alt Hacker Newsumm, I don't know if you've seen the current state of trying to make a living with music but It's widely accepted as dire. Touring is a loss leader, putting out music for free doesn't pay, stream counts payouts are abysmally low. No one buys songs.
All that is before the fact that streaming services are stuffing playlists with AI generated music to further reduce the payouts to artists.
> Yet here we are, hundreds of years later, live music is still desirable, plays still happen, and faceless voices are still around...
Yes all those things still happen, but it's increasingly untenable to make a living through it.
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But this is different? Wholesale copying of copyrighted works and packaging it up and allowing it to be generated. It's not remotely reasonable
Artists were saying this even before streaming, though, much less AI.
I listen pretty exclusively to metal, and a huge chunk of that is bands that are very small. I go to shows where they headliners stick around at the bar and chat with people. Not saying this to be a hipster - I listen to plenty of "mainstream" stuff too - but to show that it's hard to get smaller than this when it comes to people wanting to make a living making music.
None of them made any money off of Spotify or whatever before AI. They probably don't notice a difference, because they never paid attention to the "revenue" there either.
But they do pay attention to Bandcamp. Because Bandcamp has given them more ability to make money off the actual sale of music than they've had in their history - they don't need to rely on a record deal with a big label. They don't need to hope that the small label can somehow get their name out there.
For some genres, some bands, it's more viable than ever before to make a living. For others, yeah, it's getting harder and harder.