music

Cut, Paste, Innovate – The Business of (Stolen) Art

Cut, Paste, Innovate – The Business of (Stolen) Art | The Cynical Musician:

The reality is that even the best tools are seldom enough and that although the Internet has solved some problems, the biggest ones still remain – the chief of those being the ability to make your existence known to a wider audience. Plus, the same tools that enable you to enter the market at lower cost also make it easier for bad actors to do so – lifting your work in the process. If Love Lieberman was able to make any money from Art4Love, he did so by exploiting the standard pirate advantages – costless access to a large and varied body of work and the risk-minimsation that comes with it. He could even tailor the site’s offer to reflect the results achieved – phasing out disappointing works, introducing new ones and promoting those that found the most buyers. No individual artist could do the same, since they’d be restricted to the work that they had produced themselves.

Whenever an online business decides to profit from piracy – and gets called out on it – we hear the usual suspects crying out that “rent-seeking Big Media” is trying to crush “innovation”. I put it to you that most of the time what we’re actually seeing is just the “cut (or copy), paste” bit.

[Powerful piece. Rings true to me.]

The Paradise That Should Have Been | The Cynical Musician

The Paradise That Should Have Been | The Cynical Musician:

What about a band? Let’s just quickly go over the same calculations for a standard four-piece rock group (vocals, guitar, bass, drums):

Amazon and iTunes, single-track downloads: 7,250 a month; 87,000 a year.
CD Baby full-album downloads: 619 a month; 7,433 a year.
eMusic single-track downloads: 13,567 a month; 162,807 a year.
Rhapsody streams: 509,890 a month; 6,118,681 a year.
Last.fm plays: 30,933,333 a month; 371,200,000 a year.
Aside: Even if you got the entire Chinese web-connected population to listen to your song on Last.fm just once, you still probably wouldn’t meet your annual quota.

[And that’s for minimum wage and assumes no cost in the production of the music. It is to weep. Keep asking me why I no longer try and make a living in music… simple really. I found that I had to do other things to make a living, which was defeating the point. I also never thought the “Internet” was going to improve this situation in terms of sales or royalties directly. I saw it as an opportunity to market to larger audience more easily. And that it is. But that does not convert directly into sales where aggregation and a direct relationship with your audience is important. iTunes sitting between you and your audience doesn’t allow for this… or any other service of that sort. That’s why I think making credit card transactions simple is so key right now.]

Guitarist Jeff Healey dies at 41

The Ampersand: Canadian guitarist Jeff Healey has died in Toronto Sunday after a battle with cancer. He was 41. The news was released on his website, jeffhealey.com. Here’s a statement from his site. “Following a lengthy struggle with cancer, Healey passes away on the eve of the release of a new blues rock album.” [His struggle is evident in his music. That’s the mark for which we all search. RIP.]
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Music business models based on free downloads

They often start with “Get some gigs, start building a following, do some recording (because it’s super cheap now that digital is everywhere) give all that away, rinse, repeat, and sell merchandise.

That is not a business plan folks, and it simply solves the audience desire for free recordings.

First of all, getting gigs is not that simple, and are plenty expensive to a band (or band leader). There are many fewer places supporting live (especially original) music, and plenty of reasons why you need to be either willing to work for free or a loss or established. And trying to make a living selling merchandise for a band without a following is also not a winning solution.

So while a recording can be considered a promotional device the question is how to you support the cost of creating it? True the incremental cost is small, but how much does the first copy cost?

Also spoken about as if it were magic is the sell the rare, give away the ubiquitous. This is the start of the subscription model where the artist figures out ways of getting folks inside. Pre-release tracks, backstage passes, etc. It doesn’t solve the promotional problem of finding places to play.

Here’s something that a lot of folks don’t think about. Not everyone is good enough to make there living as a musician. It’s not a right that you can invoke because you desire it, and the greatest work ethic will not guarantee anything either. To be good enough as a song writer, player, etc. to support yourself in this scenario of playing your own music for adoring fans is in and of itself rare. Desire doesn’t change that. Promotion doesn’t change that.

Maybe that’s all there is to it?

Falling in love with material things.

frontLeft.jpgIf I were buying a violin…(or viola, or cello) I would buy it from David. I was once on a list to buy a guitar from him, but things got screwed up and I never did. At the moment it makes no sense for me to sink that kind of money into an instrument. Anyway, his sense of style, and sculpture is what lures me in, and the attention and study of qualities of sound keep me there.

Nine Inch Nails Becomes a Free Agent With No Record Label

Nine Inch Nails Becomes a Free Agent With No Record Label: Yesterday Trent Reznor wrote an amazing post on the Nine Inch Nails blog stating that he no longer has a record contract and that NIN is now a free agent.

Hello everyone. I’ve waited a LONG time to be able to make the following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate. Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008. Exciting times, indeed.

This, along with Radiohead’s pay what you want release of their new album “In Rainbows”, are both signs of big changes to come in the record industry. [Finally. One of the reasons I left the music business was to learn enough about business to understand the record label model, and why it wasn’t working for so many talented folks I met. Then, when it became obvious that the disintermediation that the internet can provide makes it possible for things like the above to occur, it’s taken a long time for it to happen with major acts. That’s understandable. When a group becomes a break out smash without any help from the old mechanisms, that’ll be the next step.]
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