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/u/AuthorIntelligent644
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Anyone who lived through the rise of Napster and mass music piracy on the Internet remembers Lars Ulrich of Metallica, how he condemned it, and how he was laughed at as an out of touch old musician who'd made too much money in the old system.
I think history has proven him right. Mass industrial-scale piracy was used to break the recording industry not to make way for something that would empower artists more but to bring them to a state of desperation where they'd sell their music for nothing to huge tech companies. These companies could then monetize it through streaming.
This cut the bottom out of the music industry financially. As much as people like to say things like music (and writing, and every other kind of art) should be "pure" and "not about the money," the fact is that everything costs money and without a revenue model there's no way to sustain music as a career. If you can't do that, then there's no way musicians can not have "day jobs," which means musicians can never completely dedicate themselves to making music. It also means you can't support an ecosystem of scouts, recording experts, producers, etc. to polish music and make it excellent.
Today all we have are a tiny number of over-produced pop acts that basically all sound the same and never take true musical risks. They don't take risks because when you cut the bottom out of a market one of the first things to die is risk taking. Nobody is going to sign a Trent Reznor or a Kurt Kobain or a bunch of weird artists from the hood with a new thing called "hip-hop" because it's not proven, and industries that have had their legs cut off are only willing to take risks on things that are proven. There's no financial "slack" to allow risk taking.
You also have a few who have managed to break out using social media and stuff like that, but there's only a tiny number of these. I feel like I could count them on the fingers of one hand. Breaking out big through social media enough to actually make a decent living as a true musician is harder than getting a recording contract ever was.
Lars was right. Mass industrial-scale piracy was not the only thing that destroyed music, but it was one of the biggest nails in the coffin.
(I am not saying the recording industry was good, and I don't think Lars was arguing that. He was arguing that the new thing is even worse for artists, and I think history has shown that he was right.)
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I think history has proven him right. Mass industrial-scale piracy was used to break the recording industry not to make way for something that would empower artists more but to bring them to a state of desperation where they'd sell their music for nothing to huge tech companies. These companies could then monetize it through streaming.
This cut the bottom out of the music industry financially. As much as people like to say things like music (and writing, and every other kind of art) should be "pure" and "not about the money," the fact is that everything costs money and without a revenue model there's no way to sustain music as a career. If you can't do that, then there's no way musicians can not have "day jobs," which means musicians can never completely dedicate themselves to making music. It also means you can't support an ecosystem of scouts, recording experts, producers, etc. to polish music and make it excellent.
Today all we have are a tiny number of over-produced pop acts that basically all sound the same and never take true musical risks. They don't take risks because when you cut the bottom out of a market one of the first things to die is risk taking. Nobody is going to sign a Trent Reznor or a Kurt Kobain or a bunch of weird artists from the hood with a new thing called "hip-hop" because it's not proven, and industries that have had their legs cut off are only willing to take risks on things that are proven. There's no financial "slack" to allow risk taking.
You also have a few who have managed to break out using social media and stuff like that, but there's only a tiny number of these. I feel like I could count them on the fingers of one hand. Breaking out big through social media enough to actually make a decent living as a true musician is harder than getting a recording contract ever was.
Lars was right. Mass industrial-scale piracy was not the only thing that destroyed music, but it was one of the biggest nails in the coffin.
(I am not saying the recording industry was good, and I don't think Lars was arguing that. He was arguing that the new thing is even worse for artists, and I think history has shown that he was right.)
submitted by /u/AuthorIntelligent644
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