Even if you're very good, it's a gamble; almost all celebrity stories contain the element that they simply met the right person or were in the right place at the right time. And fame doesn't correlate with how good you really are; there are various famous musicians who aren't technically good at all, but got their breakthrough for some other reason. So it is almost impossible to plan a successful career a priori or to estimate its chances of success. Just like in a game of chance.

There are very many prepared minds to which the favor never comes.

> Is it not same concerning everything in life?

Sure, we all depend on fate, but there are many proven life courses where you can't make a decent living just by being lucky.

As well as timing and luck.

Presumably many musicians on soundclound are persistent and hard-working as well as insanely talented and original.

Marketing isn't the dominant factor for a new artist winning the pop music lottery. Luck is.

There's a lot of great music out there that will never be a hit song, and it's nice that we can still listen to it.

I'm not a music buff by a long shot but on one of our first dates my partner and I went to Brighton during the Brighton festival. During a rain shower we heard some live music coming from a pub and went in. We've since followed that band whenever we get a chance.

At first I was full of optimism that they were on the cusp of hitting it big. Their music is as good as anything we hear played on the radio. Live their performance is exceptional.

For reasons I don't fully understand they don't seem to have moved on from where they where when we first encountered them, a small indie band with a niche but loyal following.

I guess my point is that skill isn't the only factor. I suspect a big part of it is luck and connections.

- good, with terrible marketing/no connections/luck

- not good, with great marketing/great connections/luck

- good, with great marketing/great connections/luck

I know so many and have bought so many records from amazing bands who've never had a lucky break and basically don't understand the internet. Then there's loads of dreadful music and one hit wonders in the charts where someone has been marketed incredibly or they've had some viral luck or whatever - but they fade away pretty quickly.

Then you have those people who consistently write great music, with great marketing and a lucky break. Who have long, rich careers. But like unicorn startups and everything else, this is never going to be everyone.

Not sure how it works specifically with music because you can't really churn out endless original content. I guess part of the churn can be covers or live performances.

Connections do help tho - getting someone to promote you on their channel always helps but I'm told the online content community are actually extremely supportive and friendly.

There's no real mystery in it.

Maybe my memory isn't great, but the market has been stretched with live music becoming substantially more expensive, while recorded music has become substantially cheaper.

I feel like if you want to be a professional musician, then that's exactly what you should be expecting to do with your time - playing music to people, not recording once and expecting to live off royalties forever. Recordings should be seen as marketing for the live performance.

I'm not really a fan, but Gary Numan is a case in point. He's been gigging forever and has made a point of making sure his tickets are affordable so his fans could continue to enjoy his shows, ensuring a lifelong revenue stream.

I am not sure recordings should be seen as the marketing for live performance though - what about bands in another country? They will never tour here. And I will never get to see The Beatles...

Also, recorded songs can sound very different to live songs, hence the "thin" nature of some of the live recordings. The ability to create a sonic soundscape on a recording is what makes it so special.

Recordings should be seen as art you are paying for. Nobody seems to mind buying a painting but objects to spending money on a CD. Baffling.

One thing I do miss is that CDs are mastered far better than anything on iTunes or YouTube is these days. Modern music is compressed (not MP3 artifacts, but flattening of dynamic range) in a way that wasn't common back then. Algorithmic remastering of music by all the big websites is overdone in my opinion.

This kind of explains it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

http://georgegraham.com/compress.html

That's obviously not a requirement for becoming a professional musician.

Or simply not very good.

That, of course, is a bigger issue. But at the same time, it's really not that the people who make it are orders of magnitude better than the best ones of those who don't. Like in many other areas of life, there's factors other than excellence that play an important role, and a lot of them boil down to luck.

You can't get nowhere without some heavy-weight business insiders supporting you, even if you're that youtube wunderkind that then has a cinderella-like career. So much of a career is due to successful management, networking, and just being in the right place at the right time. Mind you, you gotta be good, and you gotta work, but that alone is not enough.

Also, Paul McCartney didn't do very well because he had rubbish lyrics like "In this world in which we live in" - how many times can you say "in" ? or "someone's knocking at the door; do me a favour, go to it, open it and let them in" - stating the obvious...

> Many open source developers are happy working on their hobby for "free"

Really not a good comparison. Open source developers tend to have no issues finding paid work, often because they worked for free on open source. The same scenario doesn't exist for artists.

Acknowledging the "paid in exposure" meme, having some free work to point at when potential employers/customers ask for references is still extremely useful for an artist, just like open source contributions are for a programmer.

Imagine you're picking between two bands to play at some event (back when those used to happen). One has 3 references amd that's it, the other has 2 references but a million plays on Spotify. I know which one I'd go for...

There are more analogies with Open Source developers. For example, you can't expect that you'll become famous for writing a simple Homebridge plugin. Just like your thirteen-a-dozen blues song doesn't make it to the top of the charts. Thousands or even millions of people may use it, but you're mainly doing it to scratch your own itch. The statistics are just a feel good bonus.

Can you name a few?

Painters sold their paintings or did commissions, musicians sold their compositions or wrote them on demand, glassblowers and blacksmiths worked to sell their ware.

So your status came from being a master. Somebody in very high regard because he is practically irreplaceable. He brings us great clothes. Nobody else around can do it so well. And no, that doesn't mean you could charge a lot for them, because the market is too small and people who are buying from you are the people you depend on for getting the goods that you need.

So essentially, they had a job and a boss.

Too? I'm not sure what that has to do with Gary Numan. CDs came out in 1982. Gary Numan's first hit #1 on the UK charts was in 1979. He released a 2017 album that charted at #2. He has released music consistently for over 40 years, and there are multi-volume tribute albums of people covering his songs. And he had a side career as an aerobatic flying instructor to fall back on if everything went south. That's not a struggling artist.

The point I'm reading in this is, if someone like that is getting next to nothing back from his music being used to make people money, what chance does an actual struggling artist have?

Although I also appreciate Mick Jagger's point about the music business where he says that prior to 1970 you didn't make any money from record sales because the record companies just simply refused to pay you.

Actually selling CDs was hard. Selling music is hard. Streaming is so much more passive than people credit and so much more like the radio.

I'm absolutely with you - financially lots of people weren't successful before streaming and lots of people will continue to be unsuccessful today. Do it because you love it and if you can make a career (or even some extra cash) out of it be super thankful - there really hasn't been a better time to actually get people to hear your art.

No one deserves reward for unloading more supplies into already oversupplied market.

Sure, people can write open source software or play instruments at home but it isn't enough to live on by itself (ie it pays zero). This scenario is highlighting the problems with the INDUSTRY, since the artists are effectively now volunteers and won't even make a fraction of the minimum wage for their work.

There are multiple problems with the current set up:

1. In the past, record labels would promote individuals they thought could sell. People would look to the record labels and charts for "popular" music. Since there are so many ways to decide how to listen to music, so the labels have less control to "dictate" or push specific artists.

2. The availability of everyone to release their own music has diluted the market so now there is so much volume, nobody gets heard. eg. everyone shouting the news in the street instead of a newspaper.

3. The cost of streaming music is WAY WAY WAY too low. They priced an entire month of music at about £10, the same as a CD. That's 720 hours (30 days) for the same price as just over an hour of music. This works out at £0.013888888888889 per hour, or just over 1p for an hour of music. This is then SPLIT between the streaming company, the label (if one), the artist's manager, and the artist.

1p for an hour of ANY service is not sustainable, let alone if you split it again.

4. The streaming services are independent commercial entities that can charge what they want and negotiate payout fees with the record labels. Despite not being a cartel, no invididual company can charge more than their competitors or they will be seen as poor value. No record label wants to set up their own streaming service, so they are at the mercy of the streaming service for the price, to some extent.

5. Nobody values music. Maybe this is because some people have the radio on as background noise (like the noise of a fridge or household appliance), or because nobody would pay at least £40 a month for music (eg. 1 CD a week), it is now disposable, so the pricing of streaming has been a race to the bottom.

Maybe it's because they think that music artists are billionnaires and don't understand the time costs of learning an instrument, buying an instrument + gear, recording a song, mixing a song, mastering a song, pressing a CD or uploading to different platforms, promoting the release and believe they are only paying for the 4 minutes of audio they've just heard.

This doesn't even start to cover the costs of distribution or touring (van/truck driver, local roadies at venue, mixing engineer, monitoring engineer, sound engineer to ensure the output of the mix is appropriate for the venue since each venue is very different, equipment techs for larger bands, insurance for gear, insurance for venue, food for staff, accommodation for staff, publicity agent) so everyone thinks it's dirt cheap and a band is driving round a country and magically having equipment appear for them to play.

In short, the industry is dead.

Yeah, but who listens for 24 hours a day, all month?

Also, that £10 CD can be played infinitely. That's infinity hours of music, which comes out to around 0p per hour. That's completely unreasonable! ;)

The convenience of Spotify converted me from piracy, getting my money back into the recorded music game. I don't think I'm alone in that. That 29% cut quoted in the article doesn't seem unreasonable to me, especially when some of that is "new" money. What were the margins of old record shops?

That was the main thing I wanted to discuss, but let me also question some assumptions you seem to make.

> the labels have less control to "dictate" or push specific artists.

Why is that a problem? The curation and popularity lists are not gone, btw: the streaming services have taken over that role.

> The availability of everyone to release their own music has diluted the market so now there is so much volume, nobody gets heard

On the flip side, more people get the opportunity to be a little heard. Seems like a win to me. Also, there are definitely still those who are heard more than others.

Most musicians play because they need to. Because it's the only thing that makes sense. Nobody sponsors their years of very hard work which they do voluntarily and with joy before they become great at what they're doing.

Original bands are doing just fine. They have big following because they offer something new. They have patreon, sell tshirts vinyls and whatnot.

Many average musicians can afford equipment which top bands couldn't dream of 20 years ago.

If somebody wants to just create another pop song then yes they will have a hard time.

And existing artists who sold their soul to big labels may suffer because those companies never thought they would need to move a finger. Not ideal but there's some worse suffering happening in the world than that.

Big record labels and expensive CDs were basically a dotcom bubble. Music is entertainment and people have a lot to choose from now.

Those who need to play music will be fine and enjoy life with their instrument(s) as they always do. Those who went in with "I've heard there's some good money there" are getting disappointed.

This is true, but I think it's also more of the "I hear you can make SOME money there" or "I hear you can live on the money you make there" which is the point. You can't.

I am a musician and all of the guys I played with over 30+ years had main jobs alongside their gigging. There would be no way to afford it otherwise, and that was when CDs were being sold. The streaming issue has only made this worse, which is the point in question (is it a valid payout?), not whether every single artist can be a millionnaire.

It is also interesting about "selling their soul" because a lot of fans believe "their" band hasn't sold out and is doing it solely for the love of music - they never are. They might enjoy what they're doing ("do something you love and you'll never work a day in your life") but they would cease touring and recording if they were making £0.00. Even all the "alternative" bands were signed to labels and relied on distribution; they just promoted an image of not "playing the game" like everyone else, and being "alternative" even though they never were. It's an odd mindset people get when looking at bands and somehow believing that the musicians somehow lived without money and did their art solely for the love of the art.

In my ~10 years of streaming on Spotify I’ve definitely spent a lot more than that on subscription.

But, unlike movies or any other service, the music service is repeatable and potentially generates infinite value over the years, with very minimal cost of maintenance. Once it is submitted to spotify, it is there forever, generating revenue, without you doing anything at all.

Yet the film industry saw sense to charge £7 - £13 for a film rental or purchase PER FILM and not charge £10 for an entire month of cinema films.

This isn't true for Netflix since they get old films, but it isn't true for "just at the cinema" new releases.

I usually listen to a song multiple times each day.

Used to be I bought a CD for say $10, listened to it probably hundreds to thousands of times, say around a penny per listen. Then I'd resell the CD, say for $5, and someone else could get another 1000 listens with no money going to an artist.

An artist used to get around 10% minus packaging costs, so say at most $1 per CD.

So an artist then could get under 0.1 cents per listen, maybe vastly less.

Next, a song plays on the radio to millions, and the artist gets (?). I think that was quite small too. Even then, touring was where most of the money was made - the CD and radio game was to get exposure and fans, many of whom would then pay $50-$100 for one evening of listening to the band live.

I'm not sure how all the econ works out now without spending too much time digging into it, but making music has never been a good income stream for any but a tiny, tiny percent of artists.

This isn't the same with the music cost - you paid a tiny amount; they made a tiny amount of money - that's the unsustainable bit.

I'm the opposite to you - I will watch a film a few times, but only if I enjoyed it (as you said). I don't listen to the same song multiple times per day, let alone multiple times per week.