<story><title>Justice sues to block Penguin Random House’s acquisition of Simon and Schuster</title><url>https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-block-penguin-random-house-s-acquisition-rival-publisher-simon</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>999900000999</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m still a bit lost as to why this and the music industry haven&amp;#x27;t been more disrupted by technology. You don&amp;#x27;t need a record label you don&amp;#x27;t need a book publisher, you can, if people want to consume your content just write your book and have people just send you money via patreon or one time donations.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve made music with friends for a long time, and the industry makes it very hard for any independent artist to get ahead. You have some of the worst deals ever imaginable given to these kids, who are often only 18 or 19 and the label just takes everything.&lt;p&gt;Why do we need any of that, I go out of my way to buy music exclusively from independent artist, while I might stream some popular hit. When it comes to actually buying merchandise, or music I only give it to the Indies.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JeremyReimer</author><text>The publishing industry &lt;i&gt;was&lt;/i&gt; disrupted by technology in 2007 when Amazon released the Kindle. It took a few years, but for a while, independent book authors were rivalling the &amp;quot;Big Five&amp;quot; publishers in terms of both sales volume and books sold.&lt;p&gt;Part of this was driven by the big publishers&amp;#x27; response to indies: they raised the price of their own eBooks to protect their hardcover market. They even illegally colluded with each other, along with Apple, to force these higher prices across the industry.&lt;p&gt;But they were sued and lost, and the result was a lowering of big publisher eBook prices across the board. On the independent side, the problem was that too many people were publishing too many books. It was impossible to keep up, and there was no good system for finding the &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; independent authors, since tastes are so subjective and the vast majority of independent authors didn&amp;#x27;t have any money to spend on marketing anyway.&lt;p&gt;So that leads us to today, where the &amp;quot;Big Four&amp;quot; (trying to become the Big Three) still have access to their promotional machinery, which includes retail bookstores. There are a very few insanely successful independent authors, and a veeeeeery long tail of folks that have no way of getting noticed in the crowd.&lt;p&gt;Still, the sales volume of traditional publishing and independent publishing remains about equivalent even today (it&amp;#x27;s hard to get exact numbers because Amazon doesn&amp;#x27;t like giving them out, but apps like KindleSpy offer a broad estimate) It&amp;#x27;s just that the latter is spread out among many more authors.</text></comment>
<story><title>Justice sues to block Penguin Random House’s acquisition of Simon and Schuster</title><url>https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-block-penguin-random-house-s-acquisition-rival-publisher-simon</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>999900000999</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m still a bit lost as to why this and the music industry haven&amp;#x27;t been more disrupted by technology. You don&amp;#x27;t need a record label you don&amp;#x27;t need a book publisher, you can, if people want to consume your content just write your book and have people just send you money via patreon or one time donations.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve made music with friends for a long time, and the industry makes it very hard for any independent artist to get ahead. You have some of the worst deals ever imaginable given to these kids, who are often only 18 or 19 and the label just takes everything.&lt;p&gt;Why do we need any of that, I go out of my way to buy music exclusively from independent artist, while I might stream some popular hit. When it comes to actually buying merchandise, or music I only give it to the Indies.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throw_m239339</author><text>&amp;gt; You don&amp;#x27;t need a record label you don&amp;#x27;t need a book publisher, you can, if people want to consume your content just write your book and have people just send you money via patreon or one time donations.&lt;p&gt;Yes you do need the biggest possible label. All the big artists today (post 2000), they might have started building their audience on the internet organically , but at some point one absolutely needs a label that has all the connections, budget for advertising, touring, featuring, ...to grow as an artist, nothing has changed on that regard. What collapsed is the record industry, which virtually doesn&amp;#x27;t exist anymore, save from vinyl records maybe.&lt;p&gt;The people that are useless on the other hand are the middlemen like Spotify and co, they serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever. Better distribute your music freely on Youtube instead and grow your audience there, or do live shows on Twitch.&lt;p&gt;This is a technologist forum, but people here needs to remember  that just because you have a product to sell doesn&amp;#x27;t mean it will sell, no matter how good that product is, you often need to hire people dedicated to selling that product to clients. Music is no different.</text></comment>