So the Billy Bragg post is finally off the front page for good, but feel free to continue the discussion. It's up to 191 comments at the moment. Down near the end, my old co-blogger Vincent (who is welcome back at any time) adds a good comment that's worth reading -- it's also a reminder that he's a very good and amusing writer.
What he didn't say, but which we talked about in a chat this morning, is that the period during which musicians have gotten ridiculously rich from making music is not a metaphysical or economic constant. It was/is the result of confluence of various factors, a key one being high barriers to entry. Now of course, production and distribution have gotten very cheap, but there remains a really big one: talent. Some of us just don't have it, and we're stuck being jealous of those who do, like whoever wrote Amazing Grace. So there'll always be money to be made for the best, but maybe it will be a little less than in the past. It might be more spread out.
But consider that virtually nobody has ever gotten rich from poetry, and there's certainly no shortage of poetry out there. Like music, the primary purpose of poetry is creative expression. It's just that the idea of making a big pile from poetry is so laughable that nobody would think the two are comparable.
(Heck, as an aside, some industries, like movies, are major money losers for a lot of the people involved. And there is no shortage of films. Even among the money makers, it's known, for example, that too many R-rated movies are made, if it's all about profitability -- but obviously it's about more than that.)
Ultimately, the only point of all of this, is that we don't have to worry too much about business models when it comes to the arts. Arts will be the arts. They made arts in fascist and communist states, when there was no money to be made and the government was actively seeking to imprison artists. And they made arts back in caveman days, when the only kind of money was probably some sticks and mastodon meat. If it happened to be that there was no conceivable way to make money from the actual sale of music, we'd be okay. And there'd be plenty of music.
Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.
Frank Zappa
Posted by: art paintings | July 23, 2010 at 10:35 PM