If an artist is A) not super rich, B) on an indie or self-owned label, and C) his records are available where you live, is there any excuse for downloading them instead of buying them?

It's just as wrong to sell a promo as it is to download an album without paying.

What's the best thing to do with a promo you don't want, then?

^^^^ shd be a list thread

The best thing to do is to sell it and also stop bitching about people downloading.

send it to a kid in bangladesh who has to try to survive on 2 promos a year.

use it as building material for your promo fort

Art should be made for the love of it, not for the financial gain.

Interestingly this is also true of whatever it is you do to pay the bills.

If you want money, tour and be very good at what you do. If you're talented and release quality products, you'll make your money.

This came up in one of the other recent downloading threads - the idea that touring is always profitable. The thing is, that's not true. Part of what made touring profitable in the past is that musicians would have new audiences that would buy recordings. For a lot of bands, merch sales made touring profitable as opposed to, at best, a break even proposition. So, now that they're selling fewer CDs/records, do you think the venues are going to give bands higher guarantees or percentages? Don't think so.

One could argue that the music fan is going to use the money they would have spent on buying music (that they instead download for free) to see more shows, and that live audiences would grow. But, from everything I've heard, that's not the case.

^^^^^^^^

since I make my living in the industry & have no complaints, I try not to mouth off too much about this question, but "art should be made for the love of it, not financial gain" line must always be called out as the nonsense it is: tell that to Mozart or the Beatles for Christ's sake. then go back in time and kill all the romantic poets so we don't have to suffer this "only art that's made for love of art and without thought of profit is any good" nonsense for even a second longer.

Loving what you do for work doesn't mean it isn't still work, which is something a lot of people seem loathe to acknowledge when it comes to artistic pursuits.

I can't think of anything in their history that suggests that The Beatles wouldn't have made music if it didn't lead to them being billionaires

xpost

I can't imagine anybody actually thinking they'd have bothered making even their earliest records if it didn't beat getting a day job

but people w/ day jobs are still making records today!

Yeah, but now their dreams of being millionaires are shot to hell.

So sad, feel bad.

xpost to myself

and some of them are probably poor british people!

let me know when some of them produce a body of work over 8 years that compares favorably to the Beatles

btw give me a million dollars

all british people should stop making music not just the poor ones

if I ever get 2 million dollars, I will give you 1 of them

dude you just bought yourself beers for life on me when I'm in yr town, just in case

I've said this on previous threads, but rather than getting all pissy about people downloading, musicians, record companies, whomever, should be working their asses off trying to find a system which allows them make a living making music (I mean assuming that's what they want--I get that being pissy has its own rewards.)

k I live in sf

beers here cost half a million dollars btw

truth fucking bomb on alex in SF - I enjoy just yammering about shit but I don't bitch about downloading, I talk a lot about how it's changed the nature of the listening experience but there is, permanently, NO point in whining about the way things are. you play the cards as they lie & STFU; if you have a job in the business, you won at life and should avoid looking like you're not grateful to the people who put you there.

"let me know when some of them produce a body of work over 8 years that compares favorably to the Beatles"

Question: do you think anyone has produced a comparative body of work to the Beatles? Cuz what's music's excuse for not producing a Beatles all the time back before filesharing was killing it and money was free and easy?

Alex I think the decrease of the profit motive has thinned the talent pool & that people who might have made excellent albums are spending their creative energies in other fields where they might be better compensated.

I think they didn't want to make the beatles look bad so they only allowed one beatles at a time

Okay so basically your argument is that music has gotten worse in the post-Napster world? Cuz frankly I don't see much evidence that's the case.

also, prior to the Beatles: Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Schubert, and about 20 other artists who hoped to make their living at music & produced bodies of work I'll put up against the Beatles any time

I would say yeah I don't think the age of everything-available-for-free has been real generous with the masterpieces

one can't prove causation obv and there are several dozen other possible explanations (genre stagnation, other entertainment options for starters) but my feeling is - as in boxing, one of my other favorite areas of entertainment - that when the money started to dry up, the talent went elsewhere

So there are just a lot more (a LOT more) hacks making music now in your opinion? Cuz there is certainly still a lot of music out there?

also beethoven etc. didn't actually make enough money (directly) off their music to live.

are you just talking about being prolific? lots of musicians with day jobs are making great albums, but sure it's hard to make 2 or 3 of them a year if you have to do it in your spare time.

xp

I mean the problem with the Beatles argument is that J0hn not one of the acts you named was post-Beatles. If the old Beatles system was great at producing works of musical genius, why didn't it produce more acts that were comparable to the Beatles (or more Coltranes, Ellingtons, Basies, etc)?

The other factor there is "records" as the end goal of artistic output rather than as some kind of 'record' of it

system didn't really change - the system was "you can make a lot of money at it." I am arguing (this is a hella conservative argt I know, which I don't like making, but I cannot front) that once the profit motive is gone, you're left with some inspired hobbyists & a bunch of uninspired second-stringers

It's much easier to make the "there are more hacks now than then" argument because you aren't really going to know who the non-hacks are really going to be until history weighs in; there's a shifting perspective component to this that makes this argument difficult to pursue.

Having said that, one can certainly make the argument that technology has greatly diminished the talent pool of popular music; when you live in a world where you don't have to sing remotely in tune to be successful, it really cheapens the whole craft of singing (to name a personal bugbear; I am certain that the whole ProTools/fix all mistakes mentality behind modern sound engineering also plays into this on the instrumental side).

None of this is directly related to downloading, so I think on balance I agree with Alex's point that you can't blame downloading for this; one could argue that if music wasn't being processed into aural Cheez Whiz in the first place, people would be more willing to pay for it. (I don't know if I buy that argument, but you could make it.)

which, y'know, it's easy to ping-pong this discussion into "so you're saying there are no good records?" - no, of course not; but there's little that's ambitious, and I think the possibility of the sweet life, not having to work, etc, is a good carrot-on-a-stick for artists, and the lack of said carrot means plenty of creative people will go where the money is (which: I don't think there's anything wrong with that AT ALL)

I'm vaguely in favor of the increased quantity and variety of interesting semi-amateur music in the world, but I like punk and indiepop and 1980s one-hit wonders, so at this point maybe I'm just trained to think of that as a good idea.

xpost - I have no real opinion on this matter but it occurs to me that you could totally make any number of devil's-advocate proposition about the Beatles and the 60s and such, mostly relating to the fact that the mid-to-late 60s were surely the first moment that a rock'n'roll musician could seriously have started expecting to have any level of career control or bring home any of the wealth the music created, right? But we're talking about a whole different world with a lot of musicians from that era, because if your sole alternative was to go get a job on a dock or in a factory, pretty much anything that combined music + renown + eating would seem like a step up; I think the "renown" part of that was probably more of a draw than any notion that anyone was going to get rich playing rock'n'roll.

btw I pitch-corrected a harmony vocal on an EP earlier this year and thought "I should just kill myself right now"

in my own defense though I was stacking four-part harmonies and studio time ain't free

I feel like a million inspired hobbyists putting their stuff on the internet is gonna produce more great music than 10,000 career musicians might

xposttt

another great artist who I don't think would have ever sang outside of church if there hadn't been crazy money in it: sinatra

xpost:

I feel like a million inspired hobbyists putting their stuff on the internet is gonna produce more great music than 10,000 career musicians might

got anything to back this up or is it just a hunch? like, examples?

Do you also think that a million hobbyist violinists are likely, on balance, to sound better than 10,000 symphony violinists?

I mean, you are treating both talent and training (formal and on-the-job) as negligible when you play this type of number game.

if a million monkeys with a million leather jackets go to germany and take a bunch of speed and play music for american GI's. . .

I dunno, iatee, I think J0hn's right to think about the type of great music -- a million inspired "hobbyists" will make a ton of great music in a lot of ways that I enjoy, but not some of the expensive big-audience grand-ambition ways that are also nice, and also (maybe inevitably) slipping a bit away. If that milk has already spilled I won't cry over it too much, but it'd be nice to have all types, you know?

xxxp I think a sample of a symphony violinist probably sounds better than all of them.

I don't the great artists you've mentioned were motivated by the possibility of not having to work. It would be more like: by the possibility of artistic freedom, I'd think.

I bought a pirate copy of Tallahass33 in Hanoi once. I'm sorry.