This whole converastion seems super interesting, but unfortunately I don’t have time to really read it. Yet I dare to make a point that vast majority of professional musicians are small players (pun for fun) earning at maximum about average income relative to local population, usually less. All of them are also serious music fans and because of their lowish income, not able to spens endless amounts of money for the music they love. So, in a way they know very well both the need to sell their stuff and on the other hand getting it as cheap as possible. Maybe it would be good idea to try to get their views heard?
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I’m getting the sense that you don’t hold the arts in particularly high regard.
You are misreading what has happened here, it hasn’t destroyed the labels; there has been a massive consolidation power and capital. We simply have a new class of rentier middleman now sucking out value—the streaming service—and they are very much in hock with newly consolidated major labels.
As someone who has been in the position of negotiating deals between major labels a music services, I can tell you that it there is in no way a level playing field. Independent artists do not get paid the same, nor hold the same power as the big corporates.
The new boss, is very much the same as the old boss. And the combination of the new and the old are using all sorts of clandestine methods to continue to entrench this power structure, and the flows of revenue out of the creative industries, into the pockets of those who do nothing more than horde IP.
So were going here from art having no value, to now it having a negative value, that people should be paid to ‘consume’ it.
I really don’t think that’s what you want. Be very careful what you wish for here. The commodification of people’s attention is the very fast and slippery slope that has got us to the state we are in on the existing web. It allows people’s attention to be, sold, traded, and ultimately allows their behaviour to be manipulated.
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I totally agree. So how do we stop that? While understanding that there are no guarantees and SAFE is not going to be a panacea?
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@Warren There are no guarantees but we can take a hard stance early and set an example. If that option is a good one then competitors will feel the pressure and hopefully follow suit. That is the best we can do.
I had written a long post last night but my service was interrupted so it didn’t save, but I have a inkling of an idea that might perturb you but I’d like to float it by you and Jim to get your thoughts. It is minuscule in my opinion but it enters slippery slope territory but please come at it with an open mind if you could. 
I’ll pop in tonight to share.
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Art is subjective so that makes sense for sure. With how much siphoning of the money that people would spend on music skews any sense of how much artists should have really ever been paid in a fantastical “free market”.
So it’s hard to know what “fair value“ is. Is it minimum wage? Is it a premium? Or do we experiment with them or their audiences setting the prices? No matter what, it needs to be substantially more than what services pay out now.
I wonder how dynamics would change if higher earning artists had a % go towards supporting the collective. I think it would make for a more cordial industry and less dog eat dog. Highly political idea there though and just thinking out loud.
So an idea I had somewhat relating to this. Trying to draw in other parts of the industry. @Warren this is what I was eluding to earlier. One thing I have only entertained as a thought experiment was what if JAMStand worked with Sponsors that provide gear to musicians so that artists can apply for sponsorships or sponsors can search and support artists. In return the sponsors would show up in a small unobtrusive banner below album art in the play window of that artist. Small banner, small print, no scrolling, saying “Sponsored by: Peavey, Vic Firth, etc”. It could be a slippery slope. I don’t believe it steals attention or ruins the user experience and though that is as far as I would EVER be comfortable going towards any form of ads, what happens when I’m not around anymore, assuming it’s all still relevant? To clarify why I think it might be useful.
- Could draw in sponsors to the SAFE economy and ecosystem
- Benefits and supports musicians
- Non obtrusive or interruptive
Thoughts?
@JimCollinson I’m curious if you feel that promoters are valuable middlemen? I believe so. If so another industry we could try pulling in would be promoters by having a promoter/artist matchmaking service, or something along those lines. Musicians need promoters to get events and venues in the real world and I suspect increasingly for digital spaces (like a concert in a popular game like Fortnite) and promoters need someone to promote and the caliber of each should match most likely and we could provide that matchmaking space.
Thoughts and suggestions are appreciated folks.
As someone outside the industry with not much appreciation of the realities my inclination is to avoid replicating any of the old mechanisms.
Sponsorship for advertisement and promoters both fall into that category and I think will inevitably happen, and then will inevitably replicate the things we don’t want, unless artists get to see there are better alternatives. But these need to be invented first!
To invent will be harder if we’re thinking in the old ways, so I prefer that we keep away from any status quo style thinking (and the band 
). This forces us to come up with novel, truly decentralised mechanisms that work better for artists because the mechanisms will not be subject to the same problems (which put simply, I see as centralisation of power where power already exists). They will have problems, but at least they’ll be different problems and that creates more choice.
So stop this dangerous talk I say. It is the song of sirens!
The hard part is of course coming up with decentralised mechanisms and I don’t have answers as to what they might be. But I think it is also the fun part, for me anyway. I’m just not focusing on it with so much else going on.
I know David doesn’t want to reopen the PtP discussion, and nor do I but I do think it has some of the qualities we need here. So some things I like about it which I think help it - or any new mechanism - to compete with the old ways are:
- it’s universal, open to anyone, no filters or gatekeepers
- zero barrier to entry, it’s literally a checkbox in an app which can be on by default.
- decentralised distribution direct from network to producer, so the only intermediary is the publisher, which can be the artist themselves because that’s easier to set up than any alternative (making it the artist’s choice)
I’m aware there are valid criticisms of PtP and refer anyone who wants to examine them to one of the topics on that subject. I don’t wish to derail this topic, I only mention it here to illustrate what thinking differently means to me, and the kinds of thing I might look for as we imagine the future we’re trying to create.
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Agree with Mark here about avoiding sponsorship type things. Mostly for the reasons stated but also keeping it as simple as possible is always more sustainable and flexible. I think there was a blockchain project a while back that was trying to have some weird scheme where fans bought shares in artists they liked and then helped promote them or something. It died a pretty quick death.
Talking of blockchain, this project seems to have a reasonably good approach:
I think streaming until a threshold where you own something (and can download it) can be a good approach, and could provide a relatively unique service. It’s actually not super easy these days to legally get hold of actual files to DJ or play around with except on Bandcamp, which obviously only tends to have ‘indie’ music.
However, worth bearing in mind that most people now aren’t all that interested in downloading stuff, so from a UX point of view I suspect most people prefer the look and feel of streaming focused apps.
Just to be specific about what I think Jim is alluding to here. Early on Spotify did a deal with the major labels where they persuaded the labels to put their catalogues on the platform for very small royalty payments, in return for giving the labels equity in Spotify.
As an underhand piece of powerplay by a small company this was of course very smart, but the victims naturally are both consumers and musicians, the consumers because it ensured Spotify had a near-monopoly, the artists because they just got the tiny royalties rather than any of the equity. And so we end up with artists and consumers pitted against each other! Classic divide and conquer! (see also Brexit, British general election 2019, British establishment in general, western intervention in the Middle East etc etc.)
To re-iterate something I said earlier that I think is important though, and which applies not just to music or even art, I think the way we discover (music) is crucial. Although it has the potential to do the opposite, I think the digital world actually reinforces the dominance of small numbers of (artists.)
By flattening out global markets and information stores, then there is less space for a few ‘unicorns’ (for want of a better word,) and everybody else is left having to fight harder and harder to be heard.
I know it doesn’t sound all that sexy, but a very comprehensive, granular system of categorisation, probably based on RDF, combined with a great UI for accessing that, could be a huge help in evening out visibility of content.
In addition a set of standards to allow different platforms to seamlessly interact with each other allows people to build more specialist apps and communities that are not too limiting, whilst artists can still retain control over their work.
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Alright you’ve talked me out of it! I highly value your opinion Mark, thank you. I’m still teetering with the promoter matching though as it’s a real world thing and will increasingly become a digital thing BUT the match making could be direct also eliminating the promoter.
There’s so much to do and why bother with the old ways on a fresh start.
@david-beinn you hit the nail on the head earlier in the thread talking about solving the citation problem. I think you might latter be referring to bitunes which I think might have just been far ahead of its time and used BTC so not exactly user friendly. I think we can achieve what you’re talking about in one of a couple ways but the easiest and fairest imo would probably be PtP.
Also your point on RDF makes a lot of sense. When the Maidsafe team revisit that it will be important we take that on and @happybeing if you could ever do me a huge favor it would be then and I’d be forever indebted. There are existing ontologies from Musicbrainz and elsewhere I believed that may be of some use. Either way whatever is used MUST be shared openly for it to be beneficial.
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Out of full disclosure I am aware of resonate and audius which frustratingly have had some parallel thinking. I had drawn up a few diagrams over the last couple years and I looked at the Audius white paper and saw one of my exact diagrams. My heart kind of sank like maybe I had told somebody and it got around but that seems impossible. It was very strange and alarming so recently I figure we should just be discussing all of this. After all as long as the problems get solved BUT personally I believe SAFE is the best medium for that to be achieved and well, here we are.
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Taken as a positive, maybe it shows you are heading in the right direction.
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+1 for this. No need to reinvent the wheel always. The fact you’re doing it on SAFE is difference enough.
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One thing that none of us have mentioned yet surprisingly is how useful Labels will be. Not record labels but the Labeling/Tagging of the actual data upon upload. This will help us index, share, and categorize all data, also with RDF built in later I believe, @joshuef?
For anyone not up to speed on what labels are, please check here.
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I agree - digital tends towards monopoly and music has seen more money and power rise to the top, with the various functions of the industry consolidated into platforms, and the real danger happens when the platform becomes the only game in town.
Music’s always been very steep pyramid: those at the top pretty much get the lot, and that pyramid is just the same shape, but much bigger now.
This article puts it well 'He’s Got A Point, It’s Just That His Point Sucks' – Artists React to Spotify CEO Saying They Need to Work Harder
Streaming itself is not the enemy, the problem is the current system. Spotify has become an unaccountable, Orwellian black box. Instead, streaming services need to operate like cooperatively owned businesses. Spotify might be proud that 43,000 artists now make up their “top tier” (those artists accounting for the top 90 percent of streams), but as Rolling Stone reports, this would leave “98.6 percent of the world’s artists – i.e. 2,957,000 separate performers” operating outside of Spotify’s “top tier”.
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But why? Do we ask ourselves this? May I suggest it is the algorithms? They just feed the feedback and echo only what can be squeezed dry. Their business isn’t the little guy.
I have never had much if any luck being recommended “relevant” music that I actually liked on any streaming platform except Pandora. Pandora uses a totally different approach to music recommendations, I believe they called it the music DNA project. They would find music that had similar tempos, acoustic fingerprints, and so on. I was always impressed that I found so many new artists I’d never heard and loved them all but then I started to realize it only went so far but that is because they base it all off one artist where they should start to branch off of the other matching artists once you’ve gone through the full gamut so you can keep discovering.
My point is Spotify has so many AI engineers working to make algos that imo suck. Apple Music has some curation and tbh it’s not too shabby but they play it safe so it is predictable in a somewhat stale way, so not great either.
I think our official first approach will simply be incentivized curation and see where the cards fall. It might be a total shit show at first but the cream will start rising to the top and it will be organic. No BS algos or being stale. Hell this is a global network and once there are many translations for the app then you might be seeing Japan’s top tracks next to Afghanistan’s smoothest hits. You won’t see much outside of your geo located bubble on Spotify. All I know is there’s a chance it could be chaotic but at least it will be interesting!
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Exactly this. Their algorithms are designed to maximise profits for Spotify and herding users towards the top tier does just that. But that’s really just replicating the way the music business has worked in the past.
Why we like the music we do is very interesting because it goes way beyond modulating sound waves. Do we choose music because of the music or because of who’s making it? Do we think liking a certain style of music means we’re more sophisticated, more down to earth, more interesting, a better person? Do we like music by people who look like us and share our opinions and ideals and how are those choices and opinions formed? It’s a huge topic !
The music industry has always been about image, myth-making, the primacy of the charts, specialised radio stations that only play country, rock or R&B, the tribal music press and more recently product placement in video games. It has very little to do with music, everything to do with shifting product.
In the digital age of abundance there’s just so much music and it’s so inexpensive to reproduce it’s and distribute it’s become even more of a commodity, which is why Spotify can pile em high and sell em cheap. They don’t even have to care about building a band’s profile anymore, which is one area where record labels did assist struggling artists, or at least those lucky enough to get a deal.
On the plus side, I find Spotify’s Artist Radio algorithms to be pretty good and a way of genre-hopping to a certain extent (I expect they use a combination of tempo, acoustic fingerprint etc plus ML recommenders based on what people with a similar profile like) and mixing old with new. Curation is possible on Spotify via sharing playlists, but that seems to be a pretty minor part of the operation.
None of which provides any answers whatsoever 
, except to say that any successful music platform that gives more of a chance to the little guy will have to also be a tastemaker to a certain extent, if it’s not going to plug into the existing industry that’s there to tell us what we should like.
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This is probably a huge over simplification but ever since I was a teenager riding on the bus I’ve wondered this. I would think “How could people like these boy bands and other pop music so much?”. At the time I certainly didn’t. Ironically now I have an appreciation for it in a nostalgic way but at the time I just thought people were tasteless. I don’t think the music is inferior per se, it is all subjective as we know and anyone can come off as a music snob and say what is or isn’t good. The main reason I would convince myself is that it is what the conglomerates are shoving down youths throats. It’s just like the magazines like cosmopolitan that give young girls a negative or self conscious body image. We’re very impressionable at those young ages and when we are marketed sex or hype and when MTV or the top 40 say “This is what is hot right now!” A majority will believe it and there you go. I hate to say this about humans but at least at some point all of us tend to be a bit sheepish and can be influenced to fit in and so on so we can make our best impression in a group and have our best chances at status and success. It almost takes some real guts to shape your individuality and break off into some smaller faction but let’s be honest, where those same rules apply.
So this may well be a self fulfilling prophecy at this point and maybe that’s even what people are looking for. I don’t know how many times people have told me they like Spotify’s daily mix. I am befuddled by that but I’ll be honest I need to try and understand. That’s part of my mission. I’ll also be approaching everything through the lens in which we are discussing though and I would like a non biased feed of new uploads, or newly registered artists to be front and center by default, along with most popular etc. This way we can get a real view of what’s new in the world and discover for ourselves.
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We are very impressionable as teens and the marketing goes further than just boy bands. In fact, behind the scenes the same labels that promote the boy bands own some of the indie labels that cater for the cool kids too, and they play the two audiences off against each other. It’s a highly cynical business.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. I think of the independent labels that sprang up in the UK in the 70s and 80s which were genuinely independent, at least for a while, and did offer an alternative to a reasonably sizable audience. They solved a different problem which was distribution, getting records into shops. Distribution is simple now: upload to YouTube. The hard thing is getting anyone to notice.
Back in the day I remember poring through the small ads in the music papers when you could mail-order singles for 99p from bands with great sounding names like the Notsensibles and Desperate Bicycles and I’d occasionally buy them on the name alone because you’d rarely hear them on the radio and I lived in the sticks, but you’d trust the label. Didn’t always work out by any means but playing them for the first time was always a thrill, and I don’t suppose the Notsensibles are billionares but at least they had an enthusiastic audience and an outlet for their talents. I wonder if that could be replicated in the digital age of abundance?
I don’t personally like the Spotify daily mix, but often the Artist Radio works for me. So if one day I fancy listening to a certain band while I’m working I’ll pick their Radio and will hear their music every few tracks along with “similar” stuff, which I often do find I like, and quite a lot tends to be new stuff from bands I’ve never heard of (for which they get 0.0005p rather than the 99p I might have spent in my yoof). So as a consumer it kinda works for me, but the supply side is problematic.
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I used to have a similar tactic for music discovery and it was a hit or miss but it was totally worth it. To your question, I do genuinely think so. Like I said, it will be a similar experience to what we did and a hit or miss. A big company like Spotify or Apple would think this is ugly and try to prevent that with fancy algos and such. I think the key to not completely throwing off a users expectations is compartmentalizing a bit. Just have these new releases, new artists, new uploads be accessible and visible in their own playlists or stations but not forced on anyone or thrown in randomly to the point of irrelevance. Interesting topic and am glad to have the input so it can marinate.
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Were they the band that did “I’m in love with Margaret Thatcher” ?
My mind is telling me it got a couple of plays on John Peel but it was a very long time ago in the hazy decades.
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They were indeed. A song I can still whistle to this day (not that I was ever emotionally attached to the aforementioned you understand)
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