[gargantian]

Times change, and technology changes value. Scored music "screwed" street performers, then recordings "screwed" concert performers, then the internet "screwed" recording artists.

Plenty of artists have successfully adapted and are doing great. Others have sheltered behind curators and promoters like labels. Others have failed to deliver what people want and they are screwed. That's capitalism at work.

I don't understand why we should hold back progress so that existing artists can be sheltered from needing to adapt and provide a product people want to pay for.

I say this as a former small-time producer of club tracks and a current software developer.

Additionally, you should ask artists who's screwing them before you start pointing fingers. Many artists would kill to have their music downloaded. Much of the screwing comes from the big labels that reap almost all of the profits.

[baddox]

> Plenty of artists have successfully adapted and are doing great.

Exactly. The artists that have adapted are the ones whose art is actually valuable, rather than artists who work with the people who control distribution channels. Distribution channels are a lot more prone to disruption than creators of art.

[api]

"I don't understand why we should hold back progress"...

I don't think we should hold back progress. I'm not arguing for legislated compulsory DRM or shutting down the Internet.

I'm just saying I don't have a lot of love or sympathy for people who build businesses on the appropriation of peoples' hard work against their will. I feel the same way about jerks who take OSS software closed without authorization or credit, or who scrape peoples' blog posts and use them for their own click bait sites without even linking to the original author. TPB is in that sort of category.

"Additionally, you should ask artists who's screwing them"...

I have, and trust me... nobody has any love for record labels except maybe some of the indies.

The trouble is that the new model -- the promised land -- is not appearing. There is no new model. The new model is you give your work away for free and starve.

Like I've said, we've gone from a system where there was some opportunity -- albeit in a shitty model with shitty record labels -- to a system with no opportunity outside touring and merchandise sales.

You can squeeze by on that, but you can't build a career on it. Great art requires years of dedication. That means making it a sustainable career, a vocation. Squeezing out a few tunes in between your two day jobs just won't lead to great art.

It also means you're basically a consultant -- a glorified service sector employee. Why is it that programmers are allowed to build equity in startups, but artists are forbidden from building equity in a portfolio of copyrighted works? It's the only vehicle for equity building they ever had. Without some opportunity to build on your work in a non-linear fashion, you are just a wage slave forever.

I guess we're going to reward all those artists and musicians who enriched our lives by making them eat dog food when they're old...?

Sonny Bono always gets bashed for saying copyright should be "forever and a day." I still don't agree with him-- I think that position is too extreme. But I understand where he's coming from now. He understands economics and business.

To build an industry that can pay actual wages, benefits, and invest in new things, you need to build capital. You need some way of building a portfolio of enduring value that can produce recurrent revenue over a long period of time to fund new things and to support the vast overhead that a real profession demands.

Nobody should understand this more than the HN crowd, which is why I have such an uncharitable interpretation of the down votes I always get for pointing these things out.

[gargantian]

This is actually a great apology.

I agree with you that it's troubling that a new model for monetizing free work isn't coalescing -- in art, open source, writing, and more. I've personally felt the sting of all of these.

However, I don't blame the downloaders or the Pirate Bays. People want what they want, and Pirate Bay managed to provide that to people: a download index for the price of an ad or a drive-by download. I congratulate them on their success.

I think if you can't convince people to hand over money for what you've made, then what you've made simply isn't valuable, even if it maybe was yesterday. Perhaps this means that the local band will have to pack away their guitars while the one-hit wonder Gangnam Styles rake in the bucks, but nobody is being screwed here.

What society wants from entertainment has evolved, and holding onto a static definition of what constitutes "art", "quality", or "enriching one's life" while ignoring what real people are clearly demanding from their entertainment is, I think, pretentious.

I don't think the internet is destroying anything or screwing anyone. It's just closing gaps and optimizing every industry towards exactly what people want; if that's thrown-together garbage delivered for free at the cost of promotions shoved into your eyeballs, then don't blame the internet, or Pirate Bay. Blame people for consuming crap and blindly selling their souls to ads.

[res0nat0r]

> I think if you can't convince people to hand over money for what you've made, then what you've made simply isn't valuable.

They aren't paying because there is pretty much a zero percent chance of getting in trouble for downloading it illegally.

If magically somehow tomorrow every illegal download came with a bill for 250$ for each infraction at the end of the month things would change and more people would move back to legal purchasing. People are cheap and if they can take something for free without consequence they are going to do so.

[darrikmazey]

The myth is always that either one illegally downloads or pays for it through channels. However, most people I know will pay for some content and not others. It's a question of value. Just because the illegal download costs $250 does not imply that people will pay $10 or $20 instead. The third (and oft-ignored) option is that they will simply find other content that is worth the expense (both monetary and effort).

[doki_pen]

Who was making a living recording and selling albums before the internet? As far as I know, touring was always much more lucrative than recording. Labels always made much more money than artists and the artists were ok with that because the only way to get famous(and make money touring) was for a label to like you and promote you. Things have changed. It's harder than ever to make a living playing music because less people want to see live shows, but that isn't thepiratebay's fault. At the same time, it is easier then ever to get your music out there. If pirating was completely stopped it wouldn't change anything for "artists". We'd just revert to labels choosing winners, but it would still be harder to make a living now then it was 30 years ago.

[mullingitover]

> Like I've said, we've gone from a system where there was some opportunity -- albeit in a shitty model with shitty record labels -- to a system with no opportunity outside touring and merchandise sales.

> You can squeeze by on that, but you can't build a career on it.

Steve Albini strongly disagrees with your theory [1]:

"...As a result fans are more ardent for this music. They are willing to spend more on seeing it played live. They are willing to buy more ephemera and eager to establish a personal relationship to the people who make the music. Gig prices have escalated as a result. And the merchandise tables at gigs are universally teeming with activity. Back home, gigs that used to cost five or six bucks are now 20 or 30. Over here the ticket inflation has been more pronounced, with club gigs going for $80 or more. As a result gig income for bands has increased exponentially. My band has been playing a lot of the same places for the entirety of our existence, over 20 years now. I guess you could say we’ve saturated our audience, no matter how long we stay at it. Some of these perennial gigs are now paying an over of magnitude better than they were 10 or 15 years ago. That’s right, some places where we used to earn four or five hundred dollars we now earn four or five grand."

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-k...

[lordbusiness]

Excellent points, very well stated. I could not agree more.