What's the future of the music industry?

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.