Christopher Smith wrote: [snip]>
Surely you are not comparing the relative worth to society of ice-delivery and music?
Depends on where you earn your income, I guess. Nobody in this discussion has brought up the spectre of eliminating music, certainly I hope not me.
We have been speaking of the eliminating of some jobs from one small niche of the larger music industry. And a niche that really doesn't affect very many people after all -- those who used to play for Broadway shows and those who could attend those shows.
Our local theater group still hires the same size orchestra they've always hired for their two shows each year, at least the same size they've hired in the 30 years that I've lived in town.
That may be, but it's a decreasing segment of the population. COnsider Las Vegas - when vegas was at what some consider its peak (The 'rat pack' days), people would go there to gamble (and occasionally to gambol), and were drawn in by the free shows. Lots of musicians worked Vegas backing up the big acts and playing lounges and the like. Now the vast majority of the music there is canned, and most of the players have also been canned. That made enormous dents in the profession throughout the country, as the guys who were playing any- and everything in Vegas went elsewhere to find work. I know a lot of people here in Southern California who not only lost good gigs to former Vegas players, but also lost the potential to either work there, or to work for the guys who toured most of the time, and went to vegas for maybe a week or two a year. That was *hundreds* of jobs lost to recorded or sequenced music.
ANd when the ripples hit smaller towns, and there are good players out there, the smaller productions can pick and choose, hiring whoever will work for what pittance is offered. You want a pit orchestra job? You either compete with a few guys who get the big bucks, or with a hundred 'good enough' players who'll do it for $25 a night. The vast majority of these ripples were begun by the advent of the sequencer.
Yeah, in small town/small time productions it's not a big deal, as they have to hire from a smaller local base, but in larger towns it has made a serious dent.
cd -- http://www.livejournal.com/users/dershem/#
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