Quote:
Originally Posted by Pasta4lnch  Ya know - I'm just curious . . . being a relative newbie in the music bizz, has there ever been a time where people were like: yeah, this is the best time to be a musician. as long as you are talented you'll make it and record labels and publishers won;t get in your way . . .
i suspect the answer is no . . .
I guess he is right, but I think artists are survivalists. They gotta do what they gotta do to stay on top. . .
i dunno. i haven't had my coffee yet this morning, I can't get too deep . . . |
I suspect that there's much truth in what you suggest.
But it's
also true that there are better times and worse times -- this cycles like everything else.
Right now there's a paradigm shift going on as big, I think, as anything in three generations, back to the 30s when the remants of the prohibition era crime families consolidated control over the music industry by working their puppet legislators in Congress to write a bunch of laws that would essentially enshrine that evovling business model in black letter law.
At the end of the 20th century, the lumbering giants fostered by those laws tried to shore up the walls of that business model with the Millennium Copyright Act, which set the kind of statutory award amounts that eviscerated the old Mp3.com [or was it their sheer stupidity?] and that were recently in the news with the $220,000 judgment against a single mom who a jury found liable for making a number of mp3 songs avaialable over the internet via one of the widespread peer2peer apps.
I've always supported IP rights for musicians but it's clear that the sea shift that is occurring around us will sweep aside ideas of scrupulous public behavior just as they've swamped previously unsinkable business models.