Comment by lucas_membrane
Comment by lucas_membrane a day ago
This may be good news. Some people will want to consume more real natural music. The best way to make this happen with minimal incidence of fakery will be very small-scale cottage-industry performance venues, 10 to 50 people in a room, including both musicians and performers, voices, instruments and no wires, wireless, computers or electronics involved. Do the math, and you can see that a few musicians should be able to make a pretty good living performing that way with ticket prices no higher than what millions are now paying to sit in crowds of 10,000 or so. Of course, there will be an adjustment period as the mass-production of culture and art declines, and small-scale decentralized production becomes the norm. The media moguls will try to convince us that art made by machine is superior, and their opinion shaping conglomerates will keep manufacturing superstar icons to deliver it. But cottage-industry music will be almost as hard to control as cottage-industry terrorism, and underground cooperatives of radical musicians and listeners will pop up and start making and sharing music with each other for free. As anything free is not counted in the Gross National Product, this will be terrible for the economy, and it will also distract people from all the other distractions to which we are supposed to addict ourselves. Use your brains; lose your chains!
This already exists at thousands of local music venues around the world. It doesn't pay enough to live reasonably on, which is obvious if you just look at the numbers. Even with a megastar ticket price of $300*(50 attendees), a single show barely moves the needle on living expenses once split amongst a band. You need to do perform again and again, to the point where you can't charge $300/ticket. That's basically a residency, which is common in places like Vegas for artists at the end of their career. If you tour instead, your costs go up massively.