Is It For The Best Or Not

[Transcender]

I think the real issue is that the room for music as such is inflated. For every day, it’s getting harder and harder to build a song by using building bricks that haven’t already been used somewhere else before.

[unlooper (krisamouse)]

I sampled a load of different bricks clanking together once! They make a lovely melodic ting or a thunk depending one which ones they are…

[Foo (mr_mark_dollin)]

@BYTE-Smasher

It’s very odd to try to think of any other way to defeat piracy, when it almost seems the global assumption is that music has now become disposable.

It’s been disposable all along. We’ve just had 90 years of dumb greedy people telling us otherwise, and largely getting away with it until now.

Of course there are uncharted territories in music, but to think about it in terms of ‘which bricks to use’ is stunted. Instead, consider: art should dictate craft, not craft dictating art.

[Johann]

@Foo?

art should dictate craft, not craft dictating art.

dunno. I love making silly drawings in microsoft paint for example. Oh, I also like chip music. And 64kb demos… and… hmm.

[BYTE-Smasher]

@Foo?

It’s been disposable all along. We’ve just had 90 years of dumb greedy people telling us otherwise, and largely getting away with it until now.

So is it your opinion that the music you make isn’t worth the time you put into it? Say you spent 300 hours composing an album… that’s 15 hours per song on a 20 track LP… aproximately 1.5 straight months of 9-5 work… how much would you expect to make off it? At my current job, that would be $6,000. At $20/album, presuming I had no extra costs, I’d have to sell 300 copies to recoup that. I know the chances of me doing that as an indy artist is pretty slim. And how much does your previous production experience factor into that? How about any costs you may incur along the way?

Now, I realize completely that 15 hours per song may be a bit unreasonable for some people, but for many, this may be standard. Especially if you consider that lots of people put their heart and souls into their music. So, as it is, music may be disposable… but should it be? This is the dilemma that many artists face, and it’s why you can end up spending $300 and up on an 8x11 canvas painting. Art, unfortunately, takes time to produce, and artists still have the same living costs as everyone else… sometimes moreso … so really, why as a society do we find art, something which we all partake in and enjoy, and arguably need to survive, to be such a devalued commodity?