Time Names Taylor Swift Person of the Year

[MathOfInsects]

On 3/28/2024 at 6:17 AM, Notes_Norton said:

We got a taste of that while working for Motown, but we didn't sign the contract because our manager wanted a better deal (he wanted us to actually make money on any recordings).

To gauge the success of that decision, the question would be: Is Motown also still talking about that time they almost signed you guys but couldn't close the deal?

If not, that manager biffed it. 

[Anderton]

3 hours ago, MathOfInsects said:

To gauge the success of that decision, the question would be: Is Motown also still talking about that time they almost signed you guys but couldn't close the deal?

If not, that manager biffed it. 

What do you mean by the manager "biffed" it? That's not clear to me.

[Notes_Norton]

10 hours ago, MathOfInsects said:

To gauge the success of that decision, the question would be: Is Motown also still talking about that time they almost signed you guys but couldn't close the deal?

If not, that manager biffed it. 

I was 19 or 20 years old. The manager may have blown the deal, or saved us from being pimped, I'll never know. And actually it doesn't matter. What happened, happened, it was fun, and it didn't scar me.

I do know there are hundreds of one-hit wonders who never made any money on their hit. I read that Marcia Griffiths didn't make one penny on the 'Electric Boogie' (Electric Slide) and it was a huge hit, that the senior set still want to hear, 40 years later.

 

And as a sax player in a band that made it, it would be difficult to live on that reputation. People like Marcia Griffiths, Bobby Hebb, Sammi Smith, Phoebe Snow, Elvin Bishop and so many others, can gig for good money at least for 10 years after the hit they didn't make any money on charted. It's because they have the name that went with the song, the name that was broadcasted on the radio.

 

But what if you are the guitarist in a band like The Castaways, The Standells, Marmalade, or Ace? Can you make big money by saying, “I was the guitarist in the Standells?” Your name wasn't mentioned on the radio.

So considering that Motown had the contract rigged so that we would have to sell a million LPs to make a penny, and in the late 60s that was an almost unattainable peak even for a seasoned artist, I figure it worked out OK.

On the other hand, there was also a chance that if we signed, I was in the right place at the right time, and knowing the right person, I may have had a second chance.

There is no way to know.

I do know I enjoyed my semi-star days. As a young man, being treated as a peer by the people I enjoyed on the radio made me feel like I was in the 'in crowd', and that was fun. When opening in concert for the big stars, the pay was good, the experience was better, and there were plenty of women who wanted to meet us. So it was a good time.

I'm of retirement age now, but have no plans to retire. Mrs. Notes and I are doing 22 gigs this month. She is a world-class singer, and she plays guitar and synth. I've made my living doing music and nothing but music for most of my life, and I've enjoyed almost every day of it. To me, this is much better than being a proletarian wage-slave, even if I didn't 'make it big.' So it all worked out just fine. 

I have no regrets. The closet thing to a regret is wasting a few years as a wage-slave while seeing what being normal was all about. For me, normal was soooo overrated.


Insights and inctes by Notes ♫

[AnotherScott]

On 12/8/2023 at 8:34 PM, Anderton said:

she's also been subject to the usual "Taylor Swift died and was replaced by a lookalike" which has been applied to everyone from Justin Bieber to Vladimir Putin to...well, Taylor Swift.

Don't forget Paul McCartney. Always the pioneer!

 

On 12/13/2023 at 8:58 AM, Notes_Norton said:

While status quo is OK for the small business, the corporation needs to make more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more profits each quarter than the previous one, or the stockholders will sell their stock. Corporations need perpetual growth, but perpetual growth is not attainable in this world.

Yes. And ironically, I think it is sometimes the push to find ways to do more that ultimately kills what would otherwise have still been a successful business. Sometimes the things they choose to do to try to grow end up being wrong choices that ultimately do the opposite.

 

I have had the related thought that the entire concept of the stock market is kind of inherently a bad idea. It can be bad for businesses because of what we've just been talking about; for typical individuals, it's roughly the equivalent of gambling, but without any comparable structures to try to keep it in check; and for society as a whole, it is skewed toward further income inequality, it is largely a rich-get-richer vehicle.

 

On 3/27/2024 at 10:13 PM, Notes_Norton said:

She's as big now as Sintara, Elvis and The Beatles were in their day.

 

Yes, and in a much more fragmented world in terms of what different people are exposed to through different media. I think the last artist to have that kind of omnipresent cultural impact was Michael Jackson.

[Anderton]

22 minutes ago, AnotherScott said:

I have had the related thought that the entire concept of the stock market is kind of inherently a bad idea. It can be bad for businesses because of what we've just been talking about; for typical individuals, it's roughly the equivalent of gambling, but without any comparable structures to try to keep it in check; and for society as a whole, it is skewed toward further income inequality, it is largely a rich-get-richer vehicle.

 

Like so many things, it started off as a good idea - companies raise money to expand into other ventures, people decide whether the company has a future. Everyone makes money if the company does well, and consumers get better products. Everyone loses money if the company doesn't do well. Fair enough.

 

The problem with any system is when people start to game it and distort reality. WITHOUT GETTING POLITICAL, a good example that occurs to me is Truth Social going public. I see no way that its parent company, with around $3.3 million in ad sales for the first 9 months of 2023, a $49 million net loss over the same period, and a minuscule slice of the online audience can be valued at $4.8 billion. Similar manipulations happened recently with AMC and Gamestop, the so-called "meme" stocks. And you have companies siphoning their profits into stock buy backs. There's nothing illegal with that, but again, it distorts the system because the profits aren't going immediately into R&D and taking care of shareholders. 

 

A lot of people have chosen to invest in real estate. Again, that was great when someone had extra money to invest, bought a nice place, spruced it up, and made a profit. But when you have companies that have nothing to do with real estate buying huge tracts of houses, charging exorbitant rents and getting away with it because houses that normally people would buy to live in are being bought up for renting, that distorts the system as well...so does Air BnB, which started off as "my kids are on their own, I have a room, wouldn't mind making a couple bucks over the weekend" to a business that acts more and more like a bad hotel.

 

People will always figure out a way to screw up a good thing

 

 

[Anderton]

2 hours ago, Notes_Norton said:

I was 19 or 20 years old. The manager may have blown the deal, or saved us from being pimped, I'll never know.

 

True. But we know what the odds are. My band went through the Motown offer machine too, and based on the terms it was a hard pass. We did well with a boutique label deal, distributed by MGM and then RCA.

[Thethirdapple]

3 hours ago, Notes_Norton said:

So considering that Motown had the contract rigged so that we would have to sell a million LPs to make a penny, and in the late 60s that was an almost unattainable peak even for a seasoned artist, I figure it worked out OK.

This sounds A LOT like utub and spoty as well as almost every streaming ”service”…

 

DAMN, the more things change, the more things continue to screw us!

 

Fully align with the notion of boutique labels and local circuits when possible.

 

 

 

PEACE

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[MathOfInsects]

11 hours ago, Anderton said:

What do you mean by the manager "biffed" it? That's not clear to me.

Blew it. 

[Anderton]

1 hour ago, MathOfInsects said:

Blew it. 

 

Ah, okay. The dictionary definition is quite different.

[Anderton]

3 hours ago, Thethirdapple said:

This sounds A LOT like utub and spoty as well as almost every streaming ”service”…

 

Streaming services pay out most of their money to rights holders. Not that much goes to the streaming service itself, which is why they're losing money.

 

I think the real problem is obvious: Consumers think music should be free. They expect to pay less per month than two coffees, or even nothing, and be able to listen to everything recorded by anyone, from any era. The analogy to radio isn't even close. Radio only had a very limited selection of music at any given moment.

 

Music has been devalued to the point of no return. To make matters worse, physical media is dead. You can't sell your recordings at gigs which was always a nice income. Nowadays, unless I'm missing something, the ONLY way you can make money from recordings is from streaming.

[MathOfInsects]

10 minutes ago, Anderton said:

 

Ah, okay. The dictionary definition is quite different.

I went to check, and yes, I've never heard that definition. Whoa!

My point was that that interaction is not balanced. Most artists need(ed) Motown more than Motown need(ed) them. If, as in your case, it's just a single data point within a broader dance of eventual signing, then walking away works out fine. But for most, if you're still mentioning that possibility years later and the label is not, then you'd have to say it was a mistake to turn the offer down. Even just adding "Motown recording artist" to your bio going forward gains you more from the crappy deal than the label loses by not closing it. 

Easy for me to say. The only time I have ever had to worry about any of it, the guy who was trying to sign me got fired. I like to think it's because THAT'S how wrong they thought he was for liking my stuff. In real life I'm sure it's just because I was the latest in a long line of bad decisions. Tomato tomato.

[Thethirdapple]

57 minutes ago, Anderton said:

Streaming services pay out most of their money to rights holders. Not that much goes to the streaming service itself, which is why they're losing money.

True that, I was looking at it from a “content creator” perspective trying to monetize… the level of “engagement” to see a penny is absurd and the “rules” seemingly change on a whim...  content creators are the musicians of the Motown era (and still today IMHO)

 

(just further thoughts)

Does any “consumer” actually want to pay for things… NO, the same way a company doesn't give things away for free. Commodities are by definition to be commodified! And yet we feel that OUR work as value, when its hard to recognize the value in what others do… humans are funny that way.

 

And in a slightly snarky voice, do not the patrons in a venue enjoy your music for free? Sure the musicians are hopefully getting paid and the venue makes money from the draw of the band… if only it could be that simple.
 

We are all trying to put bread on the table, one way or another. The monetary value of creative work is zero if the creativity is unwanted or unknown. And if the creative work is overly personal its a dilemma. Years ago at the gallery in SF, a person was very interested with one of my sculptures, she asked how much it costs… as I explained to her: this piece is OF me, so its either worth way more than all the money in the world or you feel so strongly about it that I will offer it to you. She left perplexed, with my sculpture remaining on the wall.  Not sure who got “biffed” 🧐

 

Now obviously that was/is a special circumstance and I continue to do stonework and sculptures on commission which I create with passion but have commodified my process and creative worth into feeling good about putting bread on the table.

 

My son also struggles with putting a dollar value on his creativity. As a writer and illustrator he will also have to find a way to “depersonalize” his work to hopefully also put bread on his table.

 

The music I make is way too personal to endanger it with money… And I am in awe of the musicians who are able to do so. Playing o.p.m., is different, yet I struggle with copywrite/ownership laws as they are simply exploiting the musicians, which takes me back to Motown and utub. I am contemplating “reuploading” the few musical emotions I’ve placed onto utub, cause after 100 views the algorithm places ads on non-monetized content… WTF I want it for free!

 

Reminds me of a Dire Straits song…

 

 

 

PEACE

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[Anderton]

8 hours ago, Thethirdapple said:

And in a slightly snarky voice, do not the patrons in a venue enjoy your music for free?

Well, at that point, you're not a musician. You're an alcohol salesman who knows how to play music 🤣

[Bill H.]

On 3/30/2024 at 7:41 AM, AnotherScott said:

Yes, and in a much more fragmented world in terms of what different people are exposed to through different media. I think the last artist to have that kind of omnipresent cultural impact was Michael Jackson.

 

The big difference between those two is that Taylor Swift exists purely in the pop realm, while Michael Jackson's reach existed much further than that. I don't DJ to young adults in clubs nearly as much as I used to, but I still do a few nights here and there - including last Saturday. I never get requests for Taylor Swift in that environment. But I can still - even now - drop Billie Jean into the mix and get a crowd response. And back in the 1980s... wow. His music was a club staple. 

[AnotherScott]

6 hours ago, Bill H. said:

The big difference between those two is that Taylor Swift exists purely in the pop realm, while Michael Jackson's reach existed much further than that. 

If you're talking strictly musically, her success hasn't been purely in the pop realm... in fact, she originally made her name in country. (Wiki lists her genres as "Pop, country, folk, rock, alternative.") And you may not get the requests in a dance club, but that's because, unlike a lot of MJ, she's not really about dance music.

 

If you're talking beyond the musical aspect, I'd just refer again to what CA said above: "What's interesting about Taylor Swift is what you see when you scratch beneath the surface. Forget about her just being an entertainer. She blew up the traditional movie studio distribution model with just one (independently produced) movie. She also scared the crap out of record companies when she went ahead and re-recorded her albums, to the extent that companies are now busily revising their contracts to try to make sure artists can't do that again. Her Eras tour affected the economies of entire cities and states, and revitalized a significant part of the travel and hotel business that's still recovering from covid...She's even become a political force by exhorting fans to get out and vote"

 

If you take a look at her accomplishments on wikipedia, you may be surprised, e.g. at the records she's broken and her impact on the industry. Like this one, "In a June 2015 open letter, Swift criticized Apple Music for not offering royalties to artists during its free three-month trial period and threatened to withdraw her music from the platform, which prompted Apple Inc. to announce that it would pay artists during the free trial period." That's clout. 🙂 And that was 9 years ago, she was already huge, and she's a whole lot bigger now.

 

Some other career highlights from the wiki page, chronologically...

 

Quote

 

Released in October 2006, Taylor Swift peaked at number five on the US Billboard 200, on which it spent 157 weeks—the longest stay on the chart by any release in the US in the 2000s decade. Swift became the first female country music artist to write or co-write every track on a US platinum-certified debut album...Swift won multiple accolades for Taylor Swift. She was one of the recipients of the Nashville Songwriters Association's Songwriter/Artist of the Year in 2007, becoming the youngest person given the title.She also won the Country Music Association's Horizon Award for Best New Artist, the Academy of Country Music Awards' Top New Female Vocalist, and the American Music Awards' Favorite Country Female Artist honor. She was also nominated for Best New Artist at the 50th Annual Grammy Awards.

 

On the Billboard 200, {second album} Fearless spent 11 weeks at number one, becoming Swift's first chart topper and the longest-running number-one female country album. It was the bestselling album of 2009 in the US. Its lead single, "Love Story", was her first number one in Australia and the first country song to top Billboard's Pop Songs chart...That year, Swift won five American Music Awards, including Artist of the Year and Favorite Country Album. Billboard named her 2009's Artist of the Year. She won Video of the Year and Female Video of the Year for "Love Story" at the 2009 CMT Music Awards...At the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards, Fearless was named Album of the Year and Best Country Album, and "White Horse" won Best Country Song and Best Female Country Vocal Performance. At the 2009 Country Music Association Awards, Swift won Album of the Year for Fearless and was named Entertainer of the Year, the youngest person to win the honor...On television, she made her debut as a rebellious teenager in an CSI: Crime Scene Investigation episode and hosted and performed as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live; she was the first host ever to write their own opening monologue.

 

Swift's third studio album, Speak Now, was released in October 2010. Written solely by Swift, the album debuted the Billboard 200 with over one million US copies sold first week and became the fastest-selling digital album by a female artist...At the 54th Annual Grammy Awards in 2012, Swift performed "Mean", which won Best Country Song and Best Country Solo Performance. She was named Songwriter/Artist of the Year by the Nashville Songwriters Association (2010 and 2011), Woman of the Year by Billboard (2011), and Entertainer of the Year by the Academy of Country Music (2011 and 2012) and the Country Music Association in 2011. At the American Music Awards of 2011, Swift won Artist of the Year and Favorite Country Album. Rolling Stone named Speak Now on its list of "50 Best Female Albums of All Time" (2012)

 

Red, Swift's fourth studio album, was released in October 2012..a genre-spanning record that incorporated eclectic styles of pop and rock such as Britrock, dubstep, and dance-pop. The album opened at number one on the Billboard 200 with 1.21 million sales and was Swift's first number-one album in the UK. Its lead single, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together", was her first number one on the Billboard Hot 100...Red and its single "Begin Again" received three nominations at the 56th Annual Grammy Awards (2014). Swift received American Music Awards for Best Female Country Artist in 2012, Artist of the Year in 2013, and the Nashville Songwriters Association's Songwriter/Artist Award for the fifth and sixth consecutive years. At the 2014 Country Music Association Awards, Swift was honored with the Pinnacle Award, making her the second recipient in history after Garth Brooks. The Red Tour ran from March 2013 to June 2014 and became the highest-grossing country tour upon completion.

 

Swift continued writing songs for films and featuring on other artists' releases. On the soundtrack album to The Hunger Games (2012), Swift wrote and recorded "Eyes Open" and "Safe & Sound"; the latter of which was co-written with the Civil Wars and T-Bone Burnett. "Safe & Sound" won the Grammy Award for Best Song Written for Visual Media...She was a voice actress in The Lorax (2012), made a cameo in the sitcom New Girl (2013), and had a supporting role in the dystopian film The Giver (2014).

 

She described {fifth album} 1989 as her first "official pop album" ... Released in October 2014, the album opened atop the Billboard 200 with 1.28 million copies sold. Its singles "Shake It Off", "Blank Space", and "Bad Blood" reached number one in Australia, Canada, and the US, with the first two making Swift the first woman to replace herself at the Hot 100 top spot...The 1989 World Tour (2015) was the highest-grossing tour of the year with $250 million in total revenue...Swift was named Billboard's Woman of the Year in 2014, becoming the first artist to win the award twice. At the 2014 American Music Awards, Swift received the inaugural Dick Clark Award for Excellence. On her 25th birthday in 2014, the Grammy Museum at L.A. Live opened an exhibit in her honor in Los Angeles that ran until October 4, 2015. In 2015, Swift won the Brit Award for International Female Solo Artist. "Bad Blood" won Video of the Year and Best Collaboration at the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards. At the 58th Grammy Awards (2016), 1989 won Album of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Album, making Swift the first woman to win Album of the Year twice

 

{sixth album} Reputation incorporated electropop with urban styles of hip hop and R&B...At the 2018 American Music Awards, Swift won four awards, which made her accumulate 23 trophies in total and become the AMAs' most awarded female musician, surpassing Whitney Houston. The same year, she embarked on her Reputation Stadium Tour, which became the highest-grossing North American concert tour in history and grossed $345.7 million worldwide

 

 

etc. etc..you get the idea. And all that was well before she became really culturally huge (i.e. Time person-of-the-year level huge.)

[Notes_Norton]

On 3/30/2024 at 12:30 PM, Thethirdapple said:

This sounds A LOT like utub and spoty as well as almost every streaming ”service”…

 

The “gatekeepers” always make the bulk of the money, more than 90% of the artists get pimped. That goes for painters, musicians, and so on.

But, on the other hand, many of the 90% who never make the big time, can have a career and make a living doing what they love to do.
 

On 3/30/2024 at 4:14 PM, MathOfInsects said:

My point was that that interaction is not balanced. Most artists need(ed) Motown more than Motown need(ed) them.

 

And that is exactly why the gatekeepers make the money. Galleries, publishers, distributors, and the people artists need to get their work appreciated.

They need product, but there are millions waiting to be discovered. The supply is much greater than the demand. That makes the songs we write, the paintings we create, and the art we make, cheap. 

Don't like the deal we offer? There are a hundred samples in the mail today from people who will do it for even less.

 

On 3/30/2024 at 4:14 PM, MathOfInsects said:

Even just adding "Motown recording artist" to your bio going forward gains you more from the crappy deal than the label loses by not closing it. 

 

We recorded some at Motown, although when the deal fell through, it was over. Mostly cover songs in the Jobete (Motown) catalog. So we didn't have the rights in the first place. I suppose they were testing.

So technically, I'm a “Motown Recording Artist”, although since nothing was released, I won't use that in my promo. If someone asked, “What did you do?” the answer would be too long, and too disappointing.

 

On 3/30/2024 at 3:56 PM, Anderton said:

I think the real problem is obvious: Consumers think music should be free.

 

And it was free on the Radio and MTV, although it was paid for by the consumer indirectly.

Streaming seems, to the consumer, to be just like the radio, so I can't blame them for thinking they shouldn't be paying for it. It's hard to play for something intangible. And we no longer have records, tapes, or discs for them to buy.

Mrs. Notes and I have gone to famous art museums in the US, Italy, Spain, Hungary, and other countries, viewing some wonderful pieces of art, basically for free.
 

On 3/30/2024 at 10:41 AM, AnotherScott said:

I have had the related thought that the entire concept of the stock market is kind of inherently a bad idea.

 

I agree. It's like a first cousin to a Ponzi scheme. Both require perpetual growth, which just can't happen with a closed system. Eventually, the bubble will burst and the people who don't get out in time, will lose.

 

A new company grows, and people want the product so it grows more, but eventually the market for that product gets saturated. So the corporation needs to figure out how to keep that perpetual growth going.

For a while, the explosive population growth helped. In the late 1960s-early 1970s, many of us tried to initiate the zero population growth movement. But the salesperson in your living room, the TV, sold more babies. How? Every sitcom, every drama, every variety show and so on had a woman saying to her husband, “My biological clock is running out.” Which means she needs another baby. It was repeated by different women at least a dozen times every day, month after month. But there were only 3 billion people on the planet back then. It won't work anymore.

So what's left? Cheapen the production costs? Cheapen the product? Shorten the life cycle so it needs to be repurchased? Go to a subscription service? Branch out in new directions, hoping to open a new market as successful as the first? Send your labor force overseas, where labor is cheap, and/or child labor is legal? Come out with new tweaks that make the old model passé and the new model in fashion until the next, shorter replacement cycle? Buy up the competition to increase your market share? And so on.

 

It's a bad system, and Karl Marx knew that. He just didn't know how to fix it, as socialism has its own set of problems that have proved to be worse. 

I know how to identify the problem, but I don't know how to fix it either.

So for me to survive as an artist, I learned to be commercial. I provide a service people want, and try to do a better job than my competition at a competitive price. As a small, non-stockholder business, all I have to do is make enough profit to pay the bills and have an income for me and my partner. 

So far, so good. I've made a living doing music and nothing but music for most of my life. I paid off the mortgage, kept food on the table, and clothes on my back.

 

To do this, I perform live for an audience in bars, restaurants, cruise ships, hotels, resorts, yacht clubs, country clubs, private homes, animal clubs (Elks, Moose, etc.), shopping malls, grand openings, retirement communities, and pretty much anywhere a band can play. In days past, I had a taste of the big time and did huge concerts, but those days are over. 

There still is a demand for live music, and so far, people don't expect that for free. In commercial venues, the people pay indirectly by buying drinks and/or food. For private parties, they think we are worth the price to entertain their guests.

I didn't make the big time, but I still got lucky, I found a way to make a living by doing what I would do for free if I didn't need the money. 

 

The 1% of career musicians like Taylor Swift, Elvis Presley, Paul McCartney, Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, and others can, and will make fortunes, but they are the minority. For the rest of us, it's figuring out how to make a living doing what we love.

The same can go for any private business. Example: Out of the millions of small cookie bakeries, only a few will rise to Famous Amos status. 

We all have our unique set of talents. If we can use our strong suits to make a living doing what we love, we have won the game. If that eventually leads us to the big time, we hit the artist lottery.

 

Insights and incites by Notes ♫

[Anderton]

31 minutes ago, Notes_Norton said:

Streaming seems, to the consumer, to be just like the radio, so I can't blame them for thinking they shouldn't be paying for it. It's hard to play for something intangible. And we no longer have records, tapes, or discs for them to buy.

 

Radio was VERY different. It had a limited number of songs that were played for a limited number of times. They chose the songs, not you, and they played the songs when they felt like it, not on demand. With streaming, you have on demand access to basically anything recorded in the history of music. Radio is at best a teeny-tiny subset of that.

[AnotherScott]

When people are streaming an album on demand, or their own playlists, okay, that's very different from radio... but streaming services are also used the same way radio was. Spotify has all of these "algorithmically curated" channels (and also generates stuff on the fly to play after the song you picked)... so when listened to that way, it's not too different from a radio station... you've got a random bunch of songs in the genre of your choice. I wonder what percentage of spotify plays are specifically requested vs. whatever they choose to play for you.

[Notes_Norton]

21 hours ago, Anderton said:

 

Radio was VERY different. It had a limited number of songs that were played for a limited number of times. They chose the songs, not you, and they played the songs when they felt like it, not on demand. With streaming, you have on demand access to basically anything recorded in the history of music. Radio is at best a teeny-tiny subset of that.

You and I know that. But to the average consumer, it's a lot like radio, only better, and they think it should be free. To those who don't take the time to know, it seems the only thing that has changed is the technology.

Ownership of a song is a fuzzy thing. We hear them all the time, and don't have to pay for them, unless we want to own the physical media. 

 

And some people pirate that, too (not me).

I own hundreds of CDs and LPs, and am happy to let a portion of the price I paid go to the creators and manufacturers. But to tell you the truth, I don't want to pay to listen to a song. So far, I haven't subscribed to any music streaming services. I may change my mind some day. I tried satellite radio, but the DJs kept talking over the endings and sometimes the intros to the music, and decided it wasn't worth my money. If I'm going to pay, I want to hear the entire song.

 

I feel the pain of a songwriter or artist who doesn't get paid for his/her labors. I don't have an answer for that, and it seems nobody else does, either. At least "yet".

 

Insights and incites by Notes ♫

[Anderton]

3 hours ago, Notes_Norton said:

I feel the pain of a songwriter or artist who doesn't get paid for his/her labors. I don't have an answer for that, and it seems nobody else does, either.

 

The answer is obvious: music should be free. When I go into Kroger to buy groceries, the self-checkout machine says "Hey, are you the Craig Anderton with that cool video on YouTube? Your groceries are on the house. Have a nice day!"

 

That happens to everyone, so I don't see not getting paid as a problem.

[Notes_Norton]

19 hours ago, Anderton said:

The answer is obvious: music should be free. When I go into Kroger to buy groceries, the self-checkout machine says "Hey, are you the Craig Anderton with that cool video on YouTube? Your groceries are on the house. Have a nice day!"

Perhaps I should start making cool YouTube videos  

 

Sounds like a good deal to me.

[analogika]

On 3/30/2024 at 8:56 PM, Anderton said:

I think the real problem is obvious: Consumers think music should be free. They expect to pay less per month than two coffees, or even nothing, and be able to listen to everything recorded by anyone, from any era. The analogy to radio isn't even close. Radio only had a very limited selection of music at any given moment.

 

Music has been devalued to the point of no return. To make matters worse, physical media is dead. You can't sell your recordings at gigs which was always a nice income. Nowadays, unless I'm missing something, the ONLY way you can make money from recordings is from streaming.

 

Just saw an interview snippet with Trent Reznor on music streaming, and he phrased it thusly: 

"I think that people just want to turn the faucet on and have music come in. They're not really concerned about all the romantic shit I thought mattered." 

 

We always thought music mattered to most people the way it matters to us. Most people don't give a shit, and most people never did.  

People didn't believe me 25 years ago, when I said that for the vast majority, "music" is something they switch on on a device on the windowsill when they walk in the office. It's interspersed with news and the odd interview. Occasionally, something familiar comes on; that's nice. 

This is also why A.I.-generated music will take over a large portion of the market (yeah, other thread, I know): in reality, most people just never gave a shit. 

[Philbo King]

To keep perspective, remember that once Hitler was Times Man of the Year.

[analogika]

17 minutes ago, Philbo King said:

To keep perspective, remember that once Hitler was Times Man of the Year.

The award marks a person of particular importance. Not endorsing them or their views.