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?

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.

to john and dan:

I've gotten more pleasure outta this guy than anything else this year

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

I mean, like, people have been saying shit like this for ten years now. Do we have one example of a guy who the whole world hears and goes "holy fuck, the new system is bringing crazy talent out that might not have risen to the surface before"? barring that, do we have one example of a guy whose stuff is crazy good but just hasn't gotten the attention it deserves, but whose eventual embrace by history seems assured, given how audibly awesome it is?

The problem with the grand ambition is dead because of file-sharing argument is that grand ambition hasn't produced a lot of great records in the past 40 years.

So maybe grand ambition needs a shake up anyway and maybe our current era is going to provide it.

yeah I can feel that argt

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.

That's a good point, but I'd argue that there are more musicians putting their music in front of the public (even it's just myspace pages and stuff on blogs) than there were before the internet made that possible. I think there are more hacks because there are more musicians.

barring that, do we have one example of a guy whose stuff is crazy good but just hasn't gotten the attention it deserves, but whose eventual embrace by history seems assured, given how audibly awesome it is?

i think we all know people like this, or at least i know i do. actually it's more likely it'll never be heard by very many people, in the case of certain friends who don't know how to market themselves or aren't interested in doing it, but still make awesome records.

I think there are more hacks because there are more musicians.

haha I am never going to disagree with this statement

xp Jordan: It's kind of sad to think that the eventual embrace by history is the best these folks can hope for, and that said embrace would happen before they die as opposed to after.

Jordan we're talking here about stuff about which you'd say "this is every bit as vital as Rubber Soul"

I say this as a guy who doesn't listen to the Beatles or anything but I really thing the argument that removing the profit motive from art makes for better art is hopelessly naive

haha I am never going to disagree with this statemen

also STFU singerman, I will play bass licks on your grave

well this doesn't go anywhere if we keep talking about what's "great," since we presumably have different ideas of that

NB I don't think file-sharing is cutting into ambition, but I do feel, in terms of the music I know, that there's a whole combination of stuff about fracturing audiences, lower bars for "hobbyist" entry, ease of dissemination, etc. etc. etc. that probably leads just naturally to a world where very few people get to make really grand/ambitious art where they're imagining and trying to communicate with a really large audience. This isn't the worst thing in the world, it's not the fault of anything in particular, and there's nothing about the internet or mp3s that keeps a grandly ambitious musician from trying to talk to the whole universe, but there you have it, that's kinda where things are these days.

"I miss the monoculture"

lower bars for "hobbyist" entry

well, but when the bar for professionalism got lowered by punk, we got: joy division, the cure, etc

I've gotten more pleasure outta this guy than anything else this year

That's great! Is he trying to make money off of this? If so, have you given him any? How is he going to continue to make things like this without financial support from the people consuming it?

also STFU singerman, I will play bass licks on your grave

you may add a post-punk bass line to Martin's "Agnus Dei", which is what I want performed at my funeral

as a guy who doesn't listen to the beatles or anything, i agree with that.

xxxp to j0hn

couple xposts

I cannot type and think at the speed of other people. Where would you date the interval of "people getting to make really grand/ambitious art where they're imagining and trying to communicate with a really large audience" from and to? — obviously Aristophanes wrote for a tiny fraction of the number of people who are watching the Britain's Got Talent finale I can hear in the next room (although as a proportion of the the population of the civilised world as he saw it I think he probably wins there)

I kind of wonder how low the bar for professionalism really was if you were in a metal band or a soul band in Britain in the 70s and mainly played working men's clubs

like I said, I am way in favor of low bars for entry -- you are talking to a guy who likes those early Beat Happening songs that are just like a pot, a pencil, and a boombox

^ NB for all I know maybe that'll change drastically in five or ten years, like suddenly everyone who misses grand statements or grew up with productive attachments to MCR records starts plotting out world-changing 40-year careers; who knows ... mostly all I'm saying is that envisioning an all-hobbyist culture seems great at providing certain things and maybe not as likely to provide others, and it'd be nice to see cultures that accommodate both

okay stupid thought experiment:

let's say we took the artists who are gonna be on ilm's top 100 of 00s lists and we gave them all a million dollars and said "make an album, go crazy!"

I feel like there would be at least a handful of expensive loveless/pet sounds-type masterpieces that otherwise wouldn't exist. but it's not nec. *wrong* that these artists don't have the opportunity - it's just the financial reality that they're dealing with. yeah?

"I say this as a guy who doesn't listen to the Beatles or anything but I really thing the argument that removing the profit motive from art makes for better art is hopelessly naive"

I'm not sure the profit motive is being removed though, just the exorbinant profit motive. I mean none of the rest of the folks you mention had expectations of being multi-millionaires.

Even the Beatles.

yeah but Aristophanes was writing for the annual festival which was a HUGE deal, like the hugest of the huge. was able to live off it, which I think is the point. if you can live better off doing something else, you're likely to do so - which, again, I have no issue with; people should try to live as well as they can & there's no shame in it.

as to my funeral, I'm hoping they sing "gothic anus"

xpost kind of agreeing with xpost

They had expectations of day jobs though. I think that's getting tangled up, a bit, the difference between getting rich and just getting paid.

this is too abstract for this thread but fwiw I also see the lack of grand / ambitious statements in philosophy, where I make my dough...well, except for amateur crackpots who aren't worth bothering with (but if you want I can hook you up). So I think this has something to do with our post 60s culture, not just the profit motive, though fuck if I can say precisely what.

that tends to be the confusion in the post-napster age - "these artists want to be rich!" - no, they just want to make rent xpost

also "living better off" ≠ maximizing profit, though I say this on so many threads I oughta can it

okay stupid thought experiment:

let's say we took the artists who are gonna be on ilm's top 100 of 00s lists and we gave them all a million dollars and said "make an album, go crazy!"

I feel like there would be at least a handful of expensive loveless/pet sounds-type masterpieces that otherwise wouldn't exist. but it's not nec. *wrong* that these artists don't have the opportunity - it's just the financial reality that they're dealing with. yeah?

^^ I agree with this. This is completely separate from the downloading issue, though, where people are taking music that has been released for-profit and not paying for it, directly impacting the distribution channels (which honestly I don't care about) and the people making the music (which I do care about, seeing as that's the commodity under contention and cutting off some of the funding towards creating more of it seems to not be a good thing for long-term success of people in the business now or future success for people wanting to make their passion into their vocation).

xp: J0hn says it best, unsurprisingly

If you sub in 'news' for art, there is a definite argument for socializing it (i.e., both removing profit motive, but also subsidizing it so people who are interested in pursuing a career there can hope to not starve in the process) I don't know if art is as important as news in the pecking order of things to subsidize, though.

Would you guys say state-subsidized BBC news is of generally higher caliber than say the profit-motivated US/Murdoch news machine?

john I feel like you've been pushing 'get rich = motivation' more than anyone in this thread!