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Introduction
The Article Summed Up
Pay vs. Passion
The Mass May Emphasize The Few
Closing
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Introduction
The internet is an amazing place. A place where people can find everything that they’re looking for or would care to look for. It’s a great place for business, and it lets musicians and artists and writers reach out to audiences well beyond the population of their immediate surroundings.
And getting things out to more eyes - especially when you pursue something in the arts - is essential. Having someone with the right connections see and enjoy what you create could lead to your being discovered, or at least to your picking up an important gig or job.
But an article in the Globe and Mail from Tuesday 12 June 2012 raises a counterpoint to this sort of optimism about the arts on the internet.
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The Article Summed Up
The article, ("A leg up for artists or a step back for the biz?" by Guy Dixon), is about the digital music provider TuneCore. It’s a service that hosts musicians' works for a flat fee and lets them sell these works without any commission being taken from sales.
So, instead of losing 30% of every sale as is the case with iTunes, musicians pay the $9.99 or $49.99 annual fee to host their song or album and then bank whatever profit comes their way.
Admittedly this sounds like a sweet system. Make more than your fee and production costs and you can see actual profit from your music. The site also provides a songwriting copyright registration service that can help artists see international royalties come in if their works are used in the right contexts for $49.99.
Plus, according to TuneCore’s Jeff Price, about 1000 artists made over $1000 in one month around February. As far as income from art goes, that’s nothing to sneeze at.
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Pay vs. Passion
Yet, the point that the article’s author raises, alongside Pete Townshend, is that services like TuneCore may get musicians paid, but they don’t guarantee that they’re “heard.” That is, it turns music from an artistic pursuit into something more monetarily driven, it takes out the creative feedback that bands might receive from a record label’s Artists and Repertoire (A&R) department or from listeners themselves.
And, Townshend notes, it’s this feedback that artistic people want. They want to know that what they’re doing is appreciated, and not just picked up on a whim and never really given a thorough listen.
That music becomes more commercial when it’s easier for people to get their music out there and sold without all of the barriers presented by record labels. After all, their taking their percentages and ownership of copyrights (neither of which TuneCore takes) is problematic.
If people are making music to make money rather than making music to make music, turning it into a way to live rather than a way of life, then there’s a risk run that the experience will be cheapened.
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The Mass May Emphasize The Few
However, the mass number of artists that services like TuneCorp enable won’t really affect music as an art form.
There will always be a mass of popular bands and musicians that appeal to a wide audience, but then there will always be those acts or artists that are iconic. The David Bowies, the They Might Be Giants, the Björks that really only sound better for all of their mediocre competitors.
After all, the more noise there is, the more harmonious and wonderful true music becomes. And the more musicians there are promoting and creating music, the more points of reference there will be to show just how great great musicians can be, making the medium much more accessible and more appealing to more people.
In fact, as more and more people successfully make music in capitalist terms, more and more people will be able to appreciate it since more people will be able to “get into it.”
The result of this nigh-on-utopic spread of musical appreciation is that more and more people will be able to find something that really appeals to them as individuals and as communities, strengthening the identities and confidence of all.
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Closing
Check back here on Friday for a search for the good in the Ralph Bakshi flop, Cool World.
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