Pay for play?

It's been 7 years since I've promoted an album.  Things have really changed.

There are now a bunch of sites that you have to PAY to get a review from...and some artists are actually using them.  Wow.

How do you even have the pretense of objectivity with such an arrangement?  And how, once the source of such a review becomes known, does anyone in the industry take such a review seriously?

What used to be called payola is pretty rampant too: paying for spins on online stations...yet all the while the opportunities for revenue for independent artists are vanishing.  There are even sites where you can register your songs as Creative Commons with no limits on licensing so, in theory, PepsiCo could use one of your tunes in an ad and never pay you any royalties.  And those services, too, have a ton of artists on them giving it all away.

So sad that the arts have become so undervalued, so cheap...so disposable.

I suppose against the larger backdrop of a planet whose biosphere is spiraling out of control, it's a minor little concern, but it still saddens me to see artists willing to pay large sums of money to give their work away for free, essentially.

I really feel sorry for younger acts who are trying to make any sort of living at this...for a time, it was different.  Me, I'm old and my material is out of step with the times...so I know that I have to make my income via non-musical means...and I mostly always have...but what a massive set of disincentives for anyone getting into this field.  Frankly, if my muse was not screaming at me and had I not had the desire to leave a more expanded musical legacy than what I would have left otherwise, I would not have recorded the two new albums...but I have and it means I have to have at least a minor go at promoting them to do them justice...but what a weird little world for indie artists it's become.