So here I sit, stuck writing words and emphatically not making music.
…not until I complete my current music-making toys anyway, to a degree where they actually make it easier for me to make live music than an off-the-shelf software package or hardware groovebox.
And honestly I have no idea how would I go about funding my work on those, full time or part time.
But the fact remains that these projects are born not out of the intention to fulfill a market need, or (as many information-based products) to give people an entirely new need, but the opposite – as a rejection of the need/dependency for more complex mainstream tools.
Same as Linux grew out of a rejection of Minix/BSD/commercial UNIX, targeting the resource-constrained medium of the 386 PC; same as FOSS, same as Fedi are rejections of established schemes that liquidate concrete cognitive labor into abstract free-flowing capital.
And while they manage to sustain themselves, and have gain much greater mindshare than my little projects may aspire to, they’re also things that are free at the point of use – thus, on the ground level, somewhat anti-market endeavours. It’s why funding them in the most basic sense has remained a problem only ever being solved on an ad hoc basis, either as a side effect of some classic money-making enterprise, or on a donation basis.
“Money, the lifeblood of the world, has no mind but ours.”- Kmet Marko
From the basic perspective of sustainable existence on the physical plane, I sure hope to live to see a world beyond a 1D medium of exchange.
After all, “the banks keep the money in the computer, and not the other way around” – which means computers are the more powerful coordination mechanism.
At least in theory.
At least when not building atop the foundation of a monopoly on violence!
Stafford Beer would probably tend to agree with this, and apparently so did K*ssinger, considering how that whole thing in Chile had to be shut down. Imagine if they had deprecated money back in 1971? Or somewhere between 2009 and 2019 for that matter. Decentralization sure didn’t prevent crypto from being taken over by swathes of scammers. One can’t eat money, but we are all inducted in the Cult of the Magic Scrolls since an early age. Deprogram that!
And I do believe that art, especially sonic art, can and does contribute to systems of social control occasionally breaking down. After all, taping rock’n’roll 30 years after the fact off Radio Free Europe helped bring down the Soviet Union…
Speaking of “free at the point of use”, can anyone help me source a quote from Mr. Money himself – that is to say, Blixa Bargeld? Here’s a little window into his world for you:
Anyway, the quote was supposedly from way back, and went something like, “In the future, music will a fungible resource available on tap, like water and electrical power.”
So, basically, guy predicted Spotify and all the subscription mongers well in advance! Such foresight should be studied.
Besides being quite the character, he’s of course also an actual hard-working pro musician, in an entire league of his own.
I hear this sentiment a lot. Lots of frustration, and depressingly few solutions. It seems to be the universal state of the industry, right now.
As I see it, the options for funding music are:
Buy music directly, either as a CD or digital download
“Rent” music via a monthly service like Spotify/Apple Music
Use music as a lead generator to sell merch and concert tickets
What do you say? Are there other realistic methods to explore? I kind of want to understand the problem-space first, then dig into the ways each would/wouldn’t work.
There’s using music as lead generation for some shady shit.
There’s institutional grants.
There’s using music to establish entirely non-market-based networks of mutual aid.
There’s selling sample packs and synth presets.
There’s putting on a show in the street.
There’s selling beats to emcees.
There’s having a rich patron.
All of these can earn a living to someone sufficiently motivated.
Some of them require vastly more involvement on a personality level than others. All seem to rely on some degree of psychological compartmentalization and labor commoditization: a separation of what an artist might seek to accomplish by means of their music, from that which the market might seek to accomplish by means of the artist.
A primarily creative side, and a primarily extractive side, with the individual musician’s mind and skills serving as the shared point of junction/separation/balance between the two goals.
For a purely capitalist-minded creator there is no contradiction between the two; being good at making the music-as-commodity and being good at promoting it complement each other, those who excel at both have no problem being “discovered” by the market (e.g. by going viral on big social) and may – indeed, have – come to dominate.
But let’s say I want to use my skills, potentially in cooperation with other people, for the dual purposes of (a) making more music happen and (b) making less capitalism happen. Suppose we leave the extractive aspect out of the equation entirely. But the available means and methods have been designed and optimized precisely for the production and reproduction of music-as-commodity! So leaving out the commodification entirely would leave, basically, a hole.
What things should we invent to fill that hole? How do we keep the music playing while detaching our being-as-musicians from the existing network of market relations? Is it as simple as building our own marketing and distribution network, or have the global market-definers worked their dark magic to prevent competition from emerging, lest it’s by selling out to some even darker entity (as Spotify came to replace MTV as mouthpiece of the conglomerates, in effect marrying major labels to big tech)?
What focal point is even more motivating than money, for creative minds that have grown up under capitalism, and grown disillusioned with it?
This is the kind of problem space I’ve been exploring. And at present I have only the vaguest of inklings in answer to any of these questions. I hope they’re at least legitimate questions on which progress can be made by thought and discussion.
This is all resonating very hard. I would add that the anarchist concept of Mutual Aid comes into play here. People in our community recognise the impossible position of the arts under capitalism.
So yeah, they can download my music for free, but people do choose to donate if they can!
Also (and I’m not sure how sustainable this is, we are already kinda at “peak subscription”), the subscription model IS there, for those who do have some extra cash. I’m using self-hosted Ghost for this.
Yeah. I started writing a sort of listicle with a couple sentences about each, so we can use that as the skeleton of the wiki post. I realize I’m short on links to put under any of these, so I’ll be counting on others to contribute experiences, tools, and methods for each option
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