on the affordability of making music
#Let's get this out of the way first, before linking to this great article in the Guardian: releasing fully produced music is more accessible than ever. You can compose, record, produce, on your phone, on an ancient laptop, on anything from a Gameboy to a VR device. On headphones on the go, or at home.
“People who work at labels think bands make loads of money touring, while booking agents think they make loads of money on publishing and so on”
This, from the article, is a great quote. I've written before about my thoughts on not gigging, in response to the idea that playing live is supposedly imperative. However, for years playing live has been a vehicle for selling merchandise (t-shirts etc) and physical copies of music (planet-burning CDs, vinyl, cassettes).
But to anyone who has looked to craft their work and perfect their art, deeper than to simply come up with music they can perform live, it's obvious that reaching a level of sophistication above the no-name/no-label music being churned out on library sites or on Spotify, or more recently by AI, takes disproportionately long time.
That time needs sponsoring, regardless of if, to the artist, it's just a hobby or their line of work.
But in the age of depleted collective attention, corporations trading whole artist catalogues riding on algorithmic "more of the same of the past" recommendations, literally consume the time and energy for music discovery, leaving what little is left to be a kind of zero-sum game of who can steal a moment of (y)our time and finite focus, before it's diverted away again. Naturally, 99% of that goes to Swifts and their Eras, with no counterbalance mechanism. To mix-in a metaphor, no tides lifting all boats here.
Music continues to be ubiquitous and ever-present. As listeners we treat it as a given. I don't think being a musician has ever meant being financially stable. But over the past few years it has truly morphed into an expensive hobby - simply by way of taking the time to produce new and unique and meaningful art, and in conditions of being continuously distracted by 24/7 feeds or media.
Unlike the UK, many European countries sponsor the arts, but that too feels ancient, in the presence of tech giants endlessly supplying us with content, some of which swells up enough to monetise in a rush, and leads to more being produced and another cycle of the same. A true industry.