There's a lot of dialogue like this surrounding the state of the music industry, so to me it seems worthwhile to step back and think about that term: "music industry." In the past century we've become so accustomed to records, hit radio singles and music celebrities that we rarely stop to question the mechanisms behind them. "The music industry" comprises a lot of different things, and people have a strong tendency to conflate what I'd call actual music (the performative, cultural and participatory aspects of it) with the record and concert industries. Is it a coincidence that Sony releases CDs on its own record label and makes CD players? Does Clear Channel (subsidiary of Bain Capital) own over 800 radio stations and numerous venues in the US because they want to proliferate art? Color me skeptical. If you conceive of music as an industry, it's important to remember that industries live and die by profit.
We tend to think of musicians as selling music; but do they really "sell music," or do they actually perform/record music and sell records? Given that music is an intangible idea, I'm inclined to argue that it's the latter. Those two spheres of activity no doubt overlap and rely on one another heavily, but I think the distinction is important; while music is fundamentally the same thing it's always been, the record industry (a relatively new entity, historically speaking) is rapidly collapsing. Music sells records, be it cassette, CD or mp3, and up until recently, records were tangible products that needed dedicated players and physical distribution. Then the internet happened. Data and communications technology have made a huge leap that the record industry (essentially a data industry) has failed to anticipate and fumbled to utilize; it's eroding their profits. But Lowery also sees this new technology as eroding artist's "rights," and this is where I take issue with his argument.
What gives music monetary value anyways? When Dave brings up artists' "rights," what he's really talking about is intellectual property*. IP is the most imaginary form of property there is; it only "exists" insofar as it's either acknowledged by society or enforced by governments (and the former mostly happens under threat of the latter). It's the same thing that allows Merck and Pfizer to make enormous monopoly profits on pharmaceuticals, and that lets Monsanto levy fees on fields inadvertently pollinated with their GM crops. I'm not saying that artists are evil corporate entities and deserve to starve (no one does [well, maybe Monsanto does]), but when we ask ourselves what enables them to make a living in the first place (selling records and concert tickets), that's really it. The music industry operates by commodifying (privatizing, really) cultural products. In the absence of some kind of entry barrier (lack of a CD player, DRM, bouncers at the door), the price of admission falls to zero; what Lowery sees as the solemn demise of an art form is really the collapse of a commodity price.
Music - real, proper music - is far from dying. The problem isn't that people no longer value music in the cultural sense; it's that the cost of distributing and accessing recorded music has been dramatically lowered, and the pretense of intellectual property (the privatization of ideas) has become practically unenforceable. This is the reality that musicians need to face. You can hope that someone will pay you $5 for an album via Bandcamp, but who's to say that person won't upload it to
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*Lowery touches on this himself, noting that "by allowing the artist to treat his/her work as actual property, the artist can decide how to monetize his or her work."
**What if they did, and you got famous because people were able to hear your music for free?
