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IanB wrote:
I don't want to guilt people into parting with their money for my benefit but I want people to know what it means when they stuff themselves on free. The fact that recorded music has been my living for 30 years is a factor in my thinking for sure but I just find the stupidity offensive. Not least the people who would pay £2.50 for a record in 1975 who won't pay £8 in 2012 and claim recorded music is over priced. I suspect that if people could blag their way into the O2 they would make the same argument to justify not paying £50 for a ticket.
So yes there are economic factors but there is also crass self serving greed headedness dressed in anti capitalist clothing.
I will be waiting a long time before the anti copyright intellectuals work the lecture circuit and occupy their university teaching positions for free. They hate rock music, see all pop culture as ephemeral corporate crap and have nothing at stake in the game.
Completely agree, but its wrong to say the academics don't have a stake in the game. They do, but its unfortunately currently running contrary to the needs of artists, but that may change in the future. The academic take on music culture, and its development, is always a parallel stream to reality. It doesn't actually matter, as their students are not always (in fact are rarely) those who actually change things (unless they're MBA students). Also, the current copyright model is broken, so they have some valid points.
I fear what you say about the Classical tradition has already happened. How many composers actually write full symphonic works these days ? They write for smaller ensembles and quartets, if only so they actually get to hear their own work performed. It may be a sad thing, but I think the economics of scale, and the lack of an audience, has finally killed that tradition. It has become something else, and I'm not sure thats a bad thing anyway myself, and as you know I listen to a lot of classical music and take a great deal of influence and inspiration from it. The ENO has been on arts council funded life support for decades now, and I think its time to let that patient die, but then I hate opera ;).
Yes, music means more to me too than the way it seems to be becoming, and I think all we can do is to put more of ourselves into the music itself. More emotional content and care, and then hopefully people will notice. The vast amounts of mediocre, lazy, half assed, tunes and production out there (particularly in the experimental forms) isn't helping. But yeah, thats a subjective opinion, one mans gold etc.. Still I'm beginning to think the whole devaluing of the form financially is directly resulting in artists devaluing their work. As in they're making less effort, being less involved, even being disingenuous. Thats something we can all personally fight against in how we approach our own work.
Jazz is safe though, as long as the'yre are enough of us of a certain age to keep putting our hands in our pocket. Its not as great a situation as it used to be, not even close. But the Jazz audience seems to have remained static in terms of size for a long time, its oddly self replenishing.
But yep, tell people the situation, make them think about it, but they can't do anything more about it than we can. Definitely deal with the fake anti-capitalist stance though whenever you hear it, we all should do that. If just for good political, educational, reasons if nothing else.
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