I would think Metallica’s music is pretty damn popular.
1 Like
Which is why they made $86,000,000 last year from concerts alone. I’ve got no tears for Metallica.
3 Likes
Nice job putting “work” in quotes.
And “an hour”, really? I’ve honed my craft so that the sort of music I make – not commercially viable, not professionally mastered, not written to any particular spec but whatever comes to mind at the time – can often be done in a 3 hour session. That’s after hundreds of thousands of hours honing that craft.
Conversely, I was involved in an album project involving about 20 people, which took several months of preparation and several weeks of recording. It was crowdfunded for $5700 – which paid for mics and stands, recording equipment, cases, soundproofing, and mastering services (which was, as it happens, complete crap and I could have done better myself). It didn’t pay the musicians, the recording engineers (themselves group members), or me for dozens of hours spent on remixes or having my personal studio gear tied up for 6 weeks or the additional software I bought.
Meanwile: “capitalists” in general have a revenue stream based entirely on owning capital, whether or not they work at all. Rentiers and heirs to fortunes make more by doing nothing than most of us can make no matter how hard we work. Owners of IP often have a revenue stream from work that was done once, whether it was from inventing a technology that is licensed, or writing a novel, or convincing a government that they now own a portion of the human genome – some of that is fair, some not so much.
I have an author friend who’s been published in several fantasy anthologies. Her royalty checks, when they arrive – sporadically every few months or so – might pay for a meal. That’s the magic of an ongoing revenue stream from doing something once… or rather, a dozen times or so.
10 Likes
I apologize for putting the word work in quotes. It was not my intention to imply that making music does not involve labor. At least for some.
2 Likes
Anyway: I really think most of my issues with the music industry are related to bigger issues with capitalism in general. The people getting the biggest rewards are not the ones deserving them, and the proportions are all askew.
I find the differences in how music distribution has changed music, vs. how self-publishing has affected publishing, kind of interesting to look at. Thousands of self-published authors don’t really make it harder for J.K. Rowling, or… whoever churns out lots of suspense novels every year, I don’t know. Does it affect mid-tier authors? There’s some audiobook streaming out there but not like with music. There wasn’t the kind of outcry over PDFs being torrented in the 90s, etc.
7 Likes
Maybe I"m wrong about that, but I don’t think it is. I also don’t think that our own personal networks are probably going to be very productive in understanding how the culture in general treats mass culture. I’d suggest that we’re both probably outliers in that respect and probably move in circles that are also full of similar outliers. Maybe not, but that’s my own experience - people I regularly interact with engage pretty constructively with culture, in part because many of them are themselves producers of culture in various forms.
I think it’s much more common a position for people to view mass culture as entirely disposable, made by faceless corporations, and that it’s perfectly acceptable to skirt norms such as paying for such entertainment. If people think of mass culture produced by large corporations (who can take the economic hit more readily than an indie artist) in those terms, why wouldn’t they treat indie culture as such? Not everyone is aware of the differences between major label artists and indie artists and if they don’t understand that distinction, why would they treat major label artists different than indie artists? Wouldn’t Madonna and Grimes be one and the same to someone who doesn’t know the difference between being on Warners and being on 4AD? Again, you and I know what the difference is, but someone who isn’t a music geek might not.
First, I think that’s really apples and oranges. Second, who said I was arguing for the RIAA/BPI position here? I’m really not sure how much I need to keep making that distinction, but I think that freely available downloads benefit labels that are in bed with the RIAA/BPI more than it does artists trying to get out of that model, primarily because they have an easier go monetizing alternative options to sound recordings. they have deeper pockets and ready access to the American Congress, British Parliament, EU parliament, and to influence international treaty making in a way that indie artists just can’t.
I think the average recording artists salary is about $40,000. given that probably many live in big cities (to be near places to record), and that some of the top selling artists in their field are multi-millionaires, that’s saying something. I don’t see that as overcompensated. Depending on where you live, that’s either a decent living or barely scraping by. Some artists are very much overcompensated, but that’s in part because the industry has never had much in the way of salary regulation like some other fields of labor.
I also don’t think that Metallica is the people we’re really talking about here, or who we should be talking about here.
5 Likes
Can you name an artist who doesn’t actually do work of some variety?
4 Likes
I was talking about Metallica, because they were the first band to sue a p2p filesharing service:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallica_v._Napster,_Inc.
That’s blaming technology if there ever was. Not that I feel that they should blame themselves for not being more popular 
4 Likes
I think, ultimately, what puts the final nail in the coffin of recording artists is the advent of rental music. Services like Google Play Music allow - for a monthly flat fee - you to download as many albums as you please, to listen to as much as you want. I’m currently carrying around a bunch of (somewhat) difficult-to-otherwise-obtain albums thanks to big G.
Adrian John’s book, Piracy: a history of the intellectual property wars from Gutenberg to Gates chronicles copyright from inception, and the related ups and downs of the music industry. An interesting thing to note is that we’ve had this debate back in the sheet music piracy days, when the Jolly Roger Corp distributed pirate sheets cheap. Or when the advent of the player piano occurred. Etc, etc.
This century, music itself has been devalued by oversaturation. No longer is it novel to hear tunes. It’s ubiquitous. Any building you go to has music. The only reason to own an album was and is to support the artist (and to be able to play it whenever, as opposed to waiting for it on the radio).
Speaking of oversaturation: last year’s SXSW conference saw 1,201 songs released online, for free, by the artists present. 7.86GB. That’s a freaking lot, considering I only listen to music for about an hour a day at most.
Ultimately, the brief window wherein it was viable for a (relative) handful of performers to make a living as recording artists is over. Even if the state were to salary musicians, there are now far too many to financially support (whereas, in the Netherlands, there are relatively few artists, so the state can indulge and support them). Novelists long ago reached that point, and soon, gaming companies will join that list. Only an even smaller handful will take home sizes of the pie. And in the end, nobody creates just for the wealth; creation is expression.
6 Likes
Because you can’t sell that same woodworking project to 10,000 other people, then sell it to them again in different packaging in 5 years, then sell it again as part of a greatest hits compilation, then license it out to a TV show and again to a commercial. It’s a very different structure from being paid hourly or salary or piecework and only getting paid once for something.
I could see how the concept of doing something once and getting paid for the rest of your life, coupled with media portrayal of the rock star celebrity lifestyle distorts that to sound enviable. Especially if you think that they actually get a sizable part of the retail price.
But I’ve seen how small royalties checks can be and also the travel costs and expenses vs revenues of touring bands (where breaking even can be cause for celebration). And then there’s all that time that they’re working - creating, rehearsing, etc. - but not performing, and therefore not getting paid. I don’t envy that.
5 Likes
I reserve the right to hold manufactured bands in low regard.
yeah: the re-normalization of the value of music
2 Likes
Sure. My point was that these questions have less of an impact on a band as successful as Metallica and that focusing on the elites like them misses the larger story, I think.
And that is part of the argument in the Wu-Tang book in fact the core argument. But that is related to the rise of sound recording in general.
It’s still a creative process that involves a form of labor. And given how little that the initial run might net a performer/artist, it’s not unreasonable to expect monetization in other forms (licensing deals).
But that’s not the reality, that’s the mythology… as Dire Straight said, the perception is that it’s “money for nothing…” But it’s not. In some cases, a label may never recoup it’s costs for the initial promotion of an artist, and hence the artist never gets paid, and in fact end up paying the label for profiting off their intellectual labor.
And of course, as others pointed out, people do it because they genuinely love it.
That’s you’re right, of course. But what’s a manufactured band, and doesn’t it still involve labor. Japanese idols are a great example. They are built by the labels, from the ground up, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t doing real work in the process. I think we can argue about the artistic merits of such bands, but that I think is a separate, aesthetic question from economic value and labor, isn’t it?
Works for me! Have you read the Wu-Tang book yet? Seems like it would be right up your alley.
4 Likes
Thats not really an invention of xbox live or PSN it is a continuation of older practices.
3 Likes
nah, I didn’t know about it. I read this one, though. it was dope.
2 Likes
I’ll have to pick that up.
The “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” book came out a couple of months ago and just discusses the entire project.
3 Likes
There are similar studies showing the exact same effect for video games.
8 Likes
I might be an outlier, but I have a number of CDs and concert ticket stubs that I wouldn’t have had otherwise, in addition to a patreon subscription or two.
Similar regarding games, although in that case it was the switch between someone thinking “meh, this is old, we can’t sell it” and “hey maybe we could sell it on GOG” that made the difference. Of course there were a couple of games that I bought but which didn’t work properly until I cracked the DRM. 
4 Likes
These days I just crack the DRM because it’s nore convenient. (And in some cases, better for system performance)
2 Likes
I have also downloaded (or listened somewhere) to a lot of music that I have then purchased. The availability of single songs to buy is nice, because I rarely like everything on an album. All neat stuff I like that I would never have know about had I not been able to sample it. And with my weird tastes that’s something.
I remember the “good ol’ days” (not) when I had to guess what I might like from album covers in record stores. Some purchases I made I didn’t like. And back then you were not able to play them (vinyl, then CDs) first. CDs sometimes they had headphones for popular stuff, but generally not the stuff I like.
Yay internet.
5 Likes