You know Muso, everything you said is just a sign of the times. The music biz as we of the old guard know it was born and raised in a time when most of the distribution as we know it didn't exist yet. I mean back then you COULD record off the radio with your little cassette player, but that's not like today when the availability of music for download has largely eliminated sales. There have been hacked plugins for apps that allow music from streaming sources to be captured almost since the streaming services started. I had one for Pandora that had a save button right next to the skip button that allowed even free users to download songs. I quit using streaming like Pandora (NEVER used Spotify) for many reasons, most revolving around how little I care to listen to music anymore. (Can someone verify that even paid subscriptions to those services do or don't have ads?) Then was Napster, Limewire...

Remember when satellite radio was commercial free? That was like the first shot of heroin to get us hooked. We bought equipment, subscribed to the services (back then either XM or Sirius - now Sirius/XM), and then the commercials started creeping in.

Young musicians anymore know where the start button is on some device that didn't exist 40 years ago to play loops that someone else created and speak beat poetry over them and call it songwriting. How many people here can't play a note and post 17 songs per day, all created by the "start button" that is BIAB?

Look toward the newspaper industry as a parallel. How many people don't even realize that the newspaper they crave to have in their hands to read it with morning coffee is just a revisit of everything that happened yesterday? Those things were on the internet the minute they happened, and on TV news. Why read yesterday's news? (Because that's the way it has always been!!!) I frankly don't know how newspapers still exist. If Bob beats up Joe with an axe handle, there is no detail that a paper in THIS city will have that the newspaper in THAT city won't. That event was reported on the internet within an hour of it happening. Nothing changed since it happened, and if it does, the internet will have it first. Some day there will be one big Times-News-Post-Journal-Press-Leader-Tribune, which was the goal of William Randolph Hurst, and he was born in 1903.

Everybody on this planet needs to read Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat". Much of what is going on with globalization is discussed and explained in that book. Think about The British Invasion in the early 60s. Then think about how much faster that would have evolved if there had been an internet then.

Everything has to evolve. In some cases, just the perception of "new and improved" works. Why else does Tide continue to tell us it is "new and improved" every couple of years? It's frickin' laundry detergent. How much can that be improved upon? But the (stupid) public believes that somehow laundry detergent has changed significantly since 1946 when Tide first came on the market.

PG however, is not laundry detergent. It has to improve, and there is room to do that. New musicians providing samples is a great place to start.

EDITED to clean up 3 typos.

Last edited by eddie1261; 07/23/21 12:48 PM.
I am using the new 1040XTRAEZ form this year. It has just 2 lines.

1. How much did you make in 2023?
2. Send it to us.