No it's not. A commodity would mean that people are indifferent to the music of Metallica vs Taylor Swift vs your brother in law's blues band.
They aren't. So it's not a commodity. Because that's what commodity means.
You could let your playlist run for years, but you don't and nobody else does either because repetition and familiarity and quality are things people care about musically.
Playing music well in a way that is liked by millions is an unbelievably valuable thing. Playing music badly is utterly worthless from an economic standpoint.
I think you're underestimating the role marketing plays in demand generation. It's not that Taylor Swift is "better" than the local jazz guitarist, she's just more heavily marketed. Music labels know that the mass audience doesn't appreciate musical complexity so they market simple music with attractive performers. Then the Clear Channel/Ticketmaster... machine takes over and handles the promotion and distribution.
I'm actually a big fan of pop music, but that doesn't mean that non-pop is financially unsuccessful because it's "bad", it's just not put into the marketing machine because it very well may be too good.
I'm probably not underestimating the role marketing plays in music. I'm the former head of digital at a major music agency, and I handled campaigns for multiple album of the year Grammy winners and household name artists, almost certainly including music and artists you consider important in your life.
It's not really about marketing. Everyone thinks that and they're wrong. You learn this instantly when you are actually in the business and see all the artists and projects that get the exact same amount of marketing effort as the massive hits and go literally fucking nowhere.
It's like home run batting, even the best in the world at picking and promoting music are lucky to have like a 10-20% success rate.
Audiences have a mind of their own, they like what they like. The problem people have with understanding this is usually that they don't like the same thing that mass audiences like, and they consider what they do like higher quality. So in their minds the masses are being duped, marketed to.
Which is true to a point, they are being marketed to. And having resources and labels and monopolies behind you can definitely expose you to more people. But it's not enough, at all, if people don't respond to it. And conversely, if you have no resources whatsoever it's way harder, but it's not impossible at all and stuff that really has wide appeal most of the time really does bubble up and catch attention pretty quickly.
It's not really about the quantity of marketing effort, it's a butterfly effect. Of all the marketing effort that is put in, it might be the tiniest thing that makes the difference, it's not a linear relationship.
> It's like home run batting, even the best in the world at picking and promoting music are lucky to have like a 10-20% success rate.
Mass market success is basically a crap shoot and doesn't really reflect the quality of the musician. You said:
> Playing music badly is utterly worthless from an economic standpoint.
And that's not true at all, being a virtuoso is pretty much worthless from an economic standpoint. It's pointless to try to equate skill to economic success because in pop art they don't have anything to do with each other. It's all about marketing and distribution. Not to say that the studio musicians that make the pop music aren't virtuosos, but they're definitely playing simplified songs.
I never said being a virtuoso was worth anything, that's a new discussion.
My point is just that some music is incredibly valuable economically, and most is not worth anything at all.
Which is clearly true.
As such, music is not an interchangeable commodity it's an extremely idiosyncratic and heterogenous market.
I've heard the argument about how nobody cares about "better" music and so on my whole life. It's like the thing people like to talk about. But it's kind of boring, there's no definition of better that everyone is going to agree on.
For example I think Pitbull fucking sucks, deeply and profoundly, and objectively. When he rhymes Kodak with Kodak in the song "Give Me Everything" I want to throw rocks or other durable objects at whatever speaker is subjecting me to that fucking song. Somehow, 12 years after its release, this is still happening to me on a regular basis, usually within the first 2-4 hours after entering the state of Florida.
But people seem to like it. So that's the only actually objective way to determine the value of music. All the other ways are just people talking.
> But it's kind of boring, there's no definition of better that everyone is going to agree on.
I agree. Part of that is that economically successful music also isn't "better", it's just making money. I like Madonna but she's an objectively crap singer. Just because something is popular, it doesn't make it good. That's like saying Coke is the best drink in the world because it makes the most money. Commercial success is due to marketing, distribution and luck.
Excuse me for being blunt but this is way too simplistic and the world does not work like that. Artists (= suppliers in over-crowded markets) don't just "get discovered". An artist has a job, and that job is definitely not marketing, sales, public relations, or really anything other than doing their thing.
If artists were left to their own devices they would happily rot in their basements, attics and/or garden sheds and die in anonymity. The (potential) audience needs some way to actually discover said artist _before_ they can even form an opinion on likes/dislikes. And, the market is over-saturated with extremely good artists, globally. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of artists. Only, 99.999% plus is not known by anyone except perhaps their near social circle and/or relatives.
An artist without an agent or an agency* (proper marketing and networking etc) is just a random person with a creative hobby.
> In music, commercial success, more than any other factor, comes from making music that is liked by large numbers of people.
Most bands never have a chance to see if their music is liked by a large number of people because they don't have that kind of distribution. Through the 20th century the labels created a distribution network into which they pump hand selected artists (that match their marketing channels demographics). They, like you say, have roughly a 1 in 10 chance of success with this model (like vcs). Most bands will never know if their music will be popular because the won't get signed to find out.
Well see the thing is that all music that is liked by large numbers of people is also liked by small numbers of people. If you get my drift.
Most bands never get signed because nobody likes them. They play a gig to fifty people in March and when they play the same place in June twenty people show up. By fall it's just girlfriends and siblings and by the following year they're working as a roofer or something.
Artists make demos of their music and send them to people and those people don't like them, and don't play them over and over and don't share them with friends, and it never reaches the ears of people with influence because nobody cares, because it has no real connection or mass appeal.
Conversely, artists that do have mass appeal get attention very very quickly. I've been around awhile, I started working professionaly in the music business in the late 1980's. So much has changed, back then it was true that distribution mattered a lot more. In the 90's corporate radio mattered a lot more. In the 2010's you had a much clearer shot via Youtube or similar. So yeah there's substantial change in how it all works.
The basic core part is the same though. Most music doesn't even have a small chance of being genuinely popular. Because it's the kind of music that isn't really liked by mass audiences.
You're saying this:
> Most bands will never know if their music will be popular because the won't get signed to find out.
That's not true. Those bands do know that their music will not be popular. They just don't know why.
I think we have opposing views on how effective A&R is at talent discovery. Like you say, they only have a 1 in 10 record of success. That looks like they have no clue what people want and what people don't want.
I've been to tons of packed clubs with unsigned bands. I've seen absolutely amazing musicians who don't even play live, just give lessons...
The "band as a brand" is a 20th century anachronism that equates commercial success with "goodness".
Commodity has a very specific meaning in economics.
You can very easily tell that a Taylor swift song and a local jazz song are not the same song. They are not interchangeable. If someone replaced some songs in your playlists, you would notice. Therefore, not a commodity.
Fruit is a commodity, but there's many types of fruit. And when you drill down, there's a tons of types of apples or whatever, but they're pretty much commodities.
Some are more valuable or desirable than others, but if you want fruit and you can't get what you want, you substitute with something else.
Music has a lot more variety than fruit, and some varieties are much more valuable, but still. If you're thinking about a career in music, realistic goals are going to be in education, maybe session musician, live music at entertainment venues (theme parks, cruise ships), maybe symphony; maybe something in support of music like a sound tech at a venue, etc. Being a headlining act is a career, but not a lot of people get to do that.
> You could let your playlist run for years, but you don't and nobody else does either because repetition and familiarity and quality are things people care about musically.
I mean, I typically listen to a specific internet radio station and it feels like they have let their playlists stagnate, but I still listen to it. So I wouldn't say nobody does. They've been down for the last two days though, currently listening to a local radio station with similar tastes (but they're constantly adding new music to their catalog).
Dear Sirs, hold your horses. There are notable definitions and references we may lean against here :)
Commmmodity:
"In economics, a commodity is an economic good, usually a resource, that has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them."[0]
Note here that the essence is not about preferences ("indifference"), but "equivalence" only (ie. "fit for purpose"):
Fungibility:
"In economics, fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are essentially interchangeable, and each of whose parts are indistinguishable from any other part" [1]
- and
"Fungibility refers only to the equivalence and indistinguishability of each unit of a commodity with other units of the same commodity, and not to the exchange of one commodity for another."
So: Both sides can be right!
Music _is_ a commodity when one item (a song) is _perceived_ so similar to another item that their value _in_the_given_context_ is _perceived_ as equal by a consumer (the case for one poster below).
If a consumer assigns equal value (not preference, value) to Song A and Song B then these two are commodities because they are _interchangeable_ in some context. Both are "fit for purpose"
On the other hand, if the consumer does not want to replace Artist A with Band B then these are not interchangeable, and as they are not interchangeable they are not commodities either (the case of another poster below).
So, the customer is always right. Ie, commodity or not is a matter of context.
An apple (or type of apple, to be specific) can be a commodity because I don't care or who which orchard made the apple, and I am completely indifferent to the apples of various orchards when I go to the supermarket.
Recorded music isn't like that, at all.
I care if the song is Fly Me To The Moon sung by Frank Sinatra or Stairway to Heaven sung by Frank Oz using the voice of Kermit the Frog.
Some products are commodities. Some aren't. The word has an actual substantive meaning.
I think there's some talking past each other going here.
I think it's useful to bisect music into commodity/non-commidty categories.
Category 1 is things like Taylor swift's music which is not a commodity.
Category 2 is the music playing on lofi hip hop radio[0] is a commodity. 28,000 people are listening to the music on that channel as I type this and and approximately zero people know or care who made that music. The specific song basically doesn't matter so long as it fits the genre and meets a quality bar. They're analogous to handmade rugs - all slightly different but not in a way the consumer cares about.
So far as I can tell, most music that gets made is treated like it's in this second category: Generic Genre X song. Producing something that manages to break out of this commodity status is deeply unusual.
In anecdotal support of this, I often go to venues to listen to "bluegrass" (category 1) in much the same way I go out to buy an apple. I want the bluegrass to be good, just as I want good tasting apples, but the particular purveyor does not really matter unless it's someone special like the Punch Brothers (category 2).
Just because they themselves have outsourced the selection of the music doesn't make it a commodity.
It's like saying Michelin-starred restaurants are a commodity.
They aren't.
Once they are on that list they might be sort of interchangeable to a specific sort of person who just wants a generic "nice" restaurant and picks one off the list when they get to a city.
But they're all unique and different in really substantive ways, and also different from non-Michelin starred restaurants.
Your example of venues that hosts bluegrass works the same way. You trust the guy who books the bluegrass bands. If they just offered a gig to every band that asked you would hate going there and they'd close soon. Have you seen genuinely bad bluegrass? You don't like it, I can assure you of that.
You're just talking about curation. And the fact that curation is even possible proves what I'm saying.
If recorded music was a commodity there would only be one playlist because you would not be able to tell one playlist from the other.
Can your car tell Exxon from Sunoco? Can you drink a glass of milk and know which dairy it came from? Of course you can't.
Curation happens all the time in commodities. Tomatoes are clearly a commodity, but blemished or misshapen tomatoes (a purely aesthetic concern) are often worth far less and may even be discarded. Much of this process is done by hand (I've done it).
Corn is a commodity too, but I buy my sweet corn exclusively from one of a few vendors growing varietals that I enjoy more than what I can get at a super market (the varietal can be sold on the futures markets).
One definition of a commodity is:
> a mass-produced unspecialized product
My claim is that most lo-fi hip hop (and other genres) really looks like it fits this definition. The songs are produced in their thousands and have differences in the same way honeycrisp apples have slightly different colors and sizes, but ultimately are interchangeable.
Any further than this feels like it's nitpicking at technical details. I cannot tell the difference between lo-fi hop hop playlist A and lo-fi hip hop playlist B because the differences in the songs are not meaningful to me.
Exactly this.
OP is needlessly beating the horse to death. I have enough graduate microecon credits under my belt to happily declare music is a commodity. You don't have to tick off every single i and t from the microecon literature to meet the standard definition of commodity. Its the intent. I have a curated playlist in the 10s of 1000s, probably way more than the average music listener. I'm listening to music pretty much all the time. Its a commodity. Its a generic song. Its something that I play in the background to block out the pain. There's a lot of pain in my life. So I listen to music to block it out & get on with work. And that's music. Whether its this album or that artiste or whatever is immaterial to me. Its just some background noise that sounds pleasant & blocks out the mental pain of work.
Recorded music just like isn't a commodity. It's not close.
In fact, if you took a spectrum of all mass consumer products and ranked them from most like a commodity to least like a commodity recorded music would probably be on the side of least like a commodity.
It's not really an argument. Recorded music is not "kind of like" a commodity. There are tens of millions of recorded songs and literally every different iteration is wildly different, people consider some of them literal core elements of what gives their life meaning while other examples of the exact same product they have a visceral and intense hatred for.
> literally every different iteration is wildly different
We have a basic disagreement on facts here. My experience of the world is that very few songs have any substantial difference from the world as 1,000 other songs. With a small number of songs having the properties you describe. They are different in the way the patterns on the skin of an apple are different. Utterly unique, but not in a way that matters to consumers.
Diamonds are, perhaps, a good analogy here. Diamonds below a certain carat size are a commodity. They're ground up by the ton and sold for use in a variety of products at a cheap price (category 1 songs). Larger diamonds are not a commodity - a 45 carat diamond might be considered a national treasure (category 2 songs).
You're not understanding how some people use music. Does the supermarket care who the artist is? Not really. Do I care who the artist is? Not really, I just need dance music to keep part of my mind occupied so I can get into the zone easier; saccharine vocals help too, no substance please.
In the case that it's only one song, I'll be a little more picky. Same thing if you have to eat the same apple every day.
I'd probably just stop listening to music at that point. Or find some work where they're still running large collated copy jobs; those copy machines make some good beats.
If I had to eat the same banana every time I chose to eat a banana I wouldn’t give a shit, at all.
In fact if you told me that my understanding of physics was wrong, and that I had in fact only eaten one banana ever in my life, which had been reconstituted and delivered to me each time, I wouldn’t have anything to say. Because I wouldn’t be able to tell if that was true.
Because bananas are all the fucking same from a practical standpoint.
With respect to your experience cited in your other comment, a lot of my music experience time is a continuous stream of random tracks on Apple's "Made for You" feature.
I'm not particularly partial to what comes up. There's obviously a degree of quality that I'm expecting in order to keep the experience smooth and a set of genre and musical conventions I'm expecting.
I wouldn't say that's exactly commodified, no, but I definitely feel like my engagement with the difference between Taylor Swift and some other well-produced halfway reasonable pop artist is pretty minimal. At least in that act of listening.
I used to care a lot more about this. I used to keep up with my favorite artists and look forward to their releases excitedly. Now, I feel everything is such a continuous stream of mild-novelty that I'm less attuned to these differences.
So in that sense, I think I agree with the grandparent in that something feels interchangeable and indifferent about music. I don't want to pay a ton for it, even as someone who used to love buying albums. Or, at least, the times when I engage with music in that way seem fewer and further apart.
Music seems to serve two purposes. The majority of my listening is unintentional, background listening. Much more rarely am I more engaged in the experience. Only in those latter times do I feel all that attuned to a difference in quality.
Now, instead of using an algorithm of music selected by a mass market service that is playing you an endless stream of songs that are proven to have a large audience, try listening to the raw feed of uploaded music to major services.
Like the literal feed coming in that is just a firehose of every major label, all the indie releases uploaded via Distrokid or similar, and so on.
You'd find it instantly unlistenable. Nobody wants that because it sucks. Most music, even music people have taken very seriously, has almost no appeal to anyone at all.
It's a commodity in the same way as fashion is. Each piece is unique, and people become attached, but something equivalent would take its place in its absence.
I don't know a term for that other than commodity, but sure, it's not the strict definition in economics. Please suggest an alternative word if you know it.
There's no fashion choices in West Texas Crude or Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil. Those are commodities. Each producer of the product produces an indistinguishable result from each other producer. You are producer indifferent. Most of the time you don't even have a way of knowing who produced the commodity you're consuming.
Fashion, music, cars, hotels, laptops, and many other things aren't that.
You care if it's Chanel, BMW, Hilton, Apple, or Taylor Swift, versus H&M, Honda, Motel 6, HP, or Metallica.
I'm not asking what it's not. I'm asking what it is.
If an option were removed, something (not a random substitution, but eventually a substitute would be found) else would take its place and fulfill the same function even though it isn't the same it's close enough to fulfill the purpose.
That’s called a substitute good. Every good has a substitute good.
That doesn’t make it a commodity, words have meanings.
The distinction is important.
The original thread here posited that music wasn’t a lucrative field because it’s an interchangeable commodity.
That’s just flat wrong. It’s the opposite. It’s not lucrative because it’s very highly differentiated and the popularity follows a power law distribution and you’re probably not in the top echelon.
But you could be. Which is why people try so hard.
Cheers for the terminology, but being pedantic and purposely missing the point isn't useful or helpful.
You could've avoided this whole digression by providing the word people were searching for and doing a mental search/replace then moving the conversation forward.
They aren't. So it's not a commodity. Because that's what commodity means.
You could let your playlist run for years, but you don't and nobody else does either because repetition and familiarity and quality are things people care about musically.
Playing music well in a way that is liked by millions is an unbelievably valuable thing. Playing music badly is utterly worthless from an economic standpoint.