[lbo-talk] why Prince is right

[Mike Beggs]

On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 1:30 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> [great rant, on some not-unfamiliar topics]
>
> <http://blancomusic.wordpress.com/2010/07/07/why-prince-is-right/>
>
>> Bitter? Moi? Yes. Exceedingly so actually. Because long before (and who can say, possibly long after) BlancoMusic existed, I was a music lover. And even if there comes a point where music no longer provides me with an income, I will still hate this period in music’s lifespan – when even the types of people who buy eggs from farmers’ markets and FairTrade coffee are somehow too eager to blame the decline of music on the malpractice of the music industry and spout fatuous self-serving nonsense about how filesharing is ‘free pr for the artists’. I can make a living without music, that’s not an issue. The issue is that the internet is making music shit. There, I’ve said it. It’s putting the actual making of music secondary to the complicated business of trying to find a way of sustaining a living from doing so. Genius, forced to figure out ways to tour without having to incur excess baggage costs. Virtuosos, giving up music because they refuse to take the whore’s option of product placement or naked dancers in their videos. Music lovers have CD collections, not hard-drives full of shit they never listen to. This all happened before, we call it the dark ages. Yep, the internet is over, it’s killed my first love.

One, it's just not the case that the music of today is shit. Like shag
said, musicians just gotta make music, and the vast majority of
musicians never had a chance of making a living off it anyway. The
supply curve, as they say, is highly inelastic.

Two, the internet's not going away no matter how bitter you are about
it. Neither is piracy. Blaming the pirate is ineffectual moralism.
Capitalism generally allocates resources to the producers of
commodities, and this is a failure of commodification. I think it's
great you can get any music you like for free. I think it's terrible
(more) artists can't make a living off their work. Any solution to the
latter, though, has to take for granted that the former is here to
stay. Personally I favour a public solution.

Mike Beggs