More Pop Matters: "Is Music Still a Product?"

I am just going to post some more links to articles from Pop Matters because a). they have been writing interesting industry-related articles recently, and b). because I have spent much of the past two days working on a press email campaign and I am just not in the mood to be wordy.

Pop Matters' Rob Horning asks, "Is Music Still a Product?"

The point is that the intense commercialism of our society prompts us to measure the worth of things by their saleability, by their price tag, and it encourages us to regard the value of our effort as residing in a paycheck rather than in the work itself. But making art is its own reward; it’s a considerable luxury to be able to have the time to do it at all. It’s extremely unsympathetic when artists then complain that the people who spend their own precious time acknowledging other people’s art (instead of, say, making some of their own) are somehow ingrates because they won’t pay for the chance. Popular music, a social art whose power rests in its ability to be shared, ultimately doesn’t lend itself well to becoming intellectual property.