November 1, 2011 The Future of Music Coalition Looks to the Past to Understand How Musicians Make Money [Part I, Interview]
Whether or not you’re a musician, over the past ten years or so there have been incredible shifts in the music industry. It wasn’t very long ago that you probably didn’t buy your music over the Internet, or have the ability to listen to any song you wanted to hear with a couple touches of the button, or if you were a musician have an incredible range of tools to promote and record yourself that weren’t ridiculously expensive. All these changes have been welcomed thus giving greater opportunities to musicians and their fans alike to create and consume music.
While it seems these opportunities are being taken advantage of, how do we know these opportunities are leading musicians to a fruitful life of creating and living off of their art? In music circles, we often hear about the “middle class musician” and how much easier it is to be a musician today than it was 15 or more years ago. Yet, most of the evidence backing these claims in anecdotal and does not give a complete picture to the changing landscape in the music industry.