"make something, price it for more than it costs to manufacture, and sell it if you can... Pandora and Spotify are not selling goods; they are selling access"
except that's always what the record industry has been selling. at least Pandora and Spotify are honest about what they are. If i bought your vinyl record, do i actually own that or is really just a proxy for personal usage license? Can I play that record at my wedding, or in my office, or at a party with more than some arbitrary number of people?
Intellectual property is not a physical good. The recording industry has coasted along for the last 50 years or so on this strange phenomenon that allowed their IP to be sold as though it were a physical product while at the same time getting IP protections in addition to the revenue of a physical good, and they've made a ton of money doing so - more money than they ever should have. Now the gravy train is ending.
Getting paid per-play rather means that artists are finally seeing how people actually value their music. You can't use law to make your music more valuable. If you want to earn more then make more music, or go on tour, or put some effort into selling your music for soundtracks and the like. The rates spotify pays represent the actual value to the consumer - they aren't making a profit, and if spotify were any more than what it currently costs, i wouldn't pay for it. You might think your song is worth more than $10/mo in streaming royalties, but you might also be wrong.
So then you presumably believe that Matt Inman at The Oatmeal was wrong to be upset at Funnyjunk for appropriating his comics; after all, he had no right to claim them as his own property.
And, of course, what you're saying about the market valuing music is that the market values music at zero; the price of music on streaming services is simply the premium people pay over free pirated tracks in order to have a nice user interface.
I've read this a couple of times and it seems to me to ignore the way royalties worked with broadcast in the past. Artists, if that's the word, were paid per performance when broadcast. They still are and the various rights societies collect royalties for their members. Certainly hard product was a component, but big acts collect continuing royalty payments year after year because of this. I read somewhere Paul McCartney collects millions a year just from Yesterday, which hasn't been connected with a physical product in over fifty years.
Traditionally radio stations account for their playlists in much the same way as Spotify and other streaming services, which is of course why it's a fundamental expense to them.
What has changed for one thing is the change in profitability for the myriad of smaller organisations, like diverse radio, each having an income stream from sometimes equally diverse, even regional, advertisers, from which they payed these dues. And of course, demand for music was met from these lines of supply. It wasn't legislated, just the normal supply demand scenario.
This model, where media outlets competed for listeners to maximise advertising dollars meant that consumers were implicitly engaging in wealth creation for these artists. While consumers behaviours haven't changed that much, after all most would simply listen and not buy product, their position as a factor in this has.
This is more or less what Thom Yorke is saying I think. The economics have changed, and overall capital had migrated to the cartel like few.
The streaming services don't make money either. In fact, Spotify makes a loss. A substantial loss. An eye-watering loss [1]. And so does anybody else who tries to get into this business. The trail is becoming littered with the corpses of plucky companies who've tried to make a buck in this business. Why is that? Quite simply, the music business is a cartel. It used to be the Big Six; now there's just three. Three companies who own the rights to most of the last half a century's worth of popular music. Here's the problem with Spotify's business model: they don't own what they're selling. The labels do. And so if Spotify makes a profit then the major labels can just renegotiate their contracts within a year (they typically have break clauses), and gobble up all those extra earnings.
You see the music business is a /nightmarish/ labyrinth of copyright legislation, so to even start playing in this game you need a staff lawyer (or three). There's recording rights, which you have to pay to one arm of the label. Then there's publishing rights, which you have to pay to a completely different arm of the label (or, if you're unlucky, a different label - like with the erstwhile EMI's catalogue), and that's just to play some radio. If you want to do on-demand streaming, of the type that Spotify provides, then you have to pay mechanical reproduction royalties. Whaaa? I hear you say. Well, it takes a while for the law to catch up with these things so they've just repurposed the laws that were already there. Would you believe, you even have a different bunch of people to pay if you want to reproduce the lyrics. Now, take all that and multiply it by the number of countries you want to stream in, because you're gonna need to strike deal with a different branch of each label in each country. It's insanity.
The one beacon of light is the much maligned DMCA act, which (aside for enabling content owners to persecute twelve year old children) allows those wanting to stream music in a radio-like fashion to just pay a central collections agency a fixed rate. That simplifies the business significantly - no more negotiation and complex contracts, and no more need to have such detailed reporting (less staff, less code). The only thing is that it's applicable only in the US, as there's no EU equivalent (or anywhere else, for that matter). And it doesn't cover on-demand streaming. But it's a start.
Music startups really need to push for an overhaul of the copyright laws because the landscape has fundamentally changed and what exists currently is both arcane and archaic. We need a complete legislative metamorphosis, lest the major labels continue to move their contractual blessing between startups - ideally, of course, shortly after a tasty IPO - which all resembles the classic pump-and-dump scam.
I'm coming out with my first cd soon... a seven-song mini-album. I printed 300 copies as that was the smallest I could go without it becoming a CD-R instead of a redbook. They'll arrive in a couple of weeks, and I'm thinking of selling them for $10 apiece. I spent a few years writing the songs and figuring out how to record and produce them as professionally as I'm able. I spent countless hours on the project and somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 on production costs. Despite that, I know the drill - I don't really have expectations of making a lot of money on this, or even meeting my costs. But I do intend to try as hard as I can to maximize my revenue.
It's amazing what kind of culture has sprung up in the selling/delivery sphere. All these companies spring up to "empower" the indie musician and they invest in all sorts of signaling to make sure we know we had better sign up for their services or else we're not taking our career seriously. Examples:
CDBaby: keeps $4 of every cd sale, even though you've already spent $1-$3 per every cd you manufacture. As opposed to just setting up a paypal link or merchant account on your website, and shipping it yourself. 2.9% + $0.30 sounds a lot better than $4. (Shipping costs are additional either way and passed on to the user.) I have trouble imagining at what point I'd want to spend $3.41 per cd to save myself the effort of just sticking a mailing label to a padded envelope and dropping it in my mailbox.
Bandcamp: keeps 10% (by way of keeping every 10th chunk of revenue for itself). It's based around the belief that people will pay more if it's freely available, or will tend to pay more than the "suggested" price. I haven't really dived into their studies but I just cannot believe there isn't a flaw in them. A lot of it seems based off of the logic that if it worked for Radiohead or NIN (with their already built-in audiences) then it should also work for small indie musicians. (And Radiohead and NIN have also since stepped away from the free/pay-what-you-want model.) At any rate, 2.9% + $0.30 sounds better than 10%, since I have to do fulfillment on my end either way.
iTunes/digital media: $0.99 no matter what. $6.93 for a seven-song album, and you can't set your own price. If you have a major label you can apparently set your album price higher but smaller indies don't seem to have access to that privilege. Plus, if your digital album costs $6.93, then you've basically destroyed your options of selling your hard-copy.
And everyone knows the common complaints about spotify and pandora.
At any rate, I'm considering going through a lengthy staged release process, in an effort to measure all sorts of conversion and gather data along the way.
1) Release physical cd only, with no music previews. At this point, the few hundred people on my mailing list are already interested in the cd anyway, so we'll see how far that goes, along with recommendations to friends. Maintain a list of addresses for people who indicate they won't buy until it's released digitally.
2) Marketing music previews of each song and on an album level, through promoted Facebook posts (friends-of-friends) and advertising. The general principle here is to still not ever release the entire full-length tracks, and funnel people to buying the physical cd.
3) Release digitally to services that are not on-demand and can't be downloaded. This means Jango and Pandora. Jango also allows me to buy paid plays and get a bunch of demographic data points to see which tracks are popular with which groups. I can then use that to do more targeted ads over at facebook or maybe through google.
4) When things are really dying down physically, finally release through iTunes and bandcamp (allow full previews) and other sites where you can actually buy the tracks digitally, and see what happens with "discovery"
5) When I'm finally ready to just trash the whole project, release it on Spotify and forget about it to start working on the next cd.
From a fan POV: why do you think selling the digital album for $6.93 hinders hard-copy sales? Everyone I know that still buys albums understands the value of having the original artwork and a physical token from the artist. The digital version usually ends up looking expensive, not the opposite.
On not releasing full-length tracks: if there is demand, someone will do it for you. You get to choose if interested listeners get it from piratebay or your own website.
If you are hoping to sell 300 copies, my guess is your best bet at building a career would be to give everything away free, setting up a website where anyone can download free mp3s if they give you their email address and zip code. With this info you can book tours, tell prospective labels "I had 10k downloads" etc.
Even if you were able to make $10 per cd, you're still in the hole. Maybe better to chalk the whole recording thing up to marketing expense and use it to give you better leverage in the future.
Pandora should help smaller bands line up shows in towns where they are popular, and help them promote those shows to interested fans. They have the data and the consumer relationships to do it.
Bands would appreciate this service far more than a meager check. And it would be much cheaper for Pandora (those song royalties eat up all their revenue). I listen to hundreds of bands on Pandora, and I'd definitely attend more shows if only I knew when they were playing locally.
EDIT: Even $100 is far better than a check for cents. And such a service would increase attendance at shows. They key is that bands would _appreciate_ it, whereas they feel angered by insulting little checks.
Small acts make fuck-all touring. Members of bands who have put out multiple records on well-known indie labels routinely make $50-100 for a single show. Touring revenue is great if you're one of a few big ticket acts; it is a lie we tell ourselves to justify not paying for albums from almost all of the rest of them.
That should be easy for them to do. They have geo ip info, also know your tastes. Say you listen to Mumford n sons, but lumineers is coming to town, you might enjoy that show.
Traditional radio pays a much lower % of sales to the licensing companies.
Pandora and Spotify are being fleeced by comparison.
With the shift to Internet / satellite, the licensing companies made a huge land grab on the fees. The radio business has a few large organizations that go to bat for the whole industry. They're old lobbying groups with quite a bit of leverage, having been entrenched in DC for decades, and it's one of the reasons licensing fees have remained reasonable for radio. Internet radio / streaming has no such lobbying groups (yet).
Zoe Keating is always worth-while reading about this, including being open about where her royalties come from. For eg (this was the post that got represented as "pay me in data"):
http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/post/35737991443/what-i-want-fr...
(there's a spreadsheet with the breakdown in there)
http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/post/42057406771/where-does-the...
(I loved the internet-expertise implied by Several people advised me to consider touring as a revenue stream since “that is where artists make most of their money”.!) More pertinently though: "Live performance is usually my revenue stream with the highest expense ratio: flights, hotel rooms, commissions, crew, advertising, etc…"
Recorded music's value has dropped very close to zero (even 99 cents seems too much depending on the song sometimes).
Live performances will always be the profit center. Recorded music is only good for promoting a band's concerts; you can't copy the live concert experience.
Ask any musician during the pre-internet era and this would be their assessment:
Recorded music will always be the profit center. Live performances are only good for promoting a band's records; it's easier to sell 1,000,000 records than it is to sell tickets for 1,000,000 seats.
Anecdotal I know, but I've only attended one or two concerts in my lifetime and prefer to buy albums instead because they're significantly cheaper, among other reasons.
It's hard for me to believe, but I still have albums that I bought fifteen or more years ago that I still listen to on a regular basis. That's more valuable to me than a concert experience.
Live performances will always be the profit center.
I am tired of hearing this mantra repeated as fact. There are significant up-front costs to live performance that are not at all sure of being recouped. If you make some sort of niche music whose audience is highly dispersed, then you might not be able to get enough people together in one place to support a tour or more than one or two performances a year.
Have you ever worked in a band or as a producer or some similar role?
Here is a rebuttal to this article and other streaming attacks that I linked to a while back posted on music site hypebot. Worth giving it a look. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4834767
> But I have simply stopped looking to these business models to do anything for me financially as a musician.
That's too bad, because there are opportunities. You could completely discount the revenue most artists get directly get from streaming and look at the services as the free option of the freemium model. They're getting their product to a far larger audience than they would have if there was a cost right out of the gate, and some of those free users will turn into paying ones. I know I have purchased albums (from iTunes) of artists I've discovered on Spotify. I'm positive that for Galaxie 500, some of their Spotify streams generated additional revenue in other channels.
These are token royalties, I don't see the moral difference between these services and piracy. Music discovery has always been a liability for artists, the illusion that sharing is somehow worse than this sanctioned exploitation is pure hypocrisy.
Last week I was in a musicology conference where several professors from Oxford commented on how there's a glut of not only self-taught musicians, but universities and learning academies teaching music production courses that are saturating the market.
Even as a follower of very specific sub-subgenres of music it's almost all saturated, impossible to follow the latest developments in every area.
This is indicative that the value of most music nowadays is really, really low.
You could spend an eternity listening to freely-published, really good new music in Soundcloud and not spend a dime.
The market has spoken; recorded music has almost no value. Learn to profit from other avenues, don't whine and scream that its not fair the market value has been driven down to zero.
> Pressing 1,000 singles in 1988 gave us the earning potential of more than 13 million streams in 2012. (And people say the internet is a bonanza for young bands...)
If you had 13 million streams, you would easily sell a few thousand albums. The internet is a bonanza for artists - it gives you exposure and allows worldwide sales at very low cost.
Labels used to do that perfectly well. I am sick of these 'internet is a bonanza' arguments that are made by people without any direct experience.
The economics of the nternet are very unforgiving for small bands, or even small genres. I listen to/used to DJ a flavor of music a called goa trance, which was obscure enough that the typical sales on an album were about 2-3000 units. If you sold 5000 albums you had a modest hit. The best-selling record in the genre sold 85,000 copies. Nobody got rich of it but you could put out an album and travel a bit on it, and it would at least keep a roof over one's head and maybe pay for another synthesizer - the typical album cost $20, which is not unusual in specialist genres. So an artist who sold 5k copies of an album could make $25-50,000 with a bit of luck; at worst getting your album out meant some additional part-time income that you could put back into your studio gear, plus some bookings.
Nowadays, you're lucky to sell a few hundred copies of an album. When Napster came along it crushed most of the labels, which were not parts of some big corporate conglomerate but were most co-ops run by the musicians themselves. It's much harder for new acts in this genre to get traction because there isn't as much capital floating around to organize parties and do basic marketing. As has been pointed out elsehwere, touring isn't free - and this is true even though the goa community had a lot of similarities to the hippy community in terms of couchsurfing, networking and so on, but things like plane tickets and so on still cost cash up front.
A lot of musicians wound up abandoning it to work in more commercial styles. Now, nobody was owed a living for working in this genre, but here was a nice little international scene that had seen several years of healthy organic growth over the space of a decade, and the 'music should be free' approach caused it to virtually collapse outside of Europe.
I think a relevant issue that is the direct result of spotify/pandora/itunes is that we no longer consume albums, but rather individual tracks. Artists used to (and many still do) value producing a collection of songs that when listened sequentially meant something much more than listening to each song individually. Therefore, albums should theoretically be worth significantly more than the sum of the value of each individual track, but today's services have essentially destroyed this model. Don't get me wrong, there are obvious benefits of being able to consume only the tracks you like most, and I understand that we can still choose to listen to albums in their entirety, but the vast majority of people do not. A serious consequence of this is that consumers value music and the music industry as a whole significantly less than they once did. I also think there is an opportunity within the music-tech space to recreate the album-listening experience in an elegant way.
What does pay-per-play even mean? IRTFA, and then searched again to see if I missed something for the terms 'start', 'finish', or 'duration'. I did not. I get how crappy it is for musicians to get ahead in the world, but it would be for everyone if we could be open about what the basic unit of currency is in this economy.
Most of the time for my paid Rdio account, I listen to stuff I know I already like. Sometimes I don't, and I don't listen to more than 10-30 seconds of a song. Does that count as a play? Other times I'll go find tons of stuff within the app, but it's still all within Rdio-land.
Also the stuff I stream on Rdio, I already paid for much of it within iTunes, but I prefer to have everything under the same hood. First world problem, I know. Do I get a discount for everything that I bought on vinyl, cassettes, CDs, and mp3s on other formats?
I play thousands of songs each month, should I be paying 1 cent each?
I play thousands of songs each month, should I be paying 1 cent each?
Assuming a song is 3 minutes long on average, and assuming you play 1000 songs (including maybe 1000 others that you didn't like and only listened to for a couple of seconds), that's 50 hours of musical entertainment, which at a penny a song would be $10.
They had < 10k plays in 3 months. That's not album sales nor requests; that's just number of times their music played via a bot-stream. That's so low it's practically irrelevant.
They sound like someone who started a blog a decade ago, stopped after a few years, only updated it twice since, and are upset their AdWords income is low.
The article seems to go out of its way to avoid mentioning that this is residual income from 3 albums made over twenty years ago that weren't huge successes in the first place. Why would anyone expect to be making any meaningful amount of money from them at this point?
I always thought that the benefit of services like Spotify and Pandora was to get a band's music to people that wouldn't ordinarily be exposed to it. This in turn would prompt listeners to go buy the band's music on iTunes or Amazon.
Good music is really hard to find. I search around iTunes all the time and come up with nothing. So ANYTIME I hear a song that I like I buy it within the same day (usually the whole album).
For bands that aren't seeing this sort of conversion on sites like Spotify and Pandora, this might tell you something about the demand for your brand of music.
The observation that Spotify is in business solely to increase its own capitalization and not directly for music-related reasons ties in nicely to this post:
Spotify appears to be an organization related in some way to music, but in fact its purpose is merely to turn money into more money. This is not the way many businesses in the real world actually operate, and a good thing, too, because operating that way is pretty toxic.
I was in Australia last year, and in walking around downtown Brisbane I noticed a two person band playing on a street corner. There was quite a crowd around them, and their music was good. They had a suitcase open in front of them, with what looked like a couple hundred bucks in it, a stack of CDs, and a sign that said the CDs were $15 each.
It's likely they 'salted' the suitcase with cash, but even so, it looked like they made some decent cash for a couple hours work.
I bought one, and really enjoy it. The band is PLUDO, btw.
The artist's share of income from record sales and radio play has been next to nothing throughout the history of the record industry. Any experienced artist will tell you the real money comes from live shows and merch (which can still be pressed discs). This is why file-sharing only hurts the labels, not the artists. The artists actually get more exposure without losing much royalty income from the illegal downloads, which actually help promote the band and draw bigger live crowds to gigs where they can actually make some money.
This isn't true. Artists could make a middle-class living off record sales, augmented somewhat by touring and merchandise, during the major-label days. It's true that they made very little on royalties from album sales --- but that was often because they'd been advanced more money than they could ever expect to recoup. That's a business model common to all of publishing (music and books and otherwise), and it offered artists a predictable income stream in exchange for selling more of the upside to labels.
The closer you look at record labels, the more they look like venture capitalists.
(If you wanted to make a pointed critique of venture capitalists, I suppose you could also invoke the comparison in the other direction.)
This isn't true, it's more an amalgamation of half-truths and repeated statements from other people.
The first sentence is only (occasionally) true in the cases of artists signed to big-label contracts - very out of date in today's day and age, where most indie musicians don't even consider trying to get signed to a label. Meanwhile, the labels DID get money from record sales.
Piracy hurt labels and not artists because piracy hurt record sales, which went towards the labels' bottom lines and not the artists. But in a world where the record sales actually go to the artists' bottom lines, piracy does hurt the physical sales of the artists.
The real money does not come from live shows and merch. This is generally debunked elsewhere.
[+] [-] notatoad|13 years ago|reply
except that's always what the record industry has been selling. at least Pandora and Spotify are honest about what they are. If i bought your vinyl record, do i actually own that or is really just a proxy for personal usage license? Can I play that record at my wedding, or in my office, or at a party with more than some arbitrary number of people?
Intellectual property is not a physical good. The recording industry has coasted along for the last 50 years or so on this strange phenomenon that allowed their IP to be sold as though it were a physical product while at the same time getting IP protections in addition to the revenue of a physical good, and they've made a ton of money doing so - more money than they ever should have. Now the gravy train is ending.
Getting paid per-play rather means that artists are finally seeing how people actually value their music. You can't use law to make your music more valuable. If you want to earn more then make more music, or go on tour, or put some effort into selling your music for soundtracks and the like. The rates spotify pays represent the actual value to the consumer - they aren't making a profit, and if spotify were any more than what it currently costs, i wouldn't pay for it. You might think your song is worth more than $10/mo in streaming royalties, but you might also be wrong.
[+] [-] tptacek|13 years ago|reply
And, of course, what you're saying about the market valuing music is that the market values music at zero; the price of music on streaming services is simply the premium people pay over free pirated tracks in order to have a nice user interface.
[+] [-] gregsq|13 years ago|reply
Traditionally radio stations account for their playlists in much the same way as Spotify and other streaming services, which is of course why it's a fundamental expense to them.
What has changed for one thing is the change in profitability for the myriad of smaller organisations, like diverse radio, each having an income stream from sometimes equally diverse, even regional, advertisers, from which they payed these dues. And of course, demand for music was met from these lines of supply. It wasn't legislated, just the normal supply demand scenario.
This model, where media outlets competed for listeners to maximise advertising dollars meant that consumers were implicitly engaging in wealth creation for these artists. While consumers behaviours haven't changed that much, after all most would simply listen and not buy product, their position as a factor in this has.
This is more or less what Thom Yorke is saying I think. The economics have changed, and overall capital had migrated to the cartel like few.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|13 years ago|reply
That doesn't mean much, without the context of what you would do instead. Listen to CDs? Stop purchasing music? Torrent it?
[+] [-] dunk010|13 years ago|reply
You see the music business is a /nightmarish/ labyrinth of copyright legislation, so to even start playing in this game you need a staff lawyer (or three). There's recording rights, which you have to pay to one arm of the label. Then there's publishing rights, which you have to pay to a completely different arm of the label (or, if you're unlucky, a different label - like with the erstwhile EMI's catalogue), and that's just to play some radio. If you want to do on-demand streaming, of the type that Spotify provides, then you have to pay mechanical reproduction royalties. Whaaa? I hear you say. Well, it takes a while for the law to catch up with these things so they've just repurposed the laws that were already there. Would you believe, you even have a different bunch of people to pay if you want to reproduce the lyrics. Now, take all that and multiply it by the number of countries you want to stream in, because you're gonna need to strike deal with a different branch of each label in each country. It's insanity.
The one beacon of light is the much maligned DMCA act, which (aside for enabling content owners to persecute twelve year old children) allows those wanting to stream music in a radio-like fashion to just pay a central collections agency a fixed rate. That simplifies the business significantly - no more negotiation and complex contracts, and no more need to have such detailed reporting (less staff, less code). The only thing is that it's applicable only in the US, as there's no EU equivalent (or anywhere else, for that matter). And it doesn't cover on-demand streaming. But it's a start.
Music startups really need to push for an overhaul of the copyright laws because the landscape has fundamentally changed and what exists currently is both arcane and archaic. We need a complete legislative metamorphosis, lest the major labels continue to move their contractual blessing between startups - ideally, of course, shortly after a tasty IPO - which all resembles the classic pump-and-dump scam.
I hope it happens.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/10/spotify-is-having-a-good-20...
[+] [-] tunesmith|13 years ago|reply
It's amazing what kind of culture has sprung up in the selling/delivery sphere. All these companies spring up to "empower" the indie musician and they invest in all sorts of signaling to make sure we know we had better sign up for their services or else we're not taking our career seriously. Examples:
CDBaby: keeps $4 of every cd sale, even though you've already spent $1-$3 per every cd you manufacture. As opposed to just setting up a paypal link or merchant account on your website, and shipping it yourself. 2.9% + $0.30 sounds a lot better than $4. (Shipping costs are additional either way and passed on to the user.) I have trouble imagining at what point I'd want to spend $3.41 per cd to save myself the effort of just sticking a mailing label to a padded envelope and dropping it in my mailbox.
Bandcamp: keeps 10% (by way of keeping every 10th chunk of revenue for itself). It's based around the belief that people will pay more if it's freely available, or will tend to pay more than the "suggested" price. I haven't really dived into their studies but I just cannot believe there isn't a flaw in them. A lot of it seems based off of the logic that if it worked for Radiohead or NIN (with their already built-in audiences) then it should also work for small indie musicians. (And Radiohead and NIN have also since stepped away from the free/pay-what-you-want model.) At any rate, 2.9% + $0.30 sounds better than 10%, since I have to do fulfillment on my end either way.
iTunes/digital media: $0.99 no matter what. $6.93 for a seven-song album, and you can't set your own price. If you have a major label you can apparently set your album price higher but smaller indies don't seem to have access to that privilege. Plus, if your digital album costs $6.93, then you've basically destroyed your options of selling your hard-copy.
And everyone knows the common complaints about spotify and pandora.
At any rate, I'm considering going through a lengthy staged release process, in an effort to measure all sorts of conversion and gather data along the way.
1) Release physical cd only, with no music previews. At this point, the few hundred people on my mailing list are already interested in the cd anyway, so we'll see how far that goes, along with recommendations to friends. Maintain a list of addresses for people who indicate they won't buy until it's released digitally.
2) Marketing music previews of each song and on an album level, through promoted Facebook posts (friends-of-friends) and advertising. The general principle here is to still not ever release the entire full-length tracks, and funnel people to buying the physical cd.
3) Release digitally to services that are not on-demand and can't be downloaded. This means Jango and Pandora. Jango also allows me to buy paid plays and get a bunch of demographic data points to see which tracks are popular with which groups. I can then use that to do more targeted ads over at facebook or maybe through google.
4) When things are really dying down physically, finally release through iTunes and bandcamp (allow full previews) and other sites where you can actually buy the tracks digitally, and see what happens with "discovery"
5) When I'm finally ready to just trash the whole project, release it on Spotify and forget about it to start working on the next cd.
[+] [-] ricardobeat|13 years ago|reply
On not releasing full-length tracks: if there is demand, someone will do it for you. You get to choose if interested listeners get it from piratebay or your own website.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jchrisa|13 years ago|reply
Even if you were able to make $10 per cd, you're still in the hole. Maybe better to chalk the whole recording thing up to marketing expense and use it to give you better leverage in the future.
[+] [-] paulsutter|13 years ago|reply
Pandora should help smaller bands line up shows in towns where they are popular, and help them promote those shows to interested fans. They have the data and the consumer relationships to do it.
Bands would appreciate this service far more than a meager check. And it would be much cheaper for Pandora (those song royalties eat up all their revenue). I listen to hundreds of bands on Pandora, and I'd definitely attend more shows if only I knew when they were playing locally.
EDIT: Even $100 is far better than a check for cents. And such a service would increase attendance at shows. They key is that bands would _appreciate_ it, whereas they feel angered by insulting little checks.
[+] [-] tptacek|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|13 years ago|reply
Yes, and they charge so much that it leaves people with less money to attend concerts by smaller acts.
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=87981&page=1 http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2012/120525tickets
[+] [-] brianbreslin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shardling|13 years ago|reply
Anyway, I've definitely discovered multiple bands through Pandora, and then bought their albums/seen them in concert/etc.
[+] [-] revelation|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|13 years ago|reply
Pandora and Spotify are being fleeced by comparison.
With the shift to Internet / satellite, the licensing companies made a huge land grab on the fees. The radio business has a few large organizations that go to bat for the whole industry. They're old lobbying groups with quite a bit of leverage, having been entrenched in DC for decades, and it's one of the reasons licensing fees have remained reasonable for radio. Internet radio / streaming has no such lobbying groups (yet).
[+] [-] mark_h|13 years ago|reply
That one got featured in the NYT, prompting a couple of follow-ups: http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/post/41955905309/a-blog-about-a...
http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/post/42057406771/where-does-the... (I loved the internet-expertise implied by Several people advised me to consider touring as a revenue stream since “that is where artists make most of their money”.!) More pertinently though: "Live performance is usually my revenue stream with the highest expense ratio: flights, hotel rooms, commissions, crew, advertising, etc…"
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|13 years ago|reply
Live performances will always be the profit center. Recorded music is only good for promoting a band's concerts; you can't copy the live concert experience.
[+] [-] iknowno_one|13 years ago|reply
Recorded music will always be the profit center. Live performances are only good for promoting a band's records; it's easier to sell 1,000,000 records than it is to sell tickets for 1,000,000 seats.
[+] [-] binarycrusader|13 years ago|reply
It's hard for me to believe, but I still have albums that I bought fifteen or more years ago that I still listen to on a regular basis. That's more valuable to me than a concert experience.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|13 years ago|reply
I am tired of hearing this mantra repeated as fact. There are significant up-front costs to live performance that are not at all sure of being recouped. If you make some sort of niche music whose audience is highly dispersed, then you might not be able to get enough people together in one place to support a tour or more than one or two performances a year.
Have you ever worked in a band or as a producer or some similar role?
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] balbaugh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scottkduncan|13 years ago|reply
That's too bad, because there are opportunities. You could completely discount the revenue most artists get directly get from streaming and look at the services as the free option of the freemium model. They're getting their product to a far larger audience than they would have if there was a cost right out of the gate, and some of those free users will turn into paying ones. I know I have purchased albums (from iTunes) of artists I've discovered on Spotify. I'm positive that for Galaxie 500, some of their Spotify streams generated additional revenue in other channels.
[+] [-] r0s|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Daishiman|13 years ago|reply
Last week I was in a musicology conference where several professors from Oxford commented on how there's a glut of not only self-taught musicians, but universities and learning academies teaching music production courses that are saturating the market.
Even as a follower of very specific sub-subgenres of music it's almost all saturated, impossible to follow the latest developments in every area.
This is indicative that the value of most music nowadays is really, really low.
You could spend an eternity listening to freely-published, really good new music in Soundcloud and not spend a dime.
[+] [-] eurleif|13 years ago|reply
Consent makes all the difference in the world.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|13 years ago|reply
The market has spoken; recorded music has almost no value. Learn to profit from other avenues, don't whine and scream that its not fair the market value has been driven down to zero.
[+] [-] ricardobeat|13 years ago|reply
If you had 13 million streams, you would easily sell a few thousand albums. The internet is a bonanza for artists - it gives you exposure and allows worldwide sales at very low cost.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|13 years ago|reply
The economics of the nternet are very unforgiving for small bands, or even small genres. I listen to/used to DJ a flavor of music a called goa trance, which was obscure enough that the typical sales on an album were about 2-3000 units. If you sold 5000 albums you had a modest hit. The best-selling record in the genre sold 85,000 copies. Nobody got rich of it but you could put out an album and travel a bit on it, and it would at least keep a roof over one's head and maybe pay for another synthesizer - the typical album cost $20, which is not unusual in specialist genres. So an artist who sold 5k copies of an album could make $25-50,000 with a bit of luck; at worst getting your album out meant some additional part-time income that you could put back into your studio gear, plus some bookings.
Nowadays, you're lucky to sell a few hundred copies of an album. When Napster came along it crushed most of the labels, which were not parts of some big corporate conglomerate but were most co-ops run by the musicians themselves. It's much harder for new acts in this genre to get traction because there isn't as much capital floating around to organize parties and do basic marketing. As has been pointed out elsehwere, touring isn't free - and this is true even though the goa community had a lot of similarities to the hippy community in terms of couchsurfing, networking and so on, but things like plane tickets and so on still cost cash up front.
A lot of musicians wound up abandoning it to work in more commercial styles. Now, nobody was owed a living for working in this genre, but here was a nice little international scene that had seen several years of healthy organic growth over the space of a decade, and the 'music should be free' approach caused it to virtually collapse outside of Europe.
[+] [-] kenko|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianlevesque|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spendar89|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mscarborough|13 years ago|reply
Most of the time for my paid Rdio account, I listen to stuff I know I already like. Sometimes I don't, and I don't listen to more than 10-30 seconds of a song. Does that count as a play? Other times I'll go find tons of stuff within the app, but it's still all within Rdio-land.
Also the stuff I stream on Rdio, I already paid for much of it within iTunes, but I prefer to have everything under the same hood. First world problem, I know. Do I get a discount for everything that I bought on vinyl, cassettes, CDs, and mp3s on other formats?
I play thousands of songs each month, should I be paying 1 cent each?
[+] [-] anigbrowl|13 years ago|reply
Assuming a song is 3 minutes long on average, and assuming you play 1000 songs (including maybe 1000 others that you didn't like and only listened to for a couple of seconds), that's 50 hours of musical entertainment, which at a penny a song would be $10.
So yes, you should.
[+] [-] ianlevesque|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radley|13 years ago|reply
They sound like someone who started a blog a decade ago, stopped after a few years, only updated it twice since, and are upset their AdWords income is low.
[+] [-] plorkyeran|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atechnerd|13 years ago|reply
Good music is really hard to find. I search around iTunes all the time and come up with nothing. So ANYTIME I hear a song that I like I buy it within the same day (usually the whole album).
For bands that aren't seeing this sort of conversion on sites like Spotify and Pandora, this might tell you something about the demand for your brand of music.
[+] [-] kenko|13 years ago|reply
https://itself.wordpress.com/2013/03/27/like-a-business/
Spotify appears to be an organization related in some way to music, but in fact its purpose is merely to turn money into more money. This is not the way many businesses in the real world actually operate, and a good thing, too, because operating that way is pretty toxic.
[+] [-] blibble|13 years ago|reply
the music is a means to an end, the end being making money for the shareholders...
[+] [-] WalterBright|13 years ago|reply
It's likely they 'salted' the suitcase with cash, but even so, it looked like they made some decent cash for a couple hours work.
I bought one, and really enjoy it. The band is PLUDO, btw.
[+] [-] max13|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|13 years ago|reply
The closer you look at record labels, the more they look like venture capitalists.
(If you wanted to make a pointed critique of venture capitalists, I suppose you could also invoke the comparison in the other direction.)
[+] [-] tunesmith|13 years ago|reply
The first sentence is only (occasionally) true in the cases of artists signed to big-label contracts - very out of date in today's day and age, where most indie musicians don't even consider trying to get signed to a label. Meanwhile, the labels DID get money from record sales.
Piracy hurt labels and not artists because piracy hurt record sales, which went towards the labels' bottom lines and not the artists. But in a world where the record sales actually go to the artists' bottom lines, piracy does hurt the physical sales of the artists.
The real money does not come from live shows and merch. This is generally debunked elsewhere.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] therofler|13 years ago|reply