Licensing, Songwriting, Art Creation
Jon Pareles, for the NY Times, argues convincingly that, as licensing opportunities become the last bastion of truly viable monetization opportunities, the “art” of writing a song shifts and becomes more commercially oriented. Really, he’s articulating a depressing truth.
Apparently there’s no going back, structurally, to paying musicians to record music for its own sake.
Musicians need to eat and they want to be heard. Pretty simple. Rather than suggest to listeners that they enjoy music without marketing tie-ins, today’s over-30 music critics should accept the realities of today’s marketplace. Marketing and advertising do not equal selling out.
To the point of the first quote, I read Pareles’ article as less about “selling out” and more about the demise of the traditional music industry in the first place. That’s what I see happening.
The magnets of money are pulling people towards them. “Professional musicians”, meaning people that get paid to do this and furthermore meaning people that can make a decent living consistently doing this, are being pulled towards the entities and activities that can support them. When the economics of the old model supported a vast corporate infrastructure, touring, recording albums, and being a session musician was enough of an opportunity that it was a profession and that’s what the music industry meant. Now, the profession lies in composing for film and television and licensing individual songs to film and television. And, to the extent that you’re shaping songs so that they can be licensed, to Jon’s point, you’re probably writing a different kind of song.
This is a long way of saying something not very new. There is no money in recording music for its own sake. So the people that do it will gradually shift where the money is. And the people that are left will have independent means of existence and will be using their original music as a marketing vehicle for the other things they do.
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