When money is not enough
Artist's always complain about how "cheap" Spotify is. David Lowery does it too.
Yet at the same time he bitches about spending per capita on music being so low, and complains about how it's been dropping since the 90s.
What he fails to mention is that if you have a year long Spotify subscription you pay several times the per capita music spending (compared to what it is now, in the 70s, or *ever*). Moving music consumers to a subscription model (as the person to whom he writes the letter to) means more money for artists than they could ever hope to make.
Sure Spotify's payout model may have problems, but this is (again) because of the labels, not the consumers. The labels who essentially do shit when you're at the point where you record your own music and put it online at minimal technology costs.
People are willing to throw cash at musicians, but artist keep insisting on having it delivered the way they want (preferably an upfront payment for something which is for your ears only) they are going to keep starving.
This is never how people wanted to consume music in the first place, and was only possible by near-monopolizing the distribution chain for reproducible sound waves. Technology has chipped away at that since the 70s, until we arrived in the current age where this monopoly is only a memory. Artists will have to go back to the way things always were, play the music first and when you convince people it's good they'll want to pay you for it. That tradition most certainly does not include snubbing your nose complaining whatever is payed is not handed down to you on a silver platter.
Not exactly some new "Freetard" Web 2.5 idea, but just a small step back in time. With that step back, it's also time to cut the useless fat that came along with this now lost monopoly on distribution. We all know which companies those are.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
