How the Record Ruined Everything
Dec. 23rd, 2010 12:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sathorI had some interesting thoughts earlier today about the idea of recordings and what they might have done to the artists. I don't think anyone would argue that records make it easier for the consumer...on demand entertainment has become some kind of all-encompassing focus of both recent and past generations. But what about the artists?
If you go back before vinyl, what was the artists life like? Well, you'd have needed plenty of artists to appease the people of any geographic area...and it probably was a rather lucrative profession as a result. Travel was more difficult in those times, so different areas would've needed their own unique selection of local artists. This created a lot of jobs, because entertainment would have always been in demand - especially when people had little else to do besides read books, socialize and work.
I think that has changed quite a bit. True, even locally there's generally some sort of band playing at least every weekend. But I can't imagine them getting quite as many offers for gigs as they did in those days (after all, they play almost exclusively in bars - and bars already have what amounts to state-of-the-art sound systems and they can run the jukebox for free.) Nor can I imagine them getting paid quite as much relative to the time period for individual gigs. There's no way to know for sure, but I have an intuition about it.
If one imagined that people spent as much on entertainment in those days as they do today, relatively speaking, wouldn't that mean more artists making a living wage? After all, since the invention of the recording, it seems as though individual musicians have accomplished more and more, become more and more ridiculously wealthy, leaving less and less for the rest of us - those who are accomplished to varying degrees - a great many whom, especially, could appease a crowd.
The argument would be that these super-wealthy artists are the best the world has to offer. I'd have to kindly disagree...I don't really believe that's the case at all. I continue to meet talented, poor, working class musicians who are above and beyond what I'm hearing on the airwaves.
It's too bad that luck and desire to join the recording industry has a lot to do with whether or not you can ever really make music your living.
But I think what is worse, is knowing that the musician (and a great many more of them) played a much more valuable role in society in the past.
If you go back before vinyl, what was the artists life like? Well, you'd have needed plenty of artists to appease the people of any geographic area...and it probably was a rather lucrative profession as a result. Travel was more difficult in those times, so different areas would've needed their own unique selection of local artists. This created a lot of jobs, because entertainment would have always been in demand - especially when people had little else to do besides read books, socialize and work.
I think that has changed quite a bit. True, even locally there's generally some sort of band playing at least every weekend. But I can't imagine them getting quite as many offers for gigs as they did in those days (after all, they play almost exclusively in bars - and bars already have what amounts to state-of-the-art sound systems and they can run the jukebox for free.) Nor can I imagine them getting paid quite as much relative to the time period for individual gigs. There's no way to know for sure, but I have an intuition about it.
If one imagined that people spent as much on entertainment in those days as they do today, relatively speaking, wouldn't that mean more artists making a living wage? After all, since the invention of the recording, it seems as though individual musicians have accomplished more and more, become more and more ridiculously wealthy, leaving less and less for the rest of us - those who are accomplished to varying degrees - a great many whom, especially, could appease a crowd.
The argument would be that these super-wealthy artists are the best the world has to offer. I'd have to kindly disagree...I don't really believe that's the case at all. I continue to meet talented, poor, working class musicians who are above and beyond what I'm hearing on the airwaves.
It's too bad that luck and desire to join the recording industry has a lot to do with whether or not you can ever really make music your living.
But I think what is worse, is knowing that the musician (and a great many more of them) played a much more valuable role in society in the past.
