Elbows Music Blog Community

Time to move beyond record industry corruption.



who cares about "record stores", there are more "stores", outlet and music venue discussion to come, more technology to let people discuss and listen about music.  BIG deal, even the nostalgia value can be recreated. pathetic sentimentality that has nothing to do with good music.



lp,cd, album, casette, bla bla... they are just medium. plenty more medium to come and go.



But the corrupt record industry system must be eradicated . They should make honest buck like everybody else, by adding something of value instead minor packaging job and ripping off the public. Then suing everybody and paying lobbyists.

I agree with catbirdseat, that essentially the author is "correct" that sharing is permanently borrowing (ie "stealing" ) without compensation, but is it the one and only reason they don't have money? There is also the assumption that anyone who makes music DESERVES to enjoy a living from it, this simply is not true. Also, this mentality that if you are on Pitchfork you must be famous/rich is a bit skewed anyway. Seriously, I live in Calgary, Alberta, Canada - how the hell would I ever hear of a great indie band in New York without "filesharing" or "blogs", or whatever medium the music uses to make its way around the globe. So it begs the question are you poor and known, or poor and unknown and was any exposure via filesharing the actual reason you are poor? Basically, if I don't know who you are, I am clearly not buying anything from you as you do not exist in my world. Was there a study done prior to the internet that said all the unknown artists made great money and lived well, and the concept of sharing via the internet destroyed this?

Not to be a downer, but not all music is worthy, but again, I feel horrible when a band I really like doesn't get the $$ they deserve, so what I am talking about anyway. I think there needs to be a way to get more money to the artists, but I just don't know it. Is it dramatically lowering prices, so artists receive less from each sale but in theory would get more sales... I guess this would skew the Billboard charts though ;-)

I don't know why, but I feel I am defending file sharing...is that wrong?

Slowcoustic: "how the hell would I ever hear of a great indie band in New York without "filesharing" or "blogs"

Well, things got by fine for a hell of a lot of years without them, and relied on things like magazines, 'zines, touring, radio, word-of-mouth, shared mixtapes... basically, if you wanted to hear to a great indie band from New York, you could find them, but it was going to take you a lot of work to do so. And actually, that work was an important facet of the whole culture, I think. The fact that there is now so much music (and that it's "free") is not the only thing that has made people "devalue" music so much -- the fact that it takes essentially no effort at all to learn about it or get it has certainly done its share of damage as well.

the fact that it takes essentially no effort at all to learn about it or get it has certainly done its share of damage as well.

Exactly. And that's the problem I have with any articles like this - it's either all piracy's fault or never piracy's fault. No other factors or middle ground are ever considered.

I remember when Pulp's 'We Love Life' came out, and it was initially a UK-only release. I had to special order it (I spent nearly $40 on it) and wait weeks for it to arrive. I wouldn't have even known about it had I not been subscribed to about 15 different music mags at the time. Going even farther back, nearly any music I wanted had to be special ordered because I lived in a small town and we had only one record store, and they carried next to nothing. There was a lot of effort involved in being a music fan at that time, and it wasn't even that long ago.

I still order vinyl imports from Pure Groove & the like, but would most people even bother paying for imports any more? They'll likely either do a Google search and find it on Blogger (irony) or if they're inclined to go the legal route, they probably wait for Amazon to do it's $3.99 album special 3 months down the line.

There's SO much music out there, I think most people just go into information overload. We're bloggers and presumably music obsessives, yet even I can't keep up with half of this stuff. How could we expect the average consumer to? If the marketplace is flooded with an overabundance of product, value goes down. That's simply the reality of the current situation.

Posted by: catbirdseatbasically, if you wanted to hear to a great indie band from New York, you could find them, but it was going to take you a lot of work to do so. And actually, that work was an important facet of the whole culture, I think. The fact that there is now so much music (and that it's "free") is not the only thing that has made people "devalue" music so much -- the fact that it takes essentially no effort at all to learn about it or get it has certainly done its share of damage as well.

 

Not to elbow the debate off the path from sameolsville, but I call bullshit on this entire attitude.  In fact, I would argue that this whole self-aggrandizing "music was better because I worked so hard to find that one 7-inch" snobbery is one of the direct ancestors of today's devaluation of music.  Because the listener's work to put together a playlist now trumps the music on that playlist, people are so self-flattering about the choices they make that they don't consider the fact that their choices were lousy ones.  What you can do now is more easily note, without obscurer-than-thou elitism grafting some sense of listener "accomplishment" on to the quality of a record, just how terminally mediocre so much music is; the mistake is that people think things are more than mediocre simply because they've decided to champion choice x instead of choice y.  "You used to have to work harder to hear music, and that made music better" is like saying "San Francisco was so much better when you had to ride for months across the country in a covered wagon instead of taking a six-hour flight;" maybe you yourself are more interesting for doing that shit, and there's certainly something to be said for a more interesting population/audience/etc., but the city itself is more interesting playing the odds, having a bigger population/audience/etc.



Now you could argue -- with asterisks aplenty -- that the music itself worked plenty hard in the old days, having to jump higher to clear the few hurdles that existed.  Friends-of-friends etc aside, you had to impress that A&R guy, that label exec, that radio d.j., get on that single slot on the single late-night talk show, etc.  When the music had to work harder to earn one of the few spots available, it was sturdier.  That's a more interesting argument than "Music was better when one guy had that one record no one else could get."

Posted by: catbirdseatit seems that notion was instead interpreted as some kind of defense for super-obscurist hipper-than-thou music asshole posturing.

 

Possibly because the argument included "indie" and seemed to preclude the possibility of mainstream music generating as much and as deep a love though it comes via easy and free access points like radio.

the way i see it, nothing has really changed that much.



you still have a small segment of music buyers / fans who are all about it - live it breathe it, all over it.  sure, they annoy you when they tell you that Death album was so Feb 2009 and they potentially marginalize those good intentioned folks who are just looking to buy one or two cool records a year. 



but those heads give a shit and i'd rather have those than the alternative.  but i think our society is evolving to churn out fewer and fewer... (clears throat, gulp water), i'll proselytize for a moment here.



for me, i think the change has come in the mass audiences and music.  i truly think that we don't engender in young people any value for creativity.  most kids these days just shuttle between lacrosse and swim practice.  taking up a musical instrument is akin to putting a big "kick me" sign on your back. 



it's tough to develop an appreciation for art if you've never even tried it.  art is tough at first.  it takes some repetition to get used to something that might otherwise come off weird or jarring, but is intrinsically beautiful.     i'm not saying that as absolute, but i get crazy about music i like and i think because i've tried to create it my whole life and sucked at it... i have a deeper appreciation, maybe even a sense of awe. 



it should be alright to get all Salieri on shit sometimes.  i think that can be a reward if you really mean it.



(edit:  not a drunk post.  promise.)

Possibly because the argument included "indie" and seemed to preclude the possibility of mainstream music generating as much and as deep a love though it comes via easy and free access points like radio.

But that said, if you have a fixed budget for record buying, you're going to force yourself to spend more time with the albums -- because you paid for it -- than if you can download a dozen, skim and delete. Indie or not. For voracious music consumers, it's become much easier to toss aside albums without giving them a chance. Whether or not this has improved what we let reach our ears or has just made the listening experience shallower is arguable.

Before we rehash this conversation with pointless anecdotal evidence for the 1,000th time, can we please remember that in the larger perspective of centuries of music consumption, the rock era and bands-as-businesses is just an eyeblink and God forbid anybody experience music differently than we did when we were 13? Thanks.

adam, you're right on the money.

ryan, you're right on the money.

discovering music used to be so much more than it is. and while part of that is because of the way the internet changed the landscape, another large part of it is that we don't do enough to engender a deep appreciation for the music, the community and the effort involved on all parts.

rap is dead. it has nothing to say anymore. It's just endless rehash of recycled material piled up with banal words.  It's not rhythm and poetry, just remix and pathos.  Anybody with laptop and mic can flood the net with remixes these days. hypem popular list should tell you that.



The soulful art in it is gone. A little hard for a kid to pretend to be oppressed innercity minority when he is actually a suburban dweller burried in gadget with too much time in his hand.

Um, squashed, I'm pretty sure people say the same thing about most music.... Rap's not dead, artforms don't generally "die" in such grand absolutes, they go underground, out of fashion, etc, etc, but they don't die. Hell, I bet you can still find a few beatnik poets hanging around a coffee shop or two.

drip
drop
drip
ginsberg goes...
drip
drop
drip
man...

Maybe you should dig deeper somewhere else? I'm no rap aficionado, but maybe there's a cool local scene somewhere you could sink your teeth into?

Ah, squashed sounds like you are getting old, man!

wait.. is Squashed really Nas?

it all makes so much sense now..

If this year's BET Awards proved anything to me, it's that hip-hop should be embarrassed that old, rich, married Jay-Z is not only still the best rapper, but the one who has to call everybody out for not rapping anymore. I like Drake OK, though.