Better ways to music industry

The pressure to be as efficient and productive as possible has a way of sneaking into one’s mind and body, reconfiguring one’s priorities, and directing one’s creative decisions without being detected and called out for what it is.

The people who created this mess will eventually pay a price for their carelessness and greed.

And then what happens?

The last people standing might just be the musicians—and, of course, those fans who genuinely care about music. If we’re lucky they will build something new on the ruins.

I know a ton of people, from when I started researching in 2021, at public libraries around the United States and Canada that have been working on local music streaming programmes, where they pay small flat fees to local artists to license their music for these small-scale, locally focused music streaming programmes.

It seems to me that there are a lot of forces in the music business whose goal is to provide content as cheaply as possible. I hate the word ‘content’, but it’s what they use. They’ve been engaged in all these different processes of trying to reduce the cost of content, and it seems realistic to imagine that there will probably be other schemes tha... See more

Whilst economists can present a dismal picture of GDP and all of its variations, they often miss what matters most to people—cultural industries that inspire, educate, and inform their populations. Music is one of those things we do not need to live, but most would struggle to live without.