Ive been friends with Aloe Blacc since about 2005. I first met him when he came through our hotel with DJ Day & EXILE while me Spank Rock & Pase were there for the LA finale for our XXXPlosive tour. Awesome dude, humble guy, and just immediately one of the homies. He came by the next year when me, A-Trak & DJ Ayres did our Sunglasses Is A Must tour, and hung out / joined us on stage during our LA show along with Chromeo and a bunch of other friends. Later on I connected with him when him and my other two friends Jamie Strong & Chris Haycock started a little daytime backyard party in Los Angeles, that they called The Do Over. Since then Ive seen Aloe and hung with him from Los Angeles, to New York City (where he invited me to see him open for Raphael Saadiq during the Central Park Summer Stage series) to Dubai and Abu Dhabi (where we all rolled around the desert on camels and had a wild Vision Quest in the Middle East. This post isnt meant to come across as Hey I know cool and famous people. This post is meant to convey the fact that I have known a person for almost 10 years and over the span of this decade I have seen this person work so unbelievably hard to secure a career in music. And out of this hard work Aloe has achieved unbelievable success. Knowing the amount of hard work, focus, dedication, and sacrifice that it takes to have a thriving career in THE MUSIC INDUSTRY, I personally am so very happy to see the heights that this man, my friend, has reached. But being that I also am in The Music Industry and, even though I do well for myself, have only gained a modicum of the amount of success Aloe has, I personally can attest to how hard it is. This is why this article is important to read. It is a sign of the times that more music is being consumed through streaming services than ever before. And it also is a true thing that theres a disconnect with the latest generation of music consumers where music itself is not so much a tangible thing that people view of as product and more-so its part of this giant, ubiquitous flow of data and information that can be accessed instantaneously at a whim. Yes, Urban Outfitters sells LPs now, and sales of vinyl are booming (even when CD and MP3 download sales are dying on the vine)... but when was the last time you asked a 14 year old (or even a 24 year old) what it was like to not just hold a piece of recorded music in their hands? In an age when anyone can make a hit record from a laptop, and theres something thats wonderful and incredibly democratic about that (A-Trak wrote a great article about this recently,) I wonder if any of todays music-consuming populace understands the amount of hard work that goes into actually creating the product. And even just thinking about the recording process itself, the days when Walter Becker and Donald Fagen and their 372 takes to get the right guitar solo pass - and the amount of money and time that in itself takes - are gone. But even today, I was listening to Kanyes masterpiece My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and then read up on the recording process and the over 3 million dollars that was spent on it, and thought to myself that you can actually hear that dollar amount spent in the recording. For the amount of money that was spent in the time and the taking care of what they were doing, out there on that island in Hawaii. But I digress... Back on the streaming services, its no mystery that they dont pay their artists fair wages for the work thats put into their art and craft. Ive said this on multiple occasions and continue to do so. And I speak from a VERY PERSONAL PLACE about this - it is so incredibly hard to make a decent living from being an artist or musician. And the fact that streaming services do not give the actual artists a fair share of the money thats generated is an actual crime, ripping them off and funneling most profits to the corporate shareholders. Most people say Yeah I know, but its just so easy for me to use Spotify or Pandora and I try not to think about it. Well please try to think about this: What happens when it becomes too expensive and artists simply can no longer afford to make a living creating their art? Eventually... Musicians will not be able to afford to make a living being musicians. Please listen to me when I say that. Or listen to my friend, who just happens to be one of the biggest recording artists on the planet. Streaming services do not pay artists and songwriters fairly. And they need to. wired/2014/11/aloe-blacc-pay-songwriters/
Posted on: Wed, 05 Nov 2014 19:24:25 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015