Digital age has dawned upon us much earlier than I would have ever imagined. I still remember asking for a Walkman for Christmas, changing carefully the CDs in my CD player, or buying an iPod on a trip to the States. Listening to music anywhere and anytime, is nothing new though. The magic of radio has long been invented, even though on the radio we can only listen to the programs and music offered by the radio channels. Our choices are limited in a way. One can argue though that listening to our choice of music was also possible before Internet was around. We had the walkmans, CD players, but it was always music you either paid for, bought the vinyl, cassette or CD (or copied from a friend…). It needed some physical action to get the music you wanted.
Times have changed. With the evolution of technology and with the invention of internet, we are now able to listen to the music we want, anywhere, anytime, with the click of a button. Perhaps even without paying or having done anything extraordinary. Providers like YouTube offer infinite amount of music and videos available for anyone with internet connection. Quality and origin can be disputed, but it’s there. ITunes offer a big variety of music from all over the world for a relatively cheap price. And with Spotify, music in good quality has been brought to our doorsteps. Yes, it is still limited in a way, but now with Beatles on Spotify, I would say the limit is closer to the sky. And all that, practically for free. With advertising in between songs, it is literally free. Without advertising, and for making music available on your phone, there is a small charge. About 10-15 pounds a month. Is that a realistic price to have a music library of tens of thousands of artists and their numerous albums, radio channels by genre, music lists by theme and occasion?! By subscribing and paying this rather symbolic monthly subscription fee, music is available on any device, without advertising to anyone who has access to internet. Excellent! Music we like, music we want, when we want it, basically for free.
But what about the artists? Do they get paid? Do they get anything for allowing millions to access their creation? Do they get paid for all their hard work? Or publicity and accessibility compensates them?
I am not intending to answer these questions in their entirety. There may not even be one correct answer, responses may differ for each and every artist. Artists at the start of their career, may be happy for getting their name out there via Spotify or getting just a small pay from iTunes; being well paid may not be their number one priority. Once they are better known, their CDs will sell better and more people will go to their concerts. Artists with an established career, will not need such publicity anymore, their priority may simply shift to get paid. It all depends.
What I know for sure is that when you buy a CDs or go to a concert, bigger portion of your money goes to the artists. So I keep buying CDs and go to concerts. Recently, we have bought a HiFi, so we could listen to our CDs at home, because with the evolution of technology, listening to a CD is also becoming a challenge! We still have a big collection of CDs, including lots of flamenco and loads of jazz… A’s jazz.
Last year on a trip to Madrid, we went to a giant book-music-video store called Fnac, and we bought a number of CDs for our home collection. Photo above. Not strictly all my choice, but a good variety of flamenco artists, all rather traditional, and mostly from earlier days, only a couple contemporary artists and albums.
Just to put the names out there too (from left to right, up and down):
Isabelita de Jerez
Enrique Morente & Sabicas
Lole y Manuel
Paco de Lucía
David Carpio
Ray Heredia
Antonio Flores
Recent news in the UK is the music and film retailer HMV going into administration. For the second time in 6 years (!), but this time around, it seems to be final. This is the result of multiple changes over the past 10 years in our consumer behaviour: buying less music in general, buying less in stores and more online, buying more digital music, and so on. But the trend is there: we spend less on music and this results in businesses going bust, people losing their jobs, artists earning less.
So I encourage everybody to always pay for the music they listen to and keep going to concerts! Let’s support the artists in every possible way, so they can continue creating, and we can enjoy their music!
Fascinating Flamenco 