All the non-mainstream music makes I follow since I was a teenager complain that music has never been in a harder place in terms of making money off of it. Apparently their piece of the cake has massively reduced.
This should be expected, given that the amount of artists making commercial non-mainstream music has skyrocketed. The pie has gotten bigger, and the non-mainstream share of the pie has gotten bigger, but there's a lot more people fighting over its scraps.
There’s a whole market of tool-assisted beat and melody makers that build and curate then offer these for sell for artists to buy. The whole process is heavily industrialised, tools allow the maker to produce dozens of such bricks a day, basically bruteforcing a whole space, but everything resembles everything else, diluted to no end, channeling the money stream and bleeding the “old way” creators to death.
Albums have been dying for a while already, even EPs are barely living corpses in this attention grabbing landscape. Even for singles there’s just no way to mature ideas and create truly creative content in an amount of time that allows to keep up pace and make money through these platforms. So they stay on the local scene, which is being obliterated by COVID.
I think this idea is misguided. The more music you produce, the more good music you produce. Trying to keep average quality up by restricting production is counterproductive in two separate ways; (1) it ends up causing you to produce lower-quality output than otherwise, and (2) nobody cares that you released some bad songs if you also released some good songs.
I read a fun paper documenting this very effect (the first one) in a college pottery class. One class was told the grading procedure would be as follows:
1. Over the course of the term, you make some pots. It's up to you.
2. Turn in all your pots at the end of the term.
3. The instructor will evaluate your pots for quality, and you will receive a grade accordingly.
A second class was told they'd be graded like so:
1. Over the course of the term, you make some pots. It's up to you.
2. Turn in all your pots at the end of the term.
3. The instructor will never look at your pots. They will be smashed into tiny shards, and your shards will be weighed. Your grade will be based on the weight of your accumulated pots after they are destroyed. More is better.
In fact, the pots in group two were evaluated for quality just like group one. Students in group two produced more pots. They also produced better pots.
Also, it’s not justified to assume artists didn’t practice and produce early iterations e between public releases.
So what? Where did I make that assumption?
I'm assuming some combination of these two factors:
1. If you have three public releases, you probably put in more work overall than if you had only two public releases.
2. There are diminishing returns to polishing a song, such that the same amount of work is more productive spent on two songs than it is spent on a single song.
Or maybe you put in less work into each release?
There are many authors who produce one or two books a year, and those books are complete garbage. Some of the the best authors in history just wrote a few masterpieces.
Even with artists that were capable of a great output, it's not obvious that the quality of their art improves with time, beyond their formative years.
Some of the best authors in history just released a few masterpieces.
They'll likely have written a lot more.
This article sheds some light on the issue https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/should-spo...
Maybe the problem is not that it is hard for non-mainstream music to find its supporters. Maybe the problem is that non-mainstream musicians are deluded to think they have enough supporters to make a living off their music.
Even YouTubers that produce free content can make a living off Patreon. Even some podcasters can.
They just need to change the model. A Youtuber doesn't have 80% of their earnings go to a record label.
The issue is that attention is a scarce resource, and the means to keep it through market formulas and analysis of trends have become way too effective. Artists are now in a race to the bottom where they have to choose between playing the game, and changing their style, message and work to chase engagement metrics, or resign themselves to be drowned and forgotten for staying "real"
Youtubers suffer the same fate. You can see people moving from tech reviews to game streaming and then to music production or vlogging in their search for views. But they (most of them) are more businessmen than artists, and don't feel tied to a message or artistic vision that they need to communicate.
I'd argue that an ideal system should have a place for artistic quality to shine beyond entertainment, and that used to happen, at least to a higher degree than it does now. Which is not to say that everything's worse: the tools to become a creator are better and more accessible than ever (hardware, resources to learn, etc).