Agreed! Just type 'Justin Bieber' into the iTunes search and your ears will be subjected to music that can only be described as auditory rape!
It's all about audience. Today's money comes from a young generation that is easily swayed by today's celebrities. I myself am young, but sometimes it feels like I'm in the twilight zone or something (and no, the twilight zone is not about sparkly vampires). Sex sells, and these ancient music producers have known this from day one, which is why they idolize these attractive musicians that have relatively no musical talent. They have a face and a name, nickelodeon and MTV do the rest. As far as iTunes goes, I absolutely hate the program, but getting nearly any song ever for dirt cheap is pretty awesome.
As somebody who loves the plethora of quality Indie bands, as well as tons of other kinds of quality music, that we have now, I have to laugh especially heartily at this ridiculous statement by Mr. "Jovi". Talk about grasping desperately to the past.
Services like Spotify are saving the industry from piracy. If people can get music for free, legally they will. And since theres a few ads, the artists do get money. iTunes is killing the industry with its prices. £1 for a song is too much really, and with the extremely regular stream of good singles coming out, it soon adds up to a lot. Also, most artists these have a couple of good singles and the rest are album fillers. It's a rare band/artist that has all good songs.
I agree with this, when you buy software, movies and music you still don't own the content you're paying to license a copy of it. When a Netflix account costs less then a single DVD and services like Spotify, MOD and Slacker cost less then a single CD paying to license each individual piece of content you want to consume seems absurd.
Ah, Spotify. It's time for that chart again! I also just happened to read a post by someone involved with an artist/label yesterday, their quarterly figures from Spofity were 34,000 plays... earning them $6.70.
Yes, I've seen that chart before. But, Spotify has 10million users. That means people only need to play an artist's song twice per month to give min. wage. When you think you have playlists, songs will be played more often too. I think those stats are just made to look bad. But when you think about it, it's fairly reasonable. And, people will still purchase the odd song, Spotify just keeps it afloat really.
I don't think it's particularly good for artists, but I can't bring myself to argue either side either. It's definitely better than piracy even if only slightly so and they do have the option to opt out of it if they don't like the results. No doubt a good conversation point though
