3 ms·
Apparently they make the same fuck-all when we buy the albums. "Paying" for the albums is just a lie we tell ourselves to justify handing all of the money to a
by noonespecial 14y ago
Apparently they make the same fuck-all when we buy the albums. "Paying" for the albums is just a lie we tell ourselves to justify handing all of the money to a middle man so we can just get our music right now without actually having to do anything about the injustice of the big fat mess the music industry became?
- tptacek 14y agoNo, that's not true, because the middle-men were actually paying the artists. But, nice try.
- noonespecial 14y agoSometimes. But I've danced so now I'll say. The retail model was crummy to artists even when it worked. It's ending. Streaming isn't picking up the slack. Piracy isn't hurting as much as we're led to believe but it sure as hell isn't helping. I'm saying that we have a resposibilty to support the artists we like (and in some cases to figure out how best to do it) or we're all going to be listening to hobbyists. I'm arguing for a return to patronage. Connected 21st century patronage.
- tptacek 14y agoHow exactly was the retail model crummy to artists? The conventional wisdom seems to be that the model was crummy because artists barely, if ever, recouped royalties. But that was often because their advances were calibrated to prevent that from happening --- which is again how the publishing business model works. The thing the retail model seems to have done is provide predictable income streams to artists. What seems to be looming after the retail model, between streaming services and Kickstarter, is a model that provide patchy and unpredictable incomes to well-known artists and a hobbyist position for virtually everyone else.
- tunesmith 14y agoCompletely false equivalence. We make guaranteed margin off the albums and the cost/risk has already been born in production costs, and we also have control over just how much we involve the middle-men.