Until we start viewing "fanciful" ideas as realistic, our problems will persist. This article is another in the long series of observations of seemingly distinct problems which are actually facets of a larger problem, namely that overall economic inequality is way too high. It's not just that musicians, or actors, or grocery store baggers, or taxi drivers, or whatever, can't make a living, it's that the set of things you can do to make a living is narrowing more and more. Broad-based solutions like basic income, wealth taxes, breaking up large market players, etc., will do far more for us than attempting piecemeal tweaks to this or that industry.
It seems like job location, compensation, average cost of living, and commute would play a fairly large role.
Are you saying these don't involve preferences?
And a web search will bring up tons of housing preference sources coming various aspects.
https://learn.upright.us/real-estate-investing-blog/a-housin...
For example, lotteries are inherently unjust, making random people wealthy for no reason, and hardly anyone cares. They just hope to win themselves.
Taylor Swift fans don’t care that she makes far more money than other talented musicians who languish in obscurity. They’re going to keep giving her more money. If you told them they shouldn’t because it perpetuates inequality, they wouldn’t get it.
They're very different visions of what "justice" means: one focused on snapshots of distribution, one focused on processes.
Sure, there were stars -- for instance in sheet music publishing -- but since then the working-class musician jobs have nearly vanished.
The subhed spells it out. It's a supply and demand world. If it's easy to do things, the supply increases. It's that simple.
That's not to say that the larger system isn't doing what you claim. Just that music is just too easy to make to be valuable.
I didn't get your point, but we certainly need more competition, not less.
What economic inequality would you deem small enough?
And why do you care about inequality, and not eg the absolute livings standards of the least well off? We can 'solve' inequality by just destroying everything the rich have, but that won't make anyone better off.
Btw, the absolute living standards of all members of society, including the least well off, have never been better. And that's true for almost any society you care to look at on our globe. (Removing eg those currently at war, that weren't at war earlier.)
The problems of inequality go well beyond living standards. E.g. political control in a very unequal society gets concentrated in a few people.
Especially the failures to replicate.
The two are connected. You can either transfer more wealth to the poorer people without taxing the rich (lets say by helicopter money), or transfer it from the rich to the poor. In both cases the rich become less rich in relative terms. It should also make intuitive sense - if the rich (lets say top 5%) hold 95% of wealth it means there is less for everyone else - less wealth that is because the resources like land, apartments and good education are finite and not abundant.
Helicopter money transfers real wealth from the people who previously held cash.
It creates nominal wealth, but not real wealth.
> It should also make intuitive sense - if the rich (lets say top 5%) hold 95% of wealth it means there is less for everyone else - less wealth that is because the resources like land, apartments and good education are finite and not abundant.
Let's invert that: if I make everyone's lives 10% more miserable, but the lives of the richest 1% a whopping 20% more miserable, that will have decreased inequality. But it's not a good idea.
That's basically just the idea from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44411538 inverted. Many people have a hard time seeing that wealth can increase, but it's pretty easy to see that total wealth can decrease: I can set fire to my piano, and no one else gets any better because of it.
I'd like the one small enough that I won't die from my (treatable) first major medical event due to being unable to fund 100% of treatment costs.
I'd also like one small enough that me and the kids didn't spend most of the 2010s in hunger-level poverty.
That'd be a start.
So if everyone got 10x richer overnight, but the top 1% got 1000x richer, that would increase inequality by any reasonable metric, but it would help with the benchmarks you mentioned.
Or, instead of handing out more and more money from the state, try to introduce dynamism again. Try to reduce the amount of times that YouTube takes videos or accounts down for example.
For a band, it's virtually impossible to find work outside the weekend. If a region had a few restaurants that were known for year round "live music Mondays", "live music lunches", etc, it would increase the number of hours that a musician could work during the week, and make full time performance viable for more musicians. Of course, people would also need to support these performances by patronizing the venues that host them.
But until a working musician can fill their weekday calendar with paying gigs without excessive travel/lodging costs, you'll continue to see talented musicians drop out and do something else.
And you'd be locked to only playing certain types of music (country, classic rock, singer songwriter), doing multiple gigs a day.
Truth be told, most musicians would be better off by picking a job, any job really, and treating music as a side hustle. And that really pains me, as I started out as a musician.
If you're going to make a living off music, it's going to be a never-ending marathon of hustles and uncertainty. Cover bands, church bands, wedding bands, session work, lessons, roadie work, instrument tech, and half (of not two thirds) of that work is based on sheer luck, depending on what people you cross paths with.
The current world we live in doesn't care enough about creativity. I find it a bleak thought, but here I am. Feel free to try to talk me out of it, because it does feel kind of depressing. Or feel free to validate it. I want to see the world for what it is, not what I like it to be.
What do you mean by not valuing music? Should we allocate more of our paycheck to music? Or should we talk more about how great music is?
> It seems to me that most artists are making music because they love to do it themselves.
I mean, art is ultimately an expression of emotions. If you don't love creating the art you create, unless you have another deep emotional reason to create it, it's going to affect the result quite significantly.
> The current world we live in doesn't care enough about creativity.
This is just human nature though I think. Most people want the fuzzy feeling of something familiar. And then you have those who go to large events for the shared experience of going, rather than what's actually performed.
Personally I love going to smaller venues (<300 people) where the cost of admission is such that I feel I can take the risk of something unknown and outside my comfort zone. But I also realize I'm weird that way.
As has always been the case with music, success is extremely rare. For every winner, there are a million losers. So, better to think of it more like a lottery than a normal industry / job.
But: fundamentally, why did all of this happen, and why haven't prices normalised (i.e. dropped) since?
Does anyone have a hypothesis, beyond 'corporate gouging', which I can accept, but seems too simplistic to explain what seems to be an enduring global phenomenon?
Because governments printed an enormous amount of money during the pandemic. Money is worth far less that it was pre-pandemic, so prices are higher.
Many things were technically feasible pre-pandemic but not done habitually: remote work, streaming movies instead of going to the theater, ordering delivery instead of dining out, and so on. The pandemic forced many people to change their habits and get over any initial inertia (e.g. investing in a WFH setup or home theater). The result is that when the world returned to normal, the markets didn't: consumer habits had already moved on.
The problem with this as a framing device is that it doesn't describe very many working musical acts. 360 deals are probably generally gross? But Pemberton's situation is weird. In most cases, labels are in fact going to lose money from midlist acts.
The more you look at these kinds of businesses the more striking the pattern is. It's true of most media, it's true of startups, it's true for pharmaceuticals. The winners pay for the losers; in fact, the winners are usually the only thing that matter, the high-order bit of returns.
What's challenging about this is that you can't squeeze blood from a stone. The package offered to a midlist act might in fact be a loss leader; incentive to improve dealflow and optionality for the label, to get a better shot at the tiny number of acts whose returns will keep the label afloat. There may not be much more to offer to acts that aren't going to generate revenue.
David Lowery (a mathematician and the founder/lead vocalist of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker) had an article about this years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3850935
It's worth a read (though things have probably changed in a number of ways since then). It's an interesting counterpoint to the automatic cite to Albini's piece that comes up in these discussions. Not that you should have sympathy for labels, just it's useful to have a clearer idea of what the deal was. The classic label deal with a mid-sized advance that never recouped (and which the labels never came back looking for when it didn't) was basically the driver for "middle-class" rock lifestyles; it's dead now.
This is almost certainly the case. The music business is the economics of superstars. see: Rosen, Sherwin. “The Economics of Superstars.” The American Economic Review 71, no. 5 (1981): 845–58.
Small personal difference translate into enormous differences in earnings. The income curve has only small area for middle incomes. Either you are below middle, or you quickly get into upper middle class or higher incomes. It's not a market failure but a predictable dynamics of this particular field.
Artists low pay is driven by two things:
First, an oversupply of talent willing to work below a living wage keeps incomes low.
Second, promotion and marketing are the primary drivers of an artist's financial outome, leading to uneven deals where labels handle the heavy lifting and deserve larger piece of the cake. Once an artist's career reaches a certain scale, their earnings can grow to outweigh their direct creative input.
One thing that could help is transparency, but in a way the lack of transparency is a good part of what keeps the system going. Most people would not agree if they knew how little they would keep if they were successful; "what do you mean I have to pay for the losers?". They would just want to pay for what was necessary for their success, ignoring every expense that didn't work as a "stupid label decision". The thing is that nobody has a true recipe for success, you can just get reasonable estimates on your bets, but each bet will always be a biased coin flip.
We decimated recordings as a revenue stream (and literal decimation might be wildly generous, given that stream payouts frequently never add up to a single sale for many artists). We let people peddle the lie that artists can just find some other revenue source like merchandising or another job or anything else rather than paying for the thing people ostensibly value.
Minor league success was never an easy proposition but we had a chance to give it better margins. And we let Spotify and others eat those, and let too many people tell comforting lies to consumers along the way.
And without a major cultural shift, we will do the same thing for everyone eventually.
a) just a theory not a proven thing and
b) based on flawed assumptions that were quickly disproven. See the 2008 paper "Should You Invest in the Long Tail?" finding that consumers don't like niche products and the bottom 80% sold $0, contrary to the theory's prediction.
https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=32337
Had nothing to do with merchandising or whatever. The Long Tail was never correct.
If hundreds of millions of people decide to use Spotify and Youtube to obtain their music, and if that means most artists are shafted in the process, no secret organization enacted some conspiracy to achieve that. Instead, technology enabled a new form of consumption, and producers faced a new level of competition.
I’ve played many gigs for $20-100, which is once a month or week and tough work relative to typing some code from home. I played for 25 mins in front of 1000 people and spent 8+ hours total all-in to make 200 bucks. Way harder money than coding.
Really, think back through history. Musicians were needed for dance, parties, all occasions. Now hit play on your phone connected to a speaker, GG musicians.
Perhaps a bit cynical, but my thinking has long been that if I see a band that's playing in a venue that takes like 100-200 people or so[1], they're doing it out of passion. And that immediately makes it more interesting for me to go.
I've had lots of great experiences that way, including for bands that's normally way outside my comfort zone. And as the price of admission is fairly low, if it somehow is a miss it's not a big deal.
Now, as I know they're making little or no money on the gig itself, I usually end up buying some merch.
[1]: I'm in Norway, we don't have a ton of large venues.
John Philip Sousa had the right opinion on recorded music.
Not really comparable experience though.
More reliable, no divas, no drunk musicians, always on time, the repertoire is literally unlimited.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/01/writers-recall...
Want to work for the most prestigious fashion brands? You start with unpaid (or very low pay) internships in some of the most expensive cities in the world. Same goes for record labels. Art. Literature publishing.
And these days, some of the above will filter out applicants that don't have big enough social media accounts.
Let’s say your child wants to be an actor. One way to make this happen is to be a successful actor yourself - require your children to be cast in the film in return for you starring. This is how famous acting families pushed their kids forwards, including Nicholas Cage (Coppola) and Jeff Bridges.
More relevant for HN is rich people. So you are tech rich and your kid wants to act. Fund the movie on the condition your child acts in it. That is the way since movies began.
When they are younger they could pay for acting classes, acting camps and help them get into local productions.
Out of school they pay for livings costs, education and any additional classes. Living in New York or LA and being able to concentrate on getting parts of training rather than having to make money would be a huge boast.
Maybe at the next stage getting their kid an agent or manager who has contacts and experience to get their kid the roles.
Perhaps you mean throwing a few thousand dollars at student-level films to ensure their kid gets an important part. I guess maybe some will write 6 (7?) figure cheques to get their kid a part, but that probably doesn't happen often.
The customer of such a movie isn’t the audience but the wealthy patron sponsoring the movie. I suspect this self-promotion motivation is a large reason why so many movies are so bad.
- making movies is hard. A lot of things that require years to master need to go right. A *ton* of tech is involved.
- making movies is expensive. Money alone won't make you a good movie, but many productions are so on the edge that some choice they had to make for monetary reason will cause the bad.
- making movies is complex, that means making a masterful one requires multiple botched attempts and experiences by all people involved. These botched attempts are also what you see.
On top of that come the contacts and being rich. But the contacts are not a thing other people couldn't make as well, especially if they are good. One of the somewhat hidden benefits of higher education are the contacts you will make. Maybe you're not rich and your parents are roofers while you want to become an actor, but if you're good and well connected you might benefit from other peoples connections. This is how I started to make my living in a foreign country with two parents without any shared background: There were people who had those contacts and I benefitted of them simply by being the one they chose because I am accurate, reliable, on time, knowledgeable, patient and good at what I do.
But
-Poor and malnourished member of the common folk.
-Part of the elites, who is set for life anyway and creates art thanks to the ample spare time they have.
I used to be in a band and one major point of contention in our group was whether we could make a living out of this. My opinion was that no, we couldn't.
I have a friend who enjoys moderate success with his band - they're doing historical reconstruction so they're invited to events in the space and, of course, paid. He keeps his day job though. Truth be told in the historical reconstruction field only smiths and tailors can pull off this being their main thing and it's not a given.
Should we stop thinking about music as a job and start thinking about it as a hobbyist art form? Nobody is out there lamenting that you can’t make a living off of landscape painting. It’s a fun form of self expression that people will do regardless of the economics, so maybe the problem was ever thinking you could make a profession out of it?
There's lots of value in amateur engineering. What if we deprofessionalized engineering via making it difficult for anyone to make a living doing it? Some people would no doubt still continue to do it, to scratch their itches and exercise their minds. But they would spend less time doing it, less time sudying how to do it, more time doing whatever it takes to pay the bills and claw out some semblance of security. We certainly wouldn't fall into technical poverty immediately, and maybe we wouldn't miss what we don't quite invent / develop, but both the people who actually love it enough to pay attention and the professionals would know the difference between what isn't getting done.
(And in fact, the US is standing on the precipice of a FAFO event with research here, having just made it more difficult to make a living focusing on it.)
What happens to a field that can only be engaged as a dilettante, never as a committed investor?
Software development will go this way, too, as we are all starting to learn.
The problem is people are ok with corporate, mass-produced slop—whether it be music, furniture, or (soon) software. Fewer and fewer people are willing to pay for human craftsman-produced product.
those responsible for advancement of musical boundaries rarely are recognized or rewarded in kind, at least since the dawn of the recorded music mafia.
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." Hunter S. Thompson
Among other things, I play large-ensemble jazz. Over the years, I've played in a number of bands, and the level of quality and variety achieved by players with professional training is a noticeable step above amateur players. The material that my current band plays is unplayable without training. About half of the band members have music degrees (many teach music in the public schools) and the other half are dedicated amateurs with past training like myself.
Other styles, like folk music, are essentially sustained by amateurs.
Some things can only be done by amateurs, or professionals who also have a musical hobby, such as playing experimental, obscure, or historical music. Amateur musicians also support the professional scene by attending performances, taking lessons, buying instruments (resulting in economies of scale), etc.
Once, when criticising the toxic effects of advertising, I got a response to the effect of 'but how will streamers be able to support themselves?!'. Which I was really struck by, because it presumes that streamers should be able to support themselves by streaming. Should they? Is this actually a desirable outcome? Yes, the financial viability probably leads to more streaming, but what about the quality of the overall streaming? And what about the opportunity cost when someone gives up their job and puts their labours into the business of streaming?
There will always be some level of cultural output, since there will always be passionate people. But has making the arts an industry (through an ever expanding artifice of 'intellectual property', and the ever expanding criminalisation of its subversion) actually led to better arts? Would this be a better or worse world if people built bridges in their day job and played rock gigs at night, solely for the love of it?
I'm not trying to do a Socratic dialogue here, I genuinely don't know. But I suspect the answer is much more nuanced than 'more money = better art', and I am sceptical of certain legal or economic distortions based on that assumption (e.g. life + 70 copyright terms, surveillance advertising, surveillance DRM software, billion-dollar industries that subsist solely on 'IP', fines and prison terms for unauthorised sharing, or the reversing or bypassing of DRM, etc).
If musicians can't make a living, then both the quantity and quality of our musical options go down. Yes, hobbyists will always make music for themselves, but hobbyists won't necessarily record music for us or tour around the country for us to see in live venues. The issue is not that musicians inherently deserve to make a living; the issue is, what kind of musical market is available for consumers?
That's not contrary to what I said, which was "hobbyists won't necessarily [emphasis added] record music for us". And of course you didn't respond to my point about touring.
In any case, the music and recordings of hobbyists are likely to be inferior to the music and recordings of professionals, because in general, professionals are better than hobbyists at almost everything, music being only one example.
> A lot of the music I listen to is from youtubers with a handful of views.
If that's the future you want, then I guess you're in luck.