Today at lunch time I attended the Professorial Lecture by Ann-Marie Kennedy. She works in Social Marketing and was talking about ‘Change the System, Change the World’ with some examples on fast fashion. I was thinking a lot about politics, but also about music.
I pay for Spotify as a music explorer. It has a horrible user interface, but I didn’t convince my family to use Apple Music (which is slightly less horrible) or any other alternative. My main user case is looking for new music (say last 10 years or so) and discovering old jazz. I know that musicians make little, if any, money out of that. It is a terribly exploitative system where most money DOES NOT go to the creators, unless… Unless you are very famous already or you are a huge multinational holding the music rights for an already deceased, or retired artist.
So what can we do about it? I have no clear answer, but what I also do is buy CDs or DRM-free music (in Bandcamp, for example) of new(ish) artists, because I like to support them. Given that active and very famous artists & multinational holders of music rights are sorted, I feel no need to buy that music. In fact, I go out of my way to avoid doing so.
Incidentally, I’m a big fan of Little North and this is their Bandcamp and they sound like this.
PS This has nothing to do with breeding trees or wood properties and there is no implicit analogy with my work, but I do support change for the better.