Jun 1, 2009
Whither the Music Business
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By: Luke Gilman | Other Posts by Luke Gilman Go to Comments | Be the First to Comment |
I got to hang around the apartment for the first time in a while with nothing pressing to do but run through some music blogs and catch up on what’s happening. I was also sort of half-watching the 2006 documentary Before the Music Dies on Hulu (embedded below):
It began to dawn on me how much had changed even since Before the Music Dies came out. After waxing nostalgic and the standard artist/label horror stories (Doyle Bramhall was the posterchild) it moves to Napster and MySpace with some indie-power-to-the-people-be-true-to-yourself optimism. In a two-hour span, I went through a couple of hundred posts from mp3 blogs, MySpace pages and mp3 aggregators like hypemachine, pandora and last.fm, downloaded a few DRM free albums from Amazon and some tracks on iTunes (giftcard)… and all this in boxers.
There’s a certain amount that’s wrong with that – some concessions to convenience that I don’t have to have the album in my hand, that it takes more and more to get me out to a live show these days, that I’ll put up with MP3 sound quality – on the other hand I just checked out about 50 new artists I’d never heard of before today.
