Fleecing The Audience (Score 1)

"Is 'the fans always get fleeced' the rock industry's equivalent to Moore's Law?"

So, um, here's a question: at what point is a musician allowed to make money from their work? Nobody wants to buy their albums anymore; now they're "fleecing" you by charging exorbitant prices for their concerts?

I'll put it another way: screw anybody who writes an Open Source app and then wants to get paid for providing aftermarket support. I (didn't) buy the app, right? So you should come and set it up for me for free, wherever I am, and I'll pay you what I think it's worth. I hope you can afford your own plane ticket, by the way.

As both a developer and a musician, lemme clue some of you in on something: being a musician is not just doing a bunch of smack and lurching into a studio every so often. (Except for Pete Doherty.) In fact, I'd say it's a helluva lot more difficult to learn to write music well -- or even competently enough to be a pop musician -- than it does to write code well.

The notion that musicians are running around swimming in pools full of Dom Perignon and lighting their crack pipes with $100 bills, and therefore don't deserve your money, is idiotic and a product of lazy thinking. 99% of musicians make less than $1000 a month doing their jobs. Most of the other 1% make less than your average Perl programmer.

And I'm talking about famous musicians, by the way. Madonna is a millionaire, but she's been a highly successful musician for more than 20 years now. Anybody who spends 20 years marketing themselves, touring globally with a massive production setup, and consistently releasing successful product into the market ought to be a millionaire, or they're doing something very wrong. Same in music as any other type of IP work. Madonna is, in many ways, the Bill Gates of the music industry. (The merits of her music are another matter. So are the merits of Gates' software.)

I personally know a band who's opening for one of the biggest groups in the world these days, who were just on the Tonight Show, who are getting $250 per show opening for the aforementioned band. Split four ways, since there's four members.

So I fail to see how musicians are "fleecing" you by trying to hold on to the one place they can still make money, since you've clearly decided you don't want to pay them for anything else.

Oh, maybe a t-shirt at the gig that you don't want to pay to see.

Gee, thanks.