Toby Rider wrote: | | Why is it that there are so many musicians that are either computer | people or engineers? I've been playing music of one form or another since | I was in elementary school and I'm noticing a definate pattern here.. I | recently spoke to some of the guys who were part of my most successful | rock-and-roll band in high school.. 3 out of the 4 of them turned out to | be either computer people or engineers.. | They have more piercings and tatoos then I do, but other then that, we're | in similiar lines of work. :-)
Lots of people have noticed this. And the pattern goes back a long ways. One of the anecdotes I read a few years ago was that Georg Telemann was a science/enginerring student at college. But he paid his way by playing keyboards for local churches and special events. He also tried his hand at composing. He was so successful at this that after he graduated, he decided to ignore his technical degree and become a professional musician. He was, of course, one of the most successful musicians of the early 1700's. For a talented musician, such a decision could have been sensible up until sometime in the early 1900's. Then, during the 1930's and 40's, something changed. The recording industry arose. By 1950, it was no longer rational to attempt to make a living as a musician, at least in Europe and North America. To be a successful musician, you had to make recordings, and the recording industry had arranged things so that the musicians didn't profit from recordings. The oligopoly gave you no choice but to sign contracts that gave them ownership of the music and the recordings, with only a pittance to the musicians. All but the top 3 or 4 in any genre usually lost money. When I was in college, in the 60's, I understood this quite well. But like a lot of other kids, I did well in math and science, and when I was able to get my hands on computers (or punch cards, back then ;-), I decided that nobody in their right mind would become a musician. I graduated from college with exactly the same number of credits in math and music. And of course I went into computers. Since I was part of the computer crowd that was as interested in how computers got their data as with what they did with the data, I went into communications at an early stage, and naturally ended up part of the gang that brought the Internet to the world. I've noticed that Internet programmers are always amateur musicians. You have to look really hard to find even one that doesn't have an instrument that they play regularly. (Those are all folk dancers.) If the recording industry hadn't been so greedy, and had shared the money with the musicians, most of the Internet crowd would have become musicians, and the Internet would still be an academic toy that nobody else had ever heard of. But the recording industry blocked us all from our preferred occupation and forced us to become computer geeks. Now they're gonna pay for it. Our plan, of course, is to do to the recording industry what they did to us. If the plan succeeds, there will be no more profit for the fat cats who control the distribution channels. The business of selling recordings will die in the same way that the business of playing music for a living died. And we won't feel sorry for them. There will still be lots of recordings, of course. But now all it takes is a few thousand bucks to set up your own studio, making recordings, and selling them over the Net. I know a bunch of guys, all computer geeks, who are doing this on the side, and they are all seriously thinking of quitting their day jobs and going into music production full time. For a startup band, it no longer makes sense to deal with the music industry. You'll lose money, even if your recordings are successful. But there are local computer guys who can put your music online. You can't make a lot of money by selling music online, but you can make some, and the money will mostly go to the musicians. You can sell recordings online. You can put tunes online in abc form, and get some royalties if others want to use them. And you don't have to sign your rights away to anyone. For a nice example, look at: http://www.cranfordpub.com/ This site is run by a bunch of musicians, to distribute their own music. My ABC Tune Finder has included a lot of their tunes from the start. This sort of site is starting to pop up all over. It's probably the musical future for most of us. This sort of site is a real threat to the recording industry, and is really what the "music piracy" fuss is all about. Their main goal is to take control of the Internet and put distribution back into the hands of the oligopoly. The Internet can't be killed, but there is still a chance that it can be made illegal for you and me to put our own stuff online. If they can do this, they can then force us to sign over our rights to our own stuff to get it online, and they'll be back in the saddle. But they'll probably fail. They're trying to take over a system that was built by the very musicians that they put out of business. They woke up too late and don't really understand what they're fighting. But their musical computer-geek opponents understand it very well. (Does this qualify as sufficiently funny to be a musical joke? ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
