When you still find an employer, that makes a contract like that, call yourself lucky. In my country, it is a law -- and you can't cancel out laws in my country in contracts.
Not everybody is so lucky, that he has enough money or finds fitting freelancer work.
Ask the music people. They (oftentimes) can't sell their music without having contracts with big companies -- and they have to sell out all their rights.
But it seems that you just view the world from your standpoint -- fading out any negatives -- and everybody that has different experiences as you do, is just stupid or "obtuse" in your view. With such an attitude on your side, a discussion makes little to no sense.
There are lots of musicians who aren't producing a living-wage's worth of value to listeners.
They do have a choice: they can get a better paying job if they don't like the amount they can earn from music. Society should not be responsible for funding someone's passion when there isn't demand.
And yes, the expectation that you can earn a good living just by being a recording artist is foolish. The vast majority of musicians throughout history have been unable to do so.
Why don't you become a musician and try to make it before laying it out like this? They hardly have another choice. Do you immediately assume 95% of artists are entrepreneurial fools?
> Making a livelihood by getting paid for the work I do and its value on the market [...]
You're only getting paid because people have to pay you the market rate for your work. If a musician creates and records a song [1], releases it at market rates (say, 2 USD), and everyone can just copy it without repercussions, he won't be able to make a living, no matter how productive he is.
[1] Which entails many hours of work, plus equipment costs.
Aspiring musicians appreciate the vast odds against them becoming the Next Big Thing. It takes an extremely young or naive person to believe that they will become a wild success off the back of some unpaid gigs or their YouTube channel.
In fact, most musicians that I know are rightly insistent on being paid for their performances and are suspicious of promoters and agents who are eager for them to gain exposure by playing for free.
Edit: Essentially there is a continuum of risk/reward between
* Consulting or creating a small and stable business (or, say, playing as a session musician)
* Buying lottery tickets.
I just don't think that people are always aware of where they are on that scale and it doesn't seem right to give people false impressions of where they and their ideas stand. Yeah I do sound like a grumpy sod :)
I recently caught part of a radio interview where a musician bemoaned the fact that he used to be able to sell 10,000 copies of a CD and make a living, whereas now he can have millions of listeners online but still not cover the production costs.
That doesn't mean the market values such effort. They have no right to demand to be paid just because something takes skill. Lots of skilled activities are of no value to the market. And I say this as a musician who's very aware of the effort involved.
Being a full-time musician is a job too, with the equivalent of interviewing. If someone prefers software, let them.
And you can't quit your job to live minimally if you have zero or less net worth. Expenses only go so low.
Saying it's "easy to be free" is massively condescending to every person that struggles to get over the poverty line. Not everyone can just "get" gigs whenever they want.
If all gigs were fixed price or piece-work projects, I'd buy into your argument. In the real world, you've got to deal with timelines and time+materials budgets. Do you really expect to get repeat business if your customer perceives that they're being billed for your time on Facebook?
All I'm hearing from your comment is "You're lucky that I'm working for you. You need to work around MY work habits." The problem with that is that only 20% of the people who say that are rock stars. The other 80% only think they are.
I actually believe in the free market, and of course it is nowhere set in stone that musicians are entitled to make money off their music. I just wanted to point out that to say "but see, they have more ways of making money than ever" is a bit besides the point.
I suppose some artists will find ways to survive, but just because somebody is a talented musician doesn't make them talented T-Shirt designers or even talented live show performers (making music does not imply performing anymore these days). Film music is also not a good way out, because film is plagued from the same problems as music.
As a professional musician, I can corroborate this, but I can also say that this is why most musicians have day jobs. We go into the business knowing that it will never pay our bills, and usually involves investments which will never pay themselves back. (Orchestral and studio musicians are the exception, but those jobs are few and far between and reserved for the best of the best.)
Being signed, though, indentures you to a label. If I'm going to be playing music for love, and not for money, than I'm certainly not gonna put on shackles and let somebody else make money off of my music.
Getting downvoted but my opinion stands: being a musician is not a job and you can't expect to get paid for it. It would be like expecting to get paid for playing video games. Making music is a leisure activity and a very rewarding one. Thinking you should make a living on it is just greedy. Get a normal job and create music for its own sake.
That's true, but at the same time there's more absolutely fantastic music in the world than I will ever be able to able to listen to in my lifespan. While you or I might not be able to produce it, there are probably thousands if not millions of artists out there who produce worthwhile music.
I'm not saying they're overpaid, but it is an interesting economic observation that the supply side of the market might be oversaturated relative to the demand.
Yes. Even among those who hope someday to make music their living, many will opt to forgo immediate profit for experience and exposure alone.
My personal attitude (in general, I haven't contributed to this site) is that it's incredibly difficult and even soul-sucking to try and earn a decent living in music performance, let alone composition, so I don't even try. Instead, I have a day job - I work in IT for my alma mater - and in return for reduced time available for music, I get complete freedom to pursue the musical projects I want at my own pace. This way I can be sort of my own patron. Sure, getting paid for music would be nice, but I'm not going to insist on it for a given project unless that was the only way to make said project worthwhile to me, in which case I probably wouldn't undertake it in the first place. I suspect there are a good many freelance musicians nowadays who also take this approach.
I'm a musician. But I will never make music like that. Also I will never use Daniel Ek's platform, unless I just by pure chance become one of the biggest out there, which I doubt. But then I don't make music for a living, and nor would I want to–especially in this day and age–despite a lot of folks telling me that I probably should.
The question then becomes, when I already know other valuable professions, why would I want to? Then the income would have to rival the other work I can do. I mean, I do get more pleasure from making music, but only because I don't overdo it. Work, on the other hand, is work. If I made music into work, I'm not sure I'd like it anymore. So then whatever I produce is intermittent.
But, if I wanted to make music a secondary activity, that doesn't need to be my main source of income, then yeah, I'd probably keep pushing music to places like Bandcamp. And I guess that's the beauty of it, because now there finally is a niche for us who don't want to be slaves to the art. Or to Ek's platform. So while Ek makes these outrageous claims, I'll be doing something completely different. And when I do decide to make love to my guitar, the music that comes out of it, will be a love child, and not the work of a mindless slave.
This is why I think "working musicians" never have to become slaves of the stupid and oppressive ideas of people like Ek. I just don't buy into that crap. There's a market. And that market has alternatives that also works for us who "just" want to release stuff intermittently. In fact I don't even use his platform to listen to music. Why, when there are so many great alternatives, that are also much more fair to the creators? (I guess an Ek fanboi downvoted. Hey if you've got something to say, say it, coward!)
The system is obviously flawed, but the example is not very convincing. $85k a year to do what you love, for alot less hours than a regular job (it doesn't take 2000 hours to make a record), whether the record is a dud or not? That seems pretty good to me.
So give me 85k salary, a half million dollar budget to spend on production, and tell me I need to make a website of my choosing sometime within the next year, which you'll then spend potentially millions of dollars promoting. I don't have much upside in this unless it's a mega-success, but I have no downside and can choose to shoot for the stars or make something important and useful. Is it me or does this sound like a far better deal than most developers have?
Perhaps musicians should stop feeling that being able to sing or play is a golden ticket and anything that blocks them from being a member of the idle rich is the acme of economic injustice.
I guess, you are.
When you still find an employer, that makes a contract like that, call yourself lucky. In my country, it is a law -- and you can't cancel out laws in my country in contracts.
Not everybody is so lucky, that he has enough money or finds fitting freelancer work.
Ask the music people. They (oftentimes) can't sell their music without having contracts with big companies -- and they have to sell out all their rights.
But it seems that you just view the world from your standpoint -- fading out any negatives -- and everybody that has different experiences as you do, is just stupid or "obtuse" in your view. With such an attitude on your side, a discussion makes little to no sense.
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