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The investment money is gone. Record labels functioned as venture capital firms. Who cares? Venture capital won't make you practice every damn day. Venture ca

The investment money is gone. Record labels functioned as venture capital firms. Who cares? Venture capital won't make you practice every damn day. Venture capital won't make you suddenly sing in key. Venture capital won't inspire you to write compelling lyrics. Venture capital doesn't have anything at all to do with musical talent and I think most people would agree that the overwhelming majority of "VC" supported artists are chosen by record companies based on ROI, not based on their musical merit. Today more than ever, the cost of producing and distributing quality music is easily within the range of most serious musicians; the software available to musicians today is staggering and quality recording equipment becomes cheaper all the time. The schedules of musicians do not align with the modern working world. Employers do not look highly on people who take 8 weeks off to tour. In order to make money touring, you have to be pretty well established.. Give me a break. If you're not big enough to make money touring then sorry, you have to get a job like the rest of us; this is not something unique to musicians, how do you think employers feel about a 6 month sabbatical dedicated to working on your ultimate app idea? It's not gonna happen. The majority of startups don't have access to VC money, and the capital going to many successful early stage startups are (relatively) paltry sums that a determined individual could absolutely accumulate. Also, unlike software development, there is no 'day job' that musicians can work while saving to bootstrap their own venture There is no law that says musicians have to work low-paying temp jobs. There is no reason why musicians are any more economically disadvantaged than any other individual who has to work full time while building towards their personal goals on the side. The implication seems to be that musicians generally have no other useful skills besides waiting tables, but that is obviously false. Practice does not make you a good stage performer. What? Every good performer practices within an inch of their life, even Beethoven had to put in the hours, the debatable exceptions are too rare to be worth consideration. It is ultimately a dying art form and those that don't see that and in fact argue the opposite, don't have any inkling of what is actually going on. That's a pretty presumptuous and condescending assertion. I'd argue that you don't actually know what's going on since music is more alive than ever; in fact, music is so alive that the flood of new music that has exploded onto the internet has driven the cost of music way down. It turns out, music is really cheap to produce when you're rolling studio quality equipment out of your laptop (with mastering/mixing/sequencing software that is rampantly pirated by musicians, I might add)

williamcotton 13y ago
How's the view from the armchair? You comfortable over there? Practicing in a room, without an audience, does NOT make you good at anything other than practicing in a room without an audience. The stage is completely different and it takes hundreds if not thousands of performances to master. If musicians are expected to make money ONLY from touring, that is, traveling from town to town and getting up on a STAGE (not just going from town to town and setting up in rehearsal studios), they must already be really good at it. Do you not see the conundrum here? When the music industry was functioning record labels would advance money for a tour in the hopes that the venture would result in more money made from record sales than it cost to keep the van full of gas and a roof over everyone's heads for 12 weeks.
- vectorpush 13y ago
  How's the view from the armchair? You comfortable over there? Your reputation for presumption precedes you. I know exactly what it's like to perform on stage, it's not exactly a difficult opportunity to come by, even my teenage niece and all her siblings have performed on stage for years... and yes, just like everything else in life, the more you do it the better you become. Practicing in a room, without an audience, does NOT make you good at anything other than practicing in a room without an audience. Contrary to what you might believe, practicing your instrument/act/set/speech/flow/delivery always improves your public performance, that's simply an indisputable fact and you come off as foolish arguing otherwise. Your logic is akin to suggesting that you'll never get better at programming by building applications that you don't sell or push to github. It's true that exposure to a live audience presents unique challenges that sharpen your edge, but it doesn't matter how many times you've been up on stage if you don't spend the lion's share of your time refining the technical skills that produce the art. As any music fan will attest to, the stage performance is secondary to witnessing your favorite musician flawlessly assemble their headlining composition, live in front of your very eyes. If musicians are expected to make money ONLY from touring, that is, traveling from town to town and getting up on a STAGE (not just going from town to town and setting up in rehearsal studios), they must already be really good at it. Do you not see the conundrum here? Musicians aren't expected to do anything, they should make money any way they can. Yeah, these days it's hard to sell strings of ones and zeros for money since computers make it trivial to store and transmit those strings, but that's the nature of reality, it's the same reason why nobody is willing to pay a person to organize paper documents in a filing cabinet... the world has moved on. Even if we accept your assertion that you have to get up on stage in order to start making money getting up on stage, you do what everyone else does: invest in your product (your music) and take a loss till you're good enough to start turning a profit. You don't need a VC to be successful in the music industry, period. When the music industry was functioning record labels would advance money for a tour in the hopes that the venture would result in more money made from record sales than it cost to keep the van full of gas and a roof over everyone's heads for 12 weeks. Yeah, and there was once a time where the VCs would dole out cash for every other mobile/social/local iPhone app in hopes that the venture would result in more money made from app sales than it cost to keep a van full of college students fed on ramen for 12 weeks. Now that technology has caught up it's become trivially easy to produce apps that would have been game changers when the app store first debuted. Nobody wants to invest in that. The world moved on.

williamcotton 13y ago

How's the view from the armchair? You comfortable over there? Practicing in a room, without an audience, does NOT make you good at anything other than practicing in a room without an audience. The stage is completely different and it takes hundreds if not thousands of performances to master. If musicians are expected to make money ONLY from touring, that is, traveling from town to town and getting up on a STAGE (not just going from town to town and setting up in rehearsal studios), they must already be really good at it. Do you not see the conundrum here? When the music industry was functioning record labels would advance money for a tour in the hopes that the venture would result in more money made from record sales than it cost to keep the van full of gas and a roof over everyone's heads for 12 weeks.

vectorpush 13y ago
How's the view from the armchair? You comfortable over there? Your reputation for presumption precedes you. I know exactly what it's like to perform on stage, it's not exactly a difficult opportunity to come by, even my teenage niece and all her siblings have performed on stage for years... and yes, just like everything else in life, the more you do it the better you become. Practicing in a room, without an audience, does NOT make you good at anything other than practicing in a room without an audience. Contrary to what you might believe, practicing your instrument/act/set/speech/flow/delivery always improves your public performance, that's simply an indisputable fact and you come off as foolish arguing otherwise. Your logic is akin to suggesting that you'll never get better at programming by building applications that you don't sell or push to github. It's true that exposure to a live audience presents unique challenges that sharpen your edge, but it doesn't matter how many times you've been up on stage if you don't spend the lion's share of your time refining the technical skills that produce the art. As any music fan will attest to, the stage performance is secondary to witnessing your favorite musician flawlessly assemble their headlining composition, live in front of your very eyes. If musicians are expected to make money ONLY from touring, that is, traveling from town to town and getting up on a STAGE (not just going from town to town and setting up in rehearsal studios), they must already be really good at it. Do you not see the conundrum here? Musicians aren't expected to do anything, they should make money any way they can. Yeah, these days it's hard to sell strings of ones and zeros for money since computers make it trivial to store and transmit those strings, but that's the nature of reality, it's the same reason why nobody is willing to pay a person to organize paper documents in a filing cabinet... the world has moved on. Even if we accept your assertion that you have to get up on stage in order to start making money getting up on stage, you do what everyone else does: invest in your product (your music) and take a loss till you're good enough to start turning a profit. You don't need a VC to be successful in the music industry, period. When the music industry was functioning record labels would advance money for a tour in the hopes that the venture would result in more money made from record sales than it cost to keep the van full of gas and a roof over everyone's heads for 12 weeks. Yeah, and there was once a time where the VCs would dole out cash for every other mobile/social/local iPhone app in hopes that the venture would result in more money made from app sales than it cost to keep a van full of college students fed on ramen for 12 weeks. Now that technology has caught up it's become trivially easy to produce apps that would have been game changers when the app store first debuted. Nobody wants to invest in that. The world moved on.