I wish that there was a solution out there. I feel like the music industry just needs to get creative (ironically) and figure out how to make their money given what the status quo is. Really there's only a few options

1) The file sharing sites being shut down in the past year that we've seen (Megaupload, Onsmash, etc...) are just the beginning, and the RIAA and the Majors are about to go HAM in washington trying to dam up the streams of freeness that is the internet. They will fail, and nothing will change.

2) The majors stop signing as many artists, and focus on maximizing the profits out of the 10 artists that are actually making money from album sales and bloated ticket prices/merchandising. While the rest of the music world does what it looks like they're already doing and work HARDER to make connections with fans, attacking all fronts of media interaction, and work on developing niche, devoted, diehard audiences who are willing to fork over money for their music as well as peripheral items that they sell (a la OFWGKTA).


3) Somehow, make buying physical/digital music a different experiences that they can leverage into making it worth it for consumers. Something that can't be pirated. I myself just bought my first record player and am now buying favorite albums for it, simply because I think that theyre cool to own, they sound different (better), its a fun change of pace to play instead of letting 15 people decide what song to play next on iTunes when I have friends over, and I just love the tangibleness of having a really big version of my favorite albums artwork/all the packaging of it all. Now that's not going to be for everybody, but with that same idea in mind, these musicians need to get real and figure out what theyre fans ARE down to spend money on, cause Grizzly Bear has those type of fans. Many of them are just broke college students and pirating is as common as j-walking.


It SUCKS, that the music can't speak for itself, but as I said, that's been devalued. people don't want to pay for just the music, they want to pay for the identity and feeling they get when they think about their favorite bands. We can either grieve about it, and try to appeal to the morality of you and me and everyone like us, or we can be practical and figure out how to start new trends that can stimulate what is going on in music with some payola. Music is as good IMO as it has ever been in my life quality wise, and I feel like the people who actively seek it out would mostly agree. Time to figure out how to cash in.

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village.fm/okayplayer | @delajoo
"Whether you're a rock star or a garbage man, if you think about yourself all the time, you won't be very good at what you do." - Frusciante