So, as you may be aware, music albums don’t sell like they used to.
Here’s some charts from 2014 about it, so it’s 9 years out of date now and I think pre-dates the spotify like fraction of a penny per play model that stuff like spotify does these days as well as the further resurgence of vinyl (you can sort of see it start):
https://www.thecurrent.org/feature/2014/02/20/40-years-of-album-sales-data-in-two-handy-charts
Because of this bands generally seek their income sources through other avenues such as liscencing deals, selling merch, using recurrant crowdfunding income platforms like Patreon, or, famously, getting most of their money doing live shows. This is kind of interesting, really. Over the course of the 20th century and the lead up and birth of the information age, music and performance went from something that was successful if a bunch of people went to saw it live, to something that was successful if thousands of people bought the media it was on and… well, then the internet happened, and success is again something that you have in a bunch of people showing up to see you live. By progressing the information age has taken an art form experienced in person, made it media, and then made it turn around and become something ideally experienced in person again. Pretty weird.
I don’t think this is just true of music, many digital artists make their money more off merch and conventions than they do off of art they make for and put on the internet too.
But, here’s the next thing: Computers are getting better at generating audio, writing and visual arts without the hand of the artist, and because of that, I think that technology is going to start devaluing stuff on the internet and creating more and more of an interest from creators and from audiences in things off-the-net. And, much like how things were at the start of last century, we’re going to live in a world looking a lot (artistically) like it did before the invention of the technologies that allowed things to spread to a mass market. The internet, the printing press, the microphone, still there, but not the end-all be-all they made themselves. The information age, by progressing and creating more and more technology capable of more and more things, ironically, could be taking us full circle around to making things more and more not for technology.
At the end of the day, yes, echoes of everything we do is gonna end up online by our hands or others’, but will that cease to become meaningful? possibly.
Anyway those were some musings, I wonder if they’ll turn out true? Well, I’m the one saying they could.
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