Removing Bad Motives

Pop bands and music labels complain they can no longer profit from musical recordings, instead having to earn a living through live performance and merchandise. There are now a million redundant bands, all able to use inexpensive technology to record professionally in their bedrooms, indistinguishable in their allegiance to conventional composition themes and phrases, almost none venturing beyond appeal to the mass of boring consumers who can be used to fund their desired wealth. Accordingly, their product is generic and competes with a million other indistinct products in a monotonous marketplace abundant with boring repetition and bad copies of what has been done better before.

You could have been a rockstar, if only you did something interesting that others cared about.

Was their drive to make music for money and fame, or to compose exceptional music because they could? Taking away the prospects of money and fame removes unscrupulous salesmen who create products and promote them so they can be bought by dupes.

Folk music was created by the folk for the folk. Local musicians created simple music based on inspiration for the moment, and dancers choreographed steps, and these spread to nearby villages like seeds of a plant, the better ones staying around longer in repertoires. Songs carried into homes and the fields, some voices better than others, sung because they appealed to the singer, not music companies selling copies. On weekend evenings, musicians performed these the best they could for locals, including those who created them. The village enjoyed the music and no profit was made, nor was their a market when people created for themselves.

An entire industry of selling music equipment exists through the promotion of the rockstar fantasy and the notion that one more effect is needed, or purchasing a slightly superior acoustic element will suddenly make the difference and propel a mediocre talent to prominence.

Aesthetics are a fine addition, but substance is essential. Beauty indisputably reveals itself in nakedness and cannot be created through a display of external accessories one has collected to distract from an unimpressive nature.