Comment by javier123454321
1 day ago
umm, I don't know if you've seen the current state of trying to make a living with music but It's widely accepted as dire. Touring is a loss leader, putting out music for free doesn't pay, stream counts payouts are abysmally low. No one buys songs.
All that is before the fact that streaming services are stuffing playlists with AI generated music to further reduce the payouts to artists.
> Yet here we are, hundreds of years later, live music is still desirable, plays still happen, and faceless voices are still around...
Yes all those things still happen, but it's increasingly untenable to make a living through it.
Is it though? Think about being a musician 200 years ago. In 1826 you needed to essentially be nobility or nobility-adjacent just to be able to touch an instrument let alone make a living from it. 100 years later, 1926 the barrier to entry was still sky high, nobody could make and distribute recordings without extensive investment. Nowadays it's not uncommon for a 17 year old to download some free composer software, sign up for a few accounts and distribute their music to an audience of millions. It's not easy to do, sure, but there is still opportunity that never existed. If you were to take at random a 20 year old from the general population in 1826, 1923, 1943, 1953, 1973, 83, etc, would you REALLY say that any of them have a BETTER opportunity than today?
Artists were saying this even before streaming, though, much less AI.
I listen pretty exclusively to metal, and a huge chunk of that is bands that are very small. I go to shows where they headliners stick around at the bar and chat with people. Not saying this to be a hipster - I listen to plenty of "mainstream" stuff too - but to show that it's hard to get smaller than this when it comes to people wanting to make a living making music.
None of them made any money off of Spotify or whatever before AI. They probably don't notice a difference, because they never paid attention to the "revenue" there either.
But they do pay attention to Bandcamp. Because Bandcamp has given them more ability to make money off the actual sale of music than they've had in their history - they don't need to rely on a record deal with a big label. They don't need to hope that the small label can somehow get their name out there.
For some genres, some bands, it's more viable than ever before to make a living. For others, yeah, it's getting harder and harder.
But this is different? Wholesale copying of copyrighted works and packaging it up and allowing it to be generated. It's not remotely reasonable