Legendary recording engineer Steve Albini talke about the state of the music industry. Worth watching. He doesn’t think the sky is falling on the current music industry. Far from it. In fact, he thinks today’s music industry is healthier than ever.
Albini recently gave the keynote address at a music conference in Australia where he talks about how the Internet, the end of the major label stranglehold on distribution, and rapid changes in our cultural attitudes towards copyright have helped empower musicians in ways the old, broken system could never, and would never, have dreamed of.
I myself am rather enamored of the current state of music and the industry. I make a living off making music in ways i never could have under the old system. It’s no bed of roses, no pleasure cruise… it’s hard and a lot of work, but it was ALWAYS really hard. There are challenges today that didn’t exist back then (people can listen to your music forever for free and never help you make a living so you can actually make more, and the pay musicians receive for an average local gig is about the same now as it was 20 years ago) but it’s worth remembering there were other crippling challenges in the old days, too.
So:
