The recording artist as an artist has been raped by the digital music business and its ever-changing business models which are designed for global profits at any cost. Apple has fooled artist in a way that still leaves them all totally perplexed as to wtf happened.

To explain this, you have to look in more detail as to how artist have been fooled into losing their true art and its connection with the audience (The album).

Apple and its cronies are actively saying they are all about pop culture and as any artist will tell you pop culture is a fickle and ever moving target that most artist use only as a fishing rod to grab the attention of the listens so as to take them into the deeper journey of their artist album world.

The pop culture wants only to most popular the politically correct the same as everyone else the dumping down of being different and thinking different. they are the sheep that’ll follow where the culture of popular takes them. weather its fashion or plastic surgery the masses will change to conform.

Artist on the other hand are individuals they are unique and the creation of an artist album is a journey into the world of a unique person it is never just pop culture that is just the bait into finding who the artist really is and also for many finding the deeper parts of who they are also.

Since the dawn of the artist album people have always complained about the tracks they did not like only to later realise that those once unlike tracks would eventually become the most praised track of the album.

To understand an artist is to feel the whole album of work in the context of the artist
you spend time playing the album understanding the deeper meanings connecting with the artist,

Yes, you went to that album because there were one or two tracks that hit the main stream of pop culture but then having bought the album you enter the deeper and sometimes darker world of theirs and possibly your reality.

For the most part artist is nothing like pop culture but are deeper and more meaningfully complex they set their inner selves to story music and this music is rarely about thongs and gang name style dancing.

Pop culture is nothing more than a door way into the world of finding your deeper connection with an artist’s work. This is how artist build a real and dedicated fan following and people who love an artist have to travel this mystery of the artist album to understand the passion beyond the pop culture.

So, what happened to the artist album and how were all artist conned into become nothing more than a 79p pop culture download with no album sale.

Apple constantly say they love music and support the artist but its apparent no true when you look objectively at what they have done.

There is a term in business called carpet bagging, its where a company buys another company under the pretext of helping it but one it has it just chops it off and sees its most valuable assets leaving all the workers out of a job and income.

Most Artist see pop culture and a way to introduce themselves to the main stream in order to bring people out of the main stream and into their deeper artistic world

An album is a collection of the artist’s story only a few if any tracks would be mainstream and for the masses but one or two pop culture tunes could bring people into the album experience and create the true artist experience between the listener and the artist. Of an artist, it’s all about the album it takes so much time to create it’s a story a journey it’s the real connection.

The carpet bagging by Apple

By chopping up every track on an album into tiny 70p pieces apple exposed the innards of the story allowing the listener to direct only what sounded ok in an instant gratification and leaving the true meaning of the artist creation exposed to never be truly understood in its designed context.

Apple has been able to sell more music than ever before and personally make more money out of just the most popular pieces of an artist album. The artist has been stripped bare and the album story has been lost for instant gratification of pop culture

The artist album has been totally disrespected the artist hard work has been abused for the most valuable piece and the deeper connection between the listener and the artist has been lost in the process

People don’t need to enter the artist album they just cherry pick the popular songs, they miss out on the true experience of the album story where ever track created by the artist has significance and meaning the album is the whole story.

We as artist have not has a say in any of this our albums are abused chopped up with the perceived best bits taken out for sale so the corporation can get 30% cut of every sale and make millions while the artist album might only sell a few hundred in total. The most popular track cannot capture real fans alone as pop culture is as disposable as one popular song. without the sale of the album people will never get to experience the true connection the artist is trying to make.

Remember that worst track on that album you bought ended up becoming the one your cherries and the popular tract that turned out to be just the invitation to take a leap of faith and buy the album in order to find the deeper soul of the artist which eventually connected to your soul.

Yes, Apple is creaming and cherry picking the best bits leaving all the hard work of the artist album to wither and die.

They say the answer is to tour and touch your fans this way but that’s a lie. it’s the album that people spend time with when they feel low or when they want to unwind, when they feel naked, these songs are not the pop culture they are the deeper moments of everyone and that doesn’t translate on a tour its personal to the listener and the artist one on one. the tour is a celebration of those personal moments only you know you had with the album.

Has Apple killed the artist, I would say most defiantly yes, all apple want is pop culture they want to ride the music’s most popular tracks and don’t care one iota about the deeper meaning of the artist’s music. This is the real truth that’s been hidden from everyone even the artist cannot understand what happened.

But it’s getting worse still as apple continue to do the least possible to sell albums.

If the Apple music download model allowed the chopping up of artist albums so that only the popular bits could be taken out form the whole album; than streaming is the final insult in that its job is to squeeze every last drop of money from those popular tracks and pay mic units of half a piece for it to be streamed.

Streaming is designed to pay for what you play and can even be free to play by some companies the goal is to get a bulk payment of money monthly for the company streaming the content.

It’s not about the artist music in so far as they don’t care what is streamed and they don’t offer any instant way to connect with any artist streaming of the ability to buy the tracks being streamed

Again, streaming has the potential to create a point of sale for the artist albums, but does it? no why would it when the company want to keep you on a monthly payment plan.

If you have a million subscribers paying 9.99 then you have almost 10 million pound a month in income well apple had about 10 million last time I checked and Spotify was much bigger so there is a lot of easy money out there for those companies to make so long as they don’t have to pay for the true value of the artist work

So, they have a payment structure they invented in order that they can keep getting more subscribers without paying a fair price for the music they are streaming and also without offering a way to buy the artists full album.

Less than a fraction of half a cent is payed for each play
it no longer matters what’s playing and the listener is totally disconnected from the artist with no way to drive traffic to the artist of the offer of purchase of the artist full album or single.
and to add insult to injury if you do have a popular song the price the streaming companies pay you can actually decrease the more plays you get.

The artist gets no say and the payment runs from anything from a free service is purely to get those 9.99 subscribers to the company bank balance to a sliding scale of prices depending on how many streets you are getting. It’s all designed purely to keep the streaming profits up and to get as many new subscribers to their payment plan. The artist is just being raped for the corporate greed of profits.

Streaming company has it worked out so they will always make their margin but if you are streaming too much your margin the artist payment per stream decreased so that the 9.99 monthly subscription is never running in debt to the streaming company the popular streamed music is paid less royalties so that the streaming company keeps its margins intact.

Yes, the artist is penalised for being popular also.

Streaming is very bad for artist and chopping up albums in to pieces is very bad for artist. These are proven fact if you look at the state of the music business from the artist perspective.

lets give some context here
You would not go to a star wars movie and say I only like the action scene and then just watch those, how would you have the context or the story, you would not just as be buying bits from an album doesn’t give you the artist story.

Popular culture is about instant gratification with no depth, Apple is actively saying that they are in popular culture for music and fashion, good for them but they are also raping the artist’s album story in the process and for artist the tracks that make it to popular culture are supposed to be the door way into the deeper darker world of their art.

Apple don’t seem to care about the artist or their album unless it’s fashionable for them it’s a ready nasty view from a company I used to love and cherish and secretly I still hope they will look back and connect the dots because I know a million ways they could truly crate a music utopia and it’s not just about the fake cardboard pop culture that some of the outdated exec think is all there is.

Music is a deep and colourful world and pop culture is nothing more than a fake instant gratification two-dimensional piece of cardboard. The people into pop culture are and can be deeper and when they are that being when they turn to artist albums that’s when they open up and release the pressures of their day that’s where the true artist talks to them and lets them know they are not alone.

I might have been very critical of Apple but I still believe they have the power to bring albums back to life so the damage can still be fixed. I believe the iTunes lp needs to be made more accessible and easier to create and those albums need to be pushed and kept as albums only so that people can find the true meaning of the artists musical story and maybe also find that passion for a musical adventure once more.