enjoy your continued toddle into irrelevance
- December 16th, 2014
- Posted in business of indie music . diy
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Wow, this is quite the op-ed in The New York Times yesterday: Elegy for the ‘Suits’ – The Internet, Not the Labels, Hurt the Music Industry.
It’s everything you despise about The New York Times and The New Yorker rolled up into one! Paean to power and old authority? CHECK! Unchecked nostalgia for the prime of the Baby Boom era? CHECK! Slavish worship of corporate culture? CHECK! Fear of agency resting outside the hands of white guys in suits? CHECK! “What an asshole!” working just fine as a punchline? CHECK!
Really, it’s terrible and hilarious. And just wrong, of course – as I’ve written, the labels – via their industry group, the RIAA – destroyed the industry just fine on their own by making music ownership a negative value. Not to mention that they also drove the more aware musicians out through their ruinous strip-mining of artist value. It’s been almost 15 years since Courtney Love did the math, and the sharecropper approach wasn’t new then. If you signed with a label, you were giving them all the value and keeping something below minimum wage – if that. And they owned everything you made.
So no, “the Internet” didn’t “hurt the music industry.” The labels are the ones who set up the teetering edifice. The internet just let musicians break out and tear it down.
ps: talking of, pre-order the new album! We have a mastering engineer to pay. 😀
5 comments on Livejournal; 3 comments on Dreamwidth.
For those who are encountering the paywall (I don’t know why I’m not, I haven’t paid them), here’s a big part of the op-ed hosted on another site. And here’re a couple of choice bits after, starting immediately after the excerpt above:
“I don’t want thousands of choices. _Some_ choices would suffice, and the suits made that happen.”
“I would never discourage any musician, however green, from making music. But I would strongly discourage most from releasing that music just because they can. It seems like a kick to the faces of the genuinely talented and deserving, all because of a technicality called the Internet. Where are the suits when you need them?”
_Deserving_. Yeaaaaaaaah.