3 thoughts on “Trent Reznor speaks on value of music: “It costs 10 bucks, or go **** yourself. | SPIN”

1. It’s very interesting to see Trent Reznor, once the poster child of the pay-what-you-want and anti-record label models for music now becoming the most ardent supporter of the “traditional” music industry that I can name…

   • and let’s not forget thom yorke of radiohead who has also done a complete 180…

     http://musictechpolicy.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/thom-yorke-on-google-the-commoditizer/

     “[Big Tech] have to keep commodifying things to keep the share price up, but in doing so they have made all content, including music and newspapers, worthless, in order to make their billions. And this is what we want?”

     “We were so into the net around the time of Kid A,” he says. “Really thought it might be an amazing way of connecting and communicating. And then very quickly we started having meetings where people started talking about what we did as ‘content’. They would show us letters from big media companies offering us millions in some mobile phone deal or whatever it was, and they would say all they need is some content. I was like, what is this ‘content’ which you describe? Just a filling of time and space with stuff, emotion, so you can sell it?”

     Having thought they were subverting the corporate music industry with In Rainbows, he now fears they were inadvertently playing into the hands of Apple and Google and the rest.

2. Music, like a certain other activity, is usually done for love or money. A lot of pirates nod enthusiastically at this right up until they realize that, if there’s no money in it and a musician has to do it for love … that if I don’t love you, you don’t get any. 🙂

   They keep missing this part. Yes, musicians will MAKE music no matter what. But we don’t have to share it with anyone other than the people we want to share it with. In order to get into that room, now you need to persuade me you should be there. Before, you could throw money at me, and I’d let you in. Now that there’s no money in it, I need another reason. Be an asshole, and you don’t get in.

   Even the threat of not making money will only work on artists for so long. They won’t just hang around and starve. Eventually, they will read the writing on the wall, bow to reality, and simply get other jobs and decouple their artistic output from their financial input. And then they really don’t have to share our music with just anyone.

   The pirate kids really aren’t following this thing to its logical conclusion:

   1) Decouple money from art. Then,
   2) Artists get day jobs and keep them. Hence,
   3) We don’t need to share our art with anyone if we don’t want to.

   So make me want to.

   Oh … and without handing me money, which would have been the simplest way to accomplish that, but that’s not working anymore, is it?

   Neither will acting like a tantrum-throwing, entitled brat. 🙂

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