"It's stopping new artists from coming forward, and it's killing mid-level artists across the board," charged Jay Rosenthal, a music attorney at Washington, D.C.-based Berliner, Corcoran & Rowe and a board member of the Recording Artists Coalition. "There has never been an issue that has been so galvanizing."
As well as lame 'optimists' with apparently no dignity or self-respect whatsoever:
One growing market is mobile-phone ring tones. Scott Andrews, senior director of internet and mobile entertainment for royalty collection agency BMI, said ring-tone revenues are expected to double from $250 million in 2004 to $500 million in 2005. "This is a business that has scaled very quickly," Andrews said.He added that potential synergies with other mobile technologies such as Bluetooth wireless could create even more opportunities for artists.
"Can you imagine being at a concert and saying, 'OK, everyone turn on your Bluetooth. We're going to send you a ring tone for free just for being here at the concert'?" Andrews said.
CAN YOU IMAGINE!?!?!????? Unfortunately, actually, I totally can, and I am trying to figure out who would be even more likely to be playing that concert than U2, although no one comes to mind immediately.
The important thing to keep in mind, I think, is that the issue of how much money artists will be able to reasonably extract from consumers in the future of cheap-and-easy music production and distribution is entirely separate from the issue of whether music will keep getting more and more insanely awesome, which is pretty much a foregone conclusion. There are maybe 30 bands/'artists' in the US that deserve to get rich off their music, maybe 300 or so that deserve to make a living at it* - everyone else should be happy to make a buck when they can and be thrilled that anybody wants to pay to hear them at all. The means of production and distribution/consumption are getting easier to use and cheaper to acquire - there are just way too many great bands, and there's less and less justification for paying all this money to listen to their music. As Chuck D said at his 2002 CMJ keynote, "Motherfuckers [trying to preserve traditional Big Music profits] tryna stop the clouds from rainin'". Fortunately, making music is easy and more fun than most other things you can do with your spare time anyway, and I can't really think of any band/'artist' offhand whose work really benefitted from being absurdly rich**-
SPEAKING OF WHICH in the process of blogging this I was interrupted by Steve Vee, who stopped by to conveniently demonstrate that even if they could close down all the online P2P networks, 'reality-based', computer-to-computer P2P sharing can easily enable music piracy on a fantastic scale. I have literally days of new music to listent to, thanks dude! Maybe I had something else to say, I'll see if I remember. Basically, everything = awesome with music, I think that was the main idea.
* I am obviously making up these numbers, but I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any better guesses
** I obviously don't really totally mean this I guess, a lot of really awesome music has been made about getting rich/paid/etc, but that's maybe a separate issue...? Only somewhat separate though, I guess.