Where does one draw the line of ridiculousness? T-shirts and posters are okay because they’ve been around since before our time (for a lot of us anyway)?
I agree with your point, to be clear, but there is a whole generation of adults who have grown up buying Nirvana, Pink Floyd, or Joy Division branded whatevers, when they haven’t existed as a bands since before they were born. As good as some of the music was in the 90s, we were the generation that really sapped a lot of the rebelliousness out of rock and roll. We allowed them to market our angst to us.
No, I don’t agree with that. Music industry was always notorious greedy and they brought this upon themselves not us listeners.
I remember when LP’s were getting slowly fazed out and many times you needed to buy CD’s. Prices were outrageous. I payed back then, over 20€ for a CD. Music was never a cheap hobby, but these prices were basically holding both us and artists as hostages.
That money did not land in the lap of the bands, but at the record companies.
This is exactly what Lars Ulrich and Metallica fought against, regarding Napster. I stood fully on their side back then, and still do to this day. I have never downloaded music. But when it became possible, because of outlandish prices and opportunities (I know with technology you cannot stop that) bands have been forced to branch out and using their brand and not music to make money.
When you see how much they are making per stream or even per 1.000-1.000.000 stream, it’s peanuts.
Today’s money is being made by touring, if you are lucky and big enough and merchandise sales. Not the music.
Exact opposite for me, this was the beginning of thinking Metallica are jerks I don’t support. There were a whole lot of $20 (back in the day, more like $40 present day dollars!) CDs released with one, maybe two good singles, on purpose. The music industry was abusing the consumer then.
The technology to do an iTunes individual track sale model existed long before anyone would actually sell that way, and refusing to sell downloaded tracks was customer hostile greed.
The thing that stopped widespread music pirating was $1.29 downloads being available - the motivation to figure out how to keep illegal distribution went away. I’m not blaming the people who looked at $20 for a song or pirating and decided to sail the high seas, I was a broke teenager back in those days and made that decision. We could also get into the people who pirated the most also spent the most money on music, but that’s a separate topic.