Bob Lefsetz on the latest artist payments debate:
Your enemy is obscurity. Any way to reach people is to be applauded. Nowhere is it written that recorded music should generate as much revenue as it did in the past, nowhere is it written that you should be able to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars making an album, nowhere is it written that you’re entitled to make music at all!
It’s an interesting perspective you don’t hear mentioned a lot. Artists feel entitled to be paid well because they have been (relatively speaking) for the past 50 years or so. But what if that was just a brief bump in the grand scheme of things? An anomaly of new technology and business models which have now been made obsolete?
It’s always a mistake to believe you’re entitled to something just because you’ve gotten it before. That’s the true core of what leads to disruption. And lo! That’s what has happened here yet again.
Not a popular argument, for sure. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
Same thing I’ve been saying for a couple of years now. Artists are not entitled