Let’s talk about selling out.  How much do you hate it? How much respect do you lose for an artist that “sells out”?  Do you hate it enough to stop burning CD’s and start buying them so that The Killers won’t have to give a salute to Dr. Pepper™ and all of it’s 33 wonderful flavors, a 12-pack of which may be purchased at CVS for a mere eight dollars (don’t mock my terrible attempt at humor I’m fragile)?  

No, The Killers did not go and advertise with Dr. Pepper, but I doubt they let Nike use their song for free on that ‘get-psyched-out-of-your-mind-pump-up’ commercial ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ae3tFI8wXE )  they aired during the olympics.  That commercial made them a lot of money and it’s still making them crazy amounts of money and guess what?  There’s nothing wrong with that.  There are those of us who would say something to the effect of, “dude, they basically wrote a song and made millions of dollars for it.  I wish I could get paid that much to basically do nothing.” Wrong.  A good song is a culmination of a lifetime of work.  You don’t just pick up a guitar and write a lick, then make up some words that rhyme and record it.  It’s a little bit more complicated than that. 

Do you know how many songs a song writer has to write before they write the “one”?  Do you know how many song writers go there entire lives without writing the “one”? Do you have any freaking clue how many of their songs are stolen before they finally make any money at all on the “one”? And lastly, do you even care about how much they love what they do?

Here’s the crux of the matter: Most song-writers will never write the “one”.  They’ll go their whole lives writing good songs but they’ll never write the song that sets them up for life.  SO STOP TREATING AN ARTIST’S MUSIC LIKE THEY’RE MAKING MILLIONS OF DOLLARS. We’re not all The Killers.  

A quick ‘angry’ note to Christians: You claim to live by the words of Jesus yet I know personally some of you have over 40,000 stolen songs on your iPods.  Go buy 40,000 songs on iTunes and see how much you spend.  It’s not free.  Someone created it, and they didn’t give you permission to take it.  Music is a product (no comments from the guy in the Ramones shirt please. Punk is dead. Get a haircut) that provides musicians with money to live and support a family.  And don’t simply deflect  by pointing out my issues in defense.  I know I have problems, but apparently you don’t think you do.  Repentance is a staple of living a right life before God, and if you’re continually doing something, which you know is wrong without repenting, you’re rejecting repentance in favor of what the world offers.

It’s not that we want a lot of money, it’s that we want to keep doing what we love, but we’ve still gotta buy bread.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ll never stop making music just because I keep hauling in a paycheck of a whopping zero dollars, I’d just like to be able to make music without being stressed out of my mind about how I’m going to make it to the next paycheck.

By the way, I love all of you.  This whole thing just rubs me the wrong way. You know?