Interesting Mission Statement from a Musician on How Music Has No Monetary Value
But the connections formed by music are another thing entirely.
Chris Randall, founder of Positron Records and an ex-member of Sister Machine Gun, offers this post on the current state of the music industry and the place of the musician within it. Part of it reads like this:
There was a brief period where it was kind of fun to watch the entire music industry collapse in on itself, like a dying star. Can we get more of Metallica suing people for liking them, please? But Seans Fanning and Parker didn’t make Napster because they were moved by the plight of the working musician. They did it because they could, and the act itself, the act of petulant children bent on destruction, was nothing more than a path to greater things for them, increasing their reputations. The music industry, for its part, was eminently destroyable, as it had created an economy of artificial worth, by virtue of its “throw all the spaghetti at the wall and see which noodles stick” business model.
But then he moves beyond that sort of talk into something much more useful and thought-provoking. Link to everything through TechDirt.
That's quite a manifesto. While I can confirm that there are still facets of the music business and its support industries that can still make money in the era since Napster, I continue to believe that Napster did far more harm than good overall. The one good thing it exposed was the music industry king pins were fat cats abusing their artists to finance their big homes and fancy cars, and the shake up brought them down a peg or two.
When something is widely available, eg. water, it becomes devalued. That's what it has come down down to