The "Professional Suicide" of a Recording Musician

[Davey Boy 2.0]

Not sure I agree with everything he's got to say but this is definately interesting

An experienced musician explains why most musicians today would be much better off sharing music via the Internet than signing standard industry recording contracts.

[bradm]

It's a good article (and I agree with at least most of his points), but there's something he's missing: while he claims

The idea that selling permission to listen to recorded music is the foundation of the possibility of earning one's livelihood from music is at most 50 years old, and it is a myth.

he doesn't actually suggest any real way(s) to earn one's livelihood from music. For example, while some may view freely downloadable live recordings as being competition for the studio product, I view them as promotion for the live (show) product. I think bands like Phish and The Grateful Dead follow this model: support touring as the money-maker by selling studio recordings, rather than lose money touring to promote making money selling studio recordings.

Aloha,

Brad

[SmoothedShredder]

I can see as one of the greediest moves in recording music history was the increase of price of CD's over Casette's, even though they were cheaper to produce.

ITunes would do well to offer low priced access to their collection, and dole out their revenunes based on what was downloaded. Start off with a low price... like $0.10 a song, and get everyone getting their music that way, then increase the price slowly to increase their market share without intimidating 80% of their potential customers.

Sure, make money on tours... but in the current climate, it's costing more and more to tour, and bands are making less and less. The margins are slim, if not costing the band to work. It's not sustainable to be a band, and something has to change... ticket prices/attendance/merchandise revenue... those are the only things bands make money on. And the money which flies out of your pocket on tour leaves Slim Pickins' for the vast majority...

Not sour grapes... it's just ridiculously challenging to a) exist as a Canadian band (especially full time earning an income), and Getting American Bands to come to Canada. Ultimately the loser is the music fan...

[nibbler]

"Property rights" have bloated to the point where they can dictate the content of freshman art projects. But that is not all. Altogether more and more of what we do in our lives passes through the Web. People invite friends to parties, view art, listen to music, play games, have political discussions, date and fall in love, post their family photo albums, share their dreams, and play out sexual fantasies -- all on line. Since corporate legal departments claim their copyright privileges extend to anything on the Web, the result is a huge extension of corporate power into private lives and social networks.

But that is just the beginning of the story, for the accelerating rate of technological change continues to push digital technology further and further into our lives in just about any direction you might look. To pick just one example, boundaries between our bodies and minds and our technology are blurring. Cochlear implants, for example, now allow deaf people to hear via computer chips loaded with copyrighted software which are implanted in their skulls and in response to which their brains reconfigure, growing new synapses while unused synapses fade. Cochlear implants are wirelessly networked to hardware worn outside the body which usually connects to a mic, thus allowing the deaf to hear the sound environment around them. But the external hardware can just as easily be plugged into a laptop's audio output for a direct audio tap into the Web.

When the Web extends into chips in our skulls, where is the boundary between language that is carved up into words that are corporately owned and language that is free for the thinking?

I don't wish to be sensationalist. We are not all about to turn into corporately-owned cyborgs. But I do wish to point out that the issues around turning culture into property are urgent, and far-reaching. Society is not well-served if we treat specific matters like downloading music on the Web as isolated problems instead of one manifestation of a vastly bigger struggle in which much more is at stake.

Good article indeed.