That's not totally accurate, the US audience is just super into "retro",
hearing bands rehash all the styles of old. You've got a much better
chance of making it playing in a cover band than trying to do original
music, but really if you listen to what a very commercial producer like
Timbaland is doing, he's really pushing things by bringing in indian
samples and african/indian style pecussion, played by hand.
Most Linux artists are either academics who teach linux music for a
living, or indie hackers like me. However I'm demoing terminatorX at
SCALE this year and I'm lookign at writing some terminatorX articles for
Dj magazines, so I haven't given up on my own music, but if you look at
sucessfully underground artists liek Nels Cline, it takes years and
years of relentless dedication to just get by.
Part of that is that musicians are mostly limiting themselves to
thinking in terms of releasing only audio.
For me I'm really getting into video art and am working hard to climb
the learning curve on everything, learning to use Blender and building
opengl stuff to release dvd's and 3D gamesfor $$.
The thing is if you look at the statistics, DVD's sales are really the
thing that's cutting down on CD sales, more people are buying movies
instead of albums. So the thing to do is release you own DVD's for $$,
because people are more willing to pay $20 for an exxperimental DVD than
$5 for a CD.
On Mon, 2003-10-13 at 18:40, Rick Taylor wrote:
> Tim Orford <tim@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> >Ron is a shining example to us all. Personally i make
> >european pop music which requires a lot more from your
> >system than just capturing, editing, and playing back audio
> >through a desk + outboard. European music is much more electronic
> >than US stuff. It makes me laugh that people in the US even have
> >an 'electronica' category.
>
> It's just that here most "real" electronica is constrained to academia or to
> experimental/artsy categories ...None of which makes any money. {Actually, that
> whole conceptual genre has fallen into real disfavor recently.}
>
> We have that whole rock/blues and jazz legacy to deal with as well {as opposed
> to the watered down, imitative stuff that comes from that side of the pond.} The
> American public has come to value things like depth and quality and a certain
> "earthiness" that you just don't get with "Eurodisco."
>
> {Tho' you really couldn't tell it by looking at our charts. ... A few minutes
> on the streets or in some of our backwoods clubs would convince you.}
>
> >With the exception of vocals, there are no "performances"
> >in the conventional sense. Most of the sounds are generated
> >on the machine and need to be kept live to be able to
> >make last minute changes. Personally I couldnt even manage without a
