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With the internet and digital technologies driving rapid change within the music industry, articles about new releases and who has been hired and fired are no longer enough. Our up to the minute industry news alongside insightful commentary helps our readers sift through the rumors and developments to find the information they need to keep their businesses moving forward.
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If middle class means bands who can consider themselves “comfortable,” then yes, a middle class is emerging. The question is whether the musical middle class will go the way of the general American middle class.
In order to make the point stick, anyone with any type of connection to either the Internet, or the real world-at-large, can experience the vast amount of music and music-related activity going on just around your own corner of the universe. Musicians and fans, alike, are enjoying the diversity and sheer quantity of music that is, and will continue to be, available for their listening/viewing pleasure. If you don’t believe it, you’re stuck in a mode of complacency and denial…or you have nothing better to do with you time than stand against the wind instead of enjoying the ride.
Technology is helping to educate more people about music. Everything from Garage Band to Guitar Hero to lessons/coaching from Berklee on-line, SongU and UTube to availability of guitar tabs and lyrics makes it easier for people to acquire at least a basic skill set. It is also easier for musicians to take their music to higher levels of production in their own home or studio with tools like Logic and Pro-Tools and E-Session. It is easier to copyright your material on-line. It is also actually easier to send your music to “content users” like clubs, festivals, booking agents through services like Sonicbids and about a dozen different licensing services such as Pump Audio. Marketing and PR resources like Marc Harty, Gayle Murphy and networking are available from many sources including ASCAP, NSAI, NARIP, SGA just to name a few.
And finally it is way easier to access an audience directly with myriads of services like CDBaby, ITunes, Digstation and streaming services not to mention selling directly from your own website using Paypal. Since these tools are just starting to be used more widely, it remains to be seen whether they will actual create a revenue stream that could be considered “Middle Class.”
But it does seem to me from what I have seen over the last year and half that more people who derive their main income from other sources can now follow a path that might have a higher chance of actually being successful. If we can only get some tech head to design a system of tracking individual song plays on every player back to the copyright holders and authors this century might indeed see the rise of a musical middle class.