It turns out that Ulrich was incontrovertibly correct on one point: Napster did pose a grave threat to the economic value that consumers placed on recorded music. And yet the creative apocalypse he warned of has failed to arrive. Writers, performers, directors and even musicians report their economic fortunes to be similar to those of their counterparts 15 years ago, and in many cases they have improved. Against all odds, the voices of the artists seem to be louder than ever.
].. And yet collectively, the figures seem to suggest that music, the creative field that has been most threatened by technological change, has become more profitable in the post-Napster era — not for the music industry, of course, but for musicians themselves. Somehow the turbulence of the last 15 years seems to have created an economy in which more people than ever are writing and performing songs for a living.
.. It’s true that most of that live-music revenue is captured by superstar acts like Taylor Swift or the Rolling Stones. In 1982, the musical 1-percenters took in only 26 percent of the total revenues generated by live music; in 2003, they captured 56 percent of the market, with the top 5 percent of musicians capturing almost 90 percent of live revenues. But this winner-takes-all trend seems to have preceded the digital revolution; most 1-percenters achieved their gains in the ’80s and early ’90s, as the concert business matured into a promotional machine oriented around marquee world tours. In the post-Napster era, there seems to have been a swing back in a more egalitarian direction. According to one source, the top 100 tours of 2000 captured 90 percent of all revenue, while today the top 100 capture only 43 percent.
.. Economic Modeling Specialists International reports that the number of self-employed actors has grown by 45 percent since 2001.
.. ‘‘Back in the 1980s and 1990s,’’ Jason Bailey wrote on Flavorwire, ‘‘it was possible to finance — either independently or via the studio system — midbudget films (anywhere from $5 million to $60 million) with an adult sensibility. But slowly, quietly, over roughly the decade and a half since the turn of the century, the paradigm shifted.’’ Movies like ‘‘Blue Velvet,’’ ‘‘Do the Right Thing’’ or ‘‘Pulp Fiction’’ that succeeded two or three decades ago, the story goes, would have had a much harder time in the current climate.
.. The numbers seem to suggest that the market for books may be evolving into two distinct systems. Critically successful works seem to be finding their audience more easily among indie-bookstore shoppers, even as the mainstream market has been trending toward a winner-takes-all sweepstakes.
.. Indie bookstores account for only about 10 percent of overall book sales, but they have a vastly disproportionate impact on the sale of the creative midlist books that are so vital to the health of the culture.
.. American households in 2013 spent 4.9 percent of their income on entertainment, the exact same percentage they spent in 2000.
.. It has never been easier to start making money from creative work, for your passion to undertake that critical leap from pure hobby to part-time income source.
Blank Space: What Kind of Genius Is Max Martin?
And yet Martin is known to insist that the artists he works with sing his songs exactly the way he sings them on the demos. In a sense, Spears, Perry, and Swift are all singing covers of Max Martin recordings. They are also among the few people in the world who have actually heard the originals
.. Perhaps the greatest advantage that Sandberg and his Swedish colleagues enjoyed was their relative freedom from the racial underpinnings of the long-established American distinction between R. & B. and pop.
.. A white American songwriter composing R. & B. tunes was not likely to get very far on the balkanized pop-music scene in the U.S., but a Swedish writer, free of the racist legacy of the R. & B./pop dichotomy, could create music that combined both, and that is just what Martin has done. The resulting hybrid, one could argue, has become the mainstream sound on Top Forty radio today.
.. According to Marie Ledin, the managing director of the Polar Music Prize, Sweden’s musical Nobel, Swedish songwriters and producers were partly responsible for a quarter of all Billboard Top Ten hits in 2014, an astonishing accomplishment for a country of fewer than ten million people.
.. one can argue that this very freedom from having to make sense lyrically has allowed the Swedes to soar to such melodic heights.
Soundslice: by Django Creator Adrian Holovaty
The Soundslice philosophy:
The best way to learn music is by listening to it, not just reading it.
Musical Memory and Alzheimer’s
But although barely able to identify their children, or even themselves, they could both clearly recognize familiar music. In church, ED joyfully led the congregational singing of less well-known hymns, and SB sang along with great enthusiasm to recordings of nursery rhymes that she used to sing to her children. Even more strikingly, their response to the music gave the impression that they were touched by something that was no longer accessible by looking at once-familiar faces, nor by reminders of autobiographical events, nor by involvement in often-encountered everyday situations. Music seemed to establish a secure connection and willingness to actively communicate that was hard to achieve by other means. The act of hearing and singing familiar songs perhaps induced a sense of security, confident social interaction, and simple pleasure that Alzheimer’s patients rarely experience. Their moments filled with familiar music could be their only times without great doubts and anxious questionings of their state.