The record companies did a fantastic job of killing music all by themselves, the quality has absolutely cratered and the occasional great artist that has made it through the long slog to recognition has done so despite the music industry, not because of.
I spent a fortune on various formats and when streaming came along I simply refused to participate. I'm simply not going to pay a third time for music that I already legally own.
Note that the following was written well before streaming came along, but it is an excellent article on the realities of the music industry from the artists perspective written by Janis Ian:
There is a fair chance that if you're under 40 that you've never heard of her, but I suggest you give her music a try as well, it is at least as good as her writing.
You just got old. It happens to everyone, and every generation says the same thing: The music I enjoyed when I was young and impressionable was great, but all the stuff they make nowadays is crap.
People were whining about how Beatles destroyed music, how rock’n’roll was just monkey noise, how crooners like Sinatra wasn’t real singing.
Do you already own all of the music you are going to listen to for your life?
My own music tastes change over time. I don't listen to the same things I listened to 25 years ago - at least, not often. I want new music from time to time, especially if I'm walking places often.
That's the thing with streaming. I'm OK with paying an amount that is less than a CD was 25 years ago just to have a bunch of music at my disposal. A bunch of new-to-me music from various genres and from various places in the world. It isn't like I'm going to purchase physical media any time soon.
Is the service forever? Nope, probably not, but that's an issue for later me.
I pay for streaming music because I've pirated all my other music, and it's convenient. Quality is subjective, I'm no audiophile and unless I'm using it on the go with low data mode on, I can't hear the difference... except the one time with a more obscure song, but I reported that and they fixed it. Maybe that was an accidental low data mode though.
Rock/Metal/Punk is still doing really well with no shortage of great artists. Just check out the Radio 1 Rock Show with Daniel P. Carter - nearly every week there is something new that I like
Digital audio killed the industry. Why buy an album when you can
1. Use Napster
2. Use Limewire or Kazaa
3. Download from FTP trading sites
4. Torrent from Pirate Bay
5. Listen on YouTube
6. Listen on Spotify
Digital supply is effectively infinite so the price goes to zero. How to apply DRM to files ripped from a CD that can be compressed down to 3 MB?
There are other factors, like changes in youth culture and competition from other forms of entertainment, but digital audio + distribution completely transformed the music ecosystem. In the 1990s it was possible for talented, intelligent young people to start a band and pursue music as a career because the expected return was so much higher -- not only monetarily but in cultural cachet and the excitement of the local "scene". But all that has dried up. Labels aren't giving out big advances, nurturing unknown bands, or paying for million dollar albums any more, because they won't recoup the costs like they used to. Meanwhile potential talent got a job, went to college, or stayed home and played video games.
Once music lost its "goods-character", as Carl Menger would put it, all the upstream inputs -- like fancy, palatial recording studios -- withered away.
I'd argue with digital distribution there's just more of everything. Within moments I can access rap music from France, Japan, etc. This was nearly impossible just 30 years ago. In the 90s I guess I could ask an importer to sell me a French rap CD, pay 100$ for it. Etc. Or I'd probably just give up.
That said mainstream music is forced to the lowest common denominator to appeal to the maximum number of people
I think the increasingly-impossible long slog is actually a mathematical certainty.
It’s actually a mistake of the goal, in nearly every field, because it’s intrinsically contradictory.
“I want to be at the top, but I don’t want to make the stuff that isn’t to my taste that the current people at the top make”
There will be very few winners as the participation increases, the “winners” don’t scale nearly as aggressively as the amount of people fighting to be one do.
OnlyFans, YouTube, Twitch, Music, Acting. They’re all headed to the same place. Look how intuitive it is when you apply it to something like Crypto then ask why the same logic doesn’t apply virtually everywhere.
What do you mean, the natural evolution of music wasn't meant to be face-tattooed, cough syrup-drinking suicide-flirting mumble rappers who all talk about the same shit?
Quality may have tanked but profits soared. Music, movies and any other corporate product are meant to appeal to as many people as possible. Therefore they have to be average.
We always like to imagine big organizations as the "baddies", and us as the "goodies". But the reality doesn't always follow this convenient narrative. Sometimes it turns out we were the baddies all along.
Then cassettes got replaced with CDs which (initially) were read only, which again saved the market from piracy ... until online piracy with Napster and MP3 players completely crushed the music market, but far worse than cassettes.
Even 20 years later, the market still hasn't recovered to the level of peak CD revenue, despite the global economy growing substantially:
That graph does not show cassettes were responsible for that, it just shows revenue numbers. There are other possible causes.
As someone who lived through part of that (I’m from ‘78 but for a country that was lagging in media developments; we got CDs in the early 90s) I can say that cassettes were a lousy medium. I love them because I grew up with my Walkman and I loved the tape swapping scene (physically compiled and traded playlists, for those young enough to not have participated), but objectively they sucked. Even the best tapes eventually had hiss if you played them enough times. Yet they were not sold at a significantly lower price to compensate this. I mean vinyl decays too but a good pressing handled with care will outlive you (for real, I’ve got plenty of great-sounding LPs from my grandma, and she’s been dead for 8 years), but after paying a high price for a cassette only to have it sound like crap after not that much time, you wouldn’t fall for that trap too often. You’d make a copy right after buying, and then share more copies with others too.
You say that cassettes were responsible for that drop in revenue and I disagree (though of course respect your opinion), but I say the climb once CDs came in could also be interpreted as people willing to buy music just fine provided it sounded good and kept sounding good. I mean it’s not like cassettes went away as a piracy medium once CDs came in, yet revenue climbed anyway.
In the 1980s there was a record store where I lived that sold "used" records and tapes. Their hook was that they'd take any record back within a week of purchase. I think they witheld a dollar or two on the refund.
So you'd go in, buy a record and a blank cassette, go home and make a tape of the record, then return the record. My friends and I did this countless times. If there was a record we all liked we'd just buy more tapes and make a copy for each of us.
If this was a common thing in other towns, I can see why it reduced revenue. Even if this exact model was unusual, you could still borrow records from friends and make tape copies, so only one of you had to buy the record.
The hole in revenue in the early 2000 was because pirating was the only real option to get music online, you had no other choice.
The music industry was too stubborn to consider selling online and preferred to keep selling CDs, they were very very late to adapt and lost some revenue because of that.
The late 70s and early 80s was the dawn of tape trading, punk rock, rap, metal, and disco. 90% of it was only available through tape trading (or runs of 200 singles) because everyone had been shut out of a stagnant industry that was resting on AOR, super-decadent and overproduced prog, and continuing to throw money at the people who made money in the 60s.
As the 80s started, the record companies caught on and adjusted by hiring new A&R and getting into the clubs again. Then MTV happened.
The sulfur mining industry never recovered from the drop in revenue after someone discovered a way to extract it on scale from low-quality coal. Poland had a massive drop in revenue despite being the one selling both products. Does it mean they should attach a coal burning license agreement prohibiting the extraction process to each container, or try to prosecute people selling filters?
If anything cassettes served as a music discovery service before we had the ability to share links online. Pretty much everything I ever bought I discovered because someone borrowed me a tape or sent me one from abroad.
> Then cassettes got replaced with CDs which (initially) were read only, which again saved the market from piracy
CD players hit the market in the mid 80s (I got my first one in 1988). The effect of cassette tapes would have really hit in the late 70s and early 80s as high bias tapes hit the market. In the 90s, CD players became affordable. Also, there was a big price difference between a cassette and a CD. Cassette was about $8 for a new album, CD was $14.
CDs used to be crazy expensive. They cost much more than what was reasonable. Today I have access to untold thousands of records for €10 per month. That money (non inflation adjusted) would have bought me only a single record back in the day.
One could argue that the current price of music is too low. But the price they tried to extract back then was completely unreasonable and I think those excesses contributed heavily to the current situation.
Revenue based on selling copies of a recording is down. The cost of reproducing copies is less than ever. The barrier to creating your own music and distributing it to everyone in the world is less than ever.
All the middlemen cranking out wasteful copies of just one thing are not necessary since music is trivially reproduced with digital copies.
How much should music make as an industry? Who should be making the money from the music that is made? how much money should you make off of a single song that is performed a single time?
This is always a controversial issue. The loudest opinions typically say "they need to make more", which is the same opinion about nearly any profession in the entire world aside from the ones that make the very most money. Some musicians still fall into that category.
At the end of the day the lion's share of revenue doesn't go to a performer anyway, it goes to middlemen who add no value to the actual performance - they just make it be distributed and decide the winners and losers based on arbitrary gatekeeping. The contracts are predatory and the whole thing seems f'd to me.
I know many people with primary and side gigs as performance artists who don't make superstar money, there's no shortage. Live musical performance is all over the place and the ticket prices are outrageously high for any in-demand performance.
Most of us don't have the option for income in perpetuity for work performed - we just get paid for hours worked. Is there an argument around payment in perpetuity vs pay for work performed that should apply across the board?
Artists need to buy groceries and retire some day--almost none of them successfully pull this off, it's like one in a million--but every day there's a dozen posts on here about how greedy the arts industries are for trying to charge money for things.
Well, no problem, in the near future you can just get a personal AI to make everything for you. The Arts will be wiped out completely. Time to celebrate? No human artist need ever get paid again, starting in 20 years, or will it be 50? Maybe it will take 75 and you won't get to personally enjoy it? All the money can go to amazon and to ISPs because they provide the REAL value, that of providing sharing or generation infrastructure
Mix in the constant posts on here claiming that these tech companies get to make derivative works off of everyone's art, without compensating those artists, and, I don't know what to say
We've fallen into decadence, and with it has come the desire to freeze society as it existed somewhere around 1965, when baby boomers turned 20. I've had conversations with people asking how new Marvel movies could be made if some political or legal change happened. Who cares?
Don't care if no one ever writes a novel again, there's plenty to read. It'll never happen, though, because people will write novels for free, and people will sponsor people who create things that they want or that they want to be seen sponsoring. Don't care if there's never another piece of recorded music, and we're stuck playing music with each other or being in the same room with people playing music for us. Of course, this will never happen, because the vast majority of music is made for free, and the rest nearly for free after the record companies recoup.
The state doesn't need to keep encouraging the production of art through police action. If the state wants to encourage art, give everybody a tax credit that they have to send to an artist.
Ha I do miss the whole "mix tapes" thing but my god the excitement and anticipation I had when CDs and CD players came along, to be able to play Track 6 by just... pressing the "6" button. Or a tap or two with the remote: "next"!
No more rewinding/forwarding, remember counter numbers for tracks (0 -> 999).
Just an amazing step up in UI but looking back "you had to be there" :-)
Now though I just have about 600 CDs gathering dust on shelves, each one with memories from a time and place through the 80s, 90s and 00s, it's quite sad.
More like 'When Gene Simmons Waged War on the Cassette Tape During the 1980s.' It was as stupid as Lars Ulrich attacking Napster in the early 2000's. In both cases their respective bands, Kiss and Metallica, took a considerable hit in their popularity.
Treating all your customers as though they are criminals turns out to not be a very good business practice.
The content industry also waged war on computer media. It was supposed to be 100% forbidden to sell anything capable of doing anything without DRM. They were serious about this:
In Sweden there is still a tax on cassette tapes that goes directly to artists... So if you buy a cassette tape (any cassette tape for any use) artists in Sweden gets a cut... Not sure how many people today use cassette tapes for piracy...
At any stage in the process, from sheet music, to home taping, to Napster and beyond, we could point at the previous era's panic and say "ha ha, those old fools, sheet music didn't kill our vibrant music culture", and then go on to assume that, quite likely, nothing ever could.
And yet it sure seems like something is broken in the music industry in 2023. It feels like right now would be one of the least certain times in history to be a talented, dedicated musician who wants to make a living, let alone get rich and famous.
So, something changed. I think the tendency for many people is to just say that the reason for all this is the greed of the non-artistic, non-consumer parts of the music industry, but certainly it has nothing to do with me or my choices. I think that's probably self-serving position, and if we really looked at it we would find ourselves uncomfortably in an ecosystem where consumers demand immediate fulfillment of their desire, the industry rushes to give it to them without thinking about the future, and artists either adapt, or get replaced.
I did a lot of home taping. I did a lot of bittorrenting. Now I pay for Spotify, but haven't bought an album (physically or digitally) in years. I think I might have helped kill the music industry, and that's probably a bad thing.
What's interesting, 1980s was the heyday of Russian Rock tape albums.
Soviet government did actually go after artists for doing live concerts (on the grounds of illegal enterpreneurship†), but not after tape recording stuff. You could duplicate as many tape albums as you wished in specialized tape copying booths, as well as at home if you had the hardware.
† You are probably wondering whether there was "legal" enterpreneurship option in the late USSR. Basically, nope, not before Perestroika kicked in.
The campaign also coincided with the rise of cassette-based portastudios for musicians. There was concern that any record industry levy on cassettes would unfairly hit (unsigned) musicians recording their own music for demos. I think it was Sound-on-Sound magazine which came up with the "Home taping is skill in music" slogan as a counter.
And then there are sites like https://bt.etree.org/ where artists allow for free and open trading of live shows.
Back in the day before high speed internet became common, you used to subscribe to mailing lists and send "B&Ps" (blanks and postage) of either cassettes or CDs to the person with the original copy and they would burn the copy onto your media and then mail it back.
With bittorrent now it is a lot easier to get copies of live music, but it feels like the community that was there faded.
Piracy is bad but killing internet with yet another DRM in your browser, and stupid laws ("if you workaround a protection, event if it is stupid, you're going to straight jail") makes us slaves to big corporations.
Several countries have that tax. Here in Sweden we pay about $10 for every new computer, mobile phone, SSD etc just because we might store music on them. Quite absurd.
Granted, this discussion is about the recording industry, but just as an aside, don't overlook local live music. I'm a jazz musician. The bands I play in don't record. It's not worth the cost. We play in smaller venues, where the stakes are not high enough for "business" to intrude on our playing.
Each band plays a different style. More than one jazz band in my locale is playing creative original music, including one of my bands.
And the movie and TV industries wanted in on videotape back then. I remember reading a piece by one of the then big lobby shops, arguing that VHS tapes should be a tax, the income to be distributed to the studios.
[+] [-] jacquesm|2 years ago|reply
The record companies did a fantastic job of killing music all by themselves, the quality has absolutely cratered and the occasional great artist that has made it through the long slog to recognition has done so despite the music industry, not because of.
I spent a fortune on various formats and when streaming came along I simply refused to participate. I'm simply not going to pay a third time for music that I already legally own.
Note that the following was written well before streaming came along, but it is an excellent article on the realities of the music industry from the artists perspective written by Janis Ian:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070509181400/http://www.janisi...
There is a fair chance that if you're under 40 that you've never heard of her, but I suggest you give her music a try as well, it is at least as good as her writing.
And another one by Courtney Love:
https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
[+] [-] bazoom42|2 years ago|reply
You just got old. It happens to everyone, and every generation says the same thing: The music I enjoyed when I was young and impressionable was great, but all the stuff they make nowadays is crap.
People were whining about how Beatles destroyed music, how rock’n’roll was just monkey noise, how crooners like Sinatra wasn’t real singing.
[+] [-] Broken_Hippo|2 years ago|reply
My own music tastes change over time. I don't listen to the same things I listened to 25 years ago - at least, not often. I want new music from time to time, especially if I'm walking places often.
That's the thing with streaming. I'm OK with paying an amount that is less than a CD was 25 years ago just to have a bunch of music at my disposal. A bunch of new-to-me music from various genres and from various places in the world. It isn't like I'm going to purchase physical media any time soon.
Is the service forever? Nope, probably not, but that's an issue for later me.
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ojhughes|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intalentive|2 years ago|reply
1. Use Napster 2. Use Limewire or Kazaa 3. Download from FTP trading sites 4. Torrent from Pirate Bay 5. Listen on YouTube 6. Listen on Spotify
Digital supply is effectively infinite so the price goes to zero. How to apply DRM to files ripped from a CD that can be compressed down to 3 MB?
There are other factors, like changes in youth culture and competition from other forms of entertainment, but digital audio + distribution completely transformed the music ecosystem. In the 1990s it was possible for talented, intelligent young people to start a band and pursue music as a career because the expected return was so much higher -- not only monetarily but in cultural cachet and the excitement of the local "scene". But all that has dried up. Labels aren't giving out big advances, nurturing unknown bands, or paying for million dollar albums any more, because they won't recoup the costs like they used to. Meanwhile potential talent got a job, went to college, or stayed home and played video games.
Once music lost its "goods-character", as Carl Menger would put it, all the upstream inputs -- like fancy, palatial recording studios -- withered away.
[+] [-] 999900000999|2 years ago|reply
That said mainstream music is forced to the lowest common denominator to appeal to the maximum number of people
[+] [-] menacingly|2 years ago|reply
It’s actually a mistake of the goal, in nearly every field, because it’s intrinsically contradictory.
“I want to be at the top, but I don’t want to make the stuff that isn’t to my taste that the current people at the top make”
There will be very few winners as the participation increases, the “winners” don’t scale nearly as aggressively as the amount of people fighting to be one do.
OnlyFans, YouTube, Twitch, Music, Acting. They’re all headed to the same place. Look how intuitive it is when you apply it to something like Crypto then ask why the same logic doesn’t apply virtually everywhere.
[+] [-] BurningFrog|2 years ago|reply
To me, that doesn't look far from the "home taping is killing music" prediction.
It was another technology that did it, but with less money coming in, less great music did get created.
[+] [-] footlose_3815|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gumballindie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cubefox|2 years ago|reply
It wasn't the record companies which ruined the music industry. It was us, the consumers. We ruined it with piracy.
https://i.insider.com/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000
We always like to imagine big organizations as the "baddies", and us as the "goodies". But the reality doesn't always follow this convenient narrative. Sometimes it turns out we were the baddies all along.
[+] [-] cubefox|2 years ago|reply
https://i.insider.com/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000
Then cassettes got replaced with CDs which (initially) were read only, which again saved the market from piracy ... until online piracy with Napster and MP3 players completely crushed the music market, but far worse than cassettes.
Even 20 years later, the market still hasn't recovered to the level of peak CD revenue, despite the global economy growing substantially:
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/...
Piracy may since have receded, but only due to Spotify / Apple Music dumping pricing.
[+] [-] fipar|2 years ago|reply
As someone who lived through part of that (I’m from ‘78 but for a country that was lagging in media developments; we got CDs in the early 90s) I can say that cassettes were a lousy medium. I love them because I grew up with my Walkman and I loved the tape swapping scene (physically compiled and traded playlists, for those young enough to not have participated), but objectively they sucked. Even the best tapes eventually had hiss if you played them enough times. Yet they were not sold at a significantly lower price to compensate this. I mean vinyl decays too but a good pressing handled with care will outlive you (for real, I’ve got plenty of great-sounding LPs from my grandma, and she’s been dead for 8 years), but after paying a high price for a cassette only to have it sound like crap after not that much time, you wouldn’t fall for that trap too often. You’d make a copy right after buying, and then share more copies with others too.
You say that cassettes were responsible for that drop in revenue and I disagree (though of course respect your opinion), but I say the climb once CDs came in could also be interpreted as people willing to buy music just fine provided it sounded good and kept sounding good. I mean it’s not like cassettes went away as a piracy medium once CDs came in, yet revenue climbed anyway.
[+] [-] SoftTalker|2 years ago|reply
So you'd go in, buy a record and a blank cassette, go home and make a tape of the record, then return the record. My friends and I did this countless times. If there was a record we all liked we'd just buy more tapes and make a copy for each of us.
If this was a common thing in other towns, I can see why it reduced revenue. Even if this exact model was unusual, you could still borrow records from friends and make tape copies, so only one of you had to buy the record.
[+] [-] realusername|2 years ago|reply
The music industry was too stubborn to consider selling online and preferred to keep selling CDs, they were very very late to adapt and lost some revenue because of that.
[+] [-] pessimizer|2 years ago|reply
As the 80s started, the record companies caught on and adjusted by hiring new A&R and getting into the clubs again. Then MTV happened.
[+] [-] hbossy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nitwit005|2 years ago|reply
They charged more for CDs, and they became cheaper to make than tapes, so naturally revenue went up.
Music videos, and a few super successful pop stars, greatly increased interest in pop music for a period, but that tapered off.
[+] [-] akino_germany|2 years ago|reply
physical music videos (yellow); CD singles (light orange); CD albums (dark orange); cassette singles (light blue); cassette albums (Carolina blue); vinyl LP/EPs (darker blue); download singles (purple); ringtone/ringbacks (periwinkle); download albums (dark purple); SoundExchange distributions (lime green); synchronization (light gray); free streaming (green); paid streaming subscriptions (dark green)
[+] [-] jacquesm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zirgs|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indymike|2 years ago|reply
CD players hit the market in the mid 80s (I got my first one in 1988). The effect of cassette tapes would have really hit in the late 70s and early 80s as high bias tapes hit the market. In the 90s, CD players became affordable. Also, there was a big price difference between a cassette and a CD. Cassette was about $8 for a new album, CD was $14.
[+] [-] croes|2 years ago|reply
With a simple cassette recorder with microphone or other audio input you could copy any CD.
[+] [-] gardenhedge|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colonwqbang|2 years ago|reply
One could argue that the current price of music is too low. But the price they tried to extract back then was completely unreasonable and I think those excesses contributed heavily to the current situation.
[+] [-] Jeslijar|2 years ago|reply
Revenue based on selling copies of a recording is down. The cost of reproducing copies is less than ever. The barrier to creating your own music and distributing it to everyone in the world is less than ever.
All the middlemen cranking out wasteful copies of just one thing are not necessary since music is trivially reproduced with digital copies.
How much should music make as an industry? Who should be making the money from the music that is made? how much money should you make off of a single song that is performed a single time?
This is always a controversial issue. The loudest opinions typically say "they need to make more", which is the same opinion about nearly any profession in the entire world aside from the ones that make the very most money. Some musicians still fall into that category.
At the end of the day the lion's share of revenue doesn't go to a performer anyway, it goes to middlemen who add no value to the actual performance - they just make it be distributed and decide the winners and losers based on arbitrary gatekeeping. The contracts are predatory and the whole thing seems f'd to me.
I know many people with primary and side gigs as performance artists who don't make superstar money, there's no shortage. Live musical performance is all over the place and the ticket prices are outrageously high for any in-demand performance.
Most of us don't have the option for income in perpetuity for work performed - we just get paid for hours worked. Is there an argument around payment in perpetuity vs pay for work performed that should apply across the board?
[+] [-] barbariangrunge|2 years ago|reply
Well, no problem, in the near future you can just get a personal AI to make everything for you. The Arts will be wiped out completely. Time to celebrate? No human artist need ever get paid again, starting in 20 years, or will it be 50? Maybe it will take 75 and you won't get to personally enjoy it? All the money can go to amazon and to ISPs because they provide the REAL value, that of providing sharing or generation infrastructure
Mix in the constant posts on here claiming that these tech companies get to make derivative works off of everyone's art, without compensating those artists, and, I don't know what to say
[+] [-] pessimizer|2 years ago|reply
Don't care if no one ever writes a novel again, there's plenty to read. It'll never happen, though, because people will write novels for free, and people will sponsor people who create things that they want or that they want to be seen sponsoring. Don't care if there's never another piece of recorded music, and we're stuck playing music with each other or being in the same room with people playing music for us. Of course, this will never happen, because the vast majority of music is made for free, and the rest nearly for free after the record companies recoup.
The state doesn't need to keep encouraging the production of art through police action. If the state wants to encourage art, give everybody a tax credit that they have to send to an artist.
[+] [-] EGreg|2 years ago|reply
It will all become hobbies
[+] [-] brianmcc|2 years ago|reply
No more rewinding/forwarding, remember counter numbers for tracks (0 -> 999).
Just an amazing step up in UI but looking back "you had to be there" :-)
Now though I just have about 600 CDs gathering dust on shelves, each one with memories from a time and place through the 80s, 90s and 00s, it's quite sad.
[+] [-] taylodl|2 years ago|reply
Treating all your customers as though they are criminals turns out to not be a very good business practice.
[+] [-] Ralfp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] praptak|2 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital...
[+] [-] victorbjorklund|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karaterobot|2 years ago|reply
And yet it sure seems like something is broken in the music industry in 2023. It feels like right now would be one of the least certain times in history to be a talented, dedicated musician who wants to make a living, let alone get rich and famous.
So, something changed. I think the tendency for many people is to just say that the reason for all this is the greed of the non-artistic, non-consumer parts of the music industry, but certainly it has nothing to do with me or my choices. I think that's probably self-serving position, and if we really looked at it we would find ourselves uncomfortably in an ecosystem where consumers demand immediate fulfillment of their desire, the industry rushes to give it to them without thinking about the future, and artists either adapt, or get replaced.
I did a lot of home taping. I did a lot of bittorrenting. Now I pay for Spotify, but haven't bought an album (physically or digitally) in years. I think I might have helped kill the music industry, and that's probably a bad thing.
[+] [-] thriftwy|2 years ago|reply
Soviet government did actually go after artists for doing live concerts (on the grounds of illegal enterpreneurship†), but not after tape recording stuff. You could duplicate as many tape albums as you wished in specialized tape copying booths, as well as at home if you had the hardware.
† You are probably wondering whether there was "legal" enterpreneurship option in the late USSR. Basically, nope, not before Perestroika kicked in.
[+] [-] toyg|2 years ago|reply
"So put down that C90, next time we won't ask nicely"
[+] [-] taffronaut|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Neff|2 years ago|reply
Back in the day before high speed internet became common, you used to subscribe to mailing lists and send "B&Ps" (blanks and postage) of either cassettes or CDs to the person with the original copy and they would burn the copy onto your media and then mail it back.
With bittorrent now it is a lot easier to get copies of live music, but it feels like the community that was there faded.
[+] [-] p0w3n3d|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jesprenj|2 years ago|reply
In Slovenia, we pay a tax for blank media and audiovisual recorders. The law was put in place in 2020.
Source: https://www.uradni-list.si/glasilo-uradni-list-rs/vsebina/20...
[+] [-] ftrobro|2 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
[+] [-] jjtheblunt|2 years ago|reply
Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the Music Industry Waged War on the Cassette Tape During the 1980s, and Punk Bands Fought Back
[+] [-] analog31|2 years ago|reply
Each band plays a different style. More than one jazz band in my locale is playing creative original music, including one of my bands.
[+] [-] cafard|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hanniabu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewstuart|2 years ago|reply
Tapes and printers, not so much.
[+] [-] Sosh101|2 years ago|reply