Re: [LAU] Campaign: "The most remarkable album on this entire planet"

Arnold Krille wrote: Musicians, indeed artists of all types, have been supported, allowing them to produce their work, by society for very many centuries. This support has had many forms, selling individual copies to paying customers is only one variation on this. Working under a contract for someone else, who then sells the result to customers for their profit is another variation, the rewards to the original artist vary in this case. With current internet and computer technologies there are more ways to sell directly to a huge range of potential customers, and the production of recorded music is a hugely cheaper prospect than even a few years ago, so the middlemen who got very rich a few years ago may be feeling the pinch a bit. But supporting artists in other, more direct, ways through public, semi-public or private patronage, through institutions like grants from governments or through universities now, or in the past through the powerful social institutions of the time .. churches, kings, the aristocratic courts or whatever, is and has always been part of any culture. In even older social structures this was achieved by allowing some to produce art or music while others produced food or provided other services, and the results were in various fair, or unfair, ways shared. Playing music has been both recreational for many, and a way of living for some, for as long as we have had social structures, and way before any written history. Simon