The Problem with Music (1993)

Courtney Barnett (Milk records) does exactly that ~ http://www.yenmag.net/music/courtney-barnett/ and http://www.milkrecords.com.au/

I asked this Q because this was one piece of advice David Briggs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Briggs_%28producer%29) gave NY and Crazy horse - "Never give up the master tapes."

* Attention is scarce. There's lots of competition for it.

* Revenue sources are scarcer. People expect to pay less (or not pay) for recordings than they used to. Part of this is because the industry dropped the ball and let non-blessed outlets set expectations. But that by itself would be manageable -- under a pay-for-recording system with loose digital restrictions, people might be able to get a hold of free music, but they know the difference between being patrons and mooches, and some critical mass that likes what they hear will choose the former. Streaming services make this fuzzier, and buffet streaming services like Spotify could actually outright kill this: they aim not to replace radio but recording collections in general (and replace recording revenue with fractional stream plays that are orders of magnitude smaller). But they make users think they're participating patrons.

* Performance is a risk-heavy, often capital intensive, and non-scaleable way of getting revenue.

* Telling musicians to support themselves with T-shirts and tchochkes is another way of saying they should have a job besides making music (which is fine if you actually believe that, I suppose, but it's another way of saying you don't care if they spend more of their time refining their compositions/performances).

Not to take away from the quality of his music, which is really good (I have a few on my playlists), but there were also plenty of other very good musicians that tried thing-a-week and didn't break through.

Basically the context of the talk was much broader and unless you see it for yourself my interpretation will not do it justice.

Please cite some sources. The parent says there aren't and you say there are. I'm leaning towards believing the parent as I haven't seen many and I've seen some large indie bands post figures and they are barely making the average wage.

>a lot of independent musicians who have achieved massive success outside of the traditional recording studio model in the internet age, largely through selling their own work and through touring.

No there aren't. There are very, very few professional musicians working that route, and hardly any of them have achieved 'massive success.' Most of the ones who did already had an old-style label-based career, or at least label+management backing.

Most of the really successful ones don't sell their own work and perform. They write and arrange songs for top performers, or they work as producers - which is what Albini does now, mostly - or they do work-for-hire movie and game soundtracks, or they write commercial music for ads, or they work as sound designers.

Being a famous name performer is a career that works for a tiny handful of (mostly) singers, who are primarily picked for sexiness and (sometimes) charisma, not for musical creativity.

Stanislaw Lem wrote about this in the '60's. He predicted that "cybernetics" and democracy would allow the number of creators to increase enormously, but posited that the number of actual "geniuses" was small, fixed, and already almost exhausted within the current artistic community. Therefore the signal (great art) would get lost in the noise (junk produced because it could be.)

There are issues with this view--it assumes that great art is an objectively real phenomenon rather than a contingent social creation, amongst other things--but a brief perusal of Amazon's e-book offerings makes it hard to argue that the rate of creation has vastly outpaced the quality of creation. I daresay the same has happened with regard to music.

The great unsolved problem of the new era is criticism. Critics (who may have simply been record company flacs) acted as gatekeepers who allowed only material of a certain quality through. It may not have been the "best" by some standards, but it usually met some basic threshold of technical quality, which is more than can be said for the current era.

major label : publishing company :: soundcloud : wordpress

With content distribution so leveled nowadays, a musician's "being in a band" feels equivalent to a writer's "having a blog".

"We could have played a duo show instead of hiring six people to tour with us. That would have saved us over $50,000, but it was important at this stage in Pomplamoose’s career to put on a wild and crazy rock show. We wanted to be invited back to every venue, and we wanted our fans to bring their friends next time. The loss was an investment in future tours."

So it seems they suspected that investing less in production would have meant lower ticket sales for that tour and in the future, which is a rational suspicion regardless of how accurate it would have ended up being. Plus, if they had stripped it down, they still couldn't tour twelve months out of the year so it still wouldn't have amounted to a decent yearly income.

At any rate, the point is that Pomplamoose is very well-known and even if they overshot by a few tens of thousands of dollars, it still shows that touring isn't exactly big bucks for even well-known indie bands.

More commentary:

http://www.artistempathy.com/blog/the-pomplamoose-problem-ar...