The saddest, stupidest sentence I've ever read
roughtype.com
roughtype.com
In other words, if for some reason you wanted to maximize the psychological pain experienced by this one individual, and your means of accomplishing this was having everyone in the world suddenly share a single belief, the one underlying the spoken sentence would be it.
Of course, there's no reason that most of us would care, but that's a reason for it to not be on a social news website, not a reason for it to not have been written at all. From his, and therefore the audience of his blog/gestalt's perspective, this message is of the utmost importance. Perhaps the way it was written had such pathos as to absorb a submitter into posting it, and others into voting it up even though they knew it was not really appropriate material, but that's the path of kitten pictures.
When it comes to music, yes, a concert tour is more profitable for the artist than their recorded music is. This is the one difference between musicians and other artists.
While I don't completely agree with Arrington, I do believe that this blog post calling it the saddest stupidest sentence ever is guilty of the same sensationalism that Arrington is.
Reading the whole post, it is clear that Arrington is referring the importance of recorded music in monetary terms, not artistic.
The problem here is that, all context considered, Arrington is going one step further than just saying that the artists don't deserve compensation here. He is very clearly raising the point that artists shouldn't expect to be compensated at all for recordings ever.
Of course this is quite disapointing to me as much of the music I listen to cannot be created live by its artists but instead takes days or months to prepare. With the advancement of computers, more and more often, musical composers will be able to use just a computer to create music that traditionally could only be created by live musicians - and lots that can only be created through computers. Guess I'd better kiss that goodbye.
What kind of music?
Not all music is an extravagant performance art.
I am very fond of the music of master session bassist Abraham Laboriel. He's played on thousands of albums, and while he has played in bands, he's just too busy as a very in-demand session player to be playing live constantly. He rarely does anything even remotely like a "tour". If I want to hear Abraham play, the easiest way is through a recording.
Even more extremely, recordings can bring together musicians in a way that would be implausible to do live. If you enjoy the music of musicians A, B, C, and D, all of whom have their own career as a musician, it might be very rare to hear them all play together live, just due to their schedules. But get them together for a week, either in a studio or on a stage, and you can make an awesome recording that captures something rarely heard in person.
The model of "recordings are marketing tools for live performances" is not necessarily bad or wrong, but I don't think it applies in every instance.
I for one would happily pay 20 USD or more for a really well-produced album full of good music. Sadly, that's a pretty rare find. While I suspect that some musicians will continue producing quality albums regardless, and hopefully listeners will support them, it seems that more than anyone else the recording industry as a whole is destroying itself by producing lousy albums.
It's a tricky problem...
The sentence in question, "Recorded music is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of an artist," as spoken by Arrington, is pretty sad. The author has a good point. As a sometime musician, it makes me very sad.
But this sort of devaluation attitude toward music is well known about already. Ironically, it is usually blamed on those dang kids and their crazy Internet making it easy to download lots of recorded music without paying anything for it.
Ironically though, I think it's more the fault of the music business, who for decades have treated music as nothing but marketing material to drive sales of flat round pieces of plastic.
Toohey was a prominent architectural critic who could make or break an architect by a yea or nay in his column. The guy's statements always forwarded an agenda of diminishing the value of individual excellence and achievements in favor of fitting into the popular mode. If a talented architect not under his sanction dared to showcase his work, Toohey would use his influence to shut him down. In context, what he said always sounded insightful, but when you stepped back, you realized how scary his statements were. A quick search yielded this Toohey quote, for example, that falls in line with the theme:
"Artistic value is achieved collectively by each man subordinating himself to the standards of the majority."
The Arrington quote was so evocative because Toohey could personally create popularity and buzz, so he'd literally say something as self-serving as "the supposed greatness of an architect's building is irrelevant . . . the question is, are people [like me] talking about it?"
To be absolutely clear: I am not comparing Mike Arrington to Ellsworth Toohey. What I am saying is that the sentence, as worded, could definitely be a line from one of the latter's monologues.
"Seesmic is a video startup I’ve shied away from writing about too often, because I’m not sure I really get it. But I figure if so many smart people think there’s something good going on here, I should keep an eye on what the company is doing."
That's everything I disliked about silicon valley right there.
The ability to monetize something is not the only measure of its value - the benefit that it causes the world is another important measure if value (this could be measured economically or otherwise). In an ideal economy, total 'value' would be maximized when the 'benefit' and 'monetization' metrics of value were closely aligned as it would lead to the best allocation of resources. Or to put it another way - things would be best if people were rewarded for doing good, useful things.
Of course the practicalities of the world don't always make this possible. But to try to cut someone down like Arrington did for suggesting that it would be better if musicians could received compensation for the enjoyment their recordings provide is in my view incorrect and immoral.
That was indeed the silliest sentence I've ever read. I don't know if its the saddest and stupidest though.
In a world where there was no way to enforce copyright laws or prevent copying, that would be the case. Artists would make their money by playing gigs and merchandising, and "buying" a song or an album would be just a way of tipping them.
Basically it means it's supposed to promote itself. It's also a final product, and it has a very measurable value.
This is why museums are nothing but directories or a table of contents. This is why "intellectual property" is so absurd.
A musician's "product" is as much a message as someone's blog post. One hopes that the message is understood and absorbed and possibly re-transmitted with elaborations and new insights.
Yeah I'm one of those guys who listens because he appreciates music and its fascinating properties in and of itself, not for sung poetry or any other nonsense.
My grandparents are artists. Like any artist, they package something important (a message) into something desirable (a work of art). If you realize the message is there at all, they have failed; if you absorb the message subconsciously without ever noticing it, they have done their jobs.
Interesting comparison between MA's argument and the argument that anything digitally reproduced should also be enjoyed free (the issue of Software repeatedly came up)