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What Travis wrote seems rather familiar to me. Of course you canīt make huge amounts of money from your own music -- especially when serving a niche market -- but hey, anytime I play a concert somewhere I come home with a few bucks more in my pocket and a few CDs less in my kitchen, so what? I do it for the fun of it, and when you love doing it you wonīt bother whether it pays back in huge amounts of money or not. Of course other jobs are paid a lot better, or you have to pay a lot more to have someone else do a job you canīt do yourself, but so what? "If you donīt do it for the love of it, why would you do it at all?" as a friend of mine from England once said so aptly. I know this kind of cynism very well. When I decided to professionalise on making music, I was sneered at by my former co-worker who thought I was nuts, and that spending my time and my money on making albums was just pointless, that making CD album releases would be "nothing but a prestigious enterprise". Unfortunately, this attitude also reflected in his work ethics. Need I mention that I now work all on my own? The bad thing is that music is not assigned a specific value in its own right. To most people, music seems to be just a mere commodity that kills silence or drives away boredom or whatever. Thus, they are not willing to pay much for music because they donīt believe that the process of actually creating music takes time, effort, energy, and money in its own right. This attitude is reflected on the internet where people just rip albums illegally without paying for them. For a McDonaldīs bag full of shit they wouldnīt hesitate to spend comparatively huge amounts of money on, but on music? Why? It has no value at all, not even a nutritional... when asked they would rather have music for free than pay for it. The "In Rainbows" campaign by Radiohead was the best example, and were they not a well-established band with a lot of faithful supporters, they would have earned *nothing* after all, had it been up to those who got themselves the album for no money at all. If I took this as a yardstick for my own work ethics, Iīd have quit making music long ago. Luckily, the older I get, the less I bother. Stephen ____________________________________________________________________ "Ambition makes you look pretty ugly, kicking squealing Gucci little piggy." (Thom Yorke/Radiohead -- "Paranoid Android") Finally available: Stephen Parsick -- Traces of the Past Redux, reissued with three previously unreleased bonus tracks. For more info please check www.parsick.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Rick Walker" <looppool@cruzio.com> To: "LOOPERS DELIGHT (posting)" <Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com> Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2008 10:56 AM Subject: Re: Why SHOULDN'T musicians be paid? > Travis wrote: > "What I do as a musician is very useful--to me. Fifteen years of public > performance has led me to the conclusion that it's not terribly useful to > most people, certainly not when it comes to them paying me money for what I > do. > > When plumbing goes wrong, people get sick and die. Clean water flowing >in > and dirty water flowing out without a problem is a necessity for living. If > I get hit by a bus on my way to a gig, they play the in-store CD player that > night. When my sewer line breaks because a tree root has broken a pipe > under the front yard, I need a lot of specialized information, tools, >time > and smelly effort to set things right again--or I pay someone else a > thousand dollars to do it better and quicker than I can. When people don't > have any music, they turn on the radio and the problem's solved. Music >is > incredibly easy to find, plumbing less so. Thus the average plumber >makes > much more than the average musician." > > > Wow, Travis, your cyncism and lack of respect or existential self esteem > for what you do is astonishing to me and hard to believe. > > I'm proud to be a musician, whether I'm paid well or not. I'll do it > until I die because I love it and value it myself. > I can't imagine living without music, frankly. > > Maybe I"m reading you wrong, but do I detect a large share of bitterness > about your inability to make money from your music? > > In my world, I value artistry and creativity higher than almost >anything, > so I don't have any judgement of whether you can make money with your music > or not. > Some of my favorite artists are NOT full time professional musicians. > > To assume, of course, is to make an ASS out of U and ME > so I could be way off base here, but I'm just curious about your response to > the strong things I"ve just said. > > Perplexed but still respectfully yours, > > Rick