Personally, the last thing I need at this point in my life is another fucking t-shirt with a band name printed on it. 

Yes! Consider it, though: In its present incarnation as a possibly-impractical-but-rewarding piece of fandom, vinyl as it stands today is a great example of how fans engage with music on a merch level. Does anyone believe that buying an LP today and downloading something are the same kinds of activity?

I bought records (vinyl) during my transition period between buying from the cloud and holding onto the idea of my thousand-CD music collection, because I felt bad about abandoning the record stores that used to be a huge part of my life. Then I got rid of all my CDs because: who needs that much junk around the house? 

So then you buy in fully to the digital world, you plug your mp3 player into your car, into your speakers at work, into headphones as you travel. You beam music off of it over Airplay to go through your home stereo system. And then? What I discovered was that I had a ton of albums I had played maybe once, some never at all. It didn’t make sense to. You use it to obtain a digital copy if none are provided, and then shelve it forever. Those records were merely a symbol, a proof-of-purchase, and were otherwise generally useless and as such a total gigantic waste time, money, paper, plastic, carbon emissions, and physical labor. 

Vinyl is no different than CD, and if you believe otherwise you have been tricked by people who’s job is to sell you non-existent Authenticity wrapped in a nostalgic package. 

The idea that buying digital music is somehow less valid than purchasing a physical object you neither need nor even use is flat-out dumb. The idea that digital distribution has made recorded art unworthy of compensation is very obviously also dumb. 

The requirement that artists, in order to continue making money off their art, must either 

A) create art that can be performed live, with all the requisite managing, budgeting, and job/relationship destroying aspects that come with that, 
or
B) create other, tangential but unrelated works of art, to sell in place of the art they actually make

is honestly depressing, and you should probably feel at least a little bit ashamed about your massive sense of entitlement.

1. It is NOT FINE that “merch is completely divorced from music”! Who are you to tell people that they need to sell t-shirts and other horseshit to make ends meet? I don’t want t-shirts myself. There are entire demographics that don’t wants t-shirts. Not every genre caters to people looking to cover their bodies in one brand or another. Look, if Bieber has fans that will buy his latest fragrance — that’s great — but don’t tell us that sellout cross-marketing bullshit like that is how we have to survive. If that’s the best you have, prepare yourself for a shockingly one-dimensional palate of music.

2. Touring makes money. Increasingly true in many cases. But again who are you to tell someone that they need to leave their family for 250 days a year in a shitty van to support your copyright infringement? I think the most compelling artisting argument against this is that recorded music doesn’t always translate to live performance, nor should it be forced to. Not all audience types want to see music performed live. Artist’s who are forced to spend years on the road, will spend less time recording music. It may be great for some, but it’s certainly not for all. Imagine all of the classic albums that never would have been made if they needed to be performed live.

3. Money from record purchases (as well as movie tickets, and tv ad revenue) support the people who produce records (and tv shows etc.). Duh, I thing we can all agree on that. But what’s always overlooked is the people– other than the artists–who make their living playing a crucial role in producing music recordings. For example: we may care about the farmer who grew the ingredients in the food we eat, hopefully we care about our server, and the chef preparing the meal — but we would never expect the restauranteur to keep all the money! People who make things happen deserve to get paid. Why should the creative economy be any different? I would expect a recording engineer, or a mixing or mastering engineer, or the software developers at DigiDesign to get paid – just as I would expect a newspaper photographer to get paid. And I would expect the writers of my favorite TV shows to get paid. When we download episodes of Mad Men on a bittorrent site, the only people getting paid are the fat cats at Google, Comcast, Verizon, Apple and Microsoft who earn on: Ad revenue, ISP dollars, Cellphone Bills, Computers and ipods.

4. “it’s a generational difference” Well of course it is — THAT’S WHY WE’RE TALKING ABOUT IT. The decision for this generation to spend their cash on cell phone bills and not music, is their prerogative — but don’t call foul when people speak out against the culture of trying to have your cake and eat it too. I would never expect a whole generation to stop tipping their servers when going out to eat simply because they got a new cell phone. “New things for kids to spend their money on” will always exist – nobody is disputing this, so shut up about it. The day an entire demographic shafts me on my work, and their excuse is basically that “Apple gets paid first,” is the day that I reconsider whether or not to continue creating. And I for one, think it’s sad to come out on the other side of this argument — where you in effect, defend the profits of the multinational corporation over the profits of the creator.

My generation dubbed the shit out of everything. In any given friend group or scene of 20 kids there might have a single purchased copy of a record, it’s not something to be proud of — but it’s SOOO much better that what we see now, where almost nobody pays for creative works.

5. We’re already seeing the effect of this in the TV and film world. Free broadcast TV is getting dumbed down(or cancelled), and networks are replacing quality content at an insane pace. The product placement boom in tv/film, for instance, is a near-perfect analog to the touring/merch argument. Even the pay-out-the-ass cable shows are not immune to this. Bit torrenting new movies has a measurable effect at the box office… and we wonder why all the new studio movies look like sugary, endlessly-rehashed commercials. And why are there are less and less smart, original films…. it’s because we’ve made the same argument that we give to bands: “you need to create a new business model, sell more merch.” More superhero movies with superheros printed on all of your fastfood packaging. Thanks. But, see what happens when PT Anderson trys to get Joaquin Phoenix’s face on a 32oz. Bugerking cup. It’s a joke, and I don’t want it happening to my music.

Please.  It’s easy to say “get over it” and “this generation has come up in a time when the consumption of music has changed” when it’s not your music they are stealing.  No one is a slave to anyone else such that anything they produce can be consumed for free.  Any thought otherwise is rank ignorance.  

What’s ignorant is to enter into the music industry expecting to make money off of recordings of yourself. That business model is dead. It had it’s run of 100 + years, and now does not work anymore. All the lawsuits/grumbles in the world won’t change that…

So, I’m 25.  I buy my favorite bands records, tickets, etc (same with writers).  Anything stolen or streamed is only opening the window for me to later give you money if I like what you are producing.  

And the Internet has allowed like 200k bands to exist, right?  It seems to be a better alternative than praying that a major label will like your band or shillingCDs that you produced yourself for $10 in the back of a bar and selling 9 of them.  

I’m a writer, and I would prefer to have my stuff published where 10k people might read it instead of my friends paying me $5 for an anthology of my blog. 

Let’s not pretend that the 20somethings don’t support the arts.  They support them more than ever!  More people are into non-corporate controlled music, writing, visual arts than ever before.  Obviously, it sucks a little bit that people steal/copyright infringe, but why stubbornly castigate that while making no cash?  Plenty of people are making wealth off the new model, it’s still hard and still kind of fair.  

I always find it really, really f*cking funny when musicians and others who claim to be artists and generally of a liberal, non-consumer focused tribe prove themselves to be just as consumer/money driven as anyone else. 

Like a professor complaining about his/her salary while teaching Marx or a public defender bitching about the high cost of his/her loans, we’re all capitalists, baby, and it’s really fun to watch people deny their role in our consumer capitalism by being an artist whose primary concern isn’t money but then freaking out when their revenue source is threatened.

As someone else noted, 150 years ago or so, recording began to replace live performance as the main source of money for musicians. That opened up doors for some/many and closed doors for others (who goes to see a crappy band when you can listen to a good one recorded?). Now, re-playing a song no longer requires a physical recording at all. Some doors are closing (mostly on the random people in the music “business”) while others are opening (the concept of the internet sensation, for one). THIS IS OUR SYSTEM. 

Oh, and I just use spotify. morally more acceptable, but fuck a cd. that’s just an anachronism.

and don’t get me wrong — the solution is not prosecution. It’s getting places like spotify to actually pay people. It’s getting people to buy a record on occasion. It’s getting people to quit outright stealing films (that is going to kill movies faster than any of this). But most important to me, it’s raising awareness so that people think twice about where the money is going, and where it’s not going.

 This commenter is obviously right.

Turd Ferguson

Too many turds among the truffles.