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?

xpost - yes, sure, but unless you think knowing how to use a compressor is making people worse at playing/writing/singing,* I don't know that that's relevant

* hell, maybe it is, we'll see

xxxp I don't think that ability to make a SMALL profit is being removed from music.

it more or less is, is the thing - it's very difficult to turn anything like a profit on making an album. lots of the cheerleader talk about being able to do everything yourself on a laptop at home for free has turned out to be nonsense: qualified engineers & good rooms & talented collaborators are always going to cost more than pirated software & self-education & recording in rooms that haven't been constructed with a specific view to having music recorded in them (which isn't to say there won't be the occasional genius who takes advantage of all the tools being freely available). 8 days in a studio & an engineer & food & travel = money, and while there are plenty of acts that manage to buck this barrier (and you could argue, from a Darwinian standpoint, that what this'll do is weed out the less driven, but the evidence is against you - there's a surfeit of music, so much of it completely unmemorable that one hardly knows where to begin), the presence of ambition (which I'd describe as a very positive quality, artistically) seems on the wane.

I say this as a guy with no complaints, because I believe there are many things one can do to make a good living in music - cultivate a real relationship with one's listeners; be transparent; don't be a primadonna who thinks it's asking a lot of an artist to write ten or fifteen songs a year. be good & interesting live. all that stuff. but as to evidence that the new age will provide us with greater artists making greater works: I don't see it in any genre. I see more stuff, interesting niche work, but very little that I expect to be listening to even next year.

I have to go make dinner this was an interesting discussion!

going back to alex's post from like an hour ago, even though the profit motive is WAY down from say, 10-20 years ago, is anyone really gonna argue that music itself is worse?

and if not, how can you argue that the two are correlated?

can you point me at industries where people routinely produce masterpieces

Potential pedant alert, but are they really masterpieces if you are routinely producing them?

you don't have hobbyist manufacturers of turntables, even though I'm sure there's much pleasure to be had in constructing a working turntable.

http://www.altmann.haan.de/turntable/

where's Shakey Mo to tell us all about how musicians were slaves in Ancient Rome?

lolz sorry I've been sitting this thread out

xp nabisco: I'm not saying it's making anyone's music worse. There are certain styles of music where technology plays a larger role in the music than others, and presumably having access and experience with it would lead to better music made in those styles. However, it doesn't really have a whole lot of relevance to violinists or drummers, for example. And it doesn't do much for improving the way musicians play together in a band or write or perform music together in a live setting with non-computer instruments.

i don't know, i think playing with and being influenced by machines has had a pretty big impact on drummers.

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.

Essay: Connect this statement to the post-Miseducation career of Lauryn Hill.

can you point me at industries where people routinely produce masterpieces without hope of some small profit?

the music business in 2009!

― iatee,

iatee waaaaay otm here.

i don't know, i think playing with and being influenced by machines has had a pretty big impact on drummers.

^^^definitely

I think way back, Tuomas mentioned Finns rapping about being poor. What does it mean to be poor exactly in Finland? I'm not sure if I have the right Nordic country, but isn't it sort of held as a matter of national pride that no one there is too rich or too poor, and that someone like Master P would be actively shunned there for living a craven bling-centric lifestyle?

xp I was talking about compressors and pro tools ... certainly metronomes have greatly improved drummers.

I will say that for most of history the promise of "getting rich" did not really exist for musicians (at least, not for ones who were not already rich) so to argue that that goal produces masterpieces is a bit suspect.

sarahel I was talking about the basics of being able to record music -- this is 100% relevant to any musician of any type who would like to have his/her music available in a recorded form

xp nabisco: fair enough. But as I said above, recording is only part of what makes great music.

umm

no, but I think the goal of being able to make a living at it does - as I originally said, the possibility of not having to work a day job. "getting rich" is a good way of avoiding the question as it was originally put (i.e., will the [stipulated] removal of profit motive produce better music, since better music is always/only made by people doing it for love not money)

xpost to Mo!

http://l.yimg.com/a/i/us/sch/cn/vid/img/hedgehog1_pulse.jpg

xp nabisco: However, it doesn't really have a whole lot of relevance to violinists or drummers, Happy now?

I can't keep up with all the good music coming out right now. I seriously doubt "piracy" is harming music. It's probably not making moderately talented people hyper-wealthy but that's not a bad thing. If you're making music for money, you're in the wrong business. Art should be made for the love of it, not for the financial gain.

...this is the stuff with which I took issue; it still strikes me as wrong, most especially the "art should be made for the love of it" - sez who?

john, if the gov't is willing to sponsor musicians finnish-style - is this still removing the 'profit motive' and thus their drive? (shouldn't you be eatin?)

the great social-interest story underpinning this whole discussion is our commendable and relatively new belief that "musician" should not in fact be a distinct and non-privileged class category in itself, something like carnies if we thought certain specific carnies were geniuses

j0hn can't afford to have supper cuz of you iatee >:(

wait why is that commendable again?

you missed it, upthread I told him I am giving him a million dollars

also I want to meet the beatles / beethoven of carnies

xp M@tt: He can afford supper, but only because of the babies he makes as sperm donor.

tho I hope john doesn't blow the whole million on one dinner

i'm illegally downloading john's recipe right now

whadayagonnado, the market has pretty clearly dictated that making music is not worth subsistence level wages - as supply is far outstripping demand. More people want to make music then pay other people to make music, ergo, music is worth less (worthless?)

an interesting comparison to the music industry is the sports industry - where the performers (ie, athletes) have a similar relationship to the audience, in that lots of people in the audience enjoy playing sports (in a similar way that music hobbyists enjoy making music). And yet the sports industry - by sheer power of spectacle and completely vomitrocious advertising subsidies - still manages to pay people bajillions of dollars to do something most "regular" people consider "fun", something they might do in their spare time. If musicians are interested in maintaining the economic promise of their industry, I recommend they model their business/professional practices on pro-sports as much as possible.

many x-posts

I am stealing J0hn's sperm tonight (from the sperm bank.)

will Ramones of carnies do?
http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x9/blackcanary2000/14093667_114618721007.jpg

I recommend they model their business/professional practices on pro-sports as much as possible.

by which I mean, get really comfortable with the American Idol model.

http://www.astronerdboy.com/comic-strips/images/toons/ZippyStillLife.jpg

^^^the John Cage of Carnies

xp Shakey: your sports model is a more dire reality than the current one, in that there are even fewer people above the top level making money.

More people want to make music then pay other people to make music, ergo, music is worth less (worthless?)

you're saying there are more musicians than music consumers in the world?

I don't think we're interested in everyone having their own musician slave.

but there's certainly more new music to be consumed than number of hours any human being wants to consume music?

xp iatee: certainly more than they're willing to pay for.

Matt - I haven't done any detailed demographic studies but it certainly seems to me that WAY more music is being produced than there used to be, but by

all industry indications fewer people are buying physical products.

x-post

there are more pro-level musicians (in terms of skill) than pro-level athletes, surely?

okay that was worded weirdly, but generally I agree w/ shakey about the supply thing. at the moment, there's more music available than total hours a human being is going to live.

xp Shakey: your sports model is a more dire reality than the current one, in that there are even fewer people above the top level making money.

hey, I didn't say it was a GOOD model (certainly not in terms of aesthetics or masterpieces or whatever), but obviously one musical product people WILL pay to see, one that goes hand-in-hand with direct corporate sponsorship, is the mass media spectacle of competition.

it's sort of a weird thing, i mean it's not strictly a commodity. like all the old music made still exists the same as it did.

it's not like i can eat a pork chop from 1928.

there are more pro-level musicians (in terms of skill) than pro-level athletes, surely?

depends! baseball and basketball you can make $ outside of the highest leagues. but if you're a 'almost good enough to be on the raiders but not quite' football player...

I would love to see WIlliam Hung take Pete Rose's place in the Hall of Fame.

John, in my opinion, art is something you choose to do, work is something you have to do. Making art is a privilege, making money from your art is a bonus. That's just my opinion.

(what I'm trying to say is 'pro-level' depends on the league systems, rather than any set level of skill)

pro sports uses academic institutions to recruit from and train their talent. Those academic institutions also make big money from sports teams - that structure isn't present in the same way in music, except perhaps in classical.

yeah I was just about to say - if you paid college football and basketball players - who are essentially 'pro' in every sense except they don't keep the money the make - the numbers would sure be different...

my larger conclusion with the sports analogy has to do with what people will pay for (and particularly pay ridiculously over-inflated salaries for). Audiences will pay to see an overpaid athlete do something normal people do as a pasttime if involves a) an aggressive level of competition, b) a massive spectacle, and c) a token degree of regional prejudices.

To me, making music in this context sounds utterly nightmarish, but it seems like a really solid economic model.