My son has a friend who has spent a lot of time becoming a very good guitarist. He's big into the music scene and the related popular culture. Unfortunately, he can't market the skills he spent years honing because his generation steals their music rather than buying it. At least in this respect, popular culture and the moral relativism it espouses is cannibalistic.
Do your own thing, baby. There are no rules any more.
3 comments:
This is what I've learned from the sages at digg and reddit (so wise beyond their years): you can't steal imaginary property.
Is not being able to make money from music new? From what I've been told by many people over many years, the only thing that has changed is who is robbing the musicians. In the old days, they got ripped off by the music publishers, who would take their music, sell it, and then moan and groan about not making any money and pay the musicians a pittance (if at all). For that matter, I understand that a standard practice was for the music publisher to *bill* the musicians, and not actually give them any money until the production costs were paid.
Now, they are cutting out the middleman and being ripped off directly by their fans. It's just a switch from wholesale theft to retail theft, but the musician still gets squat.
Expecting to actually get PAID (*gasp!*) for making music seems to have always been a big problem, except for the one-in-a-thousand musician who actually makes it sort of big. And the ones that make it big draw in enough young cannon-fodder musicians that there are always more of them to be taken.
(note: I neither make, sell, buy, steal, or even much listen to, music, so this is pretty much hearsay as far as I'm concerned)
They may have been cheated in the past, but at least there was some funding line to draw from. In this case, they're probably still being cheated, but cheated out of a much smaller revenue stream.
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