United Kingdom

And all those music mogul cunts in the executive seats have never made a song in their lives. Mammon takes all, Mammon leaves none.

This sounds like a typical musician's life before there even was a "music industry". The point of record companies has never been there for musicians to make a good living, it's for people who own record companies to make a ton of money selling copies of their work, usually giving them nothing back but exposure that might help them get bigger and better gigs and sell more tickets - performing is how 99.99% of musicians actually make money. If an artist burns out, no big deal, there's always an endless supply of naive hopefuls knocking on the door, thinking a record deal is their Golden Ticket.

If you want to support artists, try bandcamp, it has streaming but it's more of a "try before you buy service", and money goes directly to the artists' accounts. Mp3/flacs with no DRM or just stream as much as you like. For an old-head like me who still has an SD card and a headphone jack on my phone, it's perfect.

According to a census conducted by the Musicians’ Union, nearly half of working musicians in the UK earn less than £14,000 a year from their craft

Interestingly just under the income tax threshold. So you could quite easily set yourself up as a Ltd with you as the director and sole employee, claim the full income tax threshold as the employee and live off the dividends as a director whilst saving tax there too.

I wonder if these musicians have considered a more tax efficient route for their craft? What a crazy idea. Of course musicians are famous for assiduously paying all the taxes they can.

Someone with more time than me might be interested in looking up the holding companies for Kate Nash or Lilly Allen and checking out their finances. 🙃😄.

Don't know why sexual content is so distained.

Thought with the liberty movement in the 70's, near 50 years later no one would be bothered.

I don't necessarily say it is or isnt spotifies fault, but how I see it is music kinda changed due to the digital age. Before the digital age, most people mostly needed to get into, or the eyes of a record label to get anywhere, and that had its fair share of dirty laundry (e.g whats happening with P Diddy). The digital age flipped the book around, where being able to publish music nowadays is extremely easy, but the problem is you're competing against a wave of other users. It's also significantly more expensive to do live concerts nowadays too (which is completely separate from spotify) as more and more concerts are getting canceled

Corporations are vile and cruel, more at 11.

[off topic?]

Andrea True was a porn actress who achieved success as a disco singer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_True

https://youtu.be/41CRkJvPN68 [sfw]

More power to these ladies, sex work is thankless. I do wish the music industry was in a better place to where people didn't have to subsidise it with a secondary gig, even as heavily established professionals in the music industry.

OnlyFeds - new instance funding model: Admins gone wild. The feddit.uk one would be a bit like Calendar Girls meets Austin Powers.

Friggin immigrants again, I guess.

While she was working there, the Jamaican government banned asset transfers in response to sanctions imposed by the U.S. after the election of Michael Manley, a supporter of Fidel Castro. In order to return to the U.S., True would have had to either forfeit her pay or spend the money before she went home.[13] True, who by this time was trying to break into the music industry, chose to invest the money in recording a demo of "More, More, More",

I love everything about this.

I already avoided this step by simply wearing arseless chaps onstage.

Guess Jay-Z was on to something about Tidal.

Eventually we'll only have female artists, who the hell is going to pay top dollar to see bon jovis hairy sweaty arse?