Less Money, Mo' Music and Lots of Problems: A Look at the Music Biz
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So when I want to relive that concert I will just open the video and then do some chores around the house.
Totally off topic, but this gave me a hilarious mental image of pushing a vacuum around at a Pig Destroyer concert.
You can find all their concerts at livephish.com. They also release old concerts of theirs every so often.
I could be wrong on this, but I think you also get a free mp3 download of the concert the day after if you attended the event.
Plus you only hear the crowd cheering and yelling between songs or during a "sing along" segment when the audio engineer intentionally brings in the crowd mics. During the rest, you're only getting instruments and vocals, not Bubba asking Todd if he wants another beer.
Historically, this isn't unique. Art itself was never worth much; most artists had to find a patron to be able to produce art, and in return the patron got some of the art. But art has never really been sold on the open market in the style of the Internet; and when it has been, the value someone is willing to pay for it is never in line with the amount of themselves the artist put into it.
Should art be worth more than it is? Of course it should. But it won't be until we as a culture are willing to pay a lot more for it.
Auction houses throw a wrench into the works by allowing the market as a whole to weigh in. If an artwork gets sold at auction for significantly more or less than where it "should" be selling at, the whole system suffers. So the galleries representing the artists will bid on the artworks themselves and auctioneers will pretend that the piece was sold, to someone in the back, if it doesn't meet the reserve.
The takeaway I got from it was that value of art is not and can never be intrinsic, somebody is acting as a taste-maker, but that somebody never has complete control over the market.
If you think about it, it's not a whole lot different from other kinds of tradable good, (currency comes to mind) it's just that there are far fewer external indicators of value, making it more difficult to operate rationally. There's stability within the system, but the system is artificial and can seem rather arbitrary.
I don't mean that I have to directly identify with whatever they're creating but when someone is singing or playing a song, on some level you like to think about what they were feeling when they wrote or performed it. Likewise, something that always made me feel affinity for a band (especially as a teenager who was learning to play music) was the feeling that this was something I could do myself if I spent the time or developed the skills. I was drawn to a lot of punk bands and bedroom experimenters because I heard things that sounded like something I would do if I was more talented or experienced. It's hard to explain but it made things feel more personal. I think machine-generated music could certainly exist and be programmed to be indistinguishable from human-generated music but as soon as I knew it was created solely by algorithms, I'd lose much of the intangible (and irrational) connection I might have shared with the actual art.
On a purely musical level, there are already some artists that I really enjoy, who I suspect use algorithmic composition heavily in their music. I was wondering about this one the other day, since it's sort of similar to algorithmically mashed-up sample pieces that I've made (but better):
This sounds just like the software business.