Do Artists Deserve To Be Paid?
After reading this article in the Huffington Post about tensions between Pandora and musicians, I happened to scroll down and read the comments. This is almost always a bad move, guaranteed to lower one’s faith in humanity; this experience was not an exception. The general drift of several posters seemed to be that musicians not only didn’t deserve to be paid royalties for plays of their songs, but that songs were like commercials and therefore musicians should pay to be played on the radio, Pandora, etc. What?!? One commentator opined that musicians should all get day jobs and that music should be no more than a hobby, not a vocation. It makes me wonder, where does all this hostility toward musicians come from? Believe me, producing quality music is hard work and can be quite expensive. Most of us do indeed have to work other jobs because we can’t make a living otherwise. But I would be interested to hear others’ opinions on this. Should musicians just work for fun and give up any hopes of generating an income from their craft? Should we all just hang it up and do something more “productive” with our time and energy?
