Today in the music biz - updated 4/19

In which I actually stand up for millionaires

 

Here's a interesting snapshot of today's shiny new music industry -

Geoff Barrow from the at-one-time big-unit-shifting band Portishead reports that he made a whopping $2,511.79 after taxes from 34,000,000 plays on the various streaming services (and yes, the British pay a lot of taxes, but not that much, so sit down Grover Norquist). This reminded me of something non-starving-artist Steven Tyler said once at Famous Music College (after my time there though) "What it's all about when you make it big is that on every dollar, they keep 75 cents and give you 25 cents. Then every time they see you, they tell you how shiny your quarter is."

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence because an international cartel of executives have scientifically determined what shade of green you prefer.

An article by Derek Thompson from the Atlantic  looks into the ways the major media companies use Shazam, Spotify and other digital music services to quantify the audience's preferences, and use them in the marketing, and sadly, even the production of what he calls the "dispiriting sameness in pop music".

I encourage reading it as the article confirms several suspicions of mine. But, I'll break out a few points for comment.