Yes, I think this happens in all open markets with no regulation. It is the same in agriculture. The farmer grow the food with his time and work, but he has to go to a market, he is competing with all the farmers of the same market, imagine lettuce. As lettuce are easy to produce and cheap, like music, the market is paying 0,05 $ per lettuce, all the other farmers are creating this market. Later the first middleman go to this market and pack the lettuce, and transport it, asking for 0,5 $ to the supermarket, that sells you the lettuce to the consumer for 1 $.

Farmers want a minimum price for their lettuce, but this is against the rules of market to offer the goods and services at the lowest possible level. Goberns don't want to regulate on minimal prices. You can't sell lettuce for more price than the farmer around you. If the vast mayority of musicians and artist, upload their creations to streaming services, they are giving their hard work creations for pennies.

People want to maximize their consume. And that's what spotify is doing. Offering all the lettuce (music) you want for suscription fee.
I think there is no option to unionize from music artist in different countries, not like writers in hollywood. And that you can't differentiate your music from the music of other "farmers", so this industry will be allways condemned to the new waves of tech and market. With the pros of being the first disrupted (remeber napster, now AI), and the cons of being a cheap commodity for the big capital of Wall Street.

IMO, the unique way of changing all this situation, is rethinking the market. Creating something that incentives the shareholders, to share more profit with creators. There is a thread about Patreon, related with that.

 

You should ask him if that's from personal experience because my experiences and my peers are not remotely bad with payments. In fact, they pay very quickly.

 

That's the problem when society is dictated by a free market economy with minimal regulations (or more specifically minimally enforced laws and regulations). Every priority is driven strictly by profit and the most powerful companies and lobbyists control the advantage and set the rules. You wind up with monopolization, price fixing, distribution inequality, and unfair business practices. The markets are also subject to all sorts of manipulation that control/prevent freedom of choice that leave little alternatives. I'm just curious what would happen if youtube and facebook decided to get involved in music distribution since so many popular yt channels already feature patreon links. What if youtube did something similar to beatstars. Beatmakers and artists are already uploading huge amts of content and are sharing links directed toward their business landing pages. If youtube also allowed paid subscribers to sell their music via yt platform while also streaming videos, they would eliminate all the middlemen like distrokid and would give both spotify and apple a run for their money.

 

You dont have to buy , rutracker has every cd you can think on flac and lot of them on 44.1 24bit or 96khz 24bit or vinyls at that rates etc . When i discovered it 15 years ago , i sold all my cds .....

 

I agree with much of what you stated, but you can differentiate your lettuce, thats what a brand or a band is all about, Led Zeppelin is different than Peter Gabreiel, is different than 10cc etc. by developing a unique and creative sound you become a brand. just like French Champaign - yes it difficult, but it is worth it , if you can pull it off.
So many people want to sound like someone else and no one needs a bad copy of anything and even a perfect copy is only a copy of something you already have, so redundant. The one thing that made music interesting from the 1960's to the 1990's is that people were trying to find different sounds and create new genre's. its been reduced to remixing the past at this point, which explains alot.

 

The problem is to diferentiate a lettuce from another. Genres, subgenres, mixed styles, but all doing the same that CASH OUT. In the old times there were other ingredients in comparison, more like caviar, producing an album was very expensive, plus other changes. I also like old western music but we are talking about streaming era.

With the tons of music produced / uploaded today to streaming platforms. There has to be a cut in some form, a way of curating the content.
-Because of the cost of storage. That is not so simple, having multiple files in multiple rates, for multiple globe areas.
-The exploit of the system, loading tons of shit songs, so finally at the end of the month you are making a living with millions of streamings. 1k x 1k = 1 million

So cutting cost & reduce payments to artist. This is all about = PROFIT! A legit one, as they are a private company
Anyway >1000 visits, is nothing IMO. This are like 0,00x dollars in revenue.

 

what a fucker. destroying the music industry with a smile in his face.

by that logic the cost of streaming all songs is also close to zero, yet he is raising prices of premium membership.

 

Holy shit. It's been a while since my jaw literally dropped but this piece of scum did it.

 

This guy should have nothing to do with the music biz

Music is just disposable "content" that makes him money.

He has no clue of the reality of being an artist and the cost of operating as one.

 

Music has always been a reflection of the state of the world in its lyrics and thematic ideas. From Baroque, Renaissance, Romantic.... The entire Height-Ashbury period... Jazz... Rock 'n Roll... the spoken work, Hip-Hop... People invested their time and money into getting messages to the world at large through music.

I am gob smacked that a fool with billions like Daniel Ek devalues the worth of music creation so ignorantly. Anyone over the age of 40 completely understands that time is money. By 40, any person has lived at least 3/8ths of their life and they understand the value of their time spent on anything. Even if the cost of creating music was financially next to zero, which it can be with some tools not requiring real musicians, there is no such thing in creation as zero-time.

Music has always been a reflection of the state of the world in its lyrics and thematic ideas to reiterate- It is reflection that we are on the verge of being run by autocrats in nearly everything unless something is done. I won't derail this because that's a tangent and best left for another thread, but it is related. People will have to start making the hard decisions before too long in music, and in life.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jun 3, 2024

As this wanker Ek states - today its just "content" not art or music or reflective of the times - just content.
Unfortunately most people under 30 look at music this way. Just ask one - are you a musician or content creator? The result is depressing.
Most of these "content creators" don't even own a stereo system

 

I do not begrudge anyone making a living however they choose, as long as they do not leave a trail of shattered lives in the process, or stop others who do it differently.
We now live in a world where too many people do not give a shit who they hurt in the process unfortunately.

The world should have started screaming about five years ago when it was found that people who made up playlists of other people's music, were making more money than the people who made the music they were pawning off in playlists. Too late now.
The penny should have dropped when a major music magazine put Kanye in front of a piano and a guitar and asked him to play one of his tunes. His answer should have screamed at people, but it didn't.