- One of the strangest things about watching lefty hippie types getting all fired up about wealth inequality is that I never see them even acknowledge how much worse everything is in the arts, which a lot of them are directly involved with. Don’t want to bite the hand that feeds (or pretends like it might feed you one day). Let’s face it, you’re not a real artist until rich people say you are and sadly, it’s probably better now than it used to be say, fifty years ago. Doesn’t matter what art form you’re involved with, it’s all fairly impossible to make ends meet unless you’re either born or fuck your way into the privilege factory. Having a trust fund helps. And that’s the sad thing no one’s saying about this stuff, the worse income disparity gets in society as a whole, the even more psychotically worse it gets in the arts. It doesn’t hurt when people as high ranking as Republican presidential candidates openly talk about cutting all arts funding. I’ve actually seen tons of articles where people try and say things like, it’s just so much harder to make a living as a musician these days. Errrr, yeah, our generation invented the term “starving artist”, totally.
What? You hear this sort of thing all the time. EDIT: the rest of this article sounds like it was written by an angry 14 year old.You know what article you never see? Small, completely unknown band uses digital technology to get their music out to way more critics and fans than he thought possible in places that would have been completely inaccessible five years ago.
There is a bit of truth to this. In radio, if a record label or promoter doesn't like your station very much, you simply won't see much of their music. Since all college stations (should) be charting their top 20 to CMJ, you end up with certain artists being favored over others. While there is a lot of freedom, if you're a complete oddball station then the music industry will stop giving you certain music. Outside of that, I thought this was a pretty bad and inaccurate article. Especially the portion about album reviews and Pitchfork. When you're reviewing an album you should take into account what the album is intended to in. In Andrew W.K.'s case the album isn't intended to be anything other than fun, party music. In this case it pulled it off very well, hence it's rating. The overall tone of this article sounds like it's coming from somebody who has a strong hate of the industry, perhaps because they haven't made it. Either way, only one or two actual good points were made, the rest was noise.
I have a number of friends that are full time artists/musicians and they make it by. But that's a bit deceiving because the lions share of their income doesn't come from the art directly but from teaching it in private lessons. It's hard, very hard to earn a living as an artist but you can do it, you just need to supplement your income with teaching or something else. But this article makes some good points about nobody ever calling out the music business for being bastards, just the banks etc.