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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

#131

Post by [deleted] »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #83
jdietrich wrote: post #33

The author's basic premise is false and his article is riddled with basic factual errors. The vast majority of artists never made a significant proportion of their income from recorded music, due to the extremely shady accounting practices used by the industry to deprive artists of royalties. For detail on this, see Steve Albini's notorious essay The Problem With Music . https://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17 T…

> it has greatly increased the marketability of live music Yet that might be a blip. Some of my friends who used to be passionate concertgoers, now say there’s no reason to pay for a concert, deal with getting to the venue, etc. when bands are uploading full-length concerts in fine video and audio to YouTube. Also, since musical tastes have fragmented enormously due to the wider supply, people are less likely to shar…

[deleted]

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

#132

Post by joshuas »

anigbrowl wrote: post #79
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…

This argument crops up on every discussion of this topic. Why is it always people who work in the arts always told their work isn't worthy of payment except when delivered under certain conditions? If you don't think artists should be paid, then neither should programmers.

I don't know about you, but I'm paid to perform(much like a live musician I suppose). I don't get residuals on my performance. I don't list myself as the writer or composer of my code and receive payment if someone uses or derives their own work from mine. My employer might.

I haven't seen anyone here saying musicians shouldn't get paid when they perform for an audience or for a certain purpose (let's say a commercial or soundtrack)

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

#133

Post by ovao »

Fricken wrote: post #126
throwaway8879 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, I would say there is no "the way it should be". Capitalism seems to have a net positive effect on the majority of the planet. Let's stick with it.

Capitalism is destroying the planet. That's hardly a net positive. In fact it's the worst thing possible. There is nothing humans are even theoretically capable of that is worse.

> There is nothing humans are even theoretically capable of that is worse [than capitalism].

A bartender once made me an Old Fashioned without muddling the sugar. Are you certain that’s not worse?

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

#134

Post by stephen_g »

pier25 wrote: post #58
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…

Aliasing is a problem coming from insufficient filtering. That is actually one reason that 48kHz still makes sense to upgrade to from 44.1kHz - it makes the antialiasing filter design a bit easier because the rolloff doesn't have to be as sharp to stay above the range of hearing and below the Nyquist frequency.

Neve make beautiful mixers, but it's not necessarily "better' - it just has a nice sound because the analog components colour the sound in certain ways. There are other ways to do the same thing though - as long as you have good enough preamps and digitisation, you can download characterisations of certian amplifiers/mixers to apply to your digital signal. This is massive in guitar effects - you can download basically any vintage amp and sound basically identical without having to ship around heavy amps with delicate tubes in them!

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

#135

Post by selectodude »

Fricken wrote: post #126
throwaway8879 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, I would say there is no "the way it should be". Capitalism seems to have a net positive effect on the majority of the planet. Let's stick with it.

Capitalism is destroying the planet. That's hardly a net positive. In fact it's the worst thing possible. There is nothing humans are even theoretically capable of that is worse.

What is the suggested alternative to a market economy? Command economies aren't what I would consider better for the globe. Energy intensity per unit of labor is almost universally lower in market economies than it is in command economies.

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

#136

Post by ovao »

pier25 wrote: post #58
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…

> It's common knowledge in the industry that good analog mixing desks (eg: Neve) are still better than any plugin at summing and EQing.

At certain points in history, it was common knowledge that the Earth was flat and that a reliable method to determine whether someone was a witch was to see if she would float.

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

#137

Post by ericmcer »

jdietrich wrote: post #60
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 pas…

Why were Mozart, Bach, Etc. all relatively poor then? Even the greatest musicians of their age were not wealthy. Compare their incomes to a Taylor Swift or Led Zeppelin and the difference is insane. The last 70 or so years have been the only period where artists incomes rivaled that of land/factory owners.

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

#138

Post by throwaway8879 »

Fricken wrote: post #126
throwaway8879 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, I would say there is no "the way it should be". Capitalism seems to have a net positive effect on the majority of the planet. Let's stick with it.

Capitalism is destroying the planet. That's hardly a net positive. In fact it's the worst thing possible. There is nothing humans are even theoretically capable of that is worse.

Worst thing possible? Really? That's a simpleton's view about existence. Countless planets die every day. I only care about the next 20 years I'm going to be alive for. I don't care about the planet or the survival of your children. Don't force responsibility on me.

So capitalism it is for me.

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

#139

Post by throwaway8879 »

selectodude wrote: post #135
Fricken wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism is destroying the planet. That's hardly a net positive. In fact it's the worst thing possible. There is nothing humans are even theoretically capable of that is worse.

What is the suggested alternative to a market economy? Command economies aren't what I would consider better for the globe. Energy intensity per unit of labor is almost universally lower in market economies than it is in command economies.

There is no alternative unless we magically have free energy. The only way out of this is to colonize the solar system, galaxy. At that point the Earth's status as a habitable planet will hardly matter.

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

#140

Post by selimthegrim »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #78
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…

If you're interested the non consumption-oriented music tradition, you'll do well to check out the Clifftop ["old-time music"] Festival [0]. Basically it is a music festival in which the music is made by the attendees, and there are no formally booked or scheduled artists (kind of). A few things that surprised me (I was totally naive going in, just giving a ride to a friend en route to somewhere else): - Old time mus…

Will now have image of crust punk playing Old Dan Tucker firmly burned into my mind
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