They are aiming to provide storage service for legally recorded concerts? Great. This should be a separate project, partnered and advertised, but formally unrelated to IA "backup the internet" thing. They are aiming to be a huge online library that allows you to "legally" borrow books? Great, let it be another separate project. Internet Archive has enough problems on its own, there's no need to keep loading all sorts of obviously dangerous initiatives on top of it.
Credibility doesn’t fall from the sky… it has to actually be earned by someone or groups of someones. Usually in the course of their decisions and activities.
Librarians don’t magically start off with an unlimited amount of it, such that they can completely ignore these considerations, and experience no consequences.
Even if they truly are all the most amazing, wonderful, honorable people on Earth, their credibility would still be depleteable.
Clearly not pseudonymous accounts on HN, nor can it be self declared otherwise 8 billion people can declare themselves to be ‘archivists’.
And why not? As far as I know, there is no barrier to entry to archiving things for your personal use from publically available websites.
Or are we talking about people who archive for public use?
Second, I don't know much about charities or whatever legal form the IA and co fall under, but I do recall they need to have a board of representatives; is it legal for the same people to be on that board for multiple related charities? I can imagine adding more leadership to different charities becomes challenging.
The conventional idea is a band makes a CD of their songs, mastered to perfection, stamps out CDs and streams, and that's it. The exact same audio, let's call it the "radio edit". I hear the song on the radio, it's exactly the same. I can tell when a performer is lip syncing, because no singer sings a song the same way twice, and I know the radio edit. It's burned in my brain.
But, I discovered that when real bands, like Fleetwood Mac, play a concert, they play their old standards, but in a different way every time. I bought their concert CDs, because hearing different versions of the same song makes it fresh and fun again.
So my idea is, why don't bands produce a dozen or so "radio edits" of their better songs? I bet they'd increase sales, especially to people like me.
I suppose they think they are doing that with the "remastered" edits, but those all stink. Sing it again, Sam!
> So my idea is, why don't bands produce a dozen or so "radio edits" of their better songs? I bet they'd increase sales, especially to people like me.
In no particular order:
- because concert recordings already achieve this purpose.
- because time in the studio is costly, and you are not touring or composing while you are doing it.
- because every single person will have her favorite studio version, the same way they may have their favorite concert radio and most would not buy n versions of the same song and would dislike the slightly modified one. Some have already produced n version, uncensored and censored versions. Usually you like the one you heard first the most.
- Producing many different SKUs does not magically equal to making significantly more sales and can reduce revenues if stock of the less popular ones do not sell.
Most bands are funded similar to VC.. there's an investment, then payoff then profit. If you don't payoff the investment because you "had fun with it", your band will be dropped and you are searching for a label while working your day job.
Of course, the music industry went after them once it was discovered they weren't actually a waffle recipe website, and the sites were taken down. I hope the copies and archives continue to live on on data hoarders' systems.
LOL
> because concert recordings already achieve this purpose
They are quite different, not subtly different.
> because time in the studio is costly
When they do 20 takes and pick the "best", there's always a second "best". It's not like you're starting over.
> and you are not touring or composing while you are doing it
C'mon, a big chunk of the composing is done in the studio. I watched "Get Back" and saw the many variations before the Beatles picked one.
> most would not buy n versions of the same song
Sure, but some would, and that number is greater than epsilon. I'd buy Led Zeppelin variants.
> Producing many different SKUs
Make the small variations the same SKU. Slight variations does not imply that either is better than the other.
For modern pop music... as i understand it, the 'best' is a compilation of the 20 takes. There isn't necessarily a 'second best' take to choose. You could comp the takes differently, but i don't know anyone in any field who likes intentionally doing a job less than what they think is the 'best'.
Most of the hundreds of old 78 labels (Brunswick, Federal, Odeon, Okeh, to name a few) [0] are long gone, as are their masters (if any) and their artists. IA recovered those recordings from existing copies made long, long ago... preserving a cultural heritage directly from collections of music available -only- on 78s. Many of the recordings were made with fragile shellac.
That is apparently the focus of these invidious lawsuits.
Because they don’t make (practically) any money on CD sales, streaming, or radio plays, the record labels do. That one performance is recorded, and they get paid for that performance and the record label owns it. Any time that recording is played, it’s seen as a marketing to sell the album.
The artist makes their money through each live performance, so it makes sense for them to change things up so concert goers have an incentive to see something new.
No, not any more, because Napster and the other IP-theft networks that followed in its wake destroyed that revenue model, both for the musicians and the record companies. But before that, many popular musicians made very large fortunes purely from record sales. So much so that some of them, most famously the Beatles, were able to give up live performance altogether.
Also, I would suggest that what draws typical audiences to live performance is not the hope of hearing the lead guitarist bust out hot new variations on his solos. What they enjoy is the communal experience and the thrill of seeing famous people in the flesh.
Hell, tons of other genres are recorded piles of times with each being different. Even in the pop world, covers exist, a long tradition of different artists doing the same song.
But they're each done by different musicians. They're not different takes from the same studio sessions.
I had that exact same thought today when listening to Snarky Puppy’s re-release of We Like It Here. I have become so familiar with the original release that all of the differences in the remixes sound like mistakes, and the alternative takes sound like the musician forgot to read the music.
Yes, I realise they’re improvised. Which is the point. Because they only published one canonical improvisation (until now) my conception of their music was made rigid in a way that probably wasn’t intended by the artists.
(It also makes me appreciate the work that Giles Martin did on The Beatles’ remixes, that any deviation would be seen as heresy, and yet he’s managed to avoid any substantive controversy.)
Some artists may choose to lean in the technology more than others, with one extreme being soloists and improvisations published in the form of a bespoke model, trained on the entire history of jazz and refined by the artist to suit their tastes and the particular piece of music.
They do though; more and more I'm seeing artists publish alternative edits, remasters, live versions, demos, songs-that-didn't-make-it, basically more of their back catalog onto streaming platforms. These "rare" tracks aren't going to sell albums so the investment to publish a new album won't be worth it, but uploading more stuff to streaming platforms is relatively cheap and easy in comparison. It's long tail stuff, but streaming platforms earn big on long tail.
That is absolutely nothing new. Artists have known what OP is saying, and have been doing exactly that, since we started putting music on tin foil in 1877.
one could also mention the electronic scene in there. aphex twin released ventolin in 1995 which was the same track remixed multiples times with different edits.
A while back, Scorpions decided to re-record all their hits and release them on an album. The result was so close in production and performance that Apple Music went ahead and swapped the new version in place of the original.
You'd dial up Rock You Like a Hurricane, and it'd play this thing that sounded just like the version you had burned into your head, but subtly different. It was like watching a car chase scene in a straight-to-Netflix movie where they thought they could get away with doing the whole thing in CGI. Straight down the middle of Uncanny Valley, to the point where you can't enjoy the song at all, and just spend your 4 minutes cataloging the tiny differences that don't live up to the Real Thing.
Those hit songs all captured Magic in some way that just can't be recreated. Plenty have tried what you're talking about (Great White did the same trick, redoing their early stuff with their new singer), but all it does is create bland copies that don't live up to the original. They actually make you wonder why you liked the original in the first place, since (in GW's case) the replacement is just a cookie-cutter blues rock song that anybody could have done.
It's hard to believe until you hear it, since yeah, it seems like a good idea.
Owning the master means when Carnival Cruise Lines wants to license “Virgin Killer” the band gets the money.
Why, then, do I love all the various Fleetwood Mac concert versions of their songs better than the radio edits?
Same with unplugged versions.
And what's the problem with that? Wow. I didn't know the music business was so stodgy :-)
On topic, I like studio and live versions but some artists are better better at one than the other.
Because, to a first approximation, you and I don't result in any real revenue no matter what an artist does.
If you're a mid-tier artist, you want to fully extract money from your 100 rabid fans who will show up every single time you appear in that area and everybody else can go hang.
> So my idea is, why don't bands produce a dozen or so "radio edits" of their better songs? I bet they'd increase sales, especially to people like me.
When was the last time you heard anything off of Blackstar by Bowie? Or any of Johnny Marr's latest stuff?
The issue isn't creating music. It's getting any of your music played anywhere.
Call it the "studio version".
A "radio edit" is a cut for quick consumption.
I've worked in a number of recording sessions. There are seldom actually multiple takes -- those cost money. There is usually one publishable take. When you've got that one in the can, you move on to the next song. But naturally I can't speak for major acts like Fleetwood Mac. Historically, bands varied a lot in terms of how much editing they wanted to do. Many hits were recorded in one take by hired studio musicians.
Have you ever seen a TV commercial played to death, to the point where you hate the commercial, the product, and the company behind it? I bet that would be less of a problem if the same commercial had several different takes, and then mix them up when broadcasting them. (Yes, I know some are deliberately different, and yes, it helps.) Even a version now and then where they flub their lines, or trip over something, etc.
Wouldn't it be more fun if Star Wars had two versions, one where Han shoots first, one where Greedo does, and you never knew which one you'd see when going to the theater? There are still a couple flubs in the released version, like when Luke yells "Carrie", there could be different reels released at the same time. The fans would then be impelled to keep going to the theater hoping to see all the different versions.
And, of course, there's always the unplugged variants and the performance CDs.
I know that Jimi Hendrix seems to live on and on as his estate finds alternate cuts of his songs and releases album after album. They seem to have done well with this, but only pursued it out of desperation after he died.
Do you not find it enjoyable to hear live performances of a song because it's different than the radio edit? Why not take more advantage of that?
There are. They call them Diet Pepsi, 7UP, Gatorade, etc.
But more to the point, music doesn't work like soft drinks. In soft drinks the product is physical and has a unit cost so the customer isn't just buying Pepsi once and then they have already have Pepsi and never need any more. In music an artist makes an album and then people buy it, at which point they have it and if the artist wants more money they have to make more albums. But making more recordings of the same songs is kind of like making more songs, in the sense that it's something people might want and don't already have.
You want something that makes it so a signed artist can't just do a cover of an independent artist's song, or use it in advertising, without paying. You don't want anti-circumvention laws that lock down consumer devices. But the laws do the latter -- which facilitates the monopolization of distribution -- and then artists de facto lose the former because once there's a cartel you're under pressure to sign with the record company and lose the rights to your music.
I understand that some musicians get nice royalties and this is their full-time thing, but most of us get close to nothing from streaming and barely break even from record sales.
I'd rather get nothing and be allowed to sample and remix everything.
I don't think their opinion matters much, but rather of those people who hold their rights.
And that ensures copyright is going to stay.
The smart musicians, like Taylor Swift, figured that out. Her latest tour brought in what, 2 billion dollars?
[1]: e.g., like this one from David Lowery of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven: https://thetrichordist.com/2016/02/16/the-reality-of-touring...
I feel like we need to break out the Housing Theory of Everything on this one.
Bands have been in competition with other bands since music was invented, that's not new. What's new is that it costs $200/night for a hotel room when you're making, uh, $200/night. If everything didn't cost so much then making that amount of money would work.
The music I like is good, and the music I don't like is bad. Zero people share my opinions on which is which. Are you sure you aren't just unhappy that other people don't share your taste and prefer superstar music?
Not to mention that those superstars need to come from somewhere. If a career in music is basically like spending all your money on lottery tickets, society ends up poorer: many hard-working young musicians are going to see it for the exploitation machine that it is, and go sell advertising instead.
Why would you think otherwise? How do you explain people buying "bad" music with their own money?
> many hard-working young musicians are going to see it for the exploitation machine that it is
Reminds me of every person I know that was laid off was sure he was a superstar.
I'm sure there are some overlooked gems, but remember Jimi Hendrix who came out of nowhere and went straight to the top. He was just that good.
I mean. I can enjoy ambient eerie dream-themed wailing and blown brass instruments [0], but it's not for everyone.
He definitely brought up some interesting points I had not considered about how only weekends will give a band a large draw, about over saturation of venues in the U.S., etc.
More fans mean more attendance on tours, so we're back to that, but also more fans buying merchandise, whether that's albums or something else. So there's no disproof of the argument that the band's worst enemy is obscurity, and then limiting the distribution of their music is still the threat rather than the solution.
Touring first doesn't work.
And if you're not good, touring won't fix it.
uh oh
And don't forget the band shirts. I still have an entire shelf full of band shirts even after getting rid of 2/3rds of mine back in 2020.
If you wanna know what sells for tech, go to the merch stands at an underground show =)
Both of them could do with more beanies
It's a supply and demand thing. There are so many musicians, the idea that they all can make a living doing it is simply not realistic. Only a very few will, regardless of whether they make a few pennies off of streaming or not. Having the government pay them through taxes is a terrible idea.
I know many people who are musicians. It's always a side gig.
I know artists, too. No money to be made there, either. Maybe a few pennies at the local arts&crafts fair.
The Law of Supply & Demand again is in play. More musicians => less pay for each.
The underground is dying though due to a plethora of other forms of entertainment. Shows were a great spot to get some social interaction, but people just don't go out as much anymore and are more likely to do discord and videogames instead of hitting up a basement, bar, cafe, or warehouse.
Which would include the family of working musicians | fencing contractors over the road from me in rural Western Australia.
The husband and wife lead performers are in their early forties and have been playing music live for 20 years .. they sell recordings but their main music income is hotel venues and music festivals - they tour almost half the weekends of the year, mostly local, sometime by plane to the other side of the country.
When not touring they're building fences by contract (ATM mostly around solar setups for Telstra and mobile repeater towers in the rural telecomm domain)
They're not a super band, the live performances pay for themselves and turn a profit, all up they're making something like $200K (AUD) per annum from both jobs.
They're not especially well known by name outside of blues hotel gigging.
Like it or not, that's always going to be the case. The Law of Supply & Demand cannot be repealed. It's in play even when the government fixes prices and payouts.
Artists have almost always been poor unless they found wealthy or state sponsors.
The subject is broader than musicians only.
Are people spending crazy money on Taylor Swift at their local mega stadium, also hitting up local music venues? Seems unlikely.
People like both and there are tons of players out there.
Heck, the car I just got has one. (Used 2001 model
My granddaughter absolutely loves CD media. She looks at the notes for the couple I have cases and liner notes for.
She decorates the ones we made with her tunes on them.
And working the SONY player has shown her the allure those techy looking vacuum, phosphor displays [1] coupled with buttons, dials and the little noises the thing will make, all combine to make for a fun experience just operating the thing.
I wonder what she will make of hidden tracks... [0]
[0] https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/90s-hidden-tracks/
It is just that for Taylor Swift in particular, I don't know if this genre is well represented in local venues.
The reality is that things have gotten much tougher for working musicians in general.
1. it sounds exactly like the radio edit
2. if they're dancing while singing, they're lip syncing. Nobody can sing and dance simultaneously
Just for fun tomorrow, go out for a jog and try to sing.
https://www.thethings.com/how-does-beyonce-sing-and-dance-at...
Maybe getting involved in music is not a proper function of government.
I do eat my own pudding, though. The D compiler is given away for free.
As evidence, Germany in the 1800s had no copyrights nor patents. Their economy boomed. Look at how free software, of the highest quality, has taken over the internet. I am not aware of any particularly compelling counter-evidence that copyright and patents improve productivity.
I made my living for a decade off of FOSS I originally authored, and was highly active in FOSS circles for much of that time. Being well acquainted with the economics of open source I am thus inoculated against the laughable notion that FOSS is analogous to music. Selling software != selling documents.
Sorry, what? We're talking about streaming platforms here that have contracts with record labels that have contracts with musicians. If those contracts aren't paying musicians enough, why is the solution to impose a new tax on streaming platforms specifically to pay musicians?
From the page they link to:
> The Living Wage for Musicians Act would tax providers’ non-subscription revenues and add a small fee to the price of music streaming subscriptions. DSPs like Spotify offering interactive music streaming services would pass their taxed revenues and royalties to a non-profit collection and distribution fund, that would in turn pay artists in proportion to their monthly streams.
Isn't this what these contracts are supposed to already be doing? If the numbers aren't making sense then the contract needs to renegotiated. If musicians don't have enough power to renegotiate then the government can and should address that. But why would the solution be to use the taxation power to do the job that royalties are already supposed to be doing?
This feels like a classic case of addressing the symptoms (musicians aren't making enough money) while failing to address the actual problem (musicians have no power to negotiate for what they want).
They do treat it that way. They use the economies of scale and their skill at exploitation to steal it without paying a fair amount for it. By "fair", I mean an amount that would be paid if the industry were collectively owned by musicians.
But the key here is that in global capitalism, an amount of money is not proportional to the value you bring to others any more. Instead, it is proportional to how effective you are at growing the existing power structure itself, which is an emergent phenomenon of global, high tech capitalism.
Studios are akin to large corporations who extract raw materials for cheap from economically-poor countries. They exploit and short change the people who live there for enormous profits. Extracting "raw materials" as music is much the same phenomenon.
Therefore, in order to truly solve this problem, large corporations such as music industries must be taken down, and not negotiated with. So, my advice to musicians is not to negotiate, but to create and sell your music directly. Start a Patreon and take orders yourself.
The fact of the matter is that simply creating a product/service (or in this case, a song) is valuable, sure, but is typically only of limited value. Millions of people sing and write songs every year that nobody listens to or pays for. That fact predates evil executives and greedy companies. In fact, it's been the case for the entirety of mankind's history.
The ability to take a song, popularize it enough for consumers to want more of it, package it in a way that consumers will pay for it, and distribute it widely enough that a large number of consumers will pay for it, is very difficult. And very valuable. It's the difference between the 0.01% of music that makes money and the 99.99% of music that doesn't. Of course the people who are skilled at doing that are going to be able to demand and extract large fees.
This is true in every industry, not just art/music/etc.
For example, lots of people make software and games. But improving it to the point of wide desirability, packaging it up, marketing it, and selling it on a marketplace where it successfully out-competes with other software and games is very difficult.
The difference is that in most industries, the creators of the products themselves have taken on the responsibility for packaging, marketing, and selling their creations. Artists have largely outsourced this work to others. You may argue that they've been collectively hoodwinked, and I would partially agree. But it's also true that some of the richest and most powerful businesspeople of our generation are successful musicians (Taylor Swift, Jay-Z, Rihanna, Dr. Dre, Madonna, Beyonce, Paul McCartney, Lady Gaga, Drake, etc.)
(They don't ask us what songs were actually played, and we couldn't really tell them if they did.)
Unbelievably, ASCAP's slogan is "We Create Music". They do not create music, they create lawsuits. The only service they offer is, "You pay me whatever I ask, or I sue you". They provide the same service as in that Sopranos episode where Patsy and Burt try to extort a Starbucks. It's just a shakedown. It's just some wiseguy saying to you, "Here's your cigarette machine, there's going to be $500 a week in it, capisce?"
[…]
You might wonder how they get to that number. Is it all just arbitrary capriciousness? Yes:
BMI: They take your official fire department capacity and multiply it by the number of days you are open per week, and by some dollar amount. Actual attendance does not factor in. That dollar amount is higher if you ever charge admission, higher still if you have DJs, and even higher if you have live music! That's right, they charge you more when bands are playing their own songs. Oh, and of course there's the Footloose tax: it's even higher if you allow dancing. Or if you have a jukebox. (A jukebox!) ASCAP: I don't remember and I can't figure it out, but I think it is roughly the same nonsense that BMI does. SESAC: This one is based on capacity times days open per week, then multiplied by vibes. Also does not take attendance into account. GMR: This one is based on gross revenue times 0.15%. So if you play the same song at an event with a $10 ticket, and at one with a $30 ticket, sometimes that song is worth three times as much.
[…]
Over in one corner: the entire streaming industry, paying nothing. And over in the other corner: small rooms like mine, providing that which is in actuality the only way for many bands to make any money at all, that is, by giving them a stage to play on in support of their t-shirt sales business. Because, yes, the way you make money as a band is to actually be a garment retailer. ”
-- /backstage/log/2024/12/03.html on a site that doesn't like hn very much
>It is indeed, as you say, purely a racket, as is - let's be honest - the whole industry. Not even the Ferengi could some up with something more extractive. If the Ferengi were real, the American musical performace rights system would be in their textbooks, I swear.
Reply
Dara
6 days ago at 12:46pm
7
(If anything, I feel like I'm being a little unfair to the Ferengi.)It's not like every radio station, record label, and performance venue is owned by a wide array of competing companies in a free market. In reality it's a small handful of owners who will only put you in the spotlight if you accept unfair contracts.
Check out how a lot of K-Pop contracts are structured. Imagine having a lifetime non-compete where your co-workers at Microsoft were never allowed to work on your team ever again, forever. That's how bad contracts can be in the music industry.
Well, I believe that beyond a certain point, we should not have the capability to reach such a large audience in the first place. The entire phenomenon of globalization reduces meaning for the individual and is not a societal improvement.
If that isn't enough for you, then your goal must extend beyond wanting to control your own experience and into wanting to shape society, which means shaping the experiences of others. Others who are doing just fine following their own preferences and don't particularly need you to limit their options to conform to your preferences.
Meaning is purpose, purpose is reason, reason is intention, and intention is by definition an artifact of the mind. The only one who can reduce your meaning is you. If the fact that music spreads far and wide to many people whose taste doesn't match you reduces your meaning, then that's because you choose to reduce your own meaning.
All people try and shape society: right, left, anarchists, greens, etc. There is nobody that does not.
But labels don't do that anymore. Bands do their own insta / youtube etc.
Ultimately it's a tough industry. The fact of the matter is technology has made it vastly easier for more people to become musicians and distribute their music. The result is way more competition, which has turned music into a commodity. More competition = lower prices, that's just how it works, unfortunately.
Some artists succeed at making a living, but most don't. But the fact of the matter is that this is how it's always been. There wasn't a golden era of the past where millions of musicians were making a comfortable living. Even when artists got paid more-per-sale (because consumers were willing to pay more for physical copies of media), there were far fewer people able to become artists in the first place.
The Internet Archive's "National Emergency Library" seemed legally almost suicidal. It made me wonder who is calling the shots there and what their rationale is. Are they looking to cut a deal on this topic?
A typical consolidated radical device to raise awareness.
Even I, someone inclined to take up the banner of IA thought the whole thing raised serious questions about their decision making as an organization. That's not a good thing.
Some people may think that the loss of today will cause the upheaval of tomorrow.
> Was it
That I don't know. You look and try to make sense of it. You formulate hypotheses.
If the suit is found in favor of UGM and enforced at full effect (not impossible, but Hachette v. Internet Archive was not either), then IA will be on the hook for the full $621 Million. You can guess how that ends.
But even if they don't enforce at full effect (and given Web Archive has been successfully used to provide evidence against UMG and Sony multiple times now, they have a pretty strong incentive to get it burned down), a sizable portion of the 400,000 recordings are from disks that quite literally broke down after capture. Those disks are the last copies of those recordings. Ever. Should UMG and Sony succeed, it is a very safe assumption, given they already confirmed they don't have those recordings (and based on that, don't want them), that those recordings immediately become lost media.
We need a backup of the backup, because so much of what they've got is irreplaceable.
The entirety of IA is the idea that culture and history are to be preserved for future generations. The job of these big companies like UMG is to make as much money as possible, and destroying history eliminates a core competitor, themselves. IA's existence is poking the bear (just look at how often the Web Archive's existence is used by others to show off back actors in companies). Compromise left a long time ago.
Somewhere, there was a critical failure of risk assessment and management.
In the course of preservation, the Rule That Shall Not Be Violated(tm) is that anything which would lead to significant and irreversible damage or destruction of the artifact is off limits. Especially if the artifact is irreplacable.
Recording the audio off of those disks should not have happened if it was already understood or reasonably expected that doing so would lead to their destruction. Whoever gave the OK on that exhibited a critical failure of risk assessment and management.
I guess they are not "real musicians" because the internet doesn't agree with them?
From 1909 to 1975, copyright in the US had a term of 28 years, renewable for another 28.
An artist (perhaps Tony Bennett, who performed with Lady Gaga in 2021 at the age of 95) who recorded one of the last 78s in the archive's collection would have done so in 1954, expecting the copyright to expire no later than 2010.
all I could find is this though:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160728061257/https://www.jerry...
Indie labels and the occasional hit independent label like Def Row/TDE are small in comparison and usually only include the owning musicians established music, not their beginnings. Bands often have to fight to buy back rights for that kinda stuff.
Interscope, Reprise, etc are all owned by the big three. Interscope wasn't even founded by artists.
Also labels (like Def Row and Reprise) often sell out to the big three, so even if you sign to one of them when they're independent, that won't mean it'll last forever and you as an artist won't get veto over that.
The Archive provides a valuable service, but if they're gonna die on this hill I'm going to fight them alongside my allies of convenience the record labels.
There are hundreds of thousands of record labels. Your uncle could be running a record label in his garage.
UMG alone has 38% of the entire record label market share. Its annual revenue is more than the entire revenue of all independent record labels combined.
AFAIK the lion's share of the market is held by the top ten labels, none of whom have the musician's best interest at heart. So yes, it's reasonable to say that labels generally don't represent musicians.
Historically, musicians made most of their money off of concerts and merch (especially merch at concerts). Established musicians definitely rallies against streaming/digital downloads when it first came out, but some newer artists have embraced it given it cuts out the middle man and you don't necessarily need to suck up to labels to get any "airtime" and thus reach.
Spotify can only afford to pay its musicians "unfair" compensations. Otherwise it will be forced out of business.
This is HN, we don't really need witticisms at the top of the comment section.
If I signed an ink-and-paper petition as CuddleBunny227 it would be rightly disregarded and stricken even if I insisted that was my username on Reddit. Does that change if it's "on the Internet"?
Example: https://old.reddit.com/r/musicindustry/comments/1ao87z5/spot...
The usage of generative AI has significantly lowered the barrier to entry for the creative industry, leading to an influx of AI generated products that are easily consumable and can be used to generate revenue.
Until the platforms begin to regulate AI art, which I don't see why they would, we can expect to see more of them in the near future.
The use of generative AI should also mean that the name "creative industry" should be changed to just "industry".
- Selling products based on AI capabilities that do not yet and/or will never exist in the product
- Adding "AI" to the name of product lines with very little core functionality based on AI
- Rebranding non-generative algorithms as AI (e.g., SQL queries and if statements == AI)
- Changing the name and/or domain name of the company to imply AI capability
I look at companies with heavy trend-based advertising like C3.ai, who changed their name from a previous trend (C3.IoT), and then IBM that rode marketing waves related to Watson/Watson Health, IBM Blockchain, and now AI, and these are companies who are part of the disingenous "hoax" companies.