Hmm… Back in the day, the B sides occasionally had songs that you couldn’t find on albums. “Big Black Smoke” by the Kinks comes to mind - B side to “Dead End Street”. That wasn’t released on album until a compilation in 1972.
Similarly, the Stones’ “Child of the Moon” was only released as the B side to “Jumping Jack Flash”.
Then there were A sides that weren’t released on albums, for example, Tull’s “Love Story” (not on LP until the “Living in the Past” compilation).
All good songs, but evidently didn’t quite fit the directions the bands (or their managements) saw for themselves…
…which sort of brings things back on topic. In the past, the bands were frequently at the mercy of the labels and their own management, so you get situations where musicians sign away their rights contractually (which more or less leads to the situation that @Melizmatic is talking about - “work for hire” is a thing in copyright law), or get screwed over in other ways by the labels and/or their own management - Steve Marriott (Small Faces, Humble Pie) was sort of the poster boy for that.
I’ve think I’ve heard of this, now that you mention it. And then there were advertising songs that were only sent to radio stations to plug LPs and groups. ELP’s “Brain Salad Surgery” (the song, as opposed to the album) comes to mind. It wasn’t available to the public till a much later album.
“Signing a contract” and “getting screwed” are so often the same thing aren’t they.
But there is also the problem of “devaluation” since you pay less for streaming, for example, artists get a diminished cut.
But it’s also entirely true that the recording industry itself wasn’t as adversely effected by downloading as they made out. Artists are a different story.
I’ve never paid for a streaming service. Partly because I don’t trust them to actually keep their catalogues, and partly because I’ve always thought the “fractional fee” structure was BS, right from when I read about Ted Nelson’s and Faith Popcorn’s versions. In the long term I think it’s a dead end, as more vendors realize how poor the ROI is.
Streaming is just a worse version of the “half a cent per side” sorts of royalties musicians got from labels.
Right now the people making the real money are still the marketers. Unless that gets cracked artists who don’t choose to go totally indie will continue to be exploited.
I think some of this conversation is about not understanding the creative process. There are artists who very quickly create things they can sell for high prices.
Picasso, for example, painted a ton of stuff. He would sign napkins knowing they would be worth a ton of money. Some of it was the cachet of his name, which he had created. Some of it was, damn he was amazing. And he worked damn hard to be that good. If you go back to the stuff he was doing as a teenager, he had the skill most adults would have dreamed of having in their wildest dreams. And then by the time he was in his 20s he was surpassing it.
Picasso didn’t get paid by the hour, he got paid by the painting.
Just as you pay more for one pair of Gucci shoes than you pay for one pair at Payless, in part because Gucci shoes are better quality, and in part because Gucci has created a brand that is perceived as having more value.
The reason an artist gets paid for a song that gets played year after year is because they produced a song people want to listen to year after year. Maybe they tossed it off quickly when they needed one more song on the album, they had another hour of studio time, and everyone in the band was high and feeling a little silly - and then for some reason that song became the song everyone loved. Musicians can create this because of their training, or skill, or maybe they got lucky and did a thing that captured a moment in time perfectly.
More the latter than the former these days. There was a mini-scandal a few years ago in Canada when it was revealed virtually all half-decent sunglasses – from those that sell for $30 to those that sell for $300 – are made by the same company, and to pretty much the same specs. The big brands like Chanel claimed it didn’t matter because people were willing to pay a premium for the name.
Which in a world where knock-offs exist makes no sense.
Generally with these high end brands, their expensive stuff is high quality, and all the accessories and things that anyone in the public can afford are just crap with their logo on it. If you look at the Kate Spade “sale” most everything has a small note saying that it was developed for their outlet store - meaning none of it is the actual Kate Spade quality merchandise they sell in the high end department stores.
Digital busking can sometimes be more profitable than traditional recording careers, and are especially suited to niche performers. PelleK, for example, pulls in a decent chunk (1,400 USD per video upload) from patrons.
PelleK would not have even received airtime under the pre-digital regime. It’s not gobs of money, but it keeps the lights on.
His paintings also didn’t have a fraction of the value that they do now back while he was alive. In fact he was one of the rare famous artists that didn’t die completely broke, only for their work to make fortunes (for someone else) after their deaths.
Well, I chose a career that was quite lucrative. It was an active choice on my part to not do other things I loved that paid nothing and to do things I only liked that paid very well. I make this choice every day and have for decades. I sometimes don’t even know how much the grind of my work has eroded that “like” away to nothing.
I wanted to be an actor when I was a kid. I was good enough at the time that I was actively recruited for a program in it. My mother discouraged it. Why? Because actors live in poverty and I was already growing up in poverty.
When I was in college (which I was lucky enough to have family pay for back when it was affordable without loans), I had friends, very good friends, who were a decade older than me and that were working the same jobs I was doing. I explicitly said to myself then “I don’t want to be age X (probably 31) and working this same shit job because that’s all I can do.” I reflected on this a lot when I got out of school and worked a shit counter job in a bookstore for a year (and as night manager in a retirement home the year after that). Because I was a geek and it was 1994, I managed to parley my geeky hobbies into a computer customer service job and then work my way up from there to a career at Microsoft and other places. I was extremely lucky to do so, to be honest, but I also walked away from grad school in Anthropology and a number of other very interesting things to do it. As recently as a decade ago, I was in a doctoral program in Buddhist Studies, very briefly. The stress of the program combined with finances was killing me quickly and I realized I’d bankrupt myself almost to do it and graduate with worse job prospects than I already had without the schooling. The result? I walked away from the program after only pouring $18,000 into it (instead of $150,000).
I’m using this personal example because, other than inherent narcissism with which I will be tarred, it is the one I know and lived through. I have lots of other friends and family who wound up doing similar. My wife got her current career because it was vaguely interesting but, mostly, because she didn’t want to be broke anymore.
If people want to make art, I support it to the best of my ability. That doesn’t mean it won’t be a life of poverty though. That’s certainly what I mentioned to my own daughter at one point (though her interests moved on anyway).
I’m similar, I guess. When I was growing up, I wanted to be anything and everything… a musician, a writer, a linguist, a mathematician, just about anything. I ended up becoming an electrical engineer, because it was something I loved, and it paid well, and because I could get my education for free.
If I were just in it for the money, though, I’d go into finance. Although, true story, I once had an interview for a job in finance, but I actually walked out of the interview because I was so morally opposed to what they were doing. Barring that, I probably could have gone into software development and/or cybersecurity, because there’s no shortage of work there, but I have no interest in those areas whatsoever.
There’s no narcissism. You made a pragmatic choice, as did I. Other people make different choices. I’m not going to judge either way.
I don’t know about that. Streaming I think ends up paying out less than radio plays, by far, from what I’ve heard.
That’s long been a problem that I think rock musicians tried to change, from what I studied - basically aligning the concept of songwriter and performer into a single person instead of having it as two different people. But rock upset the way the industry had worked in an earlier period when there was a different division of labor - musicians, songwriters, and performers were often understood as have different roles within the industry. Songwriters were employed by labels to write songs (even as late into the 1960s, where people like Carol King got their start as songwriters).
It’s really the copyright holders that get a cut, and for a long time that was a corporate entity, but rock musicians pushed back against that, then punks took it a step further, and set up their own labels in order to have greater control over their intellectual property.
The issue here (for me, at least) is not about a “failed” artist, as in people whose music doesn’t sell. It’s about the structure of the industry, how it privileges corporations over artists (and always has) and how that has led to the devaluation of culture in general. There are plenty of artists who do have airplay, popular support, etc, who still end up broke, because the profits never make it to their pockets, thanks to these layers of distance between the consumer/fan and the artist (labels, radios, downloading service, streaming service, distributor, etc).
There are plenty of people who do not see the connection between an individual artist and their art as a form of labor. They are plenty willing to download for free and never pay a dime, because they don’t see it as something that has any labor value attached to it.
I agree with @LearnedCoward here, BTW. I don’t think that the choices you made should is wrong, because you made it in your own best interests. I’m not condemning you or anyone else for making the pragmatic choice. Most of us end up doing so, at one point or another in our lives.
That doesn’t mean that artists (and really any field that aren’t readily profitable according to corporate ideology) aren’t worth our social, cultural, and economic investment. Value doesn’t and shouldn’t be judged solely by the amount of cash they generate, because then we are indeed an impoverished society. We also probably don’t want a world where only the rich and elite get the opportunity to express themselves artistically. At least I don’t.
No, these accusations (on the old old site) by a person or two here as well were when I used the examples of my own history (“talking about yourself again”) to illustrate points or an argument.
We don’t need to make discussing that part of this thread really but I think about it with certain readers because they’ve consistently used it to attack me in the past like I’m just another white het cis dude talking about himself…
Sorry to derail. Ultimatrly, everybody is narcissitic to some degree in that we have to relate everything to ourselves as part of the thinking process.
