09-01-2016, 01:33 PM
First of all, I can't say much to defend continued income streams of such people as George Gershwin or Hank Williams, Sr. no material enticement will ever bring them back to the creative activities wherein they excelled. Publishing companies get the revenue and creative people often get $crewed.
What could be even more troublesome to creative people is that just about anyone with a modicum of talent and effort can be a creative person. Competition is not only with free stuff streamed, but with fellow creative people. How many people can write a good op-ed or a good song? Many who never made the star system.
It's very difficult to find recordings of classical music -- in part because there was so much competition in the business. There were forty or so competing versions of such a warhorse as the 6th symphony of Peter Tchaikovsky. As a rule it was the newest recording that could sell at a full price, but the recording companies then flooded the market with old ones on various 'budget' arrangements -- two for one, five for two, etc. The market collapsed. The CD is so durable that people can listen to a 30-year-old CD with no audible loss of sound...
The recording industry is doing much the same with pop. The biggest seller of recorded music may have been Tower Records at one time -- but that entity went belly-up. It's now Wal*Mart. It sells lots of compilation discs for $5 each. So if you are a singer starting out you are competing with old recordings of Simon and Garfunkel, Carly Simon, Johnny Cash, Alabama -- you name it. Add to that, one can buy a second-rate or dated DVD of a movie for about the same price.
Contrary to myth, it was ever easy to be a creative person, whatever one's class. The poor always had to struggle to meet the demands of employers and outright owners. The middle class is largely a recent phenomenon, and a creative component within it a small part because the middle class was mostly obedient retainers, enforcers, and technicians. Getting the inspiration to do something creative implies taking a break from paid work... But even in recent times, the Beatles, arguably the most polished of all pop groups ever, put in about 10,000 hours of practicing and into performances in utter dives before going onto the world scene. 10,000 hours? That's about what one needs to achieve just about anything remarkable in entertainment, musical performance, athletics, or some high-level careers (law, medicine, architecture, engineering). That's time not spent on raw labor (as most must perform) or activities not meaningful to one's art, like tooling around in cars. As an example, symphony musicians have a reputation for being underdeveloped in their love lives; for all practical purposes they spent more time with perhaps a violin than with any person.
There will always be garage bands, and of course most of them will simply be obnoxious noise to distressed neighbors. Remember, of course, that much creative activity is rubbish... and most creative people who fall short will end up milking cows, doing oil changes, clerking in stores, or driving trucks.
Most of the money for creative people would seem to be funneled through advertising, the biggest use of creative talent, if not the most obvious. Most of the writers, photographers, and graphic artists making a genuine living do so in advertising. That may not be the noblest of activities, but it is the one in which creative people can most hone their talents, get steady work if they are good, and be certain of payment.
What could be even more troublesome to creative people is that just about anyone with a modicum of talent and effort can be a creative person. Competition is not only with free stuff streamed, but with fellow creative people. How many people can write a good op-ed or a good song? Many who never made the star system.
It's very difficult to find recordings of classical music -- in part because there was so much competition in the business. There were forty or so competing versions of such a warhorse as the 6th symphony of Peter Tchaikovsky. As a rule it was the newest recording that could sell at a full price, but the recording companies then flooded the market with old ones on various 'budget' arrangements -- two for one, five for two, etc. The market collapsed. The CD is so durable that people can listen to a 30-year-old CD with no audible loss of sound...
The recording industry is doing much the same with pop. The biggest seller of recorded music may have been Tower Records at one time -- but that entity went belly-up. It's now Wal*Mart. It sells lots of compilation discs for $5 each. So if you are a singer starting out you are competing with old recordings of Simon and Garfunkel, Carly Simon, Johnny Cash, Alabama -- you name it. Add to that, one can buy a second-rate or dated DVD of a movie for about the same price.
Contrary to myth, it was ever easy to be a creative person, whatever one's class. The poor always had to struggle to meet the demands of employers and outright owners. The middle class is largely a recent phenomenon, and a creative component within it a small part because the middle class was mostly obedient retainers, enforcers, and technicians. Getting the inspiration to do something creative implies taking a break from paid work... But even in recent times, the Beatles, arguably the most polished of all pop groups ever, put in about 10,000 hours of practicing and into performances in utter dives before going onto the world scene. 10,000 hours? That's about what one needs to achieve just about anything remarkable in entertainment, musical performance, athletics, or some high-level careers (law, medicine, architecture, engineering). That's time not spent on raw labor (as most must perform) or activities not meaningful to one's art, like tooling around in cars. As an example, symphony musicians have a reputation for being underdeveloped in their love lives; for all practical purposes they spent more time with perhaps a violin than with any person.
There will always be garage bands, and of course most of them will simply be obnoxious noise to distressed neighbors. Remember, of course, that much creative activity is rubbish... and most creative people who fall short will end up milking cows, doing oil changes, clerking in stores, or driving trucks.
Most of the money for creative people would seem to be funneled through advertising, the biggest use of creative talent, if not the most obvious. Most of the writers, photographers, and graphic artists making a genuine living do so in advertising. That may not be the noblest of activities, but it is the one in which creative people can most hone their talents, get steady work if they are good, and be certain of payment.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.