| Islands this way.
| holri wrote:
| For me, the richest discovery is playing the music on my
| instrument for myself. The discovery of music in myself through
| improvisation is the richest possible discovery.
| pvarangot wrote:
| Besides jamming, for electronic music I also find the joy of
| discovery using something like Beatport LINK with something
| like dJay for iPad to listen to music. It's an alternative to
| passively playing a playlist or playing an album.
| bluepaper wrote:
| I find myself purposefully diving through Tidal's playlists and
| genres, like I used to flick through CDs in HMV.
|
| The auto-discovery can be really hit or miss (mostly miss) -
| but so was picking CDs without listening to them. But the
| nature of streaming means I can flit between genres day to day,
| maybe I'm feeling psychedelic trance one day, the next
| schlager, the next prog rock. Prior to digital music I'd
| discover a lot within my focused genre (ambient electronic) but
| little else. But now I have the chance to find songs that have
| that similar feel for me but vary wildly in genre and style
| without sinking hours into music I don't enjoy.
|
| Yes it requires more intention to discover new music than the
| streaming services built in recommendations but I feel like my
| music library has never been so varied and rich.
| memetomancer wrote:
| I've discovered most good new stuff through deep diving on
| allmusic.com, usually while listening to something familiar.
|
| I'm not sure how that fits in your list... maybe a variation of
| reading liner notes?
| 42jd wrote:
| Some of the best music discovery I've had is actually Reddit. I
| primarily listen to electronic and the communities are 6/5.
| It's just streams of music being recommended, with occasional
| discussion, in tiny subreddits for all the subgenres. I'll let
| you find the subreddits yourself if your interested (just
| search for your intended subgenre). don't wanna spoil them :)
| baran1 wrote:
| out of curiosity, how often do you do this? And once you
| discover something, how do you get it into your music app /
| playlist?
| pvarangot wrote:
| Those subreddits sometimes become a really small echo
| chamber, and it's obvious its just a minor fraction of a
| genres listeners. I think everynoise.com and your ears is a
| way better initial genre exploration tool than Reddit even
| for genres that have been out there for a while and are still
| popular and being produced.
|
| For the genres I've been listening for a while or jamming to
| with my rig Reddit is usually underwhelming and I have more
| success by starting on everynoise.com or Beatport (which I
| generally dislike for discovery because their gatekeeping of
| genres is bullshit) and then listening to new stuff that the
| label for the artist I found is putting out.
| joconde wrote:
| Spotify has hand-curated playlists that make it easy to
| discover new artists though, if you know which genre you're
| looking for.
| baran1 wrote:
| when I learn about an artist or song through a friend, I end up
| having a mental association between that person and the
| song/artist which feels good
| endymi0n wrote:
| The issue here is that no matter how "engaging" discovery is,
| it's not a viable business model on its own.
|
| I'm working on the topic day to day in an adjacent field (movie
| & TV show discovery) and I'm currently not aware of any startup
| that has managed making money with the discovery experience
| itself.
|
| It takes a lot of effort, data and persistence to get
| reasonable algorithms churning out something sensible and then,
| nobody wants to pay for it. If anything, it's usually an upsell
| to monetizing the content itself, which is why the only serious
| contenders to me here are basically Youtube and Spotify.
|
| Even Netflix "had it all" with the million dollar recommender
| prize they set out in 2014, and I know their data science team
| is top notch. But if I scroll through their experience with my
| personal account in 2021, I basically still get "what all
| others are currently watching in {your_country} now" and I'm
| less than thrilled.
|
| And that's exactly because once you've got the perfect algo
| together that would be able to recommend you that niche movie
| Netflix features you've never seen in the interface that you're
| _really_ interested in (I can recommend "Last Breath" in that
| regard), the VP Content comes in and tells everyone something
| like "hey folks, whatever you do, make sure you're only
| promoting our originals, because they cost us far less in
| licensing... oh and let's give an extra in-your-face boost to
| King's Gambler to give it that extra buzz that lands us in
| Variety"
|
| Discovery is hard, and once you made a name there, it's rather
| easy to screw it up by monetizing it.
| lapinot wrote:
| My personal go-to for solo discovery online (ie not counting
| chatting) is the reverse directory lookup in soundcloud: the
| "in playlists" link (also $TRACK_URL/sets) which lists all the
| playlists some track appears in. There usually isn't too many
| and you can quickly navigate towards niche stuff that some
| random human deemed somehow related.
| Wingman4l7 wrote:
| I believe Spotify's discovery algorithms have factored in
| other user's playlists when trying to find songs associated
| to other songs -- that's why (in my experience, anyway) it
| has been better than the usual recommendation engines.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| I've always wanted a music recommendation system that worked in
| some sort of latent vector space. Song2Vec if you will. That way
| you could search for music similar to how people describe it.
| Something like: metal + Abba = Ghost.
|
| I know Pandora used to (still?) was doing this, but the features
| were never exposed to users, and were very music theory.
| (Apparently I like vamping, but until I looked it up, I couldn't
| tell you want it was.)
| buro9 wrote:
| The best idea I've had for the music industry goes like this:
|
| A market place for gig tickets, with open data for artists.
|
| That's it.
|
| Embrace touts, allow resale, reduce fraud (counterfeit
| tickets)... by making tickets ephemeral, transferable,
| verifiable. At this point all you've got is a more legit version
| of what happens in the real world.
|
| The data part... give artists and their promoters full access.
| The benefit is that it removes a huge part of uncertainty for the
| artsists and their management. They can now more accurately
| predict total ticket sales, comparable ticket sales, see ticket
| sales across other acts in the same city on the same night,
| etc... meaning they get to do two things: 1) They choose more
| appropriately sized venues (which makes the event more vibrant as
| it's fuller - a fuller venue makes better margins as the fixed
| opex is spread over higher revenue - less lost revenue too as
| more fans get to see a band and less money left on the table),
| and 2) They get to set the price of a ticket more accurately to
| what the market can bear (which means they get more of the ticket
| value and touts get less, so the artists come out better and more
| realistic pricing will make a better end-to-end experience for
| music fans).
|
| The data part is so valuable for filling small and medium venues
| that it can start to break the stranglehold Ticketmaster have on
| venues. The tenure of most promoters is around a decade, and
| Ticketmaster exclusivity deals with major venues come up within a
| similar time period. By building a grass roots effective
| ticketing system built on data you have a 10 year bet on knocking
| out the incumbent if you can keep the promoters and artists on
| your side as you and they grow. The Ticketmaster stranglehold
| isn't impenetrable, they have venue agreements with large
| traditional venues - but there are a lot of alternative venues
| whose seat you can fill easily, i.e. theatres and cinemas.
|
| Within a single "generation" of music (less than a decade), you
| should be able to take the majority of small and medium venues,
| most festivals, and have serious inroads into the territory of
| Ticketmaster.
|
| Are there things like this? Not really. Sure things like Dice in
| the UK for clubbing does the resell tickets, etc as a full and
| complete part of the original ticketing experience, but I do not
| know of a single company that is really creating anything like an
| open and transparent dataset that the participating artists and
| promoters can use without fee. Songkick were going to be my bet
| on who could do this, but once they went down the Ticketmaster
| affiliate route I no longer believe this is possible.
| kall wrote:
| Check out vivenu [0]. I'm not sure what their data offering
| includes because I haven't actually tried their product, but it
| sounds like they are thinking in a similar direction to you.
|
| [0] https://vivenu.com
| corrigible wrote:
| On a technical level, it sounds near-trivial... Would need a
| very strong bizdev posture
| rabuse wrote:
| Ahem, Ticketmaster owning the contracts to almost every
| venue.
| buro9 wrote:
| That's built in to this approach.
|
| Ticketmaster owns the contracts to every _major_ venue.
|
| Great... there's a hell of a lot of smaller venues,
| festivals, and other events that can be taken whilst
| Ticketmaster ignores you and you add significant value. By
| the time you worry about Ticketmaster or they worry about
| you, you already have momentum from artists, promoters and
| fans, and due to the bad press Ticketmaster gets through
| their tout-resell sites you also have political pressure.
|
| Ticketmaster is built in to this plan. Their presence makes
| the grassroots stuff even more compelling as you don't have
| to boil the ocean, you figure out how to make it work on a
| small venue level, city level, and go for scale in the
| bottom layers.
|
| Worst comes to worst, they're forced to consider purchasing
| you as you take all of the oxygen out of the system that
| feeds artists and promoters into them.
| ticviking wrote:
| Seems to me to be trivial to do. Maybe you could link the
| ticket to a NFT and put the data on the blockchain for extra
| hype? I could actually really dig having a wallet with some
| kind of digital memorabilia of tickets and concerts as well.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| The record industry isn't as alien as you think.
|
| Music is inherently human and more people than you think show
| genuine talent at their chosen musical craft.
|
| Hype separates the cream from the milk. Cream here is a value
| judgment that can best be described as "not milk", and therein
| lies the capriciousness of...
|
| ... _marketing_.
|
| Look around your workplace. Do you see an iota of evidence to
| suggest that marketing is going on? Welcome to the competitive
| hell of anything akin to the music industry. You and I are
| brethren here.
|
| Honesty, looking at A&R at least they are open about being 99%
| hype and 1% talent. Can SNAP say the same?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| > If you are building tools for DIY artists that can't grow to
| support larger teams around the artist as they find success they
| you have painted yourself into a tiny corner.
|
| This is a fine point, but sometimes I wish we weren't always
| optimizing for infinite scaling everything. Some of my favorite
| places are tiny corners that are intentionally tiny corners.
| ip26 wrote:
| That sounds more like basic business principles, e.g. prefer
| customers who have money over customers who don't.
| pueblito wrote:
| I think he means discovery of people in a social media sense, not
| as in discovery of music
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I was a bit confused because the article picks those 3 items as
| if they're related, but they're just the first items of many
| from the linked tweet, and most of those aren't related to
| social media.
| karaterobot wrote:
| This article is just recapitulating a series of tweets, with
| essentially zero value added. And, since the tweets were off-
| the-cuff and ambiguously worded, it's hard to say what the
| original author meant.
|
| I assumed he was referring to the discovery of music, as in
| "coming up with a new algorithm or process that recommends
| music to people does not, by itself, amount to a financially
| sustainable product".
|
| It reminded me of Steve Jobs' reaction to Dropbox: that the
| entire product was more like a feature that some other product
| should have. Of course, Jobs was wrong about that, and this guy
| may also be wrong about his intuition here, even though he is
| informed and experienced at his business.
| marstall wrote:
| > 3. Discovery is not a viable product
|
| I guess define viable?
|
| The future has _got_ to hold more ways to relate to music than
| the main apps of Spotify, Apple Music, etc., which push music in
| a very specific, generic way. Mostly around top 40, opaque
| personalizations, algorithms and "algotorial".
|
| We're never getting back to a place where your identity is
| defined by which record store you go to.
|
| But shouldn't 1000 music apps be blooming right now, a burbling
| ecosystem of experiences for every kind of listener?
|
| (my hat in the ring: https://avant.fm)
| Minor49er wrote:
| Do you track anything other than Spotify (eg: Bandcamp or
| YouTube)? And is there a way to submit labels?
| nerdponx wrote:
| > But shouldn't 1000 music apps be blooming right now, a
| burbling ecosystem of experiences for every kind of listener?
|
| Maybe, but where's the money in it?
| baran1 wrote:
| hat soon to be in the ring https://gliss.fun :)
| oxymoran wrote:
| This advice applies mostly to pop music that involves outside
| songwriters, marketing, and publishing music, etc. and I agree,
| the music industry has a tight grip on that sort of "music". But
| there is plenty of room for niche products for bands that
| actually write their own music (ya know, real musicians not
| dancing, lip syncing performers). Any band can find a producer to
| work with without a record label and there are plenty of examples
| of highly successful bands releasing their own albums.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| This is less about bands and more about startups building
| listening platforms. The article is basically saying that data
| about what people are listening to has almost no value past the
| present moment. There are already too many places to get that
| data and it's basically already stale by the time you aggregate
| it.
|
| Even with "indie" artists (many of whom are ironically mega-
| millionaires in their own right), there's a workflow aspect to
| the promotion side of things. You can do it yourself, but
| there's no money in streaming (artists in 2021 are influencers
| first and foremost who look at streaming as a way to acquire
| new listeners) so you gotta go through concert promoters, which
| usually means means hiring a manager to rep you. The money is
| in the live shows these days -- which is why the pandemic hit
| musicians so hard. But the fundamental problem is still getting
| people to listen to your stuff, same as it ever was.
| pvarangot wrote:
| I don't agree. I think there's still room for "purpose specific"
| social media, and in the case of music that would be being able
| to follow people and plug into their feeds of what they are
| listening to and what playlists, sets or charts they put up with
| what tags, and let them stream. Spotify has something like this
| but the UI is only usable on the desktop client. You can do
| something like this on Youtube or Twitch and a lot of artists do.
| There's also sets on Soundcloud.
|
| Kinda like what Beatport does but with a more social and better
| website, and without the gatekeeping and heavy editorializing. I
| think Last.fm was on the right track with social features but
| didn't get the streaming right (I think mostly because of IP
| issues). What some projects like everynoise.com do with Spotify
| tags for genres is pretty amazing but of course it's missing the
| social features.
| larsiusprime wrote:
| Here's the actual content the blog is summarizing:
| https://twitter.com/jherskowitz/status/1466078600822677513
| sbuccini wrote:
| @dang should consider making this the actual link
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Changed to that from
| https://musically.com/2021/12/02/herskowitz-advice-for-
| music..., which points to it.
|
| Submitters: " _Please submit the original source. If a post
| reports on something found on another site, submit the latter._
| "
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| orblivion wrote:
| Data point of one: I'm not huge into social features in the first
| place, but I really appreciated how Rdio handled it. Easily spy
| on everything your friends are listening to. Homepage is a
| dynamic looking feed of stuff including random recent stuff your
| friends listened to or things they listen to a lot. I found a lot
| of cool music this way and the context of a friend-based
| recommendation, I think, was valuable to me in a way.
|
| I was disappointed that I had to switch to Spotify. Spotify does
| the bare minimum here. You can only see what your friends are
| currently listening to. Maybe their history as well, but I don't
| even feel compelled to check. I hardly even notice it there in
| the corner of the window. And it only exists on the desktop
| client, last I checked.
|
| I can't even share a song with a friend within Spotify, I have to
| copy a link and paste it in a chat window, or connect on Facebook
| (which I don't have). Why wouldn't they want to encourage intra-
| platform sharing? The only social feature I've found useful is
| building playlists.
|
| It's baffling to me. But obviously they know what they're doing.
| amelius wrote:
| You can always Shazam when you are at your friend's place.
| wwarner wrote:
| i think i understand the sentiment-- my fb network knows all too
| well what i'm listening to. OTOH i really like following threads
| of discovery on Bandcamp. People who've bought records that I
| really like are a great source of new music. And you can also
| browse BC releases by town, which I've found pretty fruitful.
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