Casio CZ/ VZ/ FZ - Pro Series

Home recording is cheap, online distribution is easy.  File sharing is its own little ethical oddity with its own nebulous pros and cons, and is increasingly prevalent.  "Making it" has always been difficult, and it's becoming more so.  Fuck it, I've got an electrical engineering degree, why put so much effort into the business/promotion side of things when the most I can expect is a meager and temporary subsistence (if I'm lucky)?  I'll keep my day job, do my thing in my spare time, and give away the fruits of my creative labor.  It's becoming a pretty obvious mindset, and I can't see it as a bad thing.

I can guess where this will lead.  Yes, the indie "middle class" will dry up, as will most of the recording industry.  Once again, I can't really see this as a bad thing (though it will be painful for a while).  It might even loosen the corporate strangle-hold on mainstream (or at least "indie") culture (though this might be overly optimistic).  

Still, I can see a few issues with this.  First, popularity doesn't correlate with quality.  This has always been the case, but "democratization" isn't a solution for this (and I can't really suggest what would be).  There will continue to be a small population of relative successes standing out in a vast sea of total obscurity.  And this will continue to have almost no relation to any measure of quality.  I don't think it will be any worse than it's always been, though it's still not what it probably should be.

Second, giving things away sort of erodes the construction of value that this sort of thing depends on.  Scarcity really hasn't been a factor for a while, but there's still the perception that if you're not asking anything for it, it's not worth bothering with.  Again, I can't really suggest any solution, but I don't think it will help to play along and charge some nominal fee just to spur up enough interest that people fire up their P2P program of choice.  Maybe groups like Nine Inch Nails will draw some attention to free music, maybe MySpace will help as well.

I've been pondering the idea of an ad-supported website as a way to generate income from free music/art/whatever.  Of course it's not something that most people will be able to achieve, but it works for some (popular bloggers, etc.).  At least any commerce will be centered around tangible goods.

On the whole, I don't see any reason to fight the changes.  Life will get harder for some people, but I think it will get easier for more as people look at the "dream" a little more realistically.  Yes, there's more music out there than I can choke on, but I'm happy with that.  As far as I'm concerned it just puts the lunatic fringe in closer reach.

But I'm not sure if you can say that this shift is responsible for the shorter lifespan of increasingly derivative fads.  Most of the fads I'm aware of had corporate backing of some sort and weren't so much MySpace phenomena.  Perhaps it's just because an online fad propagates extremely rapidly, to the extent that it tends to hit everywhere all at once.  Warhol's fifteen minutes aren't what they used to be.  This hurts when applied to genres as a whole, especially if something isn't allowed to reach a state of maturity or depth of expression beyond "this shit all sounds the same" before it's instantly over.  Not sure quite how I feel about this.



________________________________
> To: CZsynth@yahoogroups.com
> From: ezra.buchla@gmail.com
> Date: Sun, 10 Aug 2008 17:42:52 -0700
> Subject: Re: [CZsynth] Re: music economics
>
> it happens that i personally have never thought that my records could
> make money on their own, and i'm just not interested in pursuing a
> full-time music career since it would mean having to think bout a lot
> of weird stuff that has nothing to do with making records. i'm much
> happier as a part time musician with a well-paying day job. i think a
> lot of people are reaching that conclusion, for better or worse.
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