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by pzuraq
4667 days ago
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It is competition though. Competition directly for listening time, a person's attention. Every musician has there own pitch, there own style, with which they compete for a listeners attention. It's not that anyone who picks up a guitar or drumset or ableton can be a professional, it's that these things are more accessible than ever and, much more importantly, the means of distribution is almost completely accessible to anyone. This means that there is a huge amount of music to choose from and a huge variety. Yes, a lot of it is crap, but there is still more that isn't due to the sheer volume of content (keep in mind that what is and isn't good is subjective. Even if you and I agree that musician X is terrible, maybe there's someone who likes terrible.) What this all boils down to is that professionals are losing there competitive edge, quickly. Publishing no longer needs a guarantee of profit because setup cost has dropped to practically nothing and distribution cost IS nothing. They can offer more varied and nuanced music, but when it comes down to it most people just want something to play and don't have stringent requirements for their music. Amateur music is quickly filling in that gap, especially on the electronic front (not just EDM, there is a huge variety of music composed digitally that sounds nothing like your standard rave music). In the end, music is becoming what it used to be, a cultural phenomenon. |
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No, you are completely wrong. I can't talk about genres I don't know about but for the electronic music I listen to there is a painfully obvious difference between amateur and professional stuff. To the point where I think it is harming the genre. The top artists earn almost nothing from sales of their music, but command large fees for playing 1-2 hours sets every weekend.
There is a real dearth of new talent because people getting into it just don't have the sound engineering experience to make their music sound good enough for people to enjoy. What happens is the big labels find producers would could have some talent, take them on board and teach them how to make the music and have the experienced engineers tidy up their work until it sounds good. What this has resulted in is the two major labels absolutely dominating the scene with a large majority of the big names signed to them and absolutely dominating the share of music listened to. One of the labels also owns the major online store that sells music in this genre.
And yet, they still make next to nothing from sales. This is why ghost producing is so widespread in electronic music- the only money to be made is in live performances. To get big there, you need good productions to get a name for yourself. So what do you do if you're only interested in making music but not performing? You make the music, put it out with someone else's name, they do the performance and bring in the $$ and you split it (or whatever your agreement is).
Now, competition might be more prevalent in other genres- but I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that in genres without significant competition, there is still no money to be made in sales. People listen to the top artists like crazy, they just don't pay for the music because why wouldn't you just download it all for free?