"Musicians will still make music"
Yeah, but you won't hear any of it, because they won't have any means of putting it out.
And as for your argument that bands should make money another way, how exactly? Most bands that are signed to medium/smaller labels have to tour relentlessly just to make enough money to make it worth touring. Take Clutch for example. They release an album almost every year, which they then tour relentlessly until it's time to make another one. Where does their money come from? Is it album sales? Is it gig revenue. No. It's T-Shirt sales. If they weren't selling t-shirts at gigs, then they wouldn't break into profit and as such would not be able to fund their next release.
The simple fact is, the internet has made it considerably more difficult for bands to make money from playing music, and it was fucking difficult beforehand.
I play in a band, and we're on the verge of releasing our debut album. We have to pay for pressings ourselves, as well as the cd inlays. If we want to release our album online, we have to pay publishing rights and also pay a percentage of any sales we make to the distributor. And that is on top of the thousands of pounds we'd have spent on studio time to get our album sounding as good as it does (fortunately for us I work in a studio so was able to get us in after hours). So before we even sell one copy of our album (if we even manage that) we're out of pocket.
Record labels front that cash ordinarily, but we aren't signed so it wasn't an option to us. If you get rid of record labels, you get rid of all the money that they have to put into small bands like mine. And the internet is making it so that record labels have less money than they used to, because people aren't paying for the products they release.
And what's the result? Only the dogshit corporate backed fuckholes like Lily Allen will be in any position to release music.
So yeah, let's get rid of the labels, and I'll just stop complaining about it. And in the meantime, you better get as much enjoyment out of the bands you like now, because in a couple of years, if things went the way you describe, none of them will be around and making music.
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PMGT -Bacon., Fri 16 Jul 2010, 17:36,
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No doubt he would
But he made his career in a time when few people were doing what he did, and the "industry" was nowhere near as industrialised as it is now. Back in those days, if you wrote good songs, and played them well live (or even just played them with energy, you didn't even have to play that well as Paul Simonon proved) then you could make a living out of it.
These days, you need to play well, look right, have a well produced record/demo, a press pack, a good website, a good myspace page, a music video, and THEN write good songs.
If Joe Strummer was just starting out now, he probably wouldn't get signed. Tragic as that is.
And don't get me wrong, I think it's fucking shit the amount of hoops a band has to jump through just to get noticed. It's like when you go past a pet shop, and the dogs in the window are all jostling with each other going "look at me! look at me!", when if they all teamed up, they could rip the throats out of the shopkeepers and run riot in the town, stealing sausages from butchers and pooing on everythign. Or something like that.
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PMGT -Bacon., Sun 18 Jul 2010, 10:36,
Reply)
So get a real job
There will ALWAYS be enough people who are passionate enough about making their music to get it out there, and there will ALWAYS be people who are passionate enough about hearing it to make the effort to get it.
If you're only in it to make money, then you're daft, and you're in the wrong business.
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jme, Sat 17 Jul 2010, 17:01,
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I've got a real job.
I work my arse off 6 days a week doing technical support for a college and freelance editing work. Why? To make enough money to support being in a band, because I'd rather die than not play music. If you think I'm only doing it for cash, then you obviously haven't met me and moreover, I'd have to be completely fucking stupid to think that in this day and age I could make enough money from playing guitar at this level to support myself. Which I'm not.
I agree with you however, there will always be enough people who want to make music for it to continue forever, and similarly there will always be people who want to hear it. But have you been to any local shows recently? I live in Manchester, and the music scene here is fucking crap. Unless you want to play indie music. Which I don't.
The sad fact is that the people who truly care about music are very much in the minority, and for a band to ever make a living out playing music you need the rest of the people, the ones who only listen to whatever Kerrang magazine tells them to, to buy your albums.
I'm not into music for money. Not at all. Would I like to be paid to play music for a living, you fucking bet I would. Who the fuck would turn down the chance to do something they love dearly, and have poured countless hours of their lives into (whether they got paid or not), for money? I certainly wouldn't. Give up my job and go touring with my band? Fuck yes. But even if I never make a penny from it in my life, I'll still play in bands regardless.
Which, in a convoluted way, brings me back to my original point. For a band to play music for a living, they have to sell enough of their products to sustain themselves. And that is the dream for most musicians (not to be rich, just to make enough to be able to do nothing else). This is made possible (or easier I should perhaps say) by the process of being signed to a label that has a supply of cash to pay for things like recording sessions and pressings and so on. If people are "stealing" tracks and albums as opposed to paying for them, there is less cash going to record labels and as a knock on effect, less cash for them to put into up and coming bands. And I don't want to get into an argument about how record labels are evil and controlling. They are, but thats a different conversation altogether. They also happen to be a neccessary evil for young bands who need exposure on a wider scale.
Basically, if there was a better, practical alternative to getting signed, everyone would do it. As it stands, the only real alternative is financing a release yourself (like we're doing), but thats not an option for most bands. I'm lucky I work where I do, or we'd have never got the cash together to record an album. It took us 6 months. If we'd have paid for that time, it would have run into the many thousands, without a doubt. Especially considering the spec of the studio.
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PMGT -Bacon., Sun 18 Jul 2010, 10:49,
Reply)
"Yeah, but you won't hear any of it, because they won't have any means of putting it out."
I hear they make this thing called the Internet these days.
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Quijibo Esq. BSc. May contain traces of nuts, Sun 18 Jul 2010, 20:29,
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I must admit,
I was playing devil's advocate somewhat in my first post. I am aware that the internet provides people with a means of getting their music heard. But frankly, speaking as someone who is trying to do just that, it's like pissing in the ocean. The only notable exception is Lilly Allen, but her dad is fucking Keith Allen so I wonder what really happened there?
You can't seriously think for one minute that an unknown band putting their music on the internet is going to get you as wide an audience as being signed to a well known label is. It just isn't. Try it and see.
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PMGT -Bacon., Sun 18 Jul 2010, 22:27,
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