AustLit

'At the dawn of the new millennium, as the music industry was collapsing from the havoc wreaked by emerging digital distribution and production platforms, I experienced schadenfreude. I know I wasn’t alone. The industry had been treating music lovers abysmally for years, grossly inflating the prices of CDs and overseeing a sclerotic distribution network for both local and international music. Many of us also knew that the industry was venal when it came to the exploitation of the musicians. I have friends who found some success as music artists but that meant they were locked into contracts that in some cases see them still having to pay off accumulated debts from advances and tours accrued years, even decades, ago. For many of the musicians I know, the new digital era has allowed them to have a level of control and ownership of their artistic work that was inconceivable when they were dependent on distribution through the record companies. It is still hard for musicians, as it is for any artist, to make money from their craft. Spotify and iTunes are certainly not altruistic enablers of art: they too are powerful organisations in it for the money. But now that you can upload your work on a site such as Bandcamp, that you can produce your own video clip and place it on YouTube, musicians aren’t saddled with the exorbitant debts of the past.' (Introduction)