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

rootsmusic.ca

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

#11

Post by ilamont »

cletus wrote: post #5

So this article is largely about the changes in technology, namely that with a high barrier to entry and when distribution was predicated on moving physical products, times were good for musicians selling the media of the time (records, CDs). But this article makes the same mistake pretty much every article decrying the zero cost of distribution (ie the Internet) and the inevitable piracy, it ignores a key point: at…

But the sale of recorded music did enable many musicians to earn income even if they didn't want to or couldn't tour, or couldn't make much money off of touring, which was the story for most small/indie artists. It was another income stream, and for the smaller artists, a source of revenue that helped justify continuing to record. (If they worked with an honest publisher and/or had control over rights)

As you noted, for a smaller number of top artists, record sales served as the sole source of income, and enabled them to do amazing stuff. XTC springs to mind - Andy Partridge apparently had terrible stage fright, hated touring, and basically stopped after the late 70s. During the 80s they recorded some truly groundbreaking albums on the strength of their songwriting and studio talents, and were able to survive on record sales based on a strong fan base and very limited radio airplay to promote record sales.

The KLF is another example. I worked for their record label in the early 90s, and they did absolutely no touring at that time (or ever, AFAIK). Revenue was from the sale of singles, the White Room album, special releases, and foreign licensing.

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

#13

Post by ms013 »

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…

Yup. I dug deep into the technology recently when I taught a class on the science of sound at a local college. When you look at media not only from the mathematical perspective (Nyquist, etc), but the physical (grain density and size on tape), it’s pretty clear that past technologies did have fundamental limits. It’s hard to disentangle the technical appeal of certain recording media from the nostalgia for a rosier looking past when reading some of these articles.

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

#14

Post by slothtrop »

adamnemecek wrote: post #4
TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #2

The author is out of touch. Plenty of people are making a good living making music. They just aren't making their money selling CDs and MP3s. I wish the author would read up on self-made artists like Post Malone and Logic. They have made tons of money ... starting small, selling merch, and then finally filling stadiums at $50-$100 a ticket.

Those are household names and it also requires that the artist wants to tour.

Touring isn't a new requirement for making real money

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

#15

Post by empath75 »

adamnemecek wrote: post #4
TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #2

The author is out of touch. Plenty of people are making a good living making music. They just aren't making their money selling CDs and MP3s. I wish the author would read up on self-made artists like Post Malone and Logic. They have made tons of money ... starting small, selling merch, and then finally filling stadiums at $50-$100 a ticket.

Those are household names and it also requires that the artist wants to tour.

A friend of mine makes 6 figures touring as a dj, backed by work he does producing and remixing for a pittance just to get his name out there. And he is far from a household name. Is he rich? No, but it’s a living.

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

#16

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

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…

This stuff again. I have several friends who are convinced that a $2,000 HDMI cable can produce "better" audio and video. I've grown so tired of these debates, that I just nod my head and move on when they start down these roads.

Because of these arguments, I've been saving articles about them when I run across them. When I retire, I may make a web site devoted to debunking this nonsense forever. One good example was a guy who used "cheap" and "expensive" speaker cables, and COAT HANGERS, and challenged people to reliably tell the difference in A/B testing. No one could.

It seems to me that we have the cheap and highly-available ability, these days, to 1) lift audio and video from a source directly, and 2) pass it through various stages in the reproduction chain, and 3) PROVE that this-or-that piece of kit ACTUALLY reproduces the ORIGINAL recording any better than another.

(My favorite piece of gear, in an audiophile catalog, from about 30 years ago, was a replacement knob for your amplifier. Apparently, the bakelite one that came with it introduced unfavorable harmonics into your listening experience. The replacement fixed all that for you. It was a wooden puck, with a hole drilled in the back. They wanted $500 for it. .... I'm in the wrong business.)

All this boils down to is various levels of equalization. You can say that a turntable and an analog amp is "better," and that's fine. You may really prefer it. But don't tell me it's "more accurate." I can demonstrate that - at the end of the day - it's just an EQ on the original recording, and does not reproduce the original more accurately. (With math and graphs and everything!)

Unfortunately, I know what I'm up against. The people who believe this audiophile nonsense will very likely NOT understand the math and the graphs, and I'll be wasting my time regardless. The entire market is fed by -- and I hate to say it, because these kinds of folks are GOOD friends of mine -- people with literally more money than sense.

Guess that came out a lot more rant-y than I was shooting for.

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

#17

Post by saidajigumi »

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…

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 even hear the problems.

Many people formed their critical listening opinions during this time, and came to the at-the-time logically supportable conclusion that "analog sounds better". In fact, that was just an unfortunate period of industry-wide learning curve. Much of what followed was rationalization of that early opinion, generally not backed up by the science of audio recording and production.

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

#18

Post by Pfhreak »

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…

> 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.

This seems wildly improbable to me? People didn't get paid for art until a few hundred years ago?

Are you suggesting artisans weren't a thing? That all the art produced globally outside of the past few hundred years was done just for love of doing?

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

#19

Post by empath75 »

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 don’t know of anyone who has made any worthwhile music who did it to make money. You’d be an idiot to do it for the money, even in the golden age of music labels. The vast majority of musicians made nothing and a few got super wealthy. You had to practice for years, putting aside any other career in order for a small chance to get discovered. Now once you’re discovered and you have a career, you might continue to do it for the money, but nobody starts there and by then you’re already a talented musician, having done most of the hard work of learning to make music with no real financial incentive at all.

Now people can work on music part time for years as a hobby and just throw it out there and if it’s good people will find it and maybe they’ll get asked to do a gig here and there and that might be enough for them.

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