- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
The growing popularity of the “Bowie” bond — a security backed by royalties — may sound strange, but it’s nothing new. In treating songs like annuities, capitalists prove once again that nothing is too sacred, or silly, to be commodified.
You must log in or register to comment.
The more I understand economics and the longer I live with it, the more capitalism seems like a death cult.
Extract all resources, concentrate all power, do war, collapse, repeat.
We were doing that well before capitalism was a thing. We learn from history that we don’t learn from history…
The music industry is dead. There is no music industry anymore. What once was the recording industry is now just a part of the finance industry. That’s why nothing new has been coming up in the (mainstream) music world and that’s why nothing but crap is on the movies. Why discover or produce anything new and risky when you can make good money selling and buing copyrights and bundling them into “finance product”? Why come up with new “products” for cinema when you have an ongoing and predictable(!) stream of profit from the 957th shitty sequel of a well established franchise?
They won’t stop there. AAA game developers and the awful productivity software giants like Adobe, Oracle and Microsoft themselves have already gotten everybody used to live service, cloud software, and subscription models where they have all the control and you’re just renting. They will destroy indie software and games next too, if we let them, Microsoft’s TPM requirement on Windows 11 is likely just the first step in putting up unbreakable walls around their garden, which they would build even faster if Linux weren’t providing real competition they can’t just buy to suppress.
Thanks to Linux, LibreOffice, Inkscape, Blender, Ardour and Ableton I’ve been able to avoid any of these so far. I certainly hope to keep doing so. Actually, with some will to adapt to new software and slightly different workflows it still seems possible. Kicking WaveLab and Waves seemed hard at first but I can’t say I am missing them now.
Does Ableton work well on Linux in your experience? What’s the best recipe? I haven’t tried it yet, but awesome if it works!
I’m not running it on Linux, usually. Live is pretty much the only thing I am running from the Windows partition of my laptop. I did, however, run it on my PC on a Virtualboxed Windows and -IIRC- also under wine64. The virtualized variant ran like on bare iron. Absolutely no problem, not even with hardware synths via MIDI. I think the wine install also worked fine - at least I can’t remember having any problems with Ableton on a Linux PC. The one thing that will cause problems with wine are VST(i)s. You’d have to install each one with wine and hope they’ll coexist with the shared environment.
“You will own nothing and you will be happy.”
Well, at least the first part
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hhcdIemIkg
I think the thing, at least with music, is that creating it nowadays is next to free (you just need a DAW), so it is very possible for the biggest bangers to be created by a hobbyist with some skill and free time. In a way it is better today than it was before because there is nothing financially stopping the biggest natural talents from raising to the top.
It’s tragic in a way that as soon as the technology made it possible for anyone to rise up, capitalism stepped in to smack us all back down.
I might have created the best music in a generation but it will get smothered unless I can find a capitalist to invest in it heavily enough for it to get heard.
Surely wouldn’t the best music spread by itself, by virtue of its quality? Maybe I’m underestimating the role that the established music industry still plays.
Yes, in a purely free and meritocratic market it would. But the reality is that whoever has the most capital to invest in a release skews the market in their favour by getting a bigger share of finite attention/exposure, whether that’s radio plays or playlist placements.
Free market capitalism is an oxymoron and a failure in its own terms, not just in the arts but across the board. And there will be no music on a dead planet.
Music taste is super subjective and the barriers of entry are incredibly low now. There’s a lot of sour grapes in the art fields that I side eye. Like incredibly gates open for all and equality in their persona but among close friends they’re complaining about how much competition there is how they wish it was like how it was back in the where it was way harder and more expensive to get into music as if they’d be the one to make it through the gatekeepers like Harvey Weinstein and P Diddy
There’s a ton of good music. Every year thousands and thousands of new quality music artists put music on YouTube and music subscription services. If you live in a big city, look up all the music venues including small stage coffee shops, you’ll see hundreds of good artists you’ve possibly never heard of. All these artist either local or going on a national tour, they’re all mostly paycheck to paycheck.
Broke musician/singer/writer was the standard in the 90s and before. Broke musician/singer/writer is the standard today just there’s a whole lot more of them and the Internet to hear the bitterness of not succeeding in making a lot of money off ones art
Besides that, the “best” music spreads itself on its own to a small niche of people. On one hand because of the Internet, you can be incredibly cheap on marketing compared to the past. On the other hand there’s so much music out there that marketing and knowing the right people is more important than ever. More competition than ever before.
Like before you pretty much had to pay money to get money on radio, television, play in any venue, get your music heard by industry influencers to have a shot as someone selling their own music. Now you don’t have to but really from what I’ve seen, the Internet indie to mainstream success seems pretty dead to me so you have to spend a lot of money to actually make a career out of your own music. Even just being a freelance studio musician, good luck. World class classical musician, good luck getting into any orchestras that pays well. Better off private teaching and recording holiday music covers
Context, if it’s ten years and your most popular song on YouTube has 4 million views and that was over ten years, you made some money. Not a lot and that was spread over ten years. You better have another income stream besides album sales and Internet streams or else you’d be homeless. Got to your hard. Sell merch. Write songs for other people. Work at Wal Mart. 4 million views in ten years is both an incredible success and not much money. That’s not even taking into account how much money was spent on production/studio time/etc to get 4 million YouTube views in ten years
So traditional music industry is incredibly important to success because they market. They have money to place music where people hear it. Most people don’t search for music they like, they stumble on it passively which means what’s marketed to them. What gets in Spotify playlists. What is on radio and television. What’s used in a major movie. Used by their favorite super popular influencer. Today you have greater access to reaching people but so does everyone else so marketing and networking matter an incredible amount and that’s where traditional music companies come into play
I wonder why we’re listening to the same one song (and its’ twenty clones) on the radio over and over again. Day after day, year after year. And don’t even remind me to the christmas loop. That terror will start soon enough again.
I encourage you to find other things to listen than radio.
Depends. In my area we have some awesome radio providers, promoting local bands and ventures and unknown music from around the world.
I’ve got plenty of altermatives. I just can’t always avoid exposition to radio emissions. A trip across half of Europe this month with the fucking car “entertainment” system not recognizing any of my thumb drives and USB-SSDs was experience enough to be reminded to all the songs I had hoped to never have to hear again.
