This is kind of moot. If the artists literally can't afford to make music, they have no incentive to maintain relationships with any kind of distribution platform. So everyone will be listening to a lot more "old music", not just you.

Is this actually happening though? I don’t have actual numbers and would be open to be proven wrong, but my impression is that there are more people making music than ever (barriers to entry have been lowered) and more people making a living off their music and related enterprises such as touring and merch than ever (markets are globalized and contain more people with more disposable income)

I’m not sure why people believe that artists selling copies of their music being a viable source of income in itself is something that’s necessarily critical and/or a moral imperative to preserve. Humans made music for thousands of years before technology made that possible, and after some decades technology has now made that particular business model less lucrative (it’s now very easy and basically free to share essentially unlimited copies of a piece of music, which has tanked the monetary value of such copies)

As long as music is being made, I don’t think it’s a disaster for society that some artists’ preferred way of making money isn’t so viable anymore (if it ever was - what percentage of acts were ever making real bank selling albums?)

I think my point my have been lost somewhere around how much making music actually costs.

Yes, anyone can _do_ music at little cost at any time. But there is a real cost to make "good music" and it isn't in sheer musicianship or equipment - it's also in time.

I've never done music full time but I've been in several studio and live sessions and I assure you it's exhausting and time consuming.

And are more or fewer people able to put in that time now than before piracy and streaming became a thing? The answer to that question is not obvious to me, but I lean towards ”more”, or at least ”roughly the same”

Even if the answer is ”fewer”, and we thought that was such a horrible thing that we had to have a massive social movement or introduce strict regulation to move away from streaming, how would you put the genie back in the bottle when piracy is so easy, and people have become used to the technological advancements we’ve made?

I don't think you can really compare because the culture is so different.

Before the internet, you weren't going to get famous without being an actor, musician, artist, author, etc.

Sam Walton was not famous the way Elon or Jeff Bezos are famous.

I would think there is less because music just isn't as important as it use to be and there are just so many other creative outlets now. The hard thing to account for though is electronic music. You would have had to spend quite a bit of money in the 90s just to make a track and now you can do it basically for free.

If it was 1990, I would be in a band because there wasn't much else to do. Being in a band then was like having a podcast now.

The music industry was never this static thing either. There isn't much before 1950. It is hard now to imagine how huge folk music was in the 70s. MTV was such a big deal in my youth but that only had a 25 year run of being relevant if that.

I don't think there is a real alternative to streaming or the power law distributions that are going to come with that.

It's tricky. From everything I know first hand and reading, both piracy and streaming never had a net negative impact on the artists themselves. This was often only a concern for labels.

I don't want this to come off as backpedaling - the original comment I was responding to said that if the artist became unavailable on streaming services, then they would not engage with the artist. As it turns out, artists don't rely on these people for income.

Both streaming services and piracy have the knock-on effect of increasing concert and merchandise sales (through reach), which have much higher margins for artists. I've obtained studio grade LP's from several artists entirely for free, as they have the expectation that we'll be paying them in person at concert. If the only way you support your artist is through a streaming service, then your specific engagement doesn't matter.

Just because it's exhausting and time consuming doesn't mean that it will be good or popular. Those are subjective measures anyway.

If they can't afford to make music maybe they should change their profession or get a "real" j o b.

Yes, and to extend this line of thinking: Spotify pioneered this model as a solution to rampant music piracy and consequently very low and diminishing revenues for recorded music. For the music consumer it's a beautiful proposition to have this enormous catalog for $10 or so a month. The music industry now has record revenues, and the streaming platforms can, and often do, turbo charge a new artist's career.

When I browse Spotify randomly I'm frequently surprised by coming across artists that I've never heard of with 1 million, 3 million, 15 million, etc monthly listeners, and then finding good, interesting, historically significant but obscure artists with just a few hundred or thousand listeners.

My friend, a recording artist, recently broke the 1 million monthly listeners barrier on Spotify, he's dead chuffed of course, but this is more listeners than innumerable great, classic artists. I don't see this discrepancy as a failure of the streaming system, but as a success: my friend is a young artist making money and getting good exposure.

Just saying: yes Spotify has it's faults, but it's also great too.