Originally Posted By: Notes Norton
People have been making music since at least the Neanderthal days. Professionally? Who knows? At least for many centuries.

Excellent post! This whole recording industry phenomenon was only a tiny slice of music history yet sometimes we look back on it as The Way! Before that people shared their music through performance and teaching. Lots of examples in folk music where no one tried to own the music, rather, they just created it or modified it and passed it along. Then corporate interests took control and directed everything, deciding who would be stars and how frequently they would release new music, etc. I would say it was quite a corrupt system from the beginning!

Then digital arrived and people reverted back to a time where music was shared rather than sold and owned! It should have been super-easy to predict! Didya ever know a smart kid who added a 2nd phone line without paying AT&T...a starving college student who tapped into the cable system to get free TV...a friend of a friend who bought the new album and taped it onto cassettes for all his friends? That is human nature right there and music being digitized signaled the end of the recording industry!

Originally Posted By: Notes Norton

The biggest obstacle to most musicians is not the failure of the record companies, it's Cable TV. But that's another post entirely.

Another brilliant observation! When we were kids we had B&W television with 2 or 3 channels that were barely clear enough to watch. We had one phone and often that was a party line if you lived in the country like I did. We had a radio station that played "our" music for a limited time each day. We had a crappy record player and a small stack of 45s. Of course we had libraries and a few comic books but that was about it!

Compare that to what is available today!

- smartphones
- texting
- cable TV with a thousand channels
- NetFlix and Hulu with every movie and tv series ever
- THE INTERNET with millions of options
- unlimited free music from
--- broadcast radio
--- internet radio
--- "legit" online streaming
--- stolen downloads
--- every aspiring artist in the world (millions) who all want you to buy their music so bad they are willing to give it away (and still no one wants it!)

I do not have enough time left in my life to even listen again to most of my classic rock albums!!! Then I have to Facebook and stream and chat and everything else. How in the world am I ever gonna find time to listen to your new music?

My answer is NO. Vinyl won't save a thing. This horse is so far out of the barn. The only chance anyone has to make a career in music these days is 1) perform gigs like some on this forum do and 2) sell shovels to other aspiring artists!