Is this comment productive? Rather than talk about the article you’re fixated on some minor transgression that someone made in the title and personally offends you
There are quite a lot of HN users that insist on logical correctness at least the vast majority of the time, and they will probably outlast you both in a debate and as a participant in online commenting. So it's just one of those things that you either accept or downvote and move on.
I’m not sure if it needs to be productive, per se, but it’s a valid question to ask. Based on that, I don’t see your comment as being any more productive than the one you’re scrutinzing.
To me “open letter” usually signifies that there are a significant number of signatories, like various open letters to governments from the scientific community, with one not being a significant enough number to qualify however important that one person is (or thinks they are!). Sort-of like difference between some random person telling you that you are too drunk too often, and a group of concerned friends & relatives staging an intervention, to put it into a social context. It is that significant number of significant (either to the receiver of the letter, to the public at large, or both) people that makes it important. Here I feel the term is being used incorrectly.
How to get attention in the music business if you’re a third rate commentator: rail against whatever is obvious, and use big statements that mean nothing but people can get behind. That’s much easier than working out the nuance of the business.
I'm not familiar at all, but seeing that a musical artist known for fighting ticketing systems and ticket brokers with an "open letter" while purporting to be an honest broker just already strikes me as something that I'm not going agree. It's just has the air of something like big oil running a website called clean-energy.
That's just from reading the link. After reading the TFA, I'm not impressed at all
Say what you want about music critics but Ted Gioia is certainly not a “third rate commentator”. He’s certainly more accomplished and more thoughtful in his writing than 99% of critics out there
A lot of what I see from him is outright clickbait, or is such an over-simplification and elision of complex arguments as to be misleading, or is just incorrect opinion dressed up as fact.
I know he is well regarded as a jazz critic but that’s very different from his current incarnation of industry commentator/pundit.
I don't listen to Taylor Swift so maybe this is out of line, but is she not the absolute pinnacle of music commercialisation? Why would she take a break from making millions to tank her money making machine? Seems like asking Bezos to make less money so his employees can make more.
I'm a fan (her latest work with Bon Iver and the National is great) but yes, there's no one else in the world exploiting the music industry right now quite like Taylor
They're the vast majority of the fanbase, it's just that there have been so many attempts to legitimize her as an artist that there are way more "adult" fans than you would think (I work in a record store and the 54 year old hipster who works here seriously likes her. He plays her in the store).
Not to get all music snob (because I’m not), but aren’t there already several options for artists to connect directly with music lovers? Isn’t this basically the indie music scene?
Most consumers of music don’t care enough to seek it out, and there just isn’t (?) big money in indie music. I grew up in the age of the CD transition, and CDs were how I bought my first music. It was touted as cheaper (but got more expensive) and the quality of the music went down (1-2 good songs on an album).
Digital initially changed that and gave some power to consumers. I could spend $2 on the 2 good songs. Now I can spend $10/month (less than purchasing 1 album) and have unlimited music.
Basically, the enshittification of the music industry, to the point where I, an average music consumer, don’t really care.
>I grew up in the age of the CD transition, and CDs were how I bought my first music. It was touted as cheaper (but got more expensive) and the quality of the music went down (1-2 good songs on an album).
I more 'came of age' in the CD transition era, but to claim that quality of music went down after one's youth has been proclaimed since before Neanderthals banged rocks together. The whole reason 45's and later single cassettes existed was to get people to at least buy that One Hit off an album rather than the whole thing.
I suppose the random access nature of the CD also made it easier to only listen to the good songs. Not that you can’t on vinyl or tape, but it’s certainly not as easy.
Anyway, I didn’t do a great job expanding on my previous thought. The 1-2 “good” songs were also the radio singles and enough of a reason for someone to buy an album. I know I’m a “Top-40-play-the-hits” listener. But that was kinda the point wasn’t it—the labels put the 2 good songs on the radio and charged $20 for the album.
I don’t think I’d want Taylor swift owning the record company. That’s not really a solution.
And the last thing I want is the netflixification of music with every artist having their own app so you pay Taylor Swift $5/month for her label’s music. $5 to The Rolling Stones. Etc etc.
If you can live with radio-style streaming, music has mechanical licensing, so any streaming service in the US can pay the statuatory royalties to get access to everything.
If you want to play specific songs on demand, or pay less than the statuatory rates, then the label has to be ok with it.
The labels and artists are ok with current Spotify/Apple/etc streaming rates.
I actually kind of like just buying albums at $10 a pop and storing them on my own cloud and streaming them around to wherever I want. That’s 12 albums a year so not terrible. And I own them forever.
and when I buy from an indie artist they get like $5-10 per album instead of $1.
I'm saying the everything+ model of music streaming can't really happen, because your chosen market participant can just pay blanket license rates to stream you everything; or worst case, a new player can emerge to do that.
That won't happen in movies and tv, because there's no blanket license available, and rightsholders sometimes refuse to license their content.
Tidal worked out reasonably well. It’s still well-run post-exit.
I’m a happy subscriber (and a Spotify/Apple Music refugee), but I can name zero Jay Z songs.
I hope they continue chugging along (and continue to pay artists more the Spotify), but if Taylor Swift can out-music-industry Square (now, Block), then I probably won’t complain!
> Musicians only make pennies on new albums—or fractions of a penny—where previously they made dollars.
Is this really true? I mean the per stream payout is insanely low compared to an album sale (I think it’s like $7/thousand songs played vs $1 per album). But album sales were just front loaded vs streams being paid out pennies at a time.
If an album has 10 songs and I buy the cd, the artist gets $1 (if they’re lucky, they probably get much, much less). If I stream those 10 songs they get $0.07 (seven cents).
But for albums I’ve bought I might listen to those songs hundreds or even thousands of times. If I streamed them all the artist ends up making more but it might be over 20+ years.
I think I’ve listened to Joshua Tree 500 times but it came out in 1987. So that’s 35 years. While it’s only a few cents per year, over time it’s much more than what they’d get from an album sale.
I’m also not sure what the alternative is and I haven’t heard of many proposed. Spotify is already $15/month. Even if they doubled their payout and upped the price to $30/month it’s still just pennies per year.
I used to love buying CDs from artists I liked at concerts in small venues so that the artist would get most of the $20 I was forking over. Sadly, I'm no longer in my 20s living in a large city that has lots of artists going through.
The royalties from streaming are atrociously bad. Just read some of the speeches by the writers on strike to get an idea how the economics are setup nowadays.
Are they worse than royalties on albums though? Those were atrociously bad as well.
I think streaming pays out lots if you get to hundreds of thousands or millions of streams (the equivalent of selling 100k albums).
The speeches I’ve read from writers on strike kind of blow my mind because they make $5-10k/week. I don’t think that’s comparable to artists as the average writer makes way more than the average singer.
not sure if this is currently accurate but a quick google search turned up these rates:
$/stream | service
-------- | -------------
$0.008 | apple music
$0.00402 | amazon music
$0.00318 | spotify
That really isn't bad at all if the artist gets all of it.. On the other hand, if the record label is taking a big chunk of that then it is absolutely terrible.
He calls himself the Honest Broker, but I have found on many occasions he plays fast and loose with the truth . I am not sure where he gets this figure from. He makes similar wild, unsupported claims like 'AI is dying' or 'Facebook/meta is dying' etc. He wrote an article when Meta stock was at $200 that it was going to die. Now at $310. He claimed that Chat GPT was a loss/failure on Microsoft's part because Bing search market share is flat (Chat GPT is way more than Bing). We need to hold people accountable for their claims.
> For the first time in 500 years, an increasing number of people listen to music, and don’t even know the name of the artist or the song
Radio is what, 100?
>The streaming platforms prefer a situation where fan loyalty is to their app, not the musician.
Where’s this coming from? Havent listeners always been “loyal” to inevitable platforms? I don’t understand this decline in loyalty to fans.
>Musicians only make pennies on new albums—or fractions of a penny—where previously they made dollars
You mean back when people bought albums? Is it up to Spotify to compensate all these artists lost wages that were originally given by 100+ record companies? The entire foundation has been replaced, stop vilifying streaming platforms.
> AI bad, grrr
So much music, especially techno, sounds like it was made by AI anyway. Do guys like this ever stop and think maybe Pop music is easily emulated because it’s derivative? That maybe not everyone seems music as art? It’s going to happen no matter what “Tay Tay” has to say.
Kids are going to be singing songs that only existed the second they pressed the play button, and that one kid will only know the lyrics, I think there’s some beauty in that.
>Live music is in even worse shape—venues have never fully recovered from the pandemic
People aren’t going to start seeing shows because “it’s the right thing to do”. That’s not something that will last. Read bowling alone, general community decline is a long standing topic.
>The major record labels don’t care. They would rather buy up the rights to old songs than create new ones.
Again, is this true? Are new artists no longer being signed to major labels? Can labels even make money off new artists?
> Indie radio, music media, and other traditional supports of music culture are also in irreversible decline.
I don’t really know what that means, but…ok?
So much of these points are just weird opinions that the writer just assumes we agree with.
Taylor is never going to read some academic blogger’s anti-corporate music rant. And even if she did, her fans are tweens. That force of children has no idea what you’re talking about.
Write a letter to Neal Young and his fans. You’d have a better chance, they’d eat this crap with a spoon.
46 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadAnd in the world of tech if you say "considered harmful" it's a similar thing - the label makes the message worthy of attention.
Hard to understand but that's the way people seem to work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=honest-broker.com
That said, he's not really what I come here to read.
That's just from reading the link. After reading the TFA, I'm not impressed at all
Most of his writing was done under a different domain, which I can't recall.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Gioia
I know he is well regarded as a jazz critic but that’s very different from his current incarnation of industry commentator/pundit.
I'm a fan (her latest work with Bon Iver and the National is great) but yes, there's no one else in the world exploiting the music industry right now quite like Taylor
Most consumers of music don’t care enough to seek it out, and there just isn’t (?) big money in indie music. I grew up in the age of the CD transition, and CDs were how I bought my first music. It was touted as cheaper (but got more expensive) and the quality of the music went down (1-2 good songs on an album).
Digital initially changed that and gave some power to consumers. I could spend $2 on the 2 good songs. Now I can spend $10/month (less than purchasing 1 album) and have unlimited music.
Basically, the enshittification of the music industry, to the point where I, an average music consumer, don’t really care.
I more 'came of age' in the CD transition era, but to claim that quality of music went down after one's youth has been proclaimed since before Neanderthals banged rocks together. The whole reason 45's and later single cassettes existed was to get people to at least buy that One Hit off an album rather than the whole thing.
Anyway, I didn’t do a great job expanding on my previous thought. The 1-2 “good” songs were also the radio singles and enough of a reason for someone to buy an album. I know I’m a “Top-40-play-the-hits” listener. But that was kinda the point wasn’t it—the labels put the 2 good songs on the radio and charged $20 for the album.
And the last thing I want is the netflixification of music with every artist having their own app so you pay Taylor Swift $5/month for her label’s music. $5 to The Rolling Stones. Etc etc.
If you want to play specific songs on demand, or pay less than the statuatory rates, then the label has to be ok with it.
The labels and artists are ok with current Spotify/Apple/etc streaming rates.
I actually kind of like just buying albums at $10 a pop and storing them on my own cloud and streaming them around to wherever I want. That’s 12 albums a year so not terrible. And I own them forever.
and when I buy from an indie artist they get like $5-10 per album instead of $1.
That won't happen in movies and tv, because there's no blanket license available, and rightsholders sometimes refuse to license their content.
I’m a happy subscriber (and a Spotify/Apple Music refugee), but I can name zero Jay Z songs.
I hope they continue chugging along (and continue to pay artists more the Spotify), but if Taylor Swift can out-music-industry Square (now, Block), then I probably won’t complain!
Is this really true? I mean the per stream payout is insanely low compared to an album sale (I think it’s like $7/thousand songs played vs $1 per album). But album sales were just front loaded vs streams being paid out pennies at a time.
If an album has 10 songs and I buy the cd, the artist gets $1 (if they’re lucky, they probably get much, much less). If I stream those 10 songs they get $0.07 (seven cents).
But for albums I’ve bought I might listen to those songs hundreds or even thousands of times. If I streamed them all the artist ends up making more but it might be over 20+ years.
I think I’ve listened to Joshua Tree 500 times but it came out in 1987. So that’s 35 years. While it’s only a few cents per year, over time it’s much more than what they’d get from an album sale.
I’m also not sure what the alternative is and I haven’t heard of many proposed. Spotify is already $15/month. Even if they doubled their payout and upped the price to $30/month it’s still just pennies per year.
The royalties from streaming are atrociously bad. Just read some of the speeches by the writers on strike to get an idea how the economics are setup nowadays.
I think streaming pays out lots if you get to hundreds of thousands or millions of streams (the equivalent of selling 100k albums).
The speeches I’ve read from writers on strike kind of blow my mind because they make $5-10k/week. I don’t think that’s comparable to artists as the average writer makes way more than the average singer.
Would it do them any good?
Radio is what, 100?
>The streaming platforms prefer a situation where fan loyalty is to their app, not the musician.
Where’s this coming from? Havent listeners always been “loyal” to inevitable platforms? I don’t understand this decline in loyalty to fans.
>Musicians only make pennies on new albums—or fractions of a penny—where previously they made dollars
You mean back when people bought albums? Is it up to Spotify to compensate all these artists lost wages that were originally given by 100+ record companies? The entire foundation has been replaced, stop vilifying streaming platforms.
> AI bad, grrr
So much music, especially techno, sounds like it was made by AI anyway. Do guys like this ever stop and think maybe Pop music is easily emulated because it’s derivative? That maybe not everyone seems music as art? It’s going to happen no matter what “Tay Tay” has to say.
Kids are going to be singing songs that only existed the second they pressed the play button, and that one kid will only know the lyrics, I think there’s some beauty in that.
>Live music is in even worse shape—venues have never fully recovered from the pandemic
People aren’t going to start seeing shows because “it’s the right thing to do”. That’s not something that will last. Read bowling alone, general community decline is a long standing topic.
>The major record labels don’t care. They would rather buy up the rights to old songs than create new ones.
Again, is this true? Are new artists no longer being signed to major labels? Can labels even make money off new artists?
> Indie radio, music media, and other traditional supports of music culture are also in irreversible decline.
I don’t really know what that means, but…ok?
So much of these points are just weird opinions that the writer just assumes we agree with.
Taylor is never going to read some academic blogger’s anti-corporate music rant. And even if she did, her fans are tweens. That force of children has no idea what you’re talking about.
Write a letter to Neal Young and his fans. You’d have a better chance, they’d eat this crap with a spoon.