Reminds me of a couple of married friends of mine. The wife played a classical musical instrument (e.g., not an electric guitar) and had her sights set on being a professional. While working towards that she did a lot of teaching/practising/etc, and her students would often say something along the lines of "I'm so envious of all this time you have to practice music! How are you able to do it?!" and her reply was always a bit of a let-down/reality check for them: "my husband works in tech."

Not quite independently wealthy, but I imagine there's a fair few artists out there in a similar position.

Yeah, similar situation with:

- My brother who is a writer while his wife works at an industrial job that pays exceedingly well

- My friend who is an artist, whose husband owns an engineering firm with big medical device contracts

- My other friend who is a nature photographer, whose husband works in tech

- Yet another friend who is a musician, whose wife works in tech

- Another friend who runs a dog shelter, whose husband is a high paid engineer

- My other friend who is a writer, whose girlfriend is a real estate investment manager at a large bank

- My friend who is a social worker helping at-risk youth, whose husband is an oil and gas executive

- And yet another friend who makes jewelry and sews bags, whose wife owns an investment management firm

- Finally, a friend who volunteers to catalogue deer populations for conservation, whose boyfriend just happens to be a big wig executive for the city

I could go on, I see this phenomenon everywhere. There are no free lunches in life, someone is always footing the bill... just follow the money.

"What do you call a drummer without a girlfriend?"

"Homeless."

I had to constantly remind myself, when my college friends were going off to do startups that they wouldn't be sleeping under a bridge if they failed.

Even something as simple as a supportive family is a huge leg up compared to those who don't have it.

“Even something as simple as a supportive family“

That’s a strange wording, isn’t a supportive family widely known to be an absolutely huge benefit?

Everyone in silicon valley is familiar with founders that got seed money or connections from friends and family. My point is that even having a safe place to sleep isn't assured for some people, and folks should remember that when they pat themselves on the back for 'taking risks' founding a startup. Some people would be taking much larger risks than others.

I think the implication is that, as opposed to starting a romantic relationship with someone who can support you or a side hustle or etc., having a supportive family is much more passive (and somewhat a roll of the dice, but generally speaking if you were lucky/privileged enough to be born into a family who can emotionally and/or financially support you, there probably isn't much labor/effort you had to put into to make it that way).

It's for sure a huge benefit; I think their point is that it's a huge benefit that doesn't require effort (just chance, or maintenance of good communication/relationship).

What do you call a girl on the arm of a harmonica player?

A tattoo.

I'd like to see a list of jobs for which:

1. We generally value as a society

2. Two people both working the job and married to each other cannot afford to raise two children.

There are some jobs which we romanticize as being this way (musicians and other artists being a big example), but are we okay with e.g. social workers all either starving, or from wealthy backgrounds?

Raising two children is a job in and of itself. Considering our children are the future's consumers, you'd think it would pay better.

Teaching in public schools would definitely fit in this category.

> Teaching in public schools would definitely fit in this category.

Maybe not fresh-out-of-college but after 5ish years they almost certainly can afford it.

The playground supervisors probably can't though.

Teachers can afford to raise children.

Well yeah. Just not their own.

Snark aside, it's hard to imagine how you could raise kids plural on what a teacher makes here in Seattle. Even the absolute top of the teacher salaries here, after 12 promotions and with a PhD, pay about what my very first tech job did, many years and much inflation ago. I would never have tried to raise kids on that money.

This really depends on the state, but in many areas in the south, they cannot.

((Assuming we're talking about the US))

Both my parents were teachers in the South and I had everything I needed and a lot of what I wanted, including computers when they were really expensive. I even grew up in a house.

A lot of (rural) areas in the South are so poor, teachers are among the higher pay scale because they have a steady paycheck with health insurance. My area was a city though, so teachers were on the lower end.

In most places in the USA, two married social workers can afford to raise two children without starving. It's only a few expensive areas where this is impossible.

Employers in high cost areas take advantage of the informal subsidies being discussed here to underpay social workers (as well as other socially valuable occupations such as teachers). But that won't change until the workers move away or switch occupations. There's just no incentive for employers to pay living wages as long as workers are willing to accept less.

If they're directly employed by the government, that's one thing. Nonprofit sector is another thing entirely, with generally poorer pay and benefits.

There are jobs that we pay lip service to, like musicians and teachers. But ultimately, the jobs we actually value are people in finance who make sure that our savings don't disappear.

Garbage people.

Aside: what is the gender neutral term for Garbage Man? Garbage people sounds like I'm disparaging them.

"Garbage collector"?

Sanitation workers

I worry there's a bit of HN bias here. I don't know anyone whose partner owns an investment management firm or similar.

I know a fair few day jobbing musicians and creatives of other stripes though, only one of which with parents of any real means.

One is a manager at a theatre, one does care work, one does WordPress and a bit of JS for small companies.

The most full-time musician I know did have the richest parents growing up, but he makes his cash teaching and doing session stuff in local theatres.

Given how income distributions work, I think day jobbing creatives are very much the majority.

Oh, you’re not wrong. There are lots of day-jobbing creatives that I know as well.

I’m one of them. I work a good tech job and do photography as a hobby.

Forgive me if I seemed overly focused on these folks and their lucky circumstances. If I’m being honest, I’m a bit jealous they get to spend all their time focused on their creative interests when I only get to do it part time.

If money wasn’t a requirement, I’d be out photographing every day instead of writing web code.

All in all, life is good though, so even if I’m a teeny bit jealous, I’m grateful for how good I have it in life. I’m pretty lucky, all things considered!

Heh, sorry if I misread or sounded narky! That category one is clearly there and influential, but I don't think you suggested they were everywhere.

I'm impressed by those who find the time and energy to be consistent with a craft, on top of the pressures of work and family.

I like a dabble here and there at lots of things, but don't make the time and don't follow through enough. Something to aspire to.

I wonder how many people there are out there supporting partners working on their struggling startup hmm.

This is lots of people who work in nonprofit.

my partner is a working artist and, though successful, would not be able to live in our city comfortably if they weren't with me (or someone else with similar income). it's depressing, although I'm thrilled to help. it means I can't easily quit if I want to pursue another interest. it means we both have incentive to stay together even if something goes wrong romantically. neither of these points are a problem for us right now, but I am sure many artists do struggle with them.

How does that create incentive for you to stay with them if something goes wrong romantically?

Because there's a whole lot of room in between wanting to be in a romantic relationship with someone and wanting to see them homeless.

Athletes as well. I don't see how a "husband works in tech" answer is a letdown though, as really, what's a marriage for except creating the circumstances from which to grow. Over the decades my tech jobs have supported grad students, authors, craftswomen, actresses, athletes, among others and it was a pleasure watching them level up and grow. If I were ever to be married, earning enough to support arts or athletic pursuits would be pretty ideal. They're how you make kids brilliant and not be boring.

> what's a marriage for except creating the circumstances from which to grow

This is absolutely not in line with how most people I interact with seem to view marriage nowadays, especially not my fellow university students back when I attended.

From my perspective I think younger people mostly seem to view marriage as restricting, or backward and outdated, not an opportunity for something better.

I especially think younger people don't like the idea that in order to have freedom to pursue the things you love, you might need to marry someone who supports you financially. Otherwise you will be too busy financially supporting yourself to have that same freedom.

> younger people don't like the idea that in order to have freedom to pursue the things you love, you might need to marry someone who supports you financially.

How many people have ever liked it? Hasn't it been one of the few avenues available for lots of people to pursue things they couldn't without financial help? What's a viable alternative?

I don't know about if people "liked" marrying in order to have financial support.

My point was just that marrying someone to financially support you used to be culturally accepted, maybe even expected, and now it is less so.

Especially since most marriages can't afford to keep the household on a single income anymore anyways.

> My point was just that marrying someone to financially support you used to be culturally accepted, maybe even expected, and now it is less so.

Man marrying his wive to financially support him was accepted and expected? Really?

It absolutely was accepted - not in terms of being supported by her labour, but “marrying up” ie marrying someone from a family of higher social standing and wealth to improve your own station was a common aspiration of a middle class man.

Before the 20th century marriage and inheritance was practically the only way to climb the social ladder and acquire meaningful wealth. It’s basically half of what Balzac wrote about.

I imagine those young people that see themselves being in a position to provide financial support might find marriage restricting, backward and/or outdated.

Maybe, but I think it's not limited just to the "breadwinner" side.

Among people I know who are my age, there is a real attitude that they should not have to attach themselves to another person. They want to self actualize without compromise, so if marriage (or honestly, even monogamy) is not something they want they shouldn't have to do it.

Part of this mentality is totally fair. No one should be forced to marry, or live monogamously or anything else if they don't want.

Where the disconnect lies is the self actualizing without compromising thing. They are often angry at the world because they cannot live their way, but often finding a supportive partner would allow them to, or at least a lot closer to what they want than when they are struggling on their own.

There are exceptions to every rule of course, and the situaton has changed significantly with all-software productions, but... If you dig deeper into many electronic music producers bio, you realize they were sort of rich-kids. First and foremost, hardware costs real money. And this is gambling money, since you typically dont know what is going to come out of that project. And secondly, you need sare time on your hand, to be able to playfully explore the space... Both things are typically hard to find with the working class.

I know some successful musicians, DJ's, photographers, and videographers.

One thing they all have in common? Mommy and Daddy were loaded.

Steve Aoki comes to mind as an example. His family founded the food chain Benihana.

Also pretty common with authors iirc - a spouse with an income that provides stability.

That said, also easy for people to use this as an excuse.

Yup, my brother is literally doing this. He stays at home, plays video games, writes his book. His wife literally works a coal mine to fund his career.

The plot of Breaking Bad?

Similar/tangent, even working in tech, I sometimes mention to folks how completely out of touch and out of reach the real estate market in the PNW is. "How?", they ask, forgetting that a single person living alone pays the full share of rent, and then only has a single income to save towards real estate.

Nearly 100% of the people I know under age 35 who own their dwelling are couples, with both employed (and an overwhelming majority of those couples have at least one STEM income in that "portfolio").

I know a bunch of classical musicians, and while they study and work hard they all have steady gigs for one or more ensembles & orchestra's.

From the outside it feels somewhat more doable to be a pro , then a band or solo-artist, since there are quite a few orchestra's around that hire people on a stable basis. Spots are limited, but it's not super hard.

> Spots are limited, but it's not super hard.

This depends on the instrument and your location. If you play a popular instrument (say the violin) in a metro area with just one orchestra (some have zero!) then you ain't getting on that orchestra any way short of nepotism. If you live within commuting distance of multiple orchestras, there are more spots, but you still aren't going to be playing violin in the orchestra, and it's even possible that nepotism won't help you.

This is definitely not my area, but in other contexts I have heard of blind auditions as being a common practice in orchestras (i.e. people auditioning literally are hidden from view while they play and evaluations are then based only on hearing one play) which improved gender diversity in hiring, but not really racial diversity. How does nepotism work in this system?

How do you find out about the audition?

Also (though perhaps closer to a privilege issue than a nepotism issue):

How did you find the teacher who helped you get ready for the audition?

How did you "pay" for the practice time to prepare for the audition?

Many orchestras will hold open auditions. They'd post them on their website and probably a few regional music target outlets/websites.

Also networking, if you do gigs in the same region the orchestra is located you're bound to bump into a few of the members.

You can also just email the orchestra and ask when they hold auditions.

It still feels incredibly easy to cheat that system if you were motivated? Pre-share the candidates order list, chosen candidate will signal with an additional three note bar on the finale, etc.

Not all orchestras do blind auditions. Not all orchestras hold open auditions. You need both for nepotism to not give you a leg-up.

I studied and played classical into college during my engineering degree and have some insight into the realities of the profession - it's much harder than that and the pay for those stable gigs are oftentimes less than $300 / month. You're looking at one of the classic professional survivorship bias that I thought even the layman understood very well. Firstly, orchestras are in dire straights currently where programs are oftentimes supported by movie and pop media performances (see: National Symphony Orchestra playing Fantasia, Danny Elfman scores, and even freakin' Super Mario Brothers). This is a similar situation to ballet and theatre - legacy performance media I guess I'd call them. These orchestras don't pay much at all and most of the money classical musicians make are from lessons, typically the children of fairly affluent professionals, including from tech, finance, real estate, and other usual suspects of said caste. I saw grad students have to skip meals and beg and plead students to continue lessons to eat while I went off to recruiting events sponsored by tech companies where I ate food constantly and I never stopped feeling guilty even after inviting some friends to avoid pizza waste.

Some very lucky others that do well are from multiple generations of musicians that were essentially born, bred, and raised to be among the world's best and live and breathe music. There was no way I could ever compete with these kinds of folks and the hard life I saw so many talented people including professors that _are_ established after decades to live a very modest life made it clear to me that it wasn't something I should do for a living despite how much I love and respect it all. My role I feel is to support these folks now, so I go to shows, buy merch at the show, etc. and try not to take up space or attention too much and let people do what they do while trying to show appreciation for the work I was too chickenshit to ever do.

The arts and now entertainment fields are very much "tournament" style careers where given very limited public attention the winners take basically all and the remainder struggle quite a lot. It's nothing like professional fields like tech, accounting, medicine, law, or trades like construction, hospitality. In fact, any field that becomes more mass market-driven seems to become substantially more "tournament" style which has greatly impacted sex work - a top n% take an increasingly higher percentage away from an elastic but fundamentally highly dynamic demand.

The misattributed quote "find what you love and let it kill you" is the typical path of the career musician like most arts. I prefer to at least have some money to have more options to make it more fun on the way without resorting to the trap that is recreational substances.

I think you've captured and analogized it very well. Very good points, never tied it together this way myself, thanks!

It very much is super hard

Listen, can we all agree to stop calling any expenditure of money without a direct expectation of return a "zero interest rate phenomenon"?

"Starving artists" have existed for millenia. The arts patronage system began either or thousands of years ago, depending on who you ask. People have paid lots of money for gold jewelry basically since we figured out how to pull it out of the ground.

I saw someone call dog-walkers a ZIRP recently. No! It's just a luxury! There's a difference!

But dog walking businesses weren’t getting $1.35 billion dollar valuations before the interest rates were zero for so many years in an unprecedented way.

https://www.geekwire.com/2021/pet-sitting-marketplace-rover-...

Hit max- https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate

....okay, sure, granted.

But the business model of "I walk other people's dogs when they don't have time to" is not a ZIRP. It's just not.

People might have hired more dogwalkers! Because ZIR might have created more affluent individuals! But that's a couple logical jumps from "dogwalking is a ZIRP"

Yeah, but that could just be SoftBank and its desire to light money on fire. I heard a podcast about a different fund who wanted to invest in a dog walking business, but SoftBank offered a huge multiple on what this group thought the company was worth.

As someone who tried the music-or-nothing approach for several years after college and two years in ended up with semi-regular panic attacks, persistent existential dread, and crippling anxiety over finances, I can't recommend getting a day job enough. It saddens me to think of all the creative work I could be doing and all the artistic growth I could be seeing instead of developing marketing software, but at least I'm able to pay my bills, maintain a relationship, and generally live a life that consists of more than just obsessing over music. Less existential dread, too, which helps with focus when I do work on art after work and on the weekends.

> semi-regular panic attacks, persistent existential dread

Ha - I’ve known a number of friends who have had this same problem working a “useless 9-5” job and missing out over what they’re passionate about.

It’s all about trade-offs.

> It’s all about trade-offs.

It's true that in our limited lifespans we will always have to choose trade-offs, but the current choice between crushing poverty vs crushing workload is not a natural one; it's contrived. most of us should be working fewer hours in the modern economy and have more leisure/creativity time.

personally, I've made it my goal as a SWE to get a 4-day work week and/or shorter work days. even if it means a pay tradeoff. maybe I'd even get back to coding fun things.

> crushing poverty vs crushing workload is not a natural one; it's contrived

I wish more people realized this. But then again, my goal 20 years ago was to have a lifestyle that could be enabled by a job in a coffee shop. Now I look back and wonder what happened :-)

> personally, I've made it my goal as a SWE to get a 4-day work week and/or shorter work days. even if it means a pay tradeoff.

Part time work week + fully remote is the dream for me

I don't want to spend my whole life working to make more money than I realistically am ever going to spend just to save enough to retire just to die a month into my retirement.

Had the same attitude as you, and achieved this (20h wk, remote, 6fig). Was still miserable.

Maybe for you it's only the shape of life that is the difference. But personally it was the quality of the things that filled that shape. Those tradeoffs weren't obvious at the beginning (ex: the kind of coding gigs that let me work 20h wks were boring as shit and dead ends).

Best of luck. There's a balance out there for everyone.

You may be right, that it would make me miserable too.

Personally I haven't ever worked anywhere the problems were super stimulating or interesting and mostly have worked in fairly dead end places. My advancement has been almost 100% from changing companies, which is kind of a tedious grind.

I think I would prefer to find somewhere that pays enough to support my home and needs, and have more free time.

I also suspect you were earning more with those 20 hours than I am now, since I'm low 6figs (in CAD no less) and 40+ hours a week.

But you are definitely right, it could be the grass is greener.

Yea that is a grind. I am a bit of a victim of privilege here. Had a career-defining job and was paid well. Getting ~60% of my time back to earn my cost of living + decent buffer was AMAZING.. for a while, but it ran out because the good parts of my previous job (people, learning, challenge, opportunity) were no longer there by default of my showing up. Part time gigs are self-employment gigs.

I hope you find it. Some folks are a good match for what I had. A best friend just got there and is an infinitely better fit (doesn't really care about work, has lots of hobbies, enjoys moving around, has community)

I definitely still feel sadness and anxiety over the feeling that I'm wasting my life on something I don't care about, but it feels more manageable for me than the earth-shattering feeling of having nothing but one thing and that one thing isn't working out the way I thought it would.

Trade-offs indeed.

Thanks for writing this and your previous statement re: panic attacks. It resonates and helps me attribute these feelings.

I once went on hiatus from full-time work to "make it on my own" and after the manic honeymoon period, I found myself stuck between just a similar but shittier local maxima and despair. I've tried to understand this experience but it might just come down to this - that sufficient certainty in some level of security can't be overruled by attitude for too long.

> having nothing but one thing and that one thing isn't working out

After my experience I started to think about my life like a house supported by many pillars. It can withstand one pillar completely breaking, or a few in state of disrepair. But if there's only one or two to begin with (or if most are in disrepair), then when the next one breaks it all comes tumbling. And I might incorrectly attribute my problems to that pillar, when really it's the lack of others.

I tried living off my music for 10 years when I was young. I was on the verge of homelessness at the end. The existential dread was good for my art, but not my mental health. I was very creative, but also on the verge of not wanting to exist. After that, I sold all my gear and focused on a career in software development. I live a comfortable life now and slowly building back up my home studio and making music again. It doesn't feel the same and I have to really think about how to be creative, whereas before it was more intuitive. It's a trade-off. It feels different.

You're a different person now, under different circumstances. It's reasonable that your process and music will sound very different than before.

I was in art pretty heavy. And ya, instability and dread the norm.

And obsession. To fixate on the creation of the hour 24-7. To be master of my tiny creative walled paradise and let everything else go to hell.

Now I'm not doing that. I'm doing the opposite. I'm expanding. I like it.

FWIW the open source scene (at least in the US) can often have very similar dynamics. I believe it was Ashley Williams who put it best by saying that in the Rust community (where I am), one's influence is determined by one's free time. I've noticed over time that in certain areas it can very much be those with the least experience on a subject (but the most free time) who wield the most influence.

> I've noticed over time that in certain areas it can very much be those with the least experience on a subject (but the most free time) who wield the most influence.

Unfortunately, I have found similar. A prime example I feel is Reddit mods, who all do it for free and spend countless hours moderating a community. In fact powermods, the most influential ones, were moderating a decent handful of communities. There wasn’t necessarily any reason for them to be in power specifically other than they had the time and desire for that power. No real need to interact with the community or even know what they were saying, as long as you could remove enough low quality content to retain your position.

I find that phenomenon in many self-organizing communities. it is often true that those with the most free time do get to research the problems and solutions more and have good answers, but even if they do, they dominate the conversation in an inherently unsustainable way. they either drive out newcomers or burn themselves out - sometimes both!

I think that is what HN is getting out of this article.

Lots of us have side biz, or are working on something important to us, and we often think our product is better than the leaders of the industry. Heck, from a data/math point of view, mine is the best, without a question. I just don't have the charisma or connections to make it the number 1.

I know my output(science) is going to last beyond my lifetime, even if I'm not nationally popular. I have academics and international leaders reading my work. Good enough for me.

t. Dayjobber

I'd love to work full time on my open source project (see profile) but I'll have to keep working for the man for now.

It works and is useful for me already, but without the time needed to polish it and add more content, won't be that useful to other people.

One can dream.

You say it like it's a bad thing. I guess it's a bias to be aware of so the community can try to compensate, but there's really no other way. Power goes to those who are contributing. If I'm building an open-source compiler I'd love to give power to the world renowned experts on compilers, but unfortunately they are not participating.

If you're building something that has a big community and sees a lot of use, you've got a lot of different stakeholders with different needs. The folks contributing to the compiler, language, standard library, or build system directly are not your only stakeholders, nor are they your only contributors.

Successful languages don't become successful without a rich ecosystem behind them. The people responsible for those projects are probably more important to your continued success than anyone contributing to the language itself.

What processes you have makes a huge difference in terms of who you give power to. If you have formal processes that ensure that folks have time to weigh in on things, and you make it easy to follow what's going on (signal-to-noise ratio is important here!), you can get much more relevant feedback from a much larger and more important group of stakeholders than if you handle things in a noisy, fast-moving zulip.

>> If anyone should have a shot in the various New York music scenes first and foremost, it should be local kids like Billy.If anyone should have a shot in the various New York music scenes first and foremost, it should be local kids like Billy.

New York? A city founded on repeated waves of immigration. The city that put "give us your tired masses" on a big statue in the harbor. New York is not a city setup for locals. It is and has always been a dynamic city for new people doing new things. Being "local" isn't the advantage it is in other areas.

Came in here to mention something similar.

Seems wishful thinking that New York would owe something to anybody that grew up there. If anything, growing up there should give you the opportunity to have a network already, that would be a local's leg up... from kids you grew up with, to people you practiced music with etc.

This might also be a case of a naive perspective from Billy thinking that the work is all that matters. Nope. Having connections also matters. Do you know bar owners? Do you know venues? Have you done someone a favor that they can pay back? That should be the a "local kid's" advantage. Maybe Billy just didn't form those connections or capitalize on that.

Beyond not feeling bad for taking a side-job, maybe the advice should have been: Network. Get out there, meet people, do favors for people, help them and get help back eventually.

You seem to have missed the blogger's point, which is that NYC is in the process of locking out the entire class of artists to which the young musician belongs. A one in a million musician with superior networking skill, or unbelievable good looks, or luck, or whatever, may start making bank and secure his place in the city. That's not the point.

The blogger's point is that the game is rigged to the point where if you're not That Guy, you can gtfo. The reality is that there are now millions of international rich kids bringing their parents money to outbid you for that crumbling walkup. So don't feel bad about not being able to compete in this ultra-stacked game without working another job, young musician.

No, you are missing the point of this comment thread, which is that this Billy has no more right to live this dream than Billy from Orlando.

No, again, you are speaking orthogonal to the blogger's point, which was to help Billy feel less depressed about being pushed out by understanding the bigger picture. Interesting that you and some other commenters seem so determined to obtusely miss it.

As a New Yorker, I feel the same anytime anyone talks about gentrification and/or their neighborhood changing. Zoom out a bit fella.

The article mentions Philip Glass, but not his work as a plumber, featuring this delightful anecdote he told in an interview:

“While working, I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.”

> It’s because of this harsh reality that romanticizing the lifer lifestyle in 21st century Brooklyn, or any other major American city, as anything other than the struggle it is can be incredibly dangerous. Millennials and Zoomers have been sold the lie that the big cities remain a bastion for cutting edge arts and culture, let alone that they are even livable for working artists. What year do they expect us to believe it is? The New York Times loves to gloat about the local renaissance happening in Bushwick in the Arts Section while covering a tech CEO who recently bought a brownstone in Bed-Stuy for a cool five million in the Real Estate section.

A unique paragraph. People fall in love with a story they’ve never been apart of, never will be apart of, that is told by people who only caught of glimpse of it.

I see a lot of today’s dedicated artists who don’t want to have to grind like mad just to afford rent moving to mid-size cities or even small towns. It’s really the only economically rational move.

Big cities have priced out any culture that is not either subsidized somehow (e.g. trust fund) or already established.

I’d argue that many have even priced out entrepreneurship that is not lavishly funded by VC or founder capital.

My generation (I am on the young gen-X / old millennial cusp) believed, with some truth, that one had to go to one of maybe six to ten cities to do anything cutting edge in most fields. For young people today I don’t think this is true anymore, and if anything these cities have become traps that will destroy your ability to become established.

As would be predicted by the “law of rent,” real estate costs have grown so as to soak up any advantage in being in these places.

Isn't this the modern definition of romanticism? The longing for a beautiful story that may never have existed?

I mentioned OSS in a different comment, but it's not the only thing I've noticed this with. Politics at any level in the US (local, state, or national) falls into the same situation regardless of party.

Activism takes time and resources to be successful and get your name out, and the moral status attached to it creates a similar set of incentives such that you end up with the same pattern of lifers who are perpetually broke, independently wealthy folks who can be heavily involved and live decently at the same time, and folks with a dayjob who are involved but never really wield much influence on any level.

It's an interesting problem and I'd argue it serves as evidence that this happens to anything with attached status. Journalism I've heard has the issue as well.

“In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Reminds me of that quote. Rilke, a poet, was an apprentice to, Auguste Rodin, a sculptor, who taught Rilke how to be an artist. Although different disciplines, the nature of creativity and its manifestations are the same.

> In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write.

A quick check of the suicide statistics shows that many have confessed this to themselves.

Rilke is a must!!! I loved his Duino Elegies.

I don’t see what “the game is rigged” adds to an otherwise positive message, let alone why it comes first.

Why is it somehow bad that musicians need a day job? There are a lot of aspiring musicians out there compared to the audiences waiting for them to perform. A day job is a quite reasonable way to make sure they contribute something to society while we’re waiting to see if they are truly talented or not.

Would we have the same feelings about the “rigged” brewing industry that doesn’t give a young brewer a chance to develop his craft? After a certain point it seems like we’re forgetting that a job is about a contribution to society, not just an expression of some inner identity.

Indeed. Many kids aspire to join the NBA. That's a kind of art, isn't it? Yet I think society collapses if we let every one of these kids off from contributing to sustaining it.

At least until the robots and AI take the wheel.

This doesn't just resonate with creatives - the startup / path to tech entrepreneurship is structured in a very similar way. I've seen lifers, trust funders and day jobbers succeed and fail in different ways, raise funds or bootstrap with nothing for years. Obviously the trust fund kids succeed substantially more often than the lifers or day jobbers

Pretty much everywhere really.

Several years ago I was mulling starting up a retail store in my town and when I looked closer at some of retail stores I liked in similar/adjacent markets I couldn't help but notice the backgrounds of the young founders of those stores, that they just so happened to come from enormously rich families and were obviously independently wealthy.

Their outwardly appearing successful stores may have well been simple hobbies and passion projects.

Possibly these persons were also great business persons and those stores were genuine profitable successes, but there was really no way of knowing. It was something that did dissuade me somewhat from my idea of venturing down the same path.

I absolutely did not have the sort of infinite safety net that they had.

Yup, threw my hat into the ring to try this for three years and I can see the path forward, but I don't have the income cushion or (VC) sales skills to pull it off except as a dayjobber.

Yes, that's the point of making money: so that your loved ones (probably kids) could do art or whatever else.

What's the point of it all if you can't invest in your loved ones? Are you a bad person for loving your kids more then some other random kid that they would be competing against? I fail to see anything bad about this.

From an ethical society stand point, yes. In the US, we agreed that we need to support everyone’s children and so we pay taxes so other people’s children can attend school.

If you refuse to help other people’s children get an education, you’re evading taxes and that is unethical.

It's a matter of the degree of support. Would it be wrong, in your view, for a wealthy tax-paying parent to invest in their own child above and beyond what their taxes provide for society's children?

If a wealthy tax paying parent is votes against taxes to support programs like offering free lunches to children in schools, so their children can have a 'better' education, then I think that is wrong.

I went to a wealthy private high school. 15 years later, most of the children from wealthy parents didn't amount to much. The top 50% work a high level role at their parent's company (probably taking the job from someone more skilled). At worst, they are still supported by their parents in their 30s, career-less. Only the top 5% multiplied their parent's wealth.

The money spent on private education could have been used to support low-income students, which would reduce crime and create a more powerful middle-class.

Is it wrong? No. But it's probably not good for society or even the kids, honestly. I struggle with how I'm going to be able to keep my kids grounded and motivated given the advantages they'll have in life.

If I could change the tax code I would cut income taxes (why discourage work?) but jack up taxes on inheritances/gifts.

The indie developer from two weeks ago[1] needed to hear this.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36505035

I never knew Julian Casablancas was a trust fund baby, but knowing that makes a lot of sense out of The Strokes in hindsight.

Great, practical advice. I do think however that by 2030, UBI will be the norm in many wealthy countries, and thus more people will be able to pursue their passions rather than having to sell their soul as dayjobbers to make money for corporations and rich people.

In 7 years? I think the current crop of pilot tests for UBI are set to finish up in 7 years. No way meaningful UBI gets well enough established in 7 years to be considered "a norm."

UBI is this generation's fusion - it's going to be 10 years away until the late 2070s, if at all.

Completely disagree. In 5 years AI will be so advanced that most humans will be economically irrelevant and unable to compete, forcing governments to implement UBI to avoid societal collapse. By 2030 I would be willing to be money that UBI or something resembling UBI will be the norm in most advanced wealthy countries.

> I have yet to see a pilot test for UBI even begin.

Pilots have been done all over the place [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots

It cannot be piloted without an entire country being subject to it. The whole point is that ALL the lowest income workers (janitors/fruit pickers/nursing home workers/etc) can quit their job, causing a massive re-pricing of labor and re-allocation of labor.

It would cause lots of things to increase in price that are currently priced low simply because someone's parents happened to be from a poorer country that did not speak English, and so on and so forth.

Without that, the benefits of UBI can never be observed.

> It cannot be piloted without an entire country being subject to it.

I mean, that's you changing the definition of what a pilot is. Have you looked into how they were conducted in those countries and how they determine success/failure?

I do not need to look into how they were conducted. Universal is a condition of universal basic income, without which the dynamics of the labor market cannot change, and hence the benefits cannot be observed.

Only once all the lowest paid workers (who ostensibly are doing their job because they have no other option) can drop their jobs and negotiate better compensation can the effects of UBI be seen.

I think you might be underestimating the fantastic power of the market to adjust. Once this UBI hits, every single landlord will have the same idea..

UBI would ideally be funded by a land value tax (see Henry George's "citizen's dividend")

> I do think however that by 2030, UBI will be the norm in many wealthy countries, and thus more people will be able to pursue their passions rather than having to sell their soul as dayjobbers to make money for corporations and rich people.

2030 is much too soon for UBI to be an established norm, and even more much to soon for economies to support it at a level which would radically change this dynamic rather than just mitigating perverse incentives that exist at the edges of means-tested poverty support programs.

There's no way UBI will become the norm. I'm certainly not willing to pay higher taxes so that other people can pursue their passions. They can get a job like the rest of us.

A.k.a "I'm miserable so others should be, too".

Who is miserable? Not me. Being forced to pay higher taxes so that others can goof around creating crappy art would make me miserable, though.

In 5-10 years most humans will be economically obsolete because AI will be vastly superior, making UBI inevitable to avoid societal collapse. At that point it will be funny to look back at the arrogance of statements like this.

The point of UBI is that it is universal, so you also would be getting the basic income, so presumably, you can also pursue your "passions".

Under any conceivable UBI proposal I would receive less additional income than I pay in higher taxes. So no thanks. People who want to pursue their passions can find other sources of funding instead of my taxes. I will certainly vote against any UBI scheme.

Of course, the whole purpose of UBI is to provide a floor for quality of life by reducing the wealth gap. Therefore, everyone on the higher end, whether deserved or not, have to be brought lower.

I don't really care for this argument. We are currently not living in a meritocracy.

In a true meritocracy everyone must have the same starting point and rise up within the ranks based on their merits from there. In our society we do not all start at the same place. There are people born into wealth and people born into poverty. So some people have to struggle harder to get to the same place as others where born into. Essentially an anti-meritocracy system.

If anything UBIs will help make the system more meritocratic since the ones the bottom no longer need to climb the first hill.

> UBI is a bane because it kills meritocracy.

UBI enables meritocracy, it doesn’t kill it.

How so? A big motivating factor to be successful for most people is to set themselves apart financially from the masses.

Edit: And of course, what would be the motivating factor for someone to give their best possible work, if the other 12 guys in their position get paid the same for less quality work?

The ubi is a minimum for everyone, rather than a maximum.

The merit comes from people being able to take risks that otherwise only the wealthy could do

If you thought the rent is too damn high now, imagine what it’ll look like after everyone is getting free money.

Because many of those who excel in terms of merit now are those with the resources to support them while they perfect their craft. Money from something other than their craft is paying the bills while they gain their merit.

UBI gives that to everyone, giving everyone a shot at developing their merit.

> A big motivating factor to be successful for most people is to set themselves apart financially from the masses.

UBI isn’t “no one gets paid on top of UBI for value delivered”. UBI does nothing to limit that motivation.

> UBI would just let you not fall into homelessness and / or under the poverty threshold.

How do you figure? Why wouldn’t landlords, businesses, etc just adjust their prices based on the UBI amount. They’ll be happy to collect more money courtesy of the taxpayers.

> Why wouldn’t landlords, businesses, etc just adjust their prices based on the UBI amount.

The same reason why they don’t capture all income now: “landlords, businesses, etc.” aren’t one single monopolistic entity, there is price competition in markets for necessities that aren't regulated public utilities. There may at times be (natural or artificial) supply constraints in one or anothet market, but those are (1) separate issues from UBI, and (2) natural poison points which create political pressure for resolution.

Yeah, I don't think straight-up UBI would work in our current systems, because the market for the basic goods would absorb it, as you say (and as we experienced many times in history). I do think that it would have no negative effect of motivation though.

How much would taxes have to increase in order to provide a UBI that would keep everyone above the poverty threshold? Have you actually done the math on this?

I don't think straight-up UBI would work, in the current systems. I think it would just make every affected good that much more expensive. A similar thing happened recently in Hungary with housing prices, when the government basically put subsidy into people's pockets. And the market just ate the subsidy.

I really do like the idea of a country keeping all of its citizens above the poverty line though. If UBI isn't the way, then some other way - maybe providing goods and meals instead of money? Taking a page from the Sikh's book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langar_(Sikhism)

What if most people paying taxes now opt for UBI instead?

The "U" part means everyone would get it, so you don't have to opt for it, and everyone would still pay taxes

Another way to think of it is as a negative income tax - as a simple example the equation could be ((income * 0.2) - 20000), so if you make no money you get 20k, if you make 100k you pay no taxes and get nothing, if you make 200k you owe 20. This is using a flat tax rate for simplicity but then everyone get taxes 20% and everyone gets 20k. It's similar to public school - everyone pays for it and everyone gets it, but the purpose is to ensure it's there for people that wouldn't be able to afford it privately.

The question is how many people making 200k will, given the option, take the free 20k and not work, therefore paying no taxes.

> The question is how many people making 200k will, given the option, take the free 20k and not work, therefore paying no taxes.

A lot of people making 200k+ have grown accustomed to the kind of lifestyle that income enables (nice house, nice car, nice restaurants, foreign vacations, sending their kids to private school, etc)-and couldn’t afford to keep doing that on 20k. Given the choice between 200k job and 200k lifestyle, and no job and 20k lifestyle, I think the majority of people already accustomed to the first option would choose to continue in it. Also, a lot of people on 200k+ already have more than 20k of savings/investments, so if they are willing to run those down, they could choose the no job/20k lifestyle today, no need to wait for UBI-yet few do.

Agreed - I'm betting that it's a small percentage of people, because anyone making that much is motivated more by the societal recognition than the money - at that point even in the US all your basic needs are met and you're just looking for brownie points, and you'll still be looking for that with an extra 20k.

As another way to think about it - do bonuses disincentivize workers? At least personally that just makes me want to do more because it's freeing up a bunch of mental energy I need to spend on finances, and then I can focus on important things aside from basic survival

I don't personally know anyone that would opt for 20k/yr over their current salary, but I know several people making over 250k that want to make more to drive their sense of societal value.

I don't agree with it, but if you want to maintain the threat of poverty to force labor you can still do that with UBI

What societal recognition? Most people I know that much are in big tech, finance and corporate law. None of us pretend to be of any value to society (thankfully -- that would be insufferable!)

$20k is not quite enough, but I can tell you that I lived the life of my dreams on $25k a year from 2016-2018. If I could guarantee that lifestyle forever I would take it over my current $300k+ job in a microsecond.

> $20k is not quite enough, but I can tell you that I lived the life of my dreams on $25k a year from 2016-2018. If I could guarantee that lifestyle forever I would take it over my current $300k+ job in a microsecond.

But government policy (even that notionally of a Constitutional character, which most UBI proposals wouldn’t be) isn’t a permanent guarantee (see abortion rights for a recent example), and if that was really true, it doesn’t take long living a $25k lifestyle on a $300k income to be able to save and make yourself a firmer guarantee of a $25k lifestyle forever than government policy would ever do.

Approximately no one does it, because as much as people making lots of money might rhetorically appeal to the attractiveness of such an idea, no one actually making that money now feels it enough to act on it.

The people who would be content to rely on minimal poverty support are, largely, doing that already, since we have such programs now and they have a much stronger disincentive to additional income than would exist with UBI due to means testing, which takes benefits away rapidly (sometimes more than 1:1) with additional income.

> it doesn’t take long living a $25k lifestyle on a $300k income to be able to save

It's much harder to live a $25k lifestyle while working a demanding full-time job than it is while having all your time free, though.

- You can choose a low cost of living area.

- You have plenty of time to cook all your own meals.

- You can fix your own car.

- You can travel during off-times when prices are lower.

And so on.

> The question is how many people making 200k will, given the option, take the free 20k and not work, therefore paying no taxes.

Almost certainly the same number as are making 200k now that cease additional effort beyond what is necessary to make 20k, i.e., 0.

Probably even at lower levels more people would work (at least in the open economy paying full taxes) than dobcurrently, since pushing any clawback of benefits from the low levels and high marginal rates that they kick in with means tested benefit programs to somewhere higher on the income spectrum at a lower marginal additional rate reduces the disincentive to additional work compared to the status quo.

> Almost certainly the same number as are making 200k now that cease additional effort beyond what is necessary to make 20k, i.e., 0.

I don't think so, because making $20k usually requires much more than 10% of the time and effort needed to make $200k.

Why does anyone work in countries that already have strong welfare systems then (eg. Scandinavia, Germany)?

Then prices increase for services that are currently being done because someone was too poor to have access to a better path in life.

> What if most people paying taxes now opt for UBI instead?

Most people don’t settle for poverty level income if additional effort provides a better standard of living, and UBI increases the degree to which that is true compared to means-tested aid programs (which is why, under a different name, it was proposed as a right-libertarian alternative to such programs long before becoming popular on the left.)

Even within software there are a lot of excellent projects created by financially secure people. Clearly at least some people do enjoy doing hard work without being threatened for their livelihood.

I interpreted hard work to mean dishwashing, landscaping, janitor in an elementary school etc...

> Stress is a factor of excellence.

So is having a rich family. The article provides a long list of examples of great artists who's success is largely enabled by already being wealthy, not necessarily being the best. Even just being lucky enough to already be established puts you far ahead of people trying to break in. I can walk out the door and likely find a job in my industry because I have lots of experience to point to and references who will vouch for me. I think I'm good at my job, but I was also in the right place at the right time to get it and now I'm a safe bet for someone who needs my skills, even if I'm not the best bet. Someone who's trying to break in that's ten times more talented than me might never catch that break. I know for a fact that I've hired lesser candidates because I needed someone who was a known quantity more than I needed someone who was possibly great.

Meritocracy is pretty far down the list as a factor of success in my experience.

> I needed someone who was a known quantity more than I needed someone who was possibly great.

There's also an economic side to this: Higher skill most often has higher costs, so it would not be rational to overshoot in a business setting.

In an Art setting higher skill very rarely commands a higher price. At least for the Visual Arts (painting, sculpture, etc) producer skill is hardly the most requested property. IOW it's mostly a matter of provenience and history of the artwork in question, not much the skill required to produce it. Also, for Music, Visual Arts, Performative Arts (excluding Sports!) personal preferences seem to dictate a substantially larger proportion of the price level than performer competence.

> UBI is a bane because it kills meritocracy. The reason most people are successful is because they risk a lot if they weren’t

This seems kinda backwards - UBI gives people the ability to take more risks. Success is mostly determined by how many bets you're able to make, and UBI lets people place more bets. There's plenty of people that would want to start a business but don't have parents able to loan or gift them the money. You'd be opening up more possibilities for people, and people naturally want to do useful things. I'm not sure what hard jobs you're imagining but anything valued by society will still get done because people want to see themselves as valuable.

I think the confusion here is because you have a false premise that there is a meritocracy now - UBI is something that could help us get towards a meritocracy. Right now it doesn't matter how good you would be at something if you can't afford to do it

I understood well in college that without the pressure of exams and the threat of flunking out, I'd not have learned nearly as much.

As for a career, other people finding your work so valuable that they're willing to pay you $$$$ for it is the ultimate compliment.

> UBI is a bane because it kills meritocracy.

How does UBI kill meritocracy?

> none of the hard jobs gets done.

Hard jobs that society doesn't value won't get done by humans, but hard jobs that society does value will certainly get done. UBI does not remove free markets, and if anything increases the reward of working hard if large swaths of the labor force do decide to drop out.

> You say it yourself: If UBI is introduced, then none of the hard jobs gets done.

Unless the work is paid highly enough for people to take the job, no? What prevents a company from raising wages?

There is no meritocracy to begin with. What's there to kill is the desperation of people for their next meal.

>UBI is a bane because it kills meritocracy.

Meritocracy is already dead (if it existed in the first place).

Sounds like a market failure for hard jobs to get done at poor wages. What you really meant to say, economically speaking, is that harder jobs will cost more. Good. The current UBI is $0. Let's just increase that a bit.

Elizabeth Gilbert has a good take on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g7ARarFNnw

If you're linking to a YouTube video without providing a timestamp, can you at least give us a quick summary of the said "good take"?

> Knowing that the game is rigged is liberating!

> how should you be expected to earn a living using their platforms unless you find a way to game the system? Do you have 20 smartphones lying around, per chance?

This is the message I'd take away. Once you learn that the whole capitalist hellscape operates in approximately the same way, you can start to explicitly target its mechanisms in order to improve your life.

Having moral flexibility helps so much. Being actively willing to "fuck over" arbitrary, faceless entities makes all the difference. If you start looking at the law in terms of "how much does it cost to do whatever I want", then you are now effectively playing by the same rules as those who seek to control your life.

Honor is what separates men from animals. We all get to choose which we are.

What is moral and what is legal are different. There is overlap, but they are marketed as being the same thing. They are not.

I think you are mostly reacting to GP's word choice of "moral flexibility," and are missing the point.

Do the moral thing, but view the legal as pay-to-play.

A great example is parking tickets. Violating parking rules results in a fine and is not immoral in many situations.

> What is moral and what is legal are different.

I understand and agree with that.

"Having moral flexibility helps so much. Being actively willing to "fuck over" arbitrary, faceless entities makes all the difference. If you start looking at the law in terms of "how much does it cost to do whatever I want", then you are now effectively playing by the same rules as those who seek to control your life."

This clearly advocates no honor at all. It is not dishonorable to not follow an unjust law (such as a law requiring you to inform on your neighbors), but it is dishonorable to be a cheater because others are cheating.

your mistake is thinking that there is moral equivalence in stealing from your neighbor vs stealing from a billionaire.

and please define what honor means to you in this conversation, we've moved too far past pithiness.

> there is moral equivalence in stealing from your neighbor vs stealing from a billionaire

They are the same. You said it yourself: STEALING

I read this as a shortcut phrasing, not meant to be literal.

Doing something that negatively impacts their stock price could be categorized as "stealing" from a billionaire. Is that really stealing?

Purposely infringing on a company's trademarks/copyrights/marketing/etc (I don't mean pirating movies/books/etc) to gain publicity/get started could be called stealing from that company. But I don't consider that immoral in the slightest.

There often isn't simple terminology for discussing these differences, so people use shortcuts like this.

San Francisco amply shows the results of justifying stealing from "The Man".

> Doing something that negatively impacts their stock price could be categorized as "stealing" from a billionaire. Is that really stealing?

No. There isn't much of a grey area around stealing.

> not meant to be literal

What's amusing when people try to reframe stealing as "liberating", or "getting paid", meaning they know it's dishonorable.

No, at least in my case, it's that I literally don't have the terminology to phrase it better.

Such is the case when I'm talking about subjects I have practical experience in but little formal knowledge of.

No they're not, even with caps lock engaged.

Yeah, they are. A true story:

A friend of mine years ago worked at Microsoft. He noticed that one of his colleagues was pilfering things in the office, and when asked about it said it was ok to steal from Microsoft because it was a wealthy company. One day, he found a stack of 4 hubcaps on his chair. He asked around, and my friend said "oh, I put those on your chair. I figured I'd give you a hand so you don't have to steal hubcaps from the parking lot." He got the message and that was the end of the pilfering.

That's a very stupid story, but it does perfectly demonstrate the total lack of understanding you and your friend have.

> it is dishonorable to be a cheater because others are cheating

I disagree with this. Cheating can be moral or immoral. Cheating just means not following the rules. At least as often as not, the rules are meant to maintain the status quo or benefit the existing organizations.

Terms of Service (TOS) are great examples of this. Companies blatantly stick in illegal terms just because they can since it's expensive to challenge them. I don't want you to do this, so I will make unfair rules in my favor.

That said, I agree with the sentiment, but it's too reductive to allow the creativity needed in problem-solving to compete against entities that have many times the resources.

> Cheating just means not following the rules

When you agree to follow the rules, and then cheat, that is dishonorable. Even if everyone else does it (the Lance Armstrong defense).

What's your word worth to you?

Wow, that is an extreme point of view.

How could you even square that view with something like the civil disobedience of Gandhi or MLK Jr.?

When I'm in a situation where one party is able to make demands unilaterally, then my word is worthless. And I will gleefully disregard portions of these agreements.

On the other hand, when all parties have at least some consideration, my word is worth its weight in gold.

> Wow, that is an extreme point of view.

That's a pretty sad thing to say.

> How could you even square that view with something like the civil disobedience of Gandhi or MLK Jr.?

Did they break rules they freely agreed to? I don't think so.

It's not dishonorable to do things forced to do at gunpoint.

>What's your word worth to you?

My dad taught me the importance of being honest early on. It was very important to him and it's important to me. I teach my kids the same thing.

If you're a dishonest person, everyone will know it and treat you accordingly. It'll be the first thing out of someone's mouth when asked about you. It's not a shortcut. Even though some people can win that way, most don't.

if that's true, then the animals are in charge. you'll be miserable for the honor of being enslaved by beast?

the GP hit the nail on the head saying,

> If you start looking at the law in terms of "how much does it cost to do whatever I want", then you are now effectively playing by the same rules as those who seek to control your life.

laws are for the powerless.

>laws are for the powerless.

But understanding that doesn't give you any power back. Knowing that you can just pay large fines to do illegal business things doesn't help someone who isn't running a business or can afford to pay those large fines

I somewhat disagree. It doesn't give you resources, but it does give you a degree of freedom in your thinking and problem-solving.

There is also the fact that many things you could be fined for aren't worth it if you're small enough not to be a threat. Most of those threats come from other companies holding you to the flame, not from public institutions.

Follow the rules enforced by public institutions, but take risks when it's not worth it for private institutions to complain.

That said, if you don't have money for multiple years of expenses, it doesn't help you much directly.

nope, you're still in grave danger if you're not wealthy. but it does give the insight that we don't have to play by their rules when we realize most of those rules only exist to make it harder for us to play.

"Not playing by the rules" can't help you if not playing by the rules requires resources. That's the WHOLE POINT of the system as designed. You as an individual cannot do anything outside the system even if you know it's rigged unless you already had the resources required to play outside the system.

It allows you to maybe optimize for a different state within the system, but that state will still be one that you are "allowed" to optimize for.

Knowing the casino is rigged does not give you the ability to beat the house. It only allows you to better decide to go home, but in reality there's no equivalent to "going home".

I don't know what your point is. We both agreed the system is bullshit. In response, you can either steal from Walmart or not.

Trying to justify acting like an animal means making that choice.

yes, I'm happily making that choice. it is the only sane choice.

if you really think the kingdom can be neatly divided into wolverines, nuthatches, and happy people on one side, and "honorable" people on the other side, you do you. aren't you amazed that an animal like me can argue with you though?

Choosing honor over animalism has nothing to do with intelligence nor education.

Like I said, each of us gets to make that choice.

An observation - many people brag about things like cheating in school "because everybody does it", or other excuses. When other people hear these, they smile and nod and move them to the "do not trust" list in their heads. The cheaters unwittingly miss out on a lot of opportunities that way.

What about all of the cheaters who don’t brag?

The only way to negotiate with animals is on their terms. When in Rome as they say...

oh most definitely. you break the laws you can afford to and you repeal the ones you can't.

Choosing not to overturn the current abhorrent and unjust system is NOT honor.

The people writing the rules always have an unfair advantage.

They can include literally anything they come up with and often, with enough time and rewriting, make it sound fair and equitable.

How do you propose addressing that? You can't be on the rules-making groups of every institution you participate in.

Honor is independent of the rules. (Honor isn't about fairness or equity, either. It's its own thing.)

I'm sorry, but "you'll know it when you see it" and "if you have to ask, you'll never know aren't" don't mean much to me.

Tell me what standard of conduct do you ascribe to if fairness or equity aren't included? It sounds like you have an unrealistically strict definition of honor if those aren't included.

> Tell me what standard of conduct do you ascribe to if fairness or equity aren't included?

I never said that being honorable was the only thing I aspire to. Fairness and equity are different topics. It shares some aspects with morality, but is not interchangeable with morality.

Honor is things like keeping your word. Not taking things from others that aren't yours. Not trying to trick or force others into doing things. Not being abusive towards others. Not betraying a confidence. Not cheating.

Is dishonesty such a hard concept?

I don't view keeping your word or not cheating against a unilateral agreement as a virtue.

Doing the moral thing in many of those situations requires going against the laws or rules of those unjust systems. In other words, it requires cheating for the purpose of changing the system.

Civil rights disobedience, Gandhi's fight for independence in India, fighting against monopolies, and unionizing all require rejecting others' rules or laws which you feel are immoral.

I did not say honor had anything to do with the law. I've explicitly said it was different from the law. You're simply not reading what I did write.

Sir, you appear to be arguing with the Arch-Boomer. The rules were written (and re-written, and re-re-written) for him for the better part of a century - do you think he's open to any other way?

I envy him in a way. Everything’s so black and white. I wish everything had been stacked in my favor that way.

If you develop a reputation for integrity and honor, things will stack in your favor.

If you go around telling people that it's fine to steal from them, do you think they'll consider doing business with you? I wouldn't.

I had a conversation once with the contractor who was fixing my roof. He said that he'd have a customer now and then who didn't pay. He said the roofing contractors all knew each other, and they kept a list of those customers and would refuse to bid on jobs for them.

How often would the client need roofing work done anyway?

In the words of John Oliver's character on Community, "It's just that the average person has a much harder time saying 'booyah' to moral relativism."

Nice essay, but some of the contemporary examples in this paragraph about the independenlty wealthy are not really that compelling:

I’m not saying wealthy people can’t make incredible artists. Without Marcel Duchamp’s monthly allowance from his father throughout his adult life, we would never have Dada. Giacinto Scelsi was literally the heir and Duke of La Spezia castle estate. Something more contemporary? Grimes’ mother was a Crown Prosecutor, the Canadian equivalent of a District Attorney, in Vancouver. Frankie Cosmos’ dad is the guy from Wild Wild West, no, not Will Smith, the other guy. Julian Casablancas’ father ran New York’s top super modeling agency while young Julian hung out at the kid’s table with Ivanka Trump at Christmas time. The list goes on.

The argument is supposed to be that these kids didn't have to worry about paying the rent, so they were able to devote more time to their craft. But I don't think some of the contemporary examples listed were necessarily like that.

Take Grimes -- a Crown Prosecutor is a public servant, so you can look up their average pay ranges: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/careers-myhr/all-employee... . That's definitely a solid middle class life, but not exactly generational wealth. Now, compared to a poor kid who has to take on jobs in high school to support their family, I'm sure she had more time and less stress in her teenage years which let her practice more, but there are lots and lots of middle class children who have that level of free time which they devote to all sorts of extracurriculars.

Moreover, Grimes, Casablancas, and Cosmos blew up when they were in their very early 20s: Cosmos released her debut studio album at 20, Grimes at 22, Casablancas at 23. So, despite any family wealth they may have had, it's not like they spent years and years of their adult lives living off their parents' support, or at least not any more so than hundreds of thousands of college students do every year. Of course, they had it easier than kids who cannot even afford to go to college, or who are working 20 hours a week to pay their way, but I'm not sure it's at all comparable to Duchamp or Scelsi.

Maybe there's an argument that social connections helped them to get their record deals, but the argument presented doesn't seem to apply.

Grimes's dad was a former banker working on "the business side of biotech". That's two very solid incomes. And then she was with Devon Welsh, a singer/songwriter whose father was an actor. And most famously has been the partner of Elon Musk. She's had probably a larger share of carefree living than most.

However, success is never just one thing. Because there are plenty of people with the same or greater level of support that Grimes had that never make it.

But the point is that there are plenty of people as talented or more than Grimes who achieve no success at all.

Success is more often than not the result of avoiding catastrophic issues than it is from anything you actively choose. And the more chances you have to try, the more chances you have of doing something that avoids catastrophe.

Hard work, support, talent, luck, determination, these will all help you, but none of them will guarantee you success. Not singularly or in combination.

> And then she was with Devon Welsh, a singer/songwriter whose father was an actor. And most famously has been the partner of Elon Musk. She's had probably a larger share of carefree living than most.

No doubt she's had a good life, but Devon Welsh was himself basically a nobody when they dated, and she was already extremely successful as an artist by the time she became Elon's partner.

It's just strange of the author to pick someone who had already released two studio albums during her time as a student at McGill as a supposed example of someone being able to succeed because their parents paid their bills for an interminable amount of time. This is after a paragraph where the author said:

> Who paid for all this time? How does someone outside of a conservatory program have the time to compose, record, and perform new original material every month, let alone to even practice their instrument an hour a day? The answer almost always comes down to the ability to not have to worry about paid work while pursuing your craft. As in, most likely, someone in your family pays your rent.

The answer, in the case of Grimes, is she was a college student, probably neglecting her studies a bit, being supported the way many college students or even people in conservatories are.

But Devon Welsh's dad was a successful Canadian actor with a net worth of several million. Being the girlfriend of a millionaire's son is not a bad position to be in.

Failure wouldn't even be a blip on her radar at any point in her life. I really can't see at any point in her life where something had to work in order for her to survive.

Which is the case for a lot of people. They have to do things that are lower risk because losing that bet means you're simply fucked. You can take the 1 in 1 million chance you become a successful recording artist or you can take the 100 in 1 chance you get a job to sustain yourself. If your survival is the thing that is at stake, the smart play is to take the job. If you'd survive no matter what, you not only take the 1 in a million shot, you take it as often as you can.

I think that the author belies his true poverty in the piece then. If a middle class lifestyle is seen to the author as 'rich', then he must be really really struggling. Knowing a few friends that are in the situation that the author is in, I'd agree.

Be like Einstein, make the post office work for you. Maybe that's a better way of thinking about it?

I wonder if there is any artistic benefit by marrying the arts with a deeply capitalist system.

Obviously as this article mentions its not great for the artists themselves, but perhaps the cutthroat nature of the industry makes it so that only the best of the best rise to the top, even if it means it comes from an independently wealthy musician.

Music is a commodity. There's already more music available to let my playlist run for years without repeats. Plus it's never been easier for folk to create, and publish, new music. With endless supply comes diminishing unit value.

So, not to be brutal, but playing music is not an especially valuable thing, and so people really don't need to pay much for it. Ditto for writing books, making ceramics, pretty much anything artistic.

I say this not to be a dick, but simply to point out the economics. When a million other people can do what you do, and live in the same city, then don't expect to make much of a living at it.

Sure there are exceptions (hi Taylor) but that has less to do with actual music and more to do with other factors.

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.

> the exact same amount of marketing effort

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.

> Commercial success is due to marketing, distribution and luck.

But we're back here. I still disagree with this, it's a poor analysis of what's actually happening.

In music, commercial success, more than any other factor, comes from making music that is liked by large numbers of people.

If you can make music like that you'll probably have commercial success.

> if you build a better mouse trap...

...and from another post

> will bubble up...

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.

* added: Or patron

> 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".

You're not understanding.

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.

> If someone replaced some songs in your playlists, you would notice.

I don't think this is true.

In the Spotify world, people have playlists where the songs sound similar to a certain song or band, rather than a hand curated one.

To argue that the technical meaning of the word "commodity" doesn't fit what OP is saying is to completely miss the point.

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.

I hope this helps.

You're not understanding what commodities are.

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).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfKfPfyJRdk

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.

THAT is what a commodity looks like.

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.

I have a degree in economics.

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).

> 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.

No, because ...

> 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.

I can't, and yet Exxon and Sunoco both exist.

> You're not understanding what commodities are.

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.

How would you feel about having the exact song playing on repeat every day of your life?

Every movie, every scene. Same song in the background.

Every first dance at a wedding, same song.

Before a baseball game, standup and put your hand on your heart, same song.

You’re indifferent right?

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.

That’s what a commodity looks like.

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.

Sure.

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.

So there's a filtering/refinement process. That doesn't immediately seem so unlike other commodities. I buy refined gasoline, for instance.

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.

> It's a commodity in the same way as fashion is.

Which is to say, it's not.

That's the point.

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.