The Troubador and the Patron

http://indigestmag.com/blog/?p=7937

Excerpt:

For four thousand years, there were two ways to make a living as a musician.

You could be a troubadour. That is, strap your harp or lute or hurdy-gurdy on your back and travel town to town. Set up on a street corner, in a market square, or in the corner of a pub, and start playing. Sing the epic or play the requests and hope you make enough money or charity to get a hot meal and a place to sleep before you move on to the next town. You are Homer, you are any one of a number of anonymous medieval bards, you are a vaudevillian or music-hall performer, you are Woody Guthrie.

Or, you could find a patron. Become a court musician, write and play for banquets, weddings, religious holidays, coronations. You work for the Catholic Church, writing masses and choral music, playing organ and directing the choir. You are Haydn, whipping off a symphony a week for the court concerts. You live your life in the service industry, with art as a by-product. You are Handel, you are Lully, you are Palestrina.

Then, a hundred or so years ago, a window opened for a third model: the recording artist. Now, under the right circumstances, you could stay home and mass-produce a widget that could, in a way, do your touring for you. Like the old dream, you could clone yourself, and send all your widget clones to homes and bars and radio stations all around the world to, for a small fee, play private shows for as many people will have you. You are the later Beatles, Harry Nilsson, Brian Wilson, Glenn Gould.

That window appears to have closed. The CD, the cassette, the vinyl LP, are all more or less devalued below the level of the T-shirts and other dry goods that orbit the burnt-out sun of the music industry. 

Which brings us back to touring --- which for most musicians, means playing smaller venues.  We're at the very heart of a big revolution in music!

How much do music artists earn online?

from http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/

Sorry about the music industry's downfall ...

(again, it should be record industry, but ...)

The decline of the record industry, 1973-2009

This should be titled the RECORD industry, not the music industry ...

CDs are dying ... why to be upset, and why not to

From http://peterfeld.tumblr.com/post/2894761913/cds-are-dying-sony-closing-another-cd-production

shortformblog:

• 277 workers lost their jobs in 2003, after a Springfield, Ore. CD plant (run by Sony) closed
• 300 workers in Pitman, N.J. will lose their jobs when their CD plant closes on March 31
• one CD-manufacturing plant (in Terre Haute, Ind.) will exist in the US after that plant closes source

This is depressing but inevitable. When the number one album of the week sells only 44,000 copies, that indicates something needs changing.

Jeez, time for another snap stats lesson. Rankings are meaningless, here’s why: we live in a long-tail world where tastes are fragmented. For at least ten years or probably much longer, the vast bulk of people wouldn’t recognize the #1 song, haven’t seen the #1 movie or TV show or read the #1 book. That — by itself — doesn’t mean fewer people are buying music (though that is true too), it means we have more choices and the channels for those choices are siloized. In 1965 or 1975, everyone knew the #1 song, but there were fewer choices and they all played out over the same Top 40 AM radio stations, where you’d hear in succession the Beatles, Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Led Zeppelin, Stevie Wonder and the Carpenters. You can lament the segregation by taste and its impact on the culture, but the ability to be #1 with 44k sales doesn’t signal that the pie is smaller, just that there are more - narrower - slices.