friendship wrote: ↑Mon Dec 30, 2024 12:11 pm
Gone Fission wrote: ↑Sat Dec 28, 2024 9:52 pm
More than charts and sales volume as compared to MOTR pop music, I’m concerned about the compensation structure for anyone making music. Spotify being the worst doesn’t mean other streaming is great at getting musicians paid into a middle class standard of living without what used to be rock-star level sales.
I have a lot of Feelings about this. I think what's most painful for me is that my dreams were really modest: I didn't want to be a big star, I just wanted to spend my life doing what I loved and and survive in a (lower) middle class lifestyle. I tried every avenue/role I could think of, but the barriers of entry for all of them were massive, and the only peers I knew who made it work had a lot of financial support and connections from their family. It didn't help that I wasn't very social media savvy and didn't know how to self-promote (though I tried to learn). I came to terms with it, because I loved the act of music making itself, so as long as I could do some of it in my free time, that was okay with me. Work and the stresses of life left me with very little time and energy to do it, but better than nothing, I figured.
But watching online music platforms use people's work to create massive plagiarism machines was the last straw for me. Sure, I didn't expect to make even a tiny bit of money off it anymore, but knowing that whatever I share online will be exploited by a tech company to make themselves rich while making me obsolete has dashed the last bit of faith I had that recording is a worthwhile pursuit. Why work so hard on it when it's just another ladle of slop for the content trough?
I suppose I could forget being a recording artist and just stick to live playing, where music is still vital and real. But I just turned 40. I'm tired, and I'm out of touch. I simply do not have the time and energy to hone a good live act, no matter how badly I miss it. I was visiting an old band mate last year, and he mentioned an open mic he goes to every week. He was like "we should go, you could play a couple songs." It suddenly hit me that I didn't have any new songs to play, and it had been so long since I had played the old ones that I wouldn't remember how. It broke my heart. I so badly wished in that moment that I had fresh material to play for some people and maybe make a meaningful connection to the people listening to it.
I'm in a weird, liminal space where I haven't seriously pursued the craft of music for so long that I don't feel like a real musician, but I also don't know who I am if I'm not. I felt so alive when I was working on songs, playing in bands, making records. It made me feel like my life was going somewhere, like it had meaning. I don't know what role music can even have in my life anymore. I was making some ambient music in 2023, but after seeing all the hours of AI-generated ambient music people can listen to on Youtube, even that feels pointless. All I do now is play guitar for myself on the couch. All those skills I learned, all that knowledge and experience I accumulated over the years... it feels like a big waste. I have good memories, at least, which I treasure. Maybe it's just the end of a long chapter of my life, and I need to find something else to do with myself now that it's over.
Anyway sorry about this self-pitying, whiny, negative rant, I didn't know where else to dump these feelings and maybe someone else is feeling like I'm feeling.
and for somme ppl, that like a whole neu personality alteration 
