"This is bad for the consumer."

I don't see how that follows, except for the terrible logic of less profit for the musician is automatically bad for the consumer because people will just stop making music if they can't get rich off it. It looks like they're fighting back against exclusives and bullshit restrictions like "you can stream the first 5 songs, but if you want more you have to buy the album for $14.99", just the sort of thing everybody was complaining about two weeks ago when amazon launched their streaming service.

I understand that musicians like money. I can empathize with that, i like money too. But trying to frame it as good for the consumer is silly.

> except for the terrible logic of less profit for the musician is automatically bad for the consumer because people will just stop making music if they can't get rich off it.

It's not terrible logic, it's fundamentally sound. It's just not absolute.

That is, people won't "just stop" across the board. But the harder we make it to make money from making music itself, the more time would-be music makers will have to spend finding some other way to make money to finance their life.

So you lose music at the margins, particularly music that requires a higher level of investment to produce, particularly from those who have less disposable time/money.

I don't agree with that. I like artists, not businessmen. Turning artists into businessmen, or simply making businessmen don the apparel of an artist is not "good for the consumer", it's not "fundamentally sound" either.

Most indie musicians can scarcely eek out a middle class lifestyle. Only a lucky few ever get rich off it.

but plenty of musicians manage to become rich (often becoming not-indie musicians in the process). There's lots of musicians, they can't all be successful. A musicians failure to become rich should not be taken as a sign that youtube should give them more money, it should be taken as a sign that their music don't have a broad enough appeal to make them rich.

most indie musicians are WELL below middle class.

No that's not true.

well given that most indie musicians have jobs that allow them to support their music career, then I guess you are right.

but among professional full-time music only indie musicians - the majority are below middle class. they do not own a home, they have debt.

a minority have achieved enough success to live a normal middle class lifestyle.

It's a marketing problem. Not luck.

"labels really do have a bad situation here"

Are people expected to feel sympathy for these companies? Have we forgotten that people turned to big centralized services for their music as a direct result of the recording industry's aggressive effort to kill P2P? This situation was created by the labels' own actions, their failure to embrace the Internet early on before these kinds services existed.

"Its disappointing that while technology is making it easier than ever to record and produce music, its becoming tougher and tougher to make a living off it."

It did not have to be that way. We could have set things up so that when a song was downloaded, the artist and recording studio that produced it received a small payment automatically. It could have been a truly innovative revenue stream.

> Have we forgotten that people turned to big centralized services for their music as a direct result of the recording industry's aggressive effort to kill P2P?

We are talking about small independent labels.

> This situation was created by the labels' own actions

You are talking about major labels.

> Its disappointing that while technology is making it easier than ever to record and produce music, its becoming tougher and tougher to make a living off it.

That's normal. Market commoditization. The problem is musician and labels don't want to change and they are learning the hard way.

I'd be interesting to see how many people live off music in the last century.

I don't really know what "change" they are supposed to be dealing with. Sure digital makes it easy to copy and distribute, but musicians keep making less and less and it is harder for them to actually use music as a career. Is the change you are referring to, that they basically should just deal with being broke, because it is easy to pirate? That sounds like a bad thing to me, not good.

> Sure digital makes it easy to copy and distribute, but musicians keep making less and less and it is harder for them to actually use music as a career.

This is true of every single profession that involves creating digital media. Writing, journalism, video, film, game dev, photography, you name it. The money is falling out.

I think a large part of the problem is that in all of those fields, people love what they do. Of course, they work very hard at it too, but what that means is that there are a large number of people producing media for the sheer joy of it.

As the cost of production goes down, an increasing number of "amateurs" can create media, and as distribution costs drop, that media is more easily disseminated. The end result is that people willing to do stuff for free are crowding out the paid players.

There are some exceptions, of course, creative people who make a ton of money, but they're the narrow end of the power curve. For an increasing number of people, being creative isn't a lucrative gig.

I don't believe that's a good or bad thing, just a thing. What I do think is bad is when people who make great creative works don't have the time or opportunity to do that. It's a waste if a talented musician has to spend 40 hours a week at some lame job to pay their bills and only has a few hours for music on the side.

But that's not a problem with the music not paying the bills as much as it is with the bills themselves. If we lived in some sort of utopia where we all the essentials we needed to get by for free, then there'd be no reason to whine about artists not getting paid. They wouldn't need to.

> I think a large part of the problem is that in all of those fields, people love what they do.

Also, the absolute amount of good content keeps going up. Those old Louis Armstrong albums aren't going away. People still listen to the Beatles and the Stones. And this is true of nearly all varieties of content.

The only timely content (sports, news, contest shows) is partially immune to this, but even then, attention is scarce and more quality entertainment enters the public domain every year. Right now it's mostly (classic!) books, but decades in the future, HD content will be 100% free to use and distribute and the bottom will really fall out of everything.

This is really insightful and not something I'd realized even though, for example, my own reading and music tastes encompass an increasingly long timespan.

> they basically should just deal with being broke

If they aren't willing to compete in new ways and change their business models, yes.

Even television shows have this problem. Commercial revenues are down, so production costs go down (more reality TV) and the format of advertising has adapted (more GM cars featured prominently).

And then half the Internet complains when their favourite actually good show gets cancelled because the TV execs saw its viewing figures tumble below acceptable ad revenue levels in some graveyard slot while this month's major sporting event was on.

We are inevitably reaping the consequences of what freeloaders have been sowing for some years now. It still costs a lot up front to make good quality content, more than ever as we push the envelope in some media like the big name games and movies. If too many people just take it for free with whatever excuse instead of doing something that ultimately supports all the artists and other creative professionals who make these works, then those people are going to have to find other jobs to do to pay the rent, and our culture is left poorer for it.

This is exactly why HBO keeps their Game of Thrones content which costs $6 million / episode exclusive.

If they started selling episodes for $1.99/each in HD the day after they air they'd see their upfront capital they get from their recurring subscriptions evaporate, and the show would also go away.

The irony is that Game of Thrones is big and successful enough that it probably could make a tidy profit even in the alternative model you mentioned and despite being one of the most pirated shows in the world.

The difficulty with the "adapt or die" reasoning isn't GoT, it's shows 2-10 on the popularity chart, where show 2 has only a fraction of the audience and brings in only a fraction of the revenue but its fans still want the same production values.

In the same way business does it - offer different services. There are two extra problem with this business though. Labels were stubborn to change, but I think finally they accept the fact that content is commodity. Secondly, musicians are artists not business people. There is an ethos of a poor artists that devotes live to sacrum.

Absolutely! I gave us a real warm and fuzzy feeling inside making more money with cheap, mediocre quality tshirts made in Thailand with unknown working conditions, than the actual music …

Ironically, in the time of the sacred internet, cutting a limited edition on Vinyl is still more profitable than any other digital form for a lot of small artists :)

I'm not complaining though, because I refuse to look at art as plain business and rather earn nothing at all than compromise doing what i love for a better ROI.

I think people should value money less. The artists/label on one hand, and the people who are too greedy to spend a few bucks on something every once in a while, because they can get it for free on the other.

Update: And i do believe that the current time is probably the best ever to make music, from a purely artistic viewpoint.

LOL what world do you live in where music is a commodity? A market treats commodities as equal with no regard to who produced them. This has 0 to do with music, because it's all about skill, star power and charisma, so...