In the late seventies the Danish band Gasolin was rock-stars in a country with only 5 million people. In the early part of the new millennium (as in now), the international rock-stars were gone, and replaced with beggars wanting to go viral so they could have 1 0/000 of the YouTube ad revenue or be worthy of some tasty product-placement . Let's hear some Gasolin (the song is called Lot's of success :)
Music was the first media to suffer, but literature, drawings, animation, journalism and much more are close to be the next victims of the wasteland of the internet. So many changes has happened and artists are adapting. Unfortunately it might just be that they are moving away from the internet. 10 days ago BBC could report that more vinyl-records than downloads was sold in the UK. This Danish band, Dygtig Hund (Good Dog), in many ways the grandchildren of Gasolin, did two live versions from their new album and put them on Youtube. The rest was on the vinyl-record. I bought one.
The bitterness I experience among musicians has been growing, and the move towards analogue media is part of this (it's not just a hipster phenomenon). In the end the internet could end up being a mainstream-porridge of Justin Bieber clones with sponsor names tattooed on their forehead :) with all the interesting stuff happening other places. But hey, the good thing is that I have also noticed a growing awareness from art users that artists need money to make art. Things like Bandcamp and Patreon are good examples of reasonable alternatives to the mighty evil of Spotify, iTunes & Youtube (yea, I know I am using youtube in this very post). This next song is old, late sixties, played by the band the Beefeaters and sung by the incredible blues singer Povl Dissing. It's called The ugliest man in town, and is about a rich man that despite his wealth is so ugly that he never gets any love.
The foundation of free art is entrepreneurship. Before the eighteenth century artist had to please bishops and monarchs but during the 1700s things changed, book-printing, the rise of the bourgeois, the industrialisation, the population growth - all this made room for artists as independent agents, and in time it made whole industries. Today we are on our way back to square one for many artforms, except maybe, with the help of the block-chain, user can again start to pay for art. I hope so. Would be sad If it all went away like the little shoe-shine boy of this last song by Savage Rose, live from a festival in Oslo, Norway, 1973.
Steemit, Alexandria.io, Tokenly, and maybe Yours, Synereo, Akasha et all. if they get their thing together could greatly improve the circumstances of artists all over the world.
Hope you enjoyed the exotic northern music.