But is that reasonable? Shouldn’t the musicians be the ones how decide how much they want for their music?

What if you can’t put on concerts, like it’s the case right now, do your work then become worthless?

Honestly I think the issue is the record labels. The need to seriously reduce their cut and let the musicians keep the bulk of the royalties.

It’s a little concerning that a Youtube channel with maybe 500 - 1000 Patreon supports and few ads can be a living, but musicians need to tour, to make a profit. That seems to indicate, to me at least, that Youtube may not be the problem.

I don't think the OC implied that musicians (or their agents) shouldn't have pricing authority, just that the market won't bear the prices they seem to want.

The moment a digital file exists, your competing price point is free. People can still pirate, and don't because of youtube and streaming sites. You don't have to think that's right or fair (I don't), but it's absolutely the reality.

Piracy doesn’t that viable anymore, it’s a lot more in convinient, especially for spontanious listing on a mobile device. Sure the price still need to be low enough, but not zero anymore.

Interestingly enough Youtube Music is the most expensive streaming service, that least in Denmark.

It's inconvenient because no one has needed to make it convenient. Why would you, when YouTube is doing it for free?

If all music were wiped off of YouTube, you can bet it would become convenient. I believe there's already an app somewhere that lets you stream music using BitTorrent, throw in some onion networking for privacy, a better means of content discovery, and get more people uploading music, and you'll be off to the races.

We all remember the time before Youtube, and how 15 years before Youtube Napster was vastly more convenient than anything that was offered. Not very convenient compared to Youtube, but still.

Neither Napster nor their end resulted in decent streaming options. Why would Youtube changes be any different ?

I find it very inconvenient to purchase a song from Google on my Android device. Google prefers to push me towards buying their subscription service. I have to go through a few awkward menus to find and purchase a song.

> Shouldn’t the musicians be the ones how decide how much they want for their music?

You mean release on https://bandcamp.com ?

Exactly this. Bandcamp's straightforward, egalitarian deal is exactly what any artist below the superstar level needs.

Put your stuff out, set your price, handle your own publicity, Bandcamp takes their cut. That's it.

Except that generally labels fork out the cost (invest) in their artists releases, good labels do anyway. I'm not convinced a Silicon Valley company with a turnover of $$$Million should be the most recommended option for labels and artists who aren't at superstar status. BC's investment in any artist releasing there is negligible, yet they cream off 15% from everyone for basically that zero investment (servers aside), a killer business plan. If it wasn't for labels searching, investing, risking actually, a hell of a lot of musicians would not be exposed or have the chance to be heard thus far. This shift to a generic form, or marketplace, also helps removes any choice of personal curation, of which good labels and shops build their reputation on, and in my experience is invaluable. Though as a listener if you prefer being spoon fed by an algorithm, and as an artist being lost on a supermarket shelf, then go for it. Though BC very kindly offer the odd days off from their %, because most of us lowly non-superstar artists have just lost our main source of income with CVD-19 dismantling the infrastructure. The odd day off, yeah thanks. Egalitarian? maybe, zero investment and pure profit? Definitely. That smacks of other online monopolies to me.

> It’s a little concerning that a Youtube channel with maybe 500 - 1000 Patreon supports and few ads can be a living, but musicians need to tour, to make a profit.

I’m not sure what you mean. The musician can be a YouTuber making a living from Patreon and ads.

> Shouldn’t the musicians be the ones how decide how much they want for their music?

Sounds good. What if Google looks at that cost, and the revenue they make, and realizes they would lose money?

Isn't Google's next logic move to decide to not lose money? To not host that content?

| Shouldn’t the musicians be the ones how decide how much they want for their music?

They can decide how much they want. Not how much they get. Isn't it the same as with any service or product?

The problem is too complex to be solved by just reducing the labels cut. The price of records is driven down by a combination of piracy, overwhelming offer and the existence of streaming platforms.

> Isn't it the same as with any service or product?

Except government :)

Sure. But in this case musicians have 0 input on how much to charge or how much they get paid.

Politicians decide for them and pass laws to enforce this structure.

> Shouldn’t the musicians be the ones how decide how much they want for their music?

Then break up Koda to start with, they're the state created monopoly.

Someone once asked Don McLean in an interview, "What does American Pie mean?" His response was, "it means I never have to work again."

Live shows and concerts are likely to be very limited or nonexistent in many countries for the next year. Only the most dedicated fans are willing to pay for a live stream.

The musicians already know this. It's the vampiric middlemen who need to make money from the recordings. Outside of some foolish artists, the publishing houses don't get a cut of ticket and merch sales.

Yea access to millions of users (Spotify) takes a lot of effort to build.

I am against middlemen but people get so emotionally charged that they don't understand that middlemen exists for reasons: 1) They are grandfathered into the system with laws 2) They provide value. I am against the former.

Spotify got rid of all the record label nonsense and they directly allow you to publish your music and broadcast it to millions of people.

If anything else, we need to get rid of the TicketMaster mafia that's running the show - literally and metaphorically.

That’s not case anymore since streaming took over. Many artists are making bank on releasing every single track on its own and getting millions/billions of plays.

> You can't charge tech companies more than they themselves are making from the music.

Sure you can. Tech companies are constantly losing money at the margins, by paying out more than they take in for a wide variety of things.

It's sustainable as long as tech companies can find financing, or fund one part of their business from another part, which seems fairly long-term.

EDIT: I know I'm gonna lose karma on this, but I'm right. There's no shortage of tech companies with negative revenue, or negative revenue in certain business units, and that money isn't disappearing, it's being paid to counterparties in business deals.

Musicians are apparently an exception to the HN crowd creed that entrepreneurs should negotiate hard to get the best deal possible.

Violate an Open Source license and all hell is brought down, but Pirating music is just fine. HN has some weird ethics.

I don't think "weird" is the right term for an ethical system that is more concerned with the rights of those who are perceived as underdogs or disadvantaged than with the rights of those who are perceived as excessively successful or fortunate. The "Robin Hood" folktale is a good 600 years old, and no remotely comparable tale in which the titular character is unsympathetic ever caught on. A tendency towards "restorative justice", bringing those up high down and raising up those below seems close to being a natural state for humanity; if anything, the belief that some abstract discourse about property and contract law means that we ought to cheer for a state in which person A has orders of magnitude more power and treasure than person B to continue is the weird one.

The idea software developers and the companies they work for are the underdogs compared to musicians and the music industry is just bizarre. The tech giants could buy the whole music industry and it would be a blip on a spreadsheet.

> The tech giants could buy the whole music industry and it would be a blip on a spreadsheet.

For scale, the global music industry has about $20 billion in annual revenue, Google alone has about 8× that.

Absolutely. The music industry has a high profile but there's comparatively little money in it. And because music, like all entertaimnent markets, is winner-take-all, most people who work in the music biz scrape by on wages that are dwarfed by the average tech salary.

That's the context in which generally well-off tech folks champion piracy and ridicule musicians who have the audacity to question tech industry exploitation.

But are the well-off tech folks the same ones who would defend open source licenses?

Let's see. I'm comparatively well-off by the standards of most working musicians. I'm an aggressive Open Source advocate. So... yes?

And yet you will certainly not find me championing piracy. I don't see what you're trying to get at.

The post I originally responded to talked about the existence of a demographic that reacts with offense to open-source licenses being violated but is indifferent towards or even advocates for music piracy, and contended that their ethics is "weird". To me, weirdness implies being uncommon, but to the extent that this demographic exists, I do not think that the ethical principles they are applying are uncommon at all: as they see it, the typical GPL violation case is perceived to involve a faceless megacorp benefitting off of the work of one or multiple hobbyist programmers scraping by while making their labour available for free, while music royalties are perceived to primarily benefit very affluent label executives and industry association lawyers. Conditional on this belief, a very commonly held ethical system says it's bad to steal from the former but good to steal from the latter. If the objection is merely that the belief is wrong, though, you can't say that the problem is that some "weird" ethics is involved.

All over this thread, it is musicians themselves being castigated. Not "music industry executives need to wake up", but "musicians need to wake up". Don't try to make this all about executives and lawyers now.

Good grief, how I hate the disregard for musicians so commonly seen in the tech industry.

Open source of the kind that gets violated (copyleft) is generally putting the user first, rather than the developer. So in tht sense, the main beneficiary of the license – the user – is indeed the underdog.

I don't think GPL software developers usually work for US software megacorps, and I haven't see people get up in arms about violations of non-copyleft licenses (how would you even violate those? Not crediting the original developer?). In fact, I've GPLed some of my own projects and pushback from people who seem to be associated with the Silicon Valley subculture is a pretty common occurrence (they typically want it to be relicensed under BSD or MIT or the like).

> I haven't see people get up in arms about violations of non-copyleft licenses

Oh? Then you didn't see me going off about the "Commons Clause" bullcrap.

For what it's worth, I'm a former member of the Board of Directors and V.P. Legal Affairs of the Apache Software Foundation, and I'm a music industry person who worked in a recording studio for 6 years before transitioning to tech.

It is philosophically consistent to defend attribution-based Open Source licenses and musicians' right to negotiate hard. In both cases, the rights of the creator are prioritized.

Of course they should negotiate hard.

But if their terms are unacceptable and immovable, the other party has every right to tell them No Deal.

> [T]he other party has every right to tell them No Deal.

Sure, but that's different than "You can't charge tech companies more than they themselves are making from the music." Of course you can, and you can do so long-term provided that new tech companies appear as existing ones fail.

You're welcome to try. You're welcome to think that's reasonable.

I enjoy watching news stories about new tech companies that die after making horrible deals and investors who lose their money after investing in them. People should know better than to accept loser deals like this.

If the alternative is artists not being paid enough to make a living, then one side has to push until the other side loses. The work is being given away so cheaply by tech companies trying to commoditize their complements that there isn't enough money to support both the creators and the distributors. Why should the creators lose by default?

> The work is being given away so cheaply by tech companies

I disagree with your characterization: The work is being given away by artists, who are welcome to accept the terms that tech companies offer them.

The artists are welcome to reconsider, renegotiate.

> Why should the creators lose by default?

The creators are offered terms by tech companies. They are welcome to turn down those terms, and seek better ones.

If they lack the power to negotiate a better deal, then I suggest forming a negotiating block of some kind.

The tech companies are welcome to think those negotiations are not favorable and not accept the terms.

Or possibly the artists should form their own new tech company (cf. Patreon, Band Camp)

It's not the job of tech companies to provide a living to artists. That's what your characterization implies, and it's just not the case.