I got to tell lots of musicians why they can’t find enough work to live on. Hit Slashdot then Reddit. It’s Reddit that provides Slashdottings these days. 80,000 hits later (on a blog whose normal daily hit rate is in the twenties) … The article appears to have generally been well-received; the annoying responses were people who thought I was talking about major labels and rock stars, when I was talking about small-time musicians.
If you’re on the Internet nothing it says will be news. But it was written from the perspective of musicians, obsessive record nerds and the crossover between the two, and apparently reached its audience.
I’m quite pleased because I’ve spent somewhere over a year thinking about this one, ever since I read Gwern’s essay that I nicked the title from. I’ve written enough extended think pieces that got no hits to be pleased this one did well.
And I’m even more pleased because the comments directly on the post are generally high-quality and apposite.
Interesting article. I think it’s fascinating to compare the economic situation in the music industry to the one in the board game industry. The board game industry has enjoyed a huge renaissance at about the same time as the music industry has been pummeled. Astoundingly, the board game renaissance appears to be entirely due to a clever packaging trick.
Basically the quality of a board game is determined by the interactions created by a small set of rules (it is a huge turnoff if it takes more than ten minutes or so to learn the rules of a new game). So the actual core value of the game is essentially just a small quantity of information. However, people don’t buy just the rules; no one would pay anything for a sheet of paper with some game mechanics written on it. Instead, the rules come packaged with a set of physical game pieces like playing cards, a game board, or colored tokens. These game pieces are trivially easy to manufacture; they are just little pieces of paper, wood, or cardboard, and they are worthless in and of themselves. So somehow when you package together these two components—a piece of paper with some high-quality information written on it, along with a set of dumb cardboard pieces—you can get something that people are willing to pay $50 or $70 for.
Nice piece. I wrote a somewhat similar one some years back, with the spin that illegal file sharing only made the inevitable happen earlier—that even if people hadn’t been illegally copying things, it would only have been a matter of time before new entrants would have started selling their products at such low prices that the more established companies would have been forced to follow suit.
Yeah. My key points were (1) massive oversupply (2) basic microeconomics, and a bit of (3) most people aren’t record nerds. I was disconcerted at just how many of these people who’d been working musicians for decades apparently didn’t understand (2) at all.
I got to tell lots of musicians why they can’t find enough work to live on. Hit Slashdot then Reddit. It’s Reddit that provides Slashdottings these days. 80,000 hits later (on a blog whose normal daily hit rate is in the twenties) … The article appears to have generally been well-received; the annoying responses were people who thought I was talking about major labels and rock stars, when I was talking about small-time musicians.
If you’re on the Internet nothing it says will be news. But it was written from the perspective of musicians, obsessive record nerds and the crossover between the two, and apparently reached its audience.
I’m quite pleased because I’ve spent somewhere over a year thinking about this one, ever since I read Gwern’s essay that I nicked the title from. I’ve written enough extended think pieces that got no hits to be pleased this one did well.
And I’m even more pleased because the comments directly on the post are generally high-quality and apposite.
Interesting article. I think it’s fascinating to compare the economic situation in the music industry to the one in the board game industry. The board game industry has enjoyed a huge renaissance at about the same time as the music industry has been pummeled. Astoundingly, the board game renaissance appears to be entirely due to a clever packaging trick.
Basically the quality of a board game is determined by the interactions created by a small set of rules (it is a huge turnoff if it takes more than ten minutes or so to learn the rules of a new game). So the actual core value of the game is essentially just a small quantity of information. However, people don’t buy just the rules; no one would pay anything for a sheet of paper with some game mechanics written on it. Instead, the rules come packaged with a set of physical game pieces like playing cards, a game board, or colored tokens. These game pieces are trivially easy to manufacture; they are just little pieces of paper, wood, or cardboard, and they are worthless in and of themselves. So somehow when you package together these two components—a piece of paper with some high-quality information written on it, along with a set of dumb cardboard pieces—you can get something that people are willing to pay $50 or $70 for.
Nice piece. I wrote a somewhat similar one some years back, with the spin that illegal file sharing only made the inevitable happen earlier—that even if people hadn’t been illegally copying things, it would only have been a matter of time before new entrants would have started selling their products at such low prices that the more established companies would have been forced to follow suit.
Yeah. My key points were (1) massive oversupply (2) basic microeconomics, and a bit of (3) most people aren’t record nerds. I was disconcerted at just how many of these people who’d been working musicians for decades apparently didn’t understand (2) at all.