Our friends at GOOD Magazine have posted a neat item here — Curt Smith, best known as co-founder of the band Tears for Fears, but now an independent, solo artist with a new set of fans, talks about the “musical value of sharing.” Great stuff. Snip:
I got my first record deal when I was 18 years old–next year that will be about 30 years ago, so I have been doing it for quite a while. The industry when I first started was very much one-sided in the sense that it favored the industry and not the musicians. We would sign deals when we were quite young that were pretty bad across the board: from record deals to publishing deals, even management deals and touring. You just didn’t make as high of a percentage as you would now. But of course that has changed over the years, especially in the last few years with the internet and sharing your music with people.
Technology has changed so much that now, people are quite capable of making records themselves. It used to be a very expensive process, but its not anymore. In the past, the industry controlled how your music got out there, so if you didn’t have a record deal it would never be on shelves; there was no Amazon, there was no iTunes. There was basically just radio, and the record companies controlled that as well. Now, with the freedom of the internet, people can go and discover your stuff.
The down side is that there is now so much music, some form of filtering tool is required.
Curt Smith on the Musical Value of Sharing (GOOD, as told to Eric Steuer, creative director of Creative Commons)
Curt is fun to follow on Twitter. So is GOOD.
I really dig Curt’s current solo work
