The fact that I am witnessing the end of the whole era, or the end of cd technology, or the end of one type of distributing music tells me that I am in the music business for a decent amount of time.
The news about the end of psyshop.com had an emotional impact on me. First 5-6 years of my career, I have spent watching all the time on new releases on this epic website. Psyshop was not only a shop, it was a distribution for physical release or CDs for psychedelic trance music.
Psyshop was a place where we used to follow what are the new releases on our scene, as well as previewing some of those releases, following the charts or ordering the CD for our DJ sets, and Psyshop was an online spot where I would go to fill in my CD cases.
The nostalgia for those times is bigger when we understand that we, as artists or musicians used to earn much more money through those CDs. The physical releases are in fact much more valuable than digital ones. Physical releases have a value as they must have the number of copies, as we would need to print some amount of copies to have a physical release.
Last several years, we are releasing only digitally, trying to make some money through the streams, but only a super small percentage of music is generating enough money that way for artists to survive, which makes our job much harder.
The Digital era is influencing artists enormously, as it generates money only for the platforms that are streaming our hard work, or the artist that is making music for a wide range of listeners (commercial music, trap, hip-hop..), while electronic dance music is music for dancefloors, and not many people listen to electronic dance music at home, as this music is made for dancefloors!
My whole lifetime work is available for anyone to listen for free! Not completely for free, but in compensation for few seconds of watching the ads, or just waiting until ads have passed.
As I see it, Youtube, Spotify and similar services have allowed everyone to listen my lifetime work almost for free. It is a great sadness for every psytrance artist noticing that each of its tracks won't generate enough money for few days of living, hours and hours of work in the studio going to the whole world almost for free, just doesn't seem right.
That money that those ads generated will be split between label and digital distribution, and the artist will get a super small piece at the end.
Does all of this sound fair? Does anyone think about this?
The end of psyshop.com is not only the end of one shop, or some store. It is marking the end of a better time for psytrance artists and giving us less and fewer hopes for underground music.
If we chose a life of an artist, and if we have any ambitions of making enough money for a living from our work, we are forced to make commercial music, the music that will generate us enough to survive, as making underground music just won't be enough.
Do not be surprised to understand why some of your favourite artists just might start making something completely different from what they did before, or if any of those artists just disappear and especially after this corona crisis, they just end their careers, as the whole music industry machinery will push them in that direction for sure.
Sadly
R.I.P Psyshop
Marko Radovanovic