A new MTV study shows that music fans are expecting a closer and near constant relationship with artists in exchange for their attention. “Music To The M Power” shows how social media has dismantled barriers between artist and fans creating a “zero-distancing” effect.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll pay for the music that they say they love. According to the study, buying music is little more than “symbolic patronage” for Millennial fans.

via MTV Study Unlocks 7 Secrets Of The Musician & Fan Relationship – hypebot.

Vinyl retailers are thriving as well. Mr. Kassem of Quality Record Pressings also runs Acoustic Sounds, which sells LPs as well as turntables and accessories, including cleaning machines and protective sleeves. Music Direct, a Chicago company that owns Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab, a storied audiophile label, has a similarly broad stock, including a selection of turntables that ranges from the $249 Music Hall USB-1 to the $25,000 Avid Acutus. Josh Bizar, the company’s director of sales and marketing, said that Music Direct sold 500,000 LPs and “thousands of turntables” last year.

And the buyers, Mr. Bizar said, are by no means boomer nostalgists.

“When you look at the sales for a group like Daft Punk,” he said, “you’re seeing young kids collecting records like we did when we were young.”

“We never expected the vinyl resurgence to become as crazy as it is,” he said. “But it’s come full circle. We get kids calling us up and telling us why they listen to vinyl, and when we ask them why they don’t listen to CDs, they say, ‘CDs? My dad listens to CDs — why would I do that?’ ”

via Vinyl Records Are Making a Comeback – NYTimes.com.

Again and again and again, the “free music is the devil” theory doesn’t play out. The most plausible explanation—not to downplay the Internet’s role—is that the album widget, historically, was wildly overpriced, and the labels were lucky they got people to pay close to twenty bucks a pop for so long. (This is not a spitball theory; music executives love to admit this, off the record, and laugh loudly.) Being really good and building on organic audience—true of Daft Punk and The Weeknd and Danny Brown and Radiohead—seems to be most predictive of sales.

via Daft Punk and ‘Random Access Memories’: Music Reviewing in the Leaked-Album Era : The New Yorker.

The music industry is a microcosm of what is happening in the U.S. economy at large. We are increasingly becoming a “winner-take-all economy,” a phenomenon that the music industry has long experienced. Over recent decades, technological change, globalization and an erosion of the institutions and practices that support shared prosperity in the U.S. have put the middle class under increasing stress. The lucky and the talented – and it is often hard to tell the difference – have been doing better and better, while the vast majority has struggled to keep up.

via Rock and Roll, Economics, and Rebuilding the Middle Class | The White House.