Comment by namlem
7 years ago
Making music isn't virtually free though. It's just the copying of music that has already been made that's basically free. Plenty of labor still goes into the production process. Copyright has plenty of flaws, but is there a better alternative to incentivize the creation of music and art?
There's two points --
Just because we want some copyright, doesn't mean we want the current system. There's lots of room to have mixed strategies, eg personal use copying of music is free but public performance requires a license. (Basically, the de facto state now.) And there's lots of reason to believe we should adjust the current system (and business models built around it) somehow, because it's clear that what we have legislated isn't optimal... or in some ways even workable.
Secondly, why not Kickstarter it? (or Patreon? or sell merchandise? etc.) There's no reason not to collect a pool of money, escrow it (with some payments to live on during), and hand it over when they release an album. They get paid for certain and the public can listen to the album as much as they want. This seriously hurts the machine that is pop music, but is that really a bad thing? I think we can do better as a culture than what we presently have (in the form of big, centrally controlled companies/networks).
There are lots of ways to fund music and musicians without the current paradigm. People like art and want to support art they enjoy. (And for that matter, music managed to get funded for all of human history without the present system... So I suspect the concern is overstated.)
I know it's somewhat beside your point, but production has also become a great deal cheaper. An entry-level external audio interface and DAW package will set you back a couple hundred dollars or euros at most, and will basically give you all the tools to do professional quality recording, mixing and mastering.
It's a pretty big change too, considering that just a couple decades ago the only feasible way to make recordings of any kind at home was cassette tapes.
So have the hardware and software required to write software. It still takes time though. I couldn't write software for a living if people didn't pay for it, even if I used free tools and free computers. The most expensive thing is my time. The same would be true if I wrote music.
The cost of making music is nowadays the cost of the time of the artists.
Recording can be done essentially for free (less than 10,000$). In fact many artists chose to have a studio at home and do away with that cost entirely.
As a lot of artists effectively work for free: the cost is zero.
In fact, the expectation nowadays, in many cases I've personally heard from them, is that new artists proposing themselves to a label are expected to come with a full master of their debut, self paid.