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Minor note on Brian Eno.
The guy gots schmartz. Back around the "Music for Films"
period in the 70s he made the material available for free to BBC and I think a
couple of other British entities producing TV. It's one of the reasons why
you can't get away from his work when watching PBS today. It's also what
got him contracts like "Apollo" for instance. U2 on the other hand took
this ethic and combined it with a kind of "Rip-Off Britain" method, which is why
it costs such immense amounts of money for their concerts (You don't think they
give all that money to Bob Geldof, do you?).
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, 10 January, 2006 05:06
AM
Subject: where's the money?
with all this discussion of declining CD sales, "selling
ourselves" and so forth, i was wondering... it seems to me that most artists'
don't make most of their income from CD sales. there are artists like Brian
Eno, John Cage, philosopher-types one might say, who have managed to brand
themselves essentially and are far more well known than their record sales
would indicate. Eno said he'd never sold more than 10,000 copies of a record.
but you can find his name in any history of modern music, and he makes pretty
good money on associated activities like speaking engagements, production,
etc. plus, he gets to do whatever he really wants without being
restricted by thoughts of how much his new CD might sell, thoughts of suicide
at over-commercialization, or who copies it off the web for free. or, take
even a hyper-commercial artist that does sell a lot of "records", for example
U2. i imagine U2 makes considerably more money on concert tours and
promotional deals (film licensing also, etc.) than from album sales. the
record company might make more on the CD sales... but not the artist. so, the
solution seems to be that if you want to make your own music and do the things
that interest you (music and otherwise) try and brand yourself and
sell/perform that. it can't be copied illegally or downloaded, whatever. and
it's tough for others to take a cut. plus, it's gotta be a lot more fun. in
this multi-media age i don't think an artist should be restricted to the sound
on a disc as a complete representation of their work (which is to say, of
themselves). make what is of value how you do something and the ideas behind
it rather than the resulting object/ossification from one instance of that
process.
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Woody Guthrie:
"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for
a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission,
will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it.
Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to
do."
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