An Excellent New Read: "A Brief History Of Why Artists Are No Longer Making A Living..."

I am an older guy. I don't stream. I am used to paying for music. I worry about how the dwindling income of artists may affect the availability of good music. I was a big fan of CD Baby as a means of exposing me to good artists. By, the way, I haven't heard from them in quite a while. I wonder what that means. One of the musicians I found there is Terra Naomi. I downloaded a few of her freebies and then bought her CD "To Know I'm OK". It took months to arrive because the kid is always on the road and is mailing the CD's out from her home. That must be tough. Now she is distributing her music through Patreon. I bought her CD because I liked the free samples and felt a responsibility to support her. Another great artist I discovered on CD Baby is Chris Robley. I feel it's kind of necessary to plug them because I don't want them to throw in the towel.

Another of my favorites is Eileen Rose. https://www.eileenrose.com/music
VERY highly recommended!! I have ALL her CDs and wish she could afford to release something on Vinyl. She has to support herself and her band by being the house band at Robert's Western World (where she can't even play her best compositions) 3 days a week. I'll never get to see her live unless I go to Nashville. Unless it's already too late. There's nothing new on her website since November.

So for some of my favorite artists, It's not which format is best. It's which format can I get. And I need to support them or I may not be able to get anything.

@orpheus10 :

Ivan, I'm just thankful that you are one of the few around here that's looking at anything outside of our little "ballywick".

I'm getting kind of sick of hearing this. You have no idea who we are or what our collective life experience is. Which makes your assumption an arrogant and totally unsupportable stereotype. The irony is that you are accusing an entire group of people of being sheltered and ignorant while doing so from a position of sheltered ignorance.

@2channel8, you say:

"I worry about how the dwindling income of artists may affect the availability of good music." 

I don't think anyone, including the author of the article in question has established in any way whatsoever that the income of artists is dwindling. I'm not even sure there is a way to measure that. 

That's why I reacted negatively to the article to begin with....the whole premise is flawed. He starts with an assumption that he doesn't even try to prove and then spends the rest of the article telling us why it happened.

The huge irony is that this article comes as more and more people are discovering more and more new artists that they'd never heard of and NEVER WOULD HAVE without digital streaming.

n80, it isn't necessary to know anything, only believe what you see around you; stores closing, malls closed a long time ago; things have changes more in the last 20 years than they have in the last 120 years; for the worst.

The question was, "Why aren't artists no longer making a living"? you could ask that same question about millions of other people all over this country.