“Fear is making the record companies less arrogant. They’re more open to ideas. So, what’s important now is to find music that’s timeless.”

Maybe it's a generational thing too - less willingness to struggle with poverty on the part of the children of boomers.

Bukowski said something about never trusting a writer who hadn't worked an eight-hour-a-day job. I think it's reasonable to say the same about any type of artist.

I totally agree.

So an artist has to have suffered (via an 8 hour work day) (or imbibe like Bukowski) to create true art! I am not sure I buy that. I judge Rick Rubin's production work based on what it sounds like to me, not based on whether he ever worked a dayjob. Whether or not I "trust" him, to use Unperson's description of the Bukowski phrase, does not matter.
Please do not turn this into an 'authenticity' rockism discussion.

I don't think it's that relevant anyway.

I'm not turning it into an authenticity discussion, or at least not trying to. If anything, I'm trying to make a comparison between a writer who works a day job then comes home and pounds out pages at night and some milk-fed, grant-sustained Iowa Writers' Workshop pussy who takes five years to pinch off some bloated, pretentious oh-so-postmodern opus aimed straight at the editors of The Believer. And wondering if there's something similar at work in music.

Barnett has other ideas, which he is discussing with Rubin. For instance, asking Columbia artists to give the record company up to 50 percent of their touring, merchandising and online revenue.

"Yeah guys, if you could just see your way clear to giving us half of your touring profits as, y'know, a favour."

This is already happening, though:

"Most bands, however successful, now make their money from live work and the merchandising opportunities that go with it, rather than from recordings. The record companies know this, which is why when EMI re-signed Robbie Williams in 2002, the £80m deal guaranteed the label a share in the profits generated by Williams's tours. Such spinoffs are often now make or break issues in contractual negotiations. Gerd Leonhard, a music business consultant, predicts that by 2010, recorded music sales will make up only 30 per cent of a successful label's revenues. The rest will be generated by artists' extra-musical brand extensions." From here:
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9735

It's now obvious to everyone that the business model doesn't work any more, and that Rubin article has some interesting things to say about what might happen next. I think it's inevitable we'll eventually see some kind of monthly subscription, perhaps bundled in with ISP subscription, that enables you to download or stream whatever you want to hear. Revenues of that subscription would then be split between record companies and artists depending on no. of downloads. The French govt has already debated this idea in parliament. Its time will come once good broadband service is ubiquitous and some smart 20 year old comes up with the right platform.

In any case, although the recording industry is in decline right now, I doubt that it's terminal. There will always be people who want to make music and people who want to listen to it, and there will always be financial opportunities in the interface between the two. The problem right now is that rapid technological advance has made it difficult to predict the future of that interface and therefore difficult to work out what the business model should be. That problem will eventually be solved.

yeah but guys you don't have to be on a major label to make a decent living off music, you don't even have sell that many records, you just have to be about yr business and not make stupid decisions

milk-fed, grant-sustained Iowa Writers' Workshop pussy who takes five years to pinch off some bloated, pretentious oh-so-postmodern opus aimed straight at the editors of The Believer.

I've met this guy - Jim Strawman! Nice fellow, gets a bad rap tho

milk-fed?

"oh-so-" = always winceworthy

"yeah but guys you don't have to be on a major label to make a decent living off music, you don't even have sell that many records, you just have to be about yr business and not make stupid decisions"

Exactly. So really all being on a major label does is help a precious few artists move from comfortable to ridiculously rich and a lot more move into debt without much to show for it.

But even with an indie label 50/50 split and a reasonably successful record (say 10,000 copies, and even that is getting harder to do), you're not looking at a huge chunk of money once you split it between the band - maybe something like a dollar per member per CD before taxes. Touring is supposed to be the big income generator, but it seems to take a couple of years of heavy touring before you have any reliable profit from this, barring lucky breaks with hype, and even then you're far from guaranteed anything. So at very least you've got a long, risky transitional period, and most guys I know who have tried this route have gone into major credit card debt and/or lived without health insurance and/or lived like gutter punks, unless they were lucky enough to have a super-flexible job -- and most of them never saw real money from music. Gas is more expensive and there are more bands competing for spots at fewer clubs. There's almost no radio support for indie music except college and the occasional AAA station.

Lefsetz weighs in:

http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2007/09/04/rick-rubinny-times/

+2 use of caps

all that bit about qualifications is so much bullshit - there are no qualifications required nor necessary: so many big industry moves in the history of the business have been made by people who technically had no idea what they were doing, just intuition & impulse (Alpert & Mangione, Geffen, Berry Gordy, Sinatra, the list is endless) and the strength of having been at some point somewhere near the trenches

Good point. He may be right about the following though:

As for a new office... An expensive one, at that. Why don't you explain to your acts, who you make record at home on Pro Tools, why you have to blow all this money.

there are a fair number of people [in the us] living without health insurance; while i grasp your point, nothing at all is guaranteed to non-rockstars. there seem to be plenty of ilx0rs working at wages that don't correspond to their abilities. unless you are truly exceptional, should you really expect more? outstanding musicians, like nba players, are pretty rare and pretty financially disposable. (actually, nfl players are a lot more disposable.) if the money is overflowing then obviously the artist(s) deserve the lion's share, but if not...

why does he look so old?

With careful graft, a musician can make a modest living from their main thing, as long as they're not working in a small market, skimp on extras like health insurance, and don't have children. It also helps if they have a trust fund or generous parents. From what I can observe, in Australia at least, musicians who aren't independently wealthy almost always do work at least eight hours a day.

Commonly, I see musicians diversifying and working in various fields for income, and squeezing their music in around it. Apart from their main band or project, they will often tour as hired guns with big profile artists; play in small local bands, often playing covers; write, record or sing TV ads; or work full or part time in a music-oriented day job (eg, a music tutor, a university lecturer or community artsworker).

The ones I've observed over the years that go hard on their main project and have some financial success usually end up having to fall back on one or more of the other areas eventually. As mookie says, working without health insurance is a gamble and can't be maintained indefinitely.

This isn't a disaster - one must simply become very disciplined in one's time management. It can be done, and one has the added benefit of not being answerable in one's creative decision-making to a record company.

I'm really not sure how this relates to Rick Rubin. Perhaps this is another conversation for another thread.

"As mookie says, working without health insurance is a gamble and can't be maintained indefinitely."

Is health insurance a standard package for major label artists or something? I've never heard that. I was always under the impression they had to self-insure.

I would not expect any such clause in any record contract, big or small. I think the point was that many artists at the indie level cut corners on health insurance (and savings, for that matter) because they have to.

So, eh, when's the Hose reunion? That's all I care about.

If anything, I'm trying to make a comparison between a writer who works a day job then comes home and pounds out pages at night and some milk-fed, grant-sustained Iowa Writers' Workshop pussy who takes five years to pinch off some bloated, pretentious oh-so-postmodern opus aimed straight at the editors of The Believer.

--vs.--

Because people like this tool of my acquaintance (who, by the way, teaches English in Taiwan for a living, precisely because life is cheap, the hours are short, and he's got a fetish to indulge) internalized the perverse "Protestant work ethic," they can no longer see that people who work for a living are to be pitied. Not because there's something innately horrible about work in itself, but because there's something innately horrible about selling your life. Work for what you want, and do as little as necessary to achieve as much as possible. Pay-the-rent jobs are all shitty, all a waste of time, all to be avoided as much as possible. It's the work you do for yourself that's virtuous; all the rest is evil, because it steals time you could be spending doing something enjoyable. Life is a one-way journey with no do-overs. Every moment you spend doing something you'd rather not be doing, whether it's working for an asshole boss so you can pay an asshole landlord or talking to someone whose conversation is like a drill-bit in the brain, is time you'll never get back.

But maybe you have less respect for people who appear to have inherited that leisure than people who have done the work to come up with a scam that will give them that leisure?

Strange article. It's not very complimentary of Rubin, it almost makes him seem like a guy who sticks his finger up to see which way the wind is blowing. And the thing about making Ipods obsolete with some sort of strange subscription service made no sense, to me at least.

I didn't know before reading this that the kids don't think myspace is cool anymore and that facebook is on its way out.

Also I'm kind of shocked that Rick Rubin likes The Gossip so much.

why does he look so old?

-- Maria :D, Wednesday, 5 September 2007 03:03 (11 hours ago) Link

Vegan?

And the thing about making Ipods obsolete with some sort of strange subscription service made no sense, to me at least.

I don't know about making ipods obsolete, but the thing about the subscription service makes perfect sense to me. Once buying physical product finally disappears, how else are you going to make money from recorded music? Downloads bought per track are clearly not making up for the downturn in CD sales. There will be a new paradigm, and I think some sort of monthly subscription is likely to be it. It's not that wildly different from paying for cable TV is it?

someone needs to come up with a lossless subscription service. i know bleep.com does FLAC.

someone needs to stop friggin paying for music

I have no interest in subscribing to a service wherein someone else, particularly a large corporation, is choosing what I get to hear

does he really look that old for a man in his mid-40s? i'd say most guys with facial hair start going gray in the beard by that age, if not much earlier.

i agree shakey. i have zero interest in subscription services in general as they are today because i trust my taste before anyone else's, but it could still be done in a worthwhile way i think. (like last.fm/audioscrobbler or something although i never use those)

giant corporate labels can't even cooperate long enough to put out a decent box set for an artist whose work spans across several labels, how the fuck would they ever cobble together a subscription service wherein I would actually be able to find stuff I want to listen to

itunes

itunes' selection is pathetic

Wait, where are you guys getting the impression that a subscription service would involve someone deciding what you listen to? I thought the idea was a monthly fee for unlimited access to songs. I already have an emusic subscription, which is a flat fee for a set number of downloads per month, and it's great. Even though there's tons of stuff not available (all major label music and some indies), I can always find plenty of stuff I want. I'd assume a subscription service that had participation of the big labels would only offer more selection, not less (unless they shut out the little labels or something).

there's such a huge disparity these days between being critically "blog/internet" successful and financially record label successful. i don't know how often the two worlds meet.

Of course, that said, I don't think such a model would save the big labels, b/c the 50-quid men of the world would probably be spending less for more music unless the fee was pretty high, and most other people probably wouldn't want to pay very much per month (especially with free music out there.

I suppose you could have a multi-level system, like emusic does now. A really, really deep catalog that was always instantly available might be able to compete with free, i.e. people who download illegally might pay a monthly fee for the ability to get anything anytime instead of having to find it on a torrent site and then being uncertain about quality, file security, etc.

where are you guys getting the impression that a subscription service would involve someone deciding what you listen to?

Hurting you answer your own question here: there's tons of stuff not available (all major label music and some indies)

i.e., the labels not being able to agree on what's available = access being limited due to corporate douchebaggery

I mean come on the FUCKING BEATLES are not on iTunes.

Ok, but that's not "some corporation" deciding, that's a bunch of different companies not participating, and presumably that's because it's still a new thing and labels haven't accepted the concept. If they accepted the concept, your argument would be moot.

they can't accept the concept because its too complicated legally to sort out all the rights, payments, etc. They'll all collapse (and "be bought out for pennies") before they figure it out.

in other words its the Gordian Knot - it can't be untangled, it must be cut altogether.

You might be right. But why does it have to be complicated? Why not just share revenue as a percentage of total downloads? If the new Justin Timberlake single is 5% of downloads for a given week, why not just pay out a proportional amount of subscription revenue? I know that could be more complicated than it sounds, but these labels use pretty elaborate revenue schemes as it is.

"You might be right. But why does it have to be complicated? Why not just share revenue as a percentage of total downloads?"

You are kidding, right? Have you ever read any contracts? Or any legal documents ever?

it will be amusing if jobs announces beatles on itunes today

Yeah, actually I have.

The record companies already have plenty of complex legal arrangements though.

If the record companies don't move to subscription, it will either be because they're too resistant to change (which they've shown themselves to be so far), or because they think it will be a net loss from the revenue they currently earn from recordings (which is going to keep declining anyway).

personally I feel a high degree of shadenfreude at the major labels' current predicament - with CDs they created an unnecessary and inferior technology and foisted it on the market at ridiculously overpriced rates and now the principles behind that very same technology (i.e., digital copies of music) are proving to be their undoing.

Meanwhile, the original "punk rock"/DIY dream of the music scene being diversified and democratized has been realized: an ever-increasing number of people/kids/music fiends/whathaveyou are freely creating and sharing content with an increasingly smaller and smaller degree of corporate mediation.

I do think the labels have really hurt themselves with the way they've continued to treat artists. That thing about revenue sharing from touring and merch is really offensive. What self-respecting artists would want to go to a label that even considered a deal like that? I mean you've got a whole generation of kids raised on the idea that the music business is evil; a lot of them have read the Donald Passman book, the Steve Albini essay, etc., not to mention growing up with bands like Fugazi that set a different example, watching labels like Matador rise to prominence, etc., and there's a similar (though not entirely parallel) story in hip-hop. In other words, talented artists no longer necessarily see the majors as the place to go, and this becomes a recruiting problem.

I think the labels still operate with an early 60s mindset - where you could find a good looking kid with a nice voice on the street and make him into a star, then milk everything you could out of him until he went dry.

These days labels want things both ways - they want an artist to walk in already developed and marketable, which takes lots of savvy on the artist's part, but then they want to fully take advantage of the artist, which assumes the artist lacks savvy.

I dunno, I wouldn't really call the Shins "fresh and creative" music. It seems like more and more the large indies are shepherding decent, but ultimately boring acts into the mainstream over a period of time. Large indies are informing a reasonable amount of mainstream taste these days. Obviously, this model doesn't account for the people who just need some Nickelback or decent teen pop, but can't you see some kind of new label entering the arena to fill this void?

Whether you think The Shins are "fresh and creative" is totally irrelevant - I'm talking about bands that are the bread and butter of their labels. If those bands make less money, the labels make less money, and they have less money to put out less accessible acts. If anything, a little boutique label that only focuses on "fresh, creative" music is the worst off of anyone - labels like that can't afford to take a 10% hit to their bottom line because a few people are getting their stuff for free.

i do like rubins 'if you make art people will respond' idea but the idea that we still need mega-mass marketed mainstream music needs a rethink IMO. and theres plenty of artists making 'art' on the fringes, some of whom ARE on majors, and i dont see any of that stuff shifting major units (obv, TVOTR were never going to sell much anyway but hey...) like rubin thinks they will...

If anything, a little boutique label that only focuses on "fresh, creative" music is the worst off of anyone - labels like that can't afford to take a 10% hit to their bottom line because a few people are getting their stuff for free.

I'm not sure if that is entirely accurate, considering how the boutique labels traditionally emphasize packaging, artwork, and limited editions. Check out eBay: OOP releases by boutique labels command relatively big bucks even though much of the music can be found for free online.