Yeah. I quote voraciously from The New Statesman online rag:
"The relationship between context and content in music has always been problematic. The rise of the anonymous public in the course of the 18th century certainly liberated musicians from the patronage of prince or prelate. Never again would a composer of Mozart's stature be booted out of the service of the Archbishop of Salzburg ("with a kick to my arse", as Wolfgang put it in a letter to his father). The development of a prosperous public sphere in London allowed Haydn, in a matter of months, to make six times the annual salary paid to him in Austria by Prince Esterházy. Yet public patronage came at a cost. Haydn chose not to settle in London, but to remain in the service of the Esterházys until the day he died in 1809. He may well have had an inkling that the public could be a much harder taskmaster than the relatively undemanding aristocrats he served at home."
"In the course of the 19th century, ever- growing markets, bigger spaces for music and better communications allowed many more performers to make much more money. Sopranos, especially, became rich beyond the dreams of avarice of even the most famous singers of the past. Between September 1850 and June 1851 Jenny Lind, "the Swedish Nightingale", gave 95 concerts in the United States, earning $176,675 net of all expenses. Moreover, all along the way she was feted as a queen. Had she lived long enough to take advantage of the invention of recording, her colossal fortune might well have been multiplied many times over. In 1914, Enrico Caruso was earning £20,000 a year from world sales of his records, which may even have increased ten fold after 1918."
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In the course of the past century, a rush of technological changes has made music more accessible and ubiquitous than ever before. Cinema, the gramophone, radio, the jukebox, television, the electric guitar, transistors, LPs, stereo, the Walkman, discotheques, CDs, the internet, DVDs, the MP3, the iPod and all the rest have drenched the modern world in music. Moreover, the eruption of youth culture after 1945 simultaneously propelled musicians to pole position in both status and material reward. As the annual Sunday Times Rich List shows, no other branch of the creative or performing arts can boast such a concentration of wealth. When Bono or Bob Geldof (both honorary Knights of the British Empire) lecture politicians on what to do about the problems of the third world, those politicians have to appear to be listening.
Here's a point: As I said in a previous post, physical stuff (records, tapes, CD's, software boxes, etc) is being replaced by non-physical stuff (FTP's of mp3 files. .avi movie files. .dmg or .img, or .iso files to install software).
For years the music industry made its money primarily through the creation of a physical product -- first the record and then the CD. But with the evolution of the digital age, the physical nature of music is fast becoming obsolete. Just at vinyl records hold nostalgic value, soon CDs will be a novel relic of a bygone era. I remember telling several of my buddies at Computer Sciences Corporation that the CD was transitional technology - they challenged me to name the replacement. In 1995, I didn't have a clue... but I knew it would happen. Remember the scene in the movie "Men In Black", where Tommy Lee Jones is giving Will Smith a tour of the secret facility? Row upon row of advanced alien tech, wonderous and breath-taking, is displayed - the they come to a mounted...well, it looks like a bottle cap to me. Tommy Lee intones "See this? They say some day this will replace te CD.". HA!
So is this the death of the music industry? Of course not. Music has been written, performed, and enjoyed for centuries. Music is part of culture. In many ways music as a business is thriving more than ever before. It is a period of fundamental change for this industry.
But, for every Bono and his countless millions, there is a host of modestly paid session players, 90 per cent of whom earn less than $35,000 a year, according to one of their leaders. It will come as no consolation to them to know, if they do not know it already, that it was ever so. Ever since musicians emerged from the servile but cosy world of aristocratic patronage into the harsh daylight of the public sphere, the musical profession has been a pyramid with a broad base and a sharp top. The new opportunities brought by every major technological shift have also left many casualties among musicians unable or unwilling to adapt. A good example was the advent of the gramophone, which sent an army of pianists, piano teachers and piano manufacturers to the scrapheap.
More recently, a combination of digitization and the Internet has torn a great fissure in the recording industry, which has not died (as Norman Lebrecht claimed in a characteristically strident book last year), but which has certainly been forced into fundamental change. Nor, one imagines, will the musicians plugging their way through yet another Muzak recording session be cheered by the reminder that Jimmy Page (worth $175m, according to the Sunday Times) started out as one of their number."One of my LinkedIn buddies published an online poll asking about how to implement DRM effectively to protect intellectual property rights, especially for producers of music and to "protect" the buyers of same - the overwhelming response was "who the hell buys music anymore?!?!".
Well... what's on YOUR iPod?
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