> I could blame the furniture stores for not promoting me or taking too big a cut or any number of other factors
not only could you but you should. Of course workers over the last few decades have internalised the mindset that they cannot use their power to bargain and that whatever they get is fair and they should just shut up, which is why we tolerate corporate middlemen eating our lunch.
I don't know if a penny per song is realistic or whatever, but going up against Spotify and record labels and trying to negotiate as much compensation for artists as possible collectively is exactly what they ought to do. Also, on the other end, as consumers we need to stop whining when we have to pay twenty bucks instead of ten bucks per month to compensate artists who we spend listening hours to every single week.
My scenario is not one of power imbalance, it is that I simply cannot create enough economic value doing it to make a living, and I have no right to change anyone else's rules to accommodate for that fact. I cannot make you a bookshelf cheaper than you can buy one at IKEA. At my software developer rate a Billy Bookcase would cost you $1000. It's probably safe to say you aren't going to "stop whining" and pay that.
But you know what I did last week? I didn't mope around at some job I hate complaining about "Big Furniture". I made a bookcase. I also wrote a bunch of software. I can call myself a woodworker, I paid my mortgage, and IKEA sold thousands of Billy Bookcases. All is good.
Your example is a little specious in that a bookcase is very different from a song. The production of one has huge economies of scale, whereas a song doesn't. I agree that producing things competitively is important to improve overall efficiency, but with the music industry you really have a small cartel of massive labels dictating the terms for everyone else (ie. engaging in massively anti-competitive behavior). It seems weird to me that your pro-market ideology leads you to support what (to me) seems to be more or less wage-fixing for a labor supplier (musicians)
> small cartel of massive labels dictating the terms for everyone else
Only for those who sign with them. So this brings the question
as what's stopping these musicians to make music independently and market using internet along the way avoiding these labels. It is not even the case that music can be listened only via monopolistic mobile app stores.
I have used small independent service providers for tax filing, lawn mowing, cleaning and myriad other services by finding at internet. They are not backed by big corporate chains. Why music has to come from big labels.
I think generally the point of cartelization is to make it very challenging NOT to sign with them. Clearly many independent labels can thrive, and I can't imagine that it's impossible for an artist to start their own label. Nevertheless, when eg. sound and recording engineers can be aggressively poached by a major studio it's got to be challenging to go it alone.
Price fixing? You can buy music directly from artists for any price you want. I do it all the time on Bandcamp and independent stores, for both digital and vinyl releases.
Piracy set the price at 0, Spotify pulled the price up from there, but there is literally nothing stopping consumers today from paying more for music except that they don't want to.
>Price fixing? You can buy music directly from artists for any price you want.
I think you're missing my point. The opportunity to market direct to consumer does not negate the massive wage-setting power of a cartel which can buy up rivals, production talent, leverage radio, venue, and streaming contracts, etc.
Like I don't know how you can read something like this and just say "well have you tried selling on Bandcamp?"
'''
Live Nation’s consolidation of the industry was rapid and aggressive, spending around $1 billion in just 18 months in the late 1990s buying independent concert promoters and venue owners. By 1999, when radio titan Clear Channel paid $4.4 billion for the company (then called SFX), it was the largest music venue owner and concert promoter. Antitrust enforcers took no action to stop the deal.
By 2005, Clear Channel had spun off its live music division into a new, standalone company: Live Nation, the country’s largest artists manager and concert promoter and second-largest venue owner. Today, Live Nation is once again part of a massive broadcasting and live music conglomerate that wields immense power.
Live Nation has since combined with the ticketing monopoly Ticketmaster, satellite radio monopolist SiriusXM, and online radio leader Pandora as part of media mega-conglomerate Liberty Media. Last year, Liberty Media was approved to take control of iHeartMedia, the largest radio station owner in the country; prior to 2014 iHeart was known as Clear Channel. The proverbial band was back together, antitrust concerns and all. Competition and consumer advocates stridently opposed every corporate tie-up along the way; my organization was part of a coalition that argued against the Liberty/iHeart deal last year. Antitrust enforcers permitted every one.
'''
Further down:
'''
The company’s power to steer business away from rivals is not theoretical. In late 2019 the Justice Department found that, for years, Live Nation had abused its monopoly by steering its artists and tours away from venues that refused to use Ticketmaster. The government could have sued for monopoly violations but instead simply amended the agreement it struck with the companies when they merged a decade ago.
> The production of one has huge economies of scale, whereas a song doesn't.
Actually, now that we're digital, the economies of scale of music are similar to software, in that they are massive (and Spotify is a key enabler of that).
> It seems weird to me that your pro-market ideology leads you to support what (to me) seems to be more or less wage-fixing for a labor supplier (musicians)
Musicians have been largely entrepreneurial for centuries. The advent of physical media and distribution control enabled them to form these cartels, and extract rents to enable luxurious "rockstar" lifestyles for a select few. There is now far more opportunity for success and distribution without labels than there has been since they started.
>Actually, now that we're digital, the economies of scale of music are similar to software, in that they are massive
Is this the case? It seems that there's the fundamental limitation of 10 musicians not being able to record a song in 1/10th of the time. Certainly there are SOME economies of scale, but it seems a little incredible that music would be as "factory producible" as something like a bookshelf or a car.
> The advent of physical media and distribution control enabled them to form these cartels, and extract rents to enable luxurious "rockstar" lifestyles for a select few.
This seems incongruous with the rest of what you are saying. Yes clearly there is an entrepreneurial component of music, and absolutely eg. SoundCloud and BandCamp is enabling independent artists in new and important ways. That doesn't change the fact that massive financial institutions are rent-seeking the bejeezus out of the bulk of the industry in a way that (to me) would appear to hurt competition.
Spotify is not the corporate middle man. The big record companies are. Any musician is free to not put their music on spotify and to not sell the rights to a record company. They can then let you stream a song for $50 on their website.
It's also absolutely ridiculous that you champion those who want to make more money while also saying that everyone on the other end who wants to spend less should "stop whining".
I champion people who produce things, be that artists, software developers, woodworkers or anyone else who builds stuff. Spotify and labels are both distributors and middlemen who profit from the work of others, it's consumers and large platforms that squeeze creators with their greedy mindset of 'as much as possible, for as little money as possible'.
It's long overdue that we move away from this sleazy consumer mindset and start valuing creators.
Except almost everyone can produce things. You have to produce things people want. Not only that, you need to find the people who want your stuff, especially if its niche.
Yes, I'm a highly paid software engineer. The people who created the company I work for are, however, far better paid.
There's nothing stopping me from quitting and building my own business and selling the software I produce. I have the funds to seed my own startup, so that's not even an issue. That's a shitload of work though, even if I hire people to handle the individual parts. Very quickly I'll be spending more time running a business, finding customers, marketing, dealing with legal crap, etc, than I will producing software. I can also produce software, stick it on github and hope for the best, but there's countless people who do that for shits and giggles (and for free).
Distribution, logistic, and those "middlemen" actually do a lot of work to link the product with the customers. Sure, there's parasites in the middle, organizations that just take licenses and shifts them around without doing anything. You can absolutely make a case to cut those off. But the orgs/software that link products directly to customers who want said products generate tremendous value, and it's often a lot harder to do than produce the good in the first place.
And I value the creators of Spotify who create good software and a great infrastructure for the service they're offering. I think we should move away from this sleazy consumer mindset that the creators of Spotify should not be rewarded for the service they're offering.
are you under the impression that engineers at spotify are currently going hungry and working minimum wages? As developers we are already ridiculously overpaid compared to artists. We are the ones who benefit from the shit salaries that musicians make, which is of course why people on this website don't want to hear anything about creators bargaining. It's the people here who benefit from the status quo.
>The ones who really benefit are the shareholders. Coincidentally, the same people who didn't do any of the work.
This is how capitalism works though. There's no way Spotify can be expected to fundamentally change the economic system they exist in. Reversing that is heading into the realm of revolution.
not only could you but you should. Of course workers over the last few decades have internalised the mindset that they cannot use their power to bargain and that whatever they get is fair and they should just shut up, which is why we tolerate corporate middlemen eating our lunch.
I don't know if a penny per song is realistic or whatever, but going up against Spotify and record labels and trying to negotiate as much compensation for artists as possible collectively is exactly what they ought to do. Also, on the other end, as consumers we need to stop whining when we have to pay twenty bucks instead of ten bucks per month to compensate artists who we spend listening hours to every single week.