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literally everything about the music industry now makes me want to die
it makes me want to go full Adorno on this shit
everyone loves the Cool Female Gay Icon-Ish Indie Artist, who makes minimalistic electronically-infused ironic pop with finger snaps *5 seconds later* we regret to inform you that the artist is the daughter of obscenely wealthy international arms dealers
what kind of people do you think will be able to make money making music if 1) there is no way of making money from people buying your music any more, 2) you basically become popular because an app says you should rather than because anyone actually likes you
none of this is new but it just feels like when we had the most recent changing of the guard about four years ago, what little possibility hadn't been murdered by austerity was just struck dead without anyone noticing it even happened
a really bleak problem with the way things are at the moment is that even if people listen to you a lot, they don't bother to actually follow you any more. you can have one of the biggest songs on a top playlist and nobody will ever care who you are
there is a situation now where it is impossible for anyone to do their jobs, and the forces that were supposed to be there to lead people further up (e.g. managers) aren't interested until people can already prove they can do their jobs, which is mostly popularity contest stuff
it's the Marie Antoinette era of the music industry, but the thing is it'll probably carry on like this forever. there are enough landed gentry and CIA scions making music you can't be bothered to turn off for the industry to keep making extremely rich bastards popular.
yeaaaah a lot of this is me being angry about my failed dream i don't know enough about to move towards anyway and probably never will. i have a point though!!
i think what it is is that i miss having a context where music can actually matter to people instead of just being a massive sink full of cold spaghetti (and if you touch it, you get force-fed more cold spaghetti by a grey hand)
the problem with the 15 minutes of fame model is that, because it's a cliche, we've lost sight of how ridiculous a situation that is
pop was always silly and disposable but what with 'maybe stop making albums and just make singles if you want to eat', it basically means anyone who isn't just making short sugary-snack pop is being told they can't make money
so much of what i like in music, both the lowest-common-denominator commercial and the connoisseur-commercial, is to do with feelings of humanity and weirdness leaking out of it, even when it's in a hyper-processed form.
the internet should have made music more weird. there's so goddamn much more great music being made and distributed now than literally any other time on earth! so why can't we find any of it? why is everything we can find something that suits the rich to feed us?
i'm beating myself up over never having finished my stupid album again, ugh. ignore me
