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by efsavage
1925 days ago
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> The production of one has huge economies of scale, whereas a song doesn't. Actually, now that we're digital, the economies of scale of music are similar to software, in that they are massive (and Spotify is a key enabler of that). > It seems weird to me that your pro-market ideology leads you to support what (to me) seems to be more or less wage-fixing for a labor supplier (musicians) Musicians have been largely entrepreneurial for centuries. The advent of physical media and distribution control enabled them to form these cartels, and extract rents to enable luxurious "rockstar" lifestyles for a select few. There is now far more opportunity for success and distribution without labels than there has been since they started. |
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Is this the case? It seems that there's the fundamental limitation of 10 musicians not being able to record a song in 1/10th of the time. Certainly there are SOME economies of scale, but it seems a little incredible that music would be as "factory producible" as something like a bookshelf or a car.
> The advent of physical media and distribution control enabled them to form these cartels, and extract rents to enable luxurious "rockstar" lifestyles for a select few.
This seems incongruous with the rest of what you are saying. Yes clearly there is an entrepreneurial component of music, and absolutely eg. SoundCloud and BandCamp is enabling independent artists in new and important ways. That doesn't change the fact that massive financial institutions are rent-seeking the bejeezus out of the bulk of the industry in a way that (to me) would appear to hurt competition.