Tony L
Administrator
Whatever, the music industry isn't in a great way at the moment and unless there's some change I don't see it getting any better.
It is in uncharted territory for sure, but there is an amazing amount of music happening at present.
As I see it is all part of the same groundshift; that of the democratisation that computer technology and the internet has brought to all aspects of life. Musicians can produce release-ready music with a MacBook, USB interface and a couple of mics now which has removed so much power from industry gatekeepers; record labels, A&R men etc. The DIY thing that took its first steps in punk and new-wave is now vastly easier and more acceptable. This has left the corporate interests looking for other things to monopolise and gatekeep, and that has turned out to be streaming. Where things end up is yet to be seen, but as someone who’s interests have always been fairly obscure leftfield music that existed a good distance from the mainstream I’m finding vast amounts of stuff I want to buy. I also don’t feel I need a streaming service at all, there is always a big stack of records on the floor from new bands.
I’d like to see some coordinated radical action where vast swathes of musicians just remove their wares from mainstream streaming services. If they are not being paid anything by the corporate gatekeepers they may as well just publish a limited subset of their music on YouTube and persuade folk to buy the physical product. That may help strangle gatekeeping entities such as Spotify, Tidal, Apple etc out of viability and enable more of a Mastodon distributed model in the future. I definitely want to see these corporate entities fail. They are as destructive as the huge record labels and advances were in past eras.
We are in the early stages of whatever this turns out to be, anything can happen, but vast swathes of great music is being made and is certainly available to buy.
The idea you can access 80 million tracks for a tenner a month, with about £9.93* of which going to corporate gatekeepers and middlemen, is clearly not viable for artists.
*I made that figure up as I don’t know the exact amount, but it won’t be far off, and as Benn Jordan points out many artists actually end up paying to be platformed.