The continuing inexorable devaluation of music
When music was hard to come by, we cared a lot more about it. If you paid X dollars for an album, you were going to listen to it over and over again until you liked almost every song it contained. You paid for it, dammit, and you were determined to get your money’s worth. And in the process, you formed a close relationship with the artist.
Today, though, music is free or very close to it. None of us has the same financial incentive to work at liking something. Why bother when you can just hit the skip button until you find something you might enjoy?
Meanwhile, musicians are making less and less money than ever. With so many people flooding the marketplace with music, the oversupply brings the price down. Too much choice makes it difficult for fans to latch onto just one artist.
What to do about this? In many cases, the situation is unsustainable. Medium.com brings attention to the devaluation of music in this article.
In their many (justified) laments about the trajectory of their profession in the digital age, songwriters and musicians regularly assert that music has been “devalued.” Over the years they’ve pointed at two outstanding culprits. First, it was music piracy and the futility of “competing with free.” More recently the focus has been on the seemingly miniscule payments songs generate when they’re streamed on services such as Spotify or Apple Music.
These are serious issues, and many agree that the industry and lawmakers have a lot of work to do. But at least there is dialogue and progress being made toward new models for rights and royalties in the new music economy.
Less obvious are a number of other forces and trends that have devalued music in a more pernicious way than the problems of hyper-supply and inter-industry jockeying. And by music I don’t mean the popular song formats that one sees on awards shows and hears on commercial radio. I mean music the sonic art form — imaginative, conceptual composition and improvisation rooted in harmonic and rhythmic ideas. In other words, music as it was defined and regarded four or five decades ago, when art music (incompletely but generally called “classical” and “jazz”) had a seat at the table.
When I hear songwriters of radio hits decry their tiny checks from Spotify, I think of today’s jazz prodigies who won’t have a shot at even a fraction of the old guard’s popular success. They can’t even imagine working in a music environment that might lead them to household name status of the Miles Davis or John Coltrane variety. They are struggling against forces at the very nexus of commerce, culture and education that have conspired to make music less meaningful to the public at large. Here are some of the most problematic issues musicians are facing in the industry’s current landscape.
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