The Professional Suicide of a Recording Musician

This just in, you don’t need to sign a recording contract to distribute your music any more. In fact it’s the corporations that are chargin you a “listening tax”. Bob Ostertag rages against the mass media music machine in this scathing article on Alternet. A great read if you want to understand how it all works and the potential with the net for it to change.

It kind of reminded me of an old Hunter S. Thompson quote,

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”

Here are a couple of quotes from the article:

“Record companies used to charge a fee for making it possible for people to listen to recorded music. Now their main function is to prohibit people from listening to music unless they pay off these corporations.”

“Or to put it slightly differently, they used to provide you with the tools you needed to hear recorded music. Now they charge you for permission to use tools you already have, that they did not provide, that in fact you paid someone else for. Really what they are doing is imposing a ‘listening tax’…”

“Really what they are doing is imposing a “listening tax.” Like all taxes, if you don’t pay you are breaking the law; you are a criminal! Armed agents of the state have shown up at private residences and taken teenagers away in handcuffs for failure to pay this corporate tax.”

Bob Ostertag is a “composer, performer, historian, instrument builder, journalist, activist, and kayak instructor ­” who has published “21 CDs of music, two movies, two DVDs, and two books”. You can check out his website here.