1. This may be a case of Survivorship bias. The most successful bands really take all the girls and all less successful just say they get laid constantly to boost their status. 2. Mötley Crüe started almost 40 years ago! Come to any gig of a really loud local band playing their instruments with attitude (don't really want to say "Rock") today and estimate the gender proportion in the crowd.
Ask the drummer in the next local band you see live.
You know, I am the drummer (besides other things).
It seems to me like musicians have always been in a precarious relation to the economy, same as all other artists. The only difference is that for a brief time in the 20th century the average person was willing to spend money on music, unlike every other time in human history. Nothing will ever stop people from making music, and 99% of working musicians are making a meager living doing what they enjoy, just like alwa…
That strikes me as dismissing "progress" as a mere blip in human history. The reason the average person was more willing to spend money on music is because we improved matters having to do with copyright and licensing. Good copyright and patent law serves a useful purpose in encouraging people to create or innovate in a system that would otherwise discourage doing so.
You are correct that there were those making money in music for the last few thousand years. However they were a minority: the vast majority of music was made by someone who did something else. You farmed all day, and when the day was done you made music.
Um, well yeah, those doing music professionally have always been a minority and still are, which has no bearing on this post, or this thread, or what I was talking about. The thread is about professionals; those making money from music. Mr. Bach and Mr. Handel weren't farming all day, I can assure you.
No, they were getting wellfare from their government!
This is essentially the pre-Beatles model we saw in Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building. Carole King's biggest hits were written for like $75/week. It declined as musicians started writing and recording their own songs and being self-contained creative acts, not to mention the, shall we say, "unfair equity strategies" the record labels used. That is, it's all well and good until the bosses take all the big money.
That's interesting. I didn't know this but I think this model should be brought back for most cases I think safe guards can be put into place to guard against "unfair equity strategies".
It was the dominant musicwriting business model from the sheet-music era until about 1962.
Spotify has had a severe and negative effect on musicians who make what I term 'peak experience music'. Amazing music, but not something you listen to every day. Say you listen once a month or even just a few times a year. Before: 2 listens = dealer price of a CD in UK = about £7.5 (on a good UK indie that's split 50/50 with the artist). Now: 2 listens = income from 2 streams on Spotify = about £0.0006 I'm thinking o…
This is not true/unfair interpretation. An artist does not get paid after the first payment from the label from the sale of a CD. If you play the CD on repeat, the artist does not benefit, nor does the label. /Labels/ get paid for every single listen on Spotify. There is also Spotify Direct, too, and the artist can directly benefit more than if they went with a label.
You appear to have missed the point. I'm singling out a genre of music where you might only listen to an album a few times. So repeat plays are irrelevant.
Or they made copies of friend's records ("ripping"). the CD-R drive has been around for 2 decades now, and came as a default option on many laptops and desktops in the early 2000s. And before that, people had CD/Casette Boomboxes where you could record CD tracks to the cassette. It was the only way to make mix tapes. I remember the days of ripping CDs borrowed from friends on a 4x speed drive; back then, you could do…
I completely forgot about this set of practices. Yes, a huge part of youth culture concerned itself with the creation and sharing of mix tapes. Looked at through this lens it makes me almost wistful thinking about the mix CDs I exchanged with friends in high school. They took a fair amount of work to put together and were often deeply personalized for the receiver. Makes you wonder who’s missing out, us or “kids thes…
Yeah, those were the days of making mixes for actual events, like road trips, relationship anniversaries, etc; these would be highly personal mixes, with inside jokes and obscure references. Now the trend has shifted to becoming an influencer with public playlists.