The record companies did a fantastic job of killing music all by themselves, the quality has absolutely cratered and the occasional great artist that has made it through the long slog to recognition has done so despite the music industry, not because of.
I spent a fortune on various formats and when streaming came along I simply refused to participate. I'm simply not going to pay a third time for music that I already legally own.
Note that the following was written well before streaming came along, but it is an excellent article on the realities of the music industry from the artists perspective written by Janis Ian:
There is a fair chance that if you're under 40 that you've never heard of her, but I suggest you give her music a try as well, it is at least as good as her writing.
You just got old. It happens to everyone, and every generation says the same thing: The music I enjoyed when I was young and impressionable was great, but all the stuff they make nowadays is crap.
People were whining about how Beatles destroyed music, how rock’n’roll was just monkey noise, how crooners like Sinatra wasn’t real singing.
> You just got old. It happens to everyone, and every generation says the same thing: The music I enjoyed when I was young and impressionable was great, but all the stuff they make nowadays is crap.
Thing is, there are objective metrics about quality. One aspect is "loudness war" aka compression, where subjective loudness gets increased at the cost of dynamic range [1], another (in)famous aspect is the increasing use of auto-tune (both the software itself as well as the general principle after which it was named). Artists and especially producers love that shit because similar to standardization in fast-food it provides a "consistent" performance even in live productions - which is seen as "cheating" in music by older people, and I think for good reason.
On top of that there's an increasing tendency of producers to push for "bland" personalities as well instead of also taking risks, and it's not just music - it's movies as well: most movies aren't original productions any more, a lot of them is based off of prior IP (Harry Potter, MCU) or endless continuations (Star Wars, Star Trek) to recoup ever growing production and marketing costs.
Firstly, the loudness war largely died with Spotify. LUFS normalization means that pushing beyond -14 is an artistic choice and not necessary to compete with other tracks on loudness alone.
Secondly, more compressed (less dynamic range) doesn't mean worse, or better. It means more compressed. In some genres, tons of compression is desirable; in others, less so. Is an orchestral Hans Zimmer piece that maxes at -10 momentary LUFS better than a Skrillex song that hits -4 during a drop? You could argue either song is better, but I don't think your argument would have anything to do with its LUFS measurement.
Compression is similar to distortion. Too much distortion is generally seen as bad. But if distortion were always bad, people would use acoustic guitars and clean electrics and never run things through a distortion pedal. Same idea with compression. Too much compression will kill a mix, but not enough will reduce the impact the song has on the listener.
In other words, trying to say that LUFS is an "objective metric of quality" is complete nonsense. To me that's like saying that lines of code written is an objective metric of quality of a software developer.
Agreed. LUFS as an "objective metric of quality" is nonsensical. I work as the assistant to a world class mastering engineer and we never discuss LUFS or aim to hit a target loudness. Such metrics (while well understood) are never a consideration.
All we do is listen. Often the goal is to get the record to feel as loud as it can be, but the moment our choices start to degrade the feel of the record we back off. We're doing very little in the way of actual limiting for loudness. We have ways of making the record feel louder, and they don't always involve dynamics processing.
Quite often no limiting is necessary because the mixes that we receive are mixed hot, which leads me to my next point:
Where I'll push back a little - for the sake of conversation - is the assertion that the loudness war died with streaming services. I consider their automatic level compensation features to be a big plus for audio fidelity. For artists and mixers who are sensitive to this issue it relieves them of the pressure of feeling that they need to deliver super hot mixes. The record can simply be what it needs to be and not conform to a certain loudness standard. It's a positive step.
Where my objection comes in is the reality that artists and mixers (who are well aware of the dilemma) nonetheless deliver us mixes that have been crafted for maximum perceived loudness. And they're really good at it. Even world class producers and mixers are sending us records that are squashed to hell, but very often they still sound good! The craft of mixing is evolving and people have become very adept at making an objectively loud record (-3 LUFS, etc) still work. HOW they do that is far too big of a topic to broach here.
Yeah it's true that people are still trying to make loud stuff. But as you say, people are so good at making it work now that's not really a "I'm making this -3 because I need to be competitive with other songs," it's "I'm making this -3 because it's a heavy bass record and I want this to melt people's goddamn faces when they listen to it." In other words, an artistic decision, rather than a business one.
I think most modern EDM-pop now is at about -7 or so. These are world-class engineers doing the mixing, they could absolutely push it to -5 or -3 if they wanted, there's just no need thanks to LUFS normalization.
Like when people think about the real victims of the loudness war, it's albums like Californication or What's the Story (Morning Glory), which really didn't need to be that loud except for sounding better (in the louder = better sense) on the radio. Something like Death Magnetic you could argue is both intentionally loud + a victim of the loudness war, but it's also just really poorly mixed/mastered in general.
I generally agree, but I don't think your comparison between distortion and compression makes sense. Distortion (guitar pedals, etc.) is something the artist intentionally adds to the song, in a specific way, intensity, and time. Compression is something added after the fact, for transit and storage. The artist doesn't really have control over what sort of artifacts lossy compression is going to add, so I don't see how "not enough [compression] will reduce the impact the song has on the listener."
> Compression is something added after the fact, for transit and storage. The artist doesn't really have control over what sort of artifacts lossy compression is going to add, so I don't see how "not enough [compression] will reduce the impact the song has on the listener."
This conversation isn't about file compression, it's about dynamic range compression. Very different.
That last statement might hold for "recent past" (last 10 or 15 years, say), but the one recent top 40 hit that stood out for me has a 50s type vibe (Until I Found You, Stephen Sanchez). I'm not particularly a fan of that style (well before my time!) but it's surely not "bland".
There are nuances there. I am not claiming that older things are bland. I'm saying that the people that are constantly pining on the past are. Really, it is more that they often make choices that lead to bland results.
Music doesn't have ever-increasing production costs, and if anything it's easier than ever to get something out there on the primary distribution mechanisms used by the public to consume media.
It certainly has it's own business problems but I don't see any lack of interesting, risk-taking music out there. Even as a fan of genres largely far out of the mainstream I often feel like there's so much great new stuff that I can't keep up with it all.
> Music doesn't have ever-increasing production costs
It actually has. Venues are getting more and more expensive, and the effort to run shows has also increased - Rammstein is far from the only one requiring dozens of trucks to move their equipment around. On top of that you have Ticketmaster and their ilk on a brutal rent-seeking ride at the expense of both artists and fans.
> It certainly has it's own business problems but I don't see any lack of interesting, risk-taking music out there. Even as a fan of genres largely far out of the mainstream I often feel like there's so much great new stuff that I can't keep up with it all.
Yeah, indie stuff still works out fine these days, if not easier as Soundcloud has replaced physical tapes, but to achieve major recognition still takes an absurd amount of money, connections and luck. Or all three of them.
Venues and their increasing costs have nothing to do with production costs. Production costs refer to what it costs to actually produce a track and release it out there to the public.
Not even talking about insane amounts of good educational material available online for free these days, the capable equipment required to produce a studio-quality track fell down in price significantly, and most older equipment is still fully functional and compatible with newer offerings (thanks, MIDI and XLR). And newer equipment is still significantly cheaper than almost anything comparable from 20 years ago (if it was even available back then).
Back then, you wouldn't be able to produce anything that could compete in quality with studios from your bedroom, and not on a reasonable budget. And even if you somehow were so rich you were able to finance a pro studio in your house, and you produced a decent track, now the question is how would you even distribute it to the public and get heard.
These days? Thanks to affordability of what it takes to produce a track and the ease of getting your material released to the public, you can go from a nobody to someone with a hit track overnight. All for the price of a laptop, some decent speakers/headphones, and a midi-controller. And even that list is optional, as there are people who produce great stuff with less than this or even something entirely different.
> These days? Thanks to affordability of what it takes to produce a track and the ease of getting your material released to the public, you can go from a nobody to someone with a hit track overnight. All for the price of a laptop, some decent speakers/headphones, and a midi-controller. And even that list is optional, as there are people who produce great stuff with less than this or even something entirely different.
But how many actually manage to pull off that feat? You can probably count them on two hands. One-hit wonders yes, there have been a fair few of these that managed to hit the zeitgeist thanks to social media (Wellerman!), but a sustained career after that, from scratch and with no prior experience? I couldn't name one.
Everyone has the chance to strike a lottery jackpot, but only one person will.
> But how many actually manage to pull off that feat?
Quite a few, but that's not the point. Increasing opportunities for everyone does not mean that there will be the same levels of increase in top tier outlier outcomes. Just like if you suddenly gave access to MIT education to everyone, I think the success metric median (whether it is income or achievements) for MIT students will decrease, but the absolute number of successful people due to MIT education being available to everyone will increase.
Off the top of my head in terms of examples: Brockhampton, Skrillex, Billie Eilish, Porter Robinson, Steve Lacy (who produced hit tracks for artists like Mac Miller, J.Cole, and Kendrick Lamar), Flume, etc. The list can keep going on and on, and I listed only the very top tier artists in terms of popularity and lasting presence so far.
Are they everywhere? Nah, music is a capitalist endeavor, and the market wouldn't support that. But there are a surprising number of artists that have gained success with their first endeavors produced out of their homes.
I too agree that music was ruined once loud orchestra's were formed. The only good music was chamber music. Orchestras anonymized the musician and were basically the end of musicianship.
I don't like the results of the loudness war either but it isn't objectively worse. Lots of people are listening to music on cheap speakers over the sound of road noise while driving or with generic earbuds on a train or any number of situations not conducive to high dynamic ranges. To these people in these situations, the highly compressed music sounds better.
Imo musicians need to make it a norm to release two 'correct' verions:
The highly compressed versions for radio play/commoners
And
A 'hi-fi' version for audiophiles
They need to be the same except for levels etc, and neither more official than the other
If your song can't be enjoyed in both ways, then either your music is 'specialty' music catering to audiophiles and musicophiles (?) Or it's just garbage and shouldn't be released regardless.
But that opinion may be a major cause for myself never releasing anything....
At the risk of being reductive, dig a little bit deeper, beyond popular music, and you'll find large swathes of fantastic music where this isn't the case.
>Thing is, there are objective metrics about quality. One aspect is "loudness war" aka compression...
Eeeeehhhhh. I've heard plenty of beautifully-mastered tracks that were otherwise just crap pieces of music, just as I've heard plenty of music that was so good I was willing to overlook the fact that it might be taking part in the loudness war.
Nothing about the "quality" of art, including music, is objective. These sound waves are better than those sound waves? No. Beauty and the quality of art is in the eye (or ear) of the beholder.
> One aspect is "loudness war" aka compression, where subjective loudness gets increased at the cost of dynamic range
The interesting thing about streaming services is they really put a cap on this (often a hard one measured by LUFS) and we really don't have as much wall-of-sound compression like we did from the 90s through the mid 00s.
While the Loudness War is indeed a race to the bottom for the dynamic quality of audio, it would have occurred sooner if the medium for recorded music had allowed for it. Vinyl records simply cannot go as loud as today's modern records because of physical limitations in the medium.
Nevertheless, for 70+ years producers, record executives, and artists have been using every sonic trick at their disposal to make their record "pop" and stand out from the competition. The advent of digital audio simply opened up more headroom with which to push the record.
Eh. You can make the same argument for synthesizers, samplers, drum machines or anything that allows you to use midi to control instruments. At that point, you're not having to play it, so isn't that technically cheating?
Note I'm not making a point for or against either way, just pointing out that this argument taken to its logical end covers a pretty broad domain of the music industry.
> You just got old. It happens to everyone, and every generation says the same thing
I hate how people decide something is an inevitable eternal cycle that started in the 20th century. Recorded music hasn't been around long enough to think that platitudes like this actually have any meaningful content.
I'm here whining about how you're using a Beatles example because your argument is literally a teenage Baby Boomer argument. I've got board games older than your eternal generational war over the consumption of recorded music.
> I hate how people decide something is an inevitable eternal cycle that started in the 20th century.
People were complaining about the loudness war in _classical music_ in the early 19th century, unfavorably comparing Beethoven to his predecessors, and how his imitators were ruining music. Human nature doesn't change, and the phenomenon of people having their taste in music frozen in their teens and twenties is not something that was invented with the phonograph.
“It is not surprising that Beethoven should, occasionally, have entertained blasé notions of his
art; that he should have mistaken noise for grandeur, extravagance for originality, and have
supposed that the interest of his compositions would be in proportion to their duration. That he
gave little time to reflection, is proved most clearly in the extraordinary length of some
movements in his later symphonies… His great qualities are frequently alloyed by a morbid
desire for novelty; by extravagance, and by a disdain of rule… The effect which the writings of
Beethoven have had on the art must, I fear, be considered as injurious. Led away by the force of
his genius and dazzled by his creations, a crowd of imitators has arisen, who have displayed as
much harshness, as much extravagance, and as much obscurity, with little or none of his beauty
and grandeur. Thus music is no longer intended to sooth, to delight, to ‘wrap the sense in
Elysium’; it is absorbed in one principle—to astonish.”
Letter to the Editor in the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, London, 1827
If you read that more carefully you'll see that the letter writer isn't complaining about Beethoven or his music but that his imitators can't do it as well as he does.
He's not complaining that the burgeoning romantic movement sucked compared to the true classical music from his youth but that the quality of the music being produced has tanked because the new practitioners suck at making it: Beethoven, because he was a genius and could get it right, gave them carte blanche to break the rules that previously kept the music good.
Although it's true to say that Beethoven didn't know how to stop.
> I hate how people decide something is an inevitable eternal cycle that started in the 20th century. Recorded music hasn't been around long enough to think that platitudes like this actually have any meaningful content.
Maybe, but doesn't the same complaint exist about other media, too? 'Kids these days and their [books|music|art|clothes|dance styles]'
Where are the ugly singers? Music is represented my a disproportionately high number of hot women (and less so men) with no room for others. There is obviously a standard other than musical quality in play.
Today, it's mostly true that everything is available. The music that reaches the masses, though, is defined by production over musical quality.
Would we even see or hear from Cass Elliot, Janis Joplin, or Patsy Cline today? Producers would choose someone other than Patsy Cline for Crazy and twist Willie Nelson's arm to make him a ghostwriter on the song so the hot, autotuned, woman could claim she wrote it herself.
They'd have a youtube channel and 8 million followers, whether or not you'd hear about them is debatable.
Mac Demarco is not a handsome man. Lady Gaga isn't winning any pageants, Adele was mocked for her weight,and then her weight loss, Lizzo's whole thing is self love because she gets harassed for her weight.
There will always be beautiful people produced and controlled for sale, and there will always be the talented, the weird, the outrageous that rise to public conscious - and some from all camps that do not.
I don't agree at all. I've found the YouTube algorithms as good for discovering new singer-songwriters as when I used to see live music a few times a week in New York decades ago. Many, or even most, of the women that come up in my feed are no more conventionally beautiful than the people you cite.
How mainstream was someone like Janis Joplin? She was on the radio, but she was also somewhat counter culture. The women (who don't deserve to be written about as evidence of success without beauty) have hundreds of thousands of subscribers just on youtube, many millions of listens, and I hear their music in stores, commercials and coffee shops.
In addition to there being many more avenues for reaching a large audience outside of record labels, there are also quite a few mainstream performers who aren't conventionally attractive who became famous through pseudo-grassroot paths like television contests.
Take a look at which artists get traction on YouTube....
It's extremely biased by beauty, as the algorithm rewards engagement and if nothing else all the creeps wanking while watching on repeat drive the ladies up the figurative charts....
I'm sure that has something to do with the music industry. People who work in things like professional modelling or professional sports makes many times more than they made decades ago. Even well-known musicians who made their mark decades ago remain not that rich.
This is nothing new though, this has been true since the rise of TV and things like top of the pops. Because guess what? People prefer pretty people.
Once artists became visible, this was inevitable. The pretty people were going to become popular regardless of whether the music industry got involved or not.
A french singer contest saw a normal/chubby girl winning by a wide margin. The tour after te tv show bombed horribly.
There's a reflex in crowds to seek for some traits and physical "beauty" seems one of them. The rest seems the exception (and those singers have either very special skills or a super solid persona)
It’s also a sign you aren’t looking. Yeah, music is going to be trash if you’re just looking at what’s popular on the radio/TikTok/charts. Spend some time on bandcamp going through what’s been posted in your preferred genres.
“what’s popular on the radio /TikTok/charts” being gutter tier hogwash is exactly what they’re talking about. Humans didn’t lose the ability to create good interesting music, and nobody legitimately thinks that. The publishing industry prevents independent artists from reaching any kind of mainstream popularity. Indie artists need money and the publishers that decide the winners/losers by controlling all the traditional distribution networks have no incentive to signal boost independents.
> Indie artists need money and the publishers that decide the winners/losers by controlling all the traditional distribution networks have no incentive to signal boost independents.
A publisher may wish to control distribution, but the cost to distribute any media (music, text, video, software) is nearly zero. The internet allows all of us to have a slush pile, to delve as deep for raw ore as we want. Some people want to go mining. Most don't and the traditional distribution networks ultimately market to such a person - and one way or another, we can't all delve through every slush pile. If you spend hours on SoundCloud or Bandcamp looking for music, you have less time to crawl for independent films or writing.
Any attempt to narrow the slush pile has the effect of marginalizing less mainstream efforts. If you read reviews or blogs to find things that seem worthy, then you are seeing what made it through someone else's slush pile. If you let the YouTube algorithm do it through recommendations, you are allowing Google to work through the slush pile.
You have TikTok completely backwards. It's giving a platform and virality to independent artists at a scale that was simply not possible before.
If your only association with TikTok music culture is "TikTok charts" then you're just falling for the same Billboard top 40s but with a new coat of paint.
Yes! One of the many joys of the internet and cheap computers is that anyone can produce music with very little upfront cost compared to before.
If you trawl around through youtube videos with 100 views, obscure bandcamps, audiophile forums, niche discord and subreddits, etc, you can find all sorts of absolutely fantastic music.
It obviously takes some work, but it's a lot of fun to discover as well!
Oh yeah, I forgot about YouTube, some of the best stuff I’ve found in recent years have been on channels that curate/promote music in particular genre. I have one for all sorts of punk genres, as well as one for doom metal and its related genres. They’re great, because they have all sorts of stuff, old and new, and help cut down on the cruft.
My only complaint about bandcamp is the mobile app. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to change the sorting when you’re looking through a genre, so it’s usually filled with albums and artists I already heard years ago, but their website is much better.
Basically all of the music I've bought in the last 5ish years I found through the channel Years of Silence. That person apparently has a very similar taste to me. Rujnuj has remained my favorite album for several years, especially since I found translations of the lyrics last year.
> It’s also a sign you aren’t looking. Yeah, music is going to be trash if you’re just looking at what’s popular on the radio/TikTok/charts. Spend some time on bandcamp going through what’s been posted in your preferred genres.
There's more recorded music than ever, and I don't care what your tastes are there are - new and interesting artists are out there to discover.
... which is also, in its own way, a new difficulty. There's so much to sift through, finding what you think is "good" is going to be difficult. This is doubly so for people who grew up listening to the radio or watching MTV, where these decisions were made for them.
The best advice I could give anybody is to find an actual radio station that plays what they consider to be good new music. This probably doesn't look like a commercial station, and you may not even have any in broadcast range of you, but there are plenty out there that stream online. I'm partial to my local NPR music station, but maybe you'd have better luck with college radio or a local low powered station instead.
DJs may be a rare breed these days, but try to find some you like and just let them do the work for you. The algorithms aren't going to cut it.
Plus, The Winnowing: We don't listen to most music from decades ago. We don't listen to most hits from decades ago. The Winnowing removes most works, in every medium, from the popular consciousness, leaving only the consensus favorites, also known as the canon.
Here's an example: "The Ballad Of The Green Berets" by SSG Barry Sadler was number one for five weeks in 1966, tied with "California Dreamin'" by The Mamas And The Papas. That song is effectively gone now. It's no longer remembered. It didn't make the canon, because The Winnowing got to it, so now it isn't part of The Sixties as a consensus mass memory. "California Dreamin'" which was objectively just as popular by the metric of the charts, however, is pretty well remembered and is, therefore, part of the canon.
I agree with you in part, but feel there's something to the criticism as well. You can look at the top hits --- number ones, top 10s, Billboard top 40, etc., going back through time. And whilst the most popular song of any given year or decade often is reasonably banal, it often isn't, and as you go back through the list, there are dark-horse pieces which do appear.
Another factor is that far more music is published or streamed now, which makes sorting through the mix much more challenging.
Popular taste and memory are both fickle, and one thing that makes going through back-catalogues and earlier periods so interesting is that the sounds of forgotten hits are often fresh to modern ears, while at the same time being tinged with nostalgia based on style, composition, performance characteristics, etc.
If you look at popular hits going back about 150--200 years (say to the 1820s -- 1870s onward), one characteristic that becomes overwhelmingly apparent is the role of technology in popular music. Earlier pieces are often meant to be played or sung by the masses themselves, and tend to instrumentation that would have been available (fiddle, flute, piano). The first recorded formats were player-piano pieces distributed on rolls (and with a distinctly mechanical sound). By the early 20th century, amplification starts to emerge, allowing smaller acts, then electrification (the 3--4 piece rock group emerges), synthesizers (1- and 2-person acts), rap DJs, and over the past decade or so the ability for either a single person to play multiple tracks or for artists in remote locations to be able to collaborate on a single piece.
This may give rise to either original pieces, or simply amazing covers of classics. Leonid & Friends cover of Chicago's "25 or 6 to 4", for example, seems to me better than and at the same time more faithful to the original. It is technically fantastic, while at the same time having its own honest spirit and vivaciousness:
I still think that songs such as "Gangnam Style" and "Someone That I Used to Know" are both truly good recent (post-2000, for me) songs. Both in originals and covers such as Walk Off the Earth's: <https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=p4hIzgqA9io>. (Not to mention the parodies of the original and cover versions...).
That said ...
... I listen to very little contemporary music, largely preferring classical and jazz / blues / folk traditions. Terrestrial broadcast radio is all but completely dead to me. And I don't use streaming services, so that's not really there either.
Ehh. I was in high school and college throughout the '90s and still think pop music quality peaked sometime between 1966 and 1986. It's not necessarily an age thing. I mean, I remember thinking that at the time too.
There are still tons of great musicians and bands making new music today, but the stuff that most people are familiar with is dreck compared to what most people were familiar with fifty years ago.
Among other things is that popular attention, once focused by a handful of local radio stations and three national broadcast networks (in the US), has been atomized by a billion channels. The stuff that gets shoved down the big expensive earball-rich pipes is pablum for broad but weak appeal, processed by self-affirming accountants and algorithms, to a degree it simply was not a generation or two ago. It's simply not the same.
You weren't around for the garbage. You're getting the benefit of listening to only the best of the best music from an entire generation with ears untainted by it being overplayed. If I pushed you twenty years in the future, made you completely forget all
music from 2010 on and played only the very best hearing it for the first time you would be convinced that it was a renaissance.
> I was in high school and college throughout the '90s and still think pop music quality peaked sometime between 1966 and 1986.
Pop music or rock music in particular? Rock is a type of pop music and it's arguable that it is past its prime and was better when it was newer.
> the stuff that most people are familiar with is dreck compared to what most people were familiar with fifty years ago.
Likely some survival bias here. There was tons of awful music that was quickly forgotten about back in the day too. I will grant that the cost of recording and distributing music is much lower today so there very well is a lower barrier to entry which means there's probably more garbage than ever.
The place of music in society. Availability doesn't mean wide impact. It often created smaller sub cultures.
The place of music in people, there are more things capturing your mind now.
The place of the industry, in the past access was granted through a tree of labels and record companies, it also had a weight in the inertia of styles and art. You went through more skilled eyes, it gives you a different legitimity.
Honestly this popular rebuttal actually appears more inaccurate and quaint to me than the opinion it’s dismissing.
My teenage kid strongly feels that modern pop music is trash quality compared to previous decades, thinks that new “underground” music is poorly mimicking previous decades, and bemoans the lack of current scenes that she can participate in. It’s a bit sad watching her sift through 90s/00s music rather than dig into new music of her generation, but I can hear the problem when she plays me both the underground and pop stuff her friends are listening to. It’s tame.
There have been profound infrastructural changes to cultural production and distribution, lead by SV and VCs. These have served to massively boost stock valuations of centralising digital platforms. The music they produce is affected by these changes. The faux meta genre “hyperpop” even exploits this (boringly imo).
It’s reassuring to believe the kids are alright but the problem is not the kids.
What you describe is pretty common - a segement of younger people preferring older music, typically the music of their parents generation. This is nothing new either, not every young person liked Elvis either.
I know. but what’s atypical is the tame-ness, the lack of energy and lack of community participation and shared experience in new music, and its sharp decline of perceived cultural value by the younger generation. I think the changing valuation and changing qualities are not wholly unrelated.
I have a lot of friends in the music industry since I used to work there until recently, both back end eg A&Rs and agents as well as artists. The common sentiment is that nothing new has happened in the last decade, everyone’s wondering why, and increasingly exasperated.
So okay, hip hop.. US trap has been largely in stasis since 2008/2010 (lex lugar era). Uk drill has been in stasis since 2017.
Does 2023 Kendrick really sound much different to 2012 kendrick? Compare 2002 rap to 1992 rap.
I've liked significant portions of most eras, but it's true that today's music is different and seems more limited. The average song is being driven down toward 2 minutes by the realities of streaming, songs use a lot more sampling (because musicians cost more), there is much less modulation than there once was, etc.
Objectively, it seems like less sophisticated music, in part because there isn't the same kind of money there once was in the system to pay for studio musicians, producers, etc.
Is it possible to create great songs despite that? Yes, but it involves a lot of "skating uphill".
You can see that older music is still getting a LOT of plays -- I think too many to make sense, unless we accept that the current industry is not healthy.
Yes and no. The problem current artists run into is coming up with something new. Disco, Hip Hop, Punk and even post-Punk were fresh and new then...but those sounds live on to this day in "new" artists. It's entertaining, but it's hardly something to get excited about.
It's not a matter of getting old per se. It's a matter of having more context, more perspective. Yes, there's a lot of good music today. However, so much of it relies on what we've heard before, it rarely qualifies as great. Or, at best, great is relative to the current, which often is average at best.
Do I want to listen to (e.g.) New Order, or a knock-off of New Order?
Yeah, there's an insane amount of amazing music of so many different styles being produced. The nature of finding it, the gate keepers, what's cool, and everything else has changed though and if you haven't been keeping up with it, it might be somewhat invisible to you. Refusing to use streaming services out of principal definitely just sounds like being old and refusing to adapt though, you can always buy physical media to support an artist once you discover them.
Yup. Getting old is a tough pill to swallow. An early sign is when you don’t care about new music.
Face it, popular music exists for teenagers to claim their spot. Their unique identity from previous generations. The new and fresh - it’s about today and they are today.
That's weird, the stuff I'm listening to has good clarity and writing and inventiveness. I'm listening to people like cory wong, theo katzman, ariel posen, big wild, chris thile's various groups, john grant, louis cole.
Maybe whatever you're using to find new music just sucks? blink twice if it's a clearchannel playlist.
I’m knocking on 40 and the absolute best shit is on SoundCloud done by some teenager or 20-something on like a pirated copy of Ableton in a basement. There are like 2 things you can do as the technology goes to infinity: make way more diverse awesome stuff, or just make the music one tiny part of the well-oiled Taylor Swift Corporation.
There’s more amazing music being made than ever, and the stuff with big money behind it is worse than ever.
I have the same gut feeling that there has been a decline in quality, but I'm not sure that video makes the case.
In the previous 10 years (2013-2022) years the songs that clearly fit your description are "Closer" (2016), "Sunflower" (2018), "Stay" (2021). I'd probably say "Old Town Road" (2019) is pretty bad also, with a very boring, repetitive bass track. And "Despacito" (2017) is catchy but has the same cliche beat as a million other songs in the genre.
"Happy" (2013) is a fun song that could be compared to Bobby McFerrin's 1988 hit, "Uptown Funk" (2014) is a 70s throwback, "Hello" (2015) is a vocal fireworks show, "Blinding Lights" (2020) and "As It Was" (2022) are 80s throwbacks.
On the other hand is "Never Gonna Give You Up" (1987) actually a good song? Is "U Can't Touch This" (1990)? Is "Wannabe" (1996)? No, they are fun but none of these are really good songs.
I'm not sure just comparing the most recognizable song of each year gets you very far.
To so many on that list of "bad" and the reasons for it I can't help but think of James Brown and "I feel good" or a song like "Twist and Shout" which have had pretty damn good saying power and few would say are actually bad. A lot of Amy winehouses music too, as well as many "punk" songs.. repetition is not a hallmark of quality nor lack thereof.
I'm not sure. Music goes in cycles, like the 80s generated a lot of crap and then gave way to the explosion of the alternative music scene.
For an actual semi-objective measure, think about how often you hear songs from the 60s and 70s, and from the 90s (and early 2000s for hip hop). And then think of all the crap that's gone by that has no staying power. I'm sure it's partially my bubble, but there were bands in the decades I mention that are going to be widely listened to for a long time, while in between there's a ton of throwaway. Basically you get original, defining music as new genres emerge then runs of derivative crap between them, it's not constant.
Your understanding of the music industry of the 60s and 70s is at the 'not even wrong' level.
Let's start with this to set the context:
> But we dont have revolutionary music such as led zepplin, pink floyd, etc in the current crop.
And then when it comes to Led Zeppelin and this:
> none of the above sought facade public images as much as every single 'influencing' pop-stars today.
I'm not sure what 'facade' is doing there, maybe you meant to use a different word, but I'm also not sure how you can look at Led Zeppelin after the early 70s and say they weren't seeking a public image.
Then there's Pink Floyd and this:
> Their influence was organic. Today's music trends are forced.
From which I'm going to guess that you've never actually listened to the lyrics to 'Have a Cigar'.
There's not but it's a good heuristic. In pop music the average entropy is much lower, not only because the songs are simpler, but because they are more alike.
Are you quoting that "Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music" paper? Anybody who knows about music disagrees with its methods. Here's a good rundown by a classical composer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfNdps0daF8
The only heuristic that matters the quality of pop music is "do people like it" and it's almost a tautology that pop music in any given time period passes it.
If people preferred more complicated music, then more complicated music would be popular and more of it would get made.
Okay, but you know that "good" and "worse" and subjective, relative terms? Just because you have your own reasons for something doesn't make them "objective", you just don't like modern pop music.
Since you're not required to listen to pop music, the average entropy is utterly irrelevant. If you prefer more complex music there is a huge amount out there, probably more than you can listen to.
Average artwork has always been garbage throughout human history. But I still found a few good paintings to hang on my walls. As long as you can get what you want it doesn't really matter what else is out there.
> Since you're not required to listen to pop music,
Is there a trick I'm missing to avoid this in {Ubers, grocery stores, bars, ...}? If so I'd love to know about it!
Note: am blind, so can't constantly wear earplugs.
Modern music is less harmonically complex than even early Beatles, who used more chords (and more chord progressions) than are used today. Music today is highly repetitive.
Timbre is also less complex thanks in part to the use of virtual instruments and sample packs. Synthesized sounds and samples are intrinsically less complex than sounds recorded in a room. Any two hits of, say, a hi-hat will yield different waveforms and our brains pick up on these micro variations.
> Timbre is also less complex thanks in part to the use of virtual instruments and sample packs. Synthesized sounds and samples are intrinsically less complex than sounds recorded in a room. Any two hits of, say, a hi-hat will yield different waveforms and our brains pick up on these micro variations.
You should see how much time EDM producers spend tweaking the waveforms of individual percussion hits. The idea that timbre in modern music is _less_ complex than in the past is just mind boggling to me, given the level of control that people have in sculpting waveforms and samples. There are entire EDM tracks that are basically just atonal explorations of timbre.
I think it goes both ways. Some do spend insane amounts of time on individual hits or compositing sounds to various functional points.
You can also get the same thing looped 4x that has no variation. Hard to fault either side. Musicians have to get work out rapidly and then occasionally something gets legs.
> Modern music is less harmonically complex than even early Beatles
The most popular genre in America (the world?) isn’t sung and doesn’t focus on tone, so this is hardly surprising. I bet if you measured rhythmic complexity or lyrical complexity it’d show the opposite.
I notice that the authors of that paper are two physicists and a data scientist. I wonder if they even consulted a musicologist or a composer with a background in research before publishing this paper. What would you think about a paper on programming that featured no computer scientists?
> Modern music is less harmonically complex than even early Beatles, who used more chords (and more chord progressions) than are used today. Music today is highly repetitive.
The Beatles used three chord progressions for everything with very little variation.
Complexity left to right may have gone down, but top to bottom has gone up. In a DAW people add way more tracks than ever and add all kinds of detail/texture/layers the weren't possible before so yeah, people search out the new and novel to experiment/have fun with. That happens all the time in music. No one used distorted electric guitars in music then all of the sudden music was over saturated in it. Just because you might not understand/recognize the current complexity doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
You’re right about the average, but that single summary statistic is too coarse. There’s probably much more great music being produced now than ever before, but there’s much much much more crappy music. And recommendation algorithms aren’t optimizing for quality.
I agree. People will tell you they have objective ways of proving the quality of music, it's emotional reactionary BS. It's an art that moves with culture and technology; the length of the song, the instruments, complexity - people are going to make what they feel and listen to what they like (and there will always be people making some version of something even if it's not popular - one of my friends is committed to metrical verse). With so many people making music (and art in general) now, writing off a generation's output based on what sold or showed up in commercial media is short sighted. "Music" is so much more than what's irritating the taste-keepers.
I do think that the quality of the current Top 40 hits is certainly worse than in the past. However, there are good bands out there you just have to look for them on Bandcamp/Youtube or forums/sites dedicated to the genre of music you enjoy.
I like various music from the past 100 years or so, not just from when I was young, and agree quality of current pop is pretty low compared to that time period.
I'd give way to say that the music from your teens and before. It's much easier to appreciate music from before your time than after your time for some reason. I'd guess nostalgia in part and because when you first heard the old music it was new to you and part of your nostalgia. So you don't experience it the same way that teenagers did when it was released but you have a relationship with it that is meaningful none the less.
Note that a lot of people can agree that newer music is crap but wildly disagree about when the good music was made. Just in this thread you can see some claim good music was made until 1985, some say it was until the 90’s some say it was until the last decade. There is no consensus at all, which indicate it is not an objective change in quality.
Do you already own all of the music you are going to listen to for your life?
My own music tastes change over time. I don't listen to the same things I listened to 25 years ago - at least, not often. I want new music from time to time, especially if I'm walking places often.
That's the thing with streaming. I'm OK with paying an amount that is less than a CD was 25 years ago just to have a bunch of music at my disposal. A bunch of new-to-me music from various genres and from various places in the world. It isn't like I'm going to purchase physical media any time soon.
Is the service forever? Nope, probably not, but that's an issue for later me.
> Do you already own all of the music you are going to listen to for your life?
Probably not, but given that I spent until the end of the CD age to collect music I do have enough to last me for several lifetimes. I'm a bit strange in that I will listen to music over and over again until I have it internalized, and even after that. I don't need something new every day.
Neither do I, but I'm also not going to spend decades - or even years - listening to the same thing week after week. Not to mention that my music tastes are much more varied than they were years ago.
That's fine, not everybody is the same in this respect. I can drive people absolutely nuts by listening to the same piece a few hundred times in a row.
Recently: Miriam Stockley, Perfect day (1999, sorry).
I like having new music when walking, or as a background when working. For this, the Spotify playlists are great. I wouldn't want to have to sift through hundreds of records, through multiple stores, multiple times a year, then rip those, all to set up a playlist with tracks that I'll listen to maybe a few times. This is music I do enjoy listening, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't have any "deep value" or whatever to me. If it disappeared tomorrow, I really wouldn't care. The "issue for later me" would be to find an equivalent service of "disposable / background music", not to get my hands on the exact same tracks again.
But then, there are many albums, or even standalone tracks or custom playlists, which I would absolutely hate to lose. For those, I'm fine with going through the trouble of buying them and figuring long-term storage.
>I don't listen to the same things I listened to 25 years ago - at least, not often. I want new music from time to time,
It sounds like you want new music all the time. If you don't listen to "old" music often and only listen to new music from time to time, what do you listen to? So technically, 25+ years is considered classic. What is the definition of "new"? 1 year, 5 years, 10 years? What is newer than classic, but not new, modern? Is a song 15 years old modern? To me, good music is timeless. I enjoy stuff from the 1920s, 50s, 60s, 70s, the good stuff from the 80s, all the way through today.
My tastes have changed during adulthood - I've very much expanded tastes. Less rap, less grunge, more jazz and alternative metal. I like folks using traditional instruments in modern music (some metal is good for that) and I like folks mixing genres (electroswing, for instance). I try for more recent music (last 10 years or something), but I'll listen to whatever I find interesting. After all, there is a good deal of music that just wasn't available to me 15 to 25 years ago that is easy to find now.
Right there with you. I didn't start listening to hiphop until college. Did a lot of Indie in highschool, that's sorta out now. Electronic music has completely changed for me. I've been loving this new wave of music that'll change genres mid song to just hit the right vibe. It's fun to watch all the stuff that you heard in middle/high school be thrown in a blender and turned into Hyperpop. DnB has been sneaking into all sorts of genres as has chiptune. The availability means things like city pop can shine.
What do I want to listen to today? Japanese garage rock? Phonk? Industrial Hip hop? This was so much harder to do even in the torrenting era. Music has such a low amount of time investment to listen to, why not just try everything if there's no additional cost?
There is one part of me that sorta misses the era when I'd get twenty albums and that was 3 months of music. I'd know them back to front, get excited at the ending notes of one song as I got hyped about the next one. The lack of commitment has made me more like a humming bird flitting from one flower to the next.
I can see the value in the streaming services for this because it's easy and convenient. However, it's also fun to discover new music on your own ("pull" versus "push" for content discovery) by researching genres or musical influences/history (Wikipedia has really well organized tags for this) and then just downloading a few GB via your friendly torrent network. Sure, "piracy", but if the music is over a few decades old then it should be public domain anyways.
A lot of stuff is neither on Spotify nor YouTube. One of my musical special interests is a very popular Polish rock band from the 80s and even they don't have their whole discography on Spotify yet, and I had to upload some rarer stuff to the Internet myself. It improved over the years though - just a few years ago you only had a few albums of their discography on Spotify. Now it's just one studio album missing - although most of their live albums aren't there as well and that probably won't change anytime soon; and not even talking about songs that got only released as singles.
Once you go "slightly less popular than one of the top bands in the country", stuff quickly becomes hard to find across the whole Internet, not just Spotify or YouTube, often even when CDs are still available to buy (which isn't a given either).
Spotify routinely removes access to songs. Half of my "favorites" playlist, going all the way back to 2016, is just gone, off of spotify, and I'm unable to listen to those songs.
Streaming services can be compelled to remove your access to content at any point. I don’t like giving that power to anyone when it comes to something I love so deeply.
Lots of old music is not there (I love collecting 30-40s jazz, many records are simply not on any streaming service because they were bootlegs/live recordings and weren't officially released)
Very little, nowadays, but most stuff from Eric Ravn (metal/rock, somewhat famous for Wuthering Heights) [0] is not even available to buy other than as CDs that you order via HTML form ;) A few years ago, German medieval/folk band Die Streuner also wasn’t available on streaming services. Both have in common, that they have their own label.
Ha, die Streuner were the original inspiration for me to write my own dumb and small music streaming service. Seeing them mentioned here might just give me the motivation to pick that project up again.
Hah, that’s cool :D They are on Spotify, nowadays, though. But yeah, I own all their albums, though it took until last week for me to realize they had a 25th anniversary album in 2019. Without facebook it’s hard keeping up with releases of bands not on Bandcamp.
And sometimes the record label manages to upload a live album with all the track transitions cut out (the pre-gap bits on the physical CDs – I'm still wondering whether they actually just ripped their own CDs for uploading and somehow mishandled the ripping software to drop the pre-gaps instead of combining them with one of the adjacent tracks?), despite that artist being pretty well-known and one of those albums being somewhat (in)famous for what happens precisely in-between the actual tracks.
I pay for streaming music because I've pirated all my other music, and it's convenient. Quality is subjective, I'm no audiophile and unless I'm using it on the go with low data mode on, I can't hear the difference... except the one time with a more obscure song, but I reported that and they fixed it. Maybe that was an accidental low data mode though.
I’m someone who has a large FLAC collection and an obsession with my private music tracker. I do it because of an obsession of collecting music, but modern streaming is “good enough” for 99% of cases. And unlike video streaming platforms, most audio platforms have “most” content that people want to listen to.
> And unlike video streaming platforms, most audio platforms have “most” content that people want to listen to.
I'm worried about the potential for this to change. Netflix used to have a much larger catalogue, especially for movies. Nowadays the things I'm interested in may be spread across a dozen different services.
Currently it seems that Spotify, and Youtube music (probably Apple music too, though I've not tried it) have almost everything I can think of. But I can certainly see a possible future where these services get much more fragmented.
For instance, I know Apple is already pushing a classical only streaming service. Could/would they some day remove classical from their other streaming services and instead offer a higher priced bundle deal? I think it's possible.
I stream my own music, because you can do that now. It's $0/month, and I never have to worry about some cranky millionaire getting pissed at Spotify and yanking their music off of it.
Nothing is so convenient that I'd ever pay an ongoing subscription. Those always feel like scams or ripoffs, and life in 2023 is so overfilled with subscriptions that they can't possibly be affordable to even you guys who make x3 what I do. Can they?
I have internet at home, but saying it costs $0 is stretching it, since you have to have a decent upload speed on the connection you're paying for. Not to speak of the server, in this day and age when most people only have a laptop.
Rock/Metal/Punk is still doing really well with no shortage of great artists. Just check out the Radio 1 Rock Show with Daniel P. Carter - nearly every week there is something new that I like
Digital audio killed the industry. Why buy an album when you can
1. Use Napster
2. Use Limewire or Kazaa
3. Download from FTP trading sites
4. Torrent from Pirate Bay
5. Listen on YouTube
6. Listen on Spotify
Digital supply is effectively infinite so the price goes to zero. How to apply DRM to files ripped from a CD that can be compressed down to 3 MB?
There are other factors, like changes in youth culture and competition from other forms of entertainment, but digital audio + distribution completely transformed the music ecosystem. In the 1990s it was possible for talented, intelligent young people to start a band and pursue music as a career because the expected return was so much higher -- not only monetarily but in cultural cachet and the excitement of the local "scene". But all that has dried up. Labels aren't giving out big advances, nurturing unknown bands, or paying for million dollar albums any more, because they won't recoup the costs like they used to. Meanwhile potential talent got a job, went to college, or stayed home and played video games.
Once music lost its "goods-character", as Carl Menger would put it, all the upstream inputs -- like fancy, palatial recording studios -- withered away.
> Digital audio killed the industry. Why buy an album when you can...
As someone that jumped on the Napster and, to a lesser extent, Limewire and Kazaa bandwagon, their value for me wasn't so much that I could get something for free that cost money at the local record store, but it was stuff that couldn't get at all at my local record store.
That said, and much later on, the ability to legitimately listen to music on-demand via Spotify and its ilk pretty much ended my trips to the store.
The bands I love now are all ones that I discovered by downloading tracks. They weren't played on radio (or the songs that had airplay didn't really represent their catalog). I was a teenager with little ability to go to the store let alone afford to buy albums. I have no moral qualms about getting those tracks.
The experience of Napster, Limewire and Kazaa was pretty bad at the time. Plenty of songs were low quality, mislabeled, skipping, incomplete, or radio recordings with announcers talking over them, which was especially frustrating when it'd take 5 minutes to download a single song.
I was a teenager limited to summer job money, but I was happy to buy music on the iTunes store when it launched. I bought CDs as well, but my primary motivation for piracy was that record stores had a limited selection and often exorbitant prices (because the industry was engaged in price fixing^), and the record labels seemed to care more about stopping online music consumption and forcing people to buy CDs than actually providing a worthwhile paid service–their official channels were godawful, see PressPlay.
> all the upstream inputs -- like fancy, palatial recording studios
Digital audio from the listener end had its piece, but two other trends also converged:
- Digital audio from the producer end continued to advance and become cheaper. You can make pretty good recordings on a laptop with the appropriate sound interfaces now, if you have a decent soundproofed room. That is assuming your music isn't digital synth based. Studios are a thing of the past or what a person who likes to produce music calls their bedroom or basement.
- People started caring about the portability of music much more than the quality of it. That trend goes as far back as the Walkman. Regarding the quality, now no one cares if the SNR of your "recording studio" can accurately record all 20-20KHz band of a pindrop from 5 miles away at delta-sigma modulated 192Kbps. If it sounds good with headphones or a car stereo it's fine. This is why MP3 was successful despite its audio quality issues.
I'd argue with digital distribution there's just more of everything. Within moments I can access rap music from France, Japan, etc. This was nearly impossible just 30 years ago. In the 90s I guess I could ask an importer to sell me a French rap CD, pay 100$ for it. Etc. Or I'd probably just give up.
That said mainstream music is forced to the lowest common denominator to appeal to the maximum number of people
I think the increasingly-impossible long slog is actually a mathematical certainty.
It’s actually a mistake of the goal, in nearly every field, because it’s intrinsically contradictory.
“I want to be at the top, but I don’t want to make the stuff that isn’t to my taste that the current people at the top make”
There will be very few winners as the participation increases, the “winners” don’t scale nearly as aggressively as the amount of people fighting to be one do.
OnlyFans, YouTube, Twitch, Music, Acting. They’re all headed to the same place. Look how intuitive it is when you apply it to something like Crypto then ask why the same logic doesn’t apply virtually everywhere.
What do you mean, the natural evolution of music wasn't meant to be face-tattooed, cough syrup-drinking suicide-flirting mumble rappers who all talk about the same shit?
Oh so you prefer the wealthy old white guys who were born with a silver spoon in hand pretending to be "down and dirty" rednecks who's woman left them, who's tractor won't start, and who does nothing but drink cold beer?
Quality may have tanked but profits soared. Music, movies and any other corporate product are meant to appeal to as many people as possible. Therefore they have to be average.
Corporate profits soared, but not the profits that get paid to artists.
Wholehearted support for the efforts by the WGA, SAG, and the related unions, to stop “big corporate media” fucking over everyone in the arts even if it won’t help the average Spotify streamer today or tomorrow, but perhaps eventually it will further into the future…
Indeed. As a side note i wasnt praising corporations, quite the contrary. Some of the things provided are good but overall corporations are detrimental to the society, environment, public health, security and the economy. Both in the music industry and outside.
I didn’t even for a moment think you were praising them, it’s just so easy for people to forget the percentage breakdowns behind the PR pieces these companies put out. I’m sure I’ve done it myself too often enough.
Corporations aren’t inherently an evil concept… the rubicon was corporate personhood. The idea that corporations have equivalent rights to people unless we legislate that they don’t… that’s the mind poison… the rot that has slowly eaten into society and for more than a hundred years has been backing up capitalism and corporatism and all the greed and corruption with the subtle backstop of thought terminating cliches like “people have rights and corporations are people so they have rights” and normal people don’t want to learn a mountain of history to unpack the lies and bullshit…
And companies have the money to hire the best PR… so they have done a pretty good job convincing everyone on the sorts of subjects that are in the corporations best interests… sadly.
We always like to imagine big organizations as the "baddies", and us as the "goodies". But the reality doesn't always follow this convenient narrative. Sometimes it turns out we were the baddies all along.
The number of consumers that pirated music increased mostly because the record companies missed the boat in the third round of being able to sell us the same music. They quite literally sat on their hands for years while there was huge demand for online music. iTunes finally served that demand and Apple made a bundle of money on that.
Before that CDs sold for twice the amount that the original records cost when they came out ('they will last forever, and they're as good as the original masters').
You seem to have a strong conviction that piracy killed the music industry but they didn't need our help to do so, the quality on offer went down, the back catalog is large enough to sustain you for a lifetime (or even longer) and given the choice between something modern and something old I find myself picking 'something old' more and more frequently. There are some exceptions, but these are happening with lower frequency every year. It's probably a function of getting older but I'd just as soon listen to an old record by Kate Bush, 10CC, or a classical recording from the 1950's or 60's than that I will listen to something new that doesn't register with me. I can't remember when I last had the radio on, the only one I have is in the car and I probably didn't even bother plugging in the antenna.
Piracy had absolutely nothing to do with it - for me. I spent a small fortune on music and would have been happy to continue to do so. But the innovators dilemma is harsh and the music industry was too caught up in combating piracy to see that installing root kits on people's computers (Sony) or suing your artists (everybody else) is bad policy for a middle man. And so they faded. A bit late, perhaps, but I think it was inevitable. The ones (labels, not artists) that survive into the streaming era are doing well enough financially, but the music they put out just isn't compelling to me.
To this day there is a levy on any storage medium that goes to the local equivalent of the RIAA.
> The number of consumers that pirated music increased mostly because the record companies missed the boat in the third round of being able to sell us the same music. They quite literally sat on their hands for years while there was huge demand for online music. iTunes finally served that demand and Apple made a bundle of money on that.
That's not true. iTunes or Spotify did not nearly compensate for lost CD revenue.
There is no 'right to revenue', iTunes or Spotify did not compensate because they are different media with different usage patterns and a different audience. It would be far more surprising if they did compensate it.
You are making the same mistake that software companies mad(k)e when talking about revenue and losses due to piracy: not every copy made is a lost sale and depending on the price points and other business model parameters you can find sustainability or lack thereof in many different places of the parameter space.
There is a pretty good chance that if the record companies had not sat on their hands lamenting all this online piracy and if they had provided a good alternative timely that those streaming revenues would be a lot higher today.
I simply stopped buying music around that time, and I don't have a feeling I missed out on anything. The very few things I love that you could call modern are by unsigned artists who are more than happy to put their art out there because they love making good stuff, not necessarily because they are going for a huge commercial success.
Record companies are very much like start-up accelerators: they are entirely optional.
sidenote: I think posting the same link over and over again in a single thread is not a very nice thing to do, even if you believe it shows you are right (which it doesn't...).
There absolutely is. If someone produces a thing through their own hard work, they own the rights to that thing, and you do not have the right to consume that thing without paying them for it. You do not own the rights to other peoples' work.
If you disagree, then prove it by going to your boss/company and telling them that they don't have to pay you unless they want to (and that you're not going to engage in any enforcement or legal action against them, because you don't think that it's wrong).
> Record companies are very much like start-up accelerators
Record companies are completely irrelevant to the issue of piracy.
> There is no 'right to revenue', iTunes or Spotify did not compensate because they are different media with different usage patterns and a different audience.
No, because they had to compete against music piracy, which is hard, as pirated music is free.
You just didn't provide any argument that piracy did cause the observed collapse of the music industry. You believe the business model based on selling overpriced media and feeding most of it into advertising instead of paying artists, was sustainable?
The launch of Napster in 1999 is the most likely explanation for the massive drop in CD sales starting in 1999. Do you have any alternative explanation?
That's ludicrous. The start of CD sales decline was after a decade and a half of massive CD sales. The market for new CDs was saturated.
You assertion (and that of record companies) conveniently ignores the fact that through the 90s long out of print albums were re-released on CD. For a great many artists it was the first time their work had been in print in decades. So CD sales in the 90s had an enormous boost of nostalgia sales.
Furthermore sales of new music through the 90s was further buoyed by new genres. Hip hop exploded was a footnote in the 80s and exploded in the 90s. Pop country (Garth Brooks etc) also exploded in popularity.
Every Boomer that wanted a copy of Sgt Pepper owned a copy. If they bought their top dozen albums or some compilations with chart toppers they were basically set for music. When they bought iPods they took that collection of CDs and loaded them onto their iPods.
The volume of music piracy was nothing compared to the size of the Boomer economic bloc.
The piracy assertion also hilariously ignores the changes in media. In the 90s most music buyers in the US didn't have an option to buy singles. Most acts no longer released singles. So a buyer wanting one or two songs had to pay $15+ for a whole album of filler. Much to the glee of record executives.
With the iTunes Music Store debut in 2003 buyers could suddenly buy just the one or two songs they liked for a dollar each. They might ultimately spend $15 but they got 15 songs they actually wanted. They also of course had their existing CD collection to source music from. This again led to saturation, most people don't buy tens of thousands of songs. If you have about 300 pop songs (~4min) you've got a playlist that can play all day without repeating.
After 1999 CD sales started to decline once the nostalgia market got saturated and dropped even more once buyers could buy only the tracks they actually wanted. Most bands are lucky to produce an album worth of good songs over a half dozen separate album releases. The sales left after the nostalgia market dropped off was largely just new music sales.
No, I imply it's mostly our fault. (Why "their"? You were part of us too, admit it.) The proof is that we didn't start buying music even when it was perfectly possible to do so. We kept pirating because it was free. iPods could hold thousands of songs. Who would buy them on iTunes? Almost nobody of course. Downloadable music sales never nearly reached dimensions of CD sales. Until Spotify offered impossibly low flat rate pricing so that pirating wasn't worth the inconvenience. For some people, at least.
The launch of Napster in 1999 is the most likely explanation for the massive drop in CD sales starting in 1999. Do you have any alternative explanation?
Again, that's not how it works. It's your job to substantiate your hypothesis. Whether I can come up with alternatives or not it is immaterial to whether Napster caused it or not.
Oh poor, poor Sony/BMG/EMI CEOs who absolutely couldn't buy another yacht while lowering their expenses by literally making money out of thin air by literally copying digital music. /me wets a handkerchief with the tears of compassion.
You are spamming that graph, but only because you think it supports your opinion.
Except it does not. Go to RIAA, select Adjusted for inflation and select all years.
You would see what by 2017 the revenue is on par with 1981.
What happened in 1990-1998 what skyrocketed the revenue levels to be twice of that period?
The compact discs.
What happened in 2001-2008 what returned the revenue to almost 1981 levels?
Nobody wanted the fucking compact discs anymore.
They are bulky, you need a good player with at least 40sec anti-shock, you can't run with it, you need a fanny pack or something to even have it with you if you don't want to clip it on your jeans belt (if you don't even have a belt, eg track suit or skirt/dress) and god forbid you wanted more then one album (ie CD) with you, now you need to bring the CD bag with you.
And why people didn't want CDs no more?
Flash and for some time - 1"/1.8" HDD players.
People tasted how it can be to have multiple albums (and with HDD players - your whole library) on a small, compact device which is immune or way more resistant to the shock, doesn't chew the batteries and hey! shows the artist and song title!
'Piracy killed music industry [revenue]' is the bullshit, it's just what by 2008 you could no longer sell a $0.10 piece of polycarbonate for $19.99, people didn't wanted them anymore. Of course your 200% profit margin doesn't exists anymore and it shouldn't had existed in the first place.
> Oh poor, poor Sony/BMG/EMI CEOs who absolutely couldn't buy another yacht while lowering their expenses by literally making money out of thin air by literally copying digital music. /me wets a handkerchief with the tears of compassion.
You are conveniently ignoring the musicians which are hardest hit by our piracy. They make hardly any money from Spotify.
> You would see what by 2017 the revenue is on par with 1981.
Apart from 1981 pretty much coinciding with the cassette piracy decline, you are also ignoring the fact that the world economy has grown massively since 1981. Saying there was no decline in revenue is like comparing car revenue from 1981 with car revenue today and claim the natural state of things for them is to be the same. The comparison is absurd.
> What happened in 2001-2008 what returned the revenue to almost 1981 levels?
Piracy. CDs initially prevented piracy. Then CD sales collapsed because of piracy. Napster & Co.
> People tasted how it can be to have multiple albums (and with HDD players - your whole library) on a small, compact device
That was possible with the iPod and other MP3 players together with legally acquired downloadable music. But the revenue never returned to CD levels because most people kept pirating. Then Spotify came with extremely low pricing and forced musicians to accept ruinous streaming revenues, because Spotify had to compete against piracy. That's why music revenue has collapsed.
No, from Spotify. You aren't paying enough for it. Because you would switch to illegal downloads otherwise. It is hard to offer a successful product when it has to compete against a completely free alternative.
Yikes! You can't flame like this on HN, no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
You broke the site guidelines egregiously in this thread. We have to ban accounts that do that. Fortunately you've also posted quite a few good comments, so this shouldn't be hard to fix, but if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it.
> Bullshit. You are conveniently ignoring the musicians were ripped by the labels way, way before mp3s and still are. Go, read this[0] from the musician itself, ffs.
Piracy doesn't make this issue smaller, if anything, it makes it worse. Love wrote:
> There were a billion music downloads last year, but music sales are up. Where's the evidence that downloads hurt business?
This piece was published in 2000, and sales were not "up". Maybe he didn't have access to the latest figures. But they already started to go down. Over the next few years, CD sales would collapse completely, and digital music sales would not nearly make up for it. I posted the charts previously.
> > Apart from 1981 pretty much coinciding with the cassette piracy decline
> LOLWUT?
I posted the chart previously. Around that time vinyl records had declined substantially, without cassette sales compensating for it. The most likely explanation is that cassette piracy was the culprit. CDs fixed this problem for a while, as they were initially read only and couldn't be pirated.
> > Then CD sales collapsed because of piracy. Napster & Co.
> Are you fucking serious? Napster became defunct by 2001. iPod came out in late 2001, iRiver came out in 2002 and iPod 3 in 2003. By 2005 NOBODY used CDs as a means for portable music.
Yes, because Napster was replaced with countless other music piracy apps. Gnutella, eDonkey2000, Kazaa, Limewire etc. People could legally buy music for their iPods, but they were rather using filesharing. This was free after all, if illegal.
> > Do you have troubles with comprehension? You could never return to 'CD levels' because those levels literally had profit margins anywhere from 200% to 3000%:
> > In 1995, material costs were 30 cents for the jewel case and 10 to 15 cents for the CD. The wholesale cost of CDs was $0.75 to $1.15, while the typical retail price of a prerecorded music CD was $16.98
That's a nonsense comparison. Raw CD manufacturing costs have almost nothing to do with the price or value of music. With downloadable music, the "manufacturing cost" of transferring a few megabytes is likewise miniscule. But the fixed cost of making and advertising the music is not meaningfully different.
> And also you conveniently ignore what the physical media declined past 2001 precisely because people no longer needed nor wanted the physical media.
And you are conveniently ignoring the fact that legal CD music got replaced with illegally downloaded music. I posted the chart. Hardly anyone paid for downloaded music.
> Can you explain how come the label receives 27% while the artist only 16%?
Bad contracts have nothing to do with piracy, but the extremely low price of Spotify has. That Spotify and Apple Music are cheap doesn't mean that artists get a bigger share of the total revenue than in the past. But the total revenue itself got smaller.
Moreover, even if revenue were on the same level today as it was more than 20 years ago, which it isn't, this would ignore the fact that in the meantime the global economy has increased substantially, such that the revenue without piracy would be much higher than back then.
> Also, actual studies shows piracy helped sales, not hindered earnings:
This is about video games and highly speculative. For music there is overwhelming evidence that piracy completely crushed the CD market.
About a decade ago there used to be a site in the Polish internet called "Strata Kazika" (Kazik's Loss). At that time Kazik was one of the most vocal anti-piracy artists who equaled copying to stealing.
So the site's shtick was to take Kazik's newest album and copy it. Then delete to make place for another copy. In a loop. The site then counted how much money has been already stolen from Kazik in the process, and you could also copy albums by yourself locally and report it on the site, incrementing the overall counter. I have to admit that I have participated in this highly unethical venture myself, and as far as I remember we have collectively managed to steal billions of dollars this way.
We were supposed to split our loot and all get super rich. However, the site isn't available anymore. I suspect its author simply took the money and ran away...
> About a decade ago there used to be a site in the Polish internet called "Strata Kazika" (Kazik's Loss). At that time Kazik was one of the most vocal anti-piracy artists who equaled copying to stealing.
This is highly irrelevant. I didn't say anything about stealing. The actual music revenue collapsed starting from 1999. Due to pure magic apparently!
Of course industry's revenue will collapse when you steal billions from them, duh. After all, we all know there's no other rational reason for these profits to plummet than piracy... It's not like people's habits and technology has significantly changed around that time.
Yeah. The new habit was to illegally download music from the Web instead of buying it on CD or from iTunes. Or do you think that around the millennium, people suddenly lost interest in music?
I grew up during that time and I simply had no proper options to get music in a convenient digital way long after it became technologically possible. When something actually appeared, it was either DRMed or unacceptably lossy for the price (or both). How can anyone be surprised that people stopped giving money when it was made so hard for them to give money?
I ended up with a personal collection of CDs for other reasons anyway, but the music industry simply did nothing to meet the demand and gave up the playing field to Spotify and Apple on their own chord. Look at last.fm for what happened when someone wanted to step into the XXI century while respecting the music industry rules.
This isn't inflation adjusted as far as I can see. Even if it were, the revenue now should be much higher than in 1999, given that the world economy grew a lot since then. Here is an actual inflation adjusted chart, which looks pretty damning:
I'd say it was more like a joint effort. I agree with your points, but I was related to the industry for some time, and sometimes money was spent on things like renting a Concorde flight for some exec in France because he was making it late to a meeting in NY.
Then cassettes got replaced with CDs which (initially) were read only, which again saved the market from piracy ... until online piracy with Napster and MP3 players completely crushed the music market, but far worse than cassettes.
Even 20 years later, the market still hasn't recovered to the level of peak CD revenue, despite the global economy growing substantially:
That graph does not show cassettes were responsible for that, it just shows revenue numbers. There are other possible causes.
As someone who lived through part of that (I’m from ‘78 but for a country that was lagging in media developments; we got CDs in the early 90s) I can say that cassettes were a lousy medium. I love them because I grew up with my Walkman and I loved the tape swapping scene (physically compiled and traded playlists, for those young enough to not have participated), but objectively they sucked. Even the best tapes eventually had hiss if you played them enough times. Yet they were not sold at a significantly lower price to compensate this. I mean vinyl decays too but a good pressing handled with care will outlive you (for real, I’ve got plenty of great-sounding LPs from my grandma, and she’s been dead for 8 years), but after paying a high price for a cassette only to have it sound like crap after not that much time, you wouldn’t fall for that trap too often. You’d make a copy right after buying, and then share more copies with others too.
You say that cassettes were responsible for that drop in revenue and I disagree (though of course respect your opinion), but I say the climb once CDs came in could also be interpreted as people willing to buy music just fine provided it sounded good and kept sounding good. I mean it’s not like cassettes went away as a piracy medium once CDs came in, yet revenue climbed anyway.
> That graph does not show cassettes were responsible for that, it just shows revenue numbers. There are other possible causes.
You don't mention any of these possible causes though.
> interpreted as people willing to buy music just fine provided it sounded good and kept sounding good
Yes, CDs replaced cassettes and records. They had better audio quality and were nearly as small as cassettes. But cassettes weren't much worse overall than records. The audio quality wasn't as good as vinyl (though that came mostly from cheaper tapes, good tapes has fairly competitive audio) and aged more quickly, but they were much smaller, which was a big advantage. So overall, cassette piracy was competitive with vinyl sales, but not with CD sales.
> You don't mention any of these possible causes though.
I did not, but I was responding to your "The reality is that yes, cassettes really were responsible" which to me reads like a statement of fact and not one of possible cause. The fact remains that the graph you shared does not proof cassettes were responsible for that.
Another possibility is that music revenue around that 1976 peak shown in your graph is due to wider reasons (e.g., '74 and '75 had negative GDP growth, then positive for a few years, then negative in '80 and '82 with a positive '81, that actually matches the revenue graph to some extent, so I don't think it's an established fact that cassettes were the cause for this.
As a disclaimer though, I'll admit my opinion is tainted by the fact that the record companies were pushing that 'cassettes are killing music' agenda, which I disagree with, so I'm certainly biased in my views.
> I did not, but I was responding to your "The reality is that yes, cassettes really were responsible" which to me reads like a statement of fact and not one of possible cause. The fact remains that the graph you shared does not proof cassettes were responsible for that.
It's an inference to the best explanation: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ No empirical evidence conclusively proves its true explanation, but the best available explanation is the most likely correct one.
> Another possibility is that music revenue around that 1976 peak shown in your graph is due to wider reasons (e.g., '74 and '75 had negative GDP growth, then positive for a few years, then negative in '80 and '82 with a positive '81, that actually matches the revenue graph to some extent, so I don't think it's an established fact that cassettes were the cause for this.
But that seems a much less likely explanation. The GDP remained pretty steady during that time:
> It's an inference to the best explanation: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ No empirical evidence conclusively proves its true explanation, but the best available explanation is the most likely correct one.
This is gibberish, dude. If we don't know, let's admit we don't know. "the best available explanation is the most likely correct one" is not even close to reality.
> This is gibberish, dude. If we don't know, let's admit we don't know. "the best available explanation is the most likely correct one" is not even close to reality.
By this standard you don't know anything, since you can never rule out (bad) alternative explanations with certainty.
You've not provided that explanation. You're telling us it's the best explanation but you haven't explained it or given any argument for why it's the best -- other than because it's what you've said is the best.
If you have a better explanation, why you don't just provide it to us? That's like saying to a scientist: I don't believe your explanation is the best we have, but won't provide a better one myself. Very easy.
That’s not how it works though, a scientist needs supporting evidence for their explanation before the null hypothesis can be ruled out. You seem to have your mind set on an explanation while other people aren’t seeing the evidence you’re seeing to support it.
>> It's an inference to the best explanation: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ No empirical evidence conclusively proves its true explanation, but the best available explanation is the most likely correct one.
I don’t think that link implies what you think it does.
It discusses abduction as a way to justify a hypothesis, you still need to test it.
I’m not arguing your hypothesis is wrong, I’m just arguing I think you’re wrong in treating it as a fact (“the reality is yes …”). You could have said “the reality is cassettes could have … “ and that would be true.
As someone in college in the late 70s we did a ton of taping each others’ vinyl onto cassette and pretty no one I knew actually bought prerecorded cassettes unless that was the only medium available.
Of course, as with software, not every cassette copy represented a lost vinyl album sale but copying in places like colleges was very widespread.
* The rise of home gaming and computing. The second generation of gaming consoles is right around this time: Fairchild Channel F (1976), Atari 2600 (1977), Odyssey (1978)... In 1977 you had the Apple II, TRS-80, and the Commodore PET.
* VHS got introduced in 1977.
If we posit there are only so many dollars any one person is willing to spend on entertainment, perhaps it's not a stretch to think these have contributed to less dollars being spent on music?
> That graph does not show cassettes were responsible for that, it just shows revenue numbers. There are other possible causes.
You don't mention any of these possible causes though.
what?
if you put forward a graph and someone else points out that the graph doesn't show what you say it shows, the person has identified that the graph is not relevant to the discussion.
they don't now have the job of explaining the graph. the graph is not relevant. it just leaves the conversation.
In the 1980s there was a record store where I lived that sold "used" records and tapes. Their hook was that they'd take any record back within a week of purchase. I think they witheld a dollar or two on the refund.
So you'd go in, buy a record and a blank cassette, go home and make a tape of the record, then return the record. My friends and I did this countless times. If there was a record we all liked we'd just buy more tapes and make a copy for each of us.
If this was a common thing in other towns, I can see why it reduced revenue. Even if this exact model was unusual, you could still borrow records from friends and make tape copies, so only one of you had to buy the record.
Making copies of cassettes was just standard practice. A new album came out and we’d all chip in for one and then copy the rest onto cassettes using the double speed cassette copying that was standard in most stereos.
The hole in revenue in the early 2000 was because pirating was the only real option to get music online, you had no other choice.
The music industry was too stubborn to consider selling online and preferred to keep selling CDs, they were very very late to adapt and lost some revenue because of that.
By doing that, they also ensured that consumers went to great lengths to produce good-quality rips of their full catalogs, effectively establishing large libraries of content ready to be distributed for free. Thanks to reasonable streaming prices, my children will likely never have to know what a bitrate is, whereas I was forced to develop a full range of "pirate skills".
That's somewhat ridiculous if that is the reality. All of CD manufacturing, shipping, retail overhead is eliminated in streaming. In reality streaming should produce more money for talent, eliminate overhead, and put more pressure on recording companies profit margins.
The height of the CD was ludicrous. A CD cost 15-20$ in the mid nineties, and cassettes, a more expensive and complicated medium, were half of that.
So a lot of the collapse isn't EVIL PIRATES, it is that the industry was sitting on a massive monopoly and cash printing machine, and digital collapsed that profit margin.
Music production used to require million dollar+ recording studios that the labels had a semi-monopoly on. Even in the 1990s, you could get usable recording equipment and software from a PC and Microsoft Windows.
Radio payola is mostly the last gasp of label control, although that seems to be going strong.
The REAL killer of music revenue is the rise of video games and way more television/video accessibility. First of all, there isn't one TV in the home like it was up to the 1990s. TVs are cheap, and smartphones are ubiquitous. Video games. tiktoks/youtubes, and TV dominate the media of the youth, and music is a peripheral/decorative aspect of those.
Essentially music filled the world of bored teenagers once upon a time, but boredom has been destroyed in the modern world (replaced with media saturation ennui).
> Essentially music filled the world of bored teenagers once upon a time, but boredom has been destroyed in the modern world (replaced with media saturation ennui).
Interessanting hypothesis. Do people listen to music less nowadays? It seems indeed not as dominant as in the 90s, I admit that.
If you're watching insta/tictok you're probably not also listening to music at the same time. Also kids these days listen to a much wider range of music then I was ever subjected to. We got whatever local radio stations could be picked up, or if your family had a collection and let you touch it. Now my daughter can pretty much pull up anything made on YouTube and play it from classic instrumental to whatever was released yesterday.
Everyone on spotify is free to put their music on bandcamp for $10 instead, and I in fact have bought music exactly that way, getting high quality lossless audio from a niche artist that probably doesn't make a cent from spotify.
But artists largely don't take their music off spotify to exclusively sell alone, because if they tried that they wouldn't make a dime. Music is hard to "find" and your average music maker trying to go their own way (I know several) makes you zero dollars, so why not put it on spotify, make ten bucks, and also possibly find a fan who will buy your music on bandcamp for full price and essentially pay for your life.
The modern creator economy has largely shown that the way you be an artist and make a living is by giving away your stuff mostly for free, making good quality stuff, gaining fans, and letting a small percentage of those fans literally donate you an $80k salary. This works for game makers, music makers, book writers, video producers, journalists, etc.
I doubt it works for almost anyone. Who is making $80k in donations? More likely seems the following: People listen to music on Spotify and don't even begin to think about donating any money to the musician. They already pay for Spotify after all. And of course Bandcamp can't compete with Spotify pricing, let alone piracy.
Well, before spotify they made zero money from me and a lot of other people. Spotify also allowed a lot more people to publish their music. Increased supply and higher competition leads to lower prices.
1999 with its overpriced CDs is never coming back.
> Increased supply and higher competition leads to lower prices.
The "supply" of music, including music sold on CDs, is equally unlimited. What leads to the low Spotify price is that they have to compete with music piracy. CD prices weren't higher because CDs were expensive to manufacture and therefore limited in supply -- they weren't. Instead, they were more expensive because they didn't have to compete against piracy.
> they were more expensive because they didn't have to compete against piracy.
Bull. Any reasonably-sized town had at least one "dodgy" seller of pirated CDs.
CDs were expensive because they were fundamentally a vanity item, with sleeves and goodies. That empowered middlemen and official distribution chains which, in developed countries, is typically where profit accumulates. Artists themselves, under contract with labels, couldn't buy CDs at cost to sell at concerts - labels were pressured to protect the distribution chains.
You had more piracy during the CD era than anything you can imagine right now. Basically every town had a pirated CD shop, everybody knew somebody to call to get some pirated CDs, it was a full business.
By "increased supply" I meant - more artists were able to offer their music on the service. So each artist has a way bigger competition now. It was much harder to release a CD or get your songs on radio than get on spotify, bandcamp and youtube.
Yet many musicians could receive a living wage if just one executive gave up their corporate jet. Enough about that though... let's chide the 'entitled' consumer and supply and demand!
> The hole in revenue in the early 2000 was because pirating was the only real option to get music online
The Telecommunications Act of 1996, allowing the likes of Clear Channel/iHeartRadio to take over all the stations, shows to be the real culprit.
At the time we joked, due to the steep decline in radio variety, that CD sales would crater because people would only get to know a small handful of artists, leaving few CDs to buy, and the numbers here confirm it was more than just a joke.
> The hole in revenue in the early 2000 was because pirating was the only real option to get music online, you had no other choice.
You had absolutely the choice to buy CDs and not pirate anything from the Web. And the "hole" never nearly got filled with legal online services anyway even when they existed. 1999 CD sales are still the peak of music revenue.
Piracy is a service problem. Back in the early 2000s pirates simply offered a better service.
The gaming industry understood that and quickly created online marketplaces for games.
The music industry didn't - and instead of creating Spotify a decade earlier - spent the 2000s trying to sue grandmas who filmed their kids dancing to copyrighted music.
Maybe for two short years until iTunes came out. Then there was no service problem anymore. But CD sales kept collapsing while digital sales were hardly worth noting. Which proves that people loved pirated music because it was free, not because they couldn't buy it.
> created online marketplaces for games. The music industry didn't - and instead of creating Spotify a decade earlier -
Spotify exists for quite a long while now and revenue still hasn't returned, despite the world economy growing substantially since then, which refutes your theory. Spotify is so cheap because of piracy.
iTunes was not available everywhere. It was officially available in Eastern Europe only around 2011/2012. And in many other countries even later. Around the same time as Spotify which was a lot better service.
Before that I could either buy ridiculously overpriced CDs or go to ThePirateBay which was available in my country from day one. So yeah - it absolutely was a service problem.
Soon after Spotify appeared I stopped pirating, because Spotify offered a much better service than piracy sites and brick & mortar stores for a reasonable price.
> Soon after Spotify appeared I stopped pirating, because Spotify offered a much better service than piracy sites and brick & mortar stores for a reasonable price.
The fact that revenue still hasn't returned to 1999 levels shows that the price is not "reasonable". They are forced to price it that low because otherwise people would just pirate the music. Many probably still do.
Alternatively, the 1999 levels weren't reasonable. Or the 1999 level isn't reasonably today because there's a LOT more entertainment alternatives vying for attention.
Napster launched in 1999, The Pirate Bay launched in 2003, Spotify only launched internationally in 2010 / 2011. There's been a decade without proper legal options to get music.
Buying CDs wasn't a reasonable choice anymore in the digital age, CDs were outdated and not fit in the age where people could buy portable mp3 players.
The music industry was beyond late, they were a full decade late to the party and paid the price for it.
It was the same for movies for even a longer time until Netflix caught up, personally I couldn't buy the movies or series I wanted at the time, it wasn't available anywhere.
> Napster launched in 1999, The Pirate Bay launched in 2003, Spotify only launched internationally in 2010 / 2011. There's been a decade without proper legal options to get music.
Yes I know, I specifically avoided to talk about it since it did not really meet the demand at the time. The catalog was too small and DRMs were not removable at the time (until 2009) so it was pretty much useless for an mp3 player. I still give it to iTunes, it was the only legal place to buy music for the longest time even if it was limited.
Also the Windows version and the music store only launched in 2003.
Steam DRM (video games) is also not removable. And iTunes music did work on iPods. The main issue was that most people filled their iPods with pirated music instead.
But Steam games do work straight away on your computer, iTunes DRM music did not work on your average mp3 player everybody had. It's not like you could do something about it, it just refused to play it, I know, I had one.
And if you're asking customers to pay money to get the legal music and then download a DRM removal software from some Russian website to be able to listen to it (that might existed at the time, I don't remember), well that's even more hassle than piracy.
Even Apple themselves noticed the problem but a little too late, by then Spotify was already starting to spread.
Even iPod owners filled their hard drives with pirated MP3s. And every smartphone can support any DRM music software just as much as every PC can support something like Steam. The admissable reasons for piracy have long ceased to exist, yet people still don't like to pay for music. The revenue is still not on 1999 levels. It should be much higher by now if piracy wasn't a possibility.
As much iPods were a commercial success, they were absolutely dwarfed more than 10 to 1 by the number of standard mp3 players and those could not read DRM music at all. Out of my whole high school, you only had maybe one or two guys with a real iPod and thousands of mp3 players. They were much cheaper to buy and even easier to use.
And not sure why you bring smartphones, by the time modern smartphones were popular in the 2010s, people were using Spotify already.
> The revenue is still not on 1999 levels. It should be much higher by now if piracy wasn't a possibility.
Music piracy is at its lowest now it has ever been since the 80s.
iTunes only launched in 2011/2012 in Eastern Europe and many other countries. Before that the only way to get music digitally was to download it from P2P networks.
The late 70s and early 80s was the dawn of tape trading, punk rock, rap, metal, and disco. 90% of it was only available through tape trading (or runs of 200 singles) because everyone had been shut out of a stagnant industry that was resting on AOR, super-decadent and overproduced prog, and continuing to throw money at the people who made money in the 60s.
As the 80s started, the record companies caught on and adjusted by hiring new A&R and getting into the clubs again. Then MTV happened.
The sulfur mining industry never recovered from the drop in revenue after someone discovered a way to extract it on scale from low-quality coal. Poland had a massive drop in revenue despite being the one selling both products. Does it mean they should attach a coal burning license agreement prohibiting the extraction process to each container, or try to prosecute people selling filters?
So the laws were misguided. Why should someone be granted a monopoly on excluding others from using an idea (patent) or content (copyright)? To prop up a business model that cannot be sustained except if based on threats of violence?
If anything cassettes served as a music discovery service before we had the ability to share links online. Pretty much everything I ever bought I discovered because someone borrowed me a tape or sent me one from abroad.
Commercial music had it's zenith and it declined. Just like everything else it didn't grow for ever and just like everything else there are reasons why you don't want to yank the chain of your consumers and your producers too much. The fact that the two correlate timewise does not mean the one cause the other. In fact I think that the music industry missed an absolutely huge opportunity. By the time I had digitized my whole collection they had royally missed the boat, whereas if I didn't have to go through all that who knows how much money I would have spent on new music by now. I used to spend a lot of money on music, now I spend none and not a dime of that difference was due to piracy.
I have friends in the music industry and got invited to a meeting of BUMA/STEMRA regarding the potential of streaming and it was like watching dinosaurs discussing the price of swampland while in the background you could see a comet heading straight for the planet. I don't think I've ever seen such a disconnect between producers and consumers. Product market fit is not just good for new companies, it is also good for existing ones. Fail at that and you will fail.
That juncture was a very distinct divide in pop music. The peak is likely around the peak of disco (Staying Alive: 1977). The post-peak of disco was kind of barren until the 1980s / MTV scene starting things going again.
I think the collapse is due to the death of vinyl, which was probably associated with disco and older dying styles.
CDs could always be recorded to cassettes. It was just an audio stream you could feed to the cassette player. So pirates and swappers wouldn't have cared that much.
And the sales peak of cassettes is during the late 1980s. So that was well after the collapse of sales.
And their resurgence with AI and Google’s web integrity thing
The web is just TV3.0, reserved for acceptable political and commercial content now. Eh I’m done with that; switching off to all of it. Will stick to internet for job and not use it on my personal desktop, just phone.
Copyright rent seekers can do something useful for humanity or stick to making it about “the art” and perform local theatre
> not use [Internet] on my personal desktop, just phone.
Then you'll be headed in the exact wrong direction! Phones are generally locked down corporate platforms, where Google's current attempt to lock down the web got its inspiration and start (see: SafetyNet). Even if you do repave and install an OS that represents your interests, the input/output capabilities are by default limited and the available apps still generally revolve around accessing centralized services hosted elsewhere. Whereas with your personal desktop, you can keep it personal and install libre software that lets you escape the copyright cartel and big tech walled gardens.
It’s a good thing my friends also hate the web. I was pretty much the lone holdout
“Opt out” from my references frame; I will use a gmail for government and services as expected, and do nothing else online but what my job asks. I’m done scrolling and collecting useless knowledge and anecdotes
I literally just switched to shit tier ISP speeds
Fortunately I deleted TwitFace a decade ago
Will be blacklisting HN, Reddit on the router end
Down to a stupid beefy ML machine through work, personal iPhone and old MacBook Air running Linux; feels good man dog
> Then cassettes got replaced with CDs which (initially) were read only, which again saved the market from piracy
CD players hit the market in the mid 80s (I got my first one in 1988). The effect of cassette tapes would have really hit in the late 70s and early 80s as high bias tapes hit the market. In the 90s, CD players became affordable. Also, there was a big price difference between a cassette and a CD. Cassette was about $8 for a new album, CD was $14.
CDs used to be crazy expensive. They cost much more than what was reasonable. Today I have access to untold thousands of records for €10 per month. That money (non inflation adjusted) would have bought me only a single record back in the day.
One could argue that the current price of music is too low. But the price they tried to extract back then was completely unreasonable and I think those excesses contributed heavily to the current situation.
> But the price they tried to extract back then was completely unreasonable and I think those excesses contributed heavily to the current situation.
Yes that left incurable trauma. During late 90s to early 00s CD costed the same in Germany and in any post-communist country whose economies were in shambles. Something around 12 EUR which would be 18 EUR inflation adjusted now. I was wandering between shelves like a pariah and asking shop assistant like a beggar to insert the CD into the player so I could listen it in shop for few minutes. Music industry worked hard to make enemies for life.
Everyone pirated in the Eastern Europe back then. You bought a CD only if you were a big fan of the band. The rest was downloaded off the net. I've never bought a single CD in my life. Transitioned straight from pirating to Spotify.
Ha! the dial up internet was ruled by extortionist state monopoly and local ISPs were plagued with equipment thievery... the only way to acquire pirated music was physically exchanging hard drives with acquaintances.
They weren't, iTunes (and other services before that) existed before Steam. The music industry was ahead of the games industry, not the other way round. The difference is that video game DRM (Steam) succeeded, but music DRM didn't.
> CDs used to be crazy expensive. They cost much more than what was reasonable.
A market economy determines the value of goods by what people are willing to pay for it. Apparently, halfing the record price would not have doubled the sales, so the vinyl/CD price reflected the value of the music pretty well. But nowadays, legal music streaming has to compete against illegal piracy, which is free and only a little inconvenient, so the streaming price is forced to a very low level. Musicians can hardly make money from music sales anymore. If you make a type of music that isn't well suited for concerts, and you aren't massively popular, you are screwed.
That's true, but the music market is special in some ways.
* Artificial scarcity. Recorded music is a scarce good only because the law says so. You wouldn't download a car and so on.
* Non-fungibility. Music isn't all the same. Customers want a record with their favourite artist and not just any record of similar "quality".
There was a very limited time in human history where musicians could get rich by only selling recorded music. The norm otherwise has been that musicians earn money from live performances and now we're almost back to that. I'm not sure I think that's a bad thing.
> * Artificial scarcity. Recorded music is a scarce good only because the law says so. You wouldn't download a car and so on
But this scarcity is good. It enables, or would enable, production of music which wouldn't otherwise be produced. If music piracy weren't so much an issue today, the music industry size would probably be several times its current size (it would have simply grown with the rest of the economy, as it did ik the 90s) which would mean far more musicians could earn a living with their work. Especially musicians which make a type of music which isn't well suited for concerts. As a consequence, a lot of this music simply doesn't get made today. Yes, we instead got impossibly cheap Spotify (I don't think cheap flat rate streaming would have ever become a thing if it wasn't for piracy making actually selling tracks near impossible), but we also got less music, and consequently, less good music.
Compare this to the video game market, where piracy isn't as big of a problem as in music, due to much larger file sizes and better copy protection. Many of the great games we have couldn't have been made if video game piracy was significantly more common.
There are more than 100M tracks on Spotify. More that one person can listen to over several lifetimes. Even if 99% of them are crap - that still leaves 1M of good tracks. The amount of available music is simply staggering nowadays.
It's not obvious that a larger market translates to higher quality supply. Certainly greater supply, but someone who's profit-motivated and is trying to capture more of the market would probably do better producing easy and diverse content in large quantities.
Yeah, it really was way too expensive. A single with one or two remixes or other songs did cost 5€. Linkin Parks Meteora did cost me 19€ and Reanimation 16.50€. Double CD samplers were around 25€ to 30€.
I'm happy with streaming but I'm also happy to buy a vinyl to additionally support my favourite artists, even when it costs 30-40€.
Revenue based on selling copies of a recording is down. The cost of reproducing copies is less than ever. The barrier to creating your own music and distributing it to everyone in the world is less than ever.
All the middlemen cranking out wasteful copies of just one thing are not necessary since music is trivially reproduced with digital copies.
How much should music make as an industry? Who should be making the money from the music that is made? how much money should you make off of a single song that is performed a single time?
This is always a controversial issue. The loudest opinions typically say "they need to make more", which is the same opinion about nearly any profession in the entire world aside from the ones that make the very most money. Some musicians still fall into that category.
At the end of the day the lion's share of revenue doesn't go to a performer anyway, it goes to middlemen who add no value to the actual performance - they just make it be distributed and decide the winners and losers based on arbitrary gatekeeping. The contracts are predatory and the whole thing seems f'd to me.
I know many people with primary and side gigs as performance artists who don't make superstar money, there's no shortage. Live musical performance is all over the place and the ticket prices are outrageously high for any in-demand performance.
Most of us don't have the option for income in perpetuity for work performed - we just get paid for hours worked. Is there an argument around payment in perpetuity vs pay for work performed that should apply across the board?
Artists need to buy groceries and retire some day--almost none of them successfully pull this off, it's like one in a million--but every day there's a dozen posts on here about how greedy the arts industries are for trying to charge money for things.
Well, no problem, in the near future you can just get a personal AI to make everything for you. The Arts will be wiped out completely. Time to celebrate? No human artist need ever get paid again, starting in 20 years, or will it be 50? Maybe it will take 75 and you won't get to personally enjoy it? All the money can go to amazon and to ISPs because they provide the REAL value, that of providing sharing or generation infrastructure
Mix in the constant posts on here claiming that these tech companies get to make derivative works off of everyone's art, without compensating those artists, and, I don't know what to say
> Artists need to buy groceries and retire some day--almost none of them successfully pull this off, it's like one in a million--but every day there's a dozen posts on here about how greedy the arts industries are for trying to charge money for things.
I know a lot of artists, musicians, actors and even a painter or two who actually make a living from what they love. You know what none of them do? Make their living from people buying recordings or reproductions of their work. They all make money by playing gigs, performing and doing commissions. Some of them do really well, too.
Oh, and AI is not going to replace the band on the patio, or the actress in a local production of "Crazy for You" any time soon.
I don't like the posts castigating artists for trying to charge for things, but I do think that the financial woes from artists don't come from their pricing model or unfairness from middlemen distributors. Rather, I think they come from simple supply and demand economic imbalances.
Because of how many more people want to be professional artists than have the capability to competitively operate at a professional level (inclusive of both raw artistic and second order marketing talent), there will never be enough demand to support anything but the very best of the artists who would like to make a living off of their product.
But I also think that conflicts with the idea you just mentioned, that of being able to get a personal AI to make everything for you. AI has shown the ability to make a mediocre product that one can tolerate, but not a great product for personal consumption that would lead you to become a loyal fan.
If anything, I think AI will take the grunt work out of all the tasks a great work an artist has to do, and let them focus on the parts that cannot be outsourced -- coming up with and distributing a great, differentiated product.
One in a million still implies over 8000 successful artists at any given time.
Assuming an average tenure of 20 years in the limelight, that's 32000 over the course of a 80 year lifespan, which is probably more than anyone will bother to listen to in a lifetime.
Not to mention the tens of thousands of historic and famous artists.
When put in that perspective it actually makes total sense why no one will bother paying to listen to the 50 000th most popular artist, the chances of any given person being more interested in the other 49 999 at any given time is approaching 100%.
Assuming 100 different styles of music, there can then be 80 paid artists per style? Just 20 bands if a typical 4-piece.
That is not so great for those that primarily listen to one or two styles.
Today there are nearly 100'000 active bands within the metal genre alone.
We've fallen into decadence, and with it has come the desire to freeze society as it existed somewhere around 1965, when baby boomers turned 20. I've had conversations with people asking how new Marvel movies could be made if some political or legal change happened. Who cares?
Don't care if no one ever writes a novel again, there's plenty to read. It'll never happen, though, because people will write novels for free, and people will sponsor people who create things that they want or that they want to be seen sponsoring. Don't care if there's never another piece of recorded music, and we're stuck playing music with each other or being in the same room with people playing music for us. Of course, this will never happen, because the vast majority of music is made for free, and the rest nearly for free after the record companies recoup.
The state doesn't need to keep encouraging the production of art through police action. If the state wants to encourage art, give everybody a tax credit that they have to send to an artist.
I think the big difference is some digital content has an exact audience and needs to be highly customized for them. For example, companies don't buy web apps and then modify them into the web app they want they program what they want from the frameworks they choose up. So while code is digital content, it's quite resistant to having its value lowered by copying.
Ha I do miss the whole "mix tapes" thing but my god the excitement and anticipation I had when CDs and CD players came along, to be able to play Track 6 by just... pressing the "6" button. Or a tap or two with the remote: "next"!
No more rewinding/forwarding, remember counter numbers for tracks (0 -> 999).
Just an amazing step up in UI but looking back "you had to be there" :-)
Now though I just have about 600 CDs gathering dust on shelves, each one with memories from a time and place through the 80s, 90s and 00s, it's quite sad.
You did get adept at looking at a record to figure out where the songs were based on the record track "texture". (our high school had a radio station, and records being the music mode at the time). To cue up the next song, we'd play the record into the song, take the payer "out of gear" and manually spin the record backwards while listening till we hit blank. We did this part off the air (most of the time..)
We had this wierd cassette player boombox. It had 2 ff and rewinds, one of which would disable the pinch rollers, pull the tape head back a bit and fast forward the tape listening for blank areas, where upon it would stop. It worked but I'm guessing the wear and tear on the tapes must have been bad. Though we didn't notice.
Why quite sad ? There's nothing like crawling a collection of physical records or books and remind "Oh, I remember when I used to listen to this like crazy" and being able to simply put the record in a player and listen it"
That kind of serendipity is just not possible with digital collections, especially when records get deletted from services without notices, or you have to browse deep in a .mp3 collection you afforded not to lose by not backing it up.
It's nice to have those memories, for sure, but my CDs themselves get completely neglected nowadays - between mp3 rips, and streaming services conveniently tying in with my main hifi setup, the CDs just don't see active service any more. And my kids sure aren't interested :-D
I used to love exploring friends' music collections, seeing where tastes overlap. "Everyone has everything via Spotify" completely eliminates this. And I don't see us going back in any substantially wider sense, the genie's out of the bottle. Ah the march of progress, eh...
More like 'When Gene Simmons Waged War on the Cassette Tape During the 1980s.' It was as stupid as Lars Ulrich attacking Napster in the early 2000's. In both cases their respective bands, Kiss and Metallica, took a considerable hit in their popularity.
Treating all your customers as though they are criminals turns out to not be a very good business practice.
The content industry also waged war on computer media. It was supposed to be 100% forbidden to sell anything capable of doing anything without DRM. They were serious about this:
In Sweden there is still a tax on cassette tapes that goes directly to artists... So if you buy a cassette tape (any cassette tape for any use) artists in Sweden gets a cut... Not sure how many people today use cassette tapes for piracy...
At any stage in the process, from sheet music, to home taping, to Napster and beyond, we could point at the previous era's panic and say "ha ha, those old fools, sheet music didn't kill our vibrant music culture", and then go on to assume that, quite likely, nothing ever could.
And yet it sure seems like something is broken in the music industry in 2023. It feels like right now would be one of the least certain times in history to be a talented, dedicated musician who wants to make a living, let alone get rich and famous.
So, something changed. I think the tendency for many people is to just say that the reason for all this is the greed of the non-artistic, non-consumer parts of the music industry, but certainly it has nothing to do with me or my choices. I think that's probably self-serving position, and if we really looked at it we would find ourselves uncomfortably in an ecosystem where consumers demand immediate fulfillment of their desire, the industry rushes to give it to them without thinking about the future, and artists either adapt, or get replaced.
I did a lot of home taping. I did a lot of bittorrenting. Now I pay for Spotify, but haven't bought an album (physically or digitally) in years. I think I might have helped kill the music industry, and that's probably a bad thing.
> It feels like right now would be one of the least certain times in history to be a talented, dedicated musician who wants to make a living, let alone get rich and famous.
In recent history perhaps.
For most of history making a living via music was very difficult and the current state is sort of a reversion to the historical norm after the recorded music boom distorted things for a century or so.
What's interesting, 1980s was the heyday of Russian Rock tape albums.
Soviet government did actually go after artists for doing live concerts (on the grounds of illegal enterpreneurship†), but not after tape recording stuff. You could duplicate as many tape albums as you wished in specialized tape copying booths, as well as at home if you had the hardware.
† You are probably wondering whether there was "legal" enterpreneurship option in the late USSR. Basically, nope, not before Perestroika kicked in.
Even before cassette tapes become available people in USSR recorded and copied music at home using reel-to-reel tapes. LP vinyl record was the most produced media back then but it was state controlled - even is some music was not outright censored it was not published in large enough numbers if state official though massed should not listen a particular music genre or a record.
I wonder of people outside soviet block copied musing at home using reel-to-reel tapes (in non negligible numbers)?
The campaign also coincided with the rise of cassette-based portastudios for musicians. There was concern that any record industry levy on cassettes would unfairly hit (unsigned) musicians recording their own music for demos. I think it was Sound-on-Sound magazine which came up with the "Home taping is skill in music" slogan as a counter.
And then there are sites like https://bt.etree.org/ where artists allow for free and open trading of live shows.
Back in the day before high speed internet became common, you used to subscribe to mailing lists and send "B&Ps" (blanks and postage) of either cassettes or CDs to the person with the original copy and they would burn the copy onto your media and then mail it back.
With bittorrent now it is a lot easier to get copies of live music, but it feels like the community that was there faded.
Piracy is bad but killing internet with yet another DRM in your browser, and stupid laws ("if you workaround a protection, event if it is stupid, you're going to straight jail") makes us slaves to big corporations.
Several countries have that tax. Here in Sweden we pay about $10 for every new computer, mobile phone, SSD etc just because we might store music on them. Quite absurd.
Private monopoly in Sweden too. But at least they're not hiding the fact that 22.5 % of the money they collect go to their own administration costs rather than to artists...
Granted, this discussion is about the recording industry, but just as an aside, don't overlook local live music. I'm a jazz musician. The bands I play in don't record. It's not worth the cost. We play in smaller venues, where the stakes are not high enough for "business" to intrude on our playing.
Each band plays a different style. More than one jazz band in my locale is playing creative original music, including one of my bands.
And the movie and TV industries wanted in on videotape back then. I remember reading a piece by one of the then big lobby shops, arguing that VHS tapes should be a tax, the income to be distributed to the studios.
They would get tangled in the tape deck, and be ruined. They would sightly unspool themselves, get caught on something or twisted, and be ruined. They would stretch with overuse, distorting the audio horribly and/or comically, and be ruined.
In my youth it seemed like every major roadside was littered with discarded audio tape. Clumps of tangled brown film dolefully flapping about in the breeze.
I could probably fit my entire MP3 collection as FLAC on a single DLT. Shame abou the seek times but some kind of lower bitrate forward coding across the entire dataset, a cache and seek times might not matter as much for long plays.
It would be very silly to repurpose a DLT tape library for an audio jukebox: one which carried "lethal to enter if not disarmed" stickers and a ruinous electricity bill.
For anyone who wonders a single LTO9 tape is about $250 and holds 45TB. I'm holding about 15 to 20 years data hoarding at home on 6TB zfs. So for me, cold storage for life would be at this price point. As you say the drive is heinous too: $10k+
There was good tape certainly -- reel to reel, metal tapes, etc. But most people used the cheap normal tape, and probably C120 which had a tendency to get tangled in the mechanism.
Modern dirt cheap 44.1 KHz/16 bit audio is far superior to anything you could get in the tape era, except maybe a reel to reel tape set to the high quality speed.
And even the best tape still had some wow and flutter because it's ultimately a mechanical device with imperfect speed control.
That got kneecapped by the recording industry [0], and the result was that consumer interest was near zero. Once recordable CDs and then MP3 and friends came on the scene, it was rendered irrelevant.
If you stay away from the cheap consumer printers that are designed to sell ink cartridges, printers are not so bad. We have a Brother multifunction office inkjet printer that's been great, ink is reasonably priced (cheaper than the laser printer that we replaced with it), and it reliably prints around 5 - 10,000 pages/year as well as scanning almost as many pages. (Wife works in a state regulated industry and they require a lot of paper documentation, every year they promise to release the system that will reduce the need for so much paper, and it's always 6 months away)
Yeah, thankfully we don't need them that often anymore. That said, is there a convenient, compact printer for documents (greyscale is fine) for the just in case times? I think I've seen a compact bar shaped laser printer aimed at laptops, but I'm afraid of the toner cartridges being overpriced or hard to find.
It will probably still run with the same Windows driver written in late 90's in Win16 then patched and glued and slightly tilted to kinda work even today, kinda. Because here's where the real adventure happens, between buggy drivers and prehistoric spoolers.
The record companies did a fantastic job of killing music all by themselves, the quality has absolutely cratered and the occasional great artist that has made it through the long slog to recognition has done so despite the music industry, not because of.
I spent a fortune on various formats and when streaming came along I simply refused to participate. I'm simply not going to pay a third time for music that I already legally own.
Note that the following was written well before streaming came along, but it is an excellent article on the realities of the music industry from the artists perspective written by Janis Ian:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070509181400/http://www.janisi...
There is a fair chance that if you're under 40 that you've never heard of her, but I suggest you give her music a try as well, it is at least as good as her writing.
And another one by Courtney Love:
https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/