Music’s Price To Hit Zero If It Hasn’t Done So Already

YOU need to pay the mortgage. YOU need to go on vacation to the Caribbean. But the new musicians? They’re willing to sleep on the floor and eat ramen. Hell, they’re in their twenties, they’re not on the corporate track, they’ve got different ambitions!

This flummoxes the old wave. Especially after the eighties and nineties. You’re supposed to go through the usual filters. Get a lawyer and a manager and then shop your demo to labels, who get to not only decide whether to sign you, but what your music should sound like. But the music coming from said majors…it makes the new music-makers puke. So they’re doing it their own way. They care as much about the old system as snowboarders care about skiers. In other words, NOT AT ALL! They believe they’ve got a better system.

Popular music wasn’t always such big business. Go back to the press of the British Invasion acts. They were doing it on a lark, they didn’t expect it to be a lifelong career. And they got ripped off and underpaid until they survived long enough to work on THEIR terms.

…You say kids can’t make it giving their music away for free because YOU can’t make it. But they can outlast you, starve for years all in pursuit of their art. They don’t want an expensive video, never mind a stylist. They don’t want to play the game. And, if you don’t play the game, I hate to tell you, it just doesn’t cost that much.

To believe that the majors will be the logical filters in the future is to be completely ignorant. They’re only necessary if you want to reach the masses INSTANTLY! Is that a good thing? Furthermore, as every day goes by, it’s easier and easier to reach more people for almost free. Hell, you post your stuff on MySpace, and if you’re any good, your friends will tell EVERYBODY! You might not sell “Thriller” numbers, but “Thriller” was twenty five years ago, when we were all beholden to the box, to MTV. Today everybody’s scattered in a million different directions. The mainstream is the Top Forty joke of the seventies. It’s a dying vine. Hell, just look at SoundScan. The “hit” albums sell ever fewer. And the problem isn’t piracy, but the fact that so much of the theoretical potential audience has tuned out, isn’t paying attention. Why listen to crap radio when you’ve got an iPod?

• “This economic approach helps show us how recorded music has long lost any notion of being a ‘pure private good’ and now risks becoming a ‘pure public good’.

• “Music has become ‘non-rivalrous’ (If I consume an mp3 file, that doesn’t prevent you, and vice versa) and ‘non-excludable’ (it’s increasingly hard to deny others access).

• “The theory is supported by evidence: P2P networks creating non-excludability and the unlimited ‘long tail’ supply of digital content is non-rival in its consumption.

• “Both supermarkets and Spiral Frog are shown as ‘Tipping Points’ which risk pushing recorded music into a public good status – where the market could fail.