If you control the market, and have a direct way of influencing what the law considers the market, that is by definition not a competitive (and/or mostly free) market.
The name for this scenario is known as "Hobson's Choice"[0].
Also, the word for a market where you have only a couple of buyers (all colluding with each other) is called a monopsony.
We shouldn't. Art has historically been vastly overvalued and I like that its perceived/demanded value has been sharply declining over the past several decades and especially now with the advent of "AI".
I'm sorry if anyone reading this is an artist and I just twisted your pantaloons, but artists don't serve any valuable role in society. Artists exist strictly because society can afford to waste surplus time and resources on frivolous occupations, art is an intangible luxury.
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
Just a clarification, art has never been overvalued historically.
In point of fact, artisans and musicians were considered a fairly lower class as a mere trade within the medieval time period outside of a few rockstars such as Beethoven and Liszt (later in the 18th and 19th centuries).
>There is no value in music, books, movies, video games?
No.
When push comes to shove and society can't afford luxuries for one reason or another, they are among the first things thrown out for a greater (valuable) cause with no tangible losses sustained.
Programming is only art when the goal is creativity, like in creative mechanics for video games. It isn't art when it is just to make a product work, just like most people don't consider designers artists. There is an aspect of art to it, but there is an aspect of art to most engineering and development things, programming is as much an art as pretty much any other white collar job.
I think it's not that it has historically been overvalued, so much as the valuation wired into us hasn't fully accounted for the consequences of mass reproduction.
Before the printing press, a poet was valued and valuable; today, the feeling of valuation remains, but instead of each village of 160 looking after their own poets and bards, it's a power-law distribution where Taylor Swift and J. K. Rowling are worth hundreds of millions to billions while the person at the end of the top 100 best-seller lists absolutely needs a second job.
> artists don't serve any valuable role in society
I assume then that you don't listen to any music, don't watch TV or movies, don't read any books, don't have any pictures on your walls, live in a concrete box with no artistic design applied, and so on? In other words, that you get no value from art in any form?
You're quibbling. If you aren't doing without it, then it has value.
> Art is a luxury, it's not strictly necessary for living.
Neither is the conversation we're having now, nor the medium in which we are having it. Yet I don't think anyone would say the Internet, or even this website, has no value.
The vast majority of the wealth currently on this planet is "not strictly necessary for living". But "living" is more than just bare subsistence. People value quality of life, and art is a major contribution to many people's quality of life. That's why people are willing to pay significant amounts of money for it.
>You're quibbling. If you aren't doing without it, then it has value.
I never said there is no value, I'm saying art has low value (and thus no value I couldn't do without) compared to actually tangible, important things and that it has been overvalued to an extreme until recent decades when more supply (more artists) and better efficiency (digital technologies, "AI") finally started to slash perceived value.
>Neither is the conversation we're having now, nor the medium in which we are having it. Yet I don't think anyone would say the Internet, or even this website, has no value.
Plenty of people think the internet as it exists today is actually a net negative for humanity, let alone low value. While I don't agree to that extent, I do agree with a general notion that the internet is overvalued. Though not quite to what art has been, since the internet is still a communication tool with practical purposes.
>You said "artists don't serve any valuable role in society".
Just because artists don't serve any valuable role doesn't mean they have no value. A cheap keyboard or a free piece of software isn't valuable, but they nonetheless have some value.
>I've never seen anyone say that. To me it's obviously false; the Internet has enabled huge wealth creation.
Most of the sentiment is based around the ever increasingly "cable TV" nature of the internet as well as the scientifically demonstrated negative effects of social media.
> A cheap keyboard or a free piece of software isn't valuable, but they nonetheless have some value.
I find your use of language here very confusing.
> the ever increasingly "cable TV" nature of the internet
But you don't have to use those particular Internet channels in order to use the Internet. The Internet carries lots of other traffic. One of the nice things about the Internet as compared with previous communication media is how easy it is to just ignore what you don't like.
> as well as the scientifically demonstrated negative effects of social media
Those effects have been around as long as humans have, and pandering to the worst instincts of people has always been a way for cheap grifters to gain money and notoriety. But it only works because people choose to give in to those worst instincts. You can't fix human nature by discarding useful tools because some people misuse them.
>a : having desirable or esteemed characteristics or qualities; valuable friendships
>b : of great use or service; valuable advice
Artists do not provide valuable work, but doesn't mean their work has no value. Not providing valuable work simply means their work is of (very) low value.
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>But you don't have to use those particular Internet channels in order to use the Internet.
There has been a substantial centralization and consolidation of the internet to varying degrees and for better or worse, both on the front and backends. The frontend centralization in particular is not being received well in recent times.
>Those effects have been around as long as humans have, ... You can't fix human nature by discarding useful tools because some people misuse them.
I don't know about "most". The very first meaning (1 a) in your reference is "having monetary value", which is how I have been using the word.
> Artists do not provide valuable work...their work is of (very) low value
Maybe not in your subjective judgment (and both of the definitions you cited for "valuable" are subjective), but other people's subjective judgment might differ from yours. Many people pay significant sums of money for the work of artists. Maybe that doesn't make the art "valuable" in your eyes, but it apparently does in theirs.
In any case, if you're going to talk about "society" as a whole, you can't just help yourself to your subjective judgment. The definition I just cited above of "valuable" is objective: people pay money for it. And people do pay money--in many cases significant sums, as I noted above--for art in our society, so I don't think you can say artists "do not provide valuable work" for society as a whole.
Yes, if push comes to shove, people will stop buying art before they will stop buying, say, food, clothing, and shelter. But in such a hypothetical, society is much poorer, so people are forced to focus on bare subsistence. But I don't think anyone would say such a society had a lot of valuable things in it--indeed, it's precisely the fact that such a society doesn't have a lot of valuable things in it that makes it poor. A rich society has many more valuable things in it than just what is needed for bare subsistence; that's what makes it rich. And people generally prefer a rich society to a poor one. Art is one of those valuable things that people in rich societies like to have. Not everyone, but people's tastes differ, and one of the nice things about rich societies is that it's much easier for people to satisfy their particular tastes, even if they're not common.
You keep on insisting I said art has no value and implying people don't pay. Please show me when and where I said that. I said art has a low real value and that its perceived value has historically been vastly overblown.
Yes, people pay money for art (including me), but the pricing has been steadily falling due to increasing supply (more artists) and efficiency (digital technologies). "AI" in particular is likely going to slash the perceived value lower than humanity has ever seen by making the creation of art dramatically more democratic, thereby reflecting the low real value better.
I consume a lot of art just like most other people, and also realize that I probably pay far too much for it all too because art just doesn't serve any of life's needs other than perhaps killing boredom and flaunting social status.
> the pricing has been steadily falling due to increasing supply (more artists)
The average price has because the increase in supply (which, as you say, is being dramatically facilitated by digital technologies and will be even more so by AI) drastically increases the variability in quality.
I think your categorical statements don't take into account that large variability.
> art just doesn't serve any of life's needs
I have already explained why I disagree with this. I think your concept of what has value is too narrow. I don't disagree that there is much "art" produced that has little or no value--and I don't spend any money on it. But that doesn't mean I think all art has little or no value. Some works of art--the ones I've spent significant money on--have had a great deal of value for me, and for many other people.
Indeed. To a large extent, art was a means of displaying your social status, a way of demonstrating your wealth and buffing your ego. It was used as a justification for colonialism and imperialism. Our society is so advanced; look at the art it produces; obviously we're superior so we should dictate what others do.
Right, right, nobody but the social elites ever wanted to decorate anything, be entertained, or engage in cultural practices for mere enjoyment. Folk music? Dancing? mere impositions of social organization. These people think they're having fun, but that's because they lack true consciousness.
If art has little value, why is the annual revenue for the global entertainment industry over $2 trillion? No one is being forced to pay for a Netflix subscription. The markets have spoken and have assigned it a large value. Whether you view art as frivolous is subjective, the numbers aren't on your side.
We’d go outside? Derive pleasure from being around people near us instead of seeking external validation and watching shows crafted by Hollywood midwits? Maybe we’d have more hobbies and do sports?
Art isn’t keeping you inside, actually technology has made our lives more comfortable indoors, not that it’s always a bad thing. A world without art would be an industrial world where things only have utility and what the look like does not matter. Think everything being painted the same drab color because it’s efficient and cheap. Buildings having the same architecture, think people wearing the same clothes, same colors even because who would care about esthetics?
No, the author is saying the share of revenue the distributors (tech, music industry) are receiving is misaligned with the value they're adding. Compare content creators with a SWE. They both produce the product being sold, what percentage of the revenue should they receive?
This “people should be paid based on the value they create” myth comes up a lot on HN. Compensation is only tied to value creation as a maximum level. The actual compensation level is whatever people are willing to work for while doing good-enough work. If you want to price your work based on value, you need to run your own business.
Markets are how economic value gets defined. Trying to define it otherwise is fraught with often disastrous difficulty. This is one of the reasons central planning fails.
I think one of the reasons so many creatives feel cheated is there's far too much creativity, so the marginal value of more is low. In that situation of overabundance, some other step in the value chain will deliver most of the value, and reap the reward. This feels like exploitation, but it's just the market telling creatives they need to be producing something else.
The market is a system that finds a price within a given context. If conditions allow for price opacity, the market will find a different price than if price transparency is forced. Both numbers can be described as a “market price”.
If economic value is defined through markets, how then does one argue against markets' ability to assign value? What words should be used other than value?
Typical words for this include “monopoly/monopsony”, “regulatory capture”, and “necessity goods”. There are others, too, but they generally don’t apply to creative outputs.
While those words are used to critique market failings, none of then are necessarily about the value of something independent of market efficiency. They always assume that the market assigns value correctly as long as you just avoid monopolies. They start with the assumption that markets work at assigning value for all things.
How does a market determine cultural value. What is the value of a priceless family heirloom? What is the value of human connections? How do you communicate these thoughts without first assuming that markets correctly assign value?
Yes, and the only way to fix the monopsony is for creators to own their own distribution channels so they can sell directly to their customers instead of selling to middlemen who take the vast majority of the profits and pay them peanuts.
The problem with collective bargaining is that it either involves unmanageable transaction costs, or an unmanageable principal-agent problem. Either every single creator has to be directly involved in the bargaining, which can't realistically be done, or the creators have to empower some small subset of them as bargaining agents, which means the rest of the creators get screwed by those agents.
Majority of the so called creatives or influencers in the tech platforms produce sub standard material. There are cases of people like sssniperwolff etc whose entire content is rehashing on other peoples work and making money of it. And then there are people who produce life vlogs and shopping hauls. Are they worth more than a software engineer or a farmer who produces actual tangible assets for consumption?
And when you really get into it. What about factory workers producing high margin products? Don't they deserve larger cut as without them there would be no money coming in... Surely that is much more valuable than what is now paid?
Surely the robots doing all that work are worth way more than they are now sold for? Why should you take money from the robots and progress and give that to workers who didn't add that value? More money to robots means more progress.
See how easy it is to argue for the other side, that argument is so compelling that communists tend to focus more on robots over workers and keeping wages low than capitalist countries do.
You speak as if software engineers are different. Vast majority are nothing more than marketers who know python. In essence, the same value as shopping haul video makers.
Yet their compensation is very different. It should be obvious to most that what you are paid is nothing about value or efforts or risk.
Because the creative marketplaces have turned into effective monopolies or oligopolies at best (YouTube, Spotify), the market is broken. Note that an effective market has multiple vendors of similar commodities. Because the market is broken, value is payed not where it is due. This is intentional however, every big corp tries to break the market and lobbies for laws that allow that.
I wager that the share of revenue that various people in the industry are receiving is correctly aligned with the value they're adding. The bottom-line content creators are simply not adding that much value. Marketing, distribution, etc is worth the cost that they demand; otherwise people would stop using those services.
The deeper question is how much control labor has over its provision of supply (monopoly) and how much control firms have over their demand for labor provisioning (monopsony). Both can be inefficient operators in the Econ 101 view of the world.
The market’s got nothing to do with it. The music industry is a cartel. Look at the profit margins of the big 3 music companies: that’s a lowball on what the market says the art is worth, but it’s not making it back to the artists.
It isn't. The market says it's worth a lot. But the vast majority of that "a lot" doesn't go to the actual creators. It goes to middlemen.
Unfortunately, the only fix for that, from the creators' point of view, is for them to own the middlemen themselves. But creators generally have neither the time nor the desire to do that, and doing it detracts from their ability to create.
We're talking about two different things. One is the creative product of the artists themselves, the other is the packaged, delivered product purchased by consumers. The latter includes elements not in the former. The market is saying those elements can be worth more than the creative's output.
> The market is saying those elements can be worth more than the creative's output.
No, customers aren't saying that. Customers are just saying that the final packaged, delivered product they receive (today a better description would be the overall service channel through which they receive the products) is worth what they pay for it. They aren't paying the various contributors separately so their payments say nothing about how much they think those individual contributions are worth.
They aren't paying for the unpackaged raw product, hence they feel the package is worth more than the content. There are many talented people who produce works worth packaging, not many who want to do all that packaging so it can reach consumers.
> They aren't paying for the unpackaged raw product
Nobody is offering them the unpackaged raw product, at least not for creators that work through the big media companies, so it's impossible to know whether they would pay for it if it were offered by the big media companies, and if so, how much they would pay. Some creators do sell direct to customers over the Internet, or make a living through Patreon contributions or something similar, so the package the big media companies are selling is not the only thing customers are buying.
However, it's certainly true that the big media companies do have advantages that they are making full use of. As I said in my original post in this subthread, the only way for creators who don't like the small cut they are getting from the big media companies and want more of the profit for themselves is to do their own distribution instead of doing it through the big media companies. Some are doing that, as I said above, but not many.
It’s especially hard to defend given that the barriers to entry for creatives today (thanks to cheap editing equipment and Internet distribution) is extremely low.
The barrier to getting paid is significantly higher though, so in the end it’s more or less the same: if you want to make a living off creative work you’re going to have a hard time
But also quality. For example, YouTube pretty much forces people toward lowest-common-denominator filler content, because if creators don't upload new content frequently enough they'll drop out of recommendation lists even for subscribers. Creative software tools are easily available and distribution is free, but YouTube has a monopoly of information and so creators have very little insight into what/when/how people see the creative product or how revenue is calculated.
I mean barriers in the sense of market access. Studios used to be able to gatekeep the market because they controlled expensive studio time and distribution networks. That’s not true anymore.
It's not market value, it's the forces in the middle skimming off the top as much as they want and then using that to enforce their position as a de facto monopoly. Did you even read the article on how much the market is paying and how much is actually going to artists?
You clearly didn't read the article, but just the title. What this is saying that creative workers, just as workers in other forms of labor, should consider themselves as workers.
How about fuck the market, which produces terrible outcomes across the board. It's not the toy 'supply and demand' model of economics classes or anything resembling a pure meritocracy, it's heavily shaped by cartels and asymmetric contractual relations.
How about no? The evidence is that markets are essential. Attempts to use central planning instead have been universally disastrous, for reasons that were predicted ahead of time.
Markets as a general thing are essential, I agree. The particular market configuration that we have in this context is bad and tends toward oligopoly. I'm sorry for not articulating this more clearly. I'm sure you don't think that all markets are equally efficient or sustainable, but that individual markets can be more or less good depending on how they are structured and how competitive they are.
Attempts to use central planning instead have been universally disastrous
Central planning is just one example of a non-market mechanism. What other alternative do you propose that could adequately solve the problem of establishing prices?
Central planning of anything is generally very inefficient and results in the concentration of power.
So far, we haven’t been able to find a way to concentrate power without corruption. The lesson is: only give the government as much control as necessary, never more.
In a system that is more socialist, the people forfeit their power to the party. Super easy for one party to dominate in these systems so votes mean little and you enter a doom loop of inefficiency caused by corruption.
In a system that is more capitalistic and consumer-based, the people retain a good amount of their power through purchasing choices. It is also tough for any one political party to take complete control, so the people also retain power through votes.
> Central planning of anything is generally very inefficient and results in the concentration of power.
When corporations take over the central planning, what forces should counteract? Before you say 'market forces', you have to address the present case, where three music owners control 60-70% of the market on terms favorable to them rather than to customers or creators.
> When corporations take over the central planning, what forces should counteract?
Don't buy their product, buy from someone else.
The complaints here are from people who want to keep using a convenient platform, just insist it produce something different. Or, they are complaining that consumers are happy with that platform instead of what they think the consumers should be happy with.
The problem in any market economy that underlies most complaints is the realization that you have been judged to not be valuable. You are producing creative things, but people don't want them. It's maddening especially if you're entitled. At risk of Godwin, one might call this the Hitler problem.
It's not just corruption. Non-market systems fundamentally cannot solve the problem of economic calculation, figuring out prices so tradeoffs can be performed. They have to make assumptions about what's wanted and needed, assumptions that cannot help but be drastically wrong, even if everyone involved is pure of any taint of corruption.
No it isn't. It's the nature of about 30% of people, who can't be happy without knowing that someone else is worse off. Many of the characteristics that you ascribe to stupidity are actually examples of selfishness, and you're leveraging the existence thereof to rationalize your own selfishness.
Your wealth likely derives from a mixture of raw talent, hard work, luck, and preferential attachment, and imho wealth and fitness (in the technical sense) are poorly correlated in modern society.
In our system, capital tends to concentrate and flow to people who are good stewards of it.
Many of the rich train their children to provide value and allocate capital efficiently. This is somehow a bad thing?
The comment I responded to was the typical collage freshman “eat the rich” bs which is rooted in communistic ideation. Those ideas are generally worthless and go down a shitty path for both the individual and society. Those ideas result in misery literally every time we try them.
Preferential attachment is a natural phenomenon and has nothing to do with 'our system'. One could equally say of an oppressive Stalinist regime 'power tends to concentrate and flow to people who are good stewards of it,' and those who have a lot of power in such societies would not doubt agree.
The comment I responded to was the typical collage freshman “eat the rich” bs which is rooted in communistic ideation.
Then you should have directed your remarks to the person who wrote that instead of to me.
I didn't pull that number out of the air, but from the attached paper. I disagree with your second comment in that your position suggests any criticism of the rich is unwarranted. The startling upward transfer of wealth pursuant to the pandemic, for example, is a rather stark illustration of a particular social group exploiting a general tragedy for profit.
Consider the recent phenomenon of 'shrinkflation', where consumers are sold a lower volume of a commodity product for the same price they were paying previously. I find this interesting because it's not a pure supply-and-demand situation where the price of a bulk good changes and you get less product in a box or bottle; companies have to invest money in changing packaging and retooling their production lines. In other words, they choose to spend money on concealing the change in value proposition, whereas if cost inflation was the only economic factor they'd keep selling the same product but raise the price.
The statement "Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off" reflects a sentiment shared by many in the creative industries, emphasizing the need for fair compensation and ethical treatment.Addressing these issues requires concerted efforts from multiple stakeholders, including industry leaders, policymakers, advocacy groups, and the creators themselves. By fostering a fair and transparent environment, we can ensure that creative workers receive the respect and compensation they deserve.
It just comes down to the fact that music is cheap. Outside of a very small cohort of star artists, musicians just don't create anything that people at large value to any significant extent. Only a very small portion of your fans would be willing to pay for a CD or a T-shirt; most just have a song or two in a playlist somewhere, and if you make your music unavailable on that steaming platform, they won't even notice.
People value music; subscriptions are widely successful. However, the platforms (aggregators) have a stronger market position than small artists (content producers). It strikes me as comparable to the Tivo problem, where they built something of real value but had their margins squeezed to nothing by stronger players.
How about this. Take away all the musicians and their music and see what Spotify and all its software developers are worth by themselves.
Now do the opposite.
Figured it out yet?
Music is one of the most universal and important things in our culture. People define themselves and their identity with it, and most certainly value it and will pay for it.
How we structure our economic systems determines if it’s “cheap” or not and who gets the profits from it. It’s certainly not an intrinsic quality.
Society is growing out of all that egotistic nonsense.
We have built a large corpus of music. We don't need no more music. That problem has been solved. That area has been explored. All the good chord progressions, songs, sounds have been found and are in the corpus. It is quite clear musicians are no longer needed or wanted.
Perhaps there’s some sort of emerging trend in the usual community of rapacious sociopathic nerds out in San Mateo County that will soon take over the world but last I checked new music still fills stadiums.
Not to mention that the most successful and fastest growing digital network of the current generation was built on the back of people dancing to recorded music, almost exclusively newly created music.
Elevator music hell: that's what will come from safety-first social-value-aligned corporate-AI-written song lyrics and music scores. Already autotune and excessive compression have created a dreary modern musical landscape, and live pitch correction is widely used in performances - pretty farcical.
I'd rather go back to 80s punk/metal bands playing their barely-in-tune instruments in garages - but it would be fun to see what an open-source LLM fine-tuned on that material would produce. A key condition: The band 'Suicidal Tendencies' could not be excluded on safety-alignment grounds.
> You see, the money the Big Three got in the form of [Spotify] dividends, stock sales, etc was theirs to spend as they saw fit. They could share some, all, or none of it with musicians.
How can this be legal? Has it been tried in any court?
To me it feels unlikely that a court would accept the argument that since the Big Three got paid in something other than money they don’t have to pay royalties to the musicians on that. Otherwise what’s stopping any licensee from just charging their customers in gold instead of dollars, and pay zero royalty?
A fantastic economist-sniping article with lots of spicy invective, proletariate vs bourgeoisie fun, and undercurrents of protectionism.
All economic agents (producers, consumers, companies, living people) all want to pay nothing and get everything.
There is little new or special here. 1+1 = 2 and generally the sky is blue.
That being said, yes, the way for creators to capture more of the economic pie is fairly simple if not easy: join up and negotiate en-masse. Especially in industries with powerful entrenched oligopolies like music.
Has anyone ever figured out if there's a way to design the internet so gatekeepers and centralized platforms don't come to dominate everything? Or are we just doomed to see this happen time and time again.
> Do you really think that Getty Images likes paying photographers and wants to give them a single penny more than they absolutely have to?
Extended, this is how we shut down our economic engines until we all starve.
The problem is the acceptance of an adversarial nature in the relationships of economic actors. Yes, locally optional and "rational" in a mind destroying manner, so on, and so forth...
> Our path to better working conditions lies through organizing and striking
Doctorow says just pick the right side side of the scaled adversarial conflict.
It turns out we need to stop being adversarial but that's a hard coordination problem. The scalable and acceptable solution to that is the next industrial revolution scale advancement.
Another piece generalizing artist to musicians, while this race to bottom has decimated most other independent creative professions beyond music, for much longer. I thought spotify was going to democratize music?! I laughed then, I still laugh. New boss just like the old boss, someone once said...
Interesting platform because it's open source does thay mean one could easily move off the platform for any reason.
I also see that you don't handle sales tax which is a bummer and is one of the reasons people use a lot of centralized platforms but I get why you don't because it's a nightmare.
Thanks, the process to move off the platform is a process that needs to be built and documented, the data lives in a shared digital ocean bucket, the database uses uuids and we could try dumping only the relevant data out of the shared database. it was built as a multi tenet platform.
Future work is supporting api/secret keys to bring your own s3 bucket/digital ocean spaces, while keeping the database shared. otherwise it costs roughly $11/mo to host a copy of the platform ($6 for a virtual server and $5 for the digital ocean space)
As for taxes, this will be something that will need to be tackled at some point but so far I've been kicking the can down the road hoping I could find a partner to help figure that out in a clever way that is proper.
Yeah this is why despite office jobs sometimes being described as 'soul-crushing' , the alternatives are not that great either. Service sector work means bad managers and bad customers. Creative works means non-paying or overly demanding clients and inconsistency of work/pay. Another problem is success at creative work typically requires top talent . Most people who aspire to be creatives cannot outcompete GPT/AI when it comes to writing for example or graphics design.
A job is a job, construction jobs are physically demanding although pay can be competitive for the bar of entry, pilots can be a fun and prestigious career but your trade-off is your sleep schedule and days away from home every week.
I vaguely remember Richard Thaler published this research on risk as the determinant for career earning.
Don’t forget nonprofit work, which is often as toxic as corporate culture but with added gaslighting about how you should do more work “for the mission.”
Why should non-creatives go along with this?