How you killed the business of music

[kitekrazy]

Seriously. who cares?

[nathannn]

Seriously. who cares?

Like really ya know!
Like who pays attention to anything outside of eating candy and listening to One Direction?
Only smelly old farts care.. they are so stupppppppiidddd!!! uhhhgg!!! they dont get it!
Like why wont my mom give me money for that sluty dress i want,,,!!!!!!

[eyeknow]

Seriously. who cares?

Like really ya know!
Like who pays attention to anything outside of eating candy and listening to One Direction?
Only smelly old farts care.. they are so stupppppppiidddd!!! uhhhgg!!! they dont get it!
Like why wont my mom give me money for that sluty dress i want,,,!!!!!!

Man, some brutal people here!

[yur2die4]

I like that in today's world listening to wand erection and asking mom for $$$ to buy a slutty dress can almost be considered gender neutral.

[Forge.]

wand erection

ha ha that's actually the first time I've heard that.

[mosca]

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201206 ... pony.shtml

For everyone who read the Lowery article about the intern, here's a nice counterpoint.

[Buleriachk]

Written by a businessman who doesn't seem to give a shit about music (or anything else except his hedge fund) .... a republican, no doubt......

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201206 ... pony.shtml

For everyone who read the Lowery article about the intern, here's a nice counterpoint.

[kitekrazy]

Few people really listen to music anymore. I mean really listen. It's now background noise or a distraction from silence and it still sells.

Most of the label artists past their 40's prefer to do tours instead of make recordings. The sponsorship for tours are not from the music industry. Artists who create their one work will always have record crowds. Those with talent will still rise above the ashes. Imagine if all of the Beatles were still alive and they decided to do a tour. GTA5 day one sales would look like chump change.

[Buleriachk]

But they are not all still alive, and that is the whole point....
(those that still are, are not hungry.. however, some turn their talents to other projects.. like getting ripped off by younger women..)

Imagine if all of the Beatles were still alive and they decided to do a tour. GTA5 day one sales would look like chump change.

[ikeaboy]

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201206 ... pony.shtml

For everyone who read the Lowery article about the intern, here's a nice counterpoint.

Having read that I didn't think he really nailed the point he wanted to make i.e. David Lowney is pining for a past that will never come back. Lowney was criticizing the attitudes around free music mainly by examining some of the logic people use to defend artists not getting paid. That's not pining for the past, that's calling out people on the excuses they use to do what they want. It's not that people don't agree with Lowney's proposed morality it's that they refuse to examine the morality of the choices they are making because it's inconvenient, uncomfortable and the crowd says it's ok so it must be ok.

Toss in some righteous indignation that some tech companies have figured out ways to provide useful services that people want to buy, a confusion over correlation and causation

The services are useful if you want to sidestep any consideration about taking someone else's work for free without there permission (not the only use admittedly) and the people providing the services are making a lot of money out of it.

The complaints of low Spotify payouts are a mirage. Go talk to Jeff Price, a guy who knows this stuff better than just about anyone, and let him explain just how the streaming world is developing.

Ok this does have me interested, once I followed the link he sets out how the different types of royalties can filter to artists. I'm suspicious about the numbers in that link

As an example, on interactive streams in the US, the total royalty all THREE (master, public performance and mechanical royalty) generate together is about $.008 for each stream.

Do the math assuming these are all interactive streams (which they currently are not):

6,570,000,000,000 (6.5 trillion listens)

x $.008 (eight tenths of one cent)

= $52,560,000,000 ($52.5 billion dollars)

52 billion wow!, how come in three years Spotify have only paid out 500 million? (From Spotify's own site https://www.spotify.com/ie/about-us/art ... m-spotify/)

Here's a quote from Radioheads producer Nigel Godrich from July

“The music industry is being taken over by the back door.. and if we don’t try and make it fair for new music producers and artists… then the art will suffer. Make no mistake. These are all the same old industry bods trying to get a stranglehold on the delivery system..

You can read the rest of why Radiohead pulled out of Spotify hearhttp://pitchfork.com/news/51515-thom-yo ... ess-model/
Fair play to big bands like Radiohead, their the ones with the bargaining power to get a better deal for the rest of us.

[Semuta]

So, I read through this while thing, both sides, and while I see some of the points, I think that the comment about selling shovels during a gold rush is actually the most sensible way to look at the whole thing.

The music retail model of yore just doesn't work for the web. Everyone seems to acknowledge this. The barriers to entry for traditional music formats are what made the business of the music professional possible. Everyone couldn't afford a stage worth of gear in 60s and 70s. Nowadays, that's not so much the problem. Neither is obtaining tools to quickly create passable music.

I think the barriers to entry for virtuoso level playing remain, so that realm of musicianship is pretty safe for now in the form of technical guitarists, orchestra musicians, etc, but the more accessible bourgeoisie of music creation, in the middle of which Ableton sits along with Reason, Garageband, Fruityloops, and even Logic and protools at this point, make it possible for non-technical musicians to turn out credible music.

I think the proliferation of music creation does sound the death knell of the old music retail model including all this streaming stuff, top40, and whatever else and that that's actually a good thing. New ways of spreading music have to emerge. I think that in this musical middle class, there are new niches for people to fill with their sounds. New ways of connecting with them are emerging. Even back in the 90's, I remember everyone complained about how the record lables were insurmountable barriers to entry for whom all sorts of deviant acts were required in order to get published... Now anyone can be published, and really the barrier to entry is differentiation. At least now, I can look at it a and believe that its possible to blow up without the aid of a record company, and that was never possible in the 90's 80's or before. So what that I might not become a billionaire? If I really wanted that, I should have stayed in college and gone for a business degree.

What about cranking out remix packs of your song instead of finished pieces. Something akin to the remixpacks NI is putting out for traktor. This is one way for a new community to grow up around a new way to create and distribute (and in some cases even differentiate effectively).

The music industry has been a monolithic piece of the modern popular landscape for half of a century, but can't there be a return to regional sounds and a more nuanced musical landscape in the world? I think this is what it looked like in the first half of the 20th century when music was largely distributed on paper (cheaply), and when a person would deliver an interpretation of that instead of a reproduction. Back then, everyone was a musician... Everywhere you went, you would hear the same song played in a different way, on a different instrument.

And think, how the Ableton users around the world will bitterly complain in a decade or so when they perfect neural interfaces such that you can imagine music fully formed with nothing but a piece of gear in a hat on your head... -in real time. Then, another sea change, where literally everyone can do it if they are so inclined... I'm sure google (or an entity like them) will also make money selling shovels in that gold rush...

Change is constant and extreme. Adaptation is the only way to survive. Resisting is honorable somehow, but not sustainable. I think this is the lesson on both sides. For all that the major labels have managed to keep themselves relevant so far, I think it's a pyrrhic victory in the long run.

Thanks for reading,
-S

[Forge.]

People talk a lot about how easy it is now to make music and how that somehow cheapens it. There is a massive elephant in the room that people seem to miss when taking that view.

People have to want to make music, badly. And if they do then the should be able to, and the chances are that at some point they will produce music that's good.

Yes it's possible to make a song in Garageband with all the stock loops, but how many people are going to actually make enough of that to actually make a career out of it or really dilute the pool of music out there seriously?

I think probably the biggest reason people come to this conclusion is based on something like "I spend all this time looking on beatport and there is so much shit I have to wade through" - but actually even though it might not be to your tastes, someone somewhere has put a significant amount of their time and effort into making it and probably genuinely believed it had something, felt pleased with it, and the labels/distributors also felt it was worth putting the effort into.

The point I'm trying to make is, I don't think the widespread proliferation of music production has really had such a detrimental effect on music, because it still takes a hell of a lot of effort to actually do it to any kind of even semi-professional level. It really isn't as easy as knocking up some garageband loops, the people who do that probably never expect it to leave their hard drives or even try.

How many of us here on this forum actually consider ourselves serious musicians or producers or DJs or even semi-professional yet still struggle daily to be prolific or keep inspired or produce anything we think is worthwhile? I would guess most of us. The reason we keep going is because we're driven to. And if you keep doing anythign then you eventually get better at it.

Unfortunately we also have high standards of what we expect from others, which is where all this jadedness comes from.

There is some amazing music out there, I'm frequently amazed at the stuff people are coming out with. It might take longer to find it sometimes because the pile is bigger, but I think the quality has actually improved dramatically overall.

[Forge.]

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201206 ... pony.shtml

For everyone who read the Lowery article about the intern, here's a nice counterpoint.

Having read that I didn't think he really nailed the point he wanted to make i.e. David Lowney is pining for a past that will never come back. Lowney was criticizing the attitudes around free music mainly by examining some of the logic people use to defend artists not getting paid. That's not pining for the past, that's calling out people on the excuses they use to do what they want. It's not that people don't agree with Lowney's proposed morality it's that they refuse to examine the morality of the choices they are making because it's inconvenient, uncomfortable and the crowd says it's ok so it must be ok.
.

I like this bit:

The existential questions that your generation gets to answer are these:

Why do we value the network and hardware that delivers music but not the music itself?

Why are we willing to pay for computers, iPods, smartphones, data plans, and high speed internet access but not the music itself?

Why do we gladly give our money to some of the largest richest corporations in the world but not the companies and individuals who create and sell music?

This is a bit of hyperbole to emphasize the point. But it’s as if:

Networks: Giant mega corporations. Cool! have some money!

Hardware: Giant mega corporations.Cool! have some money!

Artists: 99.9 % lower middle class.Screw you, you greedy bastards!

Congratulations, your generation is the first generation in history to rebel by unsticking it to the man and instead sticking it to the weirdo freak musicians!

Hard to argue with that.

[Forge.]

I'm of the view that Internet providers should include streaming as part of the bill. I pay a small fortune for the service anyway, and it's a lot easier to just access whatever, and by Lowery's figures in that article the girl Emily his letter was aimed at she would have had to pay about $18 a month over 10 years to pay for the 11,000 songs on her iPod.

It would be hard to work out who got what though, but maybe it could be some kind of online inclusion fee, and it would have to be tiered so that download figures put you in a tier that pays differently according to popularity.

[yur2die4]

Really. Either one is the beggar, asking for a few bucks.

Or they are in demand. Sought out by others, to have money given to them.

Or, lastly, the demander who puts you in a situation where people have very little choice but to give them money due to the situation they've been put into.

Everything falls along those lines. Except usually at a more glamorous level.

I mean, this Is about money, right?

There is nothing wrong with paying a beggar. Sometimes they have earned it. Sometimes they are humble beggars. Sometimes they don't entirely ask for it but don't refuse. But a person actively has the choice as to whether to support the beggar. And the beggar has whatever network.

I take this all back actually. But I was feeling it as I posted it haha