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Of Rainbows And Freeloaders III: Taylor Swift Versus The Internet
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Except that these aren't "unknown artists". They are mid-tier and niche artists who used to be able to build small, solid fanbases, and make a decent living on that. In fact, your phrasing illustrates the problem - it used to be that there were many different levels in the industry, and a working musician could do well on any of them. Now, you're either big, or you're nothing.
Can I get a tl:dr on that article? I got like 50 paragraphs in and so far the only actual points I have seen are that new technology has not made the price for recording albums cheaper since it's mostly labor costs which are untied to technology, and total revenue across the board is down since the advent of file sharing.
http://www.sbnation.com/nba/2014/6/3/5772796/nba-y2k-series-finale-the-death-of-basketball
the 2019-2020 section explains it
But she's still on Pandora's free service, indicating to me that if Spotify paid out at a higher rate, she'd be fine with them to.
And that's fine, that's business. I don't see why the Tech Village has decided that this has broad repercussions for the twenty-first century music industry or whatever. It's like deciding that Steam is destined for failure because Minecraft isn't there.
She's on Pandora's free service in part because it works differently, and most likely in part because she has no choice (yay for statutory licensing!)
The unit of revenue at McDonald's is one burger. The unit of revenue at the local independent grass fed butcher is one cow's worth of beef. If you made an infographic comparing those things directly, it would also be shitty.
And yes, that picture makes me uncomfortable to the extent that dishonest presentations of data make me uncomfortable.
Look, I'm on your fucking side, so stow the You Can't Handle the Truth bullshit. The streaming data needs to be weighted based on the number of times the average listener could be expected to stream a particular song. If the average user listens to each of the ten songs on an album twenty times over the course of the year, AND it can be established that they would not have done so had they owned the album, then an argument could be made that the streaming numbers should be divided by 200, since that is how many times a musician is receiving their cut.
That said, you need to figure in how many times someone who owns the album might use the streaming service, how to calculate lifetime usage, and a bunch of other factors. It gets complicated.
The moral of the story us that data presentation is hard to do well, but that doesn't mean you get to barf up some pink circles on the internet and call it good.
Those are some of the big ones. The biggest, though, is that the relationship between the musician and the label was fundamentally different from the one between the musician and the online services. The labels saw themselves as being in the music business, and as such had some investment in protecting and developing the industry. In comparison, the tech companies at best see themselves in content, and as such see content as fungible in their view. (At worst? They see themselves in advertising, and the content is solely a means to the end of producing their real product - viewer eyeballs.)
I think you're correct that these kinds of services (Netflix, Steam, Spotify, ect) tend to lower prices dramatically.
You haven't explained why that's a bad thing. There is still a huge amount of content on those services, likely more than the average user can ever use. I literally can't play all the games I own on Steam. I can't watch all the movies and shows I'd like to watch on Netflix. I can't listen to all the music I'd like to listen to on Spotify. Despite the low prices, there is no shortage of supply. Quite the opposite - supply hugely outpaces demand, which is why the prices remain so low.
The music industry loves to suggest that if everyone doesn't give them more money that people will somehow decide to stop making music, because reasons. But people are making plenty of music under the current model and show no actual sign of stopping. Can you explain how we would get from A (Spotify/Netflix/Steam having massive libraries) to B (nobody making games/art/music)? Can you show me data that suggests we are progressing towards this dark fate?
Because content services like Spotify (and Steam, and Netflix, and...) depend on content in order to draw in listeners, and that means broad, popular, blockbuster stuff. That's why Netflix has a rather poor streaming selection of, say, obscure 90s dramas but you can definitely watch The Avengers and World War Z. Blockbuster material draws in listeners who contribute revenue that the service uses in part to attract blockbuster material. If people like Swift hear her argument and decide it makes sense for them, too, then blockbuster artists flee Spotify in droves, Spotify attracts fewer listeners and becomes a worse proposition for blockbuster artists, and pretty soon they're locked into a downward spiral. The same logic applies to the industry as a whole. If people decide that internet radio isn't worth it, internet radio's future will not look good (whether that means slashing profits to raise payment rates or whatever).
I guess I never considered that to be an enormous difference, but if she does, then... good for her, I guess?
Some business models will work for some artists, and others will work for others.
If anything, the big story here is that she can actually do this at all, because she owns her own music, whereas in the traditional record label relationship, the label owned the music as a "work for hire", and if the artist didn't like how the label sold it then the artist could fuck off.
So like every radio station ever?
And unless you make a big fucking record and become a household name they're gonna do some pretty nasty things.
One, I want new content. I get that there's a huge pile of content we can all get access to, but I want the pile to grow, for a number of reasons. And taking away incentive to create means that the pile won't grow as fast, and more importantly that the new additions won't be as diverse.
Which leads into my second point, which is that B is not the only shitty scenario. Right now, we're heading to C - hollowed out industries where the only options are large scale blockbusters geared towards mass consumption, and small products built on shoestrings by semiprofessional creators. The vast middle ground of well designed and professionally created content geared to focused audiences, and which has challenging content (in many ways!) has become unsustainable, because you either have to go big, and get revenue from everywhere; or you budget small and get constrained.
As a gigantic caveat, the low end royalty retail album and Spotify both have 15% to the artists, whereas the high end royalty retail album has a 50% royalty, so you're comparing apples to apple trees.
This is a good thing for consumers. The marginal cost of everything digital is about $0, so it's all marginal profit. Now, artists still need to eat, as they always have, but the savings of digital distribution have far exceeded cost of living increases by magnitudes of order.
Hell, look at the infographic. Out of the $10 cd sale, the music people got $2 in the past, and now they are up to $6.28. Over 3x, and the mp3 store is making a mint at the same time, despite the drastically lowered percentage.
But really, rather than worrying about millionaires not making enough millions, we should be asking ourselves if the way we treat music (and other arts) makes sense anymore. When almost everyone in the world can have access to a digital Library of Alexandria for nothing, the idea of using shitty monopoly pricing to hope people can make cash on music seems outdated, to rather understate it.
Why?
I see this attitude pop up over and over, and it utterly baffles me. It really comes across as "we're devaluing your labor, but it's for the good of society!"
And then you wonder why musicians don't trust you.
Edit: And as the nice folks at Cracked pointed out, the Great Library was less about knowledge, and more about cultural dominance. It was policy in Alexandria to seize any new books that came into the city, without reimbursement.
On second thought, maybe that metaphor does work. Though not the way you thought.
I mean yeah, fair enough. But you said the claim's been debunked, like there's empirical evidence that a band generally makes their money on shows and merch. If there is, I'm interested in seeing it
hitting hot metal with hammers
haha no, this is never how it was, at least in the radio era. The entire distribution model was based on relentlessly promoting 30-40 artists and marginalizing everything else.
The best argument the Lowery article makes is that under the 'old' model, the recording industry assumed (some of) the risk of creating new music. But they also assumed a much larger share of the reward reaped by a 'mid-tier' artist than the artist can potentially retain today, and also much more creative control.
There is a market for music right now; it's working fine, and taylor swift choosing to withdraw from spotify in favor of other distribution is evidence that it's working.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
seriously
there seems to be a large-ish segment of the music industry that really needs to get off its high horse about this kind of thing; you make a mass media product. The monetization of that product has included advertising and other secondary sales and always has (at least since mass media was a thing.)
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
It comes back to my point about creating an equitable deal between stakeholders. It's easy to assert that things are good for everyone if you only consider the needs of one group of stakeholders important.
As I've said before, the reason copyright became dominant was because it balances the various issues and needs of various stakeholders best.
Most of the cost of music was eaten up by practical considerations like shipping, warehousing, retail costs, etc. that no longer exist. Music that costs half as much as it did 20 years ago is overpriced, because costs have gone down by more than that on a per unit basis.
On top of that, it's a really difficult case to make that we should neither allow the free market to work, nor use government regulation for the benefit of the 99+% of people who aren't some musicians or fat cat Big Media types.
Eh, it's the best available English language metaphor for "a shitload of books." While we need everyone to chip in to maintain arts funding, it's reasonable that "every work of art created by mankind" should be covered in the spending of a middle class westerner's budget. There is almost no more scarcity of digital goods, and we should change policy to reflect that.
Copyright does exactly the opposite. A few giant rent seeking corporations have successfully bribed Congress multiple times to pass absurd laws (DMCA, Sonny Bonno, etc) because it makes them millions but no one is harmed enough to merit anything but a "Please don't, Senatory XYZ" response. It's a classic case of hyper importance to an unrepresentative minority vs. minor importance to the majority.
Uh, it's really obvious. If I can't get paid for my music, then I need stop doing music and get a different job. Case closed.Furthermore, Steam is nothing like a streaming music service and has no business in this discussion.
people play music because they love playing music, not because there's money in it. there isn't any money in it at all for anyone but the topmost acts, like U2 and Springsteen and their ilk. if a musician can't make a living being a musician, he'll pick up a day job and continue to play music in his spare time.
thanks to the possibility of making professional-quality recordings without having to spend thousands of dollars on equipment and software, there's no better time in history to be a musician. the industry still has a purpose in distribution, but they're not required for pretty much any of the creative or technical stuff anymore
hitting hot metal with hammers
No offense, but streaming services have been around for a little while and we don't seem to be running out of good music.
If it's not working out for you, sorry to hear that. Like most forms of art, music is a tough gig!
But I see zero evidence for any kind of supply shortage in music right now. The problem seems to be completely the opposite of that - too many people making awesome music, and not enough demand to support them all.
well of course; swift is obviously very popular. Artists with her popularity/sales potential obviously will not have her leverage to extract concessions from (say) spotify, but that doesn't mean the market isn't working.
the 'long tail' phenomenon has been written about forever, and we've seen it play out over the last decade. Music sales on a per-unit basis have steadily increased, while revenue has fallen. The public is buying more music, for less money, than it ever has since the dawn of mass media.
What's happened is that the 'traditional' music industry's leverage over distribution has eroded. They are able to extract less profit from the creation of content. This isn't only because of the reduced cost of media; it's because now I can buy the single I want for two bucks without having to buy a whole (frequently mediocre) album to get it, and I can choose between more artists being distributed in more ways.
media products are worth what the market will pay for them, and it turns out there's a lot of competition in music. I mean, am I supposed to apologize that it's now harder for the music industry to seek rents than it was previously?
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
When I was young, citrus fruit was expensive in the UK. Now it is cheap due to radical changes in delivery and logistics (I'm old).
Does this mean I suddenly look down on satsumas, limes, and the people who produce them? No, of course not. That's moronic.
I'm really not seeing what the issue is with the data as it's presented.
The infographic is dead simple. To make $X revenue from stream Y, you must move Z units.
This is extremely valuable as it tells us that if something like Spotify is to replace album sales, it must generate approximately 3500 listens for every sale that used to occur.
The the units you must move are different is the entire point. Because what you are trying to compare is the different quantities of those units you must move in order to generate the same income.
Streaming must move ALOT more units to generate the same income. Those units are easier to move, but that's not really the point. There's no easy way to compare the ease of moving one CD vs one Listen. That's up to you, the reader, to determine.
Uh, what? What are you basing this assumption on? Cause there is no way that this statement is true because prices are not low due to a high supply of content. That's not how the purchasing of content by Netflix works.
And secondly, the fact that there is a huge amount of content already on these services is irrelevant. If we literally stopped making music/movies/TV right now, there would still be a huge amount of content on these services. Exactly the same huge amount of content in fact. The exact thing you are talking about. Of course, pretty much everyone would consider this a bad thing though. Your framing here that "there's a huge amount of content already so it doesn't matter how more gets made" is utterly silly.
When industry chews through labor and treats them like cannon fodder to be discarded for the next desperate intern, it's terrible. When media consumers chew through indie artists and treat their content like cannon fodder to be discarded for the next desperate artist giving content away for practically free trying to get their break, they're worth what the market will pay for them.
If that is not buying into the language of upper class entitlement, then I don't know what is.
No it's not. Not in the context anyone in this thread is using it anyway.
People are talking about the way the "proper price" of a product or service effects how much people are willing to pay for it.
-Not everyone that buys a Tyler Swift album or song is going to listen to her on Spotify. Actually, I would think that would be a good thing if they do listen to her stuff on something like spotify, pandora or what have you, if they own a copy of the song because then she is getting revenue from them listening to something again, that they could listen to in a manner that would generate no additional income for her.
-Not everyone that listens to her songs there is or were ever going to by any of her songs because they have a finite amount of disposable income for entertainment purposes and determine that they would rather use it to support other creators.
-Some that do listen to her stuff on spotify decide that they do want to support her with their limited disposable income, but that wouldn't have happened if they didn't hear her songs first (there might be a very limited number, where if she wasn't on spotify, they would have never bought her music).
-She still gets some revenue; however small it may be, from each song heard on spotify, which is better than no revenue if the alternative for listeners was to either pirate it, borrow it from someone they knew or get a used copy.
So I'm in agreement with Jeffe. Comparing album sales and streams, just doesn't work the way they are doing it.
All that said, she owns the rights to her content. So if she wants to leave spotify, I feel that is well within her rights and I don't really care why she does it. If the market feels that her stuff is still worth buying for the asking price, then it will continue to do so.
The market doesn't seem broken to me at all. I mean Tyler Swift is able to choose who distributes her music, I think that is leaps and bounds better than the shitty rent seeking model, that the music industry used to have. There are lots of artists that are now getting attention, that use to be ignored because the big record companies were picking the winners and losers. The downside, if anyone wants to call it a downside, is that there are so many choices.
Right. But he'll do less. This is true for every kind of content producer. It's literally why we have things like copyright. Because the purpose of securing the ability for people who make art to profit off that art is to let them spend less time doing some other random job for food and give them more time to make that art.