I understand you see my name and you see me and make decisions on what I'm saying because of who you want me to be to be your foil, your simplistic boogeyman.
I will say I purchased a lot of albums and CDs over the years.
I ripped all my CDs into the cloud (Apple Musicmatch or something) and it's great to have them there so I can access anywhere/anytime.
But largely unnecessary because I can listen to any of it for a monthly subscription to a music service whether I ever purchased the album/CD or not.
As a consumer, the new formats are great in terms of convenience and accessibility. And my tastes can change/evolve and I don' have to purchase a bunch of new stuff. So it's great for me as a consumer. But maybe not for artists of today...
OTOH, there's a lot of stuff I'm still discovering so it's hard to know what I'm missing by the possible lack of newer talent development.
It's not working for the non-superstar artists or songwriters. If songwriters can't make a living writing songs, they will have to make a living doing something else. There has been a tremendous talent drain due to the new paradigm. The next Smokey Robinson or Carole King or Kurt Cobain may end up doing SEO or running a restaurant rather than creating legendary music. Mediocrity is the price that will be paid due to the inability and unwillingness to support talent.
This should be an absolute golden era of music. The market is much bigger and easier to access. Recording is much cheaper. The base of genres and acceptance is greater than ever. The problem is the incentives to just make a long-term living have been reduced to historically low levels.
yea dude kurt cobain fuckin loved the music industry
I understand you see my name and you see me and make decisions on what I'm saying because of who you want me to be to be your foil, your simplistic boogeyman. You don't pay attention to the core issue or my core statements. The changes that have happened are hamstringing your experience and market. At the center of everything, I have said (and I've said it directly) is that this should be a golden age of music. You should have so much more that you do have. There are so many advantages that we didn't have.
I want your generation to have new and great things, but as long as you make it so difficult for anyone to make that music to make a living, it won't happen.
I literally have access to millions of songs in my pocket that I can take anywhere I want. And I get a curated list of 30 new songs and artists waiting for me every Friday morning. What more could I want?
You can't get anything if you seem my name. The CONTEXT was great songwriting is less likely if you can't make a living doing it.
Get a grip...
Apparently you could want to pay $15 for an album of 17 songs and ditch Spotify
Or you could buy singles at an historically cheap price. In the 60s/70s, depending on where you went you'd pay 49-99 cents for a single. The $0.99 single of today is the equivalent of a quarter or less in those days in raw money and even less in the buying power.
My bad, as long as you get what you want, you don't care if you destroy the fair earnings potential of many people. As long as you get what you think you want, you don't care that you aren't getting the best of what you should have gotten.