rossipedia
Power User
This is gonna be an unpopular opinion, but…Yeah!
I was a payed, good payed studio and live musician.
Of course I do play for free and for fun but not when it’s my job.
Musicians today don’t get what they deserve.
That was one of the reasons I quit doing professional music and decided to do it just as a Hobby.
We have done it to ourselves.
The industry doesn’t want to treat us like shit, they want to make money. That often means treating us like shit, though. And they do it because they get away with it, and they get away with it because we let them.
Teens and young adults in bands make them drool, because they’re naive and easy to take advantage of. They cultivate a culture where “doing it for the money” is uncool, and take advantage of kids’ hopes and dreams to get them to believe that letting them pay to play is doing them a favor.
And the kids are hungry and playing live is fun as hell. So they take the bait and pay to play. I played the Hollywood circuit from the mid 90s to the mid 2000s and it was downright predatory.
Couple that with a race to the bottom in the actual price of the music itself, to the point that the general public mostly believes that mucus itself should be effectively free… ¯\(ツ)/¯
If we want to change this, we gotta start treating music as actually worth something. And stop letting the rest of the industry take advantage of us.
I tried the music biz for decades and the closer I got to seeing any success the uglier things looked.