Maybe the society has to finally adapt & embrace to the way things are going in the last 20 years: music stars to earn their money in the concerts they sold out due to "piracy" and not from selling CDs, movie stars from royalties paid by subscribers of Netflix and HBO and other such services, or even monetize their popularity directly from endorsing products.
Software developers seem to be the first to adapt: you can't pirate a SaaS or a cloud. One can try and copy it, but will be always behind the first moved and the original creator, because they always seem to have good ideas.
Equating IP with real estate is bad for the society: why would someone keep producing and keep performing if they made a hit with a song, or a movie, or a game?
It's not as if Netflix isn't trying, it's just that the movie industry as a whole is determined not to cooperate.
Can you imagine a music industry where, in order to listen to new releases, you are required to go to "listening parlours", or wait for radio, CD, streaming release|?
Honestly I feel like Netflix has given up and just joined the crowd. As they lose non-original content they're slowly morphing into a cable channel like Bravo.
They no longer listen to customer feedback. Their categorization and search get worse by the day. They refuse to add an option to disable the autoplay previews that no one likes.
That'd all be ok, albeit disappointing, if they were still charging $8 a month. But they keep raising prices like Comcast or AT&T each year while the quality declines or stagnates.
They're running the Amazon / Apple playbook in media.
(1) Start as a service provider, brokering sales from legacy producers who don't yet have distribution through this new market, (2) pivot to original supply, as legacy producers recognize how much money stands to be made and stand up their own distribution channels, (3, optimistic case) become so large that producers are forced to renegotiate with you, from a weaker position, because they must have distribution on your platform.
I don't think they're going to corner the market like Amazon or Apple did, as they lack the moats (respectively a hyperscale logistics system and first party hardware).
I'm kind of surprised Netflix isn't cross-licensing their back catalog to alternate channels. E.g. trading rebroadcast rights to the first season of Stranger Things to Comcast or a cable network in exchange for {insert popular program}.
That feels the most like an analog to Amazon Marketplace (context: remember, there was once an Amazon without third-party sellers).
That doesn't excuse the decline of their UX. They are adoptingany of the tactics and antipatterns used by other media companies that sow the seeds of discontent with their product.
Netflix's goal with entertainment is to monopolize your free time. Its why they are willing to promote binge-watching, its why they consider games like Fortnite to be competitors in addition to (and in some cases more than) HBO and Hulu.
Their UI is now meant to hide their complete lack of content.
They lost all the big catalogs and deals as Fox, Disney etc. ended their licensing deals. And even though they’ve pumped billions into original content, this can’t make up for the hundreds of titles they lost.
So, the new UI is meant to make you overlook all that and make you watch Netflix original content. To quote myself [1] their selection is ridiculously tragically bad.
> They're running the Amazon / Apple playbook in media.
I'm not sure how this is the Apple playbook, unless you count podcasts (which they've never had an option to charge for) as Apple original audio content, or the upcoming Apple TV+ as a 15 year gap between selling third party video content and providing their own.
The problem for me isn't the old ones - is the new ones. I want to see the new movies at my house. Yeah, there are films that I'd like to see at the cinema, but those are less than 5 per year. But if I could pay to watch a new film in the comfort of my home, I'd do it. As I can't, I'll probably download it for free.
At this point is feels like their goal is to get me to pirate as much as possible, lets see my anecdotal data point:
Music - Tidal covers about >95% of my music consumption.
TV shows - I have netflix and and prime, these cover maybe 75% of my tv consumption.
Films - Going to the cinema covers 10-20% maybe? I go to the cinema about 5-10 times a year and I pirate the rest because I don't have a good enough service to get those from legally.
Criterion’s streaming service covers this pretty well. Kanopy — if you have access via your local library — also has a large selection of lesser-known and older films.
> Spotify did it right; they managed to put together a service that is actually better than piracy in the ways that matter to a typical consumer.
I disagree. As a listener, Bandcamp and Soundcloud fulfill my needs better. Artists are more willing to put their work on those services than they are with Spotify, and it's entirely understandable. With Bandcamp, there is a link to buy albums at their asking price while listening. Spotify listens will pay out fractions of a penny. The result is that other platforms will have new music that suits my tastes, and I will be lucky if rights holders will put the same content on Spotify within the next 5 years.
NO, Spotify is a radio service with 0 promise to save your music over time. I use streaming services and have been hit by this issue frequently. It's tragic.
Now I'm stuck paying for all the music I've been paying for again. Or something else...
I disagree with your second assertion: if the streaming services go bad, the alternative isn't paying for all the music you've been paying for again; the alternative is pirating it all of it for free.
That's the beauty of the services: they have to compete with free and to do that they have to provide a superior enough experience to the user. If that ends, the music industry is the loser.
If ytdl-ing playlists is considered pirating - yep, for sure. Personally, I do it because youtube has the most complete, without any close competition, music collection (in varying quality).
Playing music off youtube is now the norm in my circle. It's definitely going to dent sales.
I don't like spotify and similar services, and try to buy my favorite music online if I can, but invariably am forced to torrents because it's hard to get where I am.
I'm amazed the music and movie business is finding it so hard to adapt.
Yes, pirated music doesn't waste mobile bandwidth, doesn't get interrupted when I lose my mobile collection, is much quicker to copy between devices, integrates better with music from local artists and gives me many much better music players to choose from.
Most streaming services let you download the media to save on bandwidth. My entire music library on Spotify is downloaded so I don't have to worry about connectivity issues. You can do similar things with Netflix.
It's also easier for me to move to different devices, because all I have to do is sign into Spotify. Manually transferring songs like I used to with an iPod is something I don't want to have to go back to.
I can't speak for spotify, but last time I tried with google music the player still used a lot of bandwidth for whatever reason when playing only cached songs. There were also bugs like pressing next twice in quick succession having non-deterministic behavior, possibly due to network requests.
> Manually transferring songs like I used to with an iPod is something I don't want to have to go back to.
A minor price to pay for not being tethered to an inferior proprietary music player.
Buying a t-shirt gives more money to an artist than several years' worth of you streaming their music online.
Spotify started off great but is now a total ripoff to artists since it got in bed with the major labels, trading stock for a larger cut of ad and subscription revenue.
You aren't any better for using Spotify and not torrenting. Make sure to support your favorite artists when they perform near you, and buy merch. Support small-time and local artists. That is the best thing you can do for the music industry.
If you deeply care about music and are an audiophile you do. I was on what.cd before it closed are really appreciated being able to get flac rips of original release vinyl, sometimes dating back 60-70 years.
Example first pressings I have in flac: velvet underground, the doors, led zeppelin, etc
Like Spotify, is their catalog often arbitrarily populated with whatever the most recent remaster is, or some other random release? There is value to having a lossless rip of a specific pressing of a given album. Especially with the case of albums that were mangled with limiters etc during their "remasters."
The number of albums I cannot find un-remastered is infuriating. I want the version I remember, not this years overcompressed mixing style squashing the dynamics while the singer autotunes out those 'bad notes'.
>FLAC has no benefit over traditional 16/24 encoded content.
You seem to have misunderstood FLAC with the sample rate / bit depth of a file. The vast majority of FLAC files are regular old 16 bit 44.1 kHz, and nobody is claiming that 24 bit 192 kHz (or whatever) files are better.
FLAC is a codec: simply a way to take all the audio on a CD and have it preserved indefinitely, without "generational" loss (where a mp3 is encoded from another mp3, and so on).
You're totally right. Complete brain blank. I don't know what I was thinking - think I subconsciously mixed my frustration over Tidal's 192/24 marketing with the concept of FLAC.
Yes it will, assuming the FLAC one makes sense to begin with. FLAC is a specialty codec tuned for compressing audio in the same way that DEFLATE is tuned for general (mostly text) files. Both of them are lossless, which means when you decompress the file you get exactly the same bits back as you started with.
So a correctly encoded FLAC file will be using CD quality audio or better. (CD audio is transparent when correctly encoded in 100% of cases.) FLAC is just a way to reduce the file size of that raw CD data by about 50%.
Lossy codecs like mp3 and AAC (the codec usually found in the m4a container) are also tuned to compress music, but they do so by throwing away a some of the original information. When this is done correctly it should still be transparent to the original the vast majority of the time. No one, not even an "audiophile", can tell the difference under any listening conditions. For mp3 (depending on encoder), the bitrate that achieves transparency is about 256 kbits/sec, though there are so-called "killer samples" that can break certain encoders at that bitrate. AAC (again, depending on encoder) is transparent closer to 192 kbits/sec. The state of the art has advanced remarkably since either were released: Opus is transparent in the vast majority of cases all the way down to 128 kbits / sec, and still sounds great at bitrates below that.
The problem is that just seeing the file extension gives you no guarantees about what the bitrate is. A 128 kbits/sec mp3 is going to sound like mush on a good system. If you convert that mp3 to FLAC it's still going to sound like mush, because you're using a lossy source. But a FLAC made from a CD will sound much better, as will a 320 kbits/sec mp3.
So if all you care about is transparency, getting 320 kbits/sec mp3s or 128 kbits/sec Opus files is probably good enough for you. The issue with "generational loss" I was referring to is when a lossy file is used as a source for another lossy encode. This is kind of like saving a file as a jpeg twice: you always lose more than just saving it once, even if the "quality" setting in the encoder is the same. Plus if you convert an AAC file to mp3, there's an even worse problem, which is that the different codecs try to compress the file in slightly different ways, which can lead to unexpected interactions and sometimes end up sounding like crap.
The point of keeping around a FLAC file is that you have a permanent archive of what was on the CD, and you have a source that you can use to make future lossy encodes from without the generational loss problem. All my albums are ripped to FLAC, but from those FLAC files I encode Opus files that are small enough to take with me on my phone.
.Zip also has no benefit over .exe, .dmg none over .app.
It’s just a codec. It makes it smaller.
Unless you mean “lossy” by “traditional”, in which case, yes, lossless codecs have a lot of benefit over lossy ones.
A perfect example is when sampling or beatmixing; if the final product will be played on youtube or streamed on digital radio or compressed lossily in any form, you will have incurred two lossy compression steps if your source material is lossy. This is akin to subsequent generations of dubbing analog media; the quality degrades quickly with each generation.
How do you convert lossy music to another lossy format? I'm having my music encoded in 96kbps opus in my phone and it is much more convenient to encode them from flac than another lossy format.
I have hundreds of albums bought and ripped to flac on my NAS server. They take about 300 GB out of the 40something terabytes available. I have real rarities stored in there and I pay about 1 euro a month for the cloud backup.
FLAC is an archival format. It's valuable because you can use whatever codec you like to stream the audio or store it on a device with limited space, including future codecs that haven't been developed yet. Lossy-to-lossy encoding is bad.
I don't think you understand what FLAC is. FLAC is a lossless compression format, that's it. FLAC also can be encoded in 16/24 or other bitrates like 24/192. Moreover, you can't (or shouldn't) do lossy to lossy encoding, so if you want to future proof your collection, you should store it FLAC or another lossless format because when/if mp3's go obsolete, you'll be stuck with it.
I do pirate movies. Old ones I can't find in any vendor, e.g. old Woody Allen movies. I also realized that some titles do exist in vendor's catalog, but are not available in my region for some reason.
I have terabytes of pirated music....that I hardly ever listen to because it's too much work to load up the player and find something to play. I much prefer google play, with their algorithms for finding new music for me, instead of me having to hunt for it. Looking at multi-terabyte directories and trying to decide what to listen to is just overwhelming. Google Play has introduced me to several new artists and a couple entire genre's of music that I would have never otherwise found, and $15/mo is well worth it.
exactly. Before I had google play I'd end up playing from the same set or leaving off with the same directory that I had listened to before. I'm also a fan of XM radio because while driving it's too much work to pull up the phone and start a playlist, and to an extent I do like the (one-sided) human "contact" of having the DJ announce the songs and make occasional chatter (even if I begrudgingly complain about it sometimes). I tried Radio Garden [1] but found myself still listening to top-40 adult contemporary crap.
It's a pain if it isn't organized well. When it is organized well, it's the best.
I have mpd+emms set up with an always on emms playlist window and dedicated dired window for my music collection.
I can't say the same for my book collection though. I tried calibre but didn't like it. Been experimenting with some custom scripts that work but are in dire need of indexing and optimization.
I had this problem, but then I just installed foobar2000 and quicksearch plugin, point it at my p2p disk root, exclude video files. Fast start-up and instant tag search through hundreds of gigs of flac. If you're in the Ts of MP3s range then YMMV, I've never had that many files.
Run a Plex server, and you can stream your own library of music from anywhere (one-time $5 purchase for your mobile app). Of course, this doesn't solve the issue of recommendations, but I personally see discovery and collection as two different roles which can be filled by two different models/services.
I personally am not a big music listener, but when I want music, I start YouTube and do it there, for free, with uBlok installed, which is the same thing. And that seems to work for artists and YouTube too.
When I was a teenager (20 years ago), this wasn't possible and we torrented whole albums like hell. Some people got in jail back then, or had to pay huge fines for "unrealized profits", which was absurd.
As an artist, who collects royalties, go on and torrent it. We see virtually nothing from the likes of spotify thanks to backroom deals selling us out. Come see the show, buy merch, the music is for better or worse, free.
> We see virtually nothing from the likes of spotify thanks to backroom deals selling us out.
Blame your publishers and companies you sell your rights to: Warner Music, Sony etc. They demand up to 70% of revenue from “the likes of Spotify” in royalties.
I have a Spotify subscription but still download music because I prefer owning a library instead of just renting it. However, pirating is becoming harder and harder. Because of Spotify and other service participaton in piracy has declined substantially. File hosting is almost gone, all I see is dead links. What.cd, the greatest archive in the world has been taken down, such a pity. I think a lot of people have moved to soulseek or rutracker, but in general the Internet seems to be cleaning up.
I tend to just listen to music on YouTube these days. For the most part, what I want to listen to is available on there, albeit probably not with the consent of the copyright holder.
That's what I do. It's absolutely stellar that there are so many live concerts, old TV shows, etc. of things that I'm interested in. Maybe if you have interests outside of the mainstream it's safe for now, but sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't download absolutely everything I like in order to avoid a future where more copyright detectin' software and lawyers get involved.
Another angle that's nice about youtube are all the digitized LPs. An awful lot of music never made the jump to CD, I remember how huge the jazz album bins used to be at some record stores.
Many songs are sped up, and the discovery that this often has the effect of making them sound better than the original may have created a whole new "genre" of music --- nightcore. I've come across some very pleasing "nightcore'd" songs, and listened to the original, but still think the sped-up and higher-pitched version sounds better. It's an interesting psychological effect.
...and I've also noticed the content ID system still detects them, but they probably remain because the IP holders are content to monetise those videos and reap the profits rather than getting them taken down (and earning nothing.) That turns the question into "is adblocking piracy?" and that's a whole different can of worms...
If I wanted mp3s I'd just torrent them, though. The whole point of YouTube is I can stream them easily and not have to worry about moving files around, and especially, not deal with anything not above-the-board on work-owned computers.
Pay for the hbo mobile version but can’t watch GoT you know. I think music well pass the stage - got both itune music and spotify. But what they should do is to have a non-Priatebay p2p services. Would pay. Really. Have paid in fact. just the broadcasting model is not working. Many got GBit network at home. Cover those first. Not give them dark screen is a good start.
> music stars to earn their money in the concerts they sold out due to "piracy" and not from selling CDs
this is not entirely true; musicians also earn a significant amount of money based on how many times their songs are played on streaming services like Spotify.
Hasan Minhaj had a bit about this in Patriot Act, explaining that this is the reason artists like Li'l Pump are releasing albums with dozens of two-minute songs—shorter tracks means more plays means more $$.
What this means, and what trips me out about using Spotify (or even YouTube), is that I literally can't listen to music on their platform without putting money in someone's pocket. Great for artists I love, sad for cultural curiosities I want to understand but decidedly don't want to support, like Li'l Pump or Chris Brown.
You don't need to make a ton of money to live of your music.
make 60k/year in concerts and you'll live without problems in a country like Italy.
It looks like a lot, but it means 150 shows/year at around 400 euros each + expenses (mainly gas, road tolls, some lunch on the road - sleeping, eating and drinking are provided by the promoter or the venue).
I've worked with bands that played more than 200 shows/year that earned around 5k + merchandise per show.
They payed me 100 bucks per gig, just to sell their merchandise.
Provided it becomes a real job and you have to work hard to keep it going, it's totally doable.
This is a funny topic for me, I've always been a super music fan, but never played any instrument.
I've been more a "roadie" than just a merchandiser, I mean that I was with them all the time, loading, unloading, driving and helping out.
Sometimes I've also acted as tour manager, but only in venues we already knew.
Most of the largest shows have been with an Italian band throughout Italy, production was in the medium range, going between a few hundreds to thousands of people (less than 5 thousands).
Many of the smaller ones were in Europe, with american bands, where it usually was in the hundreds in undeground clubs - there 's a large variety of them in Europe, you can find the youth center in Switzerland that has hotel's level accomodations and the squat in east Germany where you sleep on the floor in the cold.
But it's a good network to get a lot of shows close to each other, so you don't have to drive much and everyone is kind.
We've also been playing to many festivals: from desert fest to duna jam, from freak valley to roadburn, from up in smoke to hellfest. It's another great way to make connections and meet the bands.
I'm especially fond of what's called stoner rock (I prefer the name desert rock though) and I've toured a lot with bands from the Rome based Heavy Psych Sounds label.
I've been doing it for about 5 years, then the main band I was following took a sabbatical and I went back into tech as a programmer (my day to day job since 1997)
It's been the best part of my life, and, as crazy it might sound, the time of my life when I saved the most: I didn't have to pay for food, drinks, traveling or going to concerts, which basically is where most of my finances went anyway...
I had to pay the mortgage on my house, but if I was renting, I could have saved on that as well.
Best and worst memory is opening to Eagles of Death Metal in Milan, where I've spent the night smoking pot with Dave Catching, founder of Rancho de La Luna and one of my heroes.
I've also shared the merch booth with Nic, their merchandiser, that few days later was tragically killed in the
Bataclan massacre.
TL;DR: I got to do it as a job just by answering "yes" to "we need a driver for this one date, are you interested?". I've been reliable so they kept calling me and I ended up being part of the crew, without even noticing.
I like some stoner metal. Really fond of Sleep. I'll check out Heavy Psych Sounds.
And a night with Dave Catching sounds rad. I don't know how that could be a worst memory.
Is your estimate of ~150 annual shows being enough for a comfortable lifestyle meant to generally apply to overseas shows for American bands, or do you think the payout is more or less on par with ~150 domestic shows?
Sorry, I've haven't been clear, the worst was knowing a guy that a few days later was killed while working at Bataclan in Paris.
Many bands I know come here touring for at least a month, and when they're away rent their apartments or rooms back home because life here in Europe is cheaper, especially when touring, especially south or east.
Some of them moved here, to Berlin or Barcelona, some even moved here in Italy, I know of a band that moved in Sicily, on the Ortigia peninsula in Syracuse.
Depending on the cachet, 150 shows are enough to make a living and generally an overseas band have that exotic vibe that brings more people to the shows.
I can't make a comparison with the same number of shows in US, I've never toured that much in the States, but according to what bands said to me, touring US is harder, you have to drive a lot more and accommodations are usually worse (no food or drinks, sleep on a floor or in the van, hundreds of miles before reaching the next city) while Europe is easier.
if you plan your tours carefully and make the right connection, there's a good number of clubs that can guarantee packed shows and/or just a place to play and sleep on slow work days.
For stoner Germany, Sweden and somewhat Switzerland (they offer more than the average, be aware there's still customs in and out) are the best places in continental Europe.
A good way to do it is contact an european band or label and ask for advices. There are services that rent you the van for cheap directly in the airport, a good place is Belgium because it's exactly in the middle of EU, or they can provide you a communication channel with venues and/or services that rent backlines and stuff.
Last, but not least: be very careful with the gear, there have been numerous cases of stolen backlines, it would completely ruin the hard work (and the fun) you were putting in the tour.
The reason for short songs also applies to other services like YouTube.
Spotify is different however in that the cut artists get out of their streaming revenue is very insignificant compared to the slice that their record labels and Spotify are getting. I think it's important to keep this in mind. Spotify is negative force in the industry.
> sad for cultural curiosities I want to understand but decidedly don't want to support, like Li'l Pump or Chris Brown.
I don't think you should be concerned over the fraction of a cent you helped generate for Lil Pump.
It is not that simple. There are artists for example who are disabled and it is difficult to do concerts, but I agree with you. Just wanted to point that out as some people think of artists as dancing monkeys and not humans like everyone else.
> There are artists for example who are disabled and it is difficult to do concerts,
That's not the case. Dead artists do concerts. Artists that never physically existed do concerts. You could have a Steven Hawking concert now and people would pay for the tickets if music was good.
I’d love to know of a disabled musician who fits the archetype which is typically thrown around in this discussion. It seems to be purely hypothetical.
Also, this argument discounts second order effects. Who knows what new innovations might be brought on by the need to find an alternate revenue source.
Software developers seem to be the first to adapt: you can't pirate a SaaS or a cloud. One can try and copy it, but will be always behind the first moved and the original creator, because they always seem to have good ideas.
Equating IP with real estate is bad for the society: why would someone keep producing and keep performing if they made a hit with a song, or a movie, or a game?