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

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

#51

Post by turc1656 »

jedberg wrote: post #6

For all of human history, we've been making music and art. And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money. For a few hundred years, there was the patronage era, where if you were really good you could get a rich person to feed and clothe and house you while you made art. Or you traveled around giving performances for money or food or clothes or shelter. Then only in the last 100ish years ha…

Absolutely agree. The creation of technology that allowed people to scale their work is the key. With a single song/album that was sold in stored as well as being able to be played via FM radio and television, a single person could be known throughout the country (or even worldwide). That was never possible before. Prior to that, you always had to basically perform in person, which is a labor-intensive process and therefore pricier than just paying for the album and having it forever (and could also re-sell it). The number of people who could afford live performances historically is far less.

To add another point on top of yours - something else to consider is that music used to be considered free. Or stated another way - without ownership. Society was the owner historically. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know the reason why this was the cause, but I've heard it talked about by historians in documentaries. I suspect it has to do with what you said - that wealthy people funded their artistic endeavors and society as a whole owned the result. Or that they weren't bankrolled by a rich person but instead collected money from passers-by on the streets as they performed. This also speaks directly to the concept of "traditionals" with no known authors.

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

#52

Post by gumby »

He harks back to the "savannah" age but really he's hankering for a much more recent, 20th century mythical golden age.

The title he should have used was "why musicians and music writers now have a very hard time exploiting a temporary, and vanishing distribution shortage to make even a fraction of the money collected by the record companies."

Plenty of artists of all sorts are still making money; maybe not as much as during the 40-year bubble and of course a small number as it ever was.

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

#53

Post by carpo »

jedberg wrote: post #44
carpo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't all through patronage though. I just finished listening to a biography of Leonardo da Vinci, and he was taught in a workshop, essentially as an apprentice. They would do independent commissions for people - portraits, statues etc. It's true that the great artists would get patronage once they were great, but it seemed that there were a bunch of these workshops with apprentices that copied the master's paint…

Isn't a bespoke commission just an act of patronage though? If I hire you to make something for me, I'm your patron. I guess the main difference is that back then, you would sell the work and then make it. Nowadays, you make the work and then hope to sell it over and over again.

Patronage seemed like a more formal thing though. They lived with the patron who would provide them a workshop, food and money. Their early days in a workshop seemed more like an employee at a business, not much different than today. The owner would have to go and find work and tap his network to find people who needed his businesses wares. He would hire employees, and they would complete jobs under his supervision. When Leonardo da Vinci was 14 and working at a workshop he was an employee of the workshop owner. It took him a long time to get a patron. He even sent letters to rich people trying to get their patronage by saying what he could do (and just like today, there was a bit of "fake it till you make" in those letters too :)

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

#54

Post by eatmyshorts »

criddell wrote: post #30
saidajigumi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were also serious problems in many early digital (and hybrid) audio production chains. Some productions had great engineers on board who'd taken the time to learn the new tools. Others ... were varying degrees from "meh" to "disaster". For example, I have a CD that's unlistenable if you've still got your high-end hearing – there's major high-frequency artifacting. I'll bet that the mastering engineer couldn't e…

I always wonder how some bands (like Dire Straits) seemed to figure this stuff out so early on while a decade later others struggled to do the same.

You think they figured it out early? Go listen to some Miles Davis recordings from the late 50s. Analog tape, two mics, and that was it. And it still sounds better than almost everything made since.

Studio-quality analog has had better than CD-quality audio since the late 50s (lower noise, more headroom). With "modern" studio techniques we've adopted multitrack recording, close mic'ing of instruments, and what not. While these may make the recording process easier, they don't make recordings of a higher quality. Give me a pair of high-quality mics in ORTF configuration and natural, unamplified instruments any day.

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

#55

Post by marssaxman »

turc1656 wrote: post #51
jedberg wrote: post #6

For all of human history, we've been making music and art. And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money. For a few hundred years, there was the patronage era, where if you were really good you could get a rich person to feed and clothe and house you while you made art. Or you traveled around giving performances for money or food or clothes or shelter. Then only in the last 100ish years ha…

Absolutely agree. The creation of technology that allowed people to scale their work is the key. With a single song/album that was sold in stored as well as being able to be played via FM radio and television, a single person could be known throughout the country (or even worldwide). That was never possible before. Prior to that, you always had to basically perform in person, which is a labor-intensive process and th…

We're seeing a return to this model in DJing, where the boundaries between performance and playback have largely disintegrated, and the difference between "making new music which repeats familiar refrains" and "pasting together bits of existing recordings to make a new piece of music" has completely dissolved. There's a complex body of compromises with copyright law which is allowing this to happen, but what's essentially going on is that everyone is silently agreeing not to get too wound up about it and we're going back to a model where music is a shared, linguistic experience, and music makers copy, echo, reframe, and reply to each other in a giant collective conversation. It's a much more interesting, relaxed experience than the hard-edged, scarcity-driven model of specific recordings with specific ownership that prevailed through the end of the 20th century.

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

#56

Post by bambax »

Two very bad analogies in the first paragraph.

1/ We don't know much or anything about our prehistoric ancestors; but we do know that lions don't hunt humans, because where they still cohabit in a natural state, it's rather the other way around

2/ The story of the frog in slowly boiling water is apocryphal and false; if you put a frog in a jar and heat it, however slowly, the frog WILL JUMP OUT

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

#57

Post by criddell »

eatmyshorts wrote: post #54
criddell wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wonder how some bands (like Dire Straits) seemed to figure this stuff out so early on while a decade later others struggled to do the same.

You think they figured it out early? Go listen to some Miles Davis recordings from the late 50s. Analog tape, two mics, and that was it. And it still sounds better than almost everything made since. Studio-quality analog has had better than CD-quality audio since the late 50s (lower noise, more headroom). With "modern" studio techniques we've adopted multitrack recording, close mic'ing of instruments, and what not. W…

Is it fair to compare studio-quality analog with a consumer format for digital? You would have to compare studio-analog with studio-digital and I'd be surprised if the analog comes out on top in any way.

Techniques like close mic'ing aren't really about ease, it's about capturing a different sound and it predates the digital era.

Your preference for particular mics and instruments is kind of irrelevant to digital vs analog as a storage format, isn't it?

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

#58

Post by pier25 »

MereInterest wrote: post #8

> However, with a sampling rate of 44,000 samples per second, there were overtones of sound now missing. Human hearing only goes up to 20 kHz when you are young, dropping to about 12 kHz at the age of 50. 44 kHz sampling gives a Nyquist frequency of 22 kHz, easily encompassing the full range of human hearing. Any overtones that are missing in the recording are overtones that didn't make it through the human ear in th…

While I agree with you, it's also true that aliasing occurs below the Nyquist frequency and some people can hear those artifacts in ideal listening conditions (acoustic environment, DA conversion, monitors/headphones, etc). I seriously doubt the author can hear the differences considering his age.

Another point is maybe the author actually meant he preferred analog recording and mixing vs doing it all in digital, and his point was not really about the reproduction method. It's common knowledge in the industry that good analog mixing desks (eg: Neve) are still better than any plugin at summing and EQing.

Deadmau5 recently switched his studio to a Neve desk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWZdPQAXxW4

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

#59

Post by idiot900 »

My experience in college radio (a while back) suggests that most professional musical artists, indie or otherwise, are just not that good. I don't lament the democratization of music like this guy does. If nobody wants to listen to him, am I supposed to feel bad?

As for supporting the musicians, I'm happy to pay 10 USD/month for music streaming, but it's not worth more to me. My totally acceptable alternative is just not listening to such paid music at all. The musicians owe me nothing, and vice versa.

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

#60

Post by jdietrich »

jedberg wrote: post #6

For all of human history, we've been making music and art. And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money. For a few hundred years, there was the patronage era, where if you were really good you could get a rich person to feed and clothe and house you while you made art. Or you traveled around giving performances for money or food or clothes or shelter. Then only in the last 100ish years ha…

>I think people making money making music was an aberration in history, not "the way it should be".

Absolute nonsense. We have evidence of professional musicians dating back to at least ancient Egypt. Plato complained in his writings about popular musicians holding unruly concerts. The invention of recorded music was a disaster for professional musicians, because it rendered most of them unemployed.

People of the past had far more limited access to music, but they weren't stupid or undiscerning - they wanted to hear the best possible music and were willing to pay for it. Busking is probably as old as currency and remains a perfectly reasonable way of making a living. If you owned a bar or tavern, having the best music in town was a huge competitive advantage that you would be more than willing to pay for. Dancehalls had bands, circuses had bands, theatres had bands. The Ottoman Empire had military marching bands in at least the 13th century.

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