Great article:A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

Streaming has been around since the 00s, though. I remember Rhapsody was being pushed and I thought renting music was a dumb idea at the time, but now it's the dominant form of consuming music.

I guess the different thing now is that I really don't know what can possibly replace streaming.

 

The difference is, the ability to take it or access it anywhere via the smart phone (something that couldn't be done with Rhapsody except perhaps for on a laptop). An iPod had a very limited capacity, and Apple being how they are, gouge you considerably for storage. So you could at one time "carry thousands of songs (at a crappy bit rate) in your pocket". Now you have access to millions of songs that you can pull up wirelessly or over a cell network, any time and nearly anywhere.

What's really been killed here is the cultivation of taste. Now anyone can pull up nearly any artist's entire catalog and be an overnight expert. In some ways, this is good as it gets rid of the cultural gatekeepers (is there even a role for the "music critic" now?), but it's eliminated a lot of the mystery and allure of the form.

 

Thanks for sharing. I’m happy with my 4000 CD collection, and I do not streaming the lousy sound.

 

Me too Claus, same with dvd movies

 

That history wasn’t exactly brief, and Lil Uzi Vert is making a crazy living making music, so I call b.s. on that article.

 

Smartphones changed everything.

 

I have the every American Top 40 show from the 70's
(yes, with Casey Kasem) and several times over the
course of the decade he points out how little the artist
makes from the sales of recordings, and that nearly all
of their income is from performing live. He mentions
that an artist with just a few hits is guaranteed a lifetime
of steady work, as long as they want to go out and perform.

So, I disagree with most of everything I just read! And,
despite the title of the thread, it was not brief! lol

But I do appreciate that the OP would share this article
and start the discussion.

 

I don't know much about Lil Uzi Vert, but the author does state repeatedly that people listen less for sonic quality (or even music quality) than they do for cultural information.

 

I'm sure that was also true in 1967

 

iPhones came out in 2007, and smartphones became the norm just a few years later. Was Rhapsody not available as an app?

 

Mr. Gort, please delete this thread.

 

Was there a network to support it? I don't remember this stuff being that far along when I got my first iPhone back in 2007. Maybe I was a late adopter to the streaming world (scratch that, I certainly was). I know Spotify wasn't the big player back then, and Apple hadn't really gotten past flogging MP3's yet.

 

Dude, you are being way too sensitive. Trolling is making inflammatory or provocative comments just to stir the pot. Making an observation is not trolling just because it makes someone uncomfortable or someone disagrees with it.

From the last paragraph of the article you quoted and for which someone else has already provided a citation:

I think in the future, we must return to valuing the art form. If we as artists attend to the work at a professional level, if we support the community in every way we can as artists, and you have invested in us, is it not incumbent on the community to support in kind? Or are you happy to download it, upload it, rip it , and dispense the art form for free? I think it is incumbent on the citizens of the community to understand its relationship to the musicians and creators if it is to be considered a community at all.

The author references the “art form” not just music specifically. And someone’s written published creation is an art form as well. If you do not understand or admit that, then there is no point in discussing this further.

 

Thank you for posting the article. I went searching for the article because I wanted to share it on my Facebook. I ended up finding a link to the article on Janis Ian's Facebook. I thought it would be helpful to others to have a source so I posted it.

 

I felt exactly the same a year later, when a friend of mine showed me how Napster worked; when I saw that in a few minutes he downloaded an obscure 50's song that I asked for, I thought: "That's it. There goes the neighbourhood…"

 

Thank you Larry Mc. What a great article, well worth reading every word of it. I'm totally behind what Mr. Tamblyn is saying there.

 

Sorry you had to take the article down, Larry. I hope others here will find it and read it for there own edification. I'm really stoked reading stuff that good!

 

Your smug self-anointed sanctimony is duly noted.

 

To reference Douglas Adams in Hitchhiker's Guide:

With the advent of time travel, the past has become just like the present and future, everything is the same. With tourists traipsing back and forth, bringing their own culture with them. (He was referencing foreign countries or planets.)

This thread kind of reminds me of that. The past ain't special, neither will the future be. Isn't that the way it is supposed to be?

 

I agree with some of the article and disagree with other points.

Music has three basic components that can be sold: that which is written (the score and, if any, the lyrics), live performances thereof and - the last to appear, with the advent of the appropriate technology - the recording. This writer seems only to be referring to the monetization of one of those: the recording.

It seems to me that great "art" (and he seems very intent on referring to pretty much all recorded music products interchangeably as "art," something I don't agree with) will sell at least one of those components, even if some of the others do not.

Yes, it's harder than ever to make a living off of selling a piece of recorded music. It's also harder than ever to be a commercial jingle writer (because nobody listens to the radio any more, and televised commercials have mostly dropped jingles). Times change, tastes change and jobs become obsolete with the advent of technology. Are we worse off now that there isn't great talent around to make us laugh with commercial jingles? Is the world worse off because a folk singer from Canada can't sell recorded music like he used to?

The world is different, yes, but not worse for either of these circumstances.

And not for nothing, but it's kind of bizarre that it's a folk singer, of all people, is writing an article lamenting that an old system of commercial distribution and sale of music isn't producing enough money for him. When were folk singers principally about the money? He should use these hard times as inspiration to come up with better songs. There were plenty of people making folk songs before recording technology even existed.

 

If he wanted to be an artist, he should have become a rock star first. The grand artistic statement should come after the multi-platinum chart-topper (IMO).

When everyone's an artist, it renders the term meaningless. It puts Kevin Federline on the same level as Bob Dylan. Anyone who wants to tell me that Federline or Aaron Carter are artists is just insulting my intelligence.

 

The article was pulled down and I haven't read it, but I assume it was about recorded music sales.

I think you're underestimating he scale of decline in CD and in the business generally.

CD sales didn't reach half of all US recorded music sales volume until 1993, it was still a minor but growing format through the late '80s, so I don't think that first decade after CD's introduction meant all that much.

CD peaked in 1999 in the US with $18.9 billion in revenue on an inflation adjusted basis and 938.9M units sold. By 2010 those numbers had fallen to $3.8 billion -- a revenue decline of nearly 80% -- and unit sales had fallen to 253M, down 73%.

That's a titanic collapse, and it's a collapse which left little to replace it (as opposed what happened in prior cycles when one format replaced another): Overall inflation adjusted industry revenue in the period fell from from $21.9 billion to $7.9 billion, a 64% decline in the industry as a whole.

If it wasn't a fast decline, it was was sudden one, in that the arrival of the commercial internet was an inflection point that turned the industry from a long period of growth to an unprecedented period of decline almost overnight. It was steep, as detailed above. And it was profound because adapting to it, as we have seen, has meant completely changing the model for selling recorded music -- from a product model to a service model, which is a much harder transition than just selling one product format vs. another, because it means the whole economy of the industry has to be reordered.

 

A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

 

Thanks. It seems to me that the analysis may be spot on, but the conclusion is more in the form of a moralistic dream about how life "should be," than anything else.

When the author writes, "Though the technology has changed, the value of the work should be unchanged....," he's just wishing for something to be true that isn't true.

There was once a scarcity to recorded music -- it was only available a certain way; in a certain amount, it was costly to produce and distribute so only big companies with finance and distribution capacity could put it out limited the amount that was made; it was physical, so markets were constrained by where physical distribution could reach.

Now, production of recorded music is cheaper and more widely available to music makers, there's more recorded music available to consumers than ever before, there's more competition for consumer attention and leisure time and money, consumers are more interested in engaging in media on a participatory basis -- messaging one another -- than on a strictly passive consumption basis, electronic network distribution means distribution is global and instantaneous so there's not the same kind of regional scarcity.

In this new technology environment, recorded music is not as valuable as it once was (its true of a lot of creative work -- the value of published writing, isn't what it was either, if may be worth even less now than music). Whether is "should" or "shouldn't" be is just an academic and theoretical argument. It isn't. Music has value in use -- as music for dancing, or worship or to set a mood, etc. But as such it's pretty fungible. Two different pieces of dance music or settings of a prayer might work equally well in their social contexts. So the only really financial value art has, has ever had, will ever had, is what people are willing to pay for it.

Artist have always had to live in a world where they've needed to seek financial support. In the Renaissance, the artists did church frescos of biblical scenes and portraits of the wealthy, and not landscapes, because that's what they were paid to do under commissions. Bach wrote masses because that was part of his job as kappelmeister. Composers sought out wealthy patrons. Or, as the world turned industrial, started to do things to put on their own shows to make the music pay for itself. Someone brought up Van Gogh. Van Gogh desperately wanted to sell his art. He came from a family of art dealers. His brother was a leading art dealer for the Impressionists, and making a good living selling art. But Van Gogh was mentally ill. He suffered from psychotic episodes and probably depression. He couldn't do work that the market demanded. He couldn't even convince his brother to put on a show of his work, though his brother did support him throughout his life.

Recorded music is still generating a lot of money -- much, much less by about half than it did 15 years ago at the industry's peak, so everyone is going to have to take a haircut and some folks are going to fall by the wayside in an industry that has contracted so much. The model has shifted from a product based model to a service based model, and all the industry participants are going to need to change how they generated revenue and how they split the revenue they generate.

But the author wagging his finger at the community and scolding, "The problem is that you don't value my work like you should," isn't actually going to change the value people place on his work. He either need to do different work. Do work differently. Or find a different audience that values it more highly.

 

The stream and the download have shifted the focus onto the individual song. How many of that 938.9 million were CD singles? I'm gonna guess that it was a very small percentage of that total.