"Today I buy every damn song I listen to, thousands of dollars worth"
Why do you do this? You know that most of the money for an album doesn't go to the artist? Do you buy the physical CD or do you buy the song on iTunes?
The vast vast majority of people do not have thousands of dollars to spend on music.
Why do you do this? You know that most of the money for an album doesn't go to the artist?
You don't know that, because you don't know what sort of music he listens to or what deals those artists have with their labels. There are certainly cases where labels fuck artists, but there are a lot of others where they deliver value. This idea of blaming all the big bad labels is little more than an excuse not to pay for music. Along the way, it's crushed lots of small independent labels that had great partnerships with their artists but get blamed for the perceived moral failings of the majors.
So why didn't those small independent labels ask their artists to come out swinging for them and champion their cause? Or better, why didn't the artists who (apparently) loved their labels advocate for them in the greater public media?
> Why do you do this? You know that most of the money for an album doesn't go to the artist? Do you buy the physical CD or do you buy the song on iTunes?
You know that if you spend $0, the artist gets nothing, right? Then their label drops them because they aren't profitable.
I buy at least $30 of music each month from iTunes. Finding the addresses of these artists, writing a check and sending it their way would be more hassle than I care to go through.
If the artists don't like the deal that labels are giving them, they don't have to take it. They can build their own fan base, learn marketing, get exposure and sell their own stuff through iTunes and other places. A lot of artists are opting to do just that.
I'm not sure what you're arguing against here. Is it a problem that he spent thousands on music? In the last 7 years I've spend circa $6,000 on one service alone (emusic). I used to spend $500+ per month on vinyl. Hell, I even steal it sometimes too.
I know that the money doesn't all go to the artists - what would you have me (or the GP) do instead, not pay for any of it?
That's disingenuous. How well would it scale for a musician to personally handle depositing checks from millions of fans? There is a very good reason that many musicians become involved with labels, promoters, distributors, etc., which is to free up the time of the artist to focus on what they are actually interested in doing: writing and playing music.
> How well would it scale for a musician to personally handle depositing checks from millions of fans?
Like many scaling problems, that's a good problem to have: at that point, you can afford to have people working for you depositing checks, which is pretty much the inverse of the power relationship artists have with labels.
> the inverse of the power relationship artists have with labels.
You don't know what the relationship with the label is. Some artists come in with their own label and only need distributor to reach a bigger audience (artists $$$/labels$$). Some come in completely unknown and the label has to front all the money (artists $ / label $$$$), and some are quite happy to be on a smaller label and let the label handle the business side of things.
> at that point, you can afford to have people working for you depositing checks
...and paying royalties for samples, collaborators, songwriters. Well now we have to hire a guy to handle all of this and you can either pay him/her a salary or a cut of the sales. Now we've slipped back into the label distributor problem.
>How well would it scale for a musician to personally handle depositing checks from millions of fans?
Many of them do a good job handling fan mail. It sounds like a nice problem to have.
>There is a very good reason that many musicians become involved with labels, promoters, distributors, etc.
There are some good reasons for artists to outsource administrative errands, management. There's also the crappy reason that is the monopolization of the major distribution channels.
It's an interesting question. Do you have a moral resposibilty to make sure the money you spend makes it to the artist, or did you just justify your lack of moral effort by saying "well I 'paid' for it, meh..." and how might this be different that just paying a few bucks for a Pandora membership.
Why do you do this? You know that most of the money for an album doesn't go to the artist? Do you buy the physical CD or do you buy the song on iTunes?
The vast vast majority of people do not have thousands of dollars to spend on music.