Yes. This.

Except maybe #8. I've got boxes of unsold tshirts in my basement that contradict this. They are, however awesome for washing the car. So there's that upside.

That bugged me too. I was afraid that his baffling rant against the EFF would be used to discredit what up to that point was a pretty cogent and sound argument.

And apparently, for at least one person, it did.

You willing to go to a concert every day of the week.

If you think your average artist can make a living performing, you should really try it sometime. The profit margins are razor thin, unless you're selling out big venues, and few people do that. Even a big band can have a hard time selling a big room out on a weeknight. Not every market has big venues. Not every fanbase is centralized around, say, New York and LA where there are lots of venues.

Multiply that by a few thousand bands. You've got thousands of bands competing for a limited number of venues, and those that do sell out a smaller venue are unlikely to make more than "what it'll cost to get to the next show."

It's not a sustainable model.

He's got a weird obsession with certain copyright issues that I don't fully understand, and I think it tends to undercut his arguments. He makes a lot of good points but then goes kidna weird with OMG TEH EFF IS EEEVIL and I'm like "what?"

His main point is sound, that the model has changed but artists are still taking it up the back of a volkswagon.

I admit his rant in that are kind of went off the rails, but I see what he's trying to say, I think. A lot of these services profit from an artist's music whether the usage of their service is legitimate or not. That's his big beef. They wash their hands of the responsibility, while still making money.

I'd wager thousands have tried. They just failed.

The model is good IF everything works out right. But if one of those things goes wrong it all falls apart. Kickstarter is no gaurantee unless you can drum up support well enough to fund things. I know plenty of guys with great bands and good fanbases who couldn't, simply because they personally can't seem to motivate their fans to give money *before* the album is in the can, for whatever reason. Lack of the right kind of charisma, older fanbase, whatever.

Lost of people have contacts for licensing. The demand - and payout - for licensing is a lot lower than one would hope.

Selling it yourself is great, and does work...but only if you're technical enough to set up and maintain your own webstore. Some musicans are. Others aren't. Then you have to get people to go *there* instead of the very convenient itunes or amazon.

All these things CAN be done, but so far, very few have successfully been able to pull of each step in the game.

Yes. Thank you.

That kind of cuts to the heart of Lowery's argument. While I like his blog I think he goes off on a few tangents that undercut his message.

The fact is that under the new model, musicians are now absorbing the brunt of the financial risk while still only reaping a tiny, tiny percentage of the reward. In the old model, they only reaped a tiny eprcentage, most of the time, but someone else shared at least some of the risk.

While the new model may be a lot better at some things - barrier to entry, for example, is much lower - this new artist's utopia that a lot of the "make it in music wooo!" blogs love to go on about simply isn't true. We've traded one form of artist exploitation for another, slightly more insidious one.

Who said anything about large sums? Some of us would just like to be able to pay the bills doing this. You make it sound like all these musicians are asking for Bentleys and caviar. Most of the ones I know just want enough to afford health insurance.

The thing is, here, that a lot of these .1% are the 99.9. They don't give a crap one way or the other about the $15/CD model. Most of them are hoping that "hey, if I sell some music, I'd like to be able to live above the poverty line doing so." They'd like to be able to get more than $.0001 for every spotify play. They'd like to know that if someone buys their album from an online site, they'll get a cut (and not have it just go to some suspicious russian grey-market website or whatever).

It's always been a myth that signed musicians are rolling in the dough. Even guys that have had big hits have had to take day jobs just to make ends meet. And it might be better to *be* a musician now, since you don't need to be picked up by a label to sell your music, it's a lot worse to try and make a *living* as a musician. You look at someone like Clyde Stubblefield, one of the most famous drummers in modern history (as part of James Brown's band), and one of the most-sampled drummers ever, and see that he had to have a benefit concert to bay his medical bills, and you can't help but think "wait, why is THIS guy, of all people, just barely scraping by?"

Of course you can make the argument of "they should find better jobs"...well, great, but then we wouldn't have musicians at all, and who'd want that? You can't really do much with a few megastars and a bunch of weekend warriors. There needs to be a musical middle class for there to be enough music for people to enjoy.

True, you don't need a studio. There are lots of interesting spaces to record in, as Radiohead (among many others) have proven since the early days of recording.

However, most of those interesting spaces are not your average 2-3br suburban ranch home.

You don't need an acoustically perfect space to record. But you also don't want and acoustically awful place to record. You record your vocals in a closet? They're gunna sound like they're recorded in a closet. I recently had to remote record an ensemble in someone's living room (it was the only space they could get in the timeframe) and despite my use of baffles, reflexion filters, tight-pattern mics, etc and then a crapton of post-processing you can still tell it was done in a living room.

*mixing* too...doesn't need to be perfect, but if you want a good mix, you'd better have a pretty frickin controlled space. You can get close in a home, with a decent room, a lot of rockwool and some know-how, but it requires time and effort (and a room you can pretty much dedicate to the purpose).

(And good monitors. And good converters. And good processors. And someone who knows how to use it all).