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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

#121

Post by SeanLuke »

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…

> Studio-quality analog has had better than CD-quality audio since the late 50s (lower noise, more headroom).

I believe you're referring to dynamic range, that is, the ratio between the loudest possible sound and sound level which drowned out by hiss. My understanding was that the very best reel-to-reel studio decks are only capable of a dynamic range equivalent to roughly 14 bits in digital. Do you have any objective source backing up this better-than-CD-quality claim?

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

#122

Post by throwaway8879 »

tomcam wrote: post #119
clairity wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

art and music do require skill, and people will pay for good art/music no matter the availability. take pop music (of all sorts) for example. the money that pours into it is puzzling if you consider the music on its own merits. the melodies are catchy and the lyrics too, but no one really considers it high art. any barroom crooner could sing and play it. (in fact singing is probably the most accessible and widely dis…

> no one really considers it high art. any barroom crooner could sing and play it Um, no. I say this as a holder of season tickets to the opera and as a trained operatic tenor myself. Many, many pop singers are incredibly good and far outstrip the skills of most barroom singers I have experienced.

Oh definitely. I don't think people know how much work goes into the typical pop song, even though it may sound like anyone could write and record it.

People think they could sing Britney Spears just like her until they get behind a mic to record. Most people don't even know the cringey feeling of "God, I didn't know my voice sounded like that" after having heard their own recorded voice for the first time. Or how out of tune and rhythm they actually are.

So no. Everybody thinks they could sing the typical pop song, but I doubt that they could.

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

#123

Post by throwaway8879 »

Fricken wrote: post #113
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 most of human history nobody made money doing anything . Capitalism is an an abberation in history, not "the way it should be".

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.

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

#124

Post by nannePOPI »

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 against IP is really good

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

#125

Post by anigbrowl »

microtherion wrote: post #109
anigbrowl wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If you don't think artists should be paid, then neither should programmers. Pretty sure that RMS is advocating for that kind of vision.

Too bad he can't figure out how to apply it to real world commodities.

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

#126

Post by Fricken »

throwaway8879 wrote: post #123
Fricken wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most of human history nobody made money doing anything . Capitalism is an an abberation in history, not "the way it should be".

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.

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

#127

Post by mamon »

tomcam wrote: post #119
clairity wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

art and music do require skill, and people will pay for good art/music no matter the availability. take pop music (of all sorts) for example. the money that pours into it is puzzling if you consider the music on its own merits. the melodies are catchy and the lyrics too, but no one really considers it high art. any barroom crooner could sing and play it. (in fact singing is probably the most accessible and widely dis…

> no one really considers it high art. any barroom crooner could sing and play it Um, no. I say this as a holder of season tickets to the opera and as a trained operatic tenor myself. Many, many pop singers are incredibly good and far outstrip the skills of most barroom singers I have experienced.

It's not that pop singers aren't talented. It's just that pop music as a genre is pretty much boring, and the artists that appear every season, or every "America's got talent" edition, they all are easily forgettable. You could switch covers and sell Selena Gomez album as Ariana Grande album and noone would even notice the difference.

Pop music is a commodity, and as any commodity it's pricing/value is basically a race to bottom.

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

#128

Post by jellicle »

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…

Plenty of people are making money in music, just not artists.

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

#129

Post by jancsika »

Ok, so further down in the comments there is this:

> Superficially there is some sense - the higher frequency signals are rendered less and less accurately, and nearer a binary on-off. Who knows what nuance and harmonics may be lost affecting what's heard at lower frequencies.

It's true that at a given sampling rate, if you choose a sine wave with a frequency right below Nyquist it is composed of fewer samples per period than a lower frequency sine. But lots of audiophiles-- like the one I quoted above-- seem to equate "fewer samples" with "less accuracy" which does not follow[1].

So here's the question-- what would it sound like if you built a filter to make this common misunderstanding true? So the closer the frequency content gets to Nyquist, the more the filter distorts that frequency.

It would be fun to build so that people could apply it to digital input and realize just how awful the output would sound if their misunderstanding of digital audio were true.

[1] https://www.xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml

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

#130

Post by felipemnoa »

clairity wrote: post #117
anigbrowl wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of what you say is true, but then the live music scene is dominated by an oligopoly for ticket sales (Livenation & Ticketmaster) and for bookings (GoldenVoice). Commercial venues tend to sign contracts with these big players and that's killed off most local and regional booking agencies that used to set people up. It's better than it used to be in some respects, but also centralized and excessively driven by ana…

by the way, livenation and ticketmaster are the same company (headquartered in LA).

Honest question, why has nobody gone after them for monopolistic practices?
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