How Amateurs Destroyed the Professional Music Business 617
David Gerard writes "Here in the future, musicians and record companies complain they can't make a living any more. The problem isn't piracy — it's competition. There is too much music and too many musicians, and the amateurs are often good enough for the public. This is healthy for culture, not so much for aesthetics, and terrible for musicians. There are bands who would have trouble playing a police siren in tune, who download a cracked copy of Cubase — you know how much musicians pirate their software, VSTs and sample packs, right? — and tap in every note. There are people like me who do this. A two-hundred-quid laptop with LMMS and I suddenly have better studio equipment than I could have hired for $100/hour thirty years ago. You can do better with a proper engineer in a proper studio, but you don’t have to. And whenever quality competes with convenience, convenience wins every time. You can protest that your music is a finely-prepared steak cooked by sheer genius, and be quite correct in this, and you have trouble paying for your kitchen, your restaurant, your cow."
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Informative)
Beta took two tapes to hold a movie, while VHS took one, this was significant. The quality difference when hooked up to old TV sets via RF was negligible. If I recall, Beta machines were more expensive as well. At the time, VHS was a better choice for most people.
Re:How is this news? (Score:0, Informative)
Professional recording artists sell fuck-all these days. In the UK: in 1983, Red Guitars got to #8 in the indie charts with 60,000 sales of "Good Technology". In 2013, Rihanna has a mainstream number one album with under 10,000 sales [digitalspy.co.uk].
Really? And yet Rihanna is at the same time breaking sales records [officialcharts.com] with the 10.4m from one single alone, making it the 10th biggest seller of all time, up there with Abba, Bowie, Queen and Paul McCartney. At the same time, I have no idea who Rihanna is. It would appear that exactly the opposite of your point is true, and that you've fallen for hollywood accounting of "conventional" sales.
Re:Terrible for musicians? (Score:4, Informative)
There has never been a better time to make one's vocation music for the very reasons you have suggested
To wit, click through to the end of this video (the video is pretty good too - it's one thing to cover a song, but it's completely another to make it yours). Nataly Dawn initially asked for $20K of donations for studio time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6Z7xceSLy4 [youtube.com]
Pomplamoose (Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn) being interviewed on the BIRN about how to make a living and other things.
Part one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa3-SA9SvZ0 [youtube.com]
Part two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6a2jQ5zY94 [youtube.com]
Part three: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKLf3Bjn3v0 [youtube.com]
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BMO
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How is this news? (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How is this news? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How is this news? (Score:4, Informative)
Originally (and until fairly recently) most films came in cans that were only 12 minutes long. There have been a few tricks done by projectionists over the years including winding that film into a giant spool and splicing those various pieces of film together prior to what you saw in a movie theater, or by having multiple projectors set up where the moment one of those cans of film would end the next projector would immediately start running.
Still, if you had to interrupt your movie to switch tapes, it sounds like you had a genuine cinematic experience. Perhaps a little too authentic, and I guess you could enhance that by having two month old spilled soda on your floor along with bubble gum under the chairs and lots of popcorn and empty boxes of other candy strewn about.