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Originally Posted by Alex Linder
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The issue is that the internet is making music shit. There, I’ve said it. It’s putting the actual making of music secondary to the complicated business of trying to find a way of sustaining a living from doing so. Genius, forced to figure out ways to tour without having to incur excess baggage costs. Virtuosos, giving up music because they refuse to take the whore’s option of product placement or naked dancers in their videos. Music lovers have CD collections, not hard-drives full of shit they never listen to. This all happened before, we call it the dark ages. Yep, the internet is over, it’s killed my first love.
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I've thought a great deal these last few years about the issues this guy raises in his post and I've ultimately decided that what the Internet has done and is doing to the music industry is mostly a good thing. If you're not in it for the music, if you're not in it for the art, if the work isn't its own reward, then you shouldn't be doing it. If you want to be rich, then get a real job and set music aside as your hobby. Society doesn't owe musicians and artists a living.
I was watching a Loverboy video on JouTube the other day and it brought back to me just how horrible things were in the 80s. As bad as things may be now, they're not as bad as they were. I wouldn't ever want to go back to that.
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Most of the whining about major labels comes from acts who would never have been signed, even in the 80s/90s heyday of music.
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And that also includes this guy's act, no doubt.
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There were ways and means, and a lot of people got to make a living out of making music,
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No, actually, not a lot of people. Very few, actually.
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and a lot of us got to hear music that made out lives fuller and better because of that system.
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How? By having the FM bands dominated by stations that played the same 20 songs, all from the same 5 labels, over and over again?
This guy's on an ego trip. He thinks that were this 1988, he'd be signed to a major label and making a comfortable living with his music. He doesn't realize that there were 100,000 other bands that were more talented than his that had the same aspiration, and that at any rate, talent had little to do with being signed.
The streets of Hollywood were (and probably still are) full of 19 year olds renting their bodies for sex who originally moved there with the certainty that they were going to "make it big" in the film or music industry.