as a little radical. But here's my cue.
as a person who has to perform daily in order to meet demands, [...]
A cinema ticket at one of the big movie-houses here costs 8-10 EUR. The same movie on a DVD will set you back 20 EUR.
In the first case you hopefully get a big screen, nice sound, the cinema experience but only one showing - fine. But these are essentially canned goods that cost next to nothing to duplicate. About the only people working for the money are the cinema staff in the first case. The work's the same for the artists regardless of the number of DVDs or tickets sold.
A ticket at local theatres (as in live actorst) is 5-15 EUR (low end for students etc...)
Excuse me?? That money has to pay the theatre staff, the writer, a bunch of costumes and props people and most of all the actors who have to perform EVERY EVENING to earn their keep. But who cares, they're all subsidized anyway... </sarcasm>
The price I have to pay for my entertainment has nothing to do with the work involved in the first place - so much for artist compensation.
Back to music: musicians who do classical stuff usually get paid for doing concerts (i. e. performing regularly) and CDs are sold mostly as an income supplement and a way to get an ensemble known. Sure, I don't think anybody ever got rich off doing classical but it sure hasn't vanished either.
For mainstream/pop music it seems to me like artists get to make one album per year, and maybe a tour every two. And for some reason I have the feeling those are not about music but rather about light shows.
In my eyes music is free in every sense of the word. When I buy a CD I don't pay for the music, I pay for a way to get the music to get from the artist to me. In other words, I pay for distribution. IIRC that's what record companies were created for in the first place.
The problem here is, distribution was a very costly enterprise (producing and distributing media, maintaining retail chains ...). Even then I didn't approve of the nation that artists should be able to live off CD sales. Now the distribution requirement has all but vanished - I'd much rather have a few .flac files encoded by the artists themselves than a CD. The price of these should cover the time needed to do the encode and bandwidth cost, but not more.
If they want to earn my money they're free to WORK and do an open-air in my general vincinity. Terribly sorry, but the value of something that can be reproduced for 50 cents is 50 cents.
C.
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