Last week host of Networking Musician Radio, David Vignola interviewed me about Music Power Network and the Future of Music. Here is the audio interview along with a link to David’s site. Great resource for indie artists.
Music Power Network provides a wide variety of music business education, tools, interviews and lots of resources for the D.I.Y. musician. The site also offers an equal wealth of information / education for producers, managers or publishers.
Guest Post by MC Lars
Back in 2005, my former manager at Nettwerk, Tom Gates, gave me a copy of Kusek’s “Future of Music” book.
“Read it,” Gates said. “It might be interesting to you.”
I read the whole book in a weekend and was inspired to write a song detailing the changes Kusek proposed, many of which have come true. It seemed crazy then. Five years later, there has been an ideological shift made very apparent by the new generation of artists and consumers; music isn’t really a physical product anymore, it’s a service that artists provide that they are then paid for (if the service they provide has cultural and/or emotional value).
The song I wrote was called “Download This Song“, and it charted in Australia where I did TRL on MTV. The YouTube video received a half a million plays and the single was given press in the NME, the UK’s biggest music magazine. Afterwards, a girl in Texas who was being sued by the RIAA heard the song and contacted me. I forwarded it to Gates. Gates sent it to Terry McBride. Nettwerk paid for her legal fees because one of the songs in her collection was by an artist they managed. Clearly the ideas in the book and my song had reached a large audience.
It’s honestly somewhat eerie how much of what Kusek predicted came true. Gone is the ineffectual A&R I described in songs like “Signing Emo” who races to find “the next hit” to get their band on the radio and a $200,000 video that only recoups 10% of the time. WTF? Gone is the idea that record labels are necessary or even always helpful. Gone too is MTV’s agency as a music network, platinum albums, and commercial music retailers like Tower Records and Circuit City.
It might seem very bleak to the common music fan, but from an artist’s perfective, things have never been better. In the independent hip-hop community, thousands and thousands of regional pockets of talented artists working hard to perfect and distribute their material have all popped up across America and the world. No longer do artists aim to get $1,000,000 advances, a ridiculous and usually unrecoupable amount, but find themselves as part of an emerging middle-class that Kusek predicted would come to be.
Rap crews like Twiztid and the Psychopathic collective have used their underground and independent acumen to build empires and continue to bring tens of thousands of kids to their annual midwest hip-hop festival. Upstate New York’s Weerd Science have become a credible and influential voice in the hip-hop underground on the strength of their 2005 debut – an impressive feet for a group with no strong label backing or touring history. Records and regional tours have directly translated to lucrative career music for some of these artists.
The Peter Principal states that in the workplace, “each employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence”. Basically this means that you will keep getting promoted and promoted until you are unable to do the next job and that there is a subjectively manifested glass ceiling based on one’s ability to do their job. This is reflected in the music scene because artists now get to become as famous as they care to be or deserve. If the music is good, it sticks with people.
And this meritocracy is the future Kusek predicted – catalyzed, in part, by the broadband technological improvements made in the last few years. HD YouTube videos are a click away, downloading speeds have increased and you can get any artist’s discography for free within a few clicks. I listen to most of my new albums on Rhapsody because it’s easier than keeping track of the stacks hard drives full of mp3s I’ve collected over the years. There’s a Zen to music consumption now, one of the new simplicity of it all.
And for the record, I’m living proof that downloading doesn’t hurt artists. Without the advent of torrents, kids can quickly get any of my albums for free at any time from basically anywhere. And that’s awesome! Kids have my albums, even the rare out-of-print ones, because they’ve found them for free online. Some of them decide to help support me in other ways by buying t-shirts or getting the occasional track from iTunes, which adds up if the net is wide enough. I then pay my bills with digital sales, college gigs, and international touring.
I can’t buy a mansion in Hollywood, but that was never the goal. I get by comfortably and will keep making music until I die. High five! What more could I ask for? The 14 year old version of myself would be very proud of how I turned out at 27.
“Music was a product, now it is a service”.
Check out a new favorite crew of mine from South Africa, Die Antwoord, luminaries in the Johannesburg “zef-rap” scene. In a truly viral word-of-mouth fashion, another artist I’d worked with (Tina Root from Switchblade Symphony) sent me the YouTube link.
“You’ll like this,” she said. “It’s different.” She was right.
I checked out their “Enter the Ninja” video – the raps were tight, the chorus was very catchy, the visuals were unique, and the editing was dope! I then researched zef-rap and learned that it is an international postmodern culture that takes every regional hip-hop tradition I could imagine and amalgamates it into one thing. It’s hip-hop of the future that I had found by the web from a colleague.
This is how it “zef” a uniquely postmodern hip-hop form: In one video, a rapper named Jack Parow “ghostrides” his car, dancing along side of it. This is a hip-hop tradition that was popularized in the Bay Area in the last decade, a reflection of the car culture being so integral to “hyphy” rappers like E-40 and Mac Dre. Zef-rap incorporates many regional hip-hop movements into one genre, which is why I’m so in love with it these days! Would I have heard of this genre otherwise? Probably not. It’s all because of this viral video my friend sent. Now I can’t stop talking about them.
When kids ask me how I got into music, I always tell them this; if you want to have a career in indie hip-hop or any other genre of music these days, you need to be dedicated, come original, and work on building your brand as something real and human that people can relate to. Don’t expect to make money on albums, labels are essentially just banks that help promote artists as brands, with CDs being their main promotional tool.
Kusek gave me hope when I was starting out that the playing field would be leveled if you believe in your art. The punk rock ethics that I grew up with as a teenager in the late 90s are very conducive to the new culture of music listening and consumption.
I’d also like to thank Dave for his support through the years and also for getting me into classes at the Berklee College of Music in 2007 – I’ve learned a lot from him and trust you all can too.
Much respect to anyone working to make a career in music.
Welcome to the future!
MC Lars
Do you want to create a successful career in music? How you think about your future is critically important. Always be as positive as you possibly can be. Think about what success means to you and how you can get there. Define your goals and be realistic in what you are trying to achieve. Get others to join in your vision and support your efforts.
Be honest and dependable in your pursuits. The music business is a very small world, and it is likely that you will form a network of people that will help you at various times along your path. Treat them with respect and take responsibility for your actions, and you will find a lot of support when you need it. Often times things you setup at one point in your career, will come around again and be available to cross your path. Be sure you that the encounter will be something you expect and not an unpleasant surprise.
Make a 360 degree deal with yourself and find ways to generate revenue from your writing, performing, brand, name, activities, and interests that suit you and what you stand for. You do not want to sell your soul to another entity that will control your career options and minimize the revenue opportunities that you will have down the road.
Build a team around yourself. It is impossible for one person to do everything that needs to get done. In the case of an artist or writer, you need to write, create, record, and produce art. You need someone else to promote your work and manage the business side of things. You are forming a musician business around yourself, and eventually you will need help. The team you need will depend on what stage of your career you are at.
Eventually, as you begin to take off, you will need some combination of a manager, booking agent, producer, publisher, lawyer, publicist, agent, marketing person, online specialists, technologist, and others to help you. What does your mix look like? Imagine an organizational chart in your head, with you as the CEO. Who do you need on your team?
When trying to recruit people to your team, sell your vision and art, and get them to join in with you. It is a good reality check to try recruiting people to your dream to see if it resonates with them. Learn to understand, listen to, and ultimately motivate others by communicating clearly. Build a team around you.
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” This is a great quote from Alan Kay, one of the creative geniuses behind the laptop computer and the mouse. Musician can apply this thinking to their own careers by planning for success in a dedicated and systematic way.
I came across this great guest post by Kevin English on Creative Deconstruction that talks about the “Lower Class Musician” and suggestions for how to lift yourself out of that class into a middle or upper class status through controlling your overhead, aligning your expectations, creating a plan, getting a good and current education and diversifying your product offering. These are all things that I have blogged about in great detail in the past and agree with completely.
Here in an excerpt from Kevin’s post:
“Learn to structure yourself like any other startup and formulate a strategy on paper that will sustain you for three to five years. You’ll soon find out that overspending on manufacturing, marketing, promotion and distribution is very difficult to recoup.
For some of us, music is a hobby and that is okay. However, if you plan on feeding your children by touring the Chitlin’ circuit, that’s another thing entirely. When I realized that writing songs for Columbia Records and recording demos with The Fugees wasn’t going to sustain me forever, I had to adjust my expectations. These gigs were few and far in between and often times didn’t pay half as much as you would expect them to.
I studied profitable ideas, people, and businesses to find a common denominator. I learned that nine out of ten successful startups had a business plan. Not just any old plan, but one that was standard across all industries. Financial planning, marketing, and the management of people and products/services cannot be done on the fly. If all you want is for people to hear your music that is fine. But again, you can’t necessarily expect to make a decent living.
Hundreds of books have been written on the subject of business plans, yet no one in the music business seems to think they need one — until, of course, they run out of cash. I spent years in my local SBA in Newark, NJ looking at sample plans, meeting with retired CEOs of successful companies, and learning how basic businesses operate.
If you do the same you’ll realize that most startups have more similarities than you’d expect. However, it is important to point out that no two plans are alike. You will still need to write a plan specifically based around your music-related products and services. My first plan was a disaster. I asked my uncle for $75K with a promise to return 20% of the loan over the next five years. He had a good laugh over that one, but at least he knew I was serious about my dreams.”
To read his full post look here.
I was hanging out with my friend Charlie McEnerney last night and asked him about his interview with Larry Lessig. Here is his post and a link to the complete interview from Well Rounded Radio. Check it out.
In many music and entertainment circles, the name Lawrence Lessig needs no introduction, but for those who don’t know his work, here’s some background.
Lessig is a lawyer and activist whose interests are mostly in intellectual property, copyright, technology, and political reform. He’s has written five influential books, including Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (2000), The Future of Ideas (2001), Free Culture (2004), Code: Version 2.0 (2006), and Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (2008).
Remix was just published in paperback in October 2009.
Over the past 10 years, Lessig has worked for both Harvard Law School and Stanford Law School. He is currently a lawyer at Harvard Law School and director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University.
Lessig is a founding board member of Creative Commons. In 2008, Lessig launched the Change Congress campaign, now called Fix Congress First.
Lessig talks about Creative Commons during the interview, but in a nutshell it’s an organization with copyright tools that allows content creators to give various levels of freedom to others for them to remix and build upon the original work.
The idea behind remix culture is how an artist can take a work that a pervious artist has produced and build upon it to create something new. The term has become more commonplace in the last decade, but in fact the concept has been in use for decades, most notably in rap music starting 30 years ago.
Growing up in Queens, New York, I was lucky enough to hear the rap bands of the first era pretty early on (granted, thanks to bands like Blondie and The Clash and college radio putting Grandmaster Flash, The Sugar Hill Gang, Kurtis Blow, and Afrika Bambaattaa on my radar) which usually utilized sampling techniques when creating their music.
I have long been a fan of the groups who fine tuned the ideas behind audio sampling to perfection, in Long Island’s Public Enemy and De La Soul. I’ve always thought both groups pushed the ideas behind sampling in ways that few others did before or since, albeit in very different directions.
With Public Enemy’s 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and De La Soul’s 1989 album 3 Feet High and Rising, at the moment it seemed like the idea of what music “is” was being reinvented.
But, after a series of lawsuits for a variety of musicians and labels, the art of sampling and remixing was largely hobbled, in either using others work with or without their consent.
Twenty years later, it is still mostly the domain of those willing to tread in dangerous waters or for artists who want to engage their own fans by allowing them to remix work as part of the growing participatory culture community. For remix artists who might be looking to push their ideas further, it’s unlikely they can put their work into the public without a sizable budget.
Having read all of Lessig’s work and seen two recent documentaries about the remix culture (Brett Gaylor’s RIP: A Remix Manifesto and Benjamin Franzen’s Copyright Criminals), I wanted to speak with Lessig about how current musicians could utilize Creative Commons and share with their own audience as well as look at how we music fans can better understand this era of shared creativity, which dramatically changes the idea of those performers vs. us in the audience.
In addition to these films and Lessig’s Remix book, some good reads on the subject include DJ Spooky’s book Sound Unbound (2008) and Matt Mason’s The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism (2009).
The show includes music from the earlier era of sampling as well as some recent examples of mainstream musicians offering up their work for remixing, including David Byrne and Brian Eno, Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, and Bjork.
I sat down with Lessig at his office at Harvard Law School to discuss:
* why it’s unlikely the current copyright system will change
* why Greg Gillis, also known as Girl Talk, has not been sued
* how Creative Commons works and how musicians can use it to engage their fans even more
Songs included in the interview include:
1) Public Enemy: Welcome to the Terrordome (Welcome to the Terrordome) (in preview)
2) Grandmaster Flash: The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel
3) De La Soul: Me Myself and I (3 Feet High and Rising)
4) Public Enemy: Night of the Living Baseheads
5) DJ Moule: Black Sabotage remix of Beastie Boys‘s Sabotage
6) Radiohead: Reckoner (In Rainbows)
7) Nick Olivetti: Nasty Fish remix of Radiohead‘s Reckoner
8) David Byrne + Brian Eno: Help Me Somebody (My Life in the Bush of Ghosts)
9) Owl Garden: Secret Somebody remix of David Byrne + Brian Eno‘s Help Me Somebody
10) Mr. Briggs Hit me somebody remix of David Byrne + Brian Eno‘s Help Me Somebody
11) Girl Talk: No Pause (Feed the Animals)
12) Girl Talk: In Step (Feed the Animals)
13) Danger Mouse: Encore (The Gray Album)
14) The Album Leaf‘s remix of Nina Simone‘s Lilac Wine from Verve Remixed
15) Vind‘s remix of Bjork‘s Venus as a Boy
16) Fatboy Slim: Praise You (You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby)
17) Amplive‘s remix of Radiohead‘s Weird Fishes
Again and again, I have heard this sage advice when asking producers, label executives, and publishers about artist development. Take your time. The first and most important thing to do is to get the music right: love your music, immerse yourself in it, and live it.
As an artist/writer, your coin of the realm is your songs, and they need to be great, polished, and professional. The worst thing you can do is go to market too soon. Without careful preparation, practice, understanding, listening to others, testing your material, developing its quality, and crafting and articulating a unique story to tell, you will probably enter the marketplace too early and will most likely fail. Start out slowly. Practice. A lot.
Another critical component of artist development is live performance. Any venue will do to get started. Play the smallest clubs to get used to performing and being in front of an audience. Everybody gets better over time, and live performance in front of a crowd does many positive things for your career. When you play live, you develop sets of songs that you play and expand your repertoire. Don’t be afraid to play other people’s material mixed in with your own. Covers create a sense of familiarity that you can use to build your audience. You are also learning by playing the songs of other great artists.
Performing live helps you build your confidence and song quality, lets you interact with an audience, and experience their reactions to your songs. Also, when you play live, you can test out different material and approaches to your songs. You can experiment and find out new things about the song, tempo, bridge, chorus, lyric, etc. You can see which songs are the most popular, what should be the rhythm of your set, where the audience loses its attention, and how best to open and close a show.
Live performance and touring is a major cornerstone to any artist’s career and is one of the best ways to develop an audience. Over time, your audience will grow with you as you refine your art. Superstars Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, James Taylor, Paul Simon, and countless others all played small clubs for very minimal dollars at first, refining their approach, music, and brands to small audiences that grew over time. Just look at the size of their audiences now.
Many successful executives have told me that good music finds an audience and is very difficult to keep under wraps. If you want to have a long career in the music business, take a good look at yourself, who are you, and the package that you bring to the table. Do you have the songs, do you have the talent, do you have the charisma, and are you really ready to go to market? Develop, refine, write, practice, play live, listen, and collaborate.
Listen to Others
Great artists and writers take the time to develop, but they also listen to people around them who they can trust to give them feedback and keep them honest about what they are trying to do and how well they are accomplishing it. This is role of the A&R person, record producer, publisher, and artist manager. You simply cannot believe your own press and expect to be successful. You also cannot rely on your mother or family to be objective about what you are doing. You need to get honest opinions from a lot of different people who will tell you the truth. Listen carefully to them as a sounding board for your career and ask hard questions like the following: Do you like my songs? How do I look on stage? What do I need to do to improve? What advice can you give me?
Your fans are the ultimate source of feedback. Set up a blog or some other means of creating two-way communication. Encourage people to tell you what they think. Hand out postcards at your gigs, collect your fans email and cell phone numbers, and ask them what they think of your set, your songs, your performance, etc. Don’t be afraid of what you might hear, and use the feedback to learn, refine, and further develop your brand and music.
Collaborate
Having a band is a great way to collaborate, and hopefully you will find other musicians to play and write with at various points in your career. Another hallmark of great artists and writers is that they work with different musicians to write songs, perform together, cover each other’s songs, and most importantly learn from one another. Collaboration and the exchange of ideas are the life-blood of creative artistry.
Collaboration does not mean that you are joined at the hip with another artist forever. You can move in and out of collaborative partnerships when you need something new to spark the creative juices or just get you going in another direction. Working with other talented musicians can be a challenge. Quincy Jones has great advice for when you walk into the studio to work with other artists. He says, “Check your ego at the door.” Find people you can work with, who you enjoy being around, and who make you feel good.
There are many examples of great songwriting collaborations, including Holland, Holland & Dozier, Lennon and McCartney, and Elton John and Bernie Taupin. The list is long. Don’t be afraid to cowrite with other people or to record other songwriter’s material. This can help you reach a broader audience, develop your talents in new directions, and potentially open up your brand by association with other great artists.
One of the most successful songwriters of the last 30 years is Don Henley of the Eagles. He talks about identifying your strengths and weaknesses through collaboration with great writers like Jackson Brown and Glen Frey, and being willing to put someone else’s songs on your record if they are better than your own. Seems to have worked for him.
Many of the most successful songs of all time have come out of collaborative partnerships that were organized on a formal level at some of the songwriting factories of the past, including the Brill Building, Motown, and Philadelphia International. Collaboration helps you to stand on the shoulders of others and to peer over a horizon that you might not be able to see on your own.
From a fascinating article just published in the Atlantic. “The Grateful Dead’s influence on the business world may turn out to be a significant part of its legacy. Without intending to—while intending, in fact, to do just the opposite—the band pioneered ideas and practices that were subsequently embraced by corporate America. One was to focus intensely on its most loyal fans. It established a telephone hotline to alert them to its touring schedule ahead of any public announcement, reserved for them some of the best seats in the house, and capped the price of tickets, which the band distributed through its own mail-order house. If you lived in New York and wanted to see a show in Seattle, you didn’t have to travel there to get tickets—and you could get really good tickets, without even camping out. “The Dead were masters of creating and delivering superior customer value,” Barry Barnes, a business professor at the H. Wayne Huizenga School of Business and Entrepreneurship at Nova Southeastern University, in Florida, told me. Treating customers well may sound like common sense. But it represented a break from the top-down ethos of many organizations in the 1960s and ’70s. Only in the 1980s, faced with competition from Japan, did American CEOs and management theorists widely adopt a customer-first orientation.
As Barnes and other scholars note, the musicians who constituted the Dead were anything but naive about their business. They incorporated early on, and established a board of directors (with a rotating CEO position) consisting of the band, road crew, and other members of the Dead organization. They founded a profitable merchandising division and, peace and love notwithstanding, did not hesitate to sue those who violated their copyrights. But they weren’t greedy, and they adapted well. They famously permitted fans to tape their shows, ceding a major revenue source in potential record sales. According to Barnes, the decision was not entirely selfless: it reflected a shrewd assessment that tape sharing would widen their audience, a ban would be unenforceable, and anyone inclined to tape a show would probably spend money elsewhere, such as on merchandise or tickets. The Dead became one of the most profitable bands of all time.
It’s precisely this flexibility that Barnes believes holds the greatest lessons for business—he calls it “strategic improvisation.” It isn’t hard to spot a few of its recent applications. Giving something away and earning money on the periphery is the same idea proffered by Wired editor Chris Anderson in his recent best-selling book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Voluntarily or otherwise, it is becoming the blueprint for more and more companies doing business on the Internet. Today, everybody is intensely interested in understanding how communities form across distances, because that’s what happens online. Far from being a subject of controversy, Rebecca Adams’s next book on Deadhead sociology has publishers lining up.
Much of the talk about “Internet business models” presupposes that they are blindingly new and different. But the connection between the Internet and the Dead’s business model was made 15 years ago by the band’s lyricist, John Perry Barlow, who became an Internet guru. Writing in Wired in 1994, Barlow posited that in the information economy, “the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away.” As Barlow explained to me: “What people today are beginning to realize is what became obvious to us back then—the important correlation is the one between familiarity and value, not scarcity and value. Adam Smith taught that the scarcer you make something, the more valuable it becomes. In the physical world, that works beautifully. But we couldn’t regulate [taping at] our shows, and you can’t online. The Internet doesn’t behave that way. But here’s the thing: if I give my song away to 20 people, and they give it to 20 people, pretty soon everybody knows me, and my value as a creator is dramatically enhanced. That was the value proposition with the Dead.” The Dead thrived for decades, in good times and bad. In a recession, Barnes says, strategic improvisation is more important then ever. “If you’re going to survive this economic downturn, you better be able to turn on a dime,” he says. “The Dead were exemplars.” It can be only a matter of time until Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead or some similar title is flying off the shelves of airport bookstores everywhere.”
Ariel Hyatt, expert music publicist, discusses the important of building, maintaining and knowing your Community as an artist. The story of “What Are Records” and “The Samples”.
On my way to the TED conference last week, I devoured Jay Frank’s book Futurehit.dna on the plane. Jay has some great insights into the past, present and future of songwriting and hit making that we can all learn from. This is a must read if you are composing for the digital age and trying to gain an edge and find exposure opportunities for listeners.
Jay breaks it down for us on the impact of technology on songwriting and how hits of the past have been carefully crafted to fit into radio airplay on to the iPod, Pandora and streaming era. His insights into how song form, intros, chord changes, repeats, hooks and other techniques connect a good song with a listener are invaluable.
With today’s digital music is it crucial to catch your listeners attention in the first seven seconds of the song. After that, repeats are key as well as how the complexity of the song changes over time. Some of this is old news, but the way he relates it to the technology platforms is interesting and valuable.
How you release music and in what form will determine your chances that your songs will be listened to and remembered enough to make an impact.
Technical, detailed, clear and concise Futurehit.dna will get you thinking about how to create a competitive advantage for you and your music in the days ahead. Highly recommended food for though.
Here’s a great post by Mike Masnick.
“As you look through all of these, some patterns emerge. They’re not about getting a fee on every transaction or every listen or every stream. They’re not about licensing. They’re not about DRM or lawsuits or copyright. They’re about better connecting with the fans and then offering them a real, scarce, unique reason to buy — such that in the end, everyone is happy. Fans get what they want at a price they want, and the musicians and labels make money as well. It’s about recognizing that the music itself can enhance the value of everything else, whether it’s shows, access or merchandise, and that letting fans share music can help increase the market and create more fans willing to buy compelling offerings. It’s about recognizing that even when the music is shared freely, there are business models that work wonders, without copyright or licensing issues even coming into play.
Adding in new licensing schemes only serves to distort this kind of market. Fans and artists are connecting directly and doing so in a way that works and makes money. Putting in place middlemen only takes a cut away from the musicians and serves to make the markets less efficient. They need to deal with overhead and bureaucracy. They need to deal with collections and allocation. They make it less likely for fans to support bands directly, because the money is going elsewhere. Even when licensing fees are officially paid further up the line, those costs are passed on to the end users, and the money might not actually go to supporting the music they really like.
Instead, let’s let the magic of the market continue to work. New technologies are making it easier than ever for musicians to create, distribute and promote music — and also to make money doing so. In the past, the music business was a “lottery,” where only a very small number made any money at all. With these models, more musicians than ever before are making money today, and they’re not doing it by worrying about copyright or licensing. They’re embracing what the tools allow. A recent study from Harvard showed how much more music is being produced today than at any time in history, and the overall music ecosystem — the amount of money paid in support of music — is at an all time high, even if less and less of it is going to the purchase of plastic discs.
This is a business model that’s working now and it will work better and better in the future as more people understand the mechanisms and improve on them. Worrying about new copyright laws or new licensing schemes or new DRM or new lawsuits or new ways to shut down file sharing is counterproductive, unnecessary and dangerous. Focusing on what’s working and encouraging more of that is the way to go. It’s a model that works for musicians, works for enablers and works for fans. It is the future and we should be thrilled with what it’s producing.”
The music industry is being reinvented before our very eyes. Learn how it is developing from today’s entrepreneurs including Ian Rogers from TopSpin, Steve Schnur from EA, and Derek Sivers and how you can capitalize on the changing opportunities.
MPN is my latest project and an online service for music business people and music and artist managers creating the future of the industry. MPN provides online music business lessons, exclusive video interviews and advice, career and business planning tools and thousands of specially selected resources designed to help you achieve success in this ever changing industry. MPN gives you the tools, expertise and guidance to help you get organized and take your music career to the next level. Learn from industry experts, set your goals and realize your vision.
It is great to see successful artists rally around causes bigger than declining record sales or online piracy. The Green Music Group, founded by Guster’s Adam Gardner and his wife, environmentalist Lauren Sullivan along with Sheryl Crow, Willy Nelson, Dave Matthews Band, Bare Naked Ladies, Linkin Park and Bonnie Raitt and others is organizing to bring about widespread environmental change within the music industry and around the globe.
The newly formed coalition is focused on transforming the music business’s environmental practices in the areas of:
GMG is a large-scale, high-profile environmental coalition of musicians, industry leaders and music fans using our collective power to bring about widespread environmental change within the music industry and around the globe.
Leading by example, Green Music Group facilitates large-scale greening of the music community, and magnifies the work of national nonprofits, all while building a vibrant community committed to environmental action.
The broad support of our founding members paired with their leadership as environmental stewards enables GMG to inspire millions to action by:
1. Creating an engaging online community of musicians, music industry leaders, and music fans all committed to addressing our greatest environmental concerns.
2. Facilitating large-scale greening of the music community through touring, venue, and label standards, resource development, green grants mentoring, and viral video and public service campaigns.
3. Providing environmental nonprofits with a megaphone for their cause, allowing them to expand their reach and support base.
4. Creating a sustainable green music guild to support and inform the efforts of the music community and position leaders in the music industry as voices for change, working to shine a light on the most pressing environmental issues of our time.
I personally plan on getting involved in this and bringing Berklee along with me into the project. We already run a very environmentally friendly online music school that avoids many of the traditional and costly expenses such as buildings, heat, transportation, and lodging involved in face-to-face schools.
I am hoping to encourage the Green Music Group to explore alternative experiences to touring such as online shows, virtual studio sessions and other ideas that can cut the costs and waste out of touring while still preserving a great experience for fans and artists alike.
Green Music Group welcomes all members of the music community to join!
Here is a composition of words created from this blog by the very cool website Wordle. Have fun and enjoy.
This is how Wordle sees my blog
My friend and Berkleemusic student David Sherbow posted this list of income streams for musicians on his blog and it got picked up by Hypebot as well. This is a pretty comprehensive list of the different ways that musicians can make money.
The artist music business model has been in flux for years. The record deal dream that most artists sought is no longer the viable alternative that it once was. The leveling of the music distribution playing field by the Internet is virtually complete. Terrestrial radio is on a path towards destruction that even the major labels can’t compete with. People now access and download music from multiple sources, usually for free. D.I. Y solutions are everywhere, but for many artists hard to integrate into their daily lives.
Where does this leave the average independent artist? At the beginning. Every artist wants to know how they can make music, make money and survive to write and play another day. Here, in no particular order, is a list of possible income streams for musicians.
• Publishing
• Mechanical royalties
• Performance Royalties from ASCAP and BMI
• Digital Performance Royalties from Sound Exchange
• Synch rights TV, Commercials, Movies, Video Games
• Digital sales – Individual or by combination
• Music (studio & live) Album – Physical & Digital, Single – Digital, • Ringtone, Ringback, Podcasts
• Instant Post Gig Live Recording via download, mobile streaming or flash drives
• Video – Live, concept, personal, – Physical & Digital
• Video and Internet Games featuring or about the artist
• Photographs
• Graphics and art work, screen savers, wall paper
• Lyrics
• Sheet music
• Compilations
• Merchandise – Clothes, USB packs, Posters, other things
• Live Performances
• Live Show – Gig
• Live Show – After Party
• Meet and Greet
• Personal Appearance
• Studio Session Work
• Sponsorships, and endorsements
• Advertising
• Artist newsletter emails
• Artist marketing and promotion materials
• Blog/Website
• Videos
• Music Player
• Fan Clubs
• YouTube Subscription channel for more popular artists
• Artist programmed internet radio station or specialty playlist.
• Financial Contributions of Support – Tip Jar or direct donations, Sellaband or Kickstarter
• Patronage Model – Artist Fan Exclusives – e.g. paying to sing on a song in studio or have artist write a song for you
• Mobile Apps
• Artist Specific Revenue Stream – unique streams customized to the specific artist, e.g Amanda Palmer
• Music Teaching – Lessons and Workshops
• Music Employment – orchestras, etc, choir directors, ministers of music, etc.
• Music Production – Studio and Live
• Any job available to survive and keep making music
• Getting Help From Other Artists and Helping Them – Whatever goes around come around. – e.g. gig swapping, songwriting, marketing and promotion
Here is a list of 9 trends and challenges that were recently published as part of an overall report on Digital Music by Redwood Capital. You can download the entire report here. What I find most bothersome about all of this is that it is a very backward looking, rationalization and justification about the collapse of the recorded music business and the fantasizing about protection of the label’s assets and proliferation of the traditional business model. While it may be a good snapshot of some of the major issues the industry has faced and a good way for people to orient themselves, this is hardly the way to think about the future. No wonder the investments made in music startups over the past decade or so by the VCs and Investment Bankers have not panned out. If this is the way VCs and investors look at the world of music, I got to tell you, we are all in a lot of trouble.
I have pitched and have had many deep discussions with investors over the years about the music industry and have learned one thing that is holding the entire industry back. Investors say they care about the music business, but when it comes right down to it, they don’t care about the musicians. Not one of them would bet on a new label or artist driven business model. They all wanted to back technology or distribution, but not musicians. Pathetic.
I have taken the liberty of annotating some of these “treneds and challenges” below:
1) Rampant Piracy Continues
Despite a decade of aggressive attempts by the industry to reduce illegal downloads and peer-to-peer file sharing and preserve what remained of the old model, the biggest challenge facing the industry is still the fact that consumer attitudes towards paying for music have been forever changed, especially amongst the ever-important younger demographic. This places tremendous pressure on industry players to provide the consumer with an experience that exceeds that which can be achieved illegally and for free. The solution likely lies in packaging music with other products and services that consumers expect to pay for, such as mobile phone service, Internet connections, ringtones, concerts, merchandise, etc., and taking advantage of improvements in broadband speed and access to provide a service that can’t be replicated for free. – Certainly this is true for recorded music and something that we predicted nearly 8 years ago in our book on the Future of Music. However you cannot expect a healthy market when you have to “package” what you are trying to sell with something else as the primary means of distribution. New forms of music experiences would certainly trump “bundles”.
2) Strategy of Major Labels
Despite numerous attempts to cut out the labels as middlemen, and the potential damage they have done to their relationships with the public after years of suing their customers, the major labels still have tremendous clout in determining the fate of the various new distribution models and emerging companies. While backing by the major labels by no means guarantees any degree of success, opposition from the labels is an obstacle that is extremely difficult to overcome. That being said, many of the larger players today began without the blessing of the labels, but once they became too big to ignore the labels were willing to make a deal. – Again I would argue this perspective assumes that the existing music, the existing catalog is more important than the new music, or the music yet to be created. Tens of millions of dollars have been wasted and countless hours of negotiation sunk into trying to secure licenses to existing major label content by many companies trying to recreate the distribution model for an asset class in severe decline. I will go out on a limb here and say that the new music matters far more in the future than the existing music, and that licenses from the major labels are far less valuable than the labels think they are. Perhaps an order of magnitude less.
3) Legal Complexity
Many US copyright laws were written when the only form of music distribution was printed sheet music and as such, obtaining the proper licenses from all relevant content owners is extremely complex. Given the relative youth of the digital music industry, the law is being written and applied haphazardly and has been difficult to interpret. International differences make it difficult to offer consistent products on a global basis. For example, currently Pandora is legal in the US, but illegal in the U.K, and vice versa for Spotify. Developing a business plan in this environment is extraordinarily difficult. – Of course this is true if you are building a business based on catalog. New labels and music companies that are forming to support new artists can completely eliminate this issue by creating licenses for their content that bundle all the rights in one global license that can be easily acquired. By using this strategy, new content businesses can outrun old content business and begin to take over the landscape.
4) The End of DRM
The recent decisions by the labels to finally eliminate digital rights management for many applications should represent a landmark change for emerging growth companies in the music space. This greatly reduces a longstanding barrier by allowing compatibility of content and devices across platforms. By decoupling content and devices, consumers can now download a song from their choice of providers and listen to that song on their choice of devices. – Excuse me but the labels had nothing to do with the elimination of digital rights management. That was eliminated long ago when people began trading MP3 files while all the attempts to distribute “legitimate” digital music failed. This is just the labels saying uncle.
5) Mobile Strategy is Critical
Whereas it has been extremely challenging for content owners across all digital media sectors to monetize online content, consumers do not expect mobile content to be free to the same degree because they have been conditioned to pay for such services. Therefore, we believe that online models that don’t have credible mobile strategies will continue to struggle, and killer mobile apps will prosper. We believe that one of the primary reasons for MySpace’s acquisition of Imeem was Imeem’s mobile capabilities. – Here I agree with the basic premise that a mobile strategy is critical, although have yet to see one that works. Do people really want to listen to music on their phone? Is that the killer app? I expect that something far better is around the corner, more integrated into your life at the moments where you can and want to listen to music. The damage being done to people’s hearing by the “Ear Buds” sold with the iPod and nearly every other mobile listening device is limiting the experience and holding back the growth of mobile music more than anything. MP3 sound like crap. Ear Buds are destroying people’s hearing. No wonder hardly anyone wants to pay for digital music. Anyone who focuses on improving the sound quality of mobile listening will find a explosive opportunity.
6) Dominance and Importance of the iPhone
With iTunes’ almost 70% US share in digital downloads, and the iPhone quickly taking market share in the smartphone category, alliances with Apple and/ or apps on the iPhone have become critical to success. Rhapsody, Spotify and Sirius have all launched iPhone apps in the past few months, and MOG’s is expected shortly, and this should give each an important boost in marketing their products. Without the iPhone app, customers would have had to spring for another device to use those services. With customers hesitant to even pay monthly service fees, adding a hardware requirement would have been an insurmountable obstacle in reaching a large customer base. We believe that Apple has been smart in its willingness to approve apps even from services that compete with iTunes. – I love my iPhone, I think it is the coolest thing ever invented. But I also know that worldwide, the iPhone is just a speck on the landscape of mobile phones. Will Apple really dominate this space over time? I doubt it very much. The vast majority of people cannot afford to buy Apple products.
7) Importance of Wireless Broadband
The widespread availability of broadband in the home and the office in the past decade has enabled computer-based downloading and streaming to develop entirely new methods of discovering, purchasing and listening to music. Many of the previously mentioned business models revolve around this experience. However, the next frontier for the developing models is to take the experience mobile without frustrating consumers. Now that consumers have accepted that cell phones are also music players, the market for mobile music has dramatically expanded, given that 139 million smartphones were sold worldwide in 2008 (Source: Gartner). To date, while streaming services such as Rhapsody and Pandora are a great way to listen to music at one’s desk, the experience on a mobile phone is mediocre at best, given dead spots and dropouts, and in the case of Rhapsody, low bitrate streaming. We suspect that many early adopters have tried these mobile services, only to get frustrated and go back to listening to MP3s on their iPods. Spotify’s and Slacker’s ability to cache playlists may prove to be a good workaround until wireless broadband availability and quality catches up. – I am a firm believer that you do not have to worry about storage and bandwidth, that they will always expand faster than you think they will. Agreed.
8 ) Consumers Remain Willing to Pay for Exciting New Technologies and Products
Consumers have proven that they are indeed willing to pay for new products and technologies that enhance the music experience or provide new uses for music. The tremendous initial growth of the ringtone market is one example. US ringtone sales grew from almost zero in 2002 to a peak of $714 million in 2007, before dropping 24% in 2008 (Source: SNL Kagan) as consumers ultimately figured out how to create ringtones on their own for free. iTunes has created new value added products that sell at a premium, such as iTunes Pass, which automatically delivers all new product, including exclusive extras, from a specific band to its fans, and iTunes LP, which adds album art, videos, and other extras to an album purchase. Shazam is another good example. Shazam is the second most popular music app on the iPhone and claims 50 million users. Shazam is a unique technology that enables users to use their mobile phone to identify and tag any song they hear in public or on the radio and immediately purchase the song. The app is so popular that Shazam is now charging customers $5 for the premium app, and is limiting free users to five tags per month, and its usage is accelerating. – Completely agree. This is in line with my basic premise that the new stuff matters far more than the old stuff, and if you can deliver a unique experience to a fan, especially one that is fun and sounds incredibly great, they will eat it up.
9) Convergence of Models
Most streaming services also offer the ability to purchase tracks either with their own ecommerce model or with links to others, most often iTunes and Amazon. To date, most ecommerce models have not offered streaming services, likely out of fear of cannibalization as well as licensing requirements. We believe that as streaming catches on with a broader audience, the e-commerce players will have to offer both. Apple is now more likely to move in this direction with its purchase of Lala, and increases our level of confidence that the streaming model is the wave of the future. – I believe as we wrote about in the Future of Music, that a utility model is the only way to make money with recorded music in the future. Until music become always on and always available and feels like it is free to you, the market will continue to decline. It is not so much the convergence of models but the ascendance of a model that will work. The broadband mobile carriers are the ones that can make this happen. It is a winner take all business strategy for the company with the balls and commitment to bake paid media distribution into their basic business model.
Comments anyone?
Here are 10 recommendations for strategies that can lead to success in music, and in life. Take them with a grain of salt. With this new decade comes the promise of digital music, the power of the entrepreneur and the tools to connect with an audience and deliver the goods.
There is very little more satisfying then spending time making music. If you make this your life’s work, then you can be truly joyful. However, the chances of being successful are extremely low and the only people who are going to get there are going to have to work hard and earn the right to be a musician. Respect the privilege of being free enough to have this choice (if you do) and honor the opportunity.
People can be their own worst enemy. Countless times I have heard artists tell me the reasons why their career is not working out. Most of the time they are putting blocks in their way and pointing fingers at people and things that are holding them back. Stop whining and blaming other people and make the conscious decision that you are going to be successful and that things are going to work out in your favor. You are creating your own reality every day, so make it a good one and excel.
You can never be ready enough for opportunity. Your live shows can always be better, your songs can be more amazing, and your playing can only improve. As the CEO of your own musician business, you can learn how to run the company more effectively, reach out to more fans and be an more effective social media marketer. Don’t hold yourself back by not being ready. Be a professional.
Lets face it, it is really hard to be amazing. Some people have the natural talent and you can see it in the first 5 seconds of meeting them. They are truly blessed. The rest of us have to find our niche, our passion, our calling and then reach for it. Ask people around you for feedback. Find what you are good at and focus on that. Get other people to help you. If you don’t stand out and rise above the pack, you will struggle forever. Be amazing.
There is nothing more pleasant than working with someone who knows who they are and what their goal is. Remember the old adages of thinking before you speak, and taking a deep breath before you lay into someone. Most of us have a lot going on in our lives and we can all benefit from staying focused on our goals and remaining calm in most situations. Learn yoga, exercise, run, meditate, sit still, breathe, learn who you are.
I am amazed at how many people spend so much time looking backwards and trying to understand what people think of them. This is worrying about the past and not embracing the future. Reviews are important, but don’t run to them or let them ruin your day. Not everyone is going to like you, but more people will if you are having a good time.
The only thing that will help your career take off is forward momentum. That is how you are going to reach your goals. A lot of people are stuck in their own mud. Take action, make a move and then see what happens. Don’t spend time procrastinating or worrying about how hard it is, just do something positive to advance your cause. You will feel much better by acting instead of waiting or worrying.
This is probably the most important strategy of them all and why so many artists have gotten into trouble in the past by taking label advances. All that is, is a big loan. Get some kind of cash flow happening right away, no matter how small. Sell merch, play for the door, license your songs, play sessions, teach, write, start your musician business. The biggest mistake you can make is to borrow a lot of money and then spend it on things that don’t matter.
The people that we remember are the ones that are unique, exciting, special, provocative, fascinating, original, inventive, interesting. Music is a basic form of communication. The really successful artists have something to say and work on delivering their message. Your chances of success go up exponentially if you have a unique position and message and create a following of fans who really listen to you because you have something important to say.
Music is a tribal experience. You cannot make great music alone. Surround yourself with talented people, write together, play together, try new things. Bounce inspiration off of each other and learn. Listen to each other and let the music weave it’s way around you. Find a producer, songwriting partner, other musicians and dive in together. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Wonderful things are waiting to happen to you.
Want more strategies for success? Download my most popular ebook, Hack the Music Business, for free here.
OK
Here are some good summaries of trends that apply to music. More to follow…
10 music-tech trends that will shape the next decade – from CNET
“With recording revenue plunging, bands must draw fans to their live shows in order to make a living. The common wisdom today dictates that musicians need a personal connection with their fans. They must blog, tweet, maintain their MySpace and Facebook profiles, and generally act like your next door neighbor who’s always pestering you to see his band. There’s a word for receiving “personal” messages from your favorite 100 bands–it’s called “spam.” Eventually, this cloud of self-promotional noise will dissipate, and will be replaced by old-fashioned word of mouth. Only acts that put on a great show–not just singing and playing songs, but entertaining in the old-fashioned sense of the word, with video and stagecraft and humor and spectacle–will cut through the noise. Bonus points for the first act that somehow integrates an audience-accessible game console into their act.”
The 20 key digital music trends in 2009 – from Music Ally
“There’s no doubt that consumers like streaming music when it’s done well, as illustrated by the success of Spotify and Pandora this year. And it seems equally certain that streaming has a significant role to play in the future of the music industry. That role, however, will be alongside other revenue streams, rather than being the downloads killer it’s sometimes painted as being by the media. However, as 2009 draws to a close, there is still huge debate around the economics of streaming music, with ad revenues nowhere close to paying for the licensing costs, and artists and labels still grousing about their royalty cheques while fearful about cannibalisation of music sales. ‘Freemium’ has replaced ‘ad-supported’ as the business model of choice; but even that has yet to prove itself as a truly sustainable option.”
MidemNet Chooses Top 15 Digital Music Startups – from Hypebot
“The 15 start-ups chosen by Music Ally and a jury of entrepreneurs cover a range of digital fields that offer opportunities for the music industry including live applications (Awdio, Songkick, Streamjam), digital licensing of sheet music and lyrics (DigiClef, TuneWiki), artist management (BandCentral), managing key data for artists (Band Metrics), digital distribution (Pops Worldwide), web radio (Radionomy), remixing (Aviary, GoMix and Tracksandfields), musical discovery (Thesixtyone), artistic financing (Kickstarter) and on-line advertising (Silence Media).”
My friend Mary aka DJ Fusion wrote this rant on Hip Hop for 2009. This is a great example of an indie scene flourishing and a good read for anyone thinking about a career in music these days.
“We’re approximately 35 – 40 years into a musical art form and culture that has traveled from the ‘hood to the corporate boardroom with some dallying around a bit with college folk, the ‘burbs and outsiders worldwide wanting another groove to dance to and a way to use the spoken word for expression.
As one of the many musical great grandchildren of the African Diaspora born from the coupling of what some call American Classical Music (Jazz, Funk, Blues, Soul, Funk, Rock, etc.) and Reggae, Hip-Hop has come a long way from its beginnings.
There’s more of a hungry audience on the hunt for new and diverse types of music than ever before because of the mainstream music industry dropping the ball on what they’re supposed to do in the first place – promote great artists for different audiences to listen to and spend money on.
The second the Hip-Hop A&R rep became more an regional area SoundScan Excel Spreadsheet reader instead of the person who hunted for new music from all over the planet or took time to craft a music artist’s long term career, the Old School Music System started to collapse.
Luckily during this time, the huge technological & social advancement of the Internet becoming a normal part of life though people’s computers, mp3 players or telephones created totally new options for music to expand it’s reach to essentially anywhere, to anyone and at anytime in a relatively cheap, quick and efficient way.
This fundamental shift is one of the great gifts ever given to all aspects of the Independent Music Community.
The playing field has gone from a huge mountain to climb to even get a demo a listen or for getting people to check out your viewpoint of Hip-Hop to at least become a slightly more manageable hill for music lovers to negotiate a successful career and outlet of expression.
Audiences who want to connect to dope music don’t really have to be around the corner anymore and are just a few clicks away through sites like MySpace, BandCamp, FaceBook, Twitter, Imeem, ReverbNation, CD Baby, YouTube and more.
An indie music artist or outlet can hit up that audience and give major record labels and distributors the finger by promoting themselves at pretty much however they like with promotional singles & mixtapes or any other product via tons of ‘net companies and the right applications.
With some dope audio software, an e-mail address, file sharing programs and a solid work ethic, new forms of musical collaborations can occur as long as there are like minds in the mix.
What about current subpar TV, Radio and written media outlets that don’t play or acknowledge dope Old School Hip-Hop artists (a lot of which are now back to either being Indie Music Artists again or having to function like one to get any worthy promotion for their projects) or any innovative New School heads?
Well, there’s probably either a website, blog, podcast, internet radio station, conference call, newsletter or online video outlet to avoid all that. Old School Hip-Hop as a whole is literally being kept ALIVE through it’s accessibility through the internet from these sort of outlets.
And the great thing is if there isn’t such an outlet yet, fans OR a music artist can make create their own such sites with the numerous free services out there for self-expression and upgrade GoDaddy.com style later on if one chooses.
The Old School mentality that made truly great Hip-Hop and is still keeping it alive has made a comeback that can revolutionize a positive artistic creativity and business model – you got to do for self (D.I.Y. game proper) to come up, work hard as hell, stand out with fantastic musical product not just to get people to pay attention, but to stick around as a long time fan.
Basically, you got to earn your way homey – no shortcuts. Even some of your Top 40 Hip-Hop MCs didn’t just emerge from a record crate pre-packed for consumption – quite a few of them have been in the music business for years before getting to that point and had to climb as up as an indie to get to their current status (from Lil’ Wayne, Kanye West, Jay-Z, Kid Cudi, UGK, the list can go on for days).
An music artist really has no choice BUT to build from the ground up to earn the respect of fans so they can give up their hard earned cash & word of mouth.
Indie musicians have more ways now than ever to develop a rabid niche audience that digs their individual musical foundation and to expand from there. Along with great support team that wants to promote the hell out of a person and do business on the up and up, next thing you know there’s an empowered Hip-Hop artist who doesn’t have to pimp themselves out to the latest trend to get a crappy major label/distributor contract in hopes of riches.”
2009’s 25 Great Hip-Hop Music Related Websites (Besides PlanetIll.com, of course) That You Should Always Be Checking For Dope Writing, Music Content, Information And Balance Away From The Norm:
This is funny as hell, and probably not all that far off from what’s coming…
The Ultimate Rack:
Make Sound Like
Creative Difference Engine
Excellentalizer
Ego Controls
Decade Selector
IQ
Presence
Satire created for:
www.theinternetnowinhandybookform.com
Great info-graphics at:
www.informationisbeautiful.net
Here is a great info-graphic from the New York Times showing the relative performance of various music formats over the past 37 years. Unfortunately it does not show the impact of free music online. That would be an interesting addition to see how big file sharing and torrent downloads really are, relative to the physical formats of the past and the new “paid” digital formats.
In this economy, it’s hard to imagine anyone making thousands of phone calls trying to give money away. But that’s exactly what is happening as Sound Exchange contacts musicians who have earned, but not yet claimed, digital performance royalties. And they are building their database fast, by tapping into the cloud of musician profiles available online. How cool is that?
Sound Exchange is a performing rights organization undertaking a massive education campaign about the fact that the rights and revenue exist, and how to go about getting the money. In the past few months alone, thousands of artists have been contacted.
When sound recordings are streamed on the Internet, played on digital satellite radio, or used on cable music channels, the performers on that recording accrue a small royalty. Those digital performance royalties are collected by SoundExchange, who processes logs from services and distributes the payments to artists. Unlike other royalty societies, who collect and distribute only to their members, SoundExchange collects royalties for all performers, then has to locate and register artists so they can be paid.
If you want to get paid, you have to register with them at Sound Exchange. If you think your music has been played on Sirius-XM Satellite Radio, Internet radio such as Pandora, Yahoo, Live 365.com and AOL, or on digital cable and satellite TV services like Comcast’s “Music Choice” and DirecTV, you can collect.
The data being collected by today’s digital music companies is being knitted together to connect the dots between online listeners and the copyright holders. By partnering with CD Baby, ReverbNation, SonicBids, Nimbit and others, Sound Exchange is tapping into the long tail of the market, and rewarding musicians who have online profiles – with cash.
CD Baby says they were notified by Sound Exchange that many of their artists were owed money. They matched their databases and found that thousands of artists had not registered with Sound Exchange and therefore were not receiving their payments. CD Baby then reached out to these members with the good news.
According to iLike founder Ali Partovi, a database matching effort for artists that had uploaded their information onto iLike found more than $8 million for more than 8,000 artists. According to Partovi, the $8 million was just a first-run effort, and a broader initiative involving MySpace Music remains forthcoming. “MySpace has a much larger database, so we’ll be unlocking even more money.”
To stake your claim visit Sound Exchange, or to send an email to info@soundexchange.com
“Maybe music consumers don’t have to own their songs anymore.” – USA Today
After years of resisting efforts to offer music fans the ability to “rent” music instead of buying downloads, Apple is finally joining the party. Apple’s purchase of online music service Lala brings the No. 1 music retailer into the streaming music business.
For years, the music industry has advanced subscription services such as Rhapsody and Napster, saying they made more sense for the consumer and better profits for the labels. But the services have not panned out.
What has changed is the popularity of free streaming services, led by Pandora, which has 40 million monthly listeners worldwide. You can’t choose specific songs, but you can choose your favorite artists. Pandora then creates a music experience for you with similar-sounding music. Pandora is widely popular on the Web and on smartphones, including the iPhone.
Inside Digital Media analyst Phil Leigh says
“There’s no doubt this will become the successor to radio and be how new music will be popularized”
With big record companies willingly bucking technology, musicians and software types gathered in Cambridge to revolutionize the industry.
On an unheralded fall weekend right before Thanksgiving, a roomful of amateur hackers and Web rock stars gathered in East Cambridge for a historic convention that could dramatically reshape the way we get our music. At stake in this laptop orgy on the quiet end of Memorial Drive, appropriately held at Microsoft’s New England Research & Development (NERD) Center: how you and everyone you know will discover your next favorite band, and how artists will reach audiences in an age when the media and music industries are in steep decline.
The collaborative powwow, dubbed Music Hack Day, was the first-ever such event held in the US (earlier iterations took place this year in Berlin, Amsterdam, and London). But while such recognized brands as NPR, Apple, and Yahoo! were astute enough to show up, the confab was more populated by non-household-name Web sites, from Boston’s own tourfilter.com to CBS-owned last.fm, which, generally speaking, share an aesthetic that is anathema to the record industry: they want to make music — and virtually everything related to music — available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Most radically, they want to do that all for free, and claim that such a model could benefit consumers and performers.
The complimentary public conference was as notable for those who were not in attendance as it was for those who represented. Most glaringly absent were the Big Four — Sony, Warner, EMI, and Universal — and their major-label peers. Considering how mega-imprint executives continue to defend dated hard-distribution models as their businesses implode, it’s hardly a surprise to watch them miss the train. After all, tech mavens have long alleged that industry fat cats would rather toast past successes than discover how invention propels multimedia.
With big record companies willingly bucking technology, musicians and software types gathered in Cambridge to revolutionize the industry.Long before consumers, artists, or reporters noticed that established entertainment systems were growing increasingly irrelevant, developers were synthesizing music and applied science. And though many pioneer programmers are now being applauded, in the past such trailblazers were marginalized as everything from geeks to criminals. David Kusek, a vice-president of media at Berklee who was hacking complex circuit boards when his legionnaires were tweaking Speak & Spells, remembers the reaction when he used to tell people that he worked in music software: “They would say, ‘What the fuck is that?’ ” Commencing Hack Day festivities, Kusek preached his gospel to approximately 300 attendees: “Things have changed a lot . . . it’s such an open world today, and I think that’s wonderful. But don’t just share the code — share the money.”
I originally published this article in Forbes Magazine nearly 4 years ago.
“More people are consuming music today than ever before, yet very few of them are paying for it. The music recording industry blames file sharing for a downturn in CD sales and, with the publishing companies, has tried its best to litigate this behavior out of existence, rather than try to monetize the conduct of music fans. These efforts are fingers in a dike that is about to burst. Digital media are interactive, and people want music that they can burn to CDs, share and use as they wish. The music industry should instead look at turning this consumer phenomenon into a steady stream of cash–lots of it.
The industry ought to establish a “music utility” approach to the distribution and marketing of interactive digital music, modeled after the water, gas and electricity utility systems. It should be done voluntarily to work best for all parties, or it may eventually be legislated through a compulsory license provision.
Under a plan colleague Gerd Leonhard and I propose, con-sumers would pay a flat music licensing fee of $3 to $5 a month as part of a subscription to an Internet service provider, cellular network, digital cable service wireless carrier or other digital network provider. This fee would let people download and listen to as much music as they care to, from a vast library of files available across the networks.
These fees would result in a huge river of money. With approximately 200 million people connected to a digital network in the U.S., the potential annual revenue stream for a music utility model could be somewhere between $7 billion and $12 billion for the basic service. That is already comparable in size to the existing U.S. recorded music market, which in 2003 was $12 billion at retail, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. This basic service would be augmented with various opportunities, including packages of premium content, live concerts, new releases, artist channels, custom compilations and more. The revenue potential of these premium sources is enormous, too.
How would this money be divvied up? We propose that the industry voluntarily establish a “music utility license” for the interactive use of digital music. This license would compensate all rights holders, including the record labels and artists (for the master recording) as well as publishers and composers (for the underlying composition), with the license fee to be split in half between the owners of the sound recording and the owners of the composition, after deducting a percentage for the digital network providers. This license would be available to anyone willing to implement its terms. The digital network companies would be required to track and report which music had been used, by employing existing digital identification and tracking technologies.
There is already precedence for such a flat-fee system in cable television and in the utility-like models of public broadcasting in Europe. Streaming digital music is already provided in basic cable plans. Cable television itself at first resisted this model, but its economics eventually led to a larger market, providing more consumer choice and more revenue streams overall. Old media almost never die. Cable television did not replace broadcast television; instead, it expanded the market dramatically, by letting video flow like water into new revenue streams–instead of down the drain.
Certainly a music utility would be a radical and complex undertaking, and there are many important details to negotiate, such as the exact nature of the license, how the funds would be administered, the specific tracking method, what collection of technologies would be employed and others. Yet there are inventors and technologists outside the mainstream music business hard at work trying to figure out how to make this happen. It’s time for the main players in the music business today, namely the large record publishers, to cooperate with the inventors and jointly create a future for music where the money really flows and the global market for music can grow from $32 billion to as much as $100 billion.”
Read the original article from Forbes here, published in 2005.
Today this idea is closer to reality than you might think. The major labels have seen their revenues cut nearly in half from their peak, and paid digital downloads and advertising models have not grown to contribute nearly the decline in CD sales. The labels are in a very tough position and are looking at the utility model as perhaps their only remaining path to survival. The pain has finally gotten too much to bear.
Choruss is a new company spearheaded by Jim Griffin, and incubated by Warner Music Group whose mission is to “build a sustainable music subscription platform providing unlimited access to music for a flat monthly fee”. Choruss has been diligently acquiring the required licenses from all the “major labels”, independent labels including aggregators A2IM and Merlin and the National Music Publishers Association. The company has been granted one-year licenses for up to seven universities to offer subscription services for unlimited, DRM-free downloads as a proof of concept. This trial is set to begin in 2010.
Stay tuned for more info…
Get Busy Committee
My friend Ian Rogers, CEO of Topspin has started to co-manage the band “Get Busy Committee“. He has begun to blog about ALL the activities that an artist manager needs to drive their band to success. It is a fascinating read and a real world education on how to take a band to market in the new music business. This is going to be really fun to watch as Ian lays out step by step what he is doing to break this band and “get busy” in the marketplace.
To bring a band to market in today’s indie music market is a hell of a lot of work. You need to be an entrepreneur and you need to build a team of people to help you market, package, promote, distribute, brainstorm, license, and develop a successful artist. Ian is taking the indie artist management route described at Music Power Network.
Here are some excerpts from his blog. Required reading for the indie artist and manager today:
The first thing we did was define success: as I mentioned earlier, the goal is to get this music to as many people as possible, connect directly with the ones who like it, build products those people want to own, and turn a profit. Sure it would be great to make enough money that Get Busy Committee could be their primary income, but we definitely aren’t starting with the “if we don’t get a song on a radio this is a failure” mentality. We are starting at zero. The goal is to grow every single week and not lose money.
We started by putting together a release plan. I opened a Google Doc and started dropping ideas and info into it, and encouraged others to do the same. We needed a team, so we started assembling the roster of people, services, and tools which would help us get this record out the door:
Building a Team
Press Relations and Marketing
Creative Direction
Web site design and development
Digital distribution
Physical Distribution
Non-traditional physical manufacturing
Performing rights organizations
Legal
While getting the album to iTunes is the main thrust for a lot of artists, it’s only part of the story (and a very small part so far) for us. We’ve been preparing for this release for months, started selling the album in six different package two weeks ago, are selling the album for $1 on MySpace all weekend, and much more.
Web Site
The object was to make the site:
Home base. The top SEO result for “Get Busy Committee” and anything else related to the band.
Vibrant. It should update with the latest information about Get Busy Committee with very little effort, from a variety of sources. Furthermore, we weren’t going to spend time or money building any of these tools from scratch. We integrated WordPress and Twitter to make sure it was easy to update with long or short-form updates (respectively) easily.
A fan acquisition tool. The site should be sticky like fly-paper. If you visit the site you should have an incentive to leave behind your email address, follow GBC on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook, a friend on MySpace, friend on Flickr, subscriber on YouTube, or subscribe via RSS. We may only get one chance to make a connection with you. We don’t want you to bounce in and bounce out without granting us permission to reach out to you later with an update.
A tool for fans to create other fans. Every page of the site is instrumented with simple ways to share on Facebook and Twitter, and feedback for having done so either in the form of a counter or free music for having done so. We want it to not only be easy to spread the word but for you to be recognized for having done so.
A place to convert at whatever level of fan you happen to be. Never heard of Get Busy Committee? No problem, you can stream the record or download a few songs for free. Super fan? How about the T-Shirt/USB Flash Drive combo for $55? Somewhere in between? No worries. We have something for you.
Useful. If you’re a college radio DJ who needs a clean version to play on your show or a beatmeister who wants an acapella to remix that should be easy to find. If you’re a blogger writing about the band there should be, even if it’s not linked from the front page. Anything you email to people regularly should be on the site and easily linked to.
Thanks Ian.
Ian Rogers and his team at Topspin are on in. Listen to what he has to say in this brief interview from Wired and think how it can apply to your situation.
The more you know, the better decisions you can make and the further you can go. Simple as that. Topspin is generating data, as are Nimbit, Reverbnation and others.
Does selling records have anything to do with the music business anymore? What do you think?
115,000 new albums were released in the U.S. in 2008. Of those, only 110 sold more than 250,000 copies.
Only 1,500 titles cracked the 10,000 mark.
Read more from CNN here.
Patronage of the arts is a time honored practice that is still alive and well in the music business. Many examples of fan financing from Ellis Paul, to Jill Sobule and many others have been reported and detailed recently in this blog and others. Now a group of musicians from California have put together a very interesting program to raise money for commissioning projects that I hope catches on. We need more thinking like this in the music industry today. Effective and creative methods of connecting music fans to artists, writers, composers and producers will help propel the next generation of music making.
Symphony of a Million
“Symphony of a Million” is a 6-month campaign, a commissioning project that brings together composers, performers, and the general public.
The goal is to sell 1 million notes. Purchased notes will be used in not just one single million note work, but rather many new works. Composers will work with performers and compose pieces of varying lengths. The first work to be written will be a 1000 note work for solo marimba composed by Music Academy Online founder, Dave Schwartz, and written for percussionist Nobue Matsuoka. The second work will be a 4000 note composition for saxophone and harp and it will be composed by Anthony Lanman who will be working with saxophonist Dr. Noah Getz and harpist Jacqueline Pollauf who perform together as the duo Pictures on Silence.
* Buy a note for $1
* Each note becomes part of a piece of music composed by award winning composers. Throughout the process we will be commissioning composers to write new works of varying lengths using the notes that you purchase.
* A special “Symphony of a Million” concert, sponsored by Music Academy Online and featuring world-class ensembles, will premier all of the works created using the notes you buy. The concert will be held May 18, 2011, the 100th anniversary of the death of Gustav Mahler, the man who composed the “Symphony of a Thousand.”
* Buy as many notes as you wish. Dedicate the notes to someone special. Help to shape entire sections of new music with the notes you select! Your name (and theirs) will forever be part of the final scores.
* Encourage your friends and family to buy notes.
A friend just sent over this post on how the newly elected Chairman of the Entertainment Retailers Association, said that illegal P2P filesharing is the greatest challenge facing entertainment retailers and urged members to lobby Government for a crackdown on a problem he said “is bleeding our industry dry”.
Speaking at the association’s annual general meeting, Quirk said, “Too often the debate over illegal filesharing is portrayed as an ideological battle, but for us this is a commercial matter. Illegal filesharing is damaging our businesses, both physical and digital, on a daily basis, and the Government needs to tackle it swiftly and decisively in order to protect jobs, businesses and investment.
“First the filesharers targeted the music business and the Government did nothing. Now the filesharers have come again for TV and movies. Unless action is taken the filesharers will come for computer games, books, in fact anything which can be digitised and what will be at stake will be not just the entertainment industry but huge swathes of the UK economy. We need action now.”
Read more of this insanity here at Mi2N
Well now…
I was visiting with my Dad last weekend and thought of an interesting parallel between digital music and encyclopedias.
When I was a kid, my father had a summer job going door to door selling Comptons Encyclopedias. He would carry a couple of these huge books under his arms and try and get the husband or wife to buy the complete Comptons collection for the kids. This was big business and my dad made a healthy living during the summer.
Well, over the years the encyclopedia book business began to dry up. To start it all off, Comptons put their entire encyclopedia library on a CD-ROM and sold it via a new company they formed, called Comptons New Media. They put the CD-ROM in a chipboard box and sold it at Comp-USA, Software Etc and other retailers for $200-$300. It became big business for a while in the early 1990’s, and Comptons New Media flourished and was eventually purchased by the Tribune Co for a lot of dough.
It didn’t take long before some hackers cracked the CD-ROM and then pirated versions of the whole enchilada began making their way into stores and online outlets. By now, of course, the multi-volume Comptons Encyclopedia Book business had gone the way of the dinosaur, and countless pavement pounding salespeople were no longer going door to door selling encyclopedias – and the entire book business basically went away. Gone in a matter of a few years. I think they still sell some to schools somewhere.
The same thing soon happened to Comptons New Media as digital competitors emerged, from Microsoft “Encarta” and others, and soon price competition and the internet gave way to this information moving online for free.
Now we have something called “Wikipedia”.
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The information contained in the encyclopedias is still being researched and published and edited by now, tens of thousands of people who put it online in a living, dynamic format. By and large, no one is getting directly paid to do this work, yet no-one can dispute the fact that society in general is benefiting from Wikipedia and other community-based information resources. You might even notice that there is a lot more information being produced and updated and cross referenced than ever before. This is all without the infrastructure of the past (ie Comptons) being in-place anymore, and almost no money changing hands.
Just like Comptons, the record industry digitized all of its assets and put the entire thing out there for the public to enjoy. And just like Comptons the record industry in now suffering from price erosion, shifting formats and piracy. They can try and hang in there and bash the problem away with legislation, or they could seriously consider other methods of delivery and renumeration, or they could sell off their remaining assets and shut down. No matter what, the game they have played is over, caput. Time to face the music and change.
There are no guarantees in business that things will remain the same. Indeed, the only real constant is change and businesses that try and hold onto the past will be crushed by their own weight and failure to adapt, or in some cases, to just shut down. Nothing is forever except change. People should stop complaining about it and start working on creating a future that benefits us all.
Do I know exactly what that future is going to be? Of course not. I wish I could say with certainty but I can’t – for now. But I think it will look a lot more like wikipedia than comptons encyclopedia sets.
