
Independent Music Is Big - jeanlucas
https://medium.com/startup-study-group/independent-music-is-big-really-really-big-242641a2cbee?source=featured---------1
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guard-of-terra
The situation with "Music Industry" and "Majors" gives rise to this parable:

Imagine that we would consider "Eating Out Industry" as consisting of
McDonalds, KFC and the like - drawing elaborate charts on how they divide
market.

And then shove everything else, from falafel shops to Michelin rated
restaurants, as "Independent Eating Out". The package includes barely
mentioning those "indie" offerings in any media, magazines, etc.

We don't do this for some reason. But we actually could.

~~~
vinceguidry
We don't do this because competition doesn't work that way in the restaurant
industry. Location in most cases trumps content. When I look to eat out, I
choose amongst the restaurants close to me. Occasionally there's a restaurant
I might drive more than ten miles to eat at. But it would be foolish for any
restaurant to specifically cater to the long tail when 90% the money is in a 5
mile radius.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Believe it or not, people actually travel half the world to experience genuine
eating out. Example: Argentinean steaks.

Anyway, you can fit a lot of diverse restaurants into 5 miles radius. The
mainstream music selection is much narrower.

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Simorgh
As a musician, I would tentatively suggest that it is unbelievably difficult
to build genuine connections with large numbers of fans.

Call it the data deluge or whatever, the sheer volume of attention seeking
content out there just swamps timid voices.

Perhaps this is nothing new, however.

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gearhart
Just to play the other side of the argument - does this really matter? Most of
the major label music industry now is based on, at best, flimsy (if not
outright false) connections between fans and artists. Genuine connections are
very different things. If, for example, you could get every fan to pay £1 a
month to their favourite musicians you'd only need a few thousand fans to be
doing well. Contrast that with the millions of "fans" you need to succeed via
traditional, major label routes. I imagine artists who really love their job
would find that pretty attractive.

I'm no expert on the industry, but Ben Horowitz has been thinking about this
sort of thing for a while afaik - I only know of it through Ryan Leslie, but
this article's worth reading: [https://pando.com/2014/11/20/with-the-help-of-
ben-horowitz-r...](https://pando.com/2014/11/20/with-the-help-of-ben-horowitz-
rapper-ryan-leslie-wants-to-reinvent-the-record-label-for-the-new-music-
economy/)

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williamcotton
"The internet renders business models focused on scarcity and litigation
obsolete."

Translation: The whole concept of intellectual property is kind of troublesome
for the content aggregators that I invest in and we'd prefer not to pay for
any of the media that we sell advertisements around.

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williamcotton
To make this litigation actually obsolete it will take a constitutional
amendment to repeal the Copyright Clause.

The whole point of royalties is to reduce the amount of litigation by having
an organized and honorable system of compensation.

The reason YouTube and Pandora have spent the last decade in the courts is
precisely because they don't want to have to pay. Instead of being respectful
members of society, they decided to hide behind lawyers and put a burden on
our publicly funded civil justice systems.

There is nothing in our legal system that will ever allow someone to use
someone else's intellectual property and profit from it without compensating
the original author. That means that every time someone is selling
advertisements on a website around content that is not being compensated, they
can be successfully sued for damages, with hundreds of years of common law
precedent and statute.

There is no doubt in my mind that intellectual property and copyright have
changed drastically from the author-centric in to the corporate-centric form
that we have today.

What's needed is reform and a return to an author-centric model, not the
wholesale abandonment of copyright.

~~~
Natanael_L
> The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and
> useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the
> exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

"Shall have the power", "to promote the progress".

As far as I see it, that's all we need to drop every single copyright law now
founded on actual research (just about all of them) and swap them out for
something else entirely, if we find something that has a better effect for
society.

And I disagree entirely on the view on Youtube and Pandora. You may not like
their position, but as far as I can see they haven't destroyed anybody's
creative career. We shouldn't be building intellectual minefields and be petty
and territorial.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
How would you know? How would people whose creative careers have been
destroyed be visible to you?

I don't dislike their "position", I dislike the fact that they're essentially
even more parasitic on musical creators than the old majors used to be.

Have you ever heard of a streaming service paying a talented band/singer an
advance? Or taking out ads? Or setting up press interviews?

~~~
Natanael_L
They should be visible SOMEHOW through all the research done on the effect of
piracy. How would they go under? Sales displacement, which studies can't prove
are widespread?

Spotify pays about the same per play and listener as radio does. How is that
worse than the labels?

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ericzawo
This was bad and dumb.

~~~
jeanlucas
Thank you for the feedback, that helps the author and the community to grow,
also is insightful, showing your respect towards other people.

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voynich61
This reads as parody. Fawning over some self-important VC, doing 'analysis'
that amounts to nothing more than shooting the shit with words and graphs that
he doesn't understand. Decrying mistakes startups apparently always make, and
using Buzzfeed as an example of some apparently satanic definition of success.
Pushing a worldview, not a thought.

The music industry is immensely inefficient; the value of a piece is
independent of it's economic value. It's smaller than the porn industry [3],
and the top earners are not too distant from it artistically. It's a tenth the
size of Apple, though much of the money is concentrated on zero-sum executives
lacking a moral compass[5]. My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, Pitchfork's best
album of the 90's, never went gold, even in their home country [1]. It
bankrupt a studio and broke up the band, and to this day is about 1/100th as
popular as Drake albums on Spotify [2]. Still, there is a vast swarm of people
for whom Loveless means the world, in a way Drake has never meant to anyone.
It's a stoic, effervescent, and unmonetizable titan.

It would be fallacy to assert that the developed world is improving
emotionally [6][7], and for many in it music is a mood-regulating sidekick,
thereby providing added value where TV et al. provide replacement. It is a
levee against the disgusting world neoliberalism and tech utopianism has built
for us. Final thoughts:

* Never use the word 'consumer' non-ironically.

* Or write that "there are in fact multiple paradigms that exist within the music universe, all of which operate according to very different rules." Amongst a few other choice phrases.

* Or, in your profile bio, "Lover of Art, Poetry, Startups, Music, Journalism // Tech Founder and Deadpan Humorist".

* Walled-Garden doesn't exist on streaming services; your demented Grandma has recordings of her playing piano on her Soundcloud.

* Streaming does work... if only because nothing else does. And no, no one will tell you 'community'/'live' will work for artists who have enough integrity not to become a living meme.

[1]: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loveless_(album)#Certifications

[2]: look it up. There are a few reasons for this, including that MBV
listeners probably skew towards torrenting, and that those who stream tend not
to leave it on as background music.

[3]: nbcnews.com/business/business-news/things-are-looking-americas-porn-
industry-n289431, statista.com/topics/1639/music/

[4]: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.

[5]: celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/ceos/lyor-cohen-net-worth/

[6]: monbiot.com/2014/10/14/falling-apart/

[7]: nytimes.com/2015/11/03/health/death-rates-rising-for-middle-aged-white-
americans-study-finds.html

~~~
rayuela
I agree with you and there is plenty of room for technology to address some of
these problems, both in facilitating the creation of music and getting it to
the right audience.

