Skip to main content

The dark ages are over

The 50-year historical blip in which a tiny percentage of artists were able to get rich off of prerecorded music is blessedly over. With the plummeting cost of recording and mastering songs has come a great democratization in music creation, in which anyone, not just those backed by labels, can create great music.

Back in the day, the labels were the investors: recording good music was expensive and difficult, and getting it promoted required paying off the gatekeepers of terrestrial radio, and so labels ponied up the startup capital and therefore got the lion's share of the profits.

Today, the startup capital required is several orders of magnitude lower, and the promotion channels are infinite and free or nearly free to access. Yes, it's much less likely for an artist to get filthy stinking rich off recorded music today, but you know what? I'm okay with that. We have an embarrassment of riches in terms of great new music today, being created by tons of people who are now free to act on their creativity because recording and distributing music is basically free today.

Labels are dinosaurs. Paul Stanley is a dinosaur. File sharing was the extinction-level event. The dust just hasn't completely cleared yet. Mark my words: we have entered a new golden age for music, something that will be obvious only in retrospect.

(Copied from my replies to a post by Matt Vicente on FB.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

10 best albums of the 1990's

I haven't done a blog in a while, and there's nothing that's stoking the political fires enough to make me want to write. Therefore... I present my opinion of the best 10 albums of the 1990's. If you know anything about me, you know that I'm a hard-core metal fan, so that preference inevitably colors this list. 10. Loreena McKennitt / the mask and mirror (1994). While not her strongest album, it speaks volumes about the quality of her albums that I would still include this among my top 10 of the 1990's. Ethereal, textured, haunting: these are all adjectives that accurately describe the music. Ms. McKennitt's voice, however, is what really draws me to the music: her range is huge, and her power at the high end unmatched by any of the other non-Opera singers I've heard. 9. Pearl Jam / Vs. (1993). Their best album is also the finest example of alternative rock: plenty of anthems balanced with slower, more personal poems. With the exception of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thoughts from road-tripping

I've decided to try to get back into the business of blogging, but I'm mostly going to limit myself to bitching about things, because I don't really have the patience to write anything in-depth. So, for today, I have two thoughts from road-tripping to ProgPower XV, and an additional thought related to my drive home from the gym tonight: I want the climate control system in my car to be smarter. To be fair, it's already much better than the old style in which you slide a thermostat labelled only with red and blue, and not connected to any actual temperature, and set a blower speed explicitly, and have to constantly adjust them whenever conditions change in the slightest so you can avoid burning up or freezing. At least my car lets me set a specific temperature by degree, which the car attempts to maintain for each of the two zones. The problem is that this isn't quite what I want. Humans don't feel temperature directly so much as heat gain or loss. What I re...
1 comment
Read more