As more people are able to produce music (due to cheaper tools like DAWs, more accessible music theory education, etc etc), if the demand of music doesn't grow proportionally, the average income of musicians/songwriters would decline.
The above will happen regardless of Spotify's existence. Thus, Spotify doesn't matter (much).
That's like saying as the price of circular saws drop in price, hand made furniture becomes cheaper.
You're just going to end up with a bunch of sloppy tables.
People still want to listen to quality music from artists who have years of practice and experience. You can't reliably get years of experience unless you're getting paid to do it.
Sure, there are exceptions, but it's not the rule. Michael Jackson would not have existed if there was no money in the career. The money is why his father pushed so (insanely) hard.
The counter argument is trash music will just be the norm. And maybe for a while that would happen, but eventually we'll see someone (similar to the private search engines we see today) come out with a new platform with the selling point that artists get a living wage -- as long as the people demand it, and I believe they will.
> That's like saying as the price of circular saws drop in price, hand made furniture becomes cheaper.
Uh... and it's true? If the price of circular saws drop in price, and the demand for hand-made furniture doesn't change, then they'll become cheaper. How much cheaper is another question, as circular saws are already very cheap today, compared to hand-made furniture.
So yeah, you're right, it's just like saying that.
> if there was no money in the career
It's unlikely to decline indefinitely. Piracy, Spotify, more youtube channel teaching how to make music... all these didn't prevent Billie Eilish from becoming a star.
> Uh... and it's true? If the price of circular saws drop in price, and the demand for hand-made furniture doesn't change, then they'll become cheaper.
I don't know whether circular saws are likely to be the biggest input into a piece of handmade furniture, but my guess is they're not and it's time invested in the specific work and practicing the art rather than industrial capital.
Similarly, while DAWs while can (though not necessarily do) reduce capital necessary to do certain aspects of production, they don't represent the most significant investment into writing music. Also time, both in the creation of the specific work AND in terms of time practicing the art.
> It's unlikely to decline indefinitely. Piracy, Spotify, more youtube channel teaching how to make music... all these didn't prevent Billie Eilish from becoming a star.
Survivorship bias. Billie Eilish or any other individual success are no more an indication that all is well with the status quo than blue zone anecdotes are promises anyone who chooses can be a centenarian.
>That's like saying as the price of circular saws drop in price, hand made furniture becomes cheaper.
>You're just going to end up with a bunch of sloppy tables.
Well, yes, and that's how IKEA and mass production in general made many people that would be making furniture out of the job.
Even in tailor-made stuff good cheap tools does make work of skilled maker far quicker. And you can get more people trying to get into that if the tools are cheap.
Hardware is cheap, software is free/near free so there is far more people trying, when you no longer need to spend small car worth of money just to say play electronic music
> People still want to listen to quality music from artists who have years of practice and experience. You can't reliably get years of experience unless you're getting paid to do it.
Most musicians got that by playing in garage bands and doing concerts.
And many of them did it entirely for free, out of passion, till they were good enough, far before fancy computers were in everyone's pockets.
> The counter argument is trash music will just be the norm.
It is the norm far before Spotify happened I'm afraid
> You're just going to end up with a bunch of sloppy tables.
That's only true if you assume all the customers desire (or are willing to settle-for) arbitrarily bad tables for cheap. That isn't guaranteed, but even then... why are you so certain their decision is wrong? Maybe they simply care about something else more than their tables.
Meanwhile, the section of customers who still desire good tables will find those good-tables more affordable than before, even if they're a relatively smaller slice of the expanded table-market pie.
Sure, there are crappy $5 T-shirts, but today I could buy silk and lace enough to embarrass a king. Terribly an artful books exists to come up, but I could still accumulate a library in my pocket that would be the envy of any ancient monastery or place of learning.
> Sure, there are crappy $5 T-shirts, but today I could buy silk and lace enough to embarrass a king.
Actually I think something has happened to the textiles industry whereby demand must have driven a certain band of suppliers out of business, and now try as I could I can't get polo shirts in the same thick quality cotton weave I could 30 years ago. There is probably some niche source possibly online but I don't know how to discover it; the standard "throw money at luxury mall brand" route seems to not work any longer as the brick and mortars have watered down their materials as well. Sic transit gloria mundi
It's a well-documented escalation of planned obsolescence and it's true for everything from your washing machine to your polo shirts to your car. If you make it cheaply so it deteriorates quickly, constantly bring out new styles to make your current thing seem prematurely out of date, and make it juuuust cheap enough, you can sell people 10 shirts over 10 years instead of 2.
I like wearing industrial clothing (like red kap cotton work shirts) and to my eye seem like they're made about the same quality they always were.
There's still money in making music, just not in selling recordings. Biggest touring artists (the Beyonces etc.) bring in millions. They, in turn, require skilled producers to make their songs, who are also paid well.
Might have been interesting to ever find out if this was true.
What happened instead was that Spotify led the pricing change by taking capital, cheating policy, and producing a consumption avenue that cut the price by orders of magnitude.
And meanwhile:
> cheaper tools like DAWs, more accessible music theory education
The gains in education are fractional. The library or a neighborhood piano teacher were good enough resource wise. YouTube eliminates the trip (and the funny thing is that we're iffy on even rewarding those people proportionally), but isn't a new opportunity.
And even for materials that are better in the way that 3Blue1Brown is for math... just like you're going to have to sit down and spend a lot of time actually doing problems rather than just watching the videos if you have any hope of really getting it, the constraint when it comes to producing music is still sitting down and putting in the time, not only on the specific problem/work in front of you but in the background to do it elegantly.
DAWs are great and can make up for some margin of missing virtuosity, but you have to put in the time practicing using them too -- they become their own instrument.
The constraint on making music has always been time. And what gets you more time to do something? Either having another source of wealth, or getting economically rewarded for doing that thing.
Spotify and the damage it's done the market absolutely matters. Just because music is getting through the damage doesn't mean there wasn't some lost, and not just quantity, level that could have been leveraged to through the magic of compounding focus. Anybody who's read Graham's "maker schedule/manager scheduler" should already know this.
What even was the music market though? I think it was a spot where record labels could get rich off of music while musicians still had to pay their way with live shows and merch.
Why do I care if spotify's investors have replace the record label investors?
Even before the digital/internet sea change, this didn't capture the whole music industry. There were artists who made good money off their recordings either because they DIYd it, or found better labels, or negotiated better deals. None of those paths has ever been easy but before recording revenue got kneecapped it was more available.
But let's say for the sake of argument that's how it worked before the internet. If so, why did we let that level of disruption just replace one set of bad guys with another?
What we should have had instead was what we were on track to have: multiple-scale digital recording retail, Apple to Bandcamp to individual artist site to local indie collective as point of sale. Charge whatever artist and buyer choose and can clear a transaction at, they keep 70-90%. True streaming, some with a format, some algorithmically customized for both audio wallpaper and music discovery... but in every case not user-programmed because that's how you justify the difference between the ridiculous fractional cent payouts and recordings.
That's the world we could have tomorrow if the policy was there.
More likely, everybody's too used to a decade of having the privilege of an unlimited basically free recording buffet that Spotify used to cannibalize the industry and we won't do it no matter how it erodes the economics of creation. But we could.
I'm never not astonished by the sweeping pseudo-philosophical bullshit conflating hobby art with literally millions of people's livelihood, visual and other creative culture, etc. There has to be an echo chamber in some subreddit where people who have no idea what they're taking about all slap each other on the back for their ill-conceived musings about the disposition of artists in our society and the nature of art.
As more people are able to produce music (due to cheaper tools like DAWs, more accessible music theory education, etc etc), if the demand of music doesn't grow proportionally, the average income of musicians/songwriters would decline.
The above will happen regardless of Spotify's existence. Thus, Spotify doesn't matter (much).