| Am I Alone in This? Bill Bottrell in the January 2001 New Settler |
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could be worth nothing if it doesn't sell. You send it to the record company and they have a cement vault somewhere where they put them under controlled controlled conditions, and they have special markers that they put on the tapes and dates and all these things: this is how important these two-inch tapes were. They were "masters".
Now, it's digital,
nobody knows where the master is.
I can make ten copies and send a CD to the record company and call it "the master" - and it is. One of the masters. And that is sort of what the Internet is doing. Recorded music will be free. Needs to be free. And when that happens, things will begin to even up. Live music will regain it's value. We have become bombarded with recorded music. If you look at how much music somebody in a suburb |
who watches tv and goes to movies and listens to the radio hears - they must hear 400 individual bits of composed music a day (maybe more). None of it live. And compare that to one hundred years ago - compare it to sixty years ago - that's a lot of music floating around, and by virtue of its non-scarcity, it's got to have non-value. When you get up on those small stages, you get up there in a leadership role. Become focal. People focus. We may all be anarchists, but there is a draw to "the leader of the band". BILL: Yes. That's the live thing. That's the cabaret you're talking about. And that's why I'm doing it. Michael Franti, Rage Against the Machine: anytime there's music |