In this manner, musicians have betrayed their brothers and sisters by letting themselves become dumb sluts for the sake of the sustainability of techies' business models. Now, at some music-tech meet-up, you'll hear about how to get $8 million to fund a music-tech start-up company that doesn't remunerate musicians for the "content" they provide for the revenue-streams that make the company profitable, and then a discussion about the importance of beating the public over the head as to the importance of musicians' getting paid for what they do. The level of denial involved in accepting this glaring hypocrisy is precisely the degree of complicity althat musicians have in their alienation form one another, and from their own roles in this matter. It's not the "techies" who are primarily responsible for this, it is musicians' fault for not having grabbed the horse by the reins before it could run wild. "We" (for what that word may be worth, at this point) have let each other down, relinquishing the power we had had in mutual support and cooperation.
Related to this is another hidden reason for something often discussed but never satisfactorily (for me, anyhow) examined: why musical standards have degraded in recent years. I'm not even referring to the crap that one hears on the radio now, I'm talking about music coming from under that radar. It may be that now, any monkey with a laptop and a Soundcloud account can be called a "producer," considered a "musician." It is quite also that, despite immediate access to an infinite supply of music(s) spanning centuries and continents, people are drawing from a far more limited frame of musical reference in creating music than musicians just a generation before, and certainly those of decades ago, had taken into consideration in crafting songs. I want to add to this list the fact that musicians are growing up into a world in which they are expected to "build a brand" almost before they learn how to use Garageband.
I was recently discussing with a woman in her late 20s, a neophyte in her artform of choice, my sometimes creating something which causes me to weep because it's too good for the life I lead, with me exclaiming, "Someone who did that lives like this (looking around my domicile)?!" She said, "Oh, but I want that!" I said, "No, you don't." She also seemed to want me to write her a voucher for a chunk of my own 10,000 hours, not wanting to put in the time to master something, not willing to learn by screwing-up. She's part of this crop o' kids who talk of "stealing experience," when to me and my peers, experience was taken for granted as something earned by livingh through it, whence it become irrevocably, indelibly, one's own. She went on, "I want to do something that's so good that it will make people cry." I had no faith in the idea of impressing upon her that what it is about any art which causes such a reaction is what comes from within and is merely facilitated by the mastery of one's technique – and certainly not through what someone might pre-digest and regurgitate into another's gullet.
It's because people such as she come of age with standards set by young YouTubers with high production values and sponsors for their videos, and by "everyone" self-consciously self-representing on social media, that they have no sense of a long, arduous march toward mastery and self-actualization. They see accompilshed elders as to be used-up for superficial appropriation, then discarded. It's all about outer life, now, when it's one's inner life that is the source of substance in one's art. Everyone's in a hall of mirrors or an echo chamber, all the time. An artist develops one's art in private, alone, unto him/herself. When everything about one's life is public, with privacy as an alien concept, how can there be art? When one is preoccupied with "building a brand" and trying to get people to "follow me on my journey" (their terminology is appropriately fuckingretarded, no?), one has no time, no room, for an inner life, processing experience, going through what gives life and art their substance. One neither has "time for" putting in the proverbial 10,000 hours – a somewhat ridiculously arbitrary notion, albeit a prescription approrpriate for a generation who perceive life in terms of "time lines" and "life plans" rather than in a sense of the inevitability of chaos, setbacks and disappointments to surmount and to learn from – nor for being alone with oneself. One is never alone, anymore – one is constantly blissfully adrift in the numinous vat of cultural goo, along with all their other "friends" and followers online.
I may be describing wherefore music by those coming of age now might lack depth and sophistication because they have been deprived of the impetus to gain those qualities, but one sees a precedent for this in bands who had been so successful that they'd toured constantly and gone from writing songs from life to writing songs about being on the road. One also sees bands whose music inevitably sucked after they'd gotten signed to major labels: not only were they compromising their sound and style for the sake of broader marketability, they were increasingly dislocated from their music's spiritual source. Touring too much burns a lot of such bands out, and fame takes them into societal realms alien to where their music had come from. It becomes like transplanting a tree that thrives at sea level into soil high in the mountains. However, when one never develops roots to which to stay true, and no soil from which to draw particular sustenance, while putting all of one's energy into social-media presences and "branding," what can ya expect?