I don’t even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don’t think it’s going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.
Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.
Q: How does an aspiring artist bridge the gap between distribution and commerce?
A: We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.
This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?
In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it.
You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money.
But is that the way we want the world to work, or just something we've resigned ourselves to because we think it's inevitable?
I'm pursuing a CS PhD; in my free time, I'm working on a science fiction novel. In some ways, I think a PhD is the perfect vehicle for this since I'm free to "explore" intellectually, as long I still publish in my field. And I make things work: I squirrel away bits of time for writing, and still have enough left over to get my work done.
But I look at the industry (especially in Silicon Valley), and I'm not sure I can expect to keep going on my side projects. Work weeks of 50, 60, or more hours are common at companies in the area, and even more so at startups. I did a lot of interviews for internships and such in undergrad and early grad school, and I would ask interviewers whether they worked on any open source projects during their free time. The answer was almost always no. I found it perplexing at the time, but looking back I think it's a relatively straightforward consequence of the environment people are working in. Most people aren't in a position to take up serious hobbies, and a big part of that is work culture and the sorts of hours employers expect.
I think Coppola is very lucky if he has a job where he can do this balancing act. Perhaps I'll be lucky too, I don't know. But I hope we're not driving our society towards a situation where you need to have some sort of exceptionally flexible day job in order to make progress on your other pursuits. And while I wouldn't want to be a professional artist myself (I love CS too much for that), I do hope that it'll be possible to be paid to do art in the next 100 years.
Live performances - theater, concerts, stand-up comedy, sport events, etc. - these would still be paid well (IMHO). It's the things that get copied easily that won't.
Same might happen with software - as more and more software moves "online" you won't be able to "copy-it" - you need to subscribe to a service and use it.
I'm gladly paying for "netflix", as $10 seems not much off our budget, and even it it doesn't have the latest shows I'm satisfied, in case I need to see (say Outlander, or Badlands - there is Vudu, Hulu, Google Play, Amazon, many others..)
But DVD/BluRay copying is gonna get easier and easier, and streaming and trying to save to disk to play later is going to get more cumbersome and cumbersome, to the point no significant amount of people would really bother.
Games fully running behind servers, with the video being streamed, would be impossible to copy - it won't work for Street Fighter, Racing Games and First Person Shooters very well, but there are plenty others for which this would be totally acceptable - heh, especially my favourite genre - Turn Based Games & RPGs :) :) :)
> I don’t even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years,
> because I don’t think it’s going to work by labels and by distribution
> systems in the same way.
>
> --David Bowie, 2002
Something to think about in music that also happens in startups and software:
These are social activities. People don’t judge music solely by some kind of independent metric of appeal. They also judge whether the music is popular within their social circle. Choice of music is one of the mediums people use for communicating.
To listen to something nobody except you likes is a little like programming in a language nobody you know uses. We make up all sorts of stories about how network effects affect the quality of a language, the availability of tools, and so on, and all that is true.
But it’s also true that we self-identify in a tribal way with our choices, and that those choices have social import. Even if you brag defiantly that you’re a pragmatist who doesn’t care who does or doesn’t use a tool: That’s a lot like being a hipster growing a beard and putting on plaid.
So back to music. The vast majority of people wish to belong to the tribe of “The vast majority of people.” They work very hard to study what is and isn’t “mainstream.” There is thus a very natural force by the market to want to have some kind of pop music dominated by just a few superstars at a time.
This, I believe, drives a winner-take-all market for pop music, which in turn is a huge incentive for the existence of massive pop marketing machines. Even if you take all the friction out of distribution and discovery, the mainstream want there to be a massive marketing push for pop artists, it helps them judge who is going to be popular.
It’s not that much different than picking a JavaScript library because some large and well-heeled organization is devoting themselves to support it. You may personally say it has something to do with bug fixes, but for most people that fact helps them judge whether other people will adopt the library, which helps them judge whether they want to belong to that particular tribe.
And most people want to belong to the biggest tribe, and will follow the signals with the biggest boost.
Thus, labels or some other kind of very big, very efficient machine for manipulating pop culture.
If you'll forgive the hyperbole, he is the archetypal outsider, the patron saint of the dispossessed. So for all those who don't feel that they belong, Bowie's activities provided a message - 'It's OK to be an outsider', and, curiously, through that message provided a sense of belonging - I'm going to get all metaphysical and say that that is alchemical / transformative in a very profound way for many people.
While that may have been one of his target markets, make no mistake: Bowie worked his socks off to find a market that worked for him - in addition to quite an incredible musical talent - and it took years and years of hard, often unrecognised work, for his success to come.
I mean - his first hit was a novelty song about garden gnomes, his second was (admittedly, possibly slightly unfair to argue it) cashing in on the space race, and it took a further couple of years for him to figure out his marketing and reach consistent success.
Bowie may have been an outsider, but consider that your exact feelings are social, those feelings of belonging and connection to an icon.
The music industry is just as adept at monetizing those feelings as they are of monetizing teen-age angst or adolescent her-worship of boy bands.
My point being, that while Bowie and many others can stand outside of the industry, I don’t believe the basic dynamics are going to change. Radio may go away. Physical media may go away. Apple may disrupt the labels.
Bt I believe that massive marketing machines will continue to slice and dice the market for music and continue to dominate people’s choices.
Remember, you only heard of Bowie because he played the game.
I totally agree with your points - the market economy finds ways to monetise and that's its job.
I'm not actually a big fan of Bowie, I'm a bit too young, but it's something I'm observing. I'm also aware that those feelings of alienation are keenest for teenagers and that the music industry exploits that.
However, whilst the music machine exploits the latest pop star - if you were to compare and contrast say, Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift with Bowie, then there is a difference in what they symbolise for the fan, and, whilst the outcome of a sense of belonging is effected in both instances, Bieber / Swift do not represent the outsider, they are just more grist for the mill.
I'm afraid I don't buy that. Music follows rules, rules that we all grew up internalizing. There's no "universal music", just music who's rules you are familiar with. Tweak those rules just enough and in the right way and you are innovative (see: The Beatles). Tweak them too much and you are simply avant garde (see: Captain Beefheart).
That means that music is without question a social construction. Simply look at how non-western music is so radically different from popular western music, yet still appealing within those cultures.
It's very possible Bowie could have been too avant garde or too much of an outsider, but what he excelled at was tweaking the establishment just enough (both musically and performance-wise) to find a huge audience whilst still being "outside" the mainstream.
>Music follows rules, rules that we all grew up internalizing. There's no "universal music", just music who's rules you are familiar with. Tweak those rules just enough and in the right way and you are innovative (see: The Beatles). Tweak them too much and you are simply avant garde (see: Captain Beefheart).
I can enjoy music who's rules I am not familiar with. I don't need to know the rules to enjoy tonal and rythmic arrangements.
> That means that music is without question a social construction
That means it's culturally specific, NOT a social construction.
> It's very possible Bowie could have been too avant garde or too much of an outsider, but what he excelled at was tweaking the establishment just enough (both musically and performance-wise) to find a huge audience whilst still being "outside" the mainstream.
Which is perhaps the point I am trying to make. Within a specific culture, his work (not just his music) had a broad appeal that helped people deal with the human condition. However it was achieved, the world is a better place for it.
>I can enjoy music who's rules I am not familiar with. I don't need to know the rules to enjoy tonal and rythmic arrangements.
You don't need to know the rules, but most people will enjoy music whose rules they are familiar with. It's entirely possible I can put on some Mahori music or Trout Mask Replica and you will enjoy it, but I strongly suspect you are in the minority. Most people (myself included) will need time to adapt to music that is radically different than what they are used to.
Which is why I don't think it's fair to call Bowie a "consummate outsider". There is no question he became a beacon for those who were outside of cultural norms, but he achieved that by working in one of the most culturally constricted artistic mediums available.
This seems like a youthful way to approach music. At some point in your adult life, you have enough of a self-identity that most of this no longer applies... in music, technology choices, or anything. To me, you are just describing how people first learn to engage with the world, not how older folk actually live it.
I guess that does parallel tech, though - the youth follow the trends, while labels/VCs drive certain cherry picked groups to success, while at the same time, us older folk live in quieter places, create our own works, do our own thing, and live satisfying lives, not really being impacted by whatever the tribes currently label as "mainstream".
If you look at the entire group of people who listen to music (and make music on their own), I don't believe this analysis fits very well. It may fit for some part of it, or for parts of the music industry, but music is more like film or theatre than it is TV or video games or other art forms.
You have a group of people who just want to hang out with their friends and whatever is popular with them is "good enough" to meet that need. This is analogous with multiplex viewers. Then you have people with specific tastes or interests. They are often willing to spend more (by an order of magnitude) than "typical" listeners and less likely to care if lots of other people come along with them or not. This is similar to art house film-goers judge what to watch. Finally, you have people who may be amateur or part time musicians themselves and appreciate a different take from everyone else. They can even be trendsetters in whatever new music that comes out. In the film analogy, they could be people who set up, run, review, and/or submit movies to film festivals.
The thing is, you may be able to influence one group of people with your approach to controlling and marketing music even if the music is self is mediocre, but those people also care less and are worth less than the other segments. And the way the music industry is going, they may not be worth much at all individually (which I think was the point of the OPs quote from David Bowie).
In tech, this would be the Bing.com approach to search versus alot of other startups which seek to grab the early adopters first and then pull in more mainstream stuff later. It can work, but not as well over time.
>But it’s also true that we self-identify in a tribal way with our choices, and that those choices have social import. Even if you brag defiantly that you’re a pragmatist who doesn’t care who does or doesn’t use a tool: That’s a lot like being a hipster growing a beard and putting on plaid.
Lol what? That's stupid. Some people listen to the music that sounds good to them, some people listen to music that brings them and their friends together, some people listen to music for other reasons.
Your analysis bad because you think you can group people so simply. Stop that.
I think it's a claim that a majority of people want to be part of a single recognisable mainstream. No idea if it's true. It's conceivable that a majority of people would want to each do their own thing, with only a minority choosing to follow the "mainstream" (which would then still be the single largest "tribe")
If anything labels are more important than ever and music sales are driven by the kind of marketing campaigns that only big records labels can afford. There's a ton of interesting music being made outside their domain but most people will never hear any of it.
"If anything labels are more important than ever and music sales are driven by the kind of marketing campaigns that only big records labels can afford."
That's what record companies would like you to think. Counter-example, Milk Records, Melbourne. It's might be a record company but it looks so much like a startup.
I've been traveling all over the world and all I hear everywhere I go is crap American top 40 pop music. Like I said there's a ton of interesting stuff going on outside their purview but they control the conversation right now.
So your premise is that if it is music that you do not want to hear, it must be the labels pushing it? In no way could that music be on the radio because it is actually popular?
McD's and Coke are popular because people really want what they sell. It's not just a psychological thing, like everyone is a mindless zombie brainwashed by Ronald McDonald. They don't like it because they've been told to like it (if anything, it's the opposite these days), they like it because it's convenient and it has a ton of sugar and other addictive additives in it. People like both convenience and sugar; that's not a secret.
It's the same thing musically (though admittedly there is a bit more, not a huge amount more, of cultural influence here); there is a formula for music that most people find really satisfying. The record companies have software that analyzes songs and scores against the common patterns that produce hits. Of course, the business of music is about more than just the music, it's about the whole package.
People love cocaine too. It doesn't mean you have their best interests at heart in selling it to them. Modern commercial pop music, like junk fast food, is the product of a profit-driven corporation using psychology and focus group research to push your pleasure buttons without actually providing you with any nourishment.
The worst thing about both kinds of products is that they destroy local diversity and teach people to consume things that are worthless at best and actively harmful at their worst.
The issue wasn't whether Coke and McDonald's care about their consumers' health. It was simply that there is more to these brands than marketing. They're providing a product people really like. It is like cocaine. There is substance to the desire, which doesn't mean that its a morally or ethically justified desire, but means that it's not imaginary and it's not simply the product of emotional or psychological manipulation.
Do people want to do drugs as much as possible? Yes. Do people want to pretend that candy is normal food and eat candy for every meal? Yes. Coke and McDonald's are supplying the latter demand. It doesn't absolve them of responsibility and it doesn't mean they're not manipulative or dishonest. It just means that there is a real, physiological desire backing their products that's not artificially created by cartoon clowns or polar bears.
McDonalds contains objectively less nutrition than better foods, as well as objectively more addictive and potentially harmful additives (sugar, etc.). Today's stamped-out low-effort all-sounds-the-same pop contains objectively less novelty or information than, say, Bowie or the Beatles.
It's mostly popular because of the huge budgets (plus a state of extremely low musical and cultural education of the population).
All other things (e.g. marketing budgets) being equal, much better music could be in the top 10. In the 60s and 70s, before MTV and tightly controlled playlist radios, it was.
Is it? Maybe in shopping malls and bars, then I agree. I live in Singapore and a lot of Singaporeans who I meet listen mostly to either Chinese or Indian music. It might be different though in Thailand or Malaysia.
Remember though, that SEA is just part of Asia. China and India are huge music markets. Additionally, Japan and Korea have very strong, local music scene as well.
I would actually call out Japan first, they still have the 2nd largest market by revenue with quite a distance [1]. It's more than half of what the US music market makes.
It seems to me that, strangely enough, Chinese pop culture actually aligns much more to the USA than the Japanese one. Japanese tend to prefer everything domestic first, especially so in games and music, movies a bit less so but it's still a much larger purely domestic film market compared to EU (if you don't count US financed films made in EU countries).
Most people want to hear what most people hear, to be able to talk about it and don't be cut off from their group of friends. Same thing about TV, movies, cloths, phones, books, games etc.
I'm a non-sports person, but I had a dawning realization earlier this week. We crave shared, tribal experiences, and that's why we seek out those shared events.
On the same topic, sports is a religion. If you disagree, or don't yet understand, please compare and contrast the two for me.
What do you mean by 'religion', and why does it matter whether sports is a religion under this meaning?
Here are some differences: sports fans don't think that their team is capable of supernatural feats. I don't think I've ever seen a fan of one team try to convince a fan of another to change allegiance, or proselytizing on a street corner. Sports fans know that the teams of the other fans exist, while religious people usually deny that other gods exist. Similarly, religious people don't have to worry about whether Yahweh could beat up Vishnu, but sports fans get to actually see what happens when their teams compete.
> Here are some differences: sports fans don't think that their team is capable of supernatural feats. I don't think I've ever seen a fan of one team try to convince a fan of another to change allegiance, or proselytizing on a street corner.
thinking that something is capable of supernatural feats is not required for something to become a religion.
Quite on the contrary I present you exhibit A: "forum atheists", non-believers that believe so strongly in the non-existence of anything they haven't personally seen that they will hijack any thread that is remotely near using any religious word.
To be fair, IMO a whole lot of atheists are great people. A few of them though seems to be more religious and more proselyting about it than almost any other religious group. Which is so ironic it would be quite funny if it wasn't so annoying.
> thinking that something is capable of supernatural feats is not required for something to become a religion.
I basically agree, but I think the concept of "religion" invokes a lot of correlated things, and belief in the supernatural is one of the main ones. I expect most religions to differ from the 'prototypical' religion in a few ways, but I think sports differs in lots of ways.
(edit: or perhaps better, "beliefs about the supernatural". Religions say something specific. Atheists believe something specific. Sports teams make no claims one way or the other.)
> non-believers that believe so strongly in the non-existence of anything they haven't personally seen that they will hijack any thread that is remotely near using any religious word.
This seems like another example. I've seen that behavior from atheists and from religious people. I haven't seen it from sports fans.
> Quite on the contrary I present you exhibit A: "forum atheists", non-believers that believe so strongly in the non-existence of anything they haven't personally seen that they will hijack any thread that is remotely near using any religious word.
---
What does this have to do with the supernatural? Secondly what does this have to do with religion. If religion was 'people who feel strongly about something' then the definition of the word would no longer represent what it does.
But I will still argue that whenever I see people proselyting atheism because "big bang, stupid" and it is clear they haven't studied to much of neither physics or biology, then we have:
* proselytizing
* stronger belief than many Christians and Muslims
and I will argue that they qualify as religious even if they don't have a deity.
Is communist Russia objectively worse than the crusades or the Catholic inquisition or ISIS? Let's just be honest here and say that human being are capable of pretty cruel things, regardless of being spurned by religion or not.
And why is atheism a religion. Isn't its definition a lack of religion?
The atrocities committed during these periods were not made in the name of atheism, which is the main difference with ISIS or inquisition. Whatever they did, it was not consequence of their atheistic beliefs.
Religion is about in-group / out-group distinction through shared beliefs and costly, exclusionary displays of membership.
It's a social and organizational concept, not theological or philosophical, relating to gods or otherwise. For example, environmentalism is a type of religion.
It might also has something to do with the fact that not all good music is simply radio-friendly. That is, it's hard to appreciated it in a similar way it's hard to appreciate a good movie unless you're watching it somewhere in a quite place without distractions.
You can always turn the tap on one of the music as running water services, and start listening to whatever the collaborative filter thinks you like best.
The current UI trend in these services seems designed to thwart this. It seems they're going to a model of having the user to select music to list to when I [exercise|drive|relax|study|...]. That's wholly unhelpful, I don't understand why they'd think that my preferences for what to listen to when exercising would coincided with anybody else's, other than maybe an activity being facilitated within a range of BPM counts.
> If anything labels are more important than ever and music sales are driven by the kind of marketing campaigns that only big records labels can afford.
That's just not true. While the very few artists that do sell albums nowadays (Taylor Swift, Adele, Kanye West, etc.) are on major labels and do have promotion from major labels, these artists are also already successful enough to have done their own promotion if they wanted to.
On top of that, these successful artists by todays standards are selling what would have been considered disappointing numbers for artists at their levels 20 years ago. In the 90s Hootie and the Blowfish (an act with no staying power) sold 16 million albums in the US. By comparison Adele's 25 which is a huge hit by today's standards has only sold 3 million copies in the US (though 16 million worldwide.) In the 90s many albums sold tens of millions of copies, nobody does that any more.
Where are your numbers coming from? Wikipedia says 25 has sold 7.6 million in the US, and it's only been out a few months. 21 sold 11 million. In comparison, Thriller, one of the bestselling records of all time, sold 30 million. (All these numbers are US sales only.)
The data says exactly the opposite of what you're saying.
One would think services like Spotify would help, but they only make the music more accessible, they don't help you find it. I don't have pro and only ads I hear (besides the spotify ones that are trying to annoy you into paying) are ones from Universal Music.
I actually use Spotify to discover new music. I take some artist I know, and then I go to some related one, and then to artist related to that one, etc.
Spotify actually made discovering music way easier to me.
BTW there was one website that I used very often. It was called "We are Hunted"[1] and unfortunately it was acquired by Twitter, and as we all know Twitter Music is dead. That website had a playlist of emerging new tracks and I found a lot of good music there (and I heard some artists just 1-2 years before they became very famous)
Not true in my case. (I've had Pro for a long time, not sure which if any of these are Pro-only...) I can audition as much unheard-by-me recommended-by-Spotify music as I want through its Weekly playlist, its various curated genre "browse" playlists, its "trending" playlist (where you will often hear things that only become "visibly" popular MONTHS later, the playlist content is actually determined via algorithm to spot trendings super early)
I don't agree—I use Spotify a lot and it's helped tremendously in my finding new music. The "Discover Weekly" and social playlists features always point me to sources of new music.
Spotify and other streaming services are amazing for discovering new music if you're willing to put in the effort but most people just listen to what they have pushed on them. I doubt most people even realize that top 40 music isn't written by the people that perform it.
The internet continues to make human-curated content (college/community radio, in my opinion unmatched for discovery) more accessible. But very few people listen, and with changes to fee structure, very few stations can afford to continue online broadcasting. [0]
Really? What about the anti-Spotify's like HypeMachine? Fiercely independent, trendspotting/trendsetting, and sustainable. It's a very valuable service to lots of folks.
IMO Spotify/Rdio/Pandora could only ever hope to go the advertising route over subscription because they couldn't crack the much harder distribution problem (e.g. the HypeM's, SoundCloud's, Drip's, etc).
Spotify stopped working on Ubuntu a while back so I can't check but I'm pretty sure there is a HypeMachine app for Spotify. So you can get recommendations from them within the Spotify client.
EDIT: it stopped working after 15.04. Something with an old version libgcrypt. I didn't care enough to debug it.
I don't know about whether the spotify app doesn't work for you anymore, but I use mopidy-spotify on arch which gives me full spotify access in the terminal.
Spotify works fine for me, under both Ubuntu and Arch, but they removed support for apps a while ago (on all platforms, IIRC Linux was actually the last holdout).
My music style is far from trendy, but I can't remember the last time I listened (even more so bought something) from the major label. I'd say is much harder to become millionaire rock star now, but for indie bands, that play as a hobby, situation is very favorable as you can contact you audience directly and you don't need to frame yourself into "format" dictated by the labels.
It's an amazing time to be a hobby musician. You can record and produce your own music very cheaply and publish it to the world at the touch of a button. The problem is what happens next, which in most cases is nothing, unless you've got somebody spending money marketing your music or you're willing to work very very very hard to promote it yourself.
The difference between now and the 60s through early 90s was that labels were willing to put their weight behind more oddball artists like Bowie. He wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell of achieving the same fame if he were starting now. We're in a weird time where mainstream music is the most timid and cynically commercial it's ever been but the fringes are exceptionally vital.
Bowie's first albums didn't catch on at all. It wasn't until he decided to change his presentation and style that he became successful. I recommend seeing "David Bowie & The Story of Ziggy Stardust" which talks about it. It wasn't until Hunky Dory in 1971 that he really got traction. He was dropped by his label (Mercury) after his third album. He signed with RCA for his 4th, Hunky Dory (Ziggy was his 5th). After that, he basically hit single digits for his peak chart position in the UK for in to the 90s for his studio albums.
So, you can look at it as Mercury took a chance, didn't succeed and dropped him. RCA tried again and succeeded. But, he changed his approach and style around this time in an attempt to market himself better. Then, EMI would reap the rewards again in the 80s for Let's Dance which hit number 1 in a half-dozen countries and close to it in a few others.
Even after he made it in the UK Bowie still couldn't crack the States. His US Ziggy tour was a mostly unsuccessful attempt to have him fake it until he made it. He had to nearly go disco to become a commercial success in the US. Bowie seems to have been the beneficiary of a degree of early patience from record labels that was fairly extraordinary even at the time.
Not really. They are important to the ever-shrinking mainstream pop industry ... but here in the Great Cultural Fragmentation, that's a smaller and smaller slice of a larger and larger pie.
It's so funny how people construct narratives. I'm listening to Bloomberg Business on the radio and they're talking about how David Bowie was a pioneer in monetizing future copyright cashflows to finance music production.
Was a pioneer in that when? The two angles aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Theoretically he could be good at milking copyright while it lasted even if he didn't believe it would be around forever.
David Bowie sold the rights to future royalties from his music, in the form of bonds. Presumably influenced by his thinking that music was going to be napsterised.
this is a travesty. In addition to loving his music he also lived in my neighborhood in nyc and I've been naming our internal applications after his songs. Put up a black banner on Ground Control as we speak :(
If you haven't yet check out the single for that song. It goes really deep into the aesthetics and experiements with Trent Reznor's sensibilities. It's like Reznor shacked up in a cabin for the weekend to bang out some remixes. Warning, they get dark and noisy fast.
Metallica hates you, Major Tom! And you are right - music is becoming a commodity, and I hope to pay not $15/album, but more like $2/album, of which 1.5 goes to the artist and .5 goes to whomever helped them do a professional studio recording. The distribution will inevitably happen on the internet. That's how you end piracy and motivate people to pay artists for their divine gift.
Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.
~ David Bowie, 2002