It's embarrassing to see this story at the top of News.YC. Think of all the sentences in history (in recent history) that have sent streams of people to their deaths, and this is the saddest and stupidest he's ever read? Honestly, this is at worst a bike shed painted slightly the wrong shade of green.
You have the wrong word emphasized--it's the saddest and stupidest he's ever read. Both sadness and stupidity are subjective, and this sentence apparently butts up against his personal philosophy. I would think that making meaningless a life--subconsciously, his--dedicated to creating lasting works is a stronger raw negative emotion than simple sympathy for death, especially at a scale the human mind cannot even comprehend.
In other words, if for some reason you wanted to maximize the psychological pain experienced by this one individual, and your means of accomplishing this was having everyone in the world suddenly share a single belief, the one underlying the spoken sentence would be it.
Of course, there's no reason that most of us would care, but that's a reason for it to not be on a social news website, not a reason for it to not have been written at all. From his, and therefore the audience of his blog/gestalt's perspective, this message is of the utmost importance. Perhaps the way it was written had such pathos as to absorb a submitter into posting it, and others into voting it up even though they knew it was not really appropriate material, but that's the path of kitten pictures.
I wasn't quite sure about posting it, but I thought the contrast between Carr and Arrington was interesting, and highlights a very important issue: what to do about intellectual property, and what the consequences are for various concerned groups. It is a very sensationalist title though. I guess it would have been better to change it to something like "Carr vs Arrington on IP".
Paul Graham himself writes good essays with sensationalist titles. For example, "Microsoft is Dead" was a great essay, but he had to explain in the essay itself that he wasn't actually arguing that Microsoft is dead. This seems similar; a sensationalist title that isn't remotely true, but with some decent content.
He mistakes a mistaken analogy. The poets that he names are not selling out live readings and the sculptors are not putting on live creation events.
When it comes to music, yes, a concert tour is more profitable for the artist than their recorded music is. This is the one difference between musicians and other artists.
While I don't completely agree with Arrington, I do believe that this blog post calling it the saddest stupidest sentence ever is guilty of the same sensationalism that Arrington is.
The number of recording artists/groups making money--that is, a profit--on tour is dwarfed by the ones trying to scrape by any other way they can ('real' jobs, selling cd's and other merch at shows, bar mitzvahs, etc.). Even a lot of the top-of-the-charts artists don't draw a big enough crowd to make their tour their livelihood.
Ah but even so they're selling most of that merchandise at shows that people are coming to, even if the ticket sales aren't raking in the cash for them
Given that the Beatles' best albums came after they stopped touring, it would be a real shame if we didn't try and preserve the monetary reward of recorded music, because we would be doing everyone a disservice if bands were forced to tour to support their recording career.
The TC article title clearly says that artists should not be compensated for recordings. No context, that's the title and therefore the overall message that Arrington wants us to take away. What most of the article says is that the artists shouldn't expect to be able to retroactively be compensated when they had previously agreed not to be in this particular situation.
The problem here is that, all context considered, Arrington is going one step further than just saying that the artists don't deserve compensation here. He is very clearly raising the point that artists shouldn't expect to be compensated at all for recordings ever.
Of course this is quite disapointing to me as much of the music I listen to cannot be created live by its artists but instead takes days or months to prepare. With the advancement of computers, more and more often, musical composers will be able to use just a computer to create music that traditionally could only be created by live musicians - and lots that can only be created through computers. Guess I'd better kiss that goodbye.
>Of course this is quite disapointing to me as much of the music I listen to cannot be created live by its artists but instead takes days or months to prepare.
Almost any type of music where vocals are not the focus can today be created through computers. More than people realize already is today. I am thinking of instrumental music such as classical, of course electronica of all types, even a bit of jazz and other styles.
Another example: while not famous in the traditional sense, many session musicians have "fan followings" in their own right.
I am very fond of the music of master session bassist Abraham Laboriel. He's played on thousands of albums, and while he has played in bands, he's just too busy as a very in-demand session player to be playing live constantly. He rarely does anything even remotely like a "tour". If I want to hear Abraham play, the easiest way is through a recording.
Even more extremely, recordings can bring together musicians in a way that would be implausible to do live. If you enjoy the music of musicians A, B, C, and D, all of whom have their own career as a musician, it might be very rare to hear them all play together live, just due to their schedules. But get them together for a week, either in a studio or on a stage, and you can make an awesome recording that captures something rarely heard in person.
The model of "recordings are marketing tools for live performances" is not necessarily bad or wrong, but I don't think it applies in every instance.
Thanks for the examples. Those are all good points. Maybe if the market trends keep going and there's less of a market for session players, Abraham Laboriel will be more likely to tour...
Perhaps. Would that be a good thing or a bad thing?
I for one would happily pay 20 USD or more for a really well-produced album full of good music. Sadly, that's a pretty rare find. While I suspect that some musicians will continue producing quality albums regardless, and hopefully listeners will support them, it seems that more than anyone else the recording industry as a whole is destroying itself by producing lousy albums.
I'm an avid house fan, and a lot of that genre doesn't work well in a concert setting. However the people producing it are often DJ's, and make their money from gigs.
Yes those are a good example of (something like) concerts being the best business model for a group of artists now. I just find it funny how we all have witnessed the success of so many different business models, and then for someone to say that only one is possible.
And that type of layered electronic music could mostly be reproduced "live" if the artist was up to it, by playing live on keyboards and making loops then mixing them up with prerecorded samples. Of course, most DJs would rather just push play when they have live shows because it most take a lot of practice to master live looping. I saw Justice live recently and they were very good at pushing play.
The sentence was not taken out of context. That was the saddest part of Arrington's article - the fact that he seems to no longer be able to view music as anything other than a commodity.
Carr obviously didn't read Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business (http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free) by Chris Anderson, the "Long Tail" guy. All sorts of things are just marketing material to drive awareness and sales of other items nowadays. It's not dumb of Arrington to consider music as a loss leader for artists.
Agreed. It's not an unserious view of intellectual property to say that some creative works aren't valuable in and of themselves (or shouldn't be), but may help drive the value of something else that is.
Hi, could we try debating the content rather than the title?
The sentence in question, "Recorded music is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of an artist," as spoken by Arrington, is pretty sad. The author has a good point. As a sometime musician, it makes me very sad.
But this sort of devaluation attitude toward music is well known about already. Ironically, it is usually blamed on those dang kids and their crazy Internet making it easy to download lots of recorded music without paying anything for it.
Ironically though, I think it's more the fault of the music business, who for decades have treated music as nothing but marketing material to drive sales of flat round pieces of plastic.
I don't have a specific quote I can think of, but the sentence evoked the character in my mind instantly because of how it (out of context, at least) forsakes substance for popularity and generally trashes the value of an artist's work in favor of the buzz around it.
Toohey was a prominent architectural critic who could make or break an architect by a yea or nay in his column. The guy's statements always forwarded an agenda of diminishing the value of individual excellence and achievements in favor of fitting into the popular mode. If a talented architect not under his sanction dared to showcase his work, Toohey would use his influence to shut him down. In context, what he said always sounded insightful, but when you stepped back, you realized how scary his statements were. A quick search yielded this Toohey quote, for example, that falls in line with the theme:
"Artistic value is achieved collectively by each man subordinating himself to the standards of the majority."
The Arrington quote was so evocative because Toohey could personally create popularity and buzz, so he'd literally say something as self-serving as "the supposed greatness of an architect's building is irrelevant . . . the question is, are people [like me] talking about it?"
To be absolutely clear: I am not comparing Mike Arrington to Ellsworth Toohey. What I am saying is that the sentence, as worded, could definitely be a line from one of the latter's monologues.
That last quote reminded me of something I just read on gigaom:
"Seesmic is a video startup I’ve shied away from writing about too often, because I’m not sure I really get it. But I figure if so many smart people think there’s something good going on here, I should keep an eye on what the company is doing."
That's everything I disliked about silicon valley right there.
good point. it's very weird to not trust your own judgment about whether a startup is interesting, but to trust your own judgment of whether others see something in it. understanding what others see is actually harder than just looking at it yourself.
I think it ranks up there with 'Ideas are worthless'. You could just as well say the 'Air is worthless' or 'Air is nothing more than medium that can be used for commercial flight'.
The ability to monetize something is not the only measure of its value - the benefit that it causes the world is another important measure if value (this could be measured economically or otherwise). In an ideal economy, total 'value' would be maximized when the 'benefit' and 'monetization' metrics of value were closely aligned as it would lead to the best allocation of resources. Or to put it another way - things would be best if people were rewarded for doing good, useful things.
Of course the practicalities of the world don't always make this possible. But to try to cut someone down like Arrington did for suggesting that it would be better if musicians could received compensation for the enjoyment their recordings provide is in my view incorrect and immoral.
> "Recorded music is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of an artist."
In a world where there was no way to enforce copyright laws or prevent copying, that would be the case. Artists would make their money by playing gigs and merchandising, and "buying" a song or an album would be just a way of tipping them.
He's right. Anyone who's been a true musician or a true artist eventually realizes that the "products" are just messages. They are not exclusively an end in themselves. They are messages about awareness. They are communications from one life to another. Really, the important thing is the life lived, and the inner life shared.
This is why museums are nothing but directories or a table of contents. This is why "intellectual property" is so absurd.
A musician's "product" is as much a message as someone's blog post. One hopes that the message is understood and absorbed and possibly re-transmitted with elaborations and new insights.
I hate when artists try to sell me on some philosophical message. I could care less what some guy high on coke who has never demonstrated his analytical ability has to say.
Yeah I'm one of those guys who listens because he appreciates music and its fascinating properties in and of itself, not for sung poetry or any other nonsense.
My grandparents can't feed their dog dry kibble; it just doesn't eat it. However, not only can't they afford to feed it purely the sausages and other such meats that it will eat, it's completely unhealthy for the dog. So, instead, they try to package the kibble into the sausage, sliding it in where the dog might not realize until too late that it has consumed something nutritious. If the dog realizes, it eats around the kibble, leaving it in the bowl. (I know there's a similar story somewhere about how the dog is enlightened for doing this, but don't buy it--the dog is slowly dying from its "enlightenment." My point is different.)
My grandparents are artists. Like any artist, they package something important (a message) into something desirable (a work of art). If you realize the message is there at all, they have failed; if you absorb the message subconsciously without ever noticing it, they have done their jobs.
Even music "in and of itself" says something about the perception of sound. Note that I am talking specifically about "awareness." Not politics or philosophy. If you are a refined listener, then you are aware of these things on at least a subconscious level. I also hate it when artists and musicians spout muzzy-headed nonsense. But there are others who have had their awareness informed by what they practice. Sometimes they even have something good to say in interviews. Sturgeon's law applies here as well.
The RIAA sees it the same way as Arrington and it's how musicians have always been considered for compensation. Record labels make money off album sales, not musicians. The musicians will really make their money from tours, promotions, and merchandise.
What about "If I'd known it was harmless I would have killed it myself"? I think the small furry creatures deserve more sympathy than musicians who want government to guarantee a business model.
Interesting comparison between MA's argument and the argument that anything digitally reproduced should also be enjoyed free (the issue of Software repeatedly came up)
