Quote:
Originally Posted by kane
While there are some people who do make money from a hit song then selling the ring tone and making money from views on youtube etc, the middle class in music pretty much doesn't exist any more.
Back in the early 90's I worked for a small record label. We had bands that never got played on the radio (outside of college radio) yet many of them did pretty well for themselves. Between the publicity we could get for them through music magazines and press and them constantly touring they would do okay. We had several bands that would sell out 500+ seat places every night on their tours. I know that doesn't sound like much, but they were getting about $5 per person for those shows so the band was making $2,500 a night from ticket sales and another $1,500-$2,000 per night selling T-shirts and other merchandise. They would do 100 dates per year and clear $100K per band member just from touring. They weren't getting rich, but they were doing pretty good for an unknown indie band and some of them would go on to sign with bigger major labels and that early success helped them get better deals.
Those kinds of bands rarely exist anymore. Part of it is the competition. The cost of putting together an album is next to nothing now. Anyone with a laptop can record, mix and master an album if they want to. Then you can put it out and sell it on places like iTunes. The amount of competition because of that is staggering. Most of the music sucks and it makes just that much more difficult for the good bands to find an audience. So there might be more total people making money because you have a ton of people making a few hundred or a few thousand dollars from their music, but it appears there area lot fewer acts that are mid-list and make a living just doing music.
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Yep. Basically if you dont have some hype machine behind you, you arent going anywhere. No matter what the talent is. But remember. Anyone with a laptop could make master an album. So just as much this cuts people out, it adds people to the scene. So someone who couldnt afford studio time etc. Can now do it from home.
To me, people here who complain about Tubes and such, are just not adapting well compared to mainstream. Look at movies for instance. Movies are making plenty of money. Bootlegs or not. Everyone once in a while a friend of mine gets bootleg movies, believe it or not straight from the guy at a Video store. Even the video store guy adapted, LOL. He cant make money off of old movie rentals, so he sells new bootleg movies. I personally hate the movie theater. I would not go to the movies no matter what, I never download movies on to my computer from torrents or sites like that. maybe twice a year I watch a bootleg a friend has. I do pay for cable TV. Everytime a movie gets played on cable, people get paid.
Sorry for the tangent. But mainstream has adapted. These RIAA lawsuits are few and far between now. In adult. There are a lot of people who have changed models, started new technologies, used there minds to expand there business and have made fortunes off of doing so. Then there are the guys who are still doing what they were doing and crying about tubes.