Up The Creek Without A Paddle

Composers and musicians these days are facing an increasinly uphill battle against the music industry. To get your music published and recorded has always been an expensive undertaking, but what makes matters worse in this day and age is the lack of a feasible market or even consumer demand for your product. The hardcore collectors and audiophiles of the past have simply lost interest because it's become increasingly difficult to purchase actual physical product since most if not all music retail chains and independent shops have witnessed dwindling demand and closed their doors. So now, if you should feel the inclination to actually purchase a new recording, you have to resort to ordering a CD online, downloading digital files to your computer's data drive, or even worse, stream the binary code for a one-time listen. And speaking of streaming, according to an article from technology website Techspot, Spotify, one of the largest streaming service operators who still hasn't worked out the algorithms necessary for precise classical music searches, made more than $3.3 billion in the first quarter of this year (2023) alone. And yet they have the effrontery to pay the content creators mere pennies for each stream, an insulting return for their work.

How did it get so bad so fast? Let me give you an example that shows how disconnected and dispassionate the music industry has become. Back in 1980, when the vinyl format still ruled, the record shop I worked in was doing well what with constant traffic through the store, and high consumer demand. So much so that during the weeks following the death of John Lennon, we had set up racks upon racks of all the Lennon and Beatles LPs at the front of the store, which we constantly had to restock because fans were buying them faster than we could pull them out of the stock room. And that's just one example of how healthy the music business was around 40 years ago, before some dimwit label and industry executives made the unfortunate decision to launch the digital format. Of course, there was a burst in sales for the few years that followed because collectors and enthusiasts, convinced by those executives that digital was better, felt the need to replace their aging stacks of vinyl with CDs.

At least with CDs, though not as tactile or tangible as vinyl LPs, you still had the sense of ownership and felt the urge to build a collection. But now with downloads and streaming, it seems music has become a disposable commodity. The idiots with their earbuds and smartphones in hand, walking down the street whilst completely oblivious to their surroundings, seem delighted with that but then so would you if you heard the crap they consider music these days. Being a classical music critic and reviewer myself, as much as I can I try to obtain physical CDs of new recordings to at least listen to them on my sound system to get as close to genuine sound quality as possible. But more and more these days, the best record labels can do is offer me access to digital files that I need to download with limited bandwidth, and install on the little space I have left on my computer hard drive (I have to delete some to make room for others). Sure I have the software and know-how to make my own CD copies, but that's time consuming and in the end, just doesn't sound the same. Sure I can listen to these copies on my sound system or even in the car, but the booklet notes are on my computer screen. It all feels disjointed.

So please, keep supporting classical musicians and composers as best you can. At least throw them a rope or a lifeboat so they can pull themselves out of the stream. If all the content creators stood up to the industry, maybe, just maybe, the good old days of analog technology could make a full comeback. But wait, now it looks like composers are about to be superseded by AI and the computing power of ChatGPT. Better buy yourself a submarine.