What's the future of the music industry?

Where its going? Down the tubes of course. I've had to encourage my friends who know nothing about music to stay away from the industry for their sake and mine. Their marketing majors who want to 'promote products cause its not being very well done right now'. I was very kind (much kinder then I usually am) and did not slap them. Of course they won't listen to me but its there loss not mine and I won't be sad to tell them so.

• Sound quality doesn't improve
  
• They keep up the "hits plus filler" formula
  
• They don't realize that $19.00 is too friggin expensive, especially during a recession.
  

In the last ten or fifteen years, many artists have had a load of money spent on launching them. Record companies are unlikely to have the funds to do this in the future, so perhaps there'll be less manufactured pop.

With the increase in bandwidth rates, you don't really need to download. I reckon we'll have devices that play, on demand, tracks from a central database, through a subscription service.

hands off, now!?

Meanwhile, the general economy has been growing at blinding speed....?

The future of the music industry is that artists who've never made anything off record comapnies anyway are going to use the internet to promote their music or sell it at a reasonable price. They'll continue to use touring as their source of income. And they'll just quit bothering with record companies.

Meanwhile, big pop-idol types will still be the product promoted by record companies and the general public will keep buying it.

i.e. - nothing will really change except the means by which to find out about & aquire independently-produced music.

Just throwing out all the brick wall limiters from the mastering studios will do.

The reason that current CD's sound so bad is not that the format isn't up to the task, it's because it is compressed up to fucking -5 dB levels which kills all dynamic range in the first place. Going to 24 bit will not have ANY effect but on your wallet.[/rant]

*Recording* in 24/32 bit is a whole different thing of course...

Next!

This kind of Wired-driven digital utopia is decades away. People wil buy CDs for the forseeable future.

Unfortunately, downloading will never be as easy as it was with Napster. That was truly an amazing time. The other, newer programs [Kazaa, etc] lead to spyware, decoys and lack of the sheer breadth that Napster had. Napster was so amazing.

Kids under 18 will slowly destroy the corporate-driven realm of high-priced CDs [as I've mentioned before the new Linkin Park will retail for $19.98]

As for the decline in music sales, this is an indicator of the unspoken Deflation that is present in the market today. Fast Food, autos, movie rentals, clothes, housewares, are all indicators of deflationary tendancies in today's market. Which no self-respecting economist evens wants to mention, unless they want to be fired.

Take McDonald's for example. Much like Interscope, they mass market complete shite, have almost cut their costs in half, yet poss a first-ever loss [like 3 quarters in a row now].

Music just happens to be the biggest example of deflation. Having driven the prices down, it still went from having a $17 product to having a free product. Not easy to rebound from.

There are people who will always buy CDs and vinyl [like me, who's spent $200 already this year], but they are not beholden to Geffen, etc. as much as they are to Barely Breaking Even.

I could seriously drone on and on about this, but let's just say the future of the music business is not in any way corporate [unless they can agree on the SACD/DVDAudio argument, and not even then], and will continue to contract for at least the next 5 years...

but this Jetson's-style centrally controlled wi-fi music satellite atmospheric nonsense will become a reality, if at all, in maybe 20 years, and only for the rich. Remember, to be technologically adept, you have to have money, and the more, the better.

Wired never thought enough about that.

"Decades away" is my foreseeable future even if not yours. I only wish copyright were the small matter of 20 years. Unless a miracle happens NEW digital music downloading (that is, music produced of the time, not talking about music available for years in non-encrypted media) will become extremely corporate and user-lobotomised-friendly, you'll just have to pay. You can bank on it.

Then we can reminisce about when you could free-ride on leaking bandwidth, those were the days, sigh.

I remember finding the most amazing things on Napster, and quickly and easily. It was an incredible phenomenon and, I think, the pinnacle of Internet technology. Soulseek is closer, but not nearly with the vast array of music like Napster.

Felicity is right, people growing up will know the Internet more and more as a commercially-driven, corporate-controlled medium. And, yes, I said utopia with my tongue in my cheek.

Commercial databases will never contain all the music you like, anyhow, and the idea that all bands will rely on their own marketing and distribution solutions is truly utopian. Would anyone have heard or cared for Avril Lavigne if she had only had her own website? I doubt it.

Her company put her on billboards, MTV, radio, etc. downloading or no, pop stars will continue to be manufactured by the record companies, as they have been for going on 75 years now.

david is talking about the transaction costs of transfer of information -- not just transfer of the music itself but transfer of information through publicity and advertising. Signal-to-noise is often the issue in a hypermediated, overinterpreted, Late Capitalist society (as we have seen on this very board).

Any valid criticism or prediction of the contemporary (at any given point in time) music industry must account for the production and supply side, not just the consumption and demand side. Failing to account for the role of law is denial, and effectively takes the bite out of any commentary or proposals of the industry that lack this understanding. Also, such critiques appear unprincipled and are thus unconvincing.

Those that created the game are simply not going to continue handing out the technology needed to rip the game apart once they have it the way they like it. (Kind of like with Iraq.) However, it is human nature to sabotage for personal gain. Do you think there is value in examining how one's user choices and decisions contribute to patterns? The music companies do. Also, I think you must look at the entire environment of a user's everyday world, from elevators to scryscapers to rural country power lines and crackling AM radio -- not just the time where you are sitting at a computer (geeta's "Fuck You, Music" experiment was a great illustration of this.) The fact that ILM exists on a computer message board may contribute to a certain heuristic bias here, but the market influence of millions of world-wide Garth Brooks fans who don't contribute here should also be accounted for in making predictions.

The most interesting development has been reduction in the transfer costs of certain types of information (like distribution of digitized music itself) but as certain aspects of these become more regulated by technology, new battle fronts in the war between "legitimate" (positivist and sactioned by the Western model of capitalism) and "pirate" (for lack of a better word -- it has always been an aspect of a certain type of culture in industrialized society) elements within music production, distribution and consumption.

Imperfect and incomplete availability of information makes most markets. Auction models are certain ways of creating efficiencies between supply and demand over specified time increments. EBay is one of the most significant paradigm shifts in the Information Age. It is a sampler of things to come, as the free market system is set up to incentivize the capture of wasted value. How do people feel about the effect of eBay on after-market record collecting? Is it closer to or further from everyone's personal utopia?

what also interests me is the potential for selling CD-Rs full of media tailored to the consumer's needs/interests. what if you could purchase a band's entire catalogue as bog-standard mp3s on a single CD-R - legitimately or otherwise? surely someone somewhere is doing this. what about movies on CD? TV shows and captured footage you can't buy anywhere else anyway? there are lots of exciting possibilities...

What do you mean by clone?

Are you being sarcastic? (I'm a little dense and literal.)

and no i wasn't being sarcastic at all! i mean if people are prepared to pay £10-15 for albums on CD why not a little bit more for a CD-R with every album by a band on one disc? i am lazy and searching for obscure material online can be a chore - why can't i just buy it easily from an organised source and in a format thats as convenient as possible for me, if i want to? obviously it would take the industry to wave a white flag and say 'we can't beat you so we'll join you' somewhat and put up with piracy like they're going to have to anyway, but i really dont see what the problem is with being able to buy mp3s on CD or video on CD legitimately. while its fair to say doing this kind of thing of yourself and selling them via eBay or wherever is dubious and disrespectful, i would have no qualms about paying money for, say, 100 quality mp3s on a CD or 10 decent quality music videos of my choice on a CD or DVD for the same price you'd pay for the equivalent in the shops.

heartening: http://thequietus.com/articles/03352-a-decade-in-music-filesharing-post-napster-myths-of-the-digital-age

In the future, people will just type their preferences into a computer, and everything will be tied into a central network that programs stuff corresponding what mood the listener wants to be in that day. If they want new stuff, the computer will just automatically program something the person is guaranteed to like according to said preferences. There won't be any more middlemen like artists, promoters etc

― dave q, Saturday, October 19, 2002 6:39 PM (7 years ago)

dave q otm

Bands will play a 30 and over, non-smoking show at 7:00. Then, if they wish, they can play an under 30, smoking & posturing show that starts at 11:00.

― dave225 (Dave225), Saturday, March 15, 2003 4:25 AM (6 years ago)

dave225 sadly not yet otm

Ha, like in the sixties, but the age groups are the wrong way round.

the aime street digital music site was bought by amazon.com. they promise to integrate parts of it into amazon.com's overall service, but it sounds more to me like the service is dead.

http://www.lala.com/

RIP

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118023766.html?categoryid=16&cs=1&ref=vertmusic

Rhino -- whose name was once synonymous with high-end reissue packages and imaginative cross-licensed releases -- is plotting a course to move further into the digital realm.

great idea

i just hope that if cd's go out vinyl remains. that's all i really care for. cd's can fucking burn for all i care. most unattractive display pieces in history.

not to sound like a raging grandaddy or someone with a newfound hipster complex. i just like to display my album art around the house.

yeah fuck a cd

amie st was on a downhill slide for a while sadly

http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4d5c3e1e4bd7c86216030000/chart-of-the-day-music-industry-1973-2009-feb-2011.jpg

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-music-industry-sales-2011-2

It that adjusted for inflation? It's strange to think that in the gutting of the music industry, it may still be at mid-seventies size or larger.

^^^
The market is global now - the vast bulk of the 70s figure would be N. America and Europe.

http://www.businessinsider.com/these-charts-explain-the-real-death-of-the-music-industry-2011-2

more sensible numbers and shits

inflation and population-adjusted money shot:

http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000/music-industry.jpg

legalize spotify ffs usa

i'm more adamant about this than this stupid marijuana shit we're in riots about

We're in riots over that?

Spotify will never ever ever be legalized here.

Please do not take me literally.

It's like 99% legalized here in Denver, but we have the occasional protest outside cap. hill wanting it outside the medical realm.

"medical"

http://thequietus.com/articles/06318-how-the-music-industry-is-killing-music-and-blaming-the-fans

Yeah, that was an interesting article. Not sure but it seems that many of the main points are refutable and worst-case-scenarios, though.

richard butler reads tQ.

Illegal downloading is a total bore unless it is rare or out of print stuff. IMO. I like mp3 sites but let's face it they are full of re-recordings and poorly packaged material, dampening the enthusiasm of shopping online. These sites need to be more sensitive the cultural and social appeal of music consumption.

As massive as Amazon is, they have good stuff, but I hate going there and reading the same old crabby reviews. When you're selling music you ought to be more sensitive to fan culture. Also there is something weird about getting music at the same place you order dog food.

Some useful points in that article, esp. poking holes in the idea that touring is the cure for all musicians' woes. But a lot of caca too: "How tragic is it that the man behind ‘Anarchy In The UK' will now be forever tied in the collective imagination with Country Life Butter, even though he used the cash to help fund the reformation of PiL?" Seriously? And which collective is this? I've never heard of Country Life Butter until today. Is it even for sale in the USA? And why didn't they get Bryan Ferry to sell it?

Still this is a fine sentence: "Telling people that profit margins are at stake doesn't speak to the average music fan, but explaining how the quality of the music they enjoy is going to deteriorate, just as water would become muddy and undrinkable if no one invested in it, might encourage them to participate in the funding of its future." It'd help his argument, though, if he told us which music isn't muddy and undrinkable. If it isn't, and I quote, Lady Fucking Gaga, then who? Sigur Ros? Hmmmm...

In re: first paragraph -- Kevin, the Quietus is a UK-based publication and while the audience may be worldwide one can assume that a fair amount of its references will be UK-specific, like that is.

that article is really long. all i can remember from it is lady fucking gaga.

xpost. Right. I got that. But that weakens any sense of a collective imagination.

This article is beautifully written.

Something that isn't talked/written about, to the best of my knowledge, and I'm interested in reading about, is an investigation into 'community music'. An increase in the popularity of local scenes, what somebody derisively once called "friend-rock"-- which is absolutely my favourite kind of music.

Many of my favourite bands in the world are ones that my friends are in, play every week somewhere in this city, make records at home that sell 200-500 copies to their fans, and barely ever tour, if ever. This was not the case before 2003 or so.

I theorize that this is the product of two things: first, more realistic expectations on the part of the musicians, re: career. Second, the fact that the 'availability of all music to everyone' has informed people about What Music Exists Out There, and those people are creating better music as a result.

For example, in 2000, I had a handful of friends who had heard of the band Neu! and maybe two who actually owned something of theirs. In 2011, if your band has a motorik beat, even a casual listener can recognize that it is pastiche. To me, this isn't a signifier of any sort of upswing in Neu!'s popularity, but rather an indication that the availability of downloadable media has only served to keep artists more informed.

I'm not really in a position to gauge whether these observations are strictly site-specific or otherwise... but I have noticed that "Talk About Your Hometown Music Scene" threads are pretty popular on other message boards, and the enthusiasm seems genuine, rather than nepotistic.

Is this a dumb theory?

not dumb at all. it will all be in my new book entitled The New Yokelism:Free-Range & Organic Music Scenes In America & The People That Build Them

but for real i have been thinking about this a lot lately and the whole back to the land hand-made candle chapbook lathe-cut farm share revivalism thing and where i am and live is a long-running example of this where people do what they do for their friends and onlookers and their is creativity to spare but no desire to make it bigger than it is.

THERE is creativity, etc...

I think a strong home town scene just needs some focal point be it a fanzine or, these days, websites. My home town (oxford) has had a very lively local scene for the last 20+ years with most bands (until recently) performing just for the enjoyment rather than to make a living out of it.

Even before everyone was online there were odd little bubbles of bands influencing each other developing completely outside of what was happening elsewhere.

Great all I can think about now is "is it local" xp

RIAA President Cary Sherman Made $3.2 Million In 2009

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/052211riaa

http://www.csindy.com/IndyBlog/archives/2011/05/23/music-monday-riaa-ceo-earns-3-million-salary-for-suing-evil-downloaders
In case you're wondering why the RIAA has to go around suing grandmothers for downloading music, it may have something to do with the annual $3 million-plus the record industry trade group pays its CEO.

In addition to big chief Cary Sherman's multimillionaire lifestyle, the RIAA supported its staff of executives, lobbyists and minions in 2009 with a reported $16.2 million in "salaries, other compensation, and employee benefits."

Thank goodness the RIAA is tax-exempt!

And Sherman's pay was DOUBLE that of the next-highest-paid lobbyist.

Scott OTM.

I really don't see how this is the music industry's fault. If they're obviously making far less money than they used to, then of course they're going to do everything they can to cut costs. And if touring was as expensive as the article claims it is, why haven't we heard any complaints or interviews or twitter or facebook posts from the musicians about it? It can't be as bad as when Steve Albini wrote that "Some of Your Favorite Bands May Already Be Fucked" article.

uh plenty of musicians complain about how difficult it is to tour - the price of gas alone...

If the artists and record companies are happy to pay this kind of money for this guy, by all means let them. After all he & his crew are the ones actually collecting the money. The repo man always gets a cut.

Anyway, labels big and small have proven to be spectacularly bad at making money off digital music and unable to prevent piracy. They used to make somewhere around $1-2 per CD on average, but from Spotify they're receiving somewhere around $0.00005 for every song played - so even if all the pirates go legit this will never pay back a recording either. There is no money in selling records. The deals that they're making with Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are the future where labels license their catalogue completely to the IT wizards who've found the way to manage to pry money out of listeners wallets by bundling it with all kinds of mobile phone plans, electronics and cloud services. So they'll be out of the distribution business, drop all pretense of 'selling records', and turn into wholesale financing, publishing & marketing companies.

All this obv for professional musicians, for amateurs who essentially pay to play the current situation is fantastic. It's never been so cheap to record and distribute yr own stuff.

And if touring was as expensive as the article claims it is, why haven't we heard any complaints or interviews or twitter or facebook posts from the musicians about it?

well for one thing because when you get to make a living as a musician it's gauche, and also kinda embarrassing and humiliating, to complain about costs - I know that coming off as gauche isn't really a concern for a lot of people but I think that musicians who're making a living at it generally know that it's a shitty look to complain that (for example) if you take out a bus for a month-plus you're going to be working every night for two weeks before you see a nickel in profit - everybody not in the biz immediately goes "but you didn't have to go to a shitty day job," and comes up with lots of ad-hoc solutions that aren't really practical, it's an unwinnable argument and most people sort of instinctively figure that out & say you know what, fuck it, I get to make a living playing music so I will not complain about how much it costs

wait what? plenty of musicians complain about how expensive it is to tour! Or they complain about the conditions of touring that are largely related to the expense of touring (e.g. sleeping on floors, eating like crap, infrequency of bathing/showering, etc.).

that said I have some major issues with other bits of that article:

Of course touring has always been a next to obligatory part of the job for most musicians. Some are even inspired by the experience, while many improve their craft by playing in front of audiences. But the daily rigmarole of playing the same songs over and over again can also render the process joyless for both musician and fan, and increased touring again means reduced time spent working on new material, conjuring up bewitching sounds, expressing the inarticulate speech of the heart. The romantic vision of the musician in their bus writing new songs is rose-tinted, to say the least. Most are simply too worn out from the tedium to do anything other than talk shit, watch films, listen to music and sleep. Insisting that artists earn their keep by performing the role of wandering minstrel keeps them from exercising the talent that brought them attention in the first place, rendering music valuable only when it's performed live.

if you're going to be an artist, it is your responsibility to yourself & to your craft & to the people who respond to what you do to rise above the "daily rigamarole" etc. You got really tired & cranky and spent your downtime talking shit, watching films, etc? Well, shame on you, then. That was a choice you made. Everybody's job gets tiring - yours wasn't supposed to? If you're going to trade on your inspiration, it's your responsibility to guard it zealously, and that means nurture it at all times.

"friend rock"....yikes anarcho-utopia is just around the corner!

It's also career suicide for a musician to say on Twitter "if you motherfuckers just bought my cd instead of lining it up in Spotify, I wouldn't have to sleep in a van for three months".

i dunno if it's career suicide, it depends on the musician, really.

I can only imagine that most bands lose money touring, short strong t-shirt sales. From gas to lodging to food to other incidentals, it just doesn't add up unless you're earning big guarantees. Or touring solo, I imagine. Maybe Aero or Owen can illuminate/refute.

That Quietus article is just an elaborate way of saying that everything was better in our time and they're scared of the future.

this could also be an argument in favor of thinning the herd.

Well, it's also never been easier/cheaper to record and release a record for free, with no expectation of recompense, so I don't know if the herd will ever be thinned. One ramification of that is that the glut may devalue music, in the sense that so much free music may condition people to expect free music.

may condition? it already has!

xxp I'm actually planning to run for POTUS in 2016 as the "there is just too damn much music" party candidate

i feel like for the most part, music has entered the realm of folk art. It's something everyone can do, and more people are doing it than would make for a healthy economy with music as a commodity.

wrt thinning the herd

i don't think so. the desire to live like that doesn't correlate to the most talent

m@tt, agreed, as in "the herd should be thinned" because that's what the situation is right now

i feel like for the most part, music has entered the realm of folk art. It's something everyone can do, and more people are doing it than would make for a healthy economy with music as a commodity.

^^^ding ding. I've been saying this for years. oddly we're going to reverting back to the system that was in place PRIOR to recorded music - massive amounts of people making it at their own cost for their own amusement, with an upper strata of paid musicians financed by rich patrons (ie corporations)

going to

If every cd was $5 I would start buying music, I guess. Sorry musicians but I'm a poor skeezbag too

Many of my favourite bands in the world are ones that my friends are in

You must either have an amazing circle of friends or really bad taste in music.

... or a different relation to the concepts of "music" and "taste" than you

right, "bad taste in music."

mebbe taste doesn't even enter into it

so... no taste?

Joking aside though, there's something about that statement that bothers me and it aligns with the arguments here in favor of amateur music or music as a purely folk practice. Clearly by any measure of greatness, the greatest musicians in the world at any given time are not all going to live in the same city and be acquaintances with you (apart from a small group of people who do personally know the greatest musicians in the world). So if you find yourself only listening to music made by your friends, that seems like a conscious decision to restrict your listening and just settle for mediocre music.

The "anyone who has a different concept of music or taste than me obviously has bad taste" thing was a joke (funny because it's true). But I do think that limited and narrow tastes can never be as good as broader tastes.

they can make people happy tho

I'm not trying to argue in favor of closed-mindedness or anything, just saying — the reason I have such "good taste" is that, as a teenager, I felt alienated from the pop music on the radio and the people around me who consumed it, so I spent a lot of time and effort looking for things I liked better, and I learned a lot about what's out there. but unless yr end goal is to become a music journalist or musicologist or something, I don't see why that approach is inherently better than getting together with some friends to make our own music. (NB: I heard a lot of mediocre music during this period of my life, too)

I have been rereading that Jacques Attali book lately and it has me thinking about all this stuff

also taking a jazz history course

and: the reason I am giving you such a hard time is that I felt your first post was a beautiful example of the very things that Bourdieu criticized about the notion of "taste"

I'm sure the whole "friend-rock" thing is absolutely fantastic if you live in a city like Toronto or Oslo.

Or indeed a city which is large enough and prominent enough in its country to 1) attract the caliber of people to form such a scene in the first place and 2) have enough money sloshing around the city to provide the kind of dayjobs that enable people to participate in such a scene. And yet not large enough or prominent to force rents and living prices up high enough to drive those people out, or cut-throat enough to inspire the kind of unhealthy financial competition that ruins scenes in, for example, NYC or London. (Also, geographically isolated to not have the gravitational pull of a larger city or scene, hence why places like Portland, OR or Hull sprang great local scenes, but cities of similar size closer to, for example, LA or London just don't.)

But why some local scenes are great and others are barren is a whole topic in itself.

I'm always impressed by how smaller countries whose government arts programs actively foster music talent end up with music scenes that punch so far above their populational weight (thinking of Toronto and Oslo) - I don't know if Canada going conservative have erradicated their whole grant system, but I do think that had a lot to do with how Canada kept a thriving music scene (also the whole Cancon system.) That in larger countries like the US and UK there's this notion that the "market will provide" for good music, while in smaller countries there is the understanding that the market will just overwhelm you with cheap imported goods if you give it half a chance, so you have to make some provision for local artists to have some other source of funding if you want your own culture to thrive. That even folk art needs perservation and support.

I don't know how this idea will fare in austerity cutback climates.

The UK is fond of entirely symbolic gestures towards this like the whole miserable "musicians dole" thing while dismantling structures to support it. (But then you see people like Adele who have benefited from going to schools with government arts support turn around and say they don't want to pay taxes to support the next generation, but that's a whole nother kettle of fish beyond the remit of this thread.)

"^^^ding ding. I've been saying this for years. oddly we're going to reverting back to the system that was in place PRIOR to recorded music - massive amounts of people making it at their own cost for their own amusement, with an upper strata of paid musicians financed by rich patrons (ie corporations)"

I could be okay with this, but (at least here in Italy) the circle of friends you're playing with/for is becoming every year smaller and smaller - and the change in how we listen to music has certainly a major role.
Also, traditional folk music implied the existence of a community sharing experiences, culture, ethics, and this explained its deep resonance: again, playing with/for a number of friends in your living room isn't exactly the same.

I agree with that completely.

This is a great thread!

I'm quite happy playing music, and occasionally promoting gigs, for my own, and friends' pleasure. Helped by, as Kate(?) says above, a pretty ok music scene here. But then I get mails from only-very-slightly-more-popular bands demanding guarantees in the mid-hundreds and think, are we doing ourselves an injustice - by being happy to play for nowt, for fun, are we shooting ourselves in the collective feet?

Or are the [BAND NAME REDACTED] just a pair of greedy fuckers?

>Or are the [BAND NAME REDACTED]

My wife just went through a weird booking experience with a benefit she's help run for years. Someone higher up in her organization really, really wanted her to get a particular local band, and for several months, the band had agreed to play. By the time it came to arrange the show, they explained that they'd just let go of the day jobs, and they'd need to be paid. My wife thought it was implicit that the show was a *benefit*, looked for alternatives, but she was then informed to book them at all costs. Then they mentioned that they also needed a certain sound guy. And so the price rose to the mid-hundreds, which they said was standard for them. Of course, looking at their schedule, it's places like The Book Nook, Fredericksburg.

Now, if you play socially-acceptable music, its really nice to get a city parks gig an get a reasonable payout and such. But I think bilking a not profit's benefit, especially when it's the bake sale that makes the cash for the organization, is pretty darn gauche.

I strongly dislike the idea that touring is the only way for a musician to make money. Many of my favourite albums were by bands who didn't tour at all, and preferred to perfect their work in the studio rather than to travel around the world playing inferior versions for an audience. Late career Beatles, Scritti Politti, 10cc, Prefab Sprout, mid-to-late career 10cc. All brilliant, none of them bothering to play their material live.

many of my favourite books were by dudes who got paid by wealthy noblemen to sit around on their arses writing books

bendy that story is ridiculous! Nobody charges for doing benefit gigs, that's the whole point!

Was drinking with an inudstry type friend of mine last night and he was saying that the main reason there are so many UK electronic/laptop types being hyped right now is that the labels have cottoned on that, compared to bands, they're very cheap and high-margin (produce and record themselves, easy and cheap to fly round everywhere on tour, don't have to bother with roadies and tour managers etc). Which was kinda 'durr' but I hadn't actually thought about it like that.

I used to think bands did Glastonbury for free as well.

xpost yeah, and also why MarkESmith used to slag off Billy Bragg was because he was cheaper (costs much reduced, therefore fee = half the price but bigger profit for the artist)

trying to work out who tom's BAND NAME REDACTED are, but it's safe to say they're probly greedy fuckers

Put it into the anagram server, see what happens.

I'll tell you after the weekend ;-)

the main reason there are so many UK electronic/laptop types being hyped right now is that the labels have cottoned on that, compared to bands, they're very cheap and high-margin

Also why rappers are so popular with labels and have been promoted heavily - recording vocals anywhere is cheap, and producers tend to be happy to work for points rather than cash. I.e. the music industry has switched to a low cost, low risk (and much lower margin) model. So, a big boost in label support for genres that can be made cheaply.

Not dissimilar to post-war touring costs bringing down the big bands, and bop combos coming to the fore. Now the bop combos are too expensive.

And how records became cheaper than seeing/putting on live bands....

xpost

There was also the development of decent amplification and electric instrumentation too, so you didn't need 10 horns or 8 trumpets to make an almighty racket.

good points! I find the whole topic of economics driving aesthetics fascinating.

It does sort of bum me out that DJing has become the most lucrative stream of income for lots of acts. I mean, that ain't working.

https://encrypted-tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcREZ-Gx-G3MtXM80zTQOSyAgK-rgf4utC5O7FsuVj1UwVoRI56Cmw

If bands want to make more money playing than DJing they should try making music that people like to dance to innit

Yeah, like AC/DC! [/ xuckk]

I think DJing (as much as I like a good DJ set) is one step up from making a personal appearance at a shop opening. Not on an aesthetic level, just on a practical level.

Not to mention most musicians aren't good DJs. Competent maybe, but most lack the ability to 'read the crowd', or are simply not passionate enough about DJing.

DJing and Live concerts are both just secondhand work by musicians, who first and foremost are good at making music. Thus, it is important to find good ways to get paid for a songwriter, arranger or for putting together a good record in the studio. I feel that streaming may work to some extent, but only if they secure that all streaming customers do actually pay for the streams. I fully support Spotify's downgrading of their free content, and I hope they go even further, forcing their customers to pay. Those who have made recorded music deserve to get paid for it.

The idea that playing live is of secondary importance to musicians is the most hilariously batshit Geirism in a while.

Where do you get this myth that live renditions are inferior versions? have you never seen a great gig that's miles better than the record?

yeah even 10cc put out a double live album.

oh sorry matt, xp of course!

Um. As much as I hate being seen to be in agreement with Geir, this idea isn't completely batshit.

It really depends on the musician. Being that "musician" has taken on a double meaning both "composer" and "performer" in a way that they were not always synonymous.

There are many people who we think of as "musicians" who are far more comfortable with the composing aspect than the performing. This does not mean *all* musicians should solely be composers, but it's equally batshit as a Geirism to think that there are no musicians who are not more comfortable with a composer role than a performer.

The idea that "gigs are where the artist gets paid" is only true when the band can command a decent fee. Back whenever, groups used to do tours that would not recoup the cost, purely on the basis that the increased record sales would make up for it. Of course, the more the idea that gigs = money, the more ways to take the money off the artist will get created by the managers, promoters, rig-hires, t-shirt sellers, etc...

Karen otm -- and i think even more nowadays, considering the costs of recording and producing technology are so cheap and easy - like you can sit in your bedroom and make an album all by yourself - there are more younger musicians that don't think about playing live as the primary goal.

xxxp But what is this thinning-the-herd? What a nasty piece of bullshit. I'd hate to see you at a pass-the-hat sort of gig. "Nothing from me, thanks, it's for your own good, I'm thinning the herd." Are you serious? If you aren't, I apologize, but like I don't even know where to start. A third to half of the new bands that play, say, ACL, that is, the ones who can buy gear, record and press records, they are the vanity projects of the independently wealthy. Many bands I love fall into this category, but it doesn't exactly represent a diverse cultural landscape. "Thinning the herd" means you'll be getting more of JD & The Straight Shot.

have you never seen a great gig that's miles better than the record?

very often vice versa!

(kate otm.)

There are many people who we think of as "musicians" who are far more comfortable with the composing aspect than the performing. This does not mean *all* musicians should solely be composers, but it's equally batshit as a Geirism to think that there are no musicians who are not more comfortable with a composer role than a performer.

That's obviously true as well, but Geir was putting the primacy of studio music ahead of all else, which is a very Geir thing to do, and of course is wrong.

Also there are more musicians in the world who aren't composers than vice-versa. Way more.

But what is this thinning-the-herd? What a nasty piece of bullshit. I'd hate to see you at a pass-the-hat sort of gig. "Nothing from me, thanks, it's for your own good, I'm thinning the herd." Are you serious? If you aren't, I apologize, but like I don't even know where to start.

1. you have no idea who i am or what my background is
2. i'm mostly joking

But the thing is, the whole thrust of this thread and all this music industry handwringing is that it's the composing musicians who are getting the bitter end of the shaft in the current climate.

Performing musicians who don't compose, their ways of making a living really have not been affected by the digital revolution. We are, in this thread, already having a conversation about the ones who compose, because they're the ones hurt by the shakeup.

@ Sarah I don't seek to be antagonistic in asking this, at all at all, but why does my post have any bearing on your background? (And I figured you were mostly joking)

I'll tell you after the weekend ;-)

i checked the myspace now i'm not at work. definitely voting greedy fuckers. would've liked to've seen u guys this weekend, but there's no way i'll be getting a hall pass tomorrow so next time hopefully :(

Owen - because the part of me that isn't joking was frustrated by seeing way too many musicians and bands wanting paying gigs and touring through -- too many for the physical reality of the city i live in, of the number of potential paying audience members -- and a lot of them were fairly mediocre.

But the thing is, the whole thrust of this thread and all this music industry handwringing is that it's the composing musicians who are getting the bitter end of the shaft in the current climate.

Performing musicians who don't compose, their ways of making a living really have not been affected by the digital revolution. We are, in this thread, already having a conversation about the ones who compose, because they're the ones hurt by the shakeup.

Not entirely - surely studio musicians who don't compose are also being hit, given lower recording budgets and all that? But yeah, not the central thrust of the argument. Geir's assertion, that playing live is of secondary importance to bands who also record and release music, is nonsense in many cases.

have you never seen a great gig that's miles better than the record?

I want my music to sound absolutely perfect, with no rough edes, no wrong notes, no mistakes of any kind, everything purely perfect, perfect and utter perfect. The smoother the better.

From that criteria. No, I haven't. Studio is always better than live.

Yeah it's already been pointed out that record companies are interested in acts with low overheads, so that means, like, no horn section, for instance.

xpost

As for musicians who don't compose, they aren't real musicians. The songwriter is the one and only genius, and first and foremost it is important to find ways for the songwriter to get paid. Now that works somewhat in terms of live performance too, because all serious arrangers of live concerts will make sure to report to ASCAP or whatever what is being played, and the composers get their fair share. It is more about the superior versions (which IMO are always the studio ones, without exceptions) deserving more pay than the inferior ones.

@ Karen, the major mitigating factor in keeping good music scenes in Toronto and Montreal, as opposed to many cities in the States, is of course our highly controversial public health care program.

Grants exist, but mostly to stimulate a "culture industry"; that is, most of the money goes to stimulating the careers of established bands/labels. Sell 10K in Canada, get tour support. It actually works in a weirdly Reaganomics fashion.

The Polyphonic Spree is officially a thing of the past.

Love the idea of Geir going up to a world-class soprano or a virtuoso violinist and telling them they aren't real musicians.

As for musicians who don't compose, they aren't real musicians. The songwriter is the one and only genius,

OK, nonesense time,.

Two words: Irving Berlin.

I want my music to sound absolutely perfect, with no rough edes, no wrong notes, no mistakes of any kind, everything purely perfect, perfect and utter perfect. The smoother the better.

Volume Reference Tone - the greatest piece of music in human history.

yeah even 10cc put out a double live album.

It sounds crap though. 10cc sounded really horrible live, not surprising, given the nature of their music, which was of course impossible to reproduce live.

My favourite single of all time is "Bohemian Rhapsody". Now, Queen did perform that song live, but the best bits (the opera/choir bits obviously) were all on tape.

@ Sarah in fact, you are right on the money. My booking agent even uses words like "Rocktober" to describe that period of time where every band in the world goes on tour all at the same time.

Matt DC - It's been a decade since I was a proper session player and nearly 5 years since I was around jobbing musicians but - my memory is that being a session player, the biggest source of income was not actually studio jobs, but those things you tend not to think of - playing backup in touring bands, wedding/covers bands, musicals (for someone in the musicians union, this can be great work), Butlins/cruise ships and weird things like that. (I once knew someone who would go and play drums on cruise ships for 6 months of the year to support coming back to NYC and playing in his indie rock band the other half.)

True, the whole thing of one-dude laptop acts has cut down on the number of people who have to rent-a-rhythm-section for a touring band, but studio work was never the number one income source really.

It would be interesting to see how smaller to medium size recording studios have fared, because this is somewhere I imagine the budget taking the biggest hit, since people can record so easily in their own homes. 4-track to small studio was a massive step up, but laptop to small studio is a step down in sound quality.

Love the idea of Geir going up to a world-class soprano or a virtuoso violinist and telling them they aren't real musicians.

Mozart, Beethoven, Handel and Bach are all fondly remembered today, whereas most of the virtuoso musicians that originally performed them are not at all remembered. It took until Paganini for a virtuoso instrumentalist to become a true historical legend, and that may have helped by the fact that he also did some composition himself.

One important point, of course, is that with today's technology, you don't need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to record a great sounding album. Thus, the need for imcome for studio musicians is a bit less, but I still reckon it's important that the leading studio acts out there to be able to make a living from their music, just like 10cc, Supertramp and Prefab Sprout, Scritti Politti did (this in spite of the latter two never quite putting the hitlists on fire)

the major mitigating factor in keeping good music scenes in Toronto and Montreal, as opposed to many cities in the States, is of course our highly controversial public health care program.

Why doesn't this translate in the UK, then?

You don't have to sell 10k to get a music grant, do you? Or at least, this surely wasn't the case 10 years ago. Heck, I've toured on a Canadian music grant and there was no way that band sold 10k!

"Studio musicians" in this case meaning musicians who concentrate on composing and arranging great music in the studio - not session men.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WCkadc9qOx8/TaJDtUuAH3I/AAAAAAAAGEk/2B5mig98eCM/s1600/void.jpg

The impression here in Norway is that musicians who sell 50.000 copies of their albums will have a rather OK income from that. They don't get wealthy, but they get as much pay as the average craftsman does. Only the most popular albums sell 50.000 here, but in the US or Canadian market, even rather underground acts should be able to shift 50.000 copies.

It's like saying Lewis Hamilton isn't a racing driver because he didn't design the ford cortina.

@ Karen. There are several granting institutions and they all work differently. The one that I've found is the most lucrative, is called Radio Starmaker, and yes, if you are a pop act, you have to sell 10K in Canada to qualify. (If you're a folk act, or "electronica" act, I believe the bracket is much lower.)

going back to what you were saying, Owen, about friend rock -- like the mediocrity was only so relevant (it being subjective, esp. when the musician/band in question was gonna be an opener or support act) -- the thing that was most frustrating was the bands/musicians that didn't have local connections. It felt like they were operating on the assumption that because they were musicians that people would inherently want to see them play. Like several dozen people are gonna say to themselves, "Oh wow! I totally want to pay $6 to see some guys i don't know, that none of my friends know or have even heard of, play guitars while i drink a few beers!"

noodle otm

It's like saying Lewis Hamilton isn't a racing driver because he didn't design the ford cortina.

For me, this is about a quality difference between actually creating art and just performing other people's art. Songwriters are artists, whereas instrumentalists/vocalists/whatever are just professionals.

As for the Irving Berlin example, Irving Berlin was like Leonardo Da Vinci painting the Mona Lisa painting, while Bing Crosby was the guy printing copies of Da Vinci's original work. The latter is obviously a craftsman, with education in printing and whatever, but Irvin Berlin is the one and only artist, in terms of the guy who actually creates the art.

http://i66.photobucket.com/albums/h279/juicyfrt/geirbot.jpg

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4pzR6lrHa8Y/TdkECRVioNI/AAAAAAAAAPQ/0DKR045rMZc/s1600/Olivier.jpg

(This, of course, provides that the artist writing the songs actually wants to create art, and not just construct something that will sell - which is why Gershwin was superior to Berlin and Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson are superior to Steinberg and Kelly.)

yeah, but he couldn't play the piano for toffee...

Basically, if a top soprano isn't a musician, and Irving isn't either, than who is? Only people who can play and compose?

That's a good point, Sarah. There's a hilarious artist space in Toronto that is often mistaken for an after-hours and you consistently see confused people looking for cheap booze trying to parse whatever performance art thing is going on. But what you call "local connections" is often just as simple as having some friends who'll come and see you play, you know?

speaking of which, there's this guy that comments on every article in the regional newspaper that's about my city, and is obsessed with the unfairness of parking enforcement. Geir reminds me of that guy.

Are we getting Geir'd right now?

Basically, if a top soprano isn't a musician, and Irving isn't either, than who is? Only people who can play and compose?

It is OK for me to say that, OK, a soprano is a musician. But only the composer can possibly be an artistic genius.

"only working class people can be racist"

But what you call "local connections" is often just as simple as having some friends who'll come and see you play, you know?

yeah, exactly -- or know a couple other local bands that have friends that will come see them play.

BLimey, Geir changed his mind there.

i shd stick at the jpeg but i just had a thought. all artists are influenced by others, many composers going so far as to incorporate folk tunes and other musics directly into their own work. so when Messaien orchestrates bird song, is he stealing off a bird who is the authentic artist there? or are Zeppelin mere Willy Dixon plagiarists? is there ultimately like only one artist right back at the beginning of human culture and everybody else is a crappy professional photocopying their cast-offs?

and now back to staring into the abyss, folks

Well, I was going to say:

If VVanGogh paints sunflowers, who is the artistic genius, him, or the guy that grew the sunflowers? (or, indeed, God?)

(or, indeed, God Richard Dawkins?)

XXX-Post. There is a difference between influence and just copying. Influence is good and healthy, as long as you use that influence from others to create a composition that, note-for-note, is entirely your own.

but i can guarantee that almost all composers are using notes previously used by other composers

I'm done with the current argument.

Back to the future of the music industry, yeah?

No no, this is a brand new e-flat xp

you stole my chord!

What's the past of the music industry?

anyone heard that new Travis LP 'Songs In The Key Of H'?

xp

shameless plagiarism and inauthenticity. also Geir thinks Schoenberg is a major artist.

But what you call "local connections" is often just as simple as having some friends who'll come and see you play, you know?

yeah, exactly -- or know a couple other local bands that have friends that will come see them play.

It's weird, I've become so used to the UK system that I've completely forgotten how the North American system works, with bands dealing directly with venues.

Like, in the UK, there's this middle layer of local promoters who fill that gap. That if you work with a really good promoter, they work to put you on a bill with local bands who have a similar fanbase as you, and promote the night, contact local press, etc. and get people down, so you don't have to have "local connections" just connections with good promoters.

(That said, really good promoters like that can be quite rare, there are far too many who do precisely nothing and expect to take the lion's share of the door just for making the phone calls to the band and the venue - but then they're getting shafted by the person who owns or manages the venue themselves, and in the end, no one actually gets paid but the soundperson.)

also Geir thinks Schoenberg is a major artist.

I would say the ultimate artistic achievement is to achieve artistic acclaim and mass popularity in the same breath. Schönberg, unlike Mozart and Handel and many others, never quite achieved the latter.....

xp - the soundperson, the alcohol vendors, and the landlord.

i dunno, Les Mis is pretty popular dude

Yeah, Sarahel, that's pretty much the order they get paid in.

-soundperson
-brewery
-bar staff
-promoter
-maybe the bands get some £ from the leftovers when everything else is divvied up

And then the punters start calling the *band* arrogant for actually asking for a guarantee.

i dunno, Les Mis is pretty popular dude

Not quite up there with "The Four Seasons" or "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" or the "Hallelujah" chorus....

I am willing to bet that The Messiah could not sell out Broadway and West End theatres for years at a stretch

And nobody's made the final of Britain's Got Talent playing some of Vivaldi's so-called serial music

Schoenberg is pretty awesome.

I couldn't hum the "popular" part of The Four Seasons tbh. it's never stuck with me.

xp

yeah Miss Saigon is a good one too

Noodle Vague, I was actually enjoying this thread until you decided to turn it into a spot of Geir-baiting.

I don't blame Geir for these derailments, I blame the half dozen posters who SHOULD KNOW BETTER who seem incapable of not jumping on a pile-on and turning a good, thoughtful thread into a clusterfuck. So thanks for spoiling it, NV.

But what you call "local connections" is often just as simple as having some friends who'll come and see you play, you know?

yeah, exactly -- or know a couple other local bands that have friends that will come see them play.

It's weird, I've become so used to the UK system that I've completely forgotten how the North American system works, with bands dealing directly with venues.

Like, in the UK, there's this middle layer of local promoters who fill that gap. That if you work with a really good promoter, they work to put you on a bill with local bands who have a similar fanbase as you, and promote the night, contact local press, etc. and get people down, so you don't have to have "local connections" just connections with good promoters.

(That said, really good promoters like that can be quite rare, there are far too many who do precisely nothing and expect to take the lion's share of the door just for making the phone calls to the band and the venue - but then they're getting shafted by the person who owns or manages the venue themselves, and in the end, no one actually gets paid but the soundperson.)

― Karen D. Tregaskin, Friday, May 27, 2011 11:17 AM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lord i can't even imagine having "promoters" in a local club situation, uggg, so little money to go around as is...thank u black flag

I am willing to bet that The Messiah could not sell out Broadway and West End theatres for years at a stretch

In the 18th century, maybe.....

Only the most popular albums sell 50.000 here, but in the US or Canadian market, even rather underground acts should be able to shift 50.000 copies.

No, see, that's the problem. A relatively underground band could have sold 50,000 units in the '90s, but not anymore.

Mad kudos to Karen for dutifully keeping a sensible conversation going throughout this mentalism.

(hah, xposts)

here there's a mix of both -- independent promoters and venues that do all their own booking. Though a lot of the promoters don't take much of a cut, just cover costs of posters/flyers -- take 10% of the show's receipts, tops.

Karen I apologise but most people seem to be able to carry on their own conversations and ignore me pratting around. I will now go and start a "Wilfully Confusing Schoenbergs Because It's Friday Afternoon and You're a Git" thread tho.

and by "you're" i meant "i'm" btw

I mean, earlier this year Cake's album debuted with 44,000 sales, and it was the number one record that week!

xpost to myself re: 50k sales

cake is caked up

For this whole discussion of touring and promoters and the way that bands make money off playing live, I really really wish that emsk still posted to ILX. (I mean, you get cases where there are four layers of people trying to make money off one gig - the band, the venue, the promoter and the booking agent - however, having an actual booking agent vastly increases a band's chances of getting a Guarantee, because booking agents don't just control access to Little Indie Band, they control whether the same promoter gets access to Big Wildly Successful Touring Act as well so they have to keep their relationships good)

however, having an actual booking agent vastly increases a band's chances of getting a Guarantee, because booking agents don't just control access to Little Indie Band, they control whether the same promoter gets access to Big Wildly Successful Touring Act as well so they have to keep their relationships good)

Yeah, exactly -- and as a venue booker or indie promoter, you sometimes end up having to take on some acts that you really don't want to in order to keep up relationships w/the booking agent.

Like the music, itself, is often one of the last things on your mind after money, maintaining relationships, and doing favors for the right people

I don't think it's so much "have to take on acts you don't really want" (that's usually more to do with support bands) so much as "if you ask to book a band, you have to pay them a guarantee, and if you can't guarantee the money, you have not proved yourself a good enough promoter to make it worth the band coming out."

Trust me, I'm sympathetic to promoters to a certain point, in that it is one of those jobs where you truly have to balance love of music and the blunt realities of money. But the idea that you can ask a band to drive, with all of their gear, from, say, London to Nottingham, and expect to have them play to 3 of your mates and pay them in drink tickets, that's kind of bullshit.

I mean, sure, the whole money, maintaining relationships and doing favours thing exists, and it sucks, and it exists on every level of the music industry. But this is not *necessarily* that.

it's both. like from the point of view of a booker/promoter, you want to be the go-to person and get first dibs. If you say "no" too often, the agent develops stronger relationships with other promoters and bookers

i'm surprised nobody's linked this article yet.

http://www.littlewhiteearbuds.com/feature/everything-popular-is-wrong-making-it-in-electronic-music-despite-democratization/

it did the rounds a couple of months ago. it starts with a very familiar story but ends up in a pretty surprising place. go read it.

in my experience when we're talking about touring in the US vs touring in the UK we are talking, in every sphere - promoter, clubowner, booker, etc - about two almost completely different things.

And then touring Europe is something completely different again, like getting bumped up to Business Class if you're not expecting it.

tell that to Anvil 8)

(they got paid in goulash in the one venue. they were massively late though)

Annvil 8)))

there is a local band here who put out a new cd and booked a show at a vfw hall where they charged ten dollars at the door and you got a "free" copy of the new cd when you paid your ten bucks. they got a big crowd too. and that's how they advertised it too. record release show and free cd with admission. i thought that was pretty smart!

i realize that they were not the first people on earth to do this, but a little creativity goes a long way.

Washington DC band Medications says its not so easy anymore for bands to book their own shows into US clubs and such (this is from last year)

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/artsdesk/music/2010/04/02/the-new-medications-record-is-awesome-so-why-cant-the-band-book-a-tour/

...Trust me, I'm sympathetic to promoters to a certain point, in that it is one of those jobs where you truly have to balance love of music and the blunt realities of money. But the idea that you can ask a band to drive, with all of their gear, from, say, London to Nottingham, and expect to have them play to 3 of your mates and pay them in drink tickets, that's kind of bullshit....
― Karen D. Tregaskin, Friday, May 27, 2011 6:02 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

Totally guilty of being the guy who goes "that's ok, we'll play anyway!!!" thus perpetuating this stuff.

David Lowery OTM

Mostly, but when he hails old school record labels for absorbing cost doesn't he overlook this (from the comments):

Just asking questions here, but don't record labels recoup all of their expenses? The money laid out by most labels, if I'm not mistaken, is a loan to the artist. It has to be paid back from royalties. So, even though labels may have put money up front to develop a band, they get it back when the record sells. So, for instance, as an artist, I may receive $.25 on the dollar from record sales, but if I got an advance of $100,000, that money had to paid back to the label out of that $.25 before I make anything. Not sure how that works with the overall math.

The major labels do not provide "tour support" for free, do they?

costs

I don't see why that matters. If the record sells, the label recoups their money, if it doesn't sell, the label absorbs the costs and drops the act, if I'm not mistaken. Either way, the label fronts the costs. iTunes and Amazon don't front shit.

A lot of records never make back enough to recoup their expenses. You can criticize labels for that, but it's also a function of it being just generally pretty unpredictable what music will take and what won't.

Plus there's a pretty big value to having someone to front that money. Kind of the same way that most people can't just buy a house without a bank, most people don't have a bunch of cash up front to make and promote a record.

The big difference, of course, being that you're not paying interest on your advance and you're not personally responsible for paying it back.

yup. Hurting OTM

maybe some people shouldn't buy houses or make expensive records

Um, so you think only the rich should own houses?

yes

weird, ok

trustfund kids make the best music

maybe some people shouldn't buy houses or make expensive records

lol @ "expensive" records

Steven Corn (BFM Digital) Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Lowry's arguements are fundatmentally flawed. He's comparing apples and oranges (pun fully intended). iTunes is a retailer and not a label (at least not yet). He should compare iTunes to Tower Records if he wants to be accurate.

Further it's incredible myopic and wrong to say that "They [Apple and Amazon] put up ZERO CAPITAL and ZERO RISK and they get 30% of the gross in return."

Apple and Amazon invest a lot of money building their respective stores and technologies. It's always been a bit of a mystery how much profit they make from their respective music stores. Apple is often accused of even using their iTunes stores as a loss leader for their hardware sales.

Regardless, they both put up a LOT of capital and risk.

There are many other holes in Lowry's logic. But an obvious one is that label tour support is really the artist's money since it is recoupable. It's not a gift nor should it be considered profit.

If an artist wants to make the lion's share, they need to take the risk. Otherwise, be content with a smaller share from labels. As for me, i support the former strategy.

but artists don't have the capital - that's the point

then they should attempt less capital dependent forms of music making

http://bfmdigital.com/we/bfm-distribution-partners/

then they should attempt less capital dependent forms of music making

― iatee, Tuesday, February 14, 2012 5:36 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

As long as you're cool with never hearing any of it, that's fine.

I'm cool w/ it

Apple invest lots of money in cheap Chinese labor, they need to get something back

It's really reductive for Lowery to say that all iTunes does is host files. They have a recommendation engine, filterable search database, listener reviews, outgoing marketing based on users' previous purchases, etc. As does Amazon.

Brick-and-mortar stores also had "recommendation engines" known as clerks and searchable databases known as alphabetized, categorized shelves, fwiw. And I don't think they ever took 30%.

Point isn't really whether iTunes is good to artists (although it isn't) but that the "new model" isn't really all it's cracked up to be for artists.

iatee wait till you hear what i cooked up on garageband, hope you like preset synth pads (and i know u do)

people for most if human history seemed to get by w/o a stream of new and well-produced studio music. it sux but the economics behind it prob isn't there in the long-run.

it's gonna happen w/ lots of not-music soon

sad but true

it would be nice if everyone is as matter-of-fact as you are iatee, but sadly that is not the case.

ok, well "we're running out of natural resources anyway" is kind of a conversation stopper, if that's what you're getting at, and I think it's beyond the scope of this discussion

otm I should give lessons

xp lol waht

it's gonna happen w/ lots of not-music soon

― iatee, Tuesday, February 14, 2012 5:58 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ok maybe I read too much into this

haha I meant like. "books"

but anyway people "got by" without things like modern healthcare and a diverse food supply year round for most of human history so I don't see the point of that argument

Brick-and-mortar stores also had "recommendation engines" known as clerks and searchable databases known as alphabetized, categorized shelves, fwiw. And I don't think they ever took 30%.

ah, i know a lot of record stores that still take at least that much. don't know that anyone's getting rich off them, but...

the point is that if it's not making money it's gonna stop happening and it's not making money so it's gonna stop happening xp

what is, exactly?

capital-intensive recorded music

sure, but cheaply recorded music is only going to increase.

yes

i sort of agree with iatee here. six figure advances and massive promotional budgets are nice and all, but they aren't necessary to make an album and get it out there. it's not like the choice is between that and garageband. you can do a lot with ten grand, whether provided by a label or scratched together from wherever.

and even if piles of upfront cash aren't available for fledgeling artists, i suspect they'll continue to be stacked in front of big names with established track records.

when paul McCartney hears this thing i'm doing he's gonna retire. he had a good run

another thing that's possibly overlooked here is music placement & licensing (ie getting $ for your music being used in ads, tv, etc.). i heard recently that one of the really big electronic music labels doesn't turn a profit on basically any of their releases, but all the money from placement/licensing goes into a common pool and essentially covers everything else.

i sort of agree with iatee here. six figure advances and massive promotional budgets are nice and all, but they aren't necessary to make an album and get it out there.

this is not Lowery's point. Lowery's point is that the former deal was better for the artists, which is true.

xposts That's all true. Again I think Lowery's point is to dispel the myth that this is somehow a better world for people who intend to make a living from music. It may simply be that fewer artists will make a living from music, and that there's nothing to be done. But it's irritating to hear the same canards over and over again - "artists can just tour more" etc.

another thing that's possibly overlooked here is music placement & licensing (ie getting $ for your music being used in ads, tv, etc.)

patronage system ennit

also not necessarily better for artists, at least the ones who didn't start out intending to sell shampoo or exploding robots to make a living

xp

And it's especially annoying to hear people constantly make claims that things that are bad for artists are actually good for them, to the point that getting all of one's music for free is not only not a bad thing but actually benefits artists

But it's irritating to hear the same canards over and over again - "artists can just tour more" etc.

^^^YES this is the irritating thing. stop pretending there are other streams of revenue that will make up the difference - they won't.

I still think great music is being/will continue to be made, but it will be different, we're going to be back on more of a atomized/regional folk-music sort of continuum for awhile

He's right that iTunes and Amazon take too much but I don't think his numbers make sense otherwise. contenderizer is right about stores - what do people think Tower made on an LP that sold for $8.99?

I mean such is the progression of history. There was also a time when things called "DJ's" killed off a whole class of professional musicians who didn't even have to be recording artists, because they could make a reasonable living through playing parties and weddings and bars without ever being nationally known. Synthesized music killed off a whole class of studio musicians too, although it did create work for a smaller class of people who could program synths/electronics. Overall I'd guess that the number of people who could make a living from music declined quite a lot long before the advent of the mp3.

lol did no one hear ever work at record stores? profit margin was nowhere near 30% unless you REALLY marked shit up

xp

Hurting on all sorts of money

Even if a store's typical markup was 20%, you've still more than made up for the difference by eliminating manufacturing and shipping!

i know stores that regularly sell shit for 20% more than other stores, so a 30% markup hardly seems outlandish.

Lowery's point is that the former deal was better for the artists, which is true.

OTM, i wasn't disputing that, just agreeing w/ iatee that there will still be music in the ruins. nothing in the present situation bodes well for artists, except the ability to get their music out in front of the entire world instantaneously with no distribution or promotion.

His point of comparison is the old model versus someone marketing themselves today, though. Is the 20-35% profit range still applicable for artists on major labels today? If so, what's the difference? Just that the other 65-80% is going to different places?

how much profit margin did record stores need to get by? 20% sounds awful small. That's about costco level.

steve albini:

There's a part of the digital paradigm that nobody has really exploited yet. Sooner or later, there will be a "come to Jesus" moment with all the big corporate entities that hold all the rights to these recordings. I'll explain to you what it is. This is a legal avenue that someone should pursue that might open a lot of stuff up. Almost all old recording contracts were written using the model of a per copy royalty. The reason that's valid is because there's an inventory of those items and you can do accounting. The record companies have applied that model towards electronic downloads. But, from a contractual standpoint, anyone whose contract survives from the era of physical records... You cannot inventory downloads. You cannot account for their manufacture, because there is no manufacture. You cannot account for free, broken or lost-in-shipping goods. From a technical standpoint, downloads are not manufactured items. They are a "licensed use." Licensed use income typically, for older record contracts, would earn bands 50% of the income.

Right. Or far more.

Some brilliant lawyer is going to win a case, holding Sony or whomever, accountable for the unaccounted 50% income from the downloads that they've been accounting for pennies a copy as a manufactured item. Someone is going to win that case. It could even be class action; but, someone is going to win it and put all those record companies out of business.

They have a recommendation engine, filterable search database, listener reviews, outgoing marketing based on users' previous purchases, etc.

Each of these things on itunes blows a goat.

same as the past, marketing, marketing, marketing.

people are having less and less time for being music nerds, not that they were ever a large percentage of buyers. telling kids what music to buy will always be the "music industry"

great article here -- http://nplusonemag.com/chiquita-banana-jingle

that's a good read. lots to think about.....

yeah, anyone read that jonathan sterne / mp3 book? that one sounds pretty interesting...

It's funny to me how this writer insists that "back in 2007" it was still uncool to sell out, whereas I remember having virtually the same conversation about there being "no such thing as selling out anymore" in the late 90s/early 00s when I was in college

yeah i dunno, you don't think it changed somewhat in the 00s? I guess it seems like there are a lot of bands/artists from the 80s/90s milieu who would never have done the "song in a commercial" thing, but at some point it became less of a thing?

I think it may have changed in the early 00s. 2007 seems awfully late to me -- so many bands I liked had songs in commercials by then. I think the Volkswagen ad campaigns were kind of a watershed.

I remember reading an article in Alternative Press magazine back in like 1996 (I was in high school) about an indie band, I forget which, selling a song to a commercial and they were like "this allowed us to buy the things we needed for our baby" (it was a band with a husband and wife in it). At the time it still seemed like a novel idea to me that there might be a justification for "selling out," but I was also a teenager.

VW ad is def some kind of turning point, but it had been ramping up since the 90s (during which I remember thinking the only indie bands of note that hadn't made a commercial were Pavement and Beck)

The Volkswagen "Pink Moon" ad (featuring the nick drake song) was the first time I remember people talking about actually finding out about music from commercials. That ad and the ones that followed definitely convinced a lot more bands to ride the gravy train, especially since Volkswagen's ads seemed "cool" and "artistic"

which was 1999 btw

xp Shakey you don't remember the Supercuts commercial that used Cut Your Hair ;) ?

i guess the shins did mcdonalds pretty early in the 00s and iron and wine did m&ms... but I don't know did that many indie bands in the 90s do commercials? Did guided by voices? i remember they tried to get a budwesier sponsorship lol.

I remember reading an article in Alternative Press magazine back in like 1996 (I was in high school) about an indie band, I forget which, selling a song to a commercial and they were like "this allowed us to buy the things we needed for our baby" (it was a band with a husband and wife in it). At the time it still seemed like a novel idea to me that there might be a justification for "selling out," but I was also a teenager.

for some reason i had it in my head this was Low? can't remember if they were pro or against..

Who Killed the Music Industry: An Interactive Explainer

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/07/05/137530847/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-hit-song

But it's not a hit until everybody hears it. How much does that cost?

About $1 million, according to Daniels, Riddick and other industry insiders.

"The reason it costs so much," Daniels says, "is because I need everything to click at once. You want them to turn on the radio and hear Rihanna, turn on BET and see Rihanna, walk down the street and see a poster of Rihanna, look on Billboard, the iTunes chart, I want you to see Rihanna first. All of that costs."

That's what a hit song is: It's everywhere you look. To get it there, the label pays.

Article is from 2011, so I wonder if that's changed slightly, after Spotify and other streaming services. I'd imagine it's harder to recoup a million dollars today than it was even 5 years ago.

Is there any tracking of "flop" hit songs, the way the track flop blockbuster movies? I've always been curious if it's possible to follow the formula, get it to all the outlets at once and still just have no one want to hear that shit to the point that you lose money.

also, good call Alfie:
The logical next step is for record companies to embrace download culture. It would be a big change for them though. The profit margin on CDs is so high that record executives can be pretty wasteful and reckless. For data, which has no tangible commodity, you can't realistically expect people to pay £12 for an album.
In the last ten or fifteen years, many artists have had a load of money spent on launching them. Record companies are unlikely to have the funds to do this in the future, so perhaps there'll be less manufactured pop.

With the increase in bandwidth rates, you don't really need to download. I reckon we'll have devices that play, on demand, tracks from a central database, through a subscription service. ― Alfie (Alfie), Friday, October 18, 2002 11:15 AM (12 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

damn, nice. I read a book called The Future of Music: A Manifesto which makes the same argument, but it was not published until 2005.

I finished David Arditi's iTake-Over recently. I thought it was pretty strong, although it's clearly coming from a particular perspective. Arditi does a fairly convincing job of challenging the narrative that the music industry has been struggling in the digital era as a result of piracy. He argues that i) the major labels drove and promoted the digital transition. They were thrown off by Napster but ultimately made use of the situation to strengthen their position, both through aggressive legal action against customers (which functioned more as an intimidation/propaganda campaign than it had a strong grounding in the law), and by actually using P2P technology to develop customer surveillance techniques.
ii) there is no evidence that industry profits have declined and plenty of evidence that they have actually expanded in a number of ways
and iii) the industry has been pushing this narrative in order to push for increased corporate control over intellectual property.

Seems the only constant is that the fat cats get fatter and the artists get a pittance; albeit, maybe, with less chart manipulation by the industry. Some musician was on Charlie Rose last week talking about the disparity between the royalty check he received as an artist versus the (same) check he got as a label head.

Yeah, Arditi argues that the industry have used this 'crisis' to justify even more exploitative '360' contracts with artists, where the labels get a cut of revenues from performance, merchandise, etc, as well as recordings, ironically, while having justified their increased control in the name of protecting artists from 'stealing'. Also, labels collect mechanical royalties from Internet streaming, which they don't from terrestrial radio.

...it also makes sense that the "industry" would be in support of digital media so they don't have to deal with the overhead required with a physical object (to say nothing for for all those pesky people who manufacture, ship, and sell their wares -- more resources focuses on pushing whatever "the flavor-of-the-week" might be).

While i certainly don't fit the demographic that execs aim for, it's likely i spend at least as much money on music as any 10 random teeny-boppers.

Overhead = IT, ie tech firms, which is who really runs the music industry at this point

Arditi discusses the overhead issue quite a bit as well. The music industry, if defined as the major record labels, really traffic in intellectual property so I'm not clear on how they'd have significant new IT expenses that have replaced their previous manufacturing and shipping expenses. If iTunes/Amazon Music/etc have been replacing record stores and Spotify/Pandora/Apple Music/Youtube have been replacing radio, it would seem to be cheaper for the industry to get their product to those outlets (not to mention performance rights wrt things like games, ringtones, ...)

That would be my guess yes

I'd assume the new overhead is in maintenance of all the official accounts and relationships with the tech firms to make sure your new A&R content drops at the right times and places, which seems like a lot of work in itself

...to say nothing for all the realtors, architects, interior designers, automotive sales professionals, and coke dealers you can shake a stick at.

That's not new though. Those amenities are how you retain top talent, been true since wax.

Trying to imagine wax cylinder record industry associated coke lords.

"My card, good sir."

http://www.toptenz.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/cocaine.jpg

I have been looking for a cure for Scald Head for years - they told me it was not to be. Thank goodness we have found each other on this blessed day.

I say my good man if you could see your way clear to grant Scott Joplin's latest rag a few morning drive time spins I daresay Scald Head shall not darken your door again, if you catch my meaning

I assume Joseph Burnett there was the original Whitey Bulger.

back then the real money was in sheet music

"First one's free, kid." *hands over sheet music of "Alexander's Ragtime Band"*

$69 for an ebook seems a little excessive, no?

It does. I borrowed it from the library at the college where I work tbh.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/long-distance-rocker-miller

When they’re feeling particularly ungenerous, the company will cut you out altogether. Google did that to me when they used the guitar riff from my song “Question” as the bed music in a commercial for one of the company’s crappy phones. Google hired an ad agency. The ad agency hired a jingle house, probably giving them “Question” as a reference track. Grateful for the work, some dude in a windowless room at the jingle house (probably himself another victim of the modern music biz; maybe he used to be in bands but was now trying to feed his kids by making innocuous instrumental music to go under Google ad voice-overs) re-recorded my riff, cleverly adding an extra note at the end of the progression—just enough to absolve his employer of any obligation to compensate me for having written the thing to begin with.

I did what any aggrieved artist should do when their work has been ripped off: I contacted my publishing company’s lawyers to threaten these digital brigands with a lawsuit. Within the ranks of the publishing company, it was unanimously agreed that we had Google over a barrel. But then they hired a musicologist who specialized in copyright infringement and he pointed out the almost imperceptible difference between the two recordings. His prediction was that it was possible but unlikely we could win in court. After my publishers sized up the odds of going against the great content leviathan, they advised me to drop the idea. I agreed reluctantly, and lost a few nights’ sleep thinking of how lucky the Nick Lowes of the world had been: here, some untold millions of ad viewers would be hearing a nearly note-for-note rendition of a song I wrote, and all I was getting in return was teeth-gnashing insomnia.

I considered making a video documenting the Google heist, featuring an A/B demonstration of the two versions of the song. I would certainly have prevailed in the court of public opinion at least. I could have told the story of how I’d written the song after spending a day in London falling in love with the woman I’d go on to marry, maybe show some pictures of our sweet kids that I’m busting my ass to feed in this barren new musical landscape. But in the end I didn’t want my career narrative to be overtaken by an Ahab-like quest for the leviathan’s unlikely destruction. I took a deep breath and let it go.

Music saved my life. And musicians. And club owners, record store clerks, college radio DJs, and rock critics who owed a thousand words to the local weekly. We were often reckless, short-sighted, and profligate, but we were all in this together. And now there’s no more this.

Another interesting article from that publication that fits in this thread:

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-muzak-pelly

What indeed.

https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/a32360709/coronavirus-music-industry/

Covid-19 might catalyse reform for the benefit of those who do stick it out. Musicians have asked Spotify to triple payments to cover lost concert revenue, which would enlarge the pie, although it’s unlikely that any streaming platform will offer up significantly more on a long-term basis – Spotify was still barely profitable at the start of year, and rivals like Apple Music are basically loss-leaders, designed to get more users into their ecosystem (as Tim Cook put it in 2018, “we’re not [doing it] for the money.”)

So musicians have to hope for more $ from streaming, more fair record contracts, and a vaccine

become a massive superstar, stick to music as a side gig, or something something YouTube variety act.

Someone should start a non-profit that teaches musicians how to transition into Minecraft youtubes. Has anyone done that?

The future is terror

https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/classic-rock-biopics-holograms-catalogs-1172087/

I can't even begin to describe the amount of dystopic visions here -- and I know not all of them will pan out but good god.

Also this is the most fundamentally depressing bit

And a lawsuit Chris Cornell’s widow has filed against the late grunge superstar’s bandmates cites her interest in tours with a replacement singer, hologram concerts, and “deep-fake renditions of Chris’ vocals drawn from extant recordings by artificial intelligence that could mint brand new Soundgarden hits.”

“The film was a wrecking ball that knocked walls down,” says Greg Lin, senior VP of marketing and reporting for Sony Legacy. “And then you’re hearing their music in all these other places because there’s a big uptick in licensing and sync requests. With Queen, you’ve got songs that are instantly recognizable. You have a compelling story. And credit where credit is due, they just nailed it.”

'nailed it'

last couple years i really started to understand why UK people of a certain age hated queen so much, they were cool as this kind of b-level, campy classic rock band oddity, but there's something so grating and oppressive about them when they are rated so highly by everyone again

"The fans only want to hear our old stuff, not our new AI-extracted deep fake renditions"

I can't even begin to describe the amount of dystopic visions here

lol does this article touch on climate change because you know

It's funny that Queen were hated by certain critics for playing the opera bit of "Bohemian Rhapsody" on tape onstage. How could anyone anticipate what levels of artifice would be accepted today.

Merck “don’t you dare call me Murky” Mercuriadis

I think about those two posthumous Michael Jackson albums from time to time, they were actually not bad but they had such an uncanny valley feeling to them, I get creeped out every time they're on (outside of "Love Never Felt So Good" b/c it has a more or less complete vocal)

I have a hard time believing there's much of an audience for "new" material from dead artists. it's gonna be tried a few times and maybe even yield a charting hit or two but I think most people will just find it really creepy

People will buy it not just for making hits, but for their own entertainment. Imagine you can order for your kid a personalized happy birthday song by Billie Eilish or Ariana Grande (created by some deepfake voice plugin), it would sell like crazy.

These septuagenarian stars selling off their entire intellectual property reminds me of the mid-90s when my dad saw a there was a model train collector convention in town. Stuck all his 1940s Lionels into liquor store boxes and came back with a thousand bucks in cash, amused that he was still the youngest guy in the room, and that that market wasn't gonna rise any further.

Good article with some surprising stats:

I had a hunch that old songs were taking over music streaming platforms - but even I was shocked when I saw the most recent numbers. According to MRC Data, old songs now represent 70% of the US music market.

Those who make a living from new music - especially that endangered species known as the working musician - have to look on these figures with fear and trembling.

But the news gets worse.

The new music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs.

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/is-old-music-killing-new-music

Old Growth Pop

Definitely some interesting stats in that article, but it seems to be overly reliant on anecdotes ("one time I saw a kid singing along with an old song!") and specious arguments:

There are many reasons for this, some of them quite alarming. For example, the fear of copyright lawsuits has made many in the music industry deathly afraid of listening to unsolicited demo recordings. If you hear a demo today, you might get sued for stealing its melody—or maybe just its rhythmic groove—five years from now. Try mailing a demo to a label or producer, and watch it return unopened.

Are fewer "new" songs being recorded/released? Doesn't feel like it

the definition of "catalog" is older than 18 months. does it spell doom for new music if people are still listening to something like "blinding lights," which came out in november 2019? or dua lipa's levitating, which came out in april 2020?

masked wolf's "astronaut in the ocean" was released in 2019, made #20 on 2021's billboard year-end 100, but would be counted as a "catalog" song by that criterion

It *feels* like there are more new songs being released than ever, and fewer people listening to them (or when they do, it's because of a Spotify playlist or TikTok video and most of those people don't even know who did the song).

I doubt these old playlists consist of songs from the year before last—and even if they do, this still represents a stinging repudiation of the pop culture industry, which is almost entirely focused on what’s happening right now.

on spotify's top hits right now:
glass animals - "heat wave" (june 2020)
ckay - "love nwantiti" (2019)
maneskin - "beggin" (2017)

But perhaps Spotify isn't a good measure of how money is actually being made by songs.

streaming accounted for 83% of the record industry's revenue in 2020, and preliminary reports from 2021 indicate that the share has increased to 85%

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/the-us-recorded-music-industry-grew-by-over-1bn-in-2020-but-faces-big-challenges-over-streamings-pricing-and-its-growth/

my dude is using the grammy awards(!), particularly their live tv ratings (!!!!!!!) as a barometer for people's relative excitement for new music.

The hottest area of investment in the music business is old songs—with investment firms getting into bidding wars to buy publishing catalogs from aging rock and pop stars.

The song catalogs in most demand are by musicians in their 70s or 80s (Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, etc.)—if not already dead (David Bowie, James Brown, etc.).

does he seriously not understand why younger musicians might not want to sell the rights to the music they're gonna make for the next 30-40 years? if taylor swift decided to sell the rights to her catalog right now, do we not think that her price would be comparable, if not much higher, than the dylan and springsteen numbers?

The hottest technology in music is a format that is more than 70 years old, the vinyl LP. There’s no sign that the record labels are investing in a newer, better alternative—because, here too, old is viewed as superior to new.

cd sales grew faster than vinyl sales last year.

i don't mean to say that things are better than ever for new musicians, obviously they're not, but the arguments made in this arguable range from specious at best to completely ignorant of mountains of data at worst

"overly reliant on anecdotes and specious arguments" - Ted Gioia's entire career summed up in seven words.

arguments made in this *article

very much enjoying the roasting of Gioia here, keep it up plz

otoh that link Ned posted 7 months back is truly horrifying

x-post

I know that there are plenty of outstanding young musicians out there. The problem isn’t that they don’t exist, but that the music industry has lost its ability to discover and nurture their talents.

Gioia makes it sound so simple. As if going back to old-school major record label practices would be enough, when the world has changed and people have plenty of other options then listening to the radio or to music at all now.

He mentions the definition of "new" music in that article as being music released in the past 18 months. Surely one can quibble with the definition, but I think the important thing from a statistical point of view is to apply a definition consistently over time to identify the trend. So if people are purchasing less of music released in the past 18 months as a share of total music purchases, that indicates the trend. It's unlikely the trend would be different if one extended the definition of new to 24 or 36 months.

the ratio of new music : old music by that definition is always going to go down, based on my understanding of linear time

That's true. The amount of old music is always increasing. That's always been true though, and I think the phenomenon of declining interesting in new music is a more recent development.

The solution is to obliterate all traces of any music recorded more than 50 years ago so there's more new music.

otoh that link Ned posted 7 months back is truly horrifying

I had blotted it from my memory but yeah.

well I don't wanna sound like a boomer or nothin' but maybe there's something to be said about how homogenous pop has become? there are like a dozen big stars and a bunch of modern singles have one of them guesting on another one's track. all the songs are written by 3 guys in Sweden. so everyone just sounds like everyone else. this isn't just me blasting modern pop music like every Dad does, I think this is actually the goal. the same thing the MCU did to movies a bunch of dudes named Björn did to pop music.

obviously people have been complaining about this my whole life but there just seemed to be so much more going on in other decades. I mean there still is but it's not really getting played on the radio or anything else mainstream. remember how all the weird shit from the 90s all kinda got lumped together? that's not really happening anymore. a band like Ween may still be popular among the youth thanks to Spotify playlists or the YouTube algorithm (or Spongebob?) but it's not really leading people to all the other stuff from that era.

I question the implied premise that newly released music should be more popular than older music in a healthy music culture.xp

xp that description doesn't sound particularly different to any time since 2000 or so and is also ignoring that rap charts about just as well as pop.

all the songs are written by 3 guys in Sweden

This may have had a large enough grain of truth 5-10 years ago to be an “I’ll allow it” level of exaggeration, but not really today…

(Fwiw - I think Ariana, Billie, Olivia, Taylor, Doja, Dua, Gaga, Katy, etc. are all pretty distinctive and don’t sound much like each other)

i think it's just as likely that very little about ppl's listening habits has changed, and instead what has changed is that we went from knowing when someone purchased an album once to having the knowledge of what everyone on earth is listening to all the time

legacy acts have been dominating the touring market for how long now? many years

Yeah, for the first few singles

that general sort of argument about the homogeneity of pop probably applies a fair bit more to something like the korean idol industry but even that's capable of putting out genuinely exciting & interesting work

songs routinely stay in the billboard charts for over a year, and tiktok has caused lots of songs to pop off over a year after their release. i honestly do think that the math would change if the “catalog” parameters were extended to 3 years instead of 18 months

anyway this article is bad and gioia should feel bad for writing it

Radio stations are contributing to the stagnation, putting fewer new songs into their rotation, or—judging by the offerings on my satellite radio lineup—completely ignoring new music in favor of old hits.

my stars! why isn’t “50s on 5” playing the latest cardi b???

does it spell doom for new music if people are still listening to something like "blinding lights," which came out in november 2019?
― roflrofl fight (voodoo chili), Wednesday, January 19, 2022 11:11 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Yes, this song is atrocious

Otherwise I don't think it's news that people listen to classics and it's actually cool to know the numbers. I was on the Rumours page yesterday on Spotify and the three main songs have between 600 and 900M listens, which I normally associate with pop and reggaeton. That those numbers are growing may just be a sign that Spotify is getting more and more democratic with our venerable parents.

i think it's just as likely that very little about ppl's listening habits has changed, and instead what has changed is that we went from knowing when someone purchased an album once to having the knowledge of what everyone on earth is listening to all the time

This was a thought I had yesterday but wasn't sure how to put it.
Physical sales figures are likely to have a bias towards newer releases since people only need to buy the White Album one time. If we looked at what people listened to on the radio in 1992, I've no trouble imagining you'd see a load of classic artists.

a lot of my listening is new-to-me old music

I mean, there would have been nothing shocking about a young cashier singing along to "Light My Fire", say. (Admittedly, a song from 1949 would be less likely.)xp

in other news, i've heard that orchestras primarily play music that is older than 18 months. news at 11.

My son heard Bowie's "Starman" in the trailer for the Buzz Lightyear movie and has been playing it over and over on Spotify. Those plays get counted. If, instead, he were listening to it on my 20 some year old Ziggy Stardust CD they wouldn't be.

I feel like Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street" has made inroads among The Kids; I hear the asshole teenagers who live downstairs listening to it a lot the last couple of weeks. Is it used in a notable TikTok video or something?

it’s in an episode of rick & morty

the churn of hits at radio absolutely is slowing down, and had been substantially even before the pandemic set in

yeah, i've been noticing this as well

probably a result of streaming though, right? soundscan revealed that hits had longer shelf lives than people realized, streaming made clear that soundscan was still selling short how often people keep listening to big hits

It makes sense that if pop charts were based on reported sales + airplay in the old days, neither metric was accounting for continued listening from those who actually bought the record. And in both cases if the metric was being estimated by record store owners and music directors, sudden changes would probably be more noticeable and be exaggerated.

There was always that glimpse of continued listening in the charts when they'd rerelease some monster hit of the past, like Yesterday, and it would find its way back onto the charts.

It was always very apparent with live shows, where lots of artists who haven't had a hit in years still pull in the punters.

probably a result of streaming though, right? soundscan revealed that hits had longer shelf lives than people realized, streaming made clear that soundscan was still selling short how often people keep listening to big hits

this is only part of the story imo. overall, the churn of current hits in the streaming ecosystem is and has been substantially faster than at radio during the years that they've coexisted. it's absolutely true that sustained streaming strength is requisite for a hit song to persist into the "blinding lights" tier of seemingly permanent omnipresence. consequently it's been common for casual chartwatchers to marvel at the extreme, absurd levels of longevity attained by such hits and say things like "wow, streaming really did ruin the charts." but if you actually look at the underlying numbers, the fact is that virtually always it is overwhelmingly airplay, not streaming, that is keeping these songs this high for this long. program directors are choosing to keep these songs around, and the reason they stick around so long is because they are also choosing to barely acknowledge, at best, the majority of current streaming hit titles.

top 40 radio, supposedly the center of what's new and fresh in american contemporary culture, lost track of the pulse in the middle of the last decade at the same time that they lost their grip on what had traditionally been the younger end of their audience. these listeners used to be key to breaking "edgier" and more novel-sounding hits before they would ultimately gain mass acceptance among the more passive, adult end of the top 40 listenership. it is these listeners that have been ceded to the streaming ecosystem, and top 40 is consequently left to play to an audience that is barely interested in the music it's supposed to be playing. stations that play the few songs that these listeners are familiar with 120 times a week tend to see more favorable ratings outcomes compared to what's achieved by the more adventurous ones. songs by established superstar artists can break in quick order, but everyone else needs to slowly climb playlists at smaller-market stations for 4-8 months before the machine decides whether it's ultimately going to work in power rotation nationwide.

there is a very narrow bridge indeed between this stagnant set of evergreens and the comparatively bustling and dynamic world of the streaming charts other than the social media apps, which have been helpful to the labels but also not as predictable and controllable as they'd like. songs blow up on there seemingly without explanation or effort, and plenty of songs with considerable, sometimes obvious, effort behind them go nowhere. songs that had already been pushed at radio for months, then retired, unexpectedly start blowing up again on the socials and then get revived to new heights at radio -- "levitating" was the first, and now the same is happening for that putrid "heat waves" song, and i strongly doubt it'll be the last one. new artists with aspirations for mass acceptance now routinely spend an entire year promoting their first breakthrough hit, even if it broke first on streaming.

when i speak of 'more favorable' ratings for the more limited top 40 stations, i do mean that in a relative sense, as in an absolute sense top 40 has been in continual decline for the past 10 years, with apparently no end in sight. this is not the first time that interest in 'top 40' has declined dramatically, but in the past this would be accompanied by gains at other currents-based formats, as in the '90s. today, top 40 is cratering, and all other currents-based music formats are either steady or also declining, just not as badly. there are actually tons of recent blog posts by media and market research professionals bemoaning the current state of current hits... but really the opening and closing sentences of the one i linked above pretty much say it all:

If one were to put the ‘bundle’ of radio formats that depend on new, hit music together, in the fashion of a mutual fund, it would have performed disastrously over the last decade. It is not an exaggeration to say that ‘contemporary music’ is in a crisis at American radio, and if this trend cannot be reversed, or at least halted, there may be vast implications.

...

American music radio is rapidly becoming a Kingdom of Gold, where one mostly hears the hits of yesteryear, the songs that radio made into hits back when radio made the hits.

tl;dr: top 40 saw too many black/trap artists on the streaming charts in the mid '10s and decided that oh that can't be right, then lost all their younger listeners and are now left trying, and failing, to hold the attention of people who are slow to warm to current music and barely like much of it anyway. american musical pop culture has essentially bifurcated, and the narrow sliver of the overall universe of hits that really works in both spheres as they exist today can persist seemingly forever. the sort of oppressive longevity that "blinding lights" attained recently, to much fanfare from billboard, will be replicated many times in the coming years, and oops don't look now but laroi/bieber "stay" may be on track to be the next one

always appreciate yr insights, great post

my only question is "when will the classic rock format die" cuz it can't come too soon for me

top 40 is consequently left to play to an audience that is barely interested in the music it's supposed to be playing

this was always the case though, yes? I mean at least for the last 30 years or so?

Yeah I agree - top 40 radio would've lost all their younger listeners whatever they did. Even if they played exactly what the kids want they're not listening. From what I can see it's all streaming - either the hits are made by blunt force marketing/payola (labels pay Spotify, Spotify pushes the song to passive listeners through "algorithmic suggestions", voila: high streaming numbers, which feeds into even more algorithmic streams), or hits emerge through viral social media driven trends (tiktok memes, gaming parody covers, curated playlists by influencers, instagram models with music careers on the side, etc). Either way, radio has no power over younger listeners.

good points dyl

now imagine if the gioia article that inspired this revive bothered to reckon with this for more than half a second

tl;dr: top 40 saw too many black/trap artists on the streaming charts in the mid '10s and decided that oh that can't be right, then lost all their younger listeners

The blog post you linked to also shows listening down at rhythmic contemporary (as well as way down at active rock etc.). What’s their excuse?

joint pain

(to put it another way – listeners who want to hear hip-hop etc. have always had other formats & sources than CHR, I don’t get why the availability of streaming would cause an existential crisis for the format?)

my only question is "when will the classic rock format die" cuz it can't come too soon for me

Classic Rock is basically the new Oldies format, and presumably isn't going anywhere soon, instead just adapting in a way that's dropping '60s stuff off playlists in favor of Nirvana and Stone Temple Pilots etc.

at least on my local classic rock station that's been around since the 70s when it was an old school stoner dr. johnny fever type place, the 60s stuff is barely there anymore, there are some exceptions, like Hendrix, a few others but not many...Beatles don't get played at all (except "Come Together" which I think is because it scans more 70s to than 60s, but for example MUCH more likely to hear "Jane" by Jefferson Airplane than "White Rabbit" now

now it's more mid/late-70s to mid-80s as the center of gravity, as opposed to late 60s/early 70s, lot of the 80s stuff like Ozzy, GnR, Def Leppard are now part of the canon. And, as Grisso said, starting to hear stuff like Pearl Jam a lot now

dyl's link seems to show big increase for Classic Rock in past decade

in a way i suppose at least for classic rock/oldies radio, there's always a path forward, there's always always new stuff that becomes old stuff

The blog post you linked to also shows listening down at rhythmic contemporary (as well as way down at active rock etc.). What’s their excuse?

(to put it another way – listeners who want to hear hip-hop etc. have always had other formats & sources than CHR, I don’t get why the availability of streaming would cause an existential crisis for the format?)

― Rockin’, and rollin’, and whatnot (morrisp), Monday, January 24, 2022 8:08 AM

this is an interesting question and i don't know that i have a good response to it. the rhythmic contemporary format has long pointed in the direction that pop music is headed in musically, as its programming tends to split the difference between the black and white mainstreams. this tends to be true even when the format itself is marginal the way it is now -- unlike in the '90s, when it was a huge success and was far more impactful in many markets than 'mainstream' chr.

today the rhythmic format, despite being programmed by few outlets, is ironically considered to be in a good place musically for the past several years, with a healthy turnover of many hits that work well for its audience (unsurprising, as it is well positioned to react to streaming stories). my city lost its rhythmic station in 2016, which was at the time splitting the difference between late-stage edm hits and mustard-wave r&b (w/ a corny 'party hits' branding). the rhythmic contemporary charts these days skew much closer to what's being played at hip-hop stations, and center-lane 'pop' product doesn't seem to make its way over as much.

i only hear these stations when i'm on vacation in much larger cities, often those with large latinx populations (some stations in the format do play quite a bit of urbano and other latin pop), so i suspect that these are the only markets where the format is thought to work nowadays. instead, in markets like mine you'll have your hip-hop stations and your pop stations (often owned by the same firm), but nothing on the air occupying the middle ground. i guess this reflects the extremely consolidated nature of the airwaves nowadays, + the sentiment that we've seen mentioned in other threads from some in the industry who feel that black music not crossing over is beneficial to black music (years later i would say it's evidently not helping black music radio very much!!)

classic rock unfortunately will never go away until all its listeners do

american radio is dead and the american industry is losing its ability to actually bring new hits to mass acceptance. at least this probably means its stranglehold over the industry in other regions of the world will loosen substantially + these places will be able to better develop and promote their own talent

the other part of the equation i haven't mentioned yet is the technological aspect, i.e. that younger folks have been quicker to adopt novel products that make listening to music through streaming as convenient as tuning into radio if not more

maybe this is a dumb question but do classic rock tracks qualify for airplay ratings, and how do they compare with pop songs? i.e. as a whole, across the country, are core Top 40 songs played more than core classic rock songs?

per track? probably top 40, since there are only 40 of them

Generous of you to imply that classic rock stations play more than 40 different songs

they play 40 different Eagles songs

Yeah idg that one. For their many faults, it seems fairly obvious that they have a wider repertoire than a top 40 station would at any given moment.

here's my local's recently played

https://www.92kqrs.com/recently-played/

you can see how it's evolving as i said to be more late 70s/early 80s focused - The Police who used to be new wave, and also hair metal in Poison and alt rock in Soul Asylum

Agree 100% about the shift, although I've been hearing the Police (and Cars and Cheap Trick) on classic rock radio my whole life.

xp - makes sense, it might "seem" like classic rock plays the same 50 songs over and over again but in reality it's an order of magnitude greater than the new pop stations.

Agree 100% about the shift, although I've been hearing the Police (and Cars and Cheap Trick) on classic rock radio my whole life.

― The sensual shock (Sund4r), Tuesday, January 25, 2022 11:04 AM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

see it's weird because i agree on Cars - Cheap Trick is pretty classic rock canon imo, some crossover w/new wave but not new wave - but the Police for some reason is new at least here

I wonder how far it will creep forward? Like I can see the White Stripes and Coldplay and the Killers and Kings of Leon ending up on Classic Rock playlists, but does it just end at some point?

I mean I guess Greta Van Fleet would be an appropriate end point

Does KQRS still use the term "classic rock" btw? I have noticed that our CHEZ106 seems to have largely dropped the term in favour of "world class rock", I imagine because it's harder to apply it to Warrant and Stone Temple Pilots.

Stuff like Muse, Coheed & Cambria, Paramore etc will end up as Classic Rock for sure.

xpost - yep they are still "Minnesota's Classic Rock Station"

Stuff like Muse, Coheed & Cambria, Paramore etc will end up as Classic Rock for sure.

The base criterion generally seems to be that the artist was played on album-oriented rock/hard rock/mainstream rock/active rock radio at the time. (So ime e.g. they play Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains but not Smashing Pumpkins or Radiohead, who are still played on 'alternative'/'modern rock' stations.) I'm not sure that applies to any of those three. And, as discussed here, that format seems to be heavily in decline, so it seems a little hard to say what will last: ITT We Figure Out the Mainstream Rock Format . Seems like it will be harder to make a case that Shinedown and Five Finger Death Punch are classics in the same way as Aerosmith or Nirvana.

They are to people who didn't grow up with Aerosmith and Nirvana...

The classic rock rule is usually that the song had to have charted in the top 40, which is why they rarely play even the non-charting singles of classic rock artists. Most of these modern rock bands don't even make the Hot 100.

But as been mentioned in this thread, the top 40 aren't really a very good guideline anymore in the monoculture streaming age.

(isn't)

Sure, I just mean that once you get to like 2006, if you’re pulling songs off the rock charts you’re mostly talking about stuff that barely registered in mainstream culture

They are to people who didn't grow up with Aerosmith and Nirvana...

Even the members of Shinedown themselves would probably not say this.

Aerosmith and Nirvana were massive pop culture juggernauts.

They have 4-5x the number of monthly Spotify listeners now that Shinedown and FFDP do.

the number one song for the past three weeks on the mainstream rock airplay chart is "Dead Inside" by Nita Strauss and David Draiman. I can't go anywhere without hearing it!

I just watched (some of) the video for "Dead Inside" and it looks like it should be properly billed as "Nita Strauss ft. Jeff Bezos"

I see that Nita Strauss was Alice Cooper's guitarist, though she was born the year Constrictor came out

Yeah, session player, solo shredder, instructor. The Netflix documentary Hired Gun from a few years ago covered contemporary session players and included her. It was p interesting, esp in terms of the, uh, contrast to the lifestyles you saw in the documentary on the Wrecking Crew session players from the 60s.

Anyone have a ‘classic rock’ hip-hop station in their area? We briefly had two and they didn’t seem to be doing too badly but then died without fanfare within a couple of months of each other.

We've got a "Throwback" R&B station that mixes Silk Sonic and Daniel Cesar with Al B. Sure and Sade.

silk sonic is pretty retro

My assumption is that typically when a classic rock station does a Top 500 over a holiday weekend or a Top 1079 (if the station was 107.9FM or whatever), the tracks that place will make up the core of that station's canon for the next year.

I've probably told this story before on here somewhere, but it seems relevant here.

One of our local long-standing Pacifica DJs moonlit for about six months at our local and now long-defunct Clear Channel Classic Rock station about 20 years ago. During a later Pacifica funds drive (where among other things, this guy hosted a weekly "Deep Cut" CR show) he spilled some tea about his period in the Big Leagues.

First of all, the station had recently gone to a completely digital library, with a CD library kept on site in case the system failed or other special circumstances. Said digital library had about 2000-2500 tracks, which was the station's masterlist, utilized for pulling requests and a yearly "A to Z" airing. From that list they pulled a selection of 250 songs that were the regular rotation playlist, of which 50 Tracks were concrete heavy hitters ("Stairway", "Freebird", "Hotel California", "Bohemian Rhapsody" etc.) not be removed, and the other 200 tracks were slightly rotated in and out every few weeks, favor sometimes given to performers who were coming to town for shows, and also allowing to shift focus within certain artist's catalogues (so like, say they are playing 4 CCR songs, they can gradually pivot over a couple months to 4 other CCR songs). And that's how it worked, because Clear Channel had done their research, and that was the best way to sell ads, which was what they were really there for.

Now admittedly that was 20 years ago, but I don't really see any reason radio conglomerates would change that setup.

really weird if classic rock stations are playing pearl jam but NOT smashing pumpkins these days idk

Anyone have a ‘classic rock’ hip-hop station in their area? We briefly had two and they didn’t seem to be doing too badly but then died without fanfare within a couple of months of each other.

― papal hotwife (milo z), Tuesday, January 25, 2022 11:06 AM (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah my city had a classic hip-hop station a few years ago for like a year but it transitioned to a mainstream/current hip-hop playlist (w/ occasional not-too-old throwbacks) after some other station in the area switched formats

from what i have read a lot of these stations signed on around the same time throughout the country, did well/drew some excitement for a while, then just kinda tapered off and mostly went away (w/ some notable exceptions that i'm not knowledgeable enough to recall)

the adult r&b stations in the area have worked classic hip-hop into the mix to varying degrees also

xp Good god, the math works out to playing each song a dozen times a week.

xp Here in L.A., we have 93.5 KDAY

really weird if classic rock stations are playing pearl jam but NOT smashing pumpkins these days idk

Not really that weird considering they typically only play 4 Pearl Jam songs (the hits from Ten).

classic hits stations (the ones that basically pop, but usually somewhat rock-leaning these days) also have universes of about 200 songs, from what i recall from looking at some program director resource thing out of curiosity. and they certainly play the top tier of songs (your "edge of seventeen"s and "don't stop believin'"s) far more than a dozen times a week. there are some songs that will absolutely play every single midday without fail

it's like being in a recursive nightmare when you are involuntarily exposed to one of those overplayed kryptonite tunes, very Philip K. Dick

but yeah, top 40 stations play a truly pathetic number of songs, probably between 15 and 30, and the ones in power rotation (the only rotation level that matters whatsoever nowadays) literally do get played over 120 times a week

since these stations are struggling so badly they have actually recently started playing more "golds" (hits more than a few months/years old), but in typical fashion, they pick the same few and then spin them a ton almost like they're current hits again. if you're hearing more of jay sean "down" or rihanna "only girl in the world"/"s&m" or britney "toxic" and such lately, that's why

friend of mine drove cross country a few years ago and decided to spend as much time as possible dial-scanning radio stations as he drove, i remember he said his main takeaway was how often he heard automation errors - the same song playing twice in a row, two different songs playing at the same time, prerecorded DJ patter accidentally playing over songs, etc

Regarding the article -- there's currently more avenues for discovery, more accessibility, more variety in the direction they might lead, more opportunities than ever for listeners to choose their own adventure in virtually any situation. Logically, this has led to more listeners successfully achieving Top 40 ignorance than any point in the last 50 years or so. So when I see 30/40-somethings assuming that teens universally adore Olivia Rodrigo or Billie Eilish based on Billboard data, it feels like just as much of an armchair observation as the anecdote about young people in 2021 pumping The Police's Greatest Hits.

random fact that might be worth knowing about music. Stuff that charts in radio world makes the artists way more money than stuff that connects in the streaming world (in the literal sense -- obviously having the streaming zeitgeist will be more valuable for an artists career over the long haul if they hold onto it)

Why is that, if no ones buys singles any longer?

presumably radio royalties are much better than streaming ones, which shouldn't be surprising since streaming royalties are notoriously awful

xp Here in L.A., we have 93.5 KDAY

― Gimme little drink / From your Dunkin cup (morrisp), Tuesday, January 25, 2022 8:55 PM

i like this station when they're actually playing music. it isn't very powerful, so i often listen to the livestream.

sidebar: is the amount of ads they play on kday representative of all mainstream radio these days? because wow, they have a lot of ads.

xp Recording artists don't get radio royalties (at least in US), though - right? I think songwriters do...

This blog post says radio royalties are actually worse for songwriters than streaming royalties (but I can't verify the analysis)

They are to people who didn't grow up with Aerosmith and Nirvana...

Having trouble imagining Shinedown and 5 Finger Death Punch fans who don't also listen to Nirvana, Aerosmith, Led Zep, etc. Loving Classic Rock already seemed like an integral part of being a straightahead Rock fan when I was a teen, would've thought that as the genre becomes more marginal this would increase?

When I was a classic rock station listener for a year in 1988-9 my local CR station (WRKI in Connecticut) was playing U2 (Sunday Bloody Sunday and New Years’ Da, I distinctly remember, maybe Pride). The songs were only five years old then!

As I remember back then there wasn't really an AOR classic format, but more of a mixture of 60s/70s rock with current AOR stuff. Classic rock stations in the late 80s played 50s and 60s rock & roll and 70s AM Gold. I see that WRKI had a New Wave and Modern Rock format in 1982, so I figure they played a mix of new and old.

Having trouble imagining Shinedown and 5 Finger Death Punch fans who don't also listen to Nirvana, Aerosmith, Led Zep, etc.

Oh, I agree. I am having more trouble imagining that everyone who is now listening to Zep and Nirvana will be enthusiastic about 5FDP joining the mix.

Heh. Almost forgot about them.

As I remember back then there wasn't really an AOR classic format, but more of a mixture of 60s/70s rock with current AOR stuff. Classic rock stations in the late 80s played 50s and 60s rock & roll and 70s AM Gold. I see that WRKI had a New Wave and Modern Rock format in 1982, so I figure they played a mix of new and old.

As I remember back then there wasn't really an AOR classic format, but more of a mixture of 60s/70s rock with current AOR stuff. Classic rock stations in the late 80s played 50s and 60s rock & roll and 70s AM Gold.

Wait, we had a station like this latter thing in the late 80s but I'm p sure they called themselves oldies and I thought of them that way. The station I thought of as classic rock was more like the former. (They were actually far more adventurous than they are now, also playing new REM and Midnight Oil songs, having jazz and blues programs, and playing some weird stuff like Focus or Babe Ruth on psychedelic Sundays.)

This blog post says radio royalties are actually worse for songwriters than streaming royalties (but I can't verify the analysis)

IIRC this was always the case but the sheer volume of radio play (for the lucky few who got on radio) made up for it.

I am having more trouble imagining that everyone who is now listening to Zep and Nirvana will be enthusiastic about 5FDP joining the mix.

Equally troubling to imagine long time Nirvana/Soundgarden fans getting pumped for Glass Animals or Milky Chance.

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/its-official-new-music-is-shrinking-in-popularity-in-the-united-states/

We shouldn’t, however, jump to any obvious conclusions about golden oldie ‘catalog’ music gobbling up the listenership of today’s teenagers (Yes, even if Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill is still the No.1 global song on Spotify right now, nearly two months after it premiered in that episode of Stranger Things.)

According to Luminate’s H1 2022 report, over a third of all ‘Catalog’ streams that took place in the US in the first half of this year were actually plays of music released between 2017 and 2019 (see below).

(‘Catalog’, remember, simply means music that was released 18 months or more before someone played/purchased it.)

Music originally released in 2019 alone took a 14% share of all ‘Catalog’ streams in H1 2022; music originally released in 2018 took an 11% share.

And music originally released in either of these years was more popular on US streaming services in the first half of 2022 than all music released in the 1990s combined.

Same goes for all music released in the 1980s, and all music released in the 1970s.

wow that is wild

was looking at some numbers since this (tiktok phenomenon?) Alec Benjamin was playing a small but crowded venue nearby recently (criminally, just criminally bad music) and so I looked him up on spotify and wtf guy has a BILLION streams on one of his songs, 15 million monthly listeners (compare with Bob Dylan, 8 million, or Miles Davis, 2 million)

weird times

Probably got carried away creating a botnet to auto play his tunes on Spotify

it's maybe not that weird if you see spotify as a halfway house between radio and itunes. people will just hit play on a playlist, or let the auoplay keep going after they've listened to the one song they came for. those "passive" listens will massively boost some songs. (glenn can tell me i'm wrong here, but i think i'm right)

also, young people like listening to songs over and over and over and they also just like listening to music period, seeking it out, playing it for themselves and their friends. adults aren't as voracious. bob dylan was part of the zeitgeist 60 years ago. add up all his radio plays and the number of times people "listened" to his albums and singles since then and we'd have something to compare.

"Hit" radio has been like this for awhile--it's no longer just the current top 40, but a mix of hits from the past decade or so (with even older stuff thrown often thrown in).

also, young people like listening to songs over and over and over and they also just like listening to music period, seeking it out, playing it for themselves and their friends.

lol yes there's an implicit (and ilx0rs) there obv

Yeah, can't discount the algorithm. I think intentional plays are a tiny minority, once a song hits escape velocity and starts getting on tons of playlists (Spotify-curated, algorithmic, etc) the numbers just go. I think it's increasingly common for a song to have millions of plays, yet for most listeners to have no idea who it's by. Just that one song that comes up once in awhile (so more like radio I guess).

"Hit" radio has been like this for awhile--it's no longer just the current top 40, but a mix of hits from the past decade or so (with even older stuff thrown often thrown in).

― F'kin Magnetometers, how do they work? (President Keyes), Wednesday, July 20, 2022 7:03 AM

recently had to venture into an office where they just had the old school method of having a boombox in the corner on low and it was one of these stations: "today's hits with yesterday's favorites" kinda thing. while i was waiting, they played some current pop song that i didn't know and then "don't dream it's over." it made me a lot more receptive to what else they might play. i'm obviously all for this.

that would be an adult contemporary station -- they've been like that for a long time now. that even regular top 40 stations are very clearly veering in that direction is the thing that's new, tho they won't go as far back as "don't dream it's over" ("running up that hill" excepted, lol), they tend to go back to 00s at the earliest, but mostly the late-00s/early-10s period that was basically the last time that top 40 was doing rly well

This is why the 30-year-olds I hang with all love Sublime and RHCP, I gather

yeah alternative stations have been upping the 90s-heyday-to-current-hits ratio for years also

is this the thread for the fracas around that bandcamp piece about the band dummy on tour? some real bad takes all over the place

https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/dummy-tour-diary-part-one

the spicy stuff is in part 2

This is really long... what's the upshot?

That indie rock is full of posers and careerist hacks, both musicians and journalists.

He is talking about the band’s motto of sorts, which appears in their Bandcamp bio and is, much like this story, kind of a joke, but not really.

Mysteries within mysteries: no-one can figure out what's being said about a Bandcamp article about a Stereogum article about responses to someone's tweet.

All this about a Portishead record?

I read Part 1 over lunch... it just kind of felt like a lightweight tour diary / promotional piece for this band (which didn't get me interested in hearing them). Maybe I'll tackle Part 2 (and the "spicy stuff") later.

I skimmed it--seemed like some shit talking about Wet Leg and industry plant indie acts

I like how this band is all serious about not posting pics of themselves on Insta, keeping it "all about the music," etc. - and yet they participated in this puff piece (is that part of what ppl are making fun of?)

Curious if the author is related to Mary Timony? I kinda liked it, it reminded me of tour diaries and blogging from a more innocent time of the internet.

It’s not a puff piece though…

I mean there are many paragraphs about how great she thinks the band is, and why

(she says upfront she's a fan, so it fits - but it's clearly not in the trad rock-mag band profile, either)

(*I missed "style of the," or something)

they're a good band tbh

I don’t think the piece is excessively complimentary which is what a puff piece is, of course she likes the band also who cares if she likes the band

Honestly if you think that’s a puff piece I can’t help you

It is totally a trad rock band profile

I'm not gonna argue about it (cuz who cares), but trad rock band profiles do not have sections like this (about another band they encounter):

“Maybe they’re just excited,” I think, feeling uncharacteristically generous towards a group I’ve always found to be the band equivalent of every dweeb who ever tried to talk to me about this really obscure label called Flying Nun Records. Yet as I start scrolling through their posts, my annoyance level starts to rise.

To me, the band’s DIY-as-promotional-shtick brims with unearned condescension toward the underground music community whose hard work and willingness to take risks has made it possible for them to have a show tonight in the first place. It’s doubly insulting coming from a group on their first full U.S. tour ever and already playing big rooms as the support act for a much larger band, as if the “DIY show” is a cute novelty that’s useful only when the “real show” falls through.

Dummy sounds like if Stereolab had more drone, less hooks, and less fun. Tbh I think ILX people would be into it.

xpost that band deserves to be taken down though

Seriously dumb shit

Also I’m sure there are plenty of Lester bangs articles with stuff like that

Don’t even like dummy that much and that’s one of the most refreshing articles I’ve read in a long time

I’m sure there are plenty of Lester bangs articles with stuff like that

Exactly. And it was well done. The whole piece is good, both parts, even though it didn't make me want to listen to Dummy at all (or hang out with the writer, for that matter).

Ftr - Lester Bangs didn't write trad rock profiles!

He fucking toured with the clash and wrote about it just like this writer did with dummy

My point is that his style is not what I meant by trad, if this writer is emulating him that's cool, but Bangs probably would've named that other band (i.e., done an actual takedown) and not just used them as an unnamed counterexample of a less cool band

(and for something so minor, I mean yeah their social posts sound annoying, but this is small-bore inside scene stuff)

(and for something so minor, I mean yeah their social posts sound annoying, but this is small-bore inside scene stuff)

I hate to break it to you, but there are no "big" bands anymore except for Metallica and Coldplay and maybe U2.

The bands are big. It's the pictures that got small!

morrisp in "not getting it" shocka

good piece overall, also the Powers/Rolin duo rule

Do I normally "not get it"(?) Guess I'll have to work on that...

Btw, I skipped ahead to the Wet Leg takedown – very trenchant!

(I guess the author was not afraid to name names there, for whatever reason)

i remember a time when the mere mention of the name "wet leg" made all who might raise their ire quiver in fear. truly, what degradation has befallen music?

Making music shouldn’t be fun.

I also enjoyed the cameo from Caldwell and Tester, who made the best ambient album of 2020 (which is really saying something).

So bitter about Wet Leg. Maybe Dummy should consider writing music more people want to hear instead of looking for conspiracies about why they aren’t as popular as other bands.

maybe if they hadn't chosen such a terrible name

good tour diary, good band. love internecine scene policing. i like wet leg too but a band's first single having a lavish video and huge promo push is not un-candleboxish, i think it's ok to be grouchy/leery/sneery when it comes to the modern alternative rock corporate apparatus.

found this unreadable lol but good on y’all

idk didn’t feel like the writer interrogated the brilliant musings of the band enough or potentially at all. good wet leg and stereogum hit jobs i guess but i find the “making art should be miserable” mentality like capitalist stockholm syndrome. i don’t know i didn’t read it all

self-importance of ppl doin it diy is why i never talk to diy ppl end of post

The thing (to me) about the writer's Wet Leg takedown isn't so much that she hates the band or thinks that ppl only like them because they're told to (tho that does carry an amusing "narcissism of small differences" angle) - it's that she's so angry about the review (and, I guess, the band's success) that she doesn't seem to even really read or engage with it, she just (mis)reads a single line about them being "carpetbaggers" and sees red.

Btw, I downloaded a "sample" (first chapter) of a book she mentions, b/c it sounded interesting – Your Band Sucks, by a guy named Jon Fine who was in Bitch Magnet. It starts off with a well-written meditation on his childhood in a quiet, leafy NJ suburb; early attempts at music / h.s. "battles of the bands"; etc. But the sample ends right when he starts going off on how "awful" mainstream music was in the '80s – as he attempts to illustrate by listing a bunch of (IMO) actually awesome/fun (if sometimes cheesy) artists, with lines like:

Things were so bad we tried to get excited about John Fogerty's first album in like ten years, even though my chemistry textbook was more exciting and contained no writing as horrendous as the lyrics to "Centerfield."

and

During one surpassingly strange fifteen or eighteen months, the ghastly and bouncy Men at Work was the biggest band in the world.

And it's like - c'mon, man. Everyone has their lane, and you've already said this book is gonna be about how your favorite bands are Swans, Scratch Acid, Sonic Youth (etc.), so I get you're no "poptimist"... but even looking back as a middle-aged guy whose tastes have presumably broadened since adolescence, you still have these opinions(?)

otm

When I skimmed this I thought it (Dummy) was all a reference to Geoff Barrow of Portishead's recent tweet:

I’ve so had it with immensely over privileged artist and bands
Do labels not sign working class people anymore ?

Same as theatre and film It’s so fucked.

Their lack of awareness and Their assumption that we’ve all grown up the same way is astonishing

— 🏴‍☠️ Geoff Barrow 🏴‍☠️ (@jetfury) July 23, 2022

Which in turn reminded me of Clairo. I don't know Clairo, but I was reading something about the new Marcus Mumford solo album, which features Clairo, so looked up their wiki. The wiki includes this:

Following the success of "Pretty Girl", a number of social media users (specifically on discussion website Reddit) began claiming that Clairo was an "industry plant" who gained success through her father's nepotism. She denied the claims, calling them sexist. Writers for The Guardian and The Ringer also stated that her father's connections facilitated her record contract signing.

I had no idea who her father could be, but indeed, he has his own wiki entry:

Geoff Cottrill is an American marketer who formerly held top positions at Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and Converse. He is the father of the musical artist Clairo.

And then later on:

Cottrill is the father of the musical artist Clairo. According to The New York Times, her record label signing was made possible by her father's connection to Jon Cohen, co-founder of The Fader and an executive at the publication's marketing agency, Cornerstone. His role in the launching of his daughter's professional career attracted scrutiny from some online communities with regard to the singer's authenticity.

So, well ... yeah. I think I've seen a few things lately making fun of indie acts with blue hyperlink parents. But upper middle class indie kids are nothing new.

Yeah - one of the Dummy guys (in the profile) refers to "punk and DIY music" as "working class genres"; which feels a bit... ahistorical (at least w/r/t indie rock, I dunno about punk). Whatever accounts for the phenomenon he's complaining about - rich indie-rock kids apparently thinking they "deserve to get paid" – I don't think it's solely b/c of their privileged backgrounds, b/c artists like that used to be willing to work their butts off too (if anything, it may have given some of them a "fallback" which made enduring the grinding-it-out life more palatable?)

Like - the DIY scene here in L.A., where Dummy is from, is absolutely populated by at least a very healthy % of upper-middle class kids (or at least was, not long ago, and I assume still is)

(and artists in that scene, whatever their background, weren't really focused on getting Sub Pop singles or touring nationally; it was all very centered around the local community... so Dummy seem to represent a very particular kind of "DIY" artist with Big Ambitions)

The Wet Leg takedown is funny - yeah, they were discovered and got a push. It's a thing that's happened faster and more often with the UK music world vs. the US for as long as I've been paying attention to music (including US bands going to England, like all the Meet Me In The Bathroom bands). Expecting the music culture there to derive meaning from the flagellation of driving a piece of shit Econoline from Reno to Vegas is harder when there's not a desert and the entire landmass is smaller than several US states.

I’m enough of a poptimist to think that getting in the van is not a virtue in and of itself

So the music industry has a class problem. What creative industry doesn't?

It's easy to take shots at artists from privileged backgrounds. But the real hard work is in uplifting voices from less privileged backgrounds. I don't see these moaners doing that. Just talking shit and complaining about their own relative lack of success.

Yes, Wet Leg and Clairo got a headstart from privilege. But more importantly, they make good music. We should be uplifting all good music, regardless of background.

Call me idealistic, but I think it's more productive to give exposure to artists from less privileged backgrounds, than to tear down more privileged artists for their success - regardless of how much you think it's deserved or not.

You had me up until Wet Leg make good music.

The allegation about Wet Leg in the piece is that they “have the immediate advantage of several powerful music industry figures giving them a boost” – to illustrate this, it links to a Billboard article which says their former bassist worked for a management guy who liked their stuff and sent it to labels.

Meanwhile, it sounds like Dummy got signed to their current label because one of the dudes sent his tape around and a label guy liked it.

So Wet Leg had a relationship that gave them a leg up (pun intended). As a listener, I couldn’t care less… I can see why it might be annoying to someone in another band with similar aspirations, but I don’t get the writer’s withering hate. Sub Pop liked Dummy enough to contact them, so they’re well on their way. The cream rises to the top, right?

clairo is a weird case because the way she blew up was about as organic as it gets (viral hit on youtube without any sort of label push) & while her dad certainly would have been a big help in getting her record deal after that i'm sure labels would have been interested regardless

You had me up until Wet Leg make good music.

Tell me you don't like to have fun with telling me you don't like to have fun.

Ugh *without obviously

It's easy to take shots at artists from privileged backgrounds. But the real hard work is in uplifting voices from less privileged backgrounds. I don't see these moaners doing that. Just talking shit and complaining about their own relative lack of success.

I have no dog in this race but surely this is literally what the writer is doing? She's writing about a band she believes is from a less privileged background and superior to other acts getting more success.

the position that Wet Leg make bogstandard indie that the music press have fastened onto in search of a new saviour is completely defensible

their privilege is self-perpetuating. they've made it so they will continue making it. what especially galls is that they made it after 1 or 2 songs, neither of which were musically interesting in any way, just lurid slogans with a basic hook

because of all this, and because it is punching up at a group who have achieved cultural ubiquity on the basis of what feels to a lot of people like very little, i am down for all Wet Leg hit-jobs

okay having read that article, the bit about Wet Leg is just a small throwaway line - an apt bit of dismissal - in a much larger piece about the trials and triumphs of touring on a tight budget, and the craft of music-making

i suppose the poptimist rejoinder would be that if people like Wet Leg more then this validates their music and approach and canonisation, but my counter to that is that poptimism is not about celebrating what is popular per se, it is about celebrating ALL music AS pop, and the issue then becomes exposure - if you're an incurious listener you won't hear much besides the big names, and you'll probably think Wet Leg are the best indie going because you simply haven't had the exposure to much else, nor the patience to look for it. 'you hate fun' is the recourse of the person who hates listening

Too late to reconsider now - you’ve already just gone on the record condoning and enabling punching up hit jobs!

At length

i wasn't reconsidering - let there be aesthetic punching up, it's healthy and it's, um, fun

my takeaway from this once you get past the snark was "yes, bands can still make money on tour"

well, yes

Unless they have to spend it all on a new van. That van was giving me anxiety.

if you're an incurious listener you won't hear much besides the big names, and you'll probably think Wet Leg are the best indie going because you simply haven't had the exposure to much else, nor the patience to look for it

v obnoxious thing to say, assumes so much about a listener you've invented in your head

no chance i'm reading this whole thing, but i skimmed to the wet leg paragraph. i thought the "making music shouldn't be fun" quote was a joke lol

to clarify, i did not think it was a real quote from the article when it was pasted into this thread

The cream rises to the top, right?

It's nice to think this, but it's definitely not universally true. Now more than ever.

Of course (I meant that with a wink), but it seems to be true enough about the band she’s writing about. The point of the article is that “true DIY” success is possible and Dummy are demonstrating that, so why is she mad? Is she pissed they don’t have even better-connected friends so they too can be on Domino Records?

Their album got a higher score in pitchfork than wet leg’s did!

clairo is a weird case because the way she blew up was about as organic as it gets (viral hit on youtube without any sort of label push) & while her dad certainly would have been a big help in getting her record deal after that i'm sure labels would have been interested regardless

― ufo, Sunday, July 24, 2022 7:19 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

it's funny because her dad's relationship with the fader (which initially got clairo signed to fader label) is prob more beneficial to the fader than to clairo herself, since they're included in her joint venture with republic

I am not discounting the possibility that there are somehow listeners out there who have heard 250 albums in a year, featuring a non-negligible amount of rock/indie, who maintain that Wet Leg are the best of the lot, more deserving of their listening time and praise than anything else. I don't understand you, but fair enough if that resembles you. However, I am saying that if you don't follow as much music as you frankly should as a critic/forum poster, you'll probably end up fatuously cheering on the supremacy of acts that get the Big Push from the big obvious places (and this doesn't just mean Pitchfork scores, it means coverage, hype, airtime). Like, I don't mind when, for example, I go on my soccer forum and see posters pipe up all 'Hey have you heard the Wet Leg? Best indie in years! Omgzors!' etc, because they're not music nerds, they'll eat what they're given and that's fine, let Wet Leg be the sound of their summer or whatever. But when you're on ILM, do the work. Poptimism doesn't mean laziness. That obnoxious enough for you?

I know Wet Leg only through this forum. I'd not heard of them through any of my friends who are still pretty plugged into The Kids and What's Happening Now.

the position that Wet Leg make bogstandard indie

given an article involving 'bands that sound like Stereloab'/'shoegaze in 2022'/'the cultural institutions of college rock labels of the 1980s'/'garage rock legends' this would seem to fall in the narcissism of small differences zone.

I admittedly haven't listened to Dummy yet

Maybe I'll do the work now

you don't follow as much music as you frankly should as a critic/forum shitposter

This sounds like Stereolab!!!!

Nah, it's got my attention. See you all in 40 minutes

frankly i'll never understand how enjoying the wet leg record is lazy if you're on an internet music forum

“if it’s catchy and people who don’t normally pay obsessive attention to music like it it can’t possibly be good”

"if you listen to enough music then eventually your tastes will resemble imago's" is a good argument for paying less attention

1988 letter page to Rolling Stone complaining that Depeche Mode don’t play real instruments

I didn't realise there was an album-listening qualification threshold for posting to ILM

I should have checked the TOS.

But when you're on ILM, do the work.

“I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.”

consider the bar” he said, with an insouciant swirl of his snifter, “raised”

Dummy record has some cool ideas and some lovely moments. Don't think they're fully realised yet but there's something there. Can just about see why someone would write them an 8000-word advertisement, if they were friends with them

acts that get the Big Push from the big obvious places

We call it the Big P

wet leg down with OPP (Obvious Places Push)

you don't follow as much music as you frankly should as a critic/forum shitposter

― slide into my KMFDMs (morrisp)

my experience as a shitposter is that shitposting works better when you _haven't_ heard the band in question

wet leg? sounds like they peed themselves! haw, haw, haw!

(this works even better if this is, actually, the inspiration for their name - see also "i'm coming out? sounds GAY")

i heard about five seconds of them and didn't like it and nobody outside of this board has ever mentioned their existence, so i'm probably not gonna listen to any more of their stuff

how dare you question the cultural ubiquity of wet leg

poptimism is not about celebrating what is popular per se, it is about celebrating ALL music AS pop, and the issue then becomes exposure

i really like this

I didn't realise there was an album-listening qualification threshold for posting to ILM

Yeah I mean probably the best poster on ILM is someone who mainly posts about the same 2 artists. I would welcome more posters who are really deeply into one thing, I'm glad if that stuff can be posted here instead of on a fan board for the artist where i'd never come across it. And I don't think good criticism has to be "on the bear" either.

i really like this

I don't, especially. Adopting a pop-centred framework for looking at all music doesn't strike me as particularly beneficial, empowering, or enlightening.

i get why people see music that way (re: poptimism) but it doesn't work for me.

i heard about five seconds of them and didn't like it and nobody outside of this board has ever mentioned their existence, so i'm probably not gonna listen to any more of their stuff

I highly suggest you try out the tracks Convincing -> Loving You -> Your Mom(!)

I think they're truly great indie-pop/whatever

poptimism was a particular strategy at a particular time. i’m glad it happened and in many ways it “won” but it’s kind of meaningless now imo. though maybe not quite so meaningless as saying “all music is pop music” lol. what a strange thing to say. not all music is pop music. but hoo boy am i looking forward to not getting into an argument about it.

there's nowhere online where wet leg is more inescapable than ilx where posters who don't like wet leg can't stop posting about how hard it is to not see posts about wet leg

'ALL music' was an exaggeration. I did actually clarify at length earlier to Sund4r on a private chat, so it's annoying he's now relitigating what I've already clarified, lol

It's an idea that's crystallised following the peoples_pop polls on Twitter
Seeing straight up pop being celebrated in the same breath as art stuff, metal, psych, whatever
Polled against it, treated equally
Made me realise what the Ewing/FT poptimism project was actually about, which is something I agree with

Yeah, but with no scorn against commercial or simplistic pop music
A full acceptance of all music as having a right to one's approval

Perhaps it centres pop, but it also allows anything to try and be pop

Some things might be more obviously pop, but there is an effort on the part of the dedicated poptimist to hear any non-classical music as pop, and even some classical in a few cases
It only has to succeed as songs, really
Any song that one might call a banger, lol
The song is at the heart of pop
The album is a more classical format in a sense, imo
More literary, less immediate

these were my clarifications fwiw

I wasn't relitigating it with you; I was replying to Deflatormouse after he endorsed your original formulation, the only one on the thread xp until now. I do still think that you're describing a pop-centred framework for listening fwiw.

Anyway, we can agree on Wet Leg sucking.

I think that that is, or has become, my preferred framework, even when I'm listening to full prog or extreme metal or whatever. What would you say yours is? You're a musician, so perhaps your framework is more about performance and process?

I measure everything relative to "Fox on the Run" by Sweet. Pop is too broad.

(Will give a serious answer after I stop procrastinating and actually play some music; thanks for the reminder.)

i like wet leg too but a band's first single having a lavish video

Isn’t the video just them walking down a lane and sitting on a porch?

Anyway, we can agree on Wet Leg sucking.

I think that that is, or has become, my preferred framework, even when I'm listening to full prog or extreme metal or whatever.

checks out.

Sund4r, why do you think Wet Leg are bad? You have fairly considered taste, so I'm interested in your thoughts

i have been confusing wet leg and dry cleaning for this entire thread

Dry Cleaning played Glastonbury so they're presumably part of Big Indie anyway.

Yeah, the writer covered the bases:

Wet Leg, one of many mediocre British post-punk groups who you’re more or less informed that you like, because you’re into guitars, right, idiot?

I'm into mediocre British post-punk groups because I like bass, really.

lol post-punk was 40 years ago

poptimism was 20

I highly suggest you try out the tracks Convincing -> Loving You -> Your Mom(!)

I think they're truly great indie-pop/whatever

― slide into my KMFDMs (morrisp)

i might but honestly i have a backlog of about a billion things to listen to, and somehow i just keep listening to _dots and loops_

maybe after i catch up on the david axelrod thread

Morrisp, I should admit I've only listened to the singles/advance tracks and not the whole album and was shooting off my mouth about an ILM darling. In what I've heard, I just find the the music kind of basic and monotonous and the detached vocals unengaging in a way that feels dry and enervating more than fun or catchy or droll. The humour doesn't land for me at all. But honestly, it's not really the kind of thing I generally seek out in contemporary music so I should probably not be commenting. I'm not exactly sure what postpunk this stuff is supposed to be reviving but it doesn't recall for me the qualities I enjoy in Joy Division, Wire, Slits, etc.

one obvious post-punk precursor is the Flying Lizards, fwiw,

(I only just realized this now, but I stand by it)

What's the future of the music industry?

arguing abt indie authenticity on a message board obv

as for the past...

Having problems parsing the manifesto style commitment of Yeah, but with no scorn against commercial or simplistic pop music
A full acceptance of all music as having a right to one's approval

with punching up hit jobs, aesthetic or not.

No implicit scorn. Case by case judgement

the position that Wet Leg make bogstandard indie

there is nothing wrong with the bogstandard. the bog has a very reasonable standard and we of the bog strive to uphold it proudly. haven't heard wet leg but wanted to say a word on behalf of the bog

i prefer fogstandard indie (music inspired by foghat)

maybe the quality of peat is different over there

what's funny to this American is I just looked up bog standard, and it tells me it means having no or few interesting qualities

Dunno about y'all experiences with bogs but if something is coming from a bog, it sounds like it *will* have something interesting or cool about it. Maybe there are more bogs in the old country

Born on the Bogyou

I sort of imagine half of England as a giant bog.

Bog standard indie is when a perfectly preserved album made in 1992 is discovered today

I'm endlessly fascinated by bog butter.

i bet you are