The investment money is gone. Record labels functioned as venture capital firms.
Who cares?
Venture capital won't make you practice every damn day.
Venture capital won't make you suddenly sing in key.
Venture capital won't inspire you to write compelling lyrics.
Venture capital doesn't have anything at all to do with musical talent and I think most people would agree that the overwhelming majority of "VC" supported artists are chosen by record companies based on ROI, not based on their musical merit. Today more than ever, the cost of producing and distributing quality music is easily within the range of most serious musicians; the software available to musicians today is staggering and quality recording equipment becomes cheaper all the time.
The schedules of musicians do not align with the modern working world. Employers do not look highly on people who take 8 weeks off to tour. In order to make money touring, you have to be pretty well established..
Give me a break. If you're not big enough to make money touring then sorry, you have to get a job like the rest of us; this is not something unique to musicians, how do you think employers feel about a 6 month sabbatical dedicated to working on your ultimate app idea? It's not gonna happen. The majority of startups don't have access to VC money, and the capital going to many successful early stage startups are (relatively) paltry sums that a determined individual could absolutely accumulate.
Also, unlike software development, there is no 'day job' that musicians can work while saving to bootstrap their own venture
There is no law that says musicians have to work low-paying temp jobs. There is no reason why musicians are any more economically disadvantaged than any other individual who has to work full time while building towards their personal goals on the side. The implication seems to be that musicians generally have no other useful skills besides waiting tables, but that is obviously false.
Practice does not make you a good stage performer.
What? Every good performer practices within an inch of their life, even Beethoven had to put in the hours, the debatable exceptions are too rare to be worth consideration.
It is ultimately a dying art form and those that don't see that and in fact argue the opposite, don't have any inkling of what is actually going on.
That's a pretty presumptuous and condescending assertion. I'd argue that you don't actually know what's going on since music is more alive than ever; in fact, music is so alive that the flood of new music that has exploded onto the internet has driven the cost of music way down. It turns out, music is really cheap to produce when you're rolling studio quality equipment out of your laptop (with mastering/mixing/sequencing software that is rampantly pirated by musicians, I might add)
How's the view from the armchair? You comfortable over there?
Practicing in a room, without an audience, does NOT make you good at anything other than practicing in a room without an audience. The stage is completely different and it takes hundreds if not thousands of performances to master.
If musicians are expected to make money ONLY from touring, that is, traveling from town to town and getting up on a STAGE (not just going from town to town and setting up in rehearsal studios), they must already be really good at it. Do you not see the conundrum here?
When the music industry was functioning record labels would advance money for a tour in the hopes that the venture would result in more money made from record sales than it cost to keep the van full of gas and a roof over everyone's heads for 12 weeks.
How's the view from the armchair? You comfortable over there?
Your reputation for presumption precedes you. I know exactly what it's like to perform on stage, it's not exactly a difficult opportunity to come by, even my teenage niece and all her siblings have performed on stage for years... and yes, just like everything else in life, the more you do it the better you become.
Practicing in a room, without an audience, does NOT make you good at anything other than practicing in a room without an audience.
Contrary to what you might believe, practicing your instrument/act/set/speech/flow/delivery always improves your public performance, that's simply an indisputable fact and you come off as foolish arguing otherwise. Your logic is akin to suggesting that you'll never get better at programming by building applications that you don't sell or push to github. It's true that exposure to a live audience presents unique challenges that sharpen your edge, but it doesn't matter how many times you've been up on stage if you don't spend the lion's share of your time refining the technical skills that produce the art. As any music fan will attest to, the stage performance is secondary to witnessing your favorite musician flawlessly assemble their headlining composition, live in front of your very eyes.
If musicians are expected to make money ONLY from touring, that is, traveling from town to town and getting up on a STAGE (not just going from town to town and setting up in rehearsal studios), they must already be really good at it. Do you not see the conundrum here?
Musicians aren't expected to do anything, they should make money any way they can. Yeah, these days it's hard to sell strings of ones and zeros for money since computers make it trivial to store and transmit those strings, but that's the nature of reality, it's the same reason why nobody is willing to pay a person to organize paper documents in a filing cabinet... the world has moved on. Even if we accept your assertion that you have to get up on stage in order to start making money getting up on stage, you do what everyone else does: invest in your product (your music) and take a loss till you're good enough to start turning a profit. You don't need a VC to be successful in the music industry, period.
When the music industry was functioning record labels would advance money for a tour in the hopes that the venture would result in more money made from record sales than it cost to keep the van full of gas and a roof over everyone's heads for 12 weeks.
Yeah, and there was once a time where the VCs would dole out cash for every other mobile/social/local iPhone app in hopes that the venture would result in more money made from app sales than it cost to keep a van full of college students fed on ramen for 12 weeks. Now that technology has caught up it's become trivially easy to produce apps that would have been game changers when the app store first debuted. Nobody wants to invest in that. The world moved on.
Where did I ever say that you don't need to practice alone? I've been performing on stage for decades. No matter how many hours I put in alone on my instrument, it still won't prepare me for playing with other musicians. No matter how many hours I put in practicing in a rehearsal room with other musicians, it still doesn't prepare me for playing on a stage in front of audience. The only time I notice that I'm getting better at performing on a stage to an audience is when I'm... I mean, for fuck's sake, do I need to continue? What is going on here?
This entire discussion we're having is completely irrelevant.
Back on track:
The author of the article at hand is making a blanket statement of "look, record sales are down, but concert sales are up, so there you go, there's the solution! there's no problem!". I'm countering, using real world experience, that he is completely ignorant as to how the music industry has been functioning, how it is functioning today, and where it is heading.
The music industry is currently in a state of epic dysfunction. There is no point to an art form that was developed for shipping plastic discs around when the industry that led to this art form is being dismantled. Music and musicians will change. The industry and the current art form are dying. New art forms will emerge to deal with the changing landscape of the marketplace and culture.
No, it's not a troll, you called me an armchair musician when you know nothing about me, that is presumptuous. In your original post you concluded that anyone who disagrees with you "doesn't know what's going on", also presumptuous.
Where did I ever say that you don't need to practice alone?
To quote you verbatim: "Practice does not make you a good stage performer."
I think that statement pretty clearly asserts that practice does not contribute to performance quality. If you want to retract that statement, go ahead, but don't pretend like you didn't just say it.
Practicing in a room, without an audience, does NOT make you good at anything other than practicing in a room without an audience.
Another stellar quote, but ultimately a meaningless tautology intended to downplay the role of technical discipline in favor of experience on the stage. Once again, nobody cares about your stagecraft if you get up on stage to perform Little Brown Jug.
No matter how many hours I put in alone on my instrument, it still won't prepare me for playing with other musicians.
Right... but playing with other musicians will. What is your point? You don't need a record label to practice with your band.
No matter how many hours I put in practicing in a rehearsal room with other musicians, it still doesn't prepare me for playing on a stage in front of audience.
I apologize if English is not your first language, but you need to research the definition of the word "rehearsal" before you argue that many hours of rehearsal with other musicians doesn't prepare you for a live performance. Practicing in preparation for a live performance is the literal definition of rehearsal.
This entire discussion we're having is completely irrelevant.
Your central argument is that piracy has made record labels scared to invest in risky music, and this is killing the music industry because the only way to become a good performer is to use an infusion of record label cash to tour till you become good enough to make a profit touring. I rejected this claim as bullshit because any intellectually honest person will admit that the most critical part of a concert is the actual music (you know, the primary product a musician is tasked with producing), something that has zero connection to VC money.
Dude... there are MANY kinds of musical art forms... pop songs, concertos, symphonies, ballets, operas, musicals.... our current "music industry" is based completely around the art form known as the "pop song".
I'm sorry I didn't make myself as clear as I thought. I'm now realizing that most people do not have a functional definition for the word "art form".
No, granting for a second that you are indeed just a little mixed up on the terminology: what you need to realize is that you completely messed up your whole argument by phrasing it in a way that only you yourself could clearly understand. Otherwise known as a failure to communicate. Paddling back now makes it seem like you want to change the history of how this discussion went down instead of admitting that you might have started on a wrong premise.
Own your mistake instead of blaming everybody else and accept the very valid arguments that people are having with your position. It's called "learning".
Who cares? Venture capital won't make you practice every damn day. Venture capital won't make you suddenly sing in key. Venture capital won't inspire you to write compelling lyrics. Venture capital doesn't have anything at all to do with musical talent and I think most people would agree that the overwhelming majority of "VC" supported artists are chosen by record companies based on ROI, not based on their musical merit. Today more than ever, the cost of producing and distributing quality music is easily within the range of most serious musicians; the software available to musicians today is staggering and quality recording equipment becomes cheaper all the time.
The schedules of musicians do not align with the modern working world. Employers do not look highly on people who take 8 weeks off to tour. In order to make money touring, you have to be pretty well established..
Give me a break. If you're not big enough to make money touring then sorry, you have to get a job like the rest of us; this is not something unique to musicians, how do you think employers feel about a 6 month sabbatical dedicated to working on your ultimate app idea? It's not gonna happen. The majority of startups don't have access to VC money, and the capital going to many successful early stage startups are (relatively) paltry sums that a determined individual could absolutely accumulate.
Also, unlike software development, there is no 'day job' that musicians can work while saving to bootstrap their own venture
There is no law that says musicians have to work low-paying temp jobs. There is no reason why musicians are any more economically disadvantaged than any other individual who has to work full time while building towards their personal goals on the side. The implication seems to be that musicians generally have no other useful skills besides waiting tables, but that is obviously false.
Practice does not make you a good stage performer.
What? Every good performer practices within an inch of their life, even Beethoven had to put in the hours, the debatable exceptions are too rare to be worth consideration.
It is ultimately a dying art form and those that don't see that and in fact argue the opposite, don't have any inkling of what is actually going on.
That's a pretty presumptuous and condescending assertion. I'd argue that you don't actually know what's going on since music is more alive than ever; in fact, music is so alive that the flood of new music that has exploded onto the internet has driven the cost of music way down. It turns out, music is really cheap to produce when you're rolling studio quality equipment out of your laptop (with mastering/mixing/sequencing software that is rampantly pirated by musicians, I might add)