Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Rob Instigator
again, albums treated as a cohesive whole did not exist prior to mid-late 1960's and went out of vogue around the early days of the death of the CD. They hold no weight in popular culture anymore. why work hard to create something that no one will appreciate?
Most musicians are NOT artists. They are craftspeople, who want to make a good living writing, and/or performing music to audiences. They are lucky to craft one good track, much less to create a fully cohesive suite of songs.
|
I disagree that albums have no weight in popular culture anymore, and in particular there is at the least most definitely a viable market within more engaged fans of music, bands, and artists. What I think has lost weight is the financial incentive within hip hop and rap in particular for artists to craft their albums because they don't make as much $ as these records would have made in say the peak of the 1990s.
Today artists in rap and hip hop don't make enough money off their masterpiece releases so they end up putting out a bunch of mixtape quality shitte so push units by volume, especially through licensing fees for streaming sites. This isn't entirely different from the way radio/music videos used to work only artists used to get slightly more $ from radio/videos compared to streaming licensing fees, and further when backed with tangible record releases choreographed by record labels they made more $ from their records when the radio/video spots served effectively as advertising.
At a fundamental level, the sheer fact that you don't have to actually buy records to access music anymore, or at the least dub a copy from a homie who did buy it, means artists are going to make less from their record sales. Since rap and hip hop don't have lucrative tours and merchandising to make up for it, these aren't able to recover the losses through other sources of funding.