Posts by giovanni tiso
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to
If it's in the relationship of appreciation between both those parties, then book tours, limited editions and personally autographed copies are one way to go.
But that's fetishism. Do we really want it to become the index of the profession of being a writer?
-
Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to
Suppose I'd better clap until they inevitably come back out again' style of today's bands, that's quite remarkably striking.
I remember we drove home a young woman of about 20 who used to work for my partner some years ago and she was telling us about the great concerts that she had seen that and all of them were bands I had seen in concert in the early to mid Eighties. It was spooky, it's what it was.
-
Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to
Totally inappropriate! I demand stricter genre divisions! What next? Cats and dogs living together?
It's like all of a sudden you're all fans of postmodernism :-)
Seriously, though, when's the last time you heard a piece of music that made you think this is really new, as opposed to this is really good?
-
Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to
Not meaning to interrupt
Yes, sorry, I was derailing there a bit. Great link, and very much looking forward to the show tonight (so much so I tried to watch it last night. What's with me and thinking that Media 7 is on Wednesdays?).
-
Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to
I don't think there aren't new genres. It's just that there are so many, that none of them seem so titanic as they used to.
Lanier is not saying that there aren't any big, paradigm shifting genres. He's saying that there aren't any new genres, period.
-
Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to
I just don't buy the "it's all fucked" conclusion.
No, neither do I - although I find his bitterness quite... interesting, for want of a better word.
-
Twenty years without a new genre. If you listen to him.
-
Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to
His views on contemporary pop music are where I think he's really out of touch.
I happily defer on this one.
-
Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to
Actually, they did:
No, they didn't. They regulated it.
...the how that you do all that is what becomes your business model and I believe we've barely scratched the surface of what will be possible.
That's a lot more reasonable, it seems to me. But aside from the fact that that we're still here scratching surfaces may give us some pause (again: where is the workable business model that can be replicated?), there is a fundamental problem I think in the idea that we should give up on making the work itself being the thing that gets rewarded.
And Apple’s Cloud Music service heads in a fascinating direction – effectively rehabilitating everyone’s dodgy downloads by offering music companies a cut of the fee charged for the cloud service itself. A revenue stream from pirated music? That’s pretty clever.
That's the kind of thing I want to see - precisely in that it rewards the content.
And innovation on an artistic level? It feels pretty good out there to me.
If you haven't read You Are Not a Gadget, you might enjoy it for the contrary views therein expressed. And I give Lanier credit as a musician and music critic, more so than in other areas.
-
Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to
You'd want to be careful breaking something that works, though. Via the iTunes Store Apple has paid out $16.6 billion to content owners and $14 billion to music companies. Its system actually favours independent artists. A tax that increases the cost of the equipment favoured by the creative community might also produce perverse outcomes.
I'm not saying we close down iTunes or Google, just that we take some of their money away. But yes, I don't claim to have a ready solution, just saying that we need to broaden the conversation beyond the "partner, innovate, diversify, self-market, sell shirts" stage, that puts the onus of navigating the transition entirely on authors.