Stairway to Heaven: The coming death of just about every rock legend ...

Music in your life and soul is as important as the right vitamin mix or whatever. Trust me. I play the guitar a lot, was once in a shitty cover band and always have music in my head. I’m 66 and feel like 36. Everyone I know who is into music is healthy as a horse...might look bad but their tickers are just fine.
Just do it.

 

I'm just thrilled that my 2-year-old niece has a fighting chance to see the 22nd century.

Yes, we're due to be bombarded by the deaths of musicians who became famous in their 20s a half-century ago. That time bomb has been ticking ever since. (I still maintain the last one alive will be Keef.)

But we'll be bombarded in the 2030s when Bruce Willis, Whoopi Goldberg and Howie Mandel finally kick the bucket. And also in the 2040s when Robert Downey Jr., Dr. Dre and J.K. Rowling die. Fame is a fairly recent invention.

 

Touring is expensive - the same costs today (room and board, transportation, staging and lights, crew, etc.) haven't changed as much as ticket prices have. Record labels are pretty much out of the business except for encouraging artists to have fell0w label-mates open their shows.

Why Are Opening Acts for Superstars Losing Money?

 

Loss-leading. Getting their name out there in hopes of making it up on the back end. Kind of like what UB40 did opening for The Police.

 

Opening acts do lose money. Big stars generally make quite a bit.

At any rate, most of the biggest tours are old rock bands, a handful of female pop stars, and Ed Sheeran.

 

And yet in this dystopian landscape of Garage Band-produced one-off singles, we have the Black Keys, Mumford & Sons, the Lumineers, Adele, Of Monsters and Men, just off the top of my head.

 

I have many disagreements with that essay. It seems like hastily written fodder.

My biggest peeve with this premise is that it’s not clear to me what music we lose with the actual death of these septuagenarians. If music is trash now, it’s trash while these rock stars are alive and can do something about it.

This millennium, I can only name new albums by Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson and Bob Dylan, among those on this list.

 

Musicians make just over a buck per album, a nickel or less per single song sale (seriously, buy the album), piss for streaming plays (seriously, Spotify pays between $0.006 and $0.0084 per song), and nothing at all on radio play (the songwriter gets paid 3¢ per play, but the artist is shut out of that revenue stream). There’s also a metric fuckton of streaming money that’s just sitting in a fund waiting for someone to clean up the paperwork, accounting shenanigans, general dishonest fuckery, and metadata mess before it can be paid out.

Touring’s always been the money source. Recorded music and its offshoots are just loss leaders to get fans to buy tickets and merch.

 

When recorded music sales were strong, songwriting was a pretty strong money source, too.

Of course, many artists were stupid/desperate and sold away those rights for a pitiance, but that's the music biz for you ...

 

And there's 71-year-old Stevie Nicks.

 

It's a producer's industry now. Are songs even "written" anymore.