Comment by ants_everywhere

2 days ago

Back in the days when the music industry stole from artists the justification was that it cost money to pay for recording studio time, print records, set up distribution channels, promote shows, organize shows, and so on.

Then in the 90s, the cost of distribution went to 0 and by maybe the 2000s the cost of recording went to 0 in many cases.

Somehow the artists are still not getting paid well and instead of setting up distribution channels the labels are spending their time trying to prevent people from distributing too much.

And that's not even mentioning how much of the American music catalogue was stolen from local artists by music reps going state to state collecting songs and not crediting or compensating the performers. And then copied repeatedly by other musicians over and over.

I don't really have a point here other than that from one lens this all looks like a bunch of thieves complaining their stolen goods got stolen. From another lens it seems like we want to have good music and reward artist we enjoy. It's just less clear what exactly we're paying them for and how that should be collected.

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ants_everywhere

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privatelypublic  2 days ago

Recording and distribution aren't anywhere close to zero, and a myriad of other costs haven't changed.

Are they likely taking excessive percentages of an artists sales? Yes. But- artists are also more able than ever to wing it themselves. AAA level recording studios may still be huge money- but Good Enough (equipment) can be had for less than a used Car.

I will agree that its better than the old days where just the tapes to hold an album's tracks cost more than a car.

  • AnthonyMouse  2 days ago

    > Recording and distribution aren't anywhere close to zero, and a myriad of other costs haven't changed.

    Recording used to require very expensive equipment to do things that can now be done with free software. Medium-quality microphones etc. are now a dime a dozen and reasonably high quality ones are well within the reach of any artist who would be making enough money to pay rent.

    Distribution of music over the internet is, as close as makes no difference, free. A music track in lossless quality is on the order of megabytes. That amount of storage is completely negligible and transferring it would be fractions of a penny even at the extortionate bandwidth prices charged by EC2 et al. If you're charging $1/song that's a rounding error and if you're distributing music for free in order to sell concert tickets you can use P2P and the users will handle the distribution themselves. This used to be something that required pressing LPs or CDs and physically transporting them on a truck to thousands of records stores.

    The "other costs" are mostly the problems the industry creates themselves in order to sell the solution. Monopolizing distribution channels so that only signed artists can get featured, payola, etc. The world would be better off if they would dry up and blow away.

  • RajT88  2 days ago

    It is hard to overstate the impact of social media here. There are acts making a go of it which were unthinkable back in the day.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Sabbath

    This is far from the weirdest band these days touring. I love it.

    • privatelypublic  1 day ago

      I'm not so sure. Certainly that they get publicity is something special and very recent (almost post-2000's recent).

      However, by far the largest change has been the removing three or four zeros from the capital costs of recording and small scale distribution. These days you can record and do $whatever for sub-$50 (sub-$100 at worst). It used to cost a few hundred dollars just for one 60 minutes track of studio/master grade tape (aka mono)- now the storage is so cheap its de minimus. And, its hard to find something incapable of playing it back (ESPs can push mono 16bit 44.1kHz out after reading it from USB mass storage or SDIO/SPI), distributing 700meg of PCM audio via AWS might be on par with producing stamped audio CD's- but it scales from $0 to infinity. And, good news: we don't distribute PCM anymore- at worst it's half that size, at best <8%.

      I can go on.

      What hasn't changed are venue fees, heck, ticket fees are worse than ever. Paid advertising has gotten worse over the past 20 years for audio artists (and probably others). And I've typed too much so I'm sure theres more.

WalterBright  2 days ago

A reframe is the only solution.

I.e. consider the recording as advertising for the band. Then, charge for live performances.

walterbell  2 days ago

There's an impending "no tax on tips" rule that may benefit artists going direct to fans.