Why Your Music Is Worthless (And How To Sell It Anyway)

[Mike McLoone]

http://www.indelicates.com/worthless/

Long but interesting blog post on adding value to what is otherwise now basically a worthless commodity. Some swearing and indignation for record label executives. Be warned, just in case that means you!

"Against the Record Executive - sat in the centre of his web sucking the life from artists and turning their great statements into compromised corporate slurry to gorge on.

They were b******s. Greying, Ralph Steadman b******s and square glasses-wearing, dolly-bird deflowering, paedophile b******s and machiavellian svengali b******s. B******s who squatted like mammon between the public and the musicians sieving out the goodness to befoul and shitting what was left into the shitty charts. That was why nothing was good enough."

[Emmet]

Your ultimate goal for most artists today is to create remarkable music and content to generate awareness, use social channels to create engagement and build a relationship with an audience. This engagement and relationship creates fans who value your works and will be willing to reward you for them. The job then is to turn as many of those fans into superfans whose large monetary purchases of scarce tangible items and experiences are a display of symbolic patronage.

[One Horse Town]

Wonderful wordplay and sentence construction aside, I'm not getting your point. Music has always been a commodity since the Renaissance - probably before. The patronage system was up and running then. As for record exec's? Well they've always occupied the same ground as estate agents and tax inspectors. Who cares? I always remember Elton John's deteriorating relationship with Dick James - the person who signed him and helped break him in America. Almost a father son relationship. But then Dick got greedy and the rest is history. However both parties made lots of money.......and so it continues.

[Mike McLoone]

Wonderful wordplay and sentence construction aside, I'm not getting your point.

It's not a blog post from me, I just found it funny and informative so posted it here.

But the point is, yes, the music is worthless, however there are good ideas on how to sell it in the article. Should anyone bother to read it.

[JRock]

Thanks for that Mike - good read, I too found it funny and informative.

[Dynamic Mike]

I read a rare interview with Ritchie Blackmore (I think in guitarist magazine) maybe 20 odd years ago, in which he was asked about the future of the music industry. He said he didn't care if it all packed up and went home tomorrow. He figured there was already enough music around to last him until he was dead, and he wasn't really interested in what happened after that.

[Drew Stephenson]

Nice blog. Nothing particularly new in it but well set out and with some lovely turns of phrase.