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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

“Is Spotify Killing Music?”

August 11, 2014 by Scott Timberg

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TWO descendants of Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck make a good illustration of what’s happened to the lives of musicians lately. A new story — co-written by yours truly — up on TakePart looks at how musicians are being proletarianized, and I don’t just mean the lyrics.

The story — written with Kathleen Sharp — weaves between a look at the musical duo Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion and the larger state of musicians in the age of streaming.220px-Woody_Guthrie_2

“Music is being treated as digital trash,” said Rebecca Gates, one-half of the ’90s indie band the Spinanes who now records as a solo artist. “But companies are getting money and building their identities on it. It’s horrifying.”

Musicians’ argument isn’t with streaming per se. “It’s the fact that everyone gets paid except the music creators,” said country singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash, who has recorded 13 albums since the 1970s. “We are creating a culture where content creators are a new servant class, and paid as such.”

For what it’s worth, Sharp wrote most of this piece; I mostly provided the context. In any case, please check it out.

 

Filed Under: "Disruption", California, literary, music, Music streaming, Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

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