The future of the music business is getting a lot attention. It’s thrashing and gasping for breath. Perhaps you saw the recent article in the New York Times. It extends an article on Wired magazine’s site
I found both very interesting and they seem to make sense. The current music industry became so focused on producing silver dics (otherwise known as CDs) that they somehow missed the boat on digital distribution. This has been the subject of most of the writing about the “demise” of the music industry.
So David Byrne suggests we adopt a DYI attitude and take control of our music. Sounds great. Until you start digging deeper.
Just because we can all afford a laptop and necessary software to record the music and hack together a web site to distribute it doesn’t really mean we’ll all be producing great music. I’ve learned the hard way how difficult that task actually is. Recording engineers, mastering engineers, a good producer, graphic designers all have immense value in the process. The question remains open about how independent musicians can afford to pay all these people. Especially when the public seems to expect downloads to be free.
And even if we did raise enough money to do the project properly, I’ve never seen anyone suggest a solution for getting that music played on the radio. Just because you upload an amazing MP3 doesn’t mean anyone will ever hear it.
Clearly, we have a lot of deeper thinking to do.