For all of human history, we've been making music and art. And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money.
For a few hundred years, there was the patronage era, where if you were really good you could get a rich person to feed and clothe and house you while you made art. Or you traveled around giving performances for money or food or clothes or shelter.
Then only in the last 100ish years has it been possible to make art for mass consumption (and mass money), but that's only because of artificial scarcity.
Now that the scarcity is gone, we are back to patronage (see Patreon) and making money from the performance of music, by doing live shows and such.
I think people making money making music was an aberration in history, not "the way it should be".
I worked in the music industry for a decade and contributed to research to determine the value of music.
Everything I learned said one thing: The value was high when scarcity was controlled, and scarcity was mostly controlled by distributors and those involved in distributing art would make the most money - not the artist.
That the artist, and even the record label, make any money is a mere side effect and overspill of the money made by controlling distribution.
I think jedberg is right on this, the more I saw and learned the more I too believed that the natural model for art and music was patronage. Distribution (be it limited by production of physical media, or controlled by tech companies now) is an entirely artificial construct... where physical media at least was plausibly scarce, the digital is not.
Also the best way to summarise the research and the distribution angle was:
The avg value a consumer expresses for:
* listening on a radio in medium or high quality is near zero
* downloading a track in medium quality is near zero.
* buying an CD album in high quality is 75p per track.
* buying a CD single in high quality is 25 per track.
* buying sheet music in an abstract quality is £3 per track.
* buying a midi file to use as a ring-tone in lowest quality for portion of the track is close to £12 per track.
The fidelity and quality were not a major influence on the value... but the distribution and how controlled or locked-down the distribution and means of playback for the end consumer of the music had a direct impact on the value. The ring-tone was DRM'd (badly) at the time, which meant it was not trivial to put your own music on there but yet people would pay £1 for barely 20 seconds of a barely recognisable midi file.
The more you can lock down the distribution and control the means to access the media, the more you can push the price up.
Or as I think it... if Apple hadn't come along and artificially held the value of music at the price it did by controlling distribution, the sooner we would have reached another age of patronage. I still believe that Apple, and now Spotify, are merely holding back the inevitable and they haven't stopped it but will get very rich in the interim.
I think it's incomplete to characterize the state of the industry today without discussing how those consumer perceptions of value were intentionally created. If you worked in the music industry for 10 years then your experience almost completely post-dates these efforts.
Starting even well before Napster, investors and technology companies saw the opportunity to change the allocation of value from artists and producers, to distribution. To be clear, that was not the allocation 30+ years ago. Record stores and radio stations did not make immensely more money than the labels and artists.
Tech companies and investors worked aggressively to "commoditize their complement"--that is, depress the value of art on their platforms, so that they could reallocate consumer spending to their products and services.
"Buy a computer and Internet connection and you can have all the music and movies you want for free" was explicitly advertised by technology companies--see for example:
I think this historical perspective is crucial for understanding how we got to today. Music files are small, so the music industry was attacked first. The large size of video files kept them safe for long enough for visual artists and producers to understand what was happening and counteract. That is why you see producer-owned distribution channels for video today (Hulu, HBO Go, Disney+, etc), but not label-owned distribution channels for music. This is why Netflix, Amazon, and now Apple have had to get into original video content. They were not able to beat the movie and TV producers before the producers could figure out the technology themselves.
If you're interested the non consumption-oriented music tradition, you'll do well to check out the Clifftop ["old-time music"] Festival [0]. Basically it is a music festival in which the music is made by the attendees, and there are no formally booked or scheduled artists (kind of).
A few things that surprised me (I was totally naive going in, just giving a ride to a friend en route to somewhere else):
- Old time music has become a little bit of a punk scene. It seems like the young people interested in making music socially are "crust punks", because it's rowdy and free and made for acoustic instruments/voice. "Old people"and "hillbillies" make up the other half of the stereotype categories. The dynamic is interesting because you have old-school christian cultists and dreadlocked/pierced crust kids teaching each other tunes, and (almost) nobody finds any reason for conflict.
- I still have songs stuck in my head that I have not heard recorded or played for years and years. Many oral tradition songs are really fucking good, presumably only the most "viral" ones survived. Many of these songs do not have a recording that sounds "right", the only time it sounds the way it crystallizes in a place and time.
You could apply this argument to almost literally anything that people do or have done for money.
It's a bad argument. It ignores the fact that humans progress by division of talent and labour. You wouldn't apply it to physicists, engineers, medical specialists, lawyers, politicians [1], financial experts, sports, or software developers.
So why is it fine to apply it to an art? The predictable outcome is that you'll get mediocre unsatisfying art that leaves everyone involved feeling like something vital is missing - which is more or less where we are now.
In fact it takes many more years of study and experience to become a competent, productive musician, artist, novelist, or other creative worker, than it does to become a software developer.
The arts are a profession, not a hobby. Just because most people can have a go doesn't mean it makes sense to run them on an amateur basis - any more than it does to run software development in the same way.
Well, until the 20th century, the modern way of funding science (by competitive grant proposals to funding agencies) didn't exist. Scientists were to a large part just doing it for love of the subject as being a professional scientist just wasn't a thing. At best they could get a job as a professor, but that literally meant teaching back then; if they wanted to do research, they had it do it on their own and pay for it themselves. And the best scientists of the era like Darwin and Lord Rayleigh were from the idle rich who never needed a paying job at all so they could devote themselves full time to science. It didn't work that badly -- except of course that the number of scientists was tiny compared to now.
You could apply this argument to almost literally anything that people do or have done for money.
Yes, there is a reason nobody is making money selling NPM modules and that is the marginal cost is zero and there is no constraint on supply, people like to do it for free.
Doctors and Lawyers have professional guilds that legislate to constrain supply. Hence the price is high.
Competence doesn't really come into it, even in the high art world it's more about who you know than what you know. No amount of wishful thinking will change this.
Isn't this a natural way that scarcity comes back. If everything thar is produced is unsatisfying then someone will be willing to pay more to get something better. When someone finds a good way to sell that premium model then others will try to imitate it and after a while the value will drop again until someone finds the next way to do increase the value and so on and so forth.
Arguably the equivalent work that artists can do as compared to what other professionals can do is to have their work commissioned for some other project. You know, jingles, soundtracks, creating atmosphere (i.e. live performances), that kind of thing.
I guess what I'm saying is that following the state of typical labour markets, having somebody produce something that they have their name on, that is an artistic work of its own right and actually getting paid for it is actually pretty extraordinary. Only a very tiny fraction of people get to work that way (probably because of the limits of attention as much as anything else). In many respects it's not surprising that it's fragile.
While I don't disagree that it would turn out to be bad for music to lose its professional art for art's sake, I also don't think the comparison with other professionals holds.
> It's a bad argument. It ignores the fact that humans progress by division of talent and labour.
I suspect the "bad" argument is actually compatible with division of talent and labour.
Could you explain the link between this division and income?
> You wouldn't apply it to physicists, engineers, medical specialists, lawyers, politicians [1], financial experts, sports, or software developers.
> So why is it fine to apply it to an art?
Because history shows us that "some" art gets done, even when no money is directly involved.
And actually, it's the same for physicists, engineers, sports, software developers - not sure about lawyers, policitans, or financial experts.
Now we have to ask ourselves: for all these domains, what's an acceptable amount for "some"?
As a rule, people are pirating the most valuable art, not the best. This is an important distinction, because by conflating them, you are buying into the industry's point that the most expensive art is the best -- and as the monopoly cartel controls the price, that becomes self-fulfilling.
It is true that in pop music and movies the best art does not necessarily win, but even bad movies have some level of professionalism that is absent from indie productions.
YouTube becomes the cartel these days, and tries to drive down the price for "content" to zero.
It is far more evil for artists than any middleman taking 60% or more of a substantial sum of money.
There are pirates who are in it to make money, and pirates who are in it to get the art itself. The former might focus on most valuable art, the latter focus mostly on art that is the best - they're not going to pirate something they don't like (I'm purposefully not taking into account things like downloading that horrible Celine Dion album for dear old mumsy. :) )
> It ignores the fact that humans progress by division of talent and labour. You wouldn't apply it to physicists, engineers, medical specialists, lawyers, politicians, financial experts, sports, or software developers.
The key point you're missing is these people are selling their labor (aside, maybe, from software developers who could be selling their product).
If you get an engineer to design a bridge they do the work and get paid, no IP rights, no "limited" monopoly, no nothing but a paycheck.
If you get a musician to write a song for you they (and their heirs) get payed for that work for a long, long time.
I understand where you're coming from (that artists should be a protected class so we have "enough" artists) but the days of the billionaire rockstar is probably over.
>The predictable outcome is that you'll get mediocre unsatisfying art that leaves everyone involved feeling like something vital is missing - which is more or less where we are no
On the other hand, modern, professionally produced, top-10, high grossing music, from the few millionaire "division of labor" artists, also leaves me "feeling like something vital is missing", so there's that...
>You wouldn't apply it to physicists, engineers, medical specialists, lawyers, politicians, financial experts, sports, or software developers.
I would, probably.
Sports were better when it was amateurs, and scientists were better, more independent, and less corrupt, when they were independently wealthy people or at least tenured academics... (80% of modern science and technology that changed the world came from those people -- for the last 50 years or so, we just got incremental, evolutionary, updates in the 20% rest of the rest).
It wasn't all through patronage though. I just finished listening to a biography of Leonardo da Vinci, and he was taught in a workshop, essentially as an apprentice. They would do independent commissions for people - portraits, statues etc. It's true that the great artists would get patronage once they were great, but it seemed that there were a bunch of these workshops with apprentices that copied the master's paintings, worked on commissions with them etc. Just thinking about it now as I write, and the Patronage is like the "made-it" moment where an artist gets rich, but I bet there were a multitude of apprentices that toiled away in workshops just making money for food.
So, for the most part art was like everything else: If someone wanted it, they paid you to produce it. If you thought you could produce something people want you made it and maybe someone bought it. Or not. Same as a carpenter making a chair or a table. Maybe someone buys it, maybe not.
Then we got copyright and with it the idea that producing something gives you rights to every copy of it. Like a carpenter building a chair and laying claim to a chair someone else build, cause "they looked at my chair".
I think this is absurd, but many people seem to like it.
Isn't a bespoke commission just an act of patronage though? If I hire you to make something for me, I'm your patron.
I guess the main difference is that back then, you would sell the work and then make it. Nowadays, you make the work and then hope to sell it over and over again.
Well, I guess you could say that's a form of patronage, but "arts patronage" as a concept is more of a general sponsorship of an artist in the hope that they will produce significant works (and maybe have some influence over their production), rather than a transactional relationship where you are paying for a specific piece.
Patronage seemed like a more formal thing though. They lived with the patron who would provide them a workshop, food and money. Their early days in a workshop seemed more like an employee at a business, not much different than today. The owner would have to go and find work and tap his network to find people who needed his businesses wares. He would hire employees, and they would complete jobs under his supervision. When Leonardo da Vinci was 14 and working at a workshop he was an employee of the workshop owner. It took him a long time to get a patron. He even sent letters to rich people trying to get their patronage by saying what he could do (and just like today, there was a bit of "fake it till you make" in those letters too :)
Sure, music will always exist as a human form of expression.
It's just more likely to exist in the same way your hobby projects compete with your full time job. Lots exist as concept only. Some are half-finished but never ship. Maybe some of them get done. What could you have done if people payed you to do what you cared about?
Patronage is... a thing. Better than nothing. But obviously a weaker form of economic systematizing than a model where you pay to listen to a performance or a recording.
I mean, if you're designing a system function, do you want it to reliably tie outputs to inputs, or optionally tie outputs to inputs?
And yes, the economics matter, even considering the "love" factor. Paying for things supports the enterprise that goes into providing them. Diluting or disconnecting payment from the music is another way of saying "in order to make music, you should be spending time doing things that aren't making music."
And the problem with that is that Time is the primary ingredient that goes into making music. More time goes into making music that's "better" by any number of reward functions in listeners. You can cheat that rule a little bit at the margins with better tools or inherent talent more than a standard deviation or two above the mean, but the significance of those terms in the equation is generally less than capital-T time.
Which means diluting/disconnecting payment either limits the output of people who don't have outside resources, or limits the quality of the music produced.
> do you want it to reliably tie outputs to inputs, or optionally tie outputs to inputs?
if the input to music is money, i argue that the output is poor quality music.
> Paying for things supports the enterprise that goes into providing them
and thereby changing the goal of the enterprise from producing music, to producing money from music. Look at modern pop music today? They are pretty terrible at best. And yet, the money keeps flowing in!
Nobody is saying that artists don't get paid - they get paid by selling their music in some form, and performing their music. But because the motivations for them doing music ins't due to money, the product end up being a labour of love - a true expression of art. I think patronage achieves the same goals, where as a mass market music business model doesn't get the same result because the goals of a mass market music business is to saturate, and to make sure that their audience is huge (so you end up with pop music).
>>Look at modern pop music today? They are pretty terrible at best.
That's a whole lot of opinion there affecting your theory.
Pop music makes money because, as the name implies, it's popular. That doesn't mean it has to be lyrically or musically devoid of complexity. There's high quality pop music.
Pop music makes money because 1-it tends to be formulaic in it's musical composition to hit sounds that people "like". 2- the stars are young and attractive and people respond to that for a myriad of reasons. 3- the people producing the music and marketing the industry have found that it's a stable and reliable market in a time when the industry as a whole collapsed.
As someone married to a professional artist, I would also like to point out that the starving artist who just LOVES producing their Art so much is a problematic ideal that people romanticize. The bottom line is, if you produce something of value, and someone wants to procure this thing, they should respect your time. The problem is that so many artists don't value their work or time in an economic framework, and thus they drive the market rates lower for the community as a whole.
if the input to music is ability to eat, clothe and house your family, and pay medical bills then the output is probably the music you wouldn't get otherwise.
> Patronage is... a thing. Better than nothing. But obviously a weaker form of economic systematizing than a model where you pay to listen to a performance or a recording.
> I mean, if you're designing a system function, do you want it to reliably tie outputs to inputs, or optionally tie outputs to inputs?
> Paying for things supports the enterprise that goes into providing them. Diluting or disconnecting payment from the music is another way of saying "in order to make music, you should be spending time doing things that aren't making music."
So when you pay for a copy of a recording of a piece of music, do you feel that you are more directly paying for someone to make music?
In the exact sense that you describe here, paying for copies of recordings has a very weak tie to the actual production of music. I'd have to pay for a copy of a recording even if the recording artist has been dead for decades and can't possibly create more music. It's not payment for "making music". It's rent on some work that may have been performed in the last century. No one needs to make music to sell me a copy of a recording.
As a patron, however, I'd be paying people to create music. If they didn't and I didn't trust that the investment was worth it, I wouldn't. If they were dead, there'd be no sense in supporting them. It would be like sending paychecks to a dead employee. Someone needs to make music to receive my patronage.
If the output I expect of a "system function" is for someone to make music, paying into a function where the output is copies of recordings is worse than paying into a system function where the output is the labor of creating music. I can see why this view would be confusing, though. Vague abstractions have a tendency to obscure actualities, and of course there is a more complex relationship with more inputs, outputs and feedback loops.
Human activity of all kinds is exchanging time with each other. I spend some time doing A and give you some. In return you spend time doing B and give me some.
Ultimately we all have a finite amount of time available.
When you start assessing things in terms of hours exchanged rather than dollars, euros or pounds you see how it all works.
Baumol’s cost disease explains itself for example. It still take the same number of hours to be a violinist and a concerto takes the same amount of time to perform. And we still value violinists so some of them get paid.
Our machines reduce the human time element embedded in other products and services and that reduces their value in exchange terms. We see that expressed as the dollar price of violinists going up.
There’s even a film In Time where this idea is explored Hollywood style. Not the greatest film but the philosophical idea behind it is fascinating.
The movie had an interesting idea (presumably stolen from any number of old sci-fi novels), but unfortunately turned it to a generic "the rich hoard all the money, we should redistribute it to the masses!" action flick.
While there were several hints at some interesting effects on society throughout the movie, they were never actually explored.
> For all of human history, we've been making music and art. And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money.
I would challenge you almost precisely the opposite. The vast majority of the "great art" was in fact done for money.
For example, walk through the Parthenon and its museum, most of the art was commissioned.
Look at the wall murals of Pompeii--again, done for hire.
I can go on and on and on.
Art not done for hire is almost exclusively a very new thing brought about by industrialization giving us enough surplus that people have enough spare time to specialize in something other than their job.
People got paid, but there wasn't a way to reproduce art for basically nothing but sell it as if it was the original. That radically changed the economics of music for a period, which could be seen as a distortion and not the way things should be. OP is now lamenting (right or wrong) that system is gone, only the live performance really still exists as a money maker.
The OP's lament is heard from other musicians of his age. Being In A Band used to be a Big Deal. Fame, fortune, groupies. Then came lower cost equipment, Myspace, and streaming. At peak there were several million bands on Myspace.
Historically, anyone who made something by hand was an artisan, so the hammer maker and the sword maker. I suppose you could consider that art, but when I say I art I'm talking music, paining, sculpture, etc. Things that only have aesthetic use, not functional use.
And I don't believe there are any examples of people making aesthetic works as their only source of income before recent times, other than through patronage.
I've only studied art history briefly though, someone who has studied it more could probably chime in here.
"when I say I art I'm talking music, paining, sculpture, etc. Things that only have aesthetic use, not functional use."
Painting, sculpture, and music have had functional uses since forever.
They had functions such as:
- reminding people of what happened in the past
- teaching people moral lessons
- exulting or placating gods
- inspiring troops to be braver in combat
- honoring the dead
- letting people see things they couldn't see in person
- training doctors and scientists
- providing propaganda for rulers or religious organizations
- inspiring people towards revolution or to right various wrongs
and on, and on, and on.
Only relatively recently has the idea become popular that art should be divorced from function, placed in museums or galleries, and be appreciated merely for its aesthetic value alone.
The classical arts used to be the vectors of vital cultural information (music, poetry and story telling are mnemonic techniques).
We then invented writing which made those media mostly obsolete.
We're still drawn to those disciplines though, because they provided an evolutionary advantage for a long time, making the trait of liking those things quite stable (since pleasure leads to practice, and practice leads to skill).
Also if you look at the kind of art that is actually just appreciated on aesthetics alone now it’s actually pretty derivative. It’s the sort of stuff you’ll find artists painting in bulk to sell in order to support themselves. Most art that gets put up for public consumption has some function beyond mere aesthetic appreciation. It’s usually about something.
Grecian pots are covered in paintings. Greek and roman sculpture was considered one of the highest forms of art by Pliny.
Pliny said this of Peiraikos:
It is well to add an account of the artists who won fame with the brush in painting smaller pictures. Amongst them was Peiraikos. In mastery of his art but few take rank above him, yet by his choice of a path he has perhaps marred his own success, for he followed a humble line, winning however the highest glory that it had to bring. He painted barbers' shops, cobblers' stalls, asses, eatables and similar subjects, earning for himself the name of rhyparographos [painter of dirt/low things]. In these subjects he could give consummate pleasure, selling them for more than other artists received for their large pictures.
This sounds like an artificial distinction, drawn there only to make the point you want to make. A hammer isn't art, because a hammer is functional, and a decorative handle on it is part of that non-art. A wall isn't art, because a wall is functional, yet a fresco painted on it is art?
For most of human history, MONEY wasn't a thing. And yet we still have cave paintings as well as clear evidence that tribepeople and pre-agricultaral societies made music, art, poetry and more.
Consider that this time could have been spent building shelter, or hunting for food. We make art because we enjoy it
You misunderstand my point. I never said we do art only for money. I specifically objected to the idea that artists have only been able to do art for the money for the past few hundred years.
Sumeria had coinage thousands of years before common era. So money has definitely been a thing for more than a few hundred years.
They did not have coinage, but they already had prices and also professional musicians (besides other non-producing professionals which appeared there for the first time, i.e. judges, medical doctors, accountants and prostitutes) (obviously, chiefs and priests existed much time before written history).
Initially the prices were expressed as weights of precious metals.
The coins, which allowed simpler payments, without the use of weighing scales, appeared thousands of years later after the prices, probably in Lydia in the first millennium BC.
Yes. There is this question of 'what is art'? and we can assume that old cave paintings are 'art' but is it really? Is that just us assuming this is 'art'?
Art as we know it really is a capitalist contrivance. Sure the communists had art too but do native people outside of regular capitalism have 'art'?
In Canada they tried to get an art exhibition together of native people's art. It didn't really happen. They tried teaching them how to make art but they didn't get it. This was not because the native folk were primitive and backward, far from it. They had plenty of beautiful things they made as part of their daily existence. However, they did not see the world mediated through images and capitalism. They weren't worshipping icons either.
Before capitalism as we know it took over the church had all the power and art was invariably made on some Bible oriented theme. Nobody painted scenes of rural peasant life, it was always the baby Jesus.
I am sure that everyone puts some art into what they do. Writing code is an art. The medium just isn't brown pots or watercolours. Code is a creative medium though.
Music is an interesting one as we all grew up at a time when we partied for fun. The guy sorting out the music was just contributing to it. Then we grow up and meet musician friends. And yes, all of them are out to make money, it isn't just about the music any more. It probably had more to do with sex first time around so even then it wasn't entirely just about the music.
This is why music is not at all useful for revolutionary or activist causes. There aren't many John Lennon's in the world willing to stay in bed for peace.
Sometimes I hear of musicians I listened to many aeons ago and wonder when it is they will get a proper job. Years ago it was about the music, now it is about paying for the kids to go to private schools.
Most of what we know of as art because it commands price tags is 'art business'. This is just a game and the likes of Damien Hirst know how it is played.
"Wealthy" is a different goalpost than "doing art/music for money".
But even then, artisans in antiquity definitely reached middle classes. (And it's plausible to assume that at least a few individuals were wealthier or converted their artisanship into a bigger merchant operation.)
Sure, but isn't wealthy the undertone that goes into all these laments that music does not pay anymore? (the original doesn't seems much like a lament though, I read it more like a counter to those laments)
The whole "Let your creative juices flow, somehow gain access to recording equipment and distribution, have a hit record, be made for life", that's mostly over it seems. But it hasn't been with us for that long to begin with. Except for those brief few decades of industrial recording, getting paid for music has always been hard. Depending on economical overall productivity (excess food for entertainment specialists), maybe some or even a relatively high number of musicians would get paid, but hardly ever (or more likely "never"?) so much that their incomes would be envied by productive middle class, including artisans in decorative fields. Remember that before recording (well, before printed scores), music was entirely transient, whereas the products of artisans would routinely be investments in intergenerational status.
I think this is historically inaccurate and tbh it's also a bit dangerous to think that, making money from your art is wrong because this wasn't always the case.
There’s nothing wrong with making money from your art. People weren’t making money from art in the past centuries because until a recent time in history there was no market for it or for almost anything else, and also no property rights.
The only market there was after the fall of the Roman Empire and until the end of feudalism, was church commissioning some art and construction.
Also, I don't understand the argument about artificial scarcity. Original art has inherent scarcity, and this is the foundation of the art market. And a digital album that can be copied by anyone with a tape recorder, CD drive or computer didn't prevent bands from making serious money, even in an environment of abundance.
Finally, markets are not that easy. There is a market for art as there is a market for SaaS, or services. And most SaaS companies fail, just like most consulting agencies and most artists that don't become commercially successful.
Artists choose to seek patronage in order to minimise risk, and we are lucky that contrary to the past, they can do so without giving up their rights to opportunity, as it used to be the case.
You're right, of course. Unfortunately, this applies to a lot more fields than just music performance, and society is really going to struggle to sort out living in the post-scarcity economy. Also, the-once revolutionary "long tail" now makes choice so individualistic, and effectively arbitrary, that it's hard to capitalize on any particular genre or act.
Sales of recorded music are way down but every other part of the music industry has grown. If this is the pattern that other fields follow, then we're all going to be rich!
Has there ever been a better time to be a musician than now?
>I think people making money making music was an aberration in history, not "the way it should be".
Absolute nonsense. We have evidence of professional musicians dating back to at least ancient Egypt. Plato complained in his writings about popular musicians holding unruly concerts. The invention of recorded music was a disaster for professional musicians, because it rendered most of them unemployed.
People of the past had far more limited access to music, but they weren't stupid or undiscerning - they wanted to hear the best possible music and were willing to pay for it. Busking is probably as old as currency and remains a perfectly reasonable way of making a living. If you owned a bar or tavern, having the best music in town was a huge competitive advantage that you would be more than willing to pay for. Dancehalls had bands, circuses had bands, theatres had bands. The Ottoman Empire had military marching bands in at least the 13th century.
Not exactly. Before recorded music, a live band (or one man show!) was the only game in town. It was either that or silence. Everywhere that wanted to fill that silence had to hire musicians.
It was not "that" or silence. You're not considering that learning to play a musical instrument was itself more common. Performing music was a community activity people used to entertain themselves; the hiring of musicians was for the wealthy aristocracy.
Indeed, you see examples of people singing in the parlor, or a guest or host playing an instrument for everyone else after dinner and at parties in many books and movies.
The existence of DIY approaches was and is real, but:
1) it's a marginal point in response to observations about the meteor-strike level of impact the invention and spread of recorded music had on the market for live performers. The difference between a past with no widespread recording/playback tech and a present where recorded music is widespread and came to be treated as essentially free is so great that invoking the past seems hazardous even if ...
2) we actually have an accurate understanding of it. For my part, I'm pretty skeptical about the idea that paid performances were largely absent in common life before the 20th century.
3) Carefully consider your last sentence there. What exactly was the wealthy aristocracy buying when they hired? Why wouldn't a community or individual with modest wealth want to buy that if they could? Why would it be priced out of reach?
Not true in the USA. Thousands of towns had multiple amateur concert bands during the 19th century, and band shells are still left over in many parks, although of course they are seldom used for their original purpose.
I think the point was poorly put. I suspect most musical experiences throughout history were either not paid for or paid for voluntarily, not as a condition of access. I also suspect that there is a strong tradition throughout history of professional musicians but that the majority of musicians then (and now) are not professional but amateur (in the positive sense of that word).
> Plato complained in his writings about popular musicians holding unruly concerts.
Did he talk about how they were paid? otherwise I fail to see the relevance.
> The invention of recorded music was a disaster for professional musicians, because it rendered most of them unemployed.
That is an interesting claim, I am prepared to believe it, but I would like to see evidence supporting it. I would suspect that the money to be made by playing music created by other people was reduced. I would also suspect that this stimulated the creation of new songs and musical styles since new copyrightable work became a much more important means of earning income from music.
> People of the past had far more limited access to music, but they weren't stupid or undiscerning - they wanted to hear the best possible music and were willing to pay for it. Busking is probably as old as currency and remains a perfectly reasonable way of making a living.
The modern innovation on busking is platforms like patreon. I pay a monthly amount to a musician I have spent innumerable hours listening to while working. I suspect that payments for access to live performances and voluntary support of musicians you like is the future of musical income. Musical copyright stimulates the creation of some types of music and suppresses other types. It also primarily benefits larger, older, entrenched entities at the expense of suppressing newer, smaller and more innovative entities.
Why were Mozart, Bach, Etc. all relatively poor then? Even the greatest musicians of their age were not wealthy. Compare their incomes to a Taylor Swift or Led Zeppelin and the difference is insane. The last 70 or so years have been the only period where artists incomes rivaled that of land/factory owners.
Bach wasn't relatively poor - he was comfortably middle class, as it was then, with a secure job and extra income from a concert series he set up. (One of the first in the world.)
Mozart was relatively poor because he was terrible with money. Some of his contemporaries, especially opera composers, did very nicely indeed - something which continued to be true for centuries.
Handel was easily the equivalent of a modern multimillionaire. Some performers and/or composers - Paganini, Liszt, various opera singers - earned far more for each performance than modern artists do.
If Taylor Swift only gave concerts to hundreds of people at a time, she'd be poor too. Mozart never had studio deals or CD distribution, or endorsement deals--at least not in the global stage.
This is the intro to Gradus ad Parnassum by Johann Joseph Fux (1725) [1], the textbook used to teach music in Mozart and Beethoven's time:
Aloys. — Perhaps the hope of future riches and possessions induces you to choose this life? If this is the case, believe me you must change your mind; not Plutus but Apollo rules Parnassus. Whoever wants riches must take another path.
Joseph. — No, certainly not. Please be sure that I have no other object than to pursue my love of music, without any thought of gain. I remember also that my teacher often told me one should be content with a simple way of life and strive rather for proficiency and a good name than for wealth, for virtue is its own reward.
The number of business owners whose wealth is far greater than the richest artists has roughly kept pace with changes in artist's wealth. While Mozart was relatively poor compared to his patrons, Taylor Swift is quite poor compared to Spotify founder Daniel Ek.
Indeed, also churches had music, and education included music. Bach was an employee of a city, assigned to work for the local church, which included composing, managing the choir, teaching, and performing at services. He quibbled with his employers about pay.
Do coders get paid every time their code fires? No? Oh then musicians and artists can join the rest of society in not getting paid per usage of an item. Creatives just get greedier and greedier. No other industry gets paid the way that they do, not teaching, not labor, not babysitting, not management, not politics, none. If you want to get paid, perform or provide an object to purchase.
I would never use SaaS. Or at least, I'd never base a business on using it. Because you have no recourse if the price increases dramatically (e.g., Google map API) or the API goes away (not at all uncommon).
That's like those people who disable JavaScript in their browser. Yes you can get through life without using SaaS and you will likely be fine. But you can also join the 21st century and get on with your life.
I like that I can pay for software based on how much I use it rather than ponying up hundreds of thousands of dollars once. A lot of the cheaper end SaaS-es could never ever be sustainable without the monthly subscription business model. Particularly because they themselves use SaaS and have to keep the lights on.
Imagine if isntead of paying a monthly fee to use whatever services companies use to run their company they'd be required to build everything in house? Ain't nobody got the funds for that.
Yes, I get that. And maybe it works out OK, most of the time. But I've surely seen lots of horror stories on HN.
Also, building in-house isn't that expensive. Or at least, not compared to developing in-house. I'm not all that technical, and I setup my own Docker registry, for example.
I am one of those people who only allow minimal required JavaScript :)
I think it’s about opportunity cost. It’s often cheaper to outsource everything not-core and focus your time and attention on the things only you can do. Where “you” is whatever you consider the relevant company/team/businessunit.
Can I build a website? Yes. Can I save money by paying someone to build a website and focus instead on filling it with great content? You bet.
Same applies for SaaS. It would be a waste of time/money/effort to build my own ConvertKit for example
There's a huge difference between outsourcing and SaaS. Sure, it's cheaper to pay someone to build your website. That's outsourcing. But then you run it on a server that you lease. If it's running on something managed by a third party, it can just disappear. And that's SaaS.
There's also the issue of sharing sensitive data with SaaS providers. Just think of all the data leaks that's caused. The Squarespace heatmap stuff we just saw. The deals between Google and phone manufacturers. The behavioral-ad-delivery morass.
Re ConvertKit, the alternative would look like "git clone foo".
A vanishingly small percentage of artists make a living from art. An even smaller percentage of artists get rich. A bit like not every developer is making $120k+...
Yes. This is the key point. And various commenters have made it here, in one way or another.
Also, as others have argued, only a vanishingly small percentage of musicians have ever made a living from their art. Even during the peak of the 40s-80s boom in recorded music. At least, if you include everyone that others have cared to listen to.
That is, you only made it if you signed with a record label that didn't screw you. And through graft or luck, hit the charts. Those are some serious filters.
Indeed, one could argue that direct marketing via the Internet has allowed more artists to earn at least some income from their music. If in no other way than getting paid for performances. It's just that the chances of making it big are lower.
The Romans in 500BC were buying decorative scupltures for their villas, medieval artists made gold jewellry for cash, renaissance painters employed entire studios of artists to churn out hundreds of paintings a year under a famous artist's 'brand'. I think the commercialization of art has been going on for at least a couple of thousand years.
This argument crops up on every discussion of this topic. Why is it always people who work in the arts always told their work isn't worthy of payment except when delivered under certain conditions? If you don't think artists should be paid, then neither should programmers.
I don't know about you, but I'm paid to perform(much like a live musician I suppose). I don't get residuals on my performance. I don't list myself as the writer or composer of my code and receive payment if someone uses or derives their own work from mine. My employer might.
I haven't seen anyone here saying musicians shouldn't get paid when they perform for an audience or for a certain purpose (let's say a commercial or soundtrack)
Not a great comparison. We are talking about musicians getting paid for composing music, not for performing. If you want to go with this analogy, then you would note that you DO get paid for the composition (of the software) but not its performance (when it runs on people's computers). Musicians, on the other hand, cannot make money composing anymore, but they can still make money for performing it.
And if you are an indie dev, you probably do make money from the software in its commodified form. And if you are not an indie dev, then your high salary is because someone else makes a lot of money from the software's commodified form (even if that form today is as a service). The point of the article is that musicians can no longer make any money from the commodified (in this regard meaning recorded) form of their music.
There obviously is a market for songwriting and composition, but anger over excessive copyright (eg Disney style life+90) has drastically undermined all copyright. It's throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and is justified (above and in other comments below) on the idea that music lacks utility.
You're right -- I think the reason this is so contentious is that the market for recorded music didn't collapse, to the degree it did, due to lack of demand; it collapsed due to the marginal cost of reproduction dropping to effectively nothing. I'm not making a moral argument here, lest market libertarians prepare to jump -- I'm not saying the market as it existed should have been propped up artificially. I'm just making the observation that "there is no market for recorded music" is a very different statement than "there is no market for horse-drawn carriages." People are listening to recorded music as much as ever, by some measures more so; we just don't expect to have to pay more than ten bucks a month for All The Music.
Spotify could pay far more for each stream than it does. But it chooses not to, and the money mysteriously disappears into the bank accounts of the management team, assorted investors and Spotify's owners - which include the major record companies.
The arts publishing/management/distribution businesses have always been about relentlessly screwing value out of creators, usually by leveraging differences in political and corporate power to intimidate and bully creators into "voluntarily" signing over their income in return for access to various walled-garden markets.
Streaming media have really taken it to a new level.
While this is probably an Unpopular Opinion™, I think the heart of the problem is ultimately that streaming services undercharge. There's no objective reason to believe that their current price is correct, and the fact that Spotify loses money while artists think they're being underpaid seems to strongly suggest that the price is too low. But consumers now believe that $10/month -- less than the price that a single CD generally is, even on Amazon -- is the Objectively Correct Price, and everyone is stuck.
> If you don't think artists should be paid, then neither should programmers.
You're absolutely right! Artists, programmers, attorneys, and doctors are all exactly the same. They should get paid under the circumstances where someone with money finds their work to be valuable. Some portion of each specialty will find that others value their work enough to allow them to live by their work alone.
Is it perhaps possible that the relative size of this portion might differ between specialties? Perhaps in a way that reflects the relative number of people willing and able to do the work, and possibly also reflective of the level of demand?
"> If you don't think artists should be paid, then neither should programmers."
"Pretty sure that RMS is advocating for that kind of vision."
That's a common misconception. He actually has no problem with programmers making money.
The GNU Project has an article on this, which starts by saying:
"Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as
possible--just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.
"Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can."
Its a kind of pointless quote though because the GPL requires that after the first person buys your software they can legally put it up online for free and now you have lost your sales.
Yes, I'm familiar with that, but if said software is distributed under the GPL, one essentially gets to charge for the first sale. So programmers get paid for e.g. contract work, or custom one-offs, but not for writing retail software.
The corresponding model for artists is the Wu-tang clan selling the sole copy of their album to Martin Shkreli.
It's gross to say that making a living by creating art that people love is an "aberration." It's not like recorded music is unpopular--it's more popular than ever. But for some reason, now people are bad for expecting to make money creating it?
To be clear, there is still scarcity: new music you like is scarce. That is universally true; new music doesn't just appear, it has to be made, and until it is made, you can't get it. That is the definition of scarcity: "the state of being in short supply."
Music in general is not scarce, but some music is more popular than others. Shouldn't a normally functioning economy account for that?
New recorded music from Daft Punk is in short supply; it is scarce. Are the members of Daft Punk an "aberration" (definition: an unwelcome deviation from normal) for wanting to be compensated for reducing that scarcity?
How is that different from a new video game being released? For all of human history, we've been making and playing games. Is it an "aberration" for people who make video games to want to get compensated for reducing the scarcity of new games?
If we want to play the "doing it for love" game, then let's be clear that you, and anyone else, is welcome to make music for free, play it for free, record and release it for free. There is nothing stopping people from doing it for "the love"; in fact it is easier than ever to make music for free.
But it is IMO abusive to then say, well doing it for free is the only acceptable norm, just because they like to do it. I like to work with computers, but guess what: I also get paid do it. I bet you do too! Why is that normal for you and me, but an aberration for musicians?
Usually when people talk about "scarcity being gone" they mean that digital files can be copied and distributed with almost no marginal cost. Well guess what: so can financial instruments. Should we stop charging for Apple stock just because Apple can create new stock at the click of a button?
Why do supposedly digitally-savvy folks get so hung up on the fact that music comes on digital files? Lots of things come on digital files, like your direct deposit salary payments. Does that mean money is not scarce anymore?
Absolutely agree. The creation of technology that allowed people to scale their work is the key. With a single song/album that was sold in stored as well as being able to be played via FM radio and television, a single person could be known throughout the country (or even worldwide). That was never possible before. Prior to that, you always had to basically perform in person, which is a labor-intensive process and therefore pricier than just paying for the album and having it forever (and could also re-sell it). The number of people who could afford live performances historically is far less.
To add another point on top of yours - something else to consider is that music used to be considered free. Or stated another way - without ownership. Society was the owner historically. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know the reason why this was the cause, but I've heard it talked about by historians in documentaries. I suspect it has to do with what you said - that wealthy people funded their artistic endeavors and society as a whole owned the result. Or that they weren't bankrolled by a rich person but instead collected money from passers-by on the streets as they performed. This also speaks directly to the concept of "traditionals" with no known authors.
We're seeing a return to this model in DJing, where the boundaries between performance and playback have largely disintegrated, and the difference between "making new music which repeats familiar refrains" and "pasting together bits of existing recordings to make a new piece of music" has completely dissolved. There's a complex body of compromises with copyright law which is allowing this to happen, but what's essentially going on is that everyone is silently agreeing not to get too wound up about it and we're going back to a model where music is a shared, linguistic experience, and music makers copy, echo, reframe, and reply to each other in a giant collective conversation. It's a much more interesting, relaxed experience than the hard-edged, scarcity-driven model of specific recordings with specific ownership that prevailed through the end of the 20th century.
It's because of the artificial scarcity caused by the copyright laws. Now, with cheap digital distribution, that's changed a lot, even though you can't (legally) copy music and pass it around in most places. So it's going back to performances being the place for musicians to make money: the recorded music is how they advertise mostly, and then they make their real money by getting out on the road and performing in front of big crowds.
Not so much aberration but a gradual corporatisation and then collapse of the industry of "recorded music".
To a large extent the performance side of music has remained unchanged. For a period it may have become subservient to the recording side where artists "toured" an album, but a lot of what went on was due to artists patronage from the respective recording rights holders.
"I think people making money making music was an aberration in history, not "the way it should be"."
I don't want to put words in your mouth, but are you saying you think we should go back to the way musicians used to be treated in the past?
That's a rather reactionary position.
Historically, women in most societies were treated very poorly, often treated like property, and you could say that women being treated with respect is an "abberation in history". But so what? That doesn't mean we have to go back to when women were treated like crap just because that's the way they've mostly been treated before.
Slavery was the norm in many societies for thousands of years, and you could similarly say the lack of slavery is an aberration in history. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to bring back slavery.
If you want to argue that making money off of making music is wrong, you have to make a stronger case for that position than simply saying that's not the way it was in the past.
Sigh. jedberg makes a pretty good argument questioning the framing and underlying assumptions of the thesis, pmoriarty swings in with a respectful and reasoned rebuttal, and I'm ready for what looks to be an actual conversation.
To play devil's advocate, consider how many people you know that work in so-called "bullshit jobs".
TBH, I know plenty of people whose jobs are not that meaningful - yes, some of them create "value" in one way or another, but sometimes even if they create value (indirectly?), maybe it's a bullshit sales job where they are primarily tasked with convincing people to buy their product when an open-source or less-expensive option exists elsewhere. Think "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". You might choose Expensive Enterprise DB over Free And Open Source DB if you are a purchasing manager and don't want the blowback of choosing something with less history. And the people who sell Expensive Enterprise DB might have a salesforce of thousands of twenty-something's who, for the most part, are not technical experts, but spend most of their days propping up the product and convincing people to buy.
I don't think the theoretical perfect supply/demand curve always matches up with real life. Maybe - in the long-term, it does, but sometimes things fly under the radar, maybe for decades, before the business cycle or something else forces a correction.
I don't disagree with your statement, though. If someone wants to earn a living in music, or at least make money, they need many of the same qualifications any startup needs. 1) They need to understand what they are selling and who is buying (product and demographic). Image/Brand is everything (especially since Instagram). ; 2) They have to be able to market - find a launchpad. Whether this is done in-house or the musician is lucky enough to find someone early in their career that signs them to PR / etc., it has to be done. 3) They've gotta be good at what they are doing. Not everyone has to be a Julliard-trained pianist, but they need to be good enough that people want to listen.
Economically, there are certain genre's that (at least to me) seem to immediately be a problem for actually making a competitive living off it. On the other hand, genre's like pop may be incompatible with someone's age - you won't see many 40 year olds releasing their first album to compete with Bruno Mars, for example.
I don't know, though. Music is less important to some than others. I know people who have literally no preferences and just turn a radio on to hear something, and I know others who spend their days in studios writing and recording and living and breathing music.
> I don't think the theoretical perfect supply/demand curve always matches up with real life. Maybe - in the long-term, it does, but sometimes things fly under the radar, maybe for decades, before the business cycle or something else forces a correction.
Yes, it's not perfect. But supply does play a large role.
Nobody is lining up to do "bullshit jobs" but a ton of people do want to make a living with music(and in the arts, in general).
It's the same problem with video game software development. The pay is not that great compared to other "boring" jobs like finance because the supply of people wanting to do it is far greater.
He didn't say anything about what ought to be. Rather, just an observation that based on the last few hundred years, making a living off your art is simply not the "natural order" of things. This is relevant because a reversion to the mean (which you could argue this is) is not particularly shocking.
I think there's somewhat of a leap of logic in there. The idea that the transition to the present era is due to the end of artificial scarcity is questionable considering how many confounding variables there are.
Look at the graph of real median income vs. per capita gdp or productivity, income has been flat even while the economy grows. And this somewhat understates the problem because the economy today is different than what it was back in the 1970s. A huge segment of the working class is being pinched, economically, and they have less money to spend than they might otherwise. It shouldn't be shocking that people are spending less on things like music when they can do so. That doesn't necessarily mean that they wouldn't spend plenty if their earnings were in line with pre 1980 historical norms, however.
I don’t know of anyone who has made any worthwhile music who did it to make money. You’d be an idiot to do it for the money, even in the golden age of music labels. The vast majority of musicians made nothing and a few got super wealthy. You had to practice for years, putting aside any other career in order for a small chance to get discovered. Now once you’re discovered and you have a career, you might continue to do it for the money, but nobody starts there and by then you’re already a talented musician, having done most of the hard work of learning to make music with no real financial incentive at all.
Now people can work on music part time for years as a hobby and just throw it out there and if it’s good people will find it and maybe they’ll get asked to do a gig here and there and that might be enough for them.
You think Brittany Spears made music because she loves music? Or the Backstreet Boys? Or pretty much any K-Pop band these days? They're all out there because a record person wanted to sell personas.
That's a pretty cynical attitude you have there. You should try listening to all of the acapella recordings of Brittany Spears, or all of the videos of her singing and performing as a child.
As a child who was forced to play piano (and other instruments), in my opinion, you cannot force a child to become a "Brittany Spears," they have to want it too, or they will never perform and work hard enough to make it.
Brittany Spears, whatever you think of her, clearly loves singing and performing. The fact that you have this attitude either shows you have zero understanding of human nature or just are a very negative and cynical person. Either way, it's a sucky attitude.
She's a talented singer, but they forced her to change her range higher to fit the "cute little girl" package. So while she may enjoy music, she changed her music to make more money. And now she's changed it back and it's better, but she's already successful so she can take risks now.
>I think people making money making music was an aberration in history, not "the way it should be".
Whether that is "the way it should be" or not, depends on what we want it to be as a society.
Not to whether some technology helps it or not. Untraceable murder could be very easy tomorrow with some new technology, but we'd still not want it to happen.
So the part that "artificial scarcity" helped musicians make money off of their art, is a historical and technological accident.
But whether artists should be able to make money off of their art (scarcity be damned) is an ethical and "what kind of society we want" question.
We shouldn't abandon our "oughts" at the first sign of some technology working against them.
I'd be curious to know also how many people are still being paid for their work as artists through movies, TV, video games, etc. I bet it is also a significantly larger percentage of the population than a few hundred years ago.
art and music do require skill, and people will pay for good art/music no matter the availability.
take pop music (of all sorts) for example. the money that pours into it is puzzling if you consider the music on its own merits. the melodies are catchy and the lyrics too, but no one really considers it high art. any barroom crooner could sing and play it.
(in fact singing is probably the most accessible and widely distributed art form. we're all born with the instrument and a little practice is all that's needed for passable entertainment.)
so why do pop stars make so much money? it's simply not scarcity that drives the price. it's fashion, or culture, or whatever you prefer to call it. it's the need to forget our troubles. it's our secret hopes and dreams routed through a channel for bonding with our fellow man. that's what we're paying for.
and we'll likely always pay for it. but whether the marketing machine of yesteryear can continue to maintain a stranglehold on access and taste is really the open question.
> no one really considers it high art. any barroom crooner could sing and play it
Um, no. I say this as a holder of season tickets to the opera and as a trained operatic tenor myself. Many, many pop singers are incredibly good and far outstrip the skills of most barroom singers I have experienced.
Oh definitely. I don't think people know how much work goes into the typical pop song, even though it may sound like anyone could write and record it.
People think they could sing Britney Spears just like her until they get behind a mic to record. Most people don't even know the cringey feeling of "God, I didn't know my voice sounded like that" after having heard their own recorded voice for the first time. Or how out of tune and rhythm they actually are.
So no. Everybody thinks they could sing the typical pop song, but I doubt that they could.
It's not that pop singers aren't talented. It's just that pop music as a genre is pretty much boring, and the artists that appear every season, or every "America's got talent" edition, they all are easily forgettable. You could switch covers and sell Selena Gomez album as Ariana Grande album and noone would even notice the difference.
Pop music is a commodity, and as any commodity it's pricing/value is basically a race to bottom.
That’s not the point GP made. Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande have roughly similar genres but Ariana is a musical titan who can famously sing in any style she chooses.
sure, some pop artists have great skill, but that's beside the point.
my point was that singing entertainment (e.g., pop) is widely available (someone sitting near you right now can probably sing well enough to be entertaining), so not scarce. you can find millions of decent takes on pop songs on youtube.
and further, the level of passable entertainment is low, both because plenty of people can sing passably, and because enjoyment of the music comes not from admiring the skill but mostly from other factors.
> I think people making money making music was an aberration in history, not "the way it should be".
I assume you apply the same thinking to software, or movies, which also create artificial scarcity. It is just that movies and software are a new thing. Do you?
I guess it depends on your definition of capitalism but many would argue that it only requires private property and voluntary exchange, both of which probably stretch back into prehistory.
Nonsense. Capitalism is when people make money for doing nothing. People have been paid for work they produce for all of time. The innovation of capitalism is that you can be paid for the work other people produce.
In fact, I would say there is no "the way it should be". Capitalism seems to have a net positive effect on the majority of the planet. Let's stick with it.
Capitalism is destroying the planet. That's hardly a net positive. In fact it's the worst thing possible. There is nothing humans are even theoretically capable of that is worse.
What is the suggested alternative to a market economy? Command economies aren't what I would consider better for the globe. Energy intensity per unit of labor is almost universally lower in market economies than it is in command economies.
There is no alternative unless we magically have free energy. The only way out of this is to colonize the solar system, galaxy. At that point the Earth's status as a habitable planet will hardly matter.
Worst thing possible? Really? That's a simpleton's view about existence. Countless planets die every day. I only care about the next 20 years I'm going to be alive for. I don't care about the planet or the survival of your children. Don't force responsibility on me.
For a few hundred years, there was the patronage era, where if you were really good you could get a rich person to feed and clothe and house you while you made art. Or you traveled around giving performances for money or food or clothes or shelter.
Then only in the last 100ish years has it been possible to make art for mass consumption (and mass money), but that's only because of artificial scarcity.
Now that the scarcity is gone, we are back to patronage (see Patreon) and making money from the performance of music, by doing live shows and such.
I think people making money making music was an aberration in history, not "the way it should be".