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“Music” has been around for a long time, likely from hundreds of thousands of years ago. The “music business”, where people can own music, the distribution and
by renlo 5y ago
“Music” has been around for a long time, likely from hundreds of thousands of years ago.
The “music business”, where people can own music, the distribution and modern incarnation of “the music business”, has only been around for a a little over a century.
- foldr 5y agoPeople have been buying sheet music for a lot longer than that. Of course it's true virtually by definition that the "modern" incarnation of the music business has not been around for very long.
- tessierashpool 5y agoyeah, if you move the goalposts, then you score every time. and the original post in this thread said nothing about modernity. but even if the original ranting comment was only talking about the modern music business, that starts with sheet music publishing in the 19th century, not this made-up nonsense about churches and bars. and the 19th century sheet music publishing business was itself founded on hundreds of years of sheet music publishing that came before it, just at a smaller scale.
- obstacle1 5y ago> made-up nonsense about churches and bars. The first sheet music printed (15th century) was almost exclusively liturgical (i.e., religious). Similarly, it's no accident that the first popular work of the printed word was the Gutenberg Bible.
- foldr 5y agoSure, but the sheet music was a straightforward product. Certain people wanted to perform certain music, and the sheet music helped them to do it. Music has been part of religious observance since forever. It’s just inaccurate to analyze the situation as one where the sheet music business is only profitable because it’s being indirectly used to “sell preaching”. Anyway, whatever the beginnings of the industry, there was a very large secular sheet music market shortly thereafter. I’d love to hear the cynical analysis of the madrigal industry, but I suspect the truth of it is a lot simpler: people enjoy singing songs. From Wikipedia: > Jacques Arcadelt (also Jacob Arcadelt; c. 1507 – 14 October 1568[1]) was a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance, active in both Italy and France, and principally known as a composer of secular vocal music. Although he also wrote sacred vocal music, he was one of the most famous of the early composers of madrigals; his first book of madrigals, published within a decade of the appearance of the earliest examples of the form, was the most widely printed collection of madrigals of the entire era.
- renlo 5y agoNo clue why you're bringing up sheet music, modern music industry is recorded music, not sheet music. OP was discussing recorded music, ie "the music industry", not the "sheet music industry"
- foldr 5y agoIt's not entirely clear to me what the OP was talking about, as the claim in their original post is quite vague. I just wanted to point out that people have been able to "own" music since long before it was possible to record music. So there is a long history of music being a product.