I'm a tiny fish, my songs hardly get played anymore. This does not concern me so much, yet the future of me trying to do what i did before does. For a big part of my life I was not good enough to stop performance, and possibly not good enough to be famous. I was subsidised by the state and a girl friend a lot of this time. Slowly the screws of the world wound me down though, and now I find it hard to pick up a guitar. Maybe my heart was not in the right place from the start to go the distance, or maybe the world changed. Probably somewhere in the middle.
Questions and answers.
The world i started out in? I grew up in a world where when i listened to a popular song, I thought if i made one as good, then mine could be heard as well.
The world as it seems now? A combination of the internet/technology with a hundred year old copyright law, is not good. Sony/EMI music publishing control as much as 70 percent of popular music in Europe.
What does this mean in real terms? An absolute monopoly has taken over an already existing monopoly. In banking terms the corporation now owns all the banks and the printing press, and the government is on the payroll.
What is a publisher? To me a music publisher in a metaphoric sense is a crane driver, lifting the band or person focused on what they create, from obscurity to fame. The publisher that takes a risk, is rewarded when his bet pays off.
Who drove the crane to me? The crane driver did eventually arrive to me, yet when the driver did it felt like the driver was maybe moving scrap metal from one place to another. No nice office a pen or lawyers. No devil in a suit trying to manipulate me like I was some sort of reincarnated Morrison.
Who drives the crane now? Its up to the music artist to make his own crane, yet he has to buy all the parts at a fixed price, so that all the dead crane drivers and those that crane driver already picked up throughout the life of that crane, can be rewarded. Gradually the crane has gone from being a thousand feet tall, to something every serious artist has to buy in a toy store. The adult child sits outside the toy store with his toy crane, showing off his crane to the passing traffic, then someone from bureau comes and confiscates the toy and he has to buy the same toy from the same shop owned by the bureau. He goes home with his new crane and is never heard of again. The scrap metal worker parked outside the back of the shop.