[atlantaprog] Re: More about music & the internet (Wilco)

Hart Deer wrote:

People now are less romantic about music, so they don't want to support an artist, or feel the emotional thrill of having a prettily packaged new album, or they don't feel cool by owning the album. Whatever it is, the reason music is getting stolen- or more importantly NOT GETTING BOUGHT- is because people don't WANT to buy it.

This is really the crux of things, I think. Why are people "less romantic about music" now? Could it have something to do with the nature of the music itself that's been made in recent years? The punk/"new wave"/"alternative" tradition always had at its center the idea of a *less* intense (or at least less close) relationship with music (except for the elemental experience--moshing, dancing, whatever); a lack of "classics" seems to be a *structural feature* of it. Well, I guess they got what they wanted... :-P Metallica and the grunge bands seem to be the last bands to have inspired that kind of relationship on a large scale.

Anyway, I think your suggestions are interesting. That impulse to make people buy something may be part of what's behind the proliferation of DVD's and 5.1 remixes.

(NB: I'm on the verge of making my album, *The Electric Minstrel*, publicly available on the Net, albeit at a fairly middling-to-low bit rate. It can't hurt, I guess. More when I finish uploading it.)

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