“I want ART in the song, not pandering.”

I can certainly understand this.

“‘Live’ is very restrictive compared to what can be accomplished through a recording.”

Yes and no. It depends on how many musicians that you can get together.

“Connections are much more profound when they can be made one to one; ie laying in bed listening to your favorite artist. I don’t go in for groupthink, people singing along to songs I want records, I want the music to be “mine,” so I can listen to it whenever and wherever I want to.”

I understand entirely.

“I don’t know why people suspect that musicians will just continue going through the PAIN and arduous process of recording if there’s no market for recordings.”

Because they are musicians, and recordings are the permanent medium of musical expression in our time.

Because they like to hear the recording when they are done (this is my principle motivation).

Because they like doing it all themselves, and that’s difficult to do in a live setting.

“Mistakes breeze right by at a live show, but a recording must be perfect (or at least reasonably so). Bands don’t break up on tour *nearly* as often as they break up in the studio. Recording is a hellacious process.”

Bands break up because of a thousand reasons, most of them stemming from behavioral issues. These issues are simply more acute within the confines of a studio setting.

But recording is certainly no more difficult than writing an orchestral score. And the recording process yields an artifact of immediate gratification, whereas a score, even when finished and printed, yields nothing. A performance must still take place for music to happen: a performance involving great difficulty and expense.

And yet composers like Mahler and Bruckner still wrote these immense scores for 500 musicians, singers and soloists; knowing full well that neither sales of the score (actually, the bigger scores were usually rented in those days) nor the ticket sales for the resulting performances would come close to paying for the time and effort involved.

I wonder why they went through all of this effort to lose money?

Or why composers like Varese or Webern or Ives or Ruggles bothered writing their scores that were often never performed at all?

Or what got projects like the San Francisco Tape Music Center going when no one was earning a dime off of it?

I wonder, in fact, why the Island of Bali is filled with all manner of musicians who rehearse rigorously and regularly when the only possible ‘reward’ is the pride of having the best gamelan in the region.

Maybe it’s because real musicians make music because they want to. And whether it involves the challenge of writing a score, rehearsing an ensemble, or making a recording, they will get it done because that is what fulfills their needs.

In the 70’s this might not have been as true, because making a recording involved really expensive equipment that most musicians just didn’t have. Today, this is simply no longer the case.