Yeah they were the times because good artists actually got support from labels and went on tours and people went. Live music is losing steam all over the country. Making music free is probably one of the worst things that could happen to music as an industry. Yeah its more accessible, but it hurts the artists who don't see returns from their hard work.
I don't understand the mentality of I deserve to hear everything for free.
The artists who don't see returns for their hard work though, surely, are the ones who sadly don't quite cut the mustard?
The thing is, the music industry is driven by free samples. Why do you think the radio's so crucial? Very rarely will people buy an album with no idea of what they're getting themselves into - they'll know the genre, or one of the recording artists, or they'll have heard a song from it. They'll have a preconception, or else they won't be interested. The Beatles aren't the top selling artist of all time because they made the best music. Sure, it helped, but the Beatles sold so many records because people
found out that they were brilliant. Word of mouth, radio play, et. al. Example hasn't been at the top of the UK chart for two weeks because he's fantastic, it's because 11-million people listen to BBC Radio 1 every day, and will have heard that song. Even if 90% despise it, the other 10% could love it and that'd be enough to chart. Whereas if the perfect band - the winning formula that 100% of all people ever absolutely adore - were to only be heard by fifty people, that's still not a career.
Record labels spend tens of hundreds of thousands of millions of pounds or dollars or yen or rupees or mana trying to get the public to form an opinion about their music. Posters in Picadilly Circus, adverts on bus stations, airplay at radio stations, viral videos... payola's been illegal for decades now, I believe, but I'm sure there's an element of tastemaking. It is in everyone's best interest that
everybody hears Violet Hill by Coldplay for free, and from there... who knows? Maybe they'll start humming it. Maybe a friend will lend them the album. Or maybe there's someone out there who'll switch off the radio whenever it comes on. (I hope not, 'cause it's an ace song.) So, throw money at it, and eventually everyone
will have an opinion on Coldplay, and everyone who
might be interested in buying the album will be able to make up their mind.
But where does that leave smaller bands? The Dream Theaters and the Porcupine Trees? Heck, no - let's go more obscure. The Pure Reason Revolutions and Therions of the world. They want everyone to buy their albums, too, but they don't have the luxury of million-euro advertising campaigns. Wouldn't it be
great if everyone could listen to their music?
Free samples make a band like Dream Theater as visible as Madonna. You can't etch your music into someone's eardrums, repeatedly bashing your head against the listener until he
buys your fucking record like you can with radio-play, but you can certainly enable the listener to make a decision. And if the band are profiting from that tentative will-they-won't-they phase as they are when a track's played on Spotify or Grooveshark, all the better!
Free music offers smaller bands exposure. If they still sink, then they're clearly not producing something that people are recommending. Which is sad! I'm sure there are loads of quite-good bands going under and it's tragic that a quite-good obscure band should be failing to scratch two pennies together when an awful manufactured monolith is standing proud - but they need to be better than quite-good if they want to survive. If the listener hasn't chosen to invest, it's not the listener's fault... it's the band's fault for not creating a product that's
so good that it reaches its ghostly hand into the listener's pocket.
Filesharing and free samples give small bands that may not be so radio friendly a fighting chance. It's an equaliser, of sorts. Dream Theater get level-pegging with Madonna for the ultra-comeptitive price of
free! I'm oversimplifying a little, but at its core, that's
A Good Thing™ and I won't hear a word said against it.