thedivineash:
themattsmith:
You know, like a CAREER.
Not everyone wants to live like Fugazi, and to begrudge them that is childish.
For the Bubbs. What’s your take on this, honey?
I’ll take the bait, I guess.
I have to say that in this age of generally accepted pirated music downloads in lieu of record sales, it’s pretty ridiculous for pretentious snobs to criticize musicians for licensing their music for commercials and movies. How are people supposed to make money at music? If it really bothers you that much, send the band a check for $20 for every album of theirs you’ve downloaded and you’ve just bought yourself the right to complain.
The fact is that bands are netting less and less from album sales with the takeover of free internet culture. Also, with rises in gas prices and corporate takeover of music venues, it’s becoming harder and harder for bands to make a good living touring either.
And why should we expect them to tour forever to make a living? At a certain point, some people need to spend time with their families, give their minds and bodies a break, and have a life. It really doesn’t work for everyone to be on the road 250 days out of the year. Just look at Dan Deacon. Years of heavy touring, bending over that electronics table, has given him acute back trouble, which will likely keep him from touring for awhile; years, possibly. Expect to see a couple songs of his in commercials coming up. How else is he supposed to make money to survive?
Sometimes this demand for groups to stay small, obscure, and non-commercial borders on the sadistic, like when everyone pooped their pants when Modest Mouse hit the big time. This is a group that went from 1991-2003 with virtually no money and no commercial recognition, barely surviving on producing weirdo indie records and touring constantly in broken-down vans. When they finally were ready to make some money to live on with “Good News for People Who Love Bad News,” the “sell out” chorus chimed in. How long do you expect bands to starve before you decide that they’ve paid their dues?
The future of media belongs to advertising. Check out this Financial Times article about Vice Magazine. They’re one of the few print magazines of this decade that isn’t hemorrhaging money. Why? Because they very intelligently and proactively work with advertisers to squeeze out all the dollars they can from their readership. At the same time, they maintain their integrity by doing this very honestly and openly. Vice readers know they are being targeted, but every reader is an intelligent person who understands this process (or just doesn’t care). And with this money, Vice is able to do a lot of cool things, like running a record label, producing news stories, running a free streaming video network, making clothing, etc. All from a free glossy culture mag for hipsters.
Look, the demise of the record label is an important and inevitable process, something that needed to happen eventually to drive out the fat and the dinosaurs. But with this new market comes new realities. You can talk all you want about artistic integrity, and I have even found myself looking down on a few bands that licence their songs to companies like Wal Mart and Hummer (while being secretly aware that I would do the same thing if I were in their shoes), but the truth of the new media of the 00’s and beyond is same as the truth behind the very first newspapers: there is no purity to be lost. Even the “gray ladies” like the New York Times made their fortune with sensationalism, advertising, and back-room deals. One of the highest journalistic awards is still the William Randolph Hearst Award. Swinging back to music: Bob Dylan was in a Cadillac commercial.
Groups like Fugazi are very fortunate and very rare. They are products of luck, sacrifice, choice, and insanely supportive music scenes, the kind of which certainly don’t exist everywhere in the country. The only people who really begrudge artists from doing what it takes to support their families and themselves are entitled rich kids who have never had to do the same and don’t understand what it means to make your living in any capacity, much less on the strength of your songs.
Good for the sell-outs.
