Reddit reviews Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class

Piracy will slowly destroy all niche arts.

Mainstream artists can survive the hit of piracy much easier than small niche artists because they have more revenue sources available to them, plus they appeal to a much bigger potential audience.

Hardcore music fans of today are spoiled. For only $5 a month they get access to almost all the music they'd ever want to listen to. When your power users only pay $5 a month, the same as a casual listener, that's a big problem.

Some good, non academic, books about this topic (though they do cite actual data/studies):

http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Crash-Killing-Creative-Class/dp/0300195885

http://www.amazon.com/Free-Ride-Parasites-Destroying-Business/dp/0307739775

I make music myself and know what it approximately takes to craft certain kinds of music. The loss of revenue from music sales forces musicians to tour more than they'd like to.

If some of my favorite musicians of the pre-internet era had to tour as much as Mac DeMarco, they would have never made the albums they've made. The time and energy they invested in songwriting/production to morph a good song into an amazing song would, instead, today get invested in touring a couple of extra months.

Don't let your kids go into any business where the main product can be digitized, unless it's the video game industry. You will save them a lot of frustration.

There's a fascinating discussion of what happened to the record companies and artists during this period in Scott Timberg's book "Culture Crash."

It's true that the average consumer had no sympathy for the artists or the record companies, because they were perceived as inconceivably wealthy. The trouble is that most artists (musicians, or "content providers") were not on "Cribs." There used to be a vast middle class of moderately successful rockers, studio musicians, and an entire indie-label industry which never got rich but did manage to pay for a comfortable life by writing and playing music. They were responsible for the quality and diversity of popular music at the end of the 20th century. Napster ate everyone's lunch, indiscriminately. And then Apple stepped in, and then Google and Pandora and Spotify, and now nearly all the money that can still be made in music is either going to a tech company, or is being laid into the hands of the artists themselves on tour. And so they must tour forever lest the money dries up.

The record companies were a beheamouth by the mid-90s, it's true. But they also paid the artists to keep making music. Apple, Google, Spotify - they don't do that. They don't have to. The market has already demonstrated that the audience will never pay for music the way they did before, and the tech companies own the means of distribution, so everyone else is screwed. Including the artists.

Or, if you prefer, the "content providers."

YouTube is Google, now, obviously. But at least YouTube content providers have a direct relationship with YouTube. I think the question worth asking is - why does YouTube bother paying content providers at all? If we can answer that question, then maybe we'll know how YouTube can be incentivized to give a slit about freebooting and defend their content providers appropriately. Short of that, they have no motivation to do so - it will only cost them money to develop and implement the tools needed.

Here's a link to the book. If you're into sociology and/or enjoy being depressed about the future, I highly recommend it: http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Crash-Killing-Creative-Class/dp/0300195885