For those who claim music is dying.....

Reports of music's death have been greatly exaggerated. 

The listeners are dying. I think we've sometimes confused the two.

It's not the death of music. But as an artist I've spent 14,000$ recording 2 albums in the course of 14 months. I won't be able to record another album for maybe a year due to lack of money. I expect to see somewhere around zero dollars return. I already have another album written. I won't be able to record it in a real studio... so I have to use home studio equipment which won't sound as good... if I didn't have to work a job and made just enough (about 30,000$) per year I would be able to put out a nice studio quality album and 2 homemade albums per year.

Smurph wrote: It's not the death of music. But as an artist I've spent 14,000$ recording 2 albums in the course of 14 months. I won't be able to record another album for maybe a year due to lack of money. I expect to see somewhere around zero dollars return. I already have another album written. I won't be able to record it in a real studio... so I have to use home studio equipment which won't sound as good... if I didn't have to work a job and made just enough (about 30,000$) per year I would be able to put out a nice studio quality album and 2 homemade albums per year. As artists we are beaten down and unable to get all of our ideas out because lack of time and money. And because of that we can't spend any money on promotion because we would rather make more music with that money... meaning that no one will hear it anyway. The cycle of life...

From what I've seen, music is in fact becoming a bigger and bigger industry as time goes by. Maybe people are looking at little things in way too big a light. 

Actually, to be a bit more constructive than in my earlier post: in The Netherlands we have a number of institutes who you could classify as higher level education in rock and pop music, where young musicians not only get trained in at least 2 instruments (voice is also an instrument), but also in the business side of music. Some of them become relatively successful (look up the Dutch band Krezip, if you don't mind 'pop'), others find their niche (the bass player for Exivious for example, or the guy who runs a private music school around the corner from where I live). 

Music will never die. Music as a big business has always been a walking corpse from my perspective. 

Tapfret wrote: Kati wrote: Unfortunately rap artists are all united they will prosper no doubt while prog musicians have to deal with fellow snobs who have an urge critique   Why can't the prog community get along like the hip hop community? Its so sad to think about all the blood feuds that have resulted in prog artists getting gunned down in the street.

Music isn't dying.  Prog isn't even dying.

The music industry has changed since the 60s and 70s.
In the 60s, most labels were independent.  And they had music lovers searching for artists that were new and exciting, who were also marketable.  And the public was open to wildly different, and even experimental song stylings.  The counterculture, while starting as an underground phenomenon, became popular culture, bringing along the psychedelic, the acid rock, folk, and even prog.  It was not unusual to turn on a radio and hear Roger Miller singing "King Of The Road", followed by Cream or the Moody Blues.

In the 70s, the strong independent labels were being acquired by what was to become the "major labels".  Early on, the majors allowed their subsidiaries to continue their signing of unique bands, and the prog years flourished.  The major labels soon became corporate giants, and the risky artist signing slowed to a trickle, only to be used as "loss leaders", part of a scheme where albums would be recorded and poorly marketed, and reported to the tax collectors at inflated costs, and used to offset paying higher taxes on successful releases. 

Disco and punk, and then later, new wave, hip-hop, grunge, etc. proved to be a way to sell music to people without the difficulty of creating more artistic music.  All of these were heavily cross marketed through movies, television, in ads for unrelated products, and eventually the Internet.  All the while, the major labels were still merging into fewer and fewer entities, and all were only focused on music that could be sold as if they were Big Macs.

Independent labels still existed, and occasionally one of these managed to sign an artist that managed to break through the corporate wall.

It's the Internet that has breathed new life into all of the non-pop music styles.  There are sites for people to discover new orchestral music, jazz, folk, and even our precious prog.  An artist need not belong to the monolith major labels to get heard, they need only have someone savvy enough to get the word out on a site for their target audience to become known.  Maybe not well-known in the traditional sense, but known to those of us who would like their music.

Meanwhile, the corporate music, or "corpses", are now delivering cookie cutter pop idols, all selling generic sex, and performing songs ghost written by a handful limited range songwriters.

Music isn't dying.  You just have to find it.

Music isn't dying, the music industry's just growing. A tiny percent of everything nowadays is being over-produced, over-advertised, just to make safe money. There's tons of talented musicians, but very few are being given the chances to get a contract or promote an album. Live Evolver said, you've just got to find good music, and everyone who can't just isn't looking deep enough. There was definitely a golden era back in the 70s, but it's a whole new palette of sounds, instruments, and technology now. I mean, music is meant to progress (not just in prog) which is what both the music industry should be encouraging to a certain level, and what these retired rockers (Gene Simmons or whoever) are refusing to accept.