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Ever wonder why so much of modern pop music sounds so bland and indistinguishable? Why, thank focus groups for the tedium!
Thanks to Jason for the tip.
What next? Mr. Valdez has some rather good advice:
To be a working Jazz musician requires one to constantly be booking and promoting gigs. It's getting less and less common to have steady gigs anymore. The player is usually responsible for doing much of the promotion that the club owner used to do. The club may have an ad in a weekly paper or a listing in the entertainment section, but many times this isn't enough to ensure a decent crowd. When I was younger I didn't take promoting my gigs very seriously. I just cared about making the music good and pinning down the next gig. If you don't draw many listeners to your gig it doesn't really matter how good the music is, you probably won't get many more gigs there in the future. Besides, how much fun is it to play to an empty house?
- ...[P]osters are not always the best way to advertise your gigs. Postering is expensive and time consuming.
- Mass media is the musician's best friend. Make sure you send out your press releases for your gigs about two weeks before they happen.
- Make sure you send a note to the music calendar editors. These are usually different folks than the journalists.
- You should try to develop personal relationships with the writers and DJs that cover Jazz [or whatever musical genre you are playing... --Casper].
- Try to get on the radio as a guest before your gig. People's memories are short so do this right before your gig.
- Get your demo CDs to the DJs to play on their shows.
- Find out when the outdoor fairs and festivals happen and start working on them six months before they happen. Many times these will be booked by a professional booking agency.
- Contact every booking agency, caterer, and party planner in the phone book. These are the real money gigs.
- Work on an email list. Bring a notebook to every gig and make sure to ask the audience to put their email info in it.
- Get on the phone and personally invite people to your gig. This is much more effective than any other promotion method.
- Talk the club owner into offering some kind of food or drink special just for your gig. Use this as a draw in your promo materials.
- Save every review, blurb and ad about your band for your promo package.
- People are always more interested in musicians and bands from out of town. Bring in a player from out of town for a few gigs to generate more buzz.
Recent bickering between labels and Apple over download prices has made headlines in the last week. Many see this as an issue of labels biting the hand that feeds them. Others see this as an issue of encouraging growth and responsible pricing in digital music. Many think uniform prices are integral to gaining more customers.
(Consumers don't like to be confused, goes the argument. We need flat pricing. Forget that uniform prices exist in few places in our economy, and that such a rigid pricing structure would usually attract the attention of federal regulators who seek out and crush collusion. We're told it's in our best interest to pay the same for a hot new release as a 40-year-old catalog title that sells 3,000 units a year. Sensible? No.)
Glenn has touched on this before, but he still says it quite well.
Some tips on landing gigs (a bit condensed; follow the link for the full text):
So, Warner is going to start a label that abandons the physical world altogether. I'm not sure as to where I stand on this one right as of now.
On the one hand, I've bought way too many albums that were 80% dreck. Sometimes, I got a pleasant surprise; most of the time, though, I got used to finding the fast forward button in the dark. The idea of being able to buy only what I want without having to suffer through a bunch of filler has it's appeal. On the other hand, there's something to be said about listening to a song in the context of what the artist intended, taking the emotional ride from tune to tune.
Glenn has a few thoughts on the subject as well:
The album is still a defining artistic statement and the de facto measure of an artist’s career. Any musician worth his/her salt has put out a good album. Not a good single. Not a good MP3 download. A good album. Do I expect future artists to think so little of themselves that they aim to release singles or three-song EPs? Not at all. The album format is still what matters. Egos will demand albums. Fortunes are made on albums. Better than the single or EP, the album portrays all a band’s strengths, moods, conflicts and thoughts. If a band is one-dimensional and shallow then by all means let’s relegate it to a career of one-offs. If a band is genuinely good it shouldn’t stop at an EP, it needs to offer more to listeners.
Granted, there are plenty of bad albums, and there are many more that are merely mediocre. In the old days — pre-digital era — consumers were strong-armed into buying the entire album. But as Lou Reed sang, “These are different times.” People can choose not to pay and find just about anything on P2P networks (if they want to roll the RIAA dice) or they can buy a la carte at online stores. In fact, in a time when buyers can preview online (band websites, MTV.com, VH1.com, MySpace.com) and often at retailers (listening post, new digital kiosks) there’s no excuse for buying bad albums because there shouldn’t be any surprise.
But buyer beware: Buying three or four tracks may encourage the mediocre to keep recording. Here’s my theory on the sub-album model of the e-label: The downside of the digital revolution is that it will eventually provide a business model that will support mediocre artists who don’t have the goods to make a good album. You see, good bands make good albums while mediocre bands make three good songs and a ringtone. Buying albums will foster long term artist development and more worthwhile music. The three-song-and-a-ringtone model encourages labels to seek a quick return on a flavor of the month. It won’t weed out the weaker artists, and it will ruin the process of natural evolution that previously ended the careers all but the stronger artists.
One of the reasons why I can't quite decide where to fall on this one is that I'm in the process of starting my own label (for the upcoming album). Holding on to the idea of the album does have more appeal from the business side of the fence, but I suspect that the single will be rising in acension, dragging album sales along with it (rather than the supremecy of the album in the world today). But I could be wrong.
The RIAA, ever exemplars of infinite wisdom, has decided that the next threat to life, liberty and small fuzzy animals clearly must be The Ability Of Users To Burn CDs (caps are required, since it's such a scary thought).
Music copied onto blank recordable CDs is becoming a bigger threat to the bottom line of record stores and music labels than online file-sharing, the head of the recording industry's trade group said Friday.
"Burned" CDs accounted for 29 percent of all recorded music obtained by fans in 2004, compared to 16 percent attributed to downloads from online file-sharing networks, said Mitch Bainwol, chief executive for the Recording Industry Association of America.
For the record, Mitch, have you perhaps heard of the Audio Home Recording Act? You know, the one that specifically mentions copying a record at home for personal purposes? In fact, I'm pretty sure it says something like this: "...users may still make as many first-generation copies as they want..." Sounds pretty much like we have permission to burn CDs to our hearts content. I'm also reasonably sure that if I take three tracks off of one CD (that I own, naturally) and two tracks off of another CD (for which I have paid good money), it's still a first generation copy for me to compile them onto a single CD.
Thanks to Simon for the tip and who has a lovely little spot of sentiment:
Simon Wright, chief executive of Virgin Entertainment Group International, which oversees the Virgin chain of music stores, said he's in favor of labels releasing more albums in a copy-protected CD format, regardless of the potential for consumer backlash.
"If, particularly, the technology allows two-to-three burns, that's well within acceptable limits and I don't think why consumers should have any complaints," Wright said.
You don't, Simon? Well, how about this: I've paid for my CD, and I want to decide what to do with it, on the same basis that I've been allowed to for the last thirty years when I've been buying music and supporting your industry. If, all of a sudden, there are to be limits placed on what I can do with the CD, then I'd expect to see a substantial reduction in the price, in the same way that a disposable plate costs a lot less than a plate i can use many times. And when you say "acceptable" - to whom? I have songs which I put on every bloody compilation I make (I'm told the technical term for this is 'anal') - why is this unacceptable to you?
The big question is: does all this signal that the RIAA have accepted they've lost the filesharing battle, and are trying to move on to safer ground?
Now that's a much more interesting question....
Patterning after Hollywood's movie release windowing, a possibility is to release songs to different formats at differing times:
One strategy [Thomas] Hesse [a Sony BMG executive] mentioned was to utilize different windows when releasing music. This movie industry does this when it has different windows for theaters, rental, purchase and sticking it on poor, defenseless airline passengers on cramped cross-country flights. It would go like this: Sell a $3, 30-second ringtone a month or two before the album is out. A few weeks prior to street date, stick the song on iTunes and sell tens if not hundreds of thousands of downloads for $0.99 each. Then when the album comes out it's business as usual.
This is a fairly reasonable suposition as to what's proably going to be the way of the world (and could I make that sentence any more tenative). I'm not sure as to how I would want to fit in this model, but give me some time to think about it.
The grain of salt here is that the column is written by a lawyer, so there just might be a bit of self-servingness here.
Not surprisingly, musicians have come to loathe the complex, "fancy" contracts lawyers invariably draft, to the point that the mere prospect of a lawyer becoming involved at the deal-making stage is often enough to induce nausea. But it shouldn't be that way. In fact, as explained below, these "fancy" contracts -- which are loathed for the excruciating detail and precise language they employ -- are valuable to all parties involved precisely because of these detailed provisions.
I don't particularly like dealing with lawyers, but I understand the necessary evil they tend to be. In fact, I know that I'm about to go through a round of unpleasantness with one of the bands I'm currently working with regarding money and credit. We didn't work out the details before hand -- and commit what details we did work out to paper -- so the devil in the details is asking for his due.
From Here's A Hint.
I believe this to be crucial to success on the local level. If the band's performance is not so much a transmission of notes from musician to audience, but a social event, people are going want to come. When I go out, the company is as important as the destination. I can spin indie records at home and drink much more cheaply than at Liberation Dance Party, but if I'm out with people, it makes all the difference. I think this is why a band that normally draws 40 or 50 people can draw in the hundreds for a CD release party. It has the "eventy" feel to it that gets the outliers to come out when they normally wouldn't for "any old show".
The real question, though, is how to make your shows feel events? Obviously, it helps to not suck and have interesting songs. It also helps to know a lot of people and make sure they know you're in a band. I think that key to that last bit is how you let them know. It's got to be honest and normal. It can't be weekly emails to everyone@yourcompany.com saying that you're playing some show. It has to be through real methods like conversation and human interaction. And even then, it has to be real. There's nothing more insulting than having a musician "network" with you. You can see the look in their eyes when you tell them you aren't in a band; they immediately start scoping for a "more important" mark. Those musicians ensure that I will not be patronizing them if I can help it.
Personally, I rather hate dealing with the "networkers" -- in music or otherwise. One of the things that I have had to get after the other people in various bands in which I've played is to mingle during breaks and after shows. It's not enough to go over and spend all of your time with your buddies from the office. Don't ignore them, but please take the time to talk to as many of the people who came out to see you as you can. It's the least you can do ('specially as they are willingly giving up large portions of their night and money to see/hear you play) and you just might make a new friend.
One of the dirty little secrets of pop music (or much of any music, for that matter) is that it's so very hard to make a living doing nothing but playing music in a band. To that end, various people are contributing to a list of jobs that various musicians have held either while they were working or afterwards.
Some examples:
I'd also advise taking the list with just a tiny grain of salt.
It's titled The Cheapening Of Music, but I'm not so sure about this.
Creating an album — not just a collection of songs, but an entire “experience” has long been an artform in and of itself. It’s part of what got me interested in design early on: studying the packaging design and album artwork of bands and artists I worshipped. The collection and artwork combined with a group of songs recorded within the same time period always seemed like a time capsule of what the band was doing at that moment. But with the ability to buy a single song immediately via the web, will a shift materialize? Will we go back to the days of 7” 45s, where the single ruled?
When my friend said that he believed music has been cheapened, he was referring to the fact that music is now everywhere. It’s in your cellphone, on the web, on your microwave, TV, toys, etc. It’s even a marketing tool. It’s become easier to get, but will that affect the music itself?
To me, the near ubiquity of music doesn't cheapen it -- rather, it changes the audience for the piece. There's a challenge in writing a meaningful piece of music for a audience that is only going to hear thirty seconds of it; I would say that's actually harder than taking 3:05 to get your thoughts across.
Music is cheapened if it becomes mass produced and thrown out the door just to fill the gaping maw of consumerism. On the one hand, this has been happening for quite some time now. On the other hand, quality still manages to find it's way out, too. I'd be willing to hazzard a guess that it's probably in the same proportions it's always been in; it's just that the larger numbers of the dross drowns out the gold.
The author goes on to talk about websites and music:
What has become crucial is the band’s web site — the depot for news, info, photos, music, videos, etc. It’s possible that the web site will become even more important as digital distribution gains even more steam. Perhaps an “album” will really be a web site devoted to a group of songs released at the same time. Each “album” will stand on it’s own like an archived article.
I'm rather sympathetic to this point of view. Jeff Jarvis has been harping on this for quite some time -- the media marketspace (particularly the entertainment marketspace) is moving more and more towards a conversation rather than a lecture.
Under the old model, musicians would lay their work out and hope that people liked it. Feedback tended to be record sales, as well as the occasional letter and meet and greet. Now, fans email, IM, comment (et al) back to the artists directly.
It's a good thing, I think.
And thanks to Paul for the tip.
...men spend more money on video games than they do on all forms of music...
Initially, this surprised me. Then, I thought about my brother, who's an avid gamer at 38 and hasn't bought a CD (other than a gift) in ten years. So, I can see it.
Brad points to an article about the use of physical discs vs. the potential future of internet bound media.
But if we have learned anything from digital music, isn’t it that optimism is futile? The grand vision of a celestial jukebox was in everybody’ eyes in 1999, and look what it has come to. The record labels don’t want no stinkin’ celestial jukebox, that’s for certain, and the tech companies want it only if they can deliver it in their own private format. How will Hollywood differ?
In very real terms, he's right. The entertainment industry has historically shown out and out animosity towards technological innovations -- starting with the player piano.
Throw in there the Betamax decision: Hollywood was deadset against it (Valenti's rhetoric was nothing short of apocalyptic. Now, movie make more money from selling DVDs than they do from box office receipts.
Clay Shirky was given a DVD made by a friend of him speaking. Yet, he ran into problems when he tried to copy it for himself.
Got that? I am in possession of a video, of me, shot by a friend, copied to a piece of physical media given to me as a gift. In the video, I am speaking words written by me, and for which I am the clear holder of the copyright. I am working with said video on a machine I own. Every modern legal judgment concerning copyright, from the Berne Convention to the Betamax case, is on my side. AND I CAN'T MAKE A COPY DIRECTLY FROM THE DEVICE. This is because copyright laws do not exist to defend the moral rights of copyright holders -- they exist to help enforce artificial scarcity.
Tonight, during the voting off phase, a contestant [Aloha] let slip that they do actually have to deal with song rights clearance, right up to the moment the show airs. Watch the clip to catch the explanation, and how the chosen song didn't work out. She was voted off the show moments later.
Thanks to Matthew for the tip.
Many books become hits on the strength of personal recommendations. I would hazzard that the same thing applies to music; if I someone I know and trust tells me that I may like an artist, I'm much more inclined to check them out and hear what's being offered.
Thanks to Cory for the tip.
From time to time, I sell some of my older crap on Amazon. Still, I have some hopes of selling some original material of my own some day (maybe a Canvas CD someday?). Kevin Kelly gives the eight steps you need to get onto Amazon.
A recording engineer is suing both the record label and Ray Charles' estate, claiming that he was denied a credit on the Grammy winning album.
J-Lo has says that she can't stand to be alone.
A German study finds that copyright law may be hurting the very people it's obstensibly intended to help.
According to a GEMA (German collecting society) insider, only about 1,200 German composers can live from their creative output.
Only a small minority of artists reaches ordinary living standards from copyright income...
Thanks to Cory for the tip.
The top 5 money makers of 2004.
It seems that some insurance companies didn't want to pony up about $10M when she cancelled her tour.
Some good news:
The music industry reversed a four-year decline as album sales rose slightly in 2004 while overall music sales spiked..."
Yeah, remember when digital music and filesharing was going to end the industry?
SXSW, the amazingly successfully music showcase in Austin, is being copied in Detroit. And your band could play there, too.
Thanks to David for the tip.
These days, it seems like all the old favorites are getting back together for a little outing (and some quick cash, just maybe?). The Guardian lays out some ground rules for any band thinking of making a comeback.
3. If it's about the money, admit it
We understand that a lot of great, great bands never get their due at the time. And we understand that after splitting, the members - who may very well have changed the fabric of pop music - will often spend 20 years releasing solo albums no one buys and playing gigs no one bar two fanzine writers attends. So if the drug-addled members step forward and say, "Enough of noble poverty. We want some of the cash that talentless wasters have made by ripping off our sound," it's hard to argue. It's hard to feel quite so sympathetic when the musicians insist that they feel more relevant than ever now and have really got something to communicate to the kids - kids young enough to be their grandchildren.
Getting it right: The Pixies named their reunion the Sell-Out Tour. They've made a bundle, and they've played some blinding rock music. Now they and we can go home happy the job is done.
Getting it wrong: Jane's Addiction's reformation "came just when they're needed most", according to their website. No, no, no. It came when they were at a loose end.
A gallery of album covers that are oh so close to a more famous one.
Thanks to Brad for the tip.
Jaxx, the local venue where metal bands go to die, might be on the block. Figures being tossed around are anywhere from $750k to $2M. It'll be worth it if new management takes a decent space and starts to book worthwhile bands. I've been to Jaxx a few times (even played there once). The venue has the potential to be so much more than it is.
Thanks to Here's A Hint for the tip.
Beyonce says that the latest Destiny's Child album might be the last. Given her success as a solo artist, I wasn't particularly thikning there would be all that many more anyway.
The Beastie Boys sampled a small phrase of James Newton's Choir for one of their rap songs. When they did so, they paid a license fee for the privilege. Newton sued under copyright infringement. The Beasties won.
The sample consisted of three notes. Now, I wonder how this fits with the NWA/Funkadelic copyright decision.
Gladly, if I can get the same amount as Sting did. And I'll even do more than eight songs.
Brown Paper Tickets seems to be a site providing an alternative to the Ticketmaster.
I suspect that this site will fail much like Pearl Jam's effort in the late 90's, but I'm hoping not. Anything to add competition is a win for everyone who isn't Ticketmaster.
Thanks to Andy for the tip.
We can only hope they'll rest on their laurels.
The Darkness have sold enough official band thongs to pay for their new album.
According to a new report, the rockers have sold so much official merchandise - including black G-strings emblazoned with The Darkness, which cost £10 each - that they can afford to make another album and go on tour without having to sell any records.
As a side note, I'll be glad to sell anyone a Casper thong. I'll even make it £2 ($5) -- what a bargain!
Eliot Spitzer, the NY attorney general who has already been after the insurance industry and the brokerage houses for illegal shenanigans, is taking aim at the record labels for how they use money to buy radio time.
The inquiry encompasses all the major radio formats and is not aiming at any individual record promoter, these people said. Mr. Spitzer and representatives for the record companies declined to comment.
The major record labels have paid middlemen for decades, though the practice has long been derided as a way to skirt a federal statute - known as the payola law - outlawing bribes to radio broadcasters.
Broadcasters are prohibited from taking cash or anything of value in exchange for playing a specific song, unless they disclose the transaction to listeners. But in a practice that is common in the industry, independent promoters pay radio stations annual fees - often exceeding $100,000 - not, they say, to play specific songs, but to obtain advance copies of the stations' playlists. The promoters then bill record labels for each new song that is played; the total tab costs the record industry tens of millions of dollars each year.
The new scrutiny comes at an inconvenient time for the major record companies, which have been pressing federal and state law enforcement officials to shut pirate CD manufacturers and the unimpeded flow of copyrighted music online.
This could stand to be a pretty huge thing. Payola (I don't really care what the labels want to call it, a spade's a spade) has been a major force in the music business for almost as long as the industry's been around -- see Hit Men for a much more thorough discussion. I don't know if anything will come of this (or if the money will just be shifted around like what happened after the legislation from the 70's), but it will be interesting to see.
I just caught the tail end of this discussion (as I was spending most of my time with Mr. Pope), but what I did hear was interesting.
Several A&R people were talking about the lack of successful catalog sales in any market other than rock -- urban has virtually none whatsoever. The reps were saying that very few artists ever make it to Diamond status, and those that do tend to be rockers from the 70's.
And, as a random aside, the A&R rep for A Simple Plan said that their forthcoming album will be released on the hybrid CD/DVD format. It's part of Atlantic's testing of the waters to see what the consumers are going to do.
Will Lee, bassist extrodinaire for the David Letterman show (amongst other things) opened up Bass Player with a key note address. His mannerisms and presentation was very different than his talk at Bass Camp. He was more stilted, less open. He read his comments from a sheet (as opposed to speaking off the cuff).
Only 49% of the tickets on the latest tour sold? Has the KISS Army raised the white flag?
-- Update --
Now with linky goodness!
Wal-Mart may be helping drive down the price of CDs to under $10.
In the past decade, Wal-Mart has quietly emerged as the nation's biggest record store. Wal-Mart now sells an estimated one out of every five major-label albums. It has so much power, industry insiders say, that what it chooses to stock can basically determine what becomes a hit. "If you don't have a Wal-Mart account, you probably won't have a major pop artist," says one label executive.
Along with other giant retailers such as Best Buy and Target, Wal-Mart willingly loses money selling CDs for less than $10 (they buy most hit CDs from distributors for around $12). These companies use bargain CDs to lure consumers to the store, hoping they might also grab a boombox or a DVD player while checking out the music deals.
Less-expensive CDs are something consumers have been demanding for years. But here's the hitch: Wal-Mart is tired of losing money on cheap CDs. It wants to keep selling them for less than $10 -- $9.72, to be exact -- but it wants the record industry to lower the prices at which it purchases them. Last winter, Wal-Mart asked the industry to supply it with choice albums -- from new releases from alternative rockers the Killers to perennial classics such as Beatles 1 -- at favorable prices. According to music-industry sources, Wal-Mart executives hinted that they could reduce Wal-Mart's CD stock and replace it with more lucrative DVDs and video games.
"This wasn't framed as a gentle negotiation," says one label rep. "It's a line in the sand -- you don't do this, then the threat is this." (Wal-Mart denies these claims.) As a result, all of the major labels agreed to supply some popular albums to Wal-Mart's $9.72 program. "We're in such a competitive world, and you can't reach consumers if you're not in Wal-Mart," admits another label executive.
I don't know if I like the idea of Wal-Mart using it's de facto monopoly position to arbitrarily set prices to it's own liking, but they didn't particularly ask me for my opinion.
Another piece of fall out from this decision will be the increased death of independent music stores. Having seen the impact that Wal-Mart has on independent and small businesses, I can only conclude that the same thing is nearly inevitable for indie music stores. Unless they differentiate themselves into niche marketers, Wal-Mart will run them out of business.
Our dearly departed mp3.com used to be a great repository for unsigned bands. One of the people involved with making mp3.com has posted an analysis of how successful bands organically grew their audience.
We spent a fair amount of time analyzing this data which included actually contacting the bands to find out why they were in our charts. After interacting with somewhere around 20-30 bands we came up with a series of characteristics of these bands which included:
There was a lot of more fascinating data, but once we had this data we decided to take a look a level deeper.
- These bands were generally pre-Soundscan (they didn’t show up on local retail sales figures because they only sold their CDs at shows.)
- They were organized online using a combination of IM, blogs, and street team tools to get the word out.
- A majority of them were playing all ages venues which didn’t normally pop up on the radar of club goers. (Who wants to hang out with 15 year olds ;-) )
- The genres of music were genres that weren’t typically represented by MTV, radio and retail and were clustered around emo/pop punk and grindcore.
- These bands generally played around 50-100 shows a year.
It's worth the time to read.
Thanks to Scott for the tip.
Gerd draws a parallel.
The RIAA, protector of poor musicians everywhere, set up a group called SoundExchange to collect the royalties for satellite, cable and web based broadcasting. So far, so good, right? The catch here is that musicians have to contact SoundExchange to get their money. If they don't, SoundExchange gets to keep what they've collected.
Tens of thousands of performers have failed to claim their digital dues from the Recording Industry Ass. Of America's royalties agency, SoundExchange. If they don't get in touch by the end of the year, SoundExchange will keep the royalties that were owed to them between 1996 and 2000.
I have this mental image of a scene from the invetiable movie: Someone from the RIAA protesting to the camera, saying "We've made announcements and tried to get musicians to sign up" while on a split screen, a small man walks around a music conference, whispering "Hey! If you want your royalties, sign up here!".
Thanks to Simon for the tip.
The RIAA racks up another 762. Bravo, guys.
From Fred von Lohmann at the EFF:
The campaign appears to have hit its stride, with the Recording Industry Association of America announcing roughly 500 new suits each month.
Suing large numbers of "regular folks" is relatively unprecedented in the annals of intellectual property law. But we could be watching the makings of a new trend. DirecTV, for example, has in the last three years sent more than 170,000 demand letters to individuals who are allegedly "stealing" satellite TV. The letters deliver an ultimatum: pay $3,500 or face a lawsuit. So far, DirecTV has filed more than 24,000 suits against people who have called their bluff.
So it looks like the recording industry may be lifting a page from DirecTV's playbook. But have the lawsuits worked for the recording industry?
It's an interesting read about how the legal punishment strategy isn't being all that effective.
Thanks to Cory for the tip.
At least we don't have to worry about replacing our entire music collection for another five years or so.
Thanks to Coolfer for the tip.
Music Thing has a few posts about how Prince got his sound on some of his mid-80's music.
- Kiss was originally a country song. Prince recorded it on cassette and gave it to a band he was developing. They were called Maserati. The tape was just a verse and chorus with Prince singing and playing acoustic guitar. Maserati weren’t impressed.
- The band worked on the track for a day, trying to make it work. They still weren’t impressed.
- Early the next morning, Prince came into the studio and listened to what they’d done. He recorded the electric guitar part and his vocal. Then he threw the band out of the studio and stripped off most of what they’d recorded.
Off the top of my head, if Prince writes a song for you, you pretty much damn well find a way to make it work.
Also some details on the keyboard player who always dressed as a surgeon.
- Those massive synth sounds on ‘1999’? They came from an Oberheim 4 Voice, multi-tracked four times with different patches.
- Everything was always played live. The only time he let Dr Fink use a sequencer was to play the rhythm part on ‘I Would Die 4 U’ from Purple Rain. Prince could play it live himself, but Dr Fink couldn’t.
For what it's worth, I feel this guy's pain. Back when I was playing with In The Pocket, we did a Jeff Beck tune called Star Cycle. It had this heavily sequenced keyboard part that Tommy refused to program; he played it all by hand. The upshot was that we could only rehearse the song once or twice a week because his hands would get too tired to play through the song.
Given what some of the soundtracks sound like, I'd guess they're going for the too-much-money crowd, crossing New Age music with vaguely world rhythms. Not that there's anything wrong with that; I'd love to have a crack at that marketspace.
Thanks to Simon for the tip.
This article has been getting lots and lots of conversation over at Pho. Three myths are covered and discussed:
It's a good article to read, maybe get into a few conversations for yourself.
Bootlegs from live music can be copyrighted, but only for a limited time. It's that whole pesky Constitution thing (Article 1, Section 8, "by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries [my emphasis]"), unlike what the original law said (namely, protection for all time).
...[The record label's] anxieties about monetizing music in the future are justified. Things are going to get a lot worse. Most of you know how bad. I'm talking today because in five years of reporting from Silicon Valley on these issues, the technology people have failed to tackle the issues. For me, they lost the moral authority when they argued that Napster should be legalized and when asked "How do you pay the rights holders?" answered, "That's not our problem". All scientists bear some responsibility for what they create. Secondly the music industry has now started to sue people for enjoying music. It needs to remember that it's in the music business. And thirdly, no one believes in the "cure" that's supposed to solve these problems. It isn't sustainable.
A music reporter hands out some free advice. I don't agree with everything he says, but it's at least interesting to consider.
Yeah, I know that this is a joke, but it's still amusing. Not to mention spot-on, and a little too close to the truth.
Dear Content Producers and Owners: [i.e. labels and artists, among others]
... Look at us: every year, we churn out more computer games than your entire industry is worth. You know how we do it? We like our customers. We don't treat them like potential criminals, and try to make our products do less. We invent new things like online role-playing -games, where the money does not come from duplication of bits (which cannot be stopped, regardless of your DRM scheme) but from providing experiences that the people want. ...
Signed: The Computer Industry
Festivals like ATP [All Tomorrow's Parties] are the best PR for the increasingly successful business model of selling eclectic music made by and for people who actually like it. There are a host of like-minded events targeted to the dedicated fan of niche sounds. The Coachella festival of Indio, California, has become a pilgrimage for followers of cult favorites and rising international acts. Bonnaroo of Manchester, Tennessee, has roots in the jam-band scene but an open-ended vision. ...
These are but a few of the signs that the record business is coming to grips with a small new future. That doesn’t mean the industry’s overall revenues will shrink, nor that record sales will go down. Right now, record sales are plainly rising.... They’re just not rising in the ways we’ve become accustomed to -- the biggest, most famous artists are no longer posting ever more impressive sales figures. Suddenly, there are more and more records selling 10,000 to 500,000 copies each year, and less and less selling 1 million to 10 million. To put it simply, the patterns that used to govern sales no longer work. The industry’s biggest successes are now small ones.
Some good observations from an indie music festival across the pond in the UK.
Microsoft my be trying to add DRM directly to the operating system.
[The] deal would see Microsoft support "an industry-wide copy control platform" built in to its next-generation Longhorn operating system, with the computer giant instructing labels that the compatible secure CDs must contain additional multimedia content, such as bonus tracks, "as a quid pro quo for adding effective [DRM] into the consumer experience".
Coolfer comments on the same topic, but he is saying that the labels are reaching out to MS. To be honest, I'm not sure as to which is more likely to be true.
Thanks to Frank for the tip.
Steve Albini, the producer of Nirvana's In Utero album, tells a tale of how a band can succeed only to fail. Well worth the read.
Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed. Nobody can see what's printed on the contract. It's too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody's eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there's only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says "Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim again, please. Backstroke". And he does of course.
This is a bit of old news for some people, but I'm just now finding it:
A federal appeals court has ruled that rap artists should pay for every musical sample included in their work -- even minor, unrecognizable snippets of music.
Lower courts had ruled that artists must pay when they sample other artists' work. But it has been legal to use musical snippets -- a note here, a chord there -- as long as they weren't identifiable.
The decision Tuesday by a three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati gets rid of that distinction. The court said federal laws aimed at stopping piracy of recordings apply to digital sampling, and it ordered the case back to a lower court for rehearing.
"If you cannot pirate the whole sound recording, can you 'lift' or 'sample' something less than the whole? Our answer to that question is in the negative," the court said.
"Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way."
I, on the other hand, see lots of lawsuits in the future. When the legal principle is that even a single note must be licensed, I hate to even think of the number of court cases that will soon be on the way (not to mention the nuisance suits).
Want good tickets or to meet your favorite artist? Bribe someone!
A week later Lil' Kim was scheduled to play the B. B. King Blues Club. All shifty glances and thick Slavic accents, the staff could have been extras in a movie about cold war black marketeers. No need for disguised motives here: I placed a 50 clean in the palm of my hand and pressed it into the flesh of the ticket taker.
"I really want to see Lil' Kim."
His eyes grew large, and he shot a frantic glance at the manager, a large man with a black suit. "I help you?" he asked. I delivered the 50 straight into the fat palm of his big bear hand. "I really want to see Lil' Kim."
He cleared a path and ushered me to the head of the line like a Gazprom executive to a waiting Gulfstream. "You let me know you want come back," he said, handing me his card.
It didn't always work out for the writer of the article, though. I think he went about one for ten.
Prince suggests the new musicians should avoid the industry.
Thanks to Simon for the tip.
Cassettes 2 CDs is a service that converts analog cassette tapes to CDs (and quite cheaply, too). Michael had some tapes of his uncle playing sax and clarinet that he sent off to be converted, and he speaks quite glowingly of the experience.
Thanks to Anil for the tip.
Jorgen Larsen, CEO of Universal Music International, may just be one of those who gets it -- he writes cogently as to how the music industry should be facing the new environment of the web:
...[T]he internet also represents the greatest silver lining in our 100-year history, once legitimate delivery systems can make all the music in the world available to internet-connected consumers. That era is just around the corner, as exemplified by the recent European launches of Apple’s iTunes, Napster (the legitimate version), and T-Mobile’s EarPhones. Typical of these offerings is that they belong to technology and telephone companies and there is no cross-ownership by music companies.
This is how it should be, because the music industry makes music, and the rest is distribution. Criticism that we slept through the internet revolution is misplaced, because we are not in the IT, technology, cable or phone businesses. Our only core business is to build the strongest possible artist rosters and make incredibly good recordings that people want to buy and own in whichever form suits them the best.
The internet represents the greatest growth opportunity I have ever experienced, and I would expect the legitimate online music market to grow to (your guess!) thereby possibly leading to a doubling of the total music market, physical and online combined, over the next five years.
A shocking idea, I know. Let the people who excel at distribution handle distribution, and let those who excel at creating content focus on making good music. That's just crazy enough to work.
Thanks to Coolfer Glenn for the tip.
They soon could be, in France at least.
When you put together this article about the prevelance of high end name dropping in music (mentioning Mercedes, Cartier, Gulfstream) and this article about how advertising is everywhere and basically underwrites film and TV, I have to wonder why the musicians haven't gotten in on this act.
I'll be happy to mention Caddy everytime I'm on the stage if someone wants to give me a free car (hint, hint).
The Black-Eyed Peas will release some tunes as a part of the soundtrack of the next version of the Sims.
Coolfer is just on a roll! Previously, he gave out tips for P2P. Now, he looks at the labels themselves.
- Stop blaming piracy. Piracy is just part of the problem. The sooner you recognize the issues you face, the better off you'll be and the more consumer confidence you'll command.
- Use digital music to help create a better relationship with consumers. We're in an era of relationship marketing in which the companies that have the best relationship with their customers will be the most prosperous.
- You don't have to swing for a homerun every time you're at the plate. It's OK to start small and build to greater success.
- Embrace MP3 blogs. Look, there is a precedent here. You already give advance tracks and exclusive remixes to mixtape DJs and look the other way when their mixtapes are sold without giving you a penny in royalties.
I do take some exception on this, though. The labels have seen fit to prosecute people who traffic in mix tapes.
The swinging for the fences seems to be a result of the economic realities that have emerged over the last few decades where most artists don't make enough money to recover the labels' investments, but one or two make enough to recover the investment on both themselves and most of the other acts on the label's roster. Given that is the only way that the labels have been rewarded, it's natural that they would evolve to support that business model.
A while back, I mentioned the new copy protected CDs. Over on the Pho mailing list, SunnComm's VP talks about the actual cost to include the copy protection on a given CD.
The per-disk cost for MediaMax ranges from 8 cents down to 5 cents depending on volume. There is also a per-project/album set up cost.
In most cases, the increased revenue from minimizing the sales drop off in the initial weeks of the CDs commercial release more than covers the MediaMax cost. This is "found money" which, in several cases, has amounted to $200,000 - $400,000+ in additional PROFIT (not revenue) to the record label and the artist! As I showed you, we have had Gold and Platinum CDs with SunnComm's MediaMax M4 technology included.
I'm still rather skeptical that the additional revenues outweigh the costs, but I suppose the market will pretty conclusively determine if this is a good idea or not.
For those musicians who are also budding entrepreneurs, here's some tips on how to prepare for making a CD that can be sold. The links on the page are broken (as of this time of writing). You can move through the pages by manually substituing the new page number at the end of the URL.
Thanks to Rob for the tip.
It would seem that ringtones prove that people are quite willing to pay for digital content when they see a value to it.
As anyone following the online music debate knows, the recording industry regularly blames teenagers for the popularity of peer-to-peer file sharing. The Canadian Recording Industry Association has often cited the need for "education" so that teenagers might buy into its vision of copyright law.
The success of the ringtone market, which undoubtedly owes much to those same teenagers, contradicts that claim, illustrating not only that teens are willing to pay for digital music, but that they are willing to overpay for such music.
To the surprise of many, teenagers will think nothing of spending $20 for a batch of ringtones featuring only a portion of songs, though they would not dream of paying 99 cents for the full version of each song on one of the fee-based music services.
-- Update --
Some more on the ringtone phenomenon.
I wouldn't have thought of this, but Brad did.
You might think that, for [music] executives and employees alike, the threat of collapse would have concentrated the mind wonderfully. Both, surely would prefer to work for a profitable airline [music company] than for a nonexistent one. But the mind is often distracted by the power of past experience—what the social scientists Simon Gachter and Arno Riedl call entitlement. In a series of experiments on bargaining, Gachter and Riedl have shown that, for people in a negotiation, ideas of fairness are determined by what happened in the past. Once someone earns a particular cut, all the participants, on both sides othe bargaining table, assume that that person is entitled to a similar cut again, even if conditions have completely changed.
The substitutions do work....
Personally, I can't remember when the last time I was excited to go into a music store. Maybe when I was twelve or so. Clive Davis weighs in on what the music stores should do to survive -- be more like Tower and Virgin. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Tower go bankrupt? and Virgin nearly so?
Overtly political shows (like Music For Change) have presented a number of issues for fans of the bands playing.
"I'd prefer that my money not go to support Kerry," [Powell] Peabody [23 year old DMB fan] said. "And I'm not so sure I'd want my money going to Bush either. To be honest, I'd rather be supporting Dave Matthews."
As tour tickets go on sale today across the country, fans like Peabody are facing tough decisions.
There's no doubt the tour has musical allure to spare, featuring powerhouse matchups such as Springsteen with R.E.M. at Cobo Arena and the Dixie Chicks with James Taylor at the Fox Theatre. But a Vote for Change ticket doesn't just get you a seat. It turns you into a legally defined political contributor, with your money going to the group America Coming Together (ACT), which makes no bones about its desire to oust Bush from office.
I'm not so sure about the "legally defined political contributor" angle, but I can sympathize with the quandary. Do you go support a band that you really like (say, The Indigo Girls or Ted Nugent) when they play to support a cause with which you strongly disagree (respectively, Death Penalty Moratorium or Support Wildlife -- a pro-hunting group).
Thanks to Coolfer Glenn for the tip.
I suppose that this would count as proof that MTV must actually play a video once or twice.
Sandow's got another good article on what's to come for the classical genre. He goes over market share, demographics, the whole bit.
What people have to say about you matters. A strange thought, no? A nice PDF going over some ways to make what people say work work for you.
Some highlights:
Have the integrity not to worry about what other people think of you. Good work is the way to build good reputation in a new business. — False. It is not enough to display competence. Reputation depends on people telling stories about you to their colleagues (remember the three players: you, the contact, the colleague). Reputation is unstable over time when not discussed, and too important to leave to chance. Reputation is the lubricant for exercising social capital. Your positive reputation makes people more likely to accept you as the source of new ideas and actions.
For me, quite a few bands that I have found have been by word of mouth (good, of course).
Remember the guys who found the Beatles outtakes in a suitcase? It's a bunch of hooey. Nothing of value to see here, move along.
Behold what more than a few see as the future of music sales. I'm rather skeptical.
I'm a fan of online shopping. I like the huge selection and the convenience of being able to find almost anything with a few keystrokes. That I usually save a couple of bucks is only a bonus.
I still make time to wander through the local stores, though. Sometines, the interaction with some of the staff is enlightening (think High Fidelity but not quite so esoteric). I have to say "some," because the teenagers who work at Tower (or Borders for that matter) aren't the most lucid of music afficiandos (unless you want to rate them by the number of piercings over their left eyebrow). I usually end up finding music that I would not have ever heard of before when I go ambling through the aisles.
As a matter of fact, that's how I discovered Richard Bona. I was killing sometime before a concert, so I trapised through a Tower records. I had African music on my mind, so I wandered through their world music aisle. One of the CDs in the front of the racks had a photo of Bona holding his bass. Seemed like a good fit, so I grabbed it. And what a find that was.
In the always challenging effort to try and find new ways to reach an audience, some start-up rock bands are turning to younger and younger audiences.
It's Lollapalooza for the lollipop set. Some of the music industry's most promising — or possibly most promising — pop stars are heading to camp in an effort to reach a captive audience of taste-making teens and tweens.
For the past few summers, some of tomorrow's rock stars have been traveling to dozens of day and overnight camps from Pennsylvania to Maine, performing concerts that are either sponsored by their record labels or part of Camplified, a concert tour intended exclusively for camps.
Warner was trying to do the hip thing, enlisting various music blogs (my invitation must have been lost in the mail...) to promote The Secret Machines. They contacted the owners of the blogs and asked them to review the music as well as play it online (oh my! whatever will the RIAA say?!). Warner wins, the bloggers win, everyone wins, right?
Not quite. It seems that they weren't content to let it go at that. Rather, some corporate citizens of Warner pulled an authors-at-Amazon, going around to the aforementioned blogs and basically spammed the comments, saying how great Secret Machines and their music was. Too bad they didn't change their IP from post to post.
Now, Warner looks bad, the bloggers get to claim a fiesty independence and Secret Machines gets way more attention than they could have every gotten otherwise. Hmm... maybe this was the plan all along....
One reason why you would think the industry would be falling all over themselves to hook up with blogs.
"Film companies and music companies are seeing that 18- to 35-year-olds who are smart and have money and buy everything online are almost entirely our audience," says Chiore Sicha, editorial director of Gawker Media, a leading producer of blog content. "Blogs have this shocking demographic that most magazines would kill for."
Ah, but there's that whole RIAA copyright thing. The blogs that really like music like to post mp3s (that's bad), but they build huge buzz (that's good) even while seemingly encouraging people to download music without paying for it (that's bad). So what if it spreads the good word about a band far and wide (that's good)?
Thanks to David for the tip.
A rather self-serving article about how BMI disperses their collected monies to their hard working artists.
"Some of our business customers are surprised to hear that BMI never earns a profit," said Annastas. "Since its founding in 1939, BMI has had a unique business model."
Contrast that with this perspective:
I am a writer on "It's Five O'Clock Somewhere" which spent eight weeks at #1 last year. To make a long story short, here is the history of the royalty payments on that song:
January 2004-ASCAP $6K/BMI $20K(ASCAP matched)
April 2004-ASCAP $119K/BMI $135K(ASCAP matched)
July 2004 ASCAP total $99K/BMI $60K(drum roll please)
BMI REFUSED TO MATCH!!!!!!!
Okay, Bela Fleck making the front page of US Today would have gotten a writeup from me in any case. That it's about his business model only serves to make it easier.
A look at banjo master Fleck and how he runs his business in the digital age shows how drastically the industry has changed. A new CD release gets attention, but with many young customers bypassing CD purchases for free pirated songs on the Internet, touring pays the bills. Fleck says concerts reflect 70% of the band's income, records 20% and merchandising 10%.
Fleck will realize 40% of his yearly touring income crisscrossing the country to perform with his jazz/bluegrass/world music band at amphitheaters, auditoriums, amusement parks — even a farmer's market in Kansas City. In summer, audiences swell from 1,000 to 2,000 people nightly to anywhere from 4,000 to 20,000. The Deer Valley show sold out, at 4,000 tickets.
Totally worth your time to read.
Thanks to Rob for the tip.
Japanese record label Avex experienced an artist revolt when Masato Matsuura -- one of the senior management (well beloved by the musicians signed to the label) -- was forced out by the board of directors. After his resignation was announced, the major acts signed to the label started to voice some rumblings about leaving the label for greener pastures. In very short order, Matsuura was reinstalled at Avex.
Thanks to Simon for the tip.
Some future copyright schemas discussed by intellectual property lawyers. Some of their possibilities:
- Primarily a criminal regime (remember when copyright was considered civil law?)
- Focused on control of the design of hardware & software (in the model of the Broadcast Flag) to prevent infringement ex ante
- A regime dedicated to preserving the retail market and revenue streams for 4 discs: (CDs, DVDs, Software CDs, and Video-Game CDs), having given up on nearly everything else
- Made in WIPO or the FCC as often as the U.S. Congress
- Gone (not a good bet).
Of the five options, I'm more inclined to think that option #1 is the way that Congress and others are heading.
Not that anyone actually doubted it, but women pretty firmly are in charge of the marketplace.
- Women influence the purchase of over 80% of consumer goods
- They influence 80% of health-care decisions
- They buy 50% of all automobiles sold, and play a role in influencing the purchase of 30% more
- 40% of households with assets of more that $600,000 are headed by women
- They start new businesses at twice the rate of men
Some good info that should be useful for marketing music...
Pink Floyd's opus The Wall will debut on Broadway sometime in the near future. I wonder how they'll do the marching hammers bit.
Thanks to Jeff for the tip.
If it wasn't that she's managed to finangle her way into a fourth record contract, I wouldn't care. But somehow, Dannii Minogue has gotten picked up by a baby label of Universal.
Cincinnati has had a ban on festival seating ever since 11 fans were crushed to death at a Who concert when a mass of people made a rush for the door. I was rather young when that happened, so my exposure to this event is very literally an episode of WKRP In Cincinnati, when they talked about both the event and the aftermath.
Fast foward twenty-five years, and now the city fathers are talking about changing the law to allow general admission seating -- with a few caveats. The doors (all of them in the venue) would have to open no less than two hours before the show, with ushers and security personnel in place prior to opening. An evacuation plan must be designed as well.
Now, just speaking for myself as a fan, I kind of like the reserved seating approach. It cuts down on my personal wear and tear, I can get something to eat before I come out to the show (thereby skipping the haute cuisine of a hot dog for $10) without having to worry about getting bad seats and I don't have to give up an entire day to get a good spot (not that I have minded doing just that before). From my point of view as a musician, I like it when the crowd right in front of the stage is full of energy, and I can see an argument where general admission encourages this. I'm not sold on that, though.
The IRMA (Irish Recording Music Association) hopes to extend their present copyright situation from 50 years to 70 years.
The Irish Recording Music Association (IRMA), a lobby group for the Irish recording industry, is now demanding European law fall into line with American legislation, which extends royalty payments to 70 years.
Dick Doyle, the director general if IRMA, said Irish aritsts wanted "a level playing field."
Bernie Goldbach points out that Irish artists also enjoy tax-free royalities (both for performance and for sales), so I can't really be all that heartbroken for any loss of revenue due to a somewhat shorter copyright life.
Thanks to Cory for the tip.
A minimum of hundred grand from the final Phish concert will be going to charity.
Trying to come up with a way to be financially successful? Consider composing for film and TV. Or, to be much more precise, for film/TV in such a way as to be attractive to ringtones.
Apparently part of the problem lies with the complexity, or simplicity, of the music itself. A successful ringtone needs to be instantly recognizable and have an infectious hook. Beethoven's Fifth works; Glass and company may be a little too subtle to get our attention on a busy street corner. Composer Jean Hasse recognized those limitations when she began composing for the cell phone as musical instrument in 2001. The Oberlin-trained composer has carved out a singular niche for herself by writing hundreds of 20-second ringtones to reflect different moods and attitudes. The elliptical, jazzy little tunes, with names like Ouch, Get Out of Bed and Wait for Me, don't sound anything like typical ringtones, yet they don't sound as if they could be anything else, either. Like any dedicated composer, Hasse has figured out the quirks and character of her instrument: She knows where to place a pause for best effect; she's learned that cell phones will raise the pitch of a melody and that tempos can go astray.
It's proof time! A professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has written a paper on how DRM makes buying music less attractive.
We look at the firm's optimal choice of Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection, and find that revenue decreases with increased protection, and so it is optimal for the firm not to employ any DRM, in the absence of network effects. Listening to music or watching video protected by DRM is cumbersome to users. They have to download license files, there are restrictions on the number of times the file can be copied, and restrictions on the type of devices that can play the file. As a result there is a disutility to the legal consumer, because of which the firm charges lower prices. Loss in revenue due to decreased prices cannot be compensated by the increase in demand, and hence revenue decreases with higher protection.
Thanks to Earnest for the tip.
I have a day job. It's a pretty good one, stress aside, that pays well and has decent bennies. But I'd drop it in a New York minute if I thought I could make a living doing music. To that end, here's some thoughts on the subject:
It may be tempting to walk into work, announce that your music simply cannot wait any longer, and bid adieu to your fellow co-workers. Indeed, it can be liberating and ultimately may provide you with the time you need to write. Before you take that job and shove it, though, there are a few things you might want to keep in mind.
Some good advice for anyone.
“It was somewhere in the thick of that fog that I understood that I’m really in the T-shirt business,” Cooley [of the Drive-By Trukcers] said. “Merchandise is now the only way a band can make money. So I tell people that I sell T-shirts for a living, and play music for fun. I also sell stickers and beer Koozies, too. You want to buy one?”
I know from my experience that the merch is where the money is for just about any band. The royalty level on any CD is so low that it's hard to make any money at all on selling music, but there's no royalty for merchandise.
Thanks to David for the tip.
Jazz clubs are getting less and less through the US. So where's a fine upstanding jazz group to play?
Given the constant state of flux of live music nightclubs, and the fact that there are so few actual listening rooms left in this country, if we are to experience live jazz by major artists in the future, it will be mainly in the concert hall. The concert stage is home to jazz festivals around the world, the place where the music will be readily exposed to the next audience. At the leading edge of this phenomenon, particularly in our larger urban centers where jazz has always been more of a presence than in suburban or rural burghs, are not-for-profit presenters, in many cases those which formerly concentrated on the so-called classics (symphonic and chamber music, ballet and modern dance, legitimate theater)...
The RIAA has crossed over into a new legal realm, taking action against Berry's Music Stores for selling DJ-mix CDs.
Sometime in the late ’90s, Alan started hearing about something called mixtapes. A phenomenon with roots in the ’70s, mixtapes are cassettes (now CDs) put out by regional DJs: compilations of what they deem to be the hottest new tracks around. A typical mixtape might include remixes or mashups along with hits of the day. But sometime in the ’90s, there was a shift away from mixtapes emphasizing turntable skills to ones showcasing exclusives — guest freestyles by name rappers, as well as new tracks unavailable anywhere else. DJs became virtual talent scouts and mixtapes became the new urban radio, a means of hearing cutting-edge new music. ...
“Back then I didn’t know what they were really about,” Alan [Berry, one of the store owners] remembers, though it didn’t take much investigating to find out. “I got some of the local DJs’ names, JF I think was one of the first ones, Paul Bunyon ...” At first, Berry’s stocked only local mixes, buying them directly from the source. When they sold well enough to become a permanent fixture in the store, Alan started adding mixes by prominent national DJs as well. Mix-CDs soon made up about 5 percent of Berry’s’ total sales. ...
In 2002, with business booming, the brothers opened a second store on the Southside. By then, Andy Berry had become more of a silent partner, with Alan overseeing the stores’ day-to-day operations. By 2003, Berry’s Music was enjoying yearly sales of $1.7 million (up from $46,000 its first year). Then, on Sept. 23, came a knock at the store’s back door that would derail Alan Berry’s life. “I was at our warehouse and got a call from one of the stores saying, ‘Hey Alan, the police are here with an RIAA agent and they’re wanting to confiscate all the mixes.’ I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I couldn’t believe it.”
Armed with search warrants, the officers grabbed all the mix-CDs from both stores, then headed to the Berrys’ warehouse. Though they had no search warrant for the warehouse, Alan, believing he had nothing to hide, let them look around there as well. “We didn’t have any duplicating equipment [for pirating CDs], if that’s what they were looking for. And as for the mixes, we never really questioned the legalities of them. We never did. Because, one, we were getting some of the mix-CDs through our regular vendors that we bought our quote-unquote ‘legit’ product from. The same place I would get the Interscope record from, I would get mix-CDs from, from national distributors. Two, the artists are on there endorsing the mixes. I mean, Eminem’s on the mix-CD saying, ‘Yo, this is Eminem. You’re listening to DJ Green Lantern.’ Then he drops three or four exclusive free-styles and he’s talking within the mix, about the mix itself, saying Lantern’s his man. You would kind of assume that Eminem’s fine with it.”
[sorry for the long quote -- ed] It also seems that one of the major problems here is that Berry's store would routinely break the street date of releases. The major labels agree to give record stores marketing money if they agree to not release a specific album prior to a given date. Berry doesn't receive these moneies, so they don't feel beholdened to wait for any given date.
Eventually, the federal charges (bootlegging and such) were dropped, but the store did go out of business. I can't imagine why. I also wonder about any other kinds of activities that are going on which we do not hear about regarding other music stores.
Thanks to Earnest for the tip.
The victim's families from the nightclub fire are filing suit (presumably wrongful death, negligence and a few other old favorites).
The lawsuit names 46 defendants, including Great White, singer Jack Russell, former band manager Paul Woolnough, Knight Records, tour manager Dan Biechele, club owners Michael and Jeffrey Derderian, pyrotechnic firm Luna Tech, foam manufacturers, speaker manufacturer JBL, Providence radio station WJHY, its owner Clear Channel Broadcasting, Anheuser-Busch, Lloyd's of London, bus company Four Seasons and state and local officials.
The band, the technicians and the decision makers who decided to use pryo in a small club I can understand being sued. But why sue JBL (who had nothing to do with the event and probably didn't even know that there speakers were being used in the venue), Busch, the state of Rhode Island or the bus company (which makes as much sense as suing the taxi companies that brought some of the victims to the club)? Oh, yeah. Deep pockets. God, I hate lawyers. I'd almost rather deal with predatory drug dealers.
Atlantic Records in the UK will be releasing two different versions of some of their upcoming CDs -- one with copy protection, one without. This is sort of a different take on the three CD approach which differed on the amount of swag that came with the disc. But a tack that doesn't make sense. Presumably, the record companies want copy protection to work and for everyone to adopt it. Having even one unprotected copy would allow for it to spread far and wide unimpeded -- as if no CDs were protected. If that's the case, then why protect any at all?
Thanks to Simon for the tip.
Continuing to call the music industry a "business" is to fly in the face of reality. They've already been convicted of collusion and price-fixing (has anyone gotten their settlement check yet? I haven't.) and now they're accused of blacklisting. These are the classic actions of a cartel (drugs, crime, oil) that seeks to retain its stranglehold on its chosen domain.
In this case, the alleged blacklisting is aimed at preventing companies like RealNetworks from doing business with companies that run P2P networks. As I've noted, a few innovators are trying to use these networks to promote themselves and develop new business models. Meanwhile, the Cartel continues to fight for its antiquated business models and to strangle in the cradle anything else.
In order for the Cartel to continue to maintain that the P2P nets are illegitimate, they have to prevent those networks/companies from having any arrangements with legitimate companies. It's a lovely Catch-22 you see - since we won't let you have our music legally, any music on your net must ipso facto be illegitimate. Roll out the next round of lawsuits, boys!
I dunno. The Music Cartel just doesn't quite have the same ring to it as, say, the Columbian Cartel. But ya never know...
Thanks to Donna for the tip.
Jimmy Buffett's latest album is now at the top of the charts. I used to rather like Jimmy, even to the point of catching one of his concerts every year for about thirteen years (or so). I stopped doing this a while ago, though. The music is just about indistinguishably the same (not that the music is actually the point of going to a Buffett show).
No, the entire purpose of attending a Jimmy Buffett concert is consumption of alcohol. Massive amounts of it. When I say massive, imagine your liver writing you a Dear John letter and then suing you for divorce on the grounds of aggravated physical abuse. Once you take away the "beach party with a few thousand equally drunk people" aspect of the show, it just didn't appeal to me much anymore. I'm not a big drinker; for awhile, I had my share (and his share, and probably her share over there, too), but that's not really my thing anymore.
Now, to forestall the Parrothead legions who are getting ready to flame me about how great Buffett's music is, just stop. I'd hate for you to expose your ignorance like that. He can tell a decent enough of a story, but the music is completely formulaic and trite. Even his latest stuff (which is actually just his really old stuff) harkens back to his earliest albums of rather Country/Western music that just happens to be either about a beach or a story set in the context of a beach.
Kind of an irony here is that I own just about every Buffett album on CD (excepting the last two or three). I'll probably hang on to some of them (a few songs have sentimental value to me because of my memories as to what I was doing at the time rather than any actual musical value), but I think I'll probably sell the rest on Amazon. Now that, you can feel free to contact me about.
Thanks to Coolfer for the tip.
The Army is looking for a few good musicians. That in and of itself isn't that big a deal. The thing that caught my eye is that you don't have to be do have to be in the Army to join the band [that's what happens when you don't read closely enough. -ed]. Although I wonder if the uniform comes with the gig.
As most of my readers well know, from a business perspective the marketing of the music is almost more important than the music itself. To that end, here are some tips:
- Relationships are key
- You NEED an active, powerful, online presence
- You should regularly produce excellent articles of journalistic quality
- You need to have your name and stories showing up consistently in GoogleNews and Yahoo! News
- Recognize the power of video and audio in helping media sources to choose to call you rather than your competition
- Learn to wisely use email to pitch stories
- Learn to stand out
Thanks to Governor Arnie, recording artists will have additional access to auditing the financial books of the labels.
The law, which goes into effect Jan. 1, allows artists to conduct annual audits and applies to any record companies doing business in California. The law holds down the cost of audits through means such as letting a single auditor work for several artists on the same label simultaneously.
"This is a significant step forward for artists' rights," said Sen. Kevin Murray, the Los Angeles Democrat and former music agent who sponsored the bill. "The ability to audit will keep record companies a little bit more honest."
The law is the culmination of a campaign by some musicians, including Don Henley, to give artists more power to determine whether they are due royalty payments.
Some things to consider about road managers.
Musician.com: How do you make sure the band is paid fairly?
Brenner: As an addendum to the contract, there would be a list of expenses that are agreed to between the band's management through the booking agent and the local promoter. Typically those involve things such as advertising, production sound and lights, crew costs, catering, security, box office staff, Ticketmaster, etc. Those are all pretty standard. The tour manager should always expect at the end of every performance to be presented with a list of bills from the promoter validating these figures. At a certain point you have to believe that the bills you are looking at are indeed the correct bills. You can dispute a dollar or two here or there, but if you've done it two or three times you realize it isn't a worthwhile use of your time. You need to look at the overall expenses to see if they're in-line with what was previously budgeted. So the expense side is one issue and the income side is the other issue. You need to see the Ticketmaster manifest and understand how to read it. You need to know that within the contract you'll see a number that says what the gross box office receipt is at sellout, so if there is a sellout those numbers should be close. There are always a few seats here or there. It's never an exact match, but the numbers have to be close and reasonable. The way the deal typically works in a medium sized theatre, once you've determined the basic expenses and agreed on the basic income, the promoter will get an additional 15%, which is their profit. That profit is added onto the expenses and subtracted from the income. Then whatever money is leftover is split between the band and the promoter as per the contract: 80/20, 85/15 or however that's agreed upon. And you should always walk out with your money. But it's a business and for the most part people are dealing straight up with it because it's not worth it to screw your band for a few hundred dollars when they know they've got to deal with this agent for 20 or 30 other bands that they want to book. It's not as ugly a business as it might have been some years ago.
Thanks to Rob for the tip.
How the pimp image has been softened and popularized throughout the American culture.
All Music Guide has been a mainstay of internet music research for awhile. I've never been that big of a fan of it -- I've never liked the interface, and what information I have found tends to be somewhat accurate, if incomplete.
Well, they recently changed the look and feel. And, if you ever needed an example of a quantum leap backwards, this would be it. Over at Waxy.org, there's a pretty comprehensive examination of the negatives to the new design.
Thanks to Tim for the tip.
The NY Times has an article about bands going into therapy.
The music world — full of notoriously volatile and dysfunctional types who have long preferred to rock it out, not talk it out — has become more receptive to therapists and their ministrations. Though the notion of seeking help remains one of rock's dirty little secrets, some of these therapists have become a regular part of band retinues; Bon Jovi, R.E.M., Motley Crue, and Aerosmith have all relied on shrink sessions, as have smaller groups like the female alt-rock trio Sleater Kinney. And Dr. Cox is one of several therapists who have made a career of helping bands excavate deep-rooted resentments, break through communication blocks and negotiate power struggles.
One of the more interesting details in the article is how the labels are usually footing the bills (at $40,000 a month or so). And, since all expenses incurred by a band are typically paid out of the royalties earned by the band, I guess they're actually paying for it themselves.
The size of touring shows are getting smaller, and boh the unions and the venues aren't all that happy about it.
The shifts underway are seismic because the very force that formed these Broadway-size venues across the nation is shifting under their feet. Many have pegged the huge cultural venue boom of the past two decades on the cash flow and blockbuster sales of the Broadway touring circuit. ... There are a full range venues still under construction or renovation around the country, all built on the promise and expected revenue of the Broadway touring mega-musical. There will be some interesting aftershocks as the size and scope of the touring productions, the interest of the audience, and the cost structures of the brokers and businessfolk all work to find their new equilibrium.
Andrew Taylor considers the cause and effect of taxation on the arts.
Heads will nod in most rooms where you hear this...especially when all the heads belong to nonprofit organizational leadership or staff. And yet you'll seldom hear a voice asking if any of the above statements are actually true. Tease it out a bit and we all realize that plenty of nonprofits are driven by money (it just happens to be in the form of philanthropy in addition to sales). On the other side, plenty of 'for-profit' organizations are driven by passion and vision -- think of the florist, or the garage band, or the indie record label that never makes a nickel of profit and never seems to care.
- Nonprofits are driven by mission. For-profits are driven by money.
- Nonprofit performances are engaging and ennobling. Commerical entertainment is crass and pandering.
- Nonprofit arts organizations build community. For-profit organizations destroy bonds and values.
It's been my experience that arts groups choose to go non-prof or not almost exclusively for business reasons -- one is more viable than the other, one can bring in a higher cash flow, etc.
Follow this logic: Mozart made appallingly little money on his music during his short life, and were he still alive today, his royalties would doubtless amount to billions a year. Meanwhile, musical ensembles today have a financial incentive to play dead composers rather than living ones, because they don’t have to pay the dead ones royalties. I’ve always thought we should reverse that: that some ASCAP- or BMI-like organization should collect royalties on music by dead composers, which could then be distributed among the living ones, on the well-established theory that classical composers (at least the good ones) get a lot more performances after they’re dead than while they’re living. You’d need sort of an old-fashioned guild system that composers would have to be inducted into to qualify for the benefits - which ASCAP and BMI already are, to some extent that could be feasibly extended. Today’s composers could be living off of Wagner's and Stravinsky’s divided royalties, and the next generation of composers could live off of our music.
I don't particularly agree with Kyle on this one (although I wouldn't be opposed to taking a cut of the royalities from Mozart -- the film score revenues alone could support me quite well, thank you), but it is an interesting idea.
For anyone used to the minimum-security-prison ambiance of most rock festivals, it's a surprise to see stocked merchandise tables left unattended at night. But if you take away the safe environment, the reasonably priced food and the sober teenage virgins, Cornerstone is a lot like Ozzfest.
I'll have to take their word for it.
The sales of Christian related merchandise at festivals is big business.
At booths all around [Mr. Lula's] at the festival last month, 91 other vendors spread their wares, mostly Christian CD's, T-shirts and hats (the ones reading "I Love Christian Boys" seemed to be the most popular), in a sprawling bazaar that was part mall, part invitation to witness. The tents cleared only for twice-daily sermons.
Please-please-please tell me that the people buying the "I Heart Christian Boys" caps weren't creepy older men. Or Catholic priests. And please (pretty please, even) tell me that this is a joke:
T-shirts screamed or punned for attention. One shirt declared, "Body Piercing Saved My Life," and showed a hand with a nail through it. Other brisk-sellers said "Jesus Freak" or mimicked the Mountain Dew advertising logo, tweaking the slogan to read, "Do the Jew,'' meaning to emulate Jesus.
Bertlesmann (aka BMG) has announced that they will be offering three different varieties of musical CD in an effort to combat piracy.
Version 1: No-frills. Will "look virtually identical to a pirate copy with only the title printed directly on the disc."
Version 2: Regular. Will "include a cover and lyrics."
Version 3: Luxury. Will have "additional material and video clips."
There will be about a ten dollar spread between the top and the bottom ($9/$12/$18 or so).
I'm not too sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, a cheap version of a disc that I only want for one song might not be a bad thing. On the other hand, I kind of like reading liner notes.
And I'm afraid that the artists are going to get royally screwed by all of this. Most recording contracts have clauses allowing the label to deduct packaging expenses from the artists royalty accounts. These clauses are blanket, so I suspect that a number of artists will have their royalties calculated using the highest margin of expenses (the "luxury" example) regardless of what version of the disc is sold. Which could very easily lead to a situation where the artist might end up owing money for each no-frills copy sold.
Thanks to Simon for the tip.
While I know that just about every organization makes these kinds of choices, it's remarkable that Best Buy is this up front about it.
Some retailers are deciding that the customer can be very, very wrong -- as in unprofitable. And some, including Best Buy Co. Inc., are discriminating between profitable customers and shoppers they lose money on.
Like a customer who ties up a salesworker but never buys anything, or who buys only during big sales. Or one who files for a rebate, then returns the item.
"That would be directly equivalent to somebody going to an ATM and getting money out without putting any in," Brad Anderson, Best Buy's chief executive, said in a recent interview. "Those customers, they're smart, and they're costing us money."
An interesting piece in the local City Paper about the Lollapalooza failure in specific and outdoor venues in general.
Fans are rebelling against the outdoor amphitheaters, known in the biz as "sheds." These places are cheaper to build and operate than downtown concert halls, but they're inconveniently distant from population centers, and tend to be traffic and parking nightmares. Yet ticket prices have been soaring, in part because most of them are controlled by one company: Yup, Clear Channel. ...
Another problem with the sheds: Indoor venues are better suited to the Vegas-style showmanship that's become common in mainstream pop. "Prince is not going to do what is a relatively sophisticated presentation—a lot of choreography, a lot of lighting—outdoors because it just doesn't translate as well," said Boehlert.
According to this article in the Guardian, a group of Brits sat in a pub and invented the genre of world music.
...[O]n June 29 1987, a group of music enthusiasts involved in the running of independent record labels met in a London pub, The Empress of Russia, to discuss how they might market music from around the world. The group - which included DJ Charlie Gillett, Ian Anderson (now editor of fRoots magazine), record producer Joe Boyd and Iain Scott - decided on a joint campaign to put "world-music" boxes in record stores to promote their products. This would cost just £3,500, financed by 11 indie record labels.
It was a simple decision - but the result has been remarkable. African bands found a new global market, as have Latin musicians (notably Cuba's Buena Vista Social Club) and artists from Asia and Europe. The annual Womad festival (held this year from July 23-25) is always sold out, while Radio 3 devotes considerable air time to world music and hosts the annual world music awards.
The word chutzpah comes to mind. And lots of it.
Thanks to Alex for the tip.
ArtistShare brings a new way for musicians to make their music and, hopefully, get a little better financial arrangement out of it.
In the last decade, Maria Schneider, who regularly wins prizes for best composer and best big-band arranger in jazz, has made three albums on the Enja record label. Each sold about 20,000 copies — very good numbers for jazz. She didn't make a dime off any of them. On two of them, she lost money.
So recently, she went off the grid. She became the first musician to sign with a company called ArtistShare. Rather than go through labels, distributors and retailers, ArtistShare sells discs over the Web and turns over all the proceeds (minus a small fee) to the artist.
I don't know how useful this sort of deal would be for any music group/musician that wasn't already established and had somewhat of a built in fan base to buy the releases -- one of the main purposes of the major labels is to do the marketing, get the word out about the new music and make the arrangements with the retail shops (which are still the biggest sales pipeline in the world) to get the CD into the stores.
Ironically enough, over their use of The Lion Sleeps Tonight in the Lion King. The suit was filed in South Africa, where the song was originally written in 1939 under the name Mbube.
Thanks to Xeni for the tip.
Michael Moore's new film Fahrenheit 9/11 has already found it's way on the the web (I know, we're all just shocked). The interesting part here is that Moore says he doesn't care.
“I don’t agree with the copyright laws and I don’t have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people as long as they’re not trying to make a profit off my labour. I would oppose that,” he said.
“I do well enough already and I made this film because I want the world, to change. The more people who see it the better, so I’m happy this is happening.”
However, since the studio actually owns the rights to the movie, Moore's opinion doesn't really matter in this case.
Dan Glickman steps in to take over from Jack Valenti.
An analysis from Pop Matters.
Many of the acts chosen for this year's tour were long on critical credibility but short on drawing interest from the all important 18-24-year-old demographic. Between Sonic Youth, PJ Harvey, Flaming Lips, Modest Mouse, Wilco, Pixies, Morrissey and Michael Franti there is at least a hundred years of touring and industry experience amongst these bands, and no less than fifty albums amongst these groups and their previous incarnations. What becomes evident from looking at past rosters is that Lollapalooza has become a place for developing acts to make a name for themselves.
Thanks to Mark for the tip.
A study from Americans For The Arts details geographical information on congrgations of artistic endeavors.
The top ten cities having arts related businesses:
The study (or, at least, the publicly available part of it) doesn't go much beyond this.
Thanks to Andrew for the tip.
Rick James accepts a lifetime achievement award and closes his speech in style.
Ever mindful of his bad-boy image, as parodied in cable channel Comedy Central's "Chapelle's Show," James wrapped his heartfelt speech with an emphatic "I'm Rick James, bitch."
Coupled with this from Ladysmith Black Mambazo, there's a good reason as to why Amazing Grace is played in movies a lot.
Amazing Grace - spiritual song beloved by small-town residents in movies on account of its being royalty-free [Episode 908]
Thanks to Earnest for the tip.
I just about want to print this out and mail it to the RIAA.
After three years of sluggish momentum because of economic and terrorism woes, the global media and entertainment industry is picking up speed and is set to grow at a compound annual rate of 6.3% over the 2004-08 time frame to hit $1.67 trillion in 2008, according to the fifth annual edition of PricewaterhouseCoopers' "Global Entertainment and Media Outlook." [my emphasis added]
Jewel will be the first artist to use Clear Channel's instant concert recording system.
This article talks about Broadway productions, but the lesson is applicable to the music world.
The reason one continues while the other closes? Three annoyingly dull answers fit the bill: wildly different operating costs, expectations of the financial model, and underlying purposes for the two productions (nonprofit vs. for-profit).
'Success' is a construct, like so many other catchwords we use in business and art. It's good to keep in mind that arts managers have an essential role to play in that construction.
As always, it's managing expectations.
Eric Clapton sells one of his guitars (at a charity auction) for $959,500. The entire auction (several of his guitars) brought in $7.5M.
Mariah Carey, not to be outdone by what seems to be her heroine Madonna, will be releasing a children's book soon. I suppose she'll be changing her name to "Nehemiah" any day now.
The KISS army -- one of entertainment's true marketing success stories -- has had it's low points, too.
Today, Kiss has become the worst possible parody of itself, a traveling Vegas act located at the intersection of nostalgia and bloated bombast. The band's contempt for its audience is palpable. Simmons smirks about ripping off Kiss fans in his books, which, of course, are purchased solely by Kiss fans.
This isn't merchandising -- it's meta-merchandising. The Kiss online store features a stunning array of products; it makes Insane Clown Posse's setup look like a Kool-Aid stand. There are $750 "premium gold edition" boxed sets, $800 casino chips, and Gene Simmons Underoos. And yes, you can still buy a Kiss lunch box, except now there are four to choose from.
When a band gets this absurd, it's hard to list every wince-inducing moment, but some lowlights stand out from the rest. As part of my ongoing therapy, then, here are the ten worst moments in Kisstory.
10. The much-hyped unmasking One look at Simmons and it was obvious why they'd gone with full face paint in the first place.
8. The long good-bye Kiss played its first farewell tour eight years ago. Since then, the band has been busy -- busy touring, that is. Last year, it played arenas with Aerosmith. This summer, it's hitting the sheds with Poison. Can an outing with White Lion be far off?
2. Kiss Kondoms You'll need one of these for your "band experience." Varieties include "tongue lubricated Gene" and "studded Paul." Yeech. Really the lowest point in the history of rock merchandising. Makes the coffin seem tasteful by comparison.
Thanks to David for the tip.
A resurgence of vinyl.
Thanks to Frank for the tip.
Fender is claiming that all guitars based on the classic stratocaster design (which is just about every guitar made, more or less) is trademarked to them.
...[P]rivately held Fender Musical Instruments, which owns the name to history's most famous electric guitar--the Stratocaster--wants that to stop. Fifty years after the first Strat was sold, the company is claiming that the guitar's shape, as well as that of several other models, belongs to Fender. That's not going over well with its competitors. ...
The problem is, dozens of other companies have sold guitars with those shapes too--a knockoff market developed in the mid-'70s. Fellow industry titan Gibson Guitar has indicated it may oppose Fender's application. Some smaller guitar makers, which have built reputations and businesses on those shapes, worry they could be put out of business if Fender gets its way.
"It's like [trying to trademark] cars with four wheels, or all tennis rackets that are round," says Ronald Bienstock, a lawyer representing 18 guitar companies, big and small, that are opposing Fender's application.
I don't know if Fender even can suceed at this. The body style has hardly been unique to Fender for several decades now. Much like Xerox found out, if the reserved name falls into common use, rights to that name cannot be recovered. I definitely know that if Fender were to win, it would be rather bad thing for both the industry and for most musicians.
On the one hand, some asinine news that Universal is going to reintroduce 3" CDs (if you can even remember what they were like -- small, got lost easily, couldn't play on many CD players). On the other hand, they are going to stop producing copy protected CDs in Germany (which, also, can't play on many CD players).
Thanks to Simon for the tip.
The latest Velvet Revolver CD has topped the US charts. While this is great news for them, it might not be so good for the rest of us. This CD (like the Beastie Boy's latest) is more or less copy protected. The sucess of Contraband will only encourage more labels to try to include copy protection as part and parcel of the CD.
Oh, if you bought this CD, you can get around the protection.
As in earlier tests by BMG and SunnComm, the copy protection on the Velvet Revolver disc can be simply disabled by pushing the "Shift" key on a computer while the CD is loading, which blocks the SunnComm software from being installed. The companies say they have long been aware of the work-around but that they were not trying to create an unhackable protection.
Not saying that you should, but you can if you want.
More often than not, playing music on cruise ships is typically the sign of a music career in demise. That may be changing.
The experience proved so enjoyable for Mr. Claypool [Les Claypool, of Primus fame] that he has signed up for Jam Cruise 3 next January. So did nearly 500 fans who registered to pay between $550 and $1,125 for next year's trip even before the musical lineup was announced. The cruise, which was organized by Cloud 9 Adventures in Boca Raton, Fla., is scheduled with multiple sets from jam band favorites like Galactic, Jon Fishman of Phish, North Mississippi Allstars, Ozomatli and DJ Logic.
The indie rock scene may be coming to the fore and sowing it's own seeds of failure at the same time.
Lovers of indie rock worry that the emerging music could suffer the same fate of grunge rock from a decade ago. In that case, Nirvana, Soundgarden and other Seattle bands leaped from independent labels to the major leagues only to find their ideas and innovations co-opted by dozens of less ambitious acts. Bands like Creed and Nickelback became successful by diluting the formula created by first-generation grunge masters, indie rockers argue.
Thanks to Frank for the tip.
But this still sounds like it might be interesting.
"After they mail their CD to local and regional radio stations, independent artists have never had an accurate way to determine if those stations are playing it, how often they're playing it and which songs they're playing," notes Erik Maier, Co-Founder of Frequency Media and Vice President of Sales & Marketing for the company.
"With ArtistMonitor, they can know precisely where to target their efforts and limited resources," says Paul Wright, Frequency Media's other Co-Founder and Vice President of Operations & Development. According to Wright, "Every dollar counts when you're an independent artist without the backing of a major label. The information that ArtistMonitor provides can be the difference between putting your CD in more hands and having more people come to your shows."
Madonna and Warner have reached a settlement. She keeps on recording for Warner and Warner gets full control of the Maverick label.
"This new joint venture agreement is clearly a win-win for both WMG and Maverick," Warner Music boss Lyor Cohen said in a statement.
And this is entirely accurate. Warner wins -- they get to keep Madonna (for what that's worth) and Maverick wins in that they don't go out of business. Madonna, on the other hand, I'm not seeing the win for her.
-- Update --
Okay, so now I see the win for Madonna. She gets lots of money, as Warner buys her out (over 10 million between her and the ex-COO of Maverick)
A coming compromise between the RIAA, AFTRA and the California legislature will probably result in more labels being audited (and maybe more artists getting paid). This is particularly relevant to any musician (whether or not you live in sunny CA), since many music contracts specify that the laws of California, New York or Tennessee shall be applicable to the terms of the deal (these states having the most experience with music law).
Madonna is cashing in on Kabbalah:
Meanwhile, Madonna has joined kabbalah enthusiasts Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher in introducing a line of kabbalah candles. Harry Slatkin is producing the candles, which have names like Evil Eye and Sexual Energy.
Thanks to Simon for the tip.
Think it's hard to get work as a pop musician? Try classical:
Larsen, Hall and Hooten were among 65 trumpeters offered the chance to audition after being chosen from a pool of 286 applicants from 38 states, Canada, Mexico, Spain and Venezuela. They would step up their practice schedules, pay their own travel expenses and subject themselves to up to four nerve-wracking days of performing, often alone behind a screen -- all for a shot at the job.
Thanks to Scott for the tip.
During a single week in May, Canadian pop rocker Avril Lavigne's new song Don't Tell Me aired no fewer than 109 times on Nashville radio station WQZQ-FM.
The heaviest rotation came between midnight and 6 a.m., an on-air no man's land visited largely by insomniacs, truckers and graveyard shift workers. On one Sunday morning, the three-minute, 24-second song aired 18 times, sometimes as little as 11 minutes apart.
Those plays, or "spins," helped Don't Tell Me vault into the elite top 10 on Billboard magazine's national pop radio chart, which radio program directors across the country use to spot hot new tunes.
But what many chart watchers may not know is that the predawn saturation in Nashville — and elsewhere — occurred largely because Arista Records paid the station to play the song as an advertisement. In all, sources said, WQZQ aired Don't Tell Me as an ad at least 40 times the week ending May 23, accounting for more than one-third of the song's airplay on the station.
So, let me get this straight. Paying the radio stations directly is bad, paying independent promoters (who "influence" the radio stations to play a particular song by whatever means necessary) is okay.
Unfortunately, this practice has been the standard for the last half century or so. Radio stations -- particularly anymore in the US -- do not allow their DJs to pick songs themselves. There's a play clock on the wall, if the DJ gets any choice at all, it's from a very short list of songs. Radio is still the best way to break a song to the general public (and thereby make lots o' money for the label), and there's only so much time available, so the labels are going to do whatever it takes to get their money back on their investment.
In short, the song that's on the radio was almost certainly bought and paid for, not chosen because the radio DJ really liked it. Sorry if this bursts anyone's bubble, but it's the way of the world.
Thanks to Xeni for the tip.
The latest Beastie Boys CD is causing some problems with their fans.
The Beastie Boys' new CD, To the Five Boroughs, has DRM on it that prevents you from ripping it or making a copy for your car. I got the MP3s last week -- it's a great album -- and was going to buy the CD while I'm in the US this week, but now I think I'll just erase the MP3s and not bother. If the Beasties wanna treat me like a crook, I don't want to be their customer.
Note that the only thing that this DRM is doing here is pissing off the honest fans who want open CDs; the DRM on the CD didn't stop my source from making me a set of MP3s. In other words, if you plan on listening to the new disc on your iPod or laptop, you're better off downloading a copy made by a cracker and posted on Kazaa -- if you buy it in a shop, you're going to have to go through the lawbreaking rigamarole of breaking the DRM yourself.
In a pretty clear case of cashing in, Britney is hawking her own brand of perfume. Called Eau de tramp, perhaps?
A while ago, I heard a rumor that Guitar Center was considering buying Fender. Well, Fender states that they are not for sale.
Some labels in the UK have been failing to pay their artists, too. Just like over on this side of the pond.
Guys, I like what you do. And I tend to prefer live albums over studio. But I think this one will make it official; you have more live albums than studio. Welcome to Bjork-land.
Just in time for the 6th annual Final! Tour! Of! The! Who! comes this rather droll analysis of the farewell music tour.
"It's a cheap capitalist ploy is what it is!" Styx guitarist James "JY" Young says with a laugh. Although, he concedes, it's easy for a band to talk itself into retirement. "It's natural to be at the end of a run of shows and think, 'Man, I don't think I can do that again.' "
Styx, currently on tour with Peter Frampton, isn't ready to retire. But when the time comes, the classic rock band will probably bid adieu once, twice, maybe three times, the manager says, tongue firmly in cheek.
It's things like this that have thus far kept me from picking up tickets to see these shows. That, and I generally rather happy to see such luminaries as Alabama going off into that good night.
In an article about how tough it is to be rich and successful, there's actually an interesting nugget of info about the music business (albeit from an Austrailian perspective):
It's no secret that it's hard to reach the level of fame that both [Britney] Spears and [Vine's singer Craig] Nicholls have achieved.
There were 12,465 debut releases in the US last year, Sydney-based music industry analyst Phil Tripp said. Out of those albums, only 21 recouped their budget.
"To put it in perspective, last year in America, 24 people were killed by lightning," Tripp said.
In other words, the musical fairytale is true. It's almost miraculous when a local artist makes it to the top globally, let alone a singer from the US.
More from Simon, who was first on this one:
Sydney based music industry analyst Phil Tripp attempts to contextualise this by saying "last year in America, 24 people were killed by lightning" - but this is a rubbish comparison; he's clearly trying to suggest that having an album that recoups is even less likely than being smote by lightning, but 24 people out of the entire population of America is a much, much lower incidence than 21 out of 12,465. In addition, of course, much of the wasted budget would have been pissed up against a wall by the clueless marketing departments of the music companies; and while being hit by lightning tends to give you an instant result, debut albums have much more than a twelve month period to make their money in. We've heard rumours that The Beatle's debut is still making money.
In order to stay relevant in today's marketspace, some heavy metal bands are toning down their edge.
With record labels dumping bands who don't sell records by the truck load, more and more of heavy metal groups are offering music that's easier on the ear in a bid to win mainstream radio play and targeting their harder tunes to niche TV shows.
While pop musicians in other genres have for decades marketed their sound in ways aimed at capturing fickle teen tastes, it's a big shift for heavy metal, whose rockers have prided themselves on their nonconformist and sometimes antisocial stance.
The music majors, including BMG, EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner, could fire up to 1,000 jobs from the 5,000-strong workforce in the country. The companies say music sales have plummeted 20 per cent this year and 15 per cent last year because of illegal downloading from the Internet.
French unions, however, expressed a different view. They say the record industry has been too slow to adapt to the new trends in music consumption. According to Martine Zulber, an official in the CFDT union which organised the demonstration, most of the music industry's costs went to marketing, advertising and royalties, so "they can't just apply accounting logic to the crisis", she told AFP.
So it's not just the RIAA telling little white lies, eh?
Tim Sweeney has some good thoughts on some things a band shouldn't do if they want to sell their music at a live show.
[Most artists] continue to make the same mistakes they made before, during and after their shows. For example, using the ideas they got from their fellow artists (who have not even sold as many CDs as they should be able to), they promote their shows in two very typical ways. One, they email the same mailing list they email about every show. Never taking into account that they are trying to get people who work all day to get back in the car, back into traffic and away from their television sets, which provides hours of mindless entertainment. They don't "pre-plan" their shows, so there is no idea of which songs they will be doing (except for a hand printed set list) that will have any value or meaning to their fans that show up. In essence saying to them, we didn't think of you enough to plan anything to inspire you so stand there and watch us for 45 minutes and think we are great. Since nothing was planned or thought out ahead of time, the email will merely say, come to our next show at this place on this day and time. Boy that would really inspire me!
Two, when they decide to try to get new fans to come to their shows they head to the streets with flyers. A piece of paper which states again the place and day and time of the show. Nothing of value, just a piece of paper where no one can hear their music. When some artists do give out CD samplers they forget the verbal tracks expressing who they are as artists and the value in their music. Again not putting in the time or effort to do it correctly so it will be of benefit to them and their fans.
Thanks to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (passed in response to Enron and other corporate shenanigans), record labels will have to keep better and more open records.
See how powerful the new law is. Now multiply Miss Love with the many other artists who feel they are being cheated and you have one heck of a class action suit. A suit that can go after the personal assets of each and every board member.
Needless to say, the executives will not let it get that far. With the corporate protections stripped away, self-preservation will become the rule. The numbers that Love so desperately tried to pull from her label should now become fully accessible as will those of other artists.
The crazy accounting that was business-as-usual for the record industry will be re-evaluated and changed. General accounting principles are more conservative to a point where even innocent deviations can expose executive management to charges of impropriety.
Thanks to Eric for the tip.
A rather interesting interview with Chuck D and Hank Shocklee (both of Public Enemy fame) in which they talk about how sampling started, the affect of copyright litigation on hip-hop and their general attitudes towards copyright issues.
Thanks to Brad for the tip.
Jessica Simpson wants to get paid for wearing a T-shirt.
Singles, ignored by the labels for the last few decades, are gaining ground in sales and label priority.
Catchy singles reach radio as much as eight weeks before the full-length CDs containing them get to the stores. But even customers willing to pay for legal downloads have been forced to wait until a day or at best a week before the CDs' release date. Music companies feared that issuing the songs any earlier could fuel piracy, upset traditional marketing plans and anger brick-and-mortar retailers.
But in the past six months, recording companies have had a change of heart. Songs are now routinely released for sale by download through iTunes, Napster, RealRhapsody and other services on the same day those tracks hit radio.
As I've said before, there does seem to be a trend moving more and more towards individual songs succeeding more than albums. Online vendors are only accelerating this process.
Thanks to Brad for the tip.
Sony and BMG executives in the UK are being charged with "illegal flyposting". Estimated cost to the city of Camden is approximately a quarter of a million pounds. The executives charged could get up to five years in jail if convicted.
It's long been known in the book industry that appearing on Oprah is pretty much a guarantee for sales success. Now, musicians are reaping some of the benefits as well.
According to early sales figures the album has sold more than 50,000 copies since [George] Michael's appearance on Oprah and is set to jump from last week's disappointing debut spot of No. 25 up to a mid-Top 20 spot in this week's chart which is officially announced later.
In a brand spankin' new spasm of greed, the record labels are pursuing a course to prevent consumers for burning more CDs than the labels think you should be allowed to have.
If implemented widely, the new technology would mark a substantial change in the way ordinary people can use purchased music, possibly alienating some customers, analysts said. Given the costs of piracy, however, the labels are moving ahead cautiously in the hope of striking on a formula that works.
"There is a fine (DRM) balance that nobody has struck, especially with physical CDs," said Mike McGuire, an analyst with the GartnerG2 research group. "If there's somebody who's making 25 copies for the world and finds they can't do that, then few people will probably complain. But if someone finds they can't make a copy for their kid so he can play it in the car, you're going to have a lot of people returning broken CDs."
From the Pho mailing list, there are reports rolling around that the online music distributor CD Street is stiffing musicians their royalties.
More details can be found here:
Here's my story about CDstreet not paying me. Not once. But repeatedly.
In February 2003, as my band, Thinking Plyers, geared up for the release of our new record, "Fourteen Real Dreams", we decided to upgrade our online operations and add a one-stop online store to handle all of our merchandise sales.
After weighing our options, we decided against creating and maintaining the online store ourselves and opted for the ease of an online distributor.
We researched dozens of the top online merchandisers, including CD Baby, and eventually settled on CDstreet. Our two reasons for that were:Our record was released in March and we looked forward to receiving our first check from our online store in early April.
- Favorable payout percentage (artist keeps 80%)
- They handle CDs and other merchandise (I can't wait for CD Baby to get this going!)
We waited. And waited. And waited some more.
We waited until the payout date was long passed. We sent multiple e-mails and called CDstreet almost daily to no avail.
Finally, in late April, a blanket e-mail was issued from CDstreet explaining that their pricing and payout structures had caused huge profit losses and the company was short the cashflow to make payments on artist accounts.
Prince hit on a pretty darn smart marketing strategy when he included his new CD as part of the concert experience on his latest tour. As a result, both Soundscan and Billboard (the good folk who track record sales in the US) are altering the manner in which they tabulate sales.
Billboard's new policy requires that ticket-buyers be given a choice as to whether they want a CD served up with their concert, and that the cost of that CD be comparable to regular retail prices. If consumers choose the CD, it will count as a sale.
But Prince will still be able to earn chart benefits. The Minneapolis-based artist, who recorded Musicology with his own money and is only utilizing Sony Music as a distribution source, is protected by a grandfather clause that will keep SoundScan counting those tour CDs straight through September, when the Musicology tour wraps. Billboard's chart editor Geoff Mayfield said that it would be unfair to "change horses in the middle of the stream."
Note to self: flat fees are great and all, but owning the copyright is even better.
The better story is how Horner got so rich off Titanic, since usual practice is for composers to be paid a flat fee, and to relinquish their copyright to the film company. However, Cameron did things his own way, and got so heavily involved in every single aspect of the film, including editing the soundtrack, that things ran massively behind schedule, and over budget. Feeling the studio pressure, he cut a deal with Horner - no fee, but you get to keep your copyright. "No problem", says the canny composer. 12 months later the film score is number one in every country in the world, and Cameron has to explain to his bosses why they aren't seeing a penny off the CD sales ...
Thanks to Tim for the tip.
Either the original story was wrong or a publicist realized that ticking off your home audience might not be the best career move, but Dido is not leaving the UK for the LA area.
Blackground records has managed to convince a judge that the singer Aaliyah was an asset of the company, rather than an employee. So now musicians aren't even human, they're an object? Does this mean that said assets could be bought and sold?
I've always suspected that a number of label execs viewed their talent as sub-human; now here's some confirmation.
Thanks to Simon for the tip.
A rather good article in today's NY Times about some of the obstacles women -- particularly attractive women -- face in the classical music industry,
In sports, film and pop music, many leading women have turned their strength into an asset. But Ms. St. John is not the only evidence that classical music still seems to have trouble dealing with strong women. If you're attractive, it seems, you must also be cheesy and commercial.
I know with utter certainity that more attractive people are more likely to succeed in the music business; fair or not, this is an entertainment business, and people seem to want to be entertained by folks they consider to be pleasing to the eye. Unfortunately, this sometimes leads to untalented but pretty musicians triumphing over far more competent -- if less winsome -- ones.
To listen to the broad spectrum of people, there either is way too much government involvement in arts funding or nowhere near enough. James Allen Smith of the Getty Trust has a few thoughts on the subject.
The starving artist is a myth. Underfunded, underemployed, less well paid than others of similar education but not impoverished.
The lack of a government commitment to culture is also a myth. NEA and NEH appropriations are a fraction of what they were at their peak, but we do ourselves a disservice by ignoring the many other commitments to culture that the federal government has made and kept and that states and localities have expanded over the past two decades, even in the face of federal contraction. In our multilayered federal system the public sector commitment is fragmented and hard to appraise completely, but there is indeed a commitment, and it is substantial. Some argue that it remains stronger and more secure because it is fragmented, because there is not a single target for budget cutters to strike. We should also understand that some of our approaches are envied in other parts of the world, particularly the strong role played by private philanthropy. Sustaining and encouraging private philanthropy through the tax code has been a consistent policy choice since the 1910s.
For some of my readers who are into the more popular music genres (like rock, rap, metal, country, etc.), this is a non-issue. The marketplace will more than bear a plethora of bands. Some of the less popular art forms (like jazz, world, classical just to name three) have serious trouble scratching by without some assistance from large organizations. I consider myself fortunate to live in the DC area -- which has one of the stronger jazz communities in the nation -- and I'm well aware that not everyone has it quite this good.
Thanks to Andrew for the tip.
Ringtones, as noticed a few times before, are suprisingly big business for the music labels. But maybe not for long.
As a result, prices for "sample" ringtones across Western Europe are on the rise, ranging from the equivalent of $1.38 from Web-based reseller F1-Live in Belgium to $7.35 from T-Mobile in Britain, Informa said.
In contrast, song downloads tend to follow Apple Computer Inc. iTunes straightforward pricing model of 99 cents per track. In Europe, downloads are priced in the range of 0.99 euros ($1.20) or 99 pence ($1.79).
Lemme see. I can buy the song legally for about a buck, or I can download a small portion of the same song for several bucks. The sheer brilliance of such a Hobson's choice is staggering.
Thanks to Brad for the tip.
For those who think it might not be a good thing for Mouse-ville to keep Uncle Walt's copyright for another seventy years or so, this worth the time to read, even at the length.
The usual rationale for copyright is that it operates ex ante (which is lawyerspeak for beforehand): by promising authors a limited monopoly on copying and distribution of any work they might create in the future, we give them an incentive to create. After the work is created, the copyright monopoly leads to inefficiencies, but these are necessary because we have to keep our promise to the author. The goal of copyright is to keep others from free-riding on the author's creative work.
Recently, we have begun hearing ex post arguments for copyright, saying that even for works that have already been created, the copyright monopoly is more efficient than a competitive market would be. Some of the arguments in favor of copyright term extension are of this flavor. Lemley rebuts these arguments very convincingly, arguing that they (a) are theoretically unsound, (b) are contradicted by practical experience, and (c) reflect an odd anti-market, central-planning biasFrom Feltin's commentary
Thanks to Ed for the tip.
Clear Channel is doing their best to stop the new approach of recording a concert and then selling CDs of that same concert the same night.
...Clear Channel Entertainment has bought the patent from the technology's inventors and now claims to own the exclusive right to sell concert CDs after shows. The company, which is the biggest concert promoter in the world, says the patent covers its 130 venues along with every other venue in the country.
Thanks to Mike for the tip.
And, in somewhat related news, EMI is convinced that the music business is getting better -- despite a poor performance this quarter.
More good ideas from Andrew...
...[W]hen you look out on an audience at a performing arts event, or watch people enter a museum exhibit, you are not seeing a bunch of qualified prospects for future engagement. Less than half of that room contains qualified prospects, the other half are those they invited to come.
Of course, you may say, there are husbands and wives, arts lovers and their dates, parents and their children, but that's only part of the story. Brown suggests that there are actually two types in any audience -- initiators and responders -- and only one of those two is really likely to buy another ticket.
Like his last set of observations, there is a lot that can be taken away for any musician.
In a battle royale of the acronyms, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America, the 600 pound gorilla that argues in favor of the recording industry) and CEA (Consumer Electronics Association) have been going at each other over the impending spectre of digital radio. The RIAA sent a fax to the CEA, requesting the CEA ask their members to change the hardware in digital radios to prevent end users from recording signals (much as the RIAA succeed with prevent digital TV transmissions from being recordable via broadcast). The CEA pretty much concisely told the RIAA to stick it.
...[T]here is no content "license" at issue becuase RIAA members have no licensable right that could be a basis for imposing limitations on free broadcasts.
Finally, you state that you do not wish to limit the ability of consumers to record over-the-air radio broadcasts. Instead, you apparently want to force them to buy what they have received for free since Fleming and Marconi first made it possible for consumers to hear new and music over the public airwaves.
As you know, we have love been concered about content owners seeking to change the "play" button on our devices to a "pay" button. At least you have addressed the semantics by suggesting new devices come equippred with a "buy" button.
... As you are aware, hundreds of thousands of digital radios have already been sold in Great Britain, yet you offer no proof of harm to the recording industry. Indeed, the various consumer recording practices your letter warns of could easily be accomplished today using commonplace analog radio data service (RDS) technology combined with the digitization of FM broadcasts, but there is no evidence this is occurring. The FCC docket is also devoid of any showing linking digital radio to the unauthorized peer-to-peer file sharing of music.
Hear, hear. With friends like the RIAA, musicians don't need enemies.
Thanks to Cory for the tip.
In more American Idol related news, Jasmine Trias -- who was voted off the island last week -- has been offered a record deal. She stands to make a guarenteed $100,000 from the contract.
So how many standing ovations do you think a modern - as in still living - composer of orchestral music could get in one night? The answer, as I saw it the other evening at the first live concert of video game music in the United States, is upwards of five, because after that I lost track. And while this might have been a wonderful bridge between generations, a pseudo-classical concert for the kids, I'm also worried that the musical establishment will, in response, just get angrier and more elitist.
I've never been to a symphony concert so giddy with palpable, almost insane excitement. Nobody's parents were in sight, the participants were young and willing, and the adolescent spirit of the whole event came complete with a premature ejaculation of cheering and applause the instant the first song started. Being there (I am a fan, myself), being part of the crowd who jumped to their feet and hollered their appreciation and who took multitudes of photos, even though photography was forbidden, I suddenly thought of the refrain - "why can't we get kids into the concert halls?" And that question was silly, meaningless, because here they were, in their Korn t-shirts and their yellow sneakers, filling the place (tickets sold out in 72 hours), experiencing an orchestra that honestly looked bewildered, maybe even envious, at the response their performance received.
How was this managed? By the LA Philharmonic playing the theme music from the video game, Final Fantasy.
While this does sound a bit dubious, there's some things to take away from this for any musician. Just because the source of some type of music might not be as "acceptable" or "appropriate" as other more well established fare does not mean that it is either illegitimate or unwanted by an audience. In fact, there just might be a brand new audience just waiting to be found.
This article is focused more on the traditional arts and culture, but it's also rather applicable to marketing any kind of music.
A key element of convincing potential audiences to choose you over their other opportunities for money, time, and attention, is 'managing evidence'. Since people cannot make an informed decision about an experience they haven't yet had, they must rely on other evidence to help them make their choice. That evidence isn't just your web site or brochure or even media reviews (although that's a big one for some art and media forms). That evidence includes every past experience they've had with an art form, an organization, an artist, or a cultural destination. That evidence includes what their friends and mentors and parents have to say. That evidence includes the resonance of your message with what they already understand, or want, or need. Ultimately, that evidence plays against their entire life experience up to the moment they engage your message, your art, and your organization.
USA Today (of all places) has a good overview on some of the ins-and-outs of record contracts.
The record business abounds with tragic lore of music pioneers cheated out of earnings by predatory managers and labels. Today's industry is cleaner but still too byzantine to seal any deal with a handshake. And no aspect is thornier than royalties, which lend record contracts a Rube Goldberg complexity and cause for conflicts.
If you want more information on this subject, check out either All You Need To Know About The Music Business or Confessions Of A Record Producer.
Thanks to Joe for the tip.
I find the ringing noise of cell phones to be rather annoying. Add to the annoyance level something "musical" like a cell phone playing Beethoven's 9th, or Crazy Train, and I hit choking-someone levels of irritation. But, some people like them, and are willing to pay good money to get them.
And there was much rejoicing in the land of the music labels. However, the party may be ending.
The quest for a distinctive cell phone ring has created a $3 billion global market for everything from computer-generated renditions of such classics as The Temptations ``Just My Imagination,'' to near-CD-quality snippets of popular songs like OutKast's ``Hey Ya!.''
Ringtones are brisk business in Europe and Japan. They're catching on fast in the United States, where sales are expected to reach $140 million by year's end, according to market research firm Yankee Group.
But just as the record labels have begun hailing ringtones as a welcome windfall to help offset free-falling CD sales, along comes Xingtone.
William Fisher, one of the many professors up at Harvard, is proposing a new way to handle copyrights and licensing. It's a bit of a long read, but worthwhile.
...[T]he government would raise, through taxes sufficient money to compensate registrants for making their works available to the public. Using techniques pioneered by American and European performing rights organizations and television ratings services, a government agency would estimate the frequency with which each song and film was heard or watched by consumers.
I rather disagree with his overall concept (which shouldn't be all that suprising, given my rather libertarian leanings). I do not think that both the inherent inefficiencies of governmental bodies and the rife opportunity for politically motivated corruption that would come with the heavy hand of taxation would be the best way to address this issue. The marketplace will get there, slowly but surely; there are already signs to that effect.
If you want to make it as a woman in the music business, be angry.
Ms. Morissette and Ms. Lavigne tapped one of pop's secret mother lodes: the suppressed female anger at what men get away with. There's an eager market for songs in which women strike back. At Dixie Chicks concerts, the loudest cheers greet "Goodbye Earl," about a wife who murders her abusive husband.
A law professor at UVa has written a great write up on the history of copyright law and some of the conflicts that have been going on for the last century or so. Absolutely worth the time to read it.
Thanks to Cory for the tip.
Quite a few bands (3rd Eye Blind amongst them) are being shown the door by Atlantic records.
It seems like the RIAA is being just a litle on the deceptive side when it comes to reporting album sales.
That's 13,000,000 more units, almost a 10% increase in sales since last year. He also confessed that 1st quarter "album sales" (as opposed to overall sales) had increased 9.4% since 2003.
What gives? Didn't Cary Sherman recently attest to the "fact" that there was a "7% decrease in revenue since last year." (This quote was taken from Mr. Sherman's speech to Financial Times Media at a Broadcasting Conference in London.) ...
[The representative from SoundScan said] "The RIAA reports a sale as a unit SHIPPED to record stores. Whereas Soundscan reports units sold [to the consumer] at the point of purchase. So, you're talking about apples and oranges."
A great article. A must read, if you will.
Actually, this is something that have I wondered about (sometimes, I have too much free time on my hands). If you were to record a public domain song (like Amazing Grace or Pachelbel's Canon in D major), what happens to the songwriter's cut of the royalty check? Does it get deducted (probably) and, if so, to whom does the money go? Well, it seems that there is an answer to the question:
"When a song is in the public domain and you record it, it's standard practice in the music industry to say 'adapted and arranged by' whoever sings it," Seeger said in a recent interview. "Why let the record company keep all the royalties? They didn't write the song."
But who did? The answer isn't always clear. Seeger said he was once told by Joseph Shabalala of the South African vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo that when the word "traditional" is used, "it means the money stays in New York."
So there you go....
An interesting article about inventing new things as oppsed to innovating with existing concepts.
...you can see a similar trinity of types in what artists and arts organizations do: 'invention' is the creation of radical new ways of saying and ways of seeing; 'innovation' is the preparation and packaging of those ideas to connect to an audience; 'diffusion' is the final delivery of that innovation and the economic models that keep it flowing. ...
This innovation and diffusion in the arts has been a glorious thing, to be sure, allowing more people access to more creative experiences in more places...in small towns and big cities. But what if we stepped back to ask how we might increase invention in the arts -- completely new ways of seeing, saying, and being -- rather than innovation? Then, it becomes essential that we know the difference. According to one column in the MIT issue by Michael Shrage (free registration required for access), that difference is fundamental and complete:
The simple truth is that the economics of invention are profoundly different from the economics of innovation. Being 'first to file' has nothing to do with being first to market. Being first to market has nothing to do with being first to profitability. Being first to profitability -- and this is key! -- has virtually nothing to do with how quickly, deeply, and ubiquitously an innovation spreads. In other words, there is no meaningful correlation -- let alone causality -- between a 'successful' act of invention and a 'successful' marketplace innovation. None. [Italics in the original]
Other articles in the issue suggest that big companies are not the ones to most successfully advance invention. In fact, in many ways, they are the worst. Big companies are overly responsible to their shareholders for maximizing gains (in the arts, substitute boards and donors and sustainability), leading them to emphasize innovation rather than invention. Further, because they aggressively seek their dominant niche (electronics, genetics, biomechanics, etc. -- in the arts think dance, theater, musical performance, etc.), they draw inflexible boundaries around the questions they ask, often missing the cross-connections where true invention may arise. [my emphasis added]
This trend has been pretty clearly borne out in the music industry. The major labels hardly ever discover anything new or radical. Being an A&R person is such a high risk endeavor that they are more likely to green light yet another act that happens to be really similar to an existing success (witness the horde of clones when Britney Spears became popular) rather than to try something genuinely new.
Want an example? Rap music quickly comes to mind. Russell Simmons sold albums out of the trunk of his car because no major label was willing to bat an eye at him until the economics of the situation forced them to jump aboard the train before it left the station.
The true changes in the music scene (both innovations and inventions) arise from the underground/indie scene. Always have, and probably always will. The majors are too risk adverse to take the kinds of chances that are required to come up with something genuinely new.
Cory has some interesting thoughts on Sony's business model -- particularly in the failure of the Connect service to be even vaguely user friendly.
Back from 1976-1984, Sony was the company that spent hundreds of millions on the defense of its VCR, bringing it all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing that the entertainment industry didn't have any right to its business-model; that if new technology could make the old business irrelevant, that was tough shit, and the movie companies needed to stop pewling and get with the program (they did, and made lots of money, besides).
But ever since Sony "acquired" Columbia, it's been acting like its electronics business was a minor business unit that couldn't afford to disrupt its precious entertainment arm (despite the fact that the entertainment arm's contributions to Sony's bottom line are minimal when compared to the gadget biz). When the first MP3 players appeared in the market, from little companies like Creative Labs, Sony brought out proprietary devices that played stupid formats like RealAudio and OpenAG, which no one wanted to hear. On the other hand, these formats did come with use-restrictions that kept Sony's music execs from getting too anxious and sad.
The result was that Creative Labs, a little outfit in Singapore, ate Sony's lunch, followed by a bunch of late diners to the table, including a bunch of no-name Korean companies, and most recently, Apple. Sony, who invented the walkman and made billions off of it, has now become an irrelevant player in the personal stereo market, with a market share that's barely a blip on the chart.
Even the rejects from American Idol seem to do pretty darn well for themselves, finding some success with record sales.
Congress is currently considering a bill that would modify the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) to be a little bit more consumer friendly. The Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (sponsored by Rick Boucher, congressman from my home district) would:
For the full text of the bill, check here.
I wrote this article with iTunes humming in the background, shuffling random tracks from my collection. And just as I got to the end it surprised me by playing Bowie's A Better Future, the refrain to which is "I demand a better future or I might just stop needing you".
I could not have put it more clearly myself. If we do not get a better future from the record companies then we will stop needing them and the stars they promote.
Bowie should realise that he cannot demand ownership of every piece of work that is based on or inspired by his music, and the record industry should realise that it cannot sue its audience into submission.
Just a thought.
The Funk Brothers and the producers that popularized them are suing each other.
I don't know the details on this, or why any of it happening, but I just find it a bit side.
From 1983, a science fiction writer comments on copyright issues and how it affects his livelihood. It's still relevant today, and some musicians might want to peruse it for themselves.
Thanks to Cory for the tip.
Senator Norm Coleman (R-Minn) suggested to the music industry that they might want to adapt to the new enviroment rather than fight it.
Coleman said the recording industry is going to have to develop more competitive alternative business models in order to keep the industry running in an era of digital technology.
But suing customers, he said, is not a good business strategy.
"You are the creative force in America; be creative," Coleman said. "I don't believe you can stop illegal use by suing a few people."
More good news for musicians.
Major recording companies have agreed to return nearly $50 million in unclaimed royalties to Sean Combs, Gloria Estefan, Dolly Parton and thousands of lesser known musicians under a settlement being announced Tuesday.
A two-year investigation by New York state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's office found that many artists were not being paid royalties because record companies lost contact with the performers and had stopped making required payments.
Although I'm having a really hard time believing that Sony couldn't find P Diddy, Ms. Estefan or Dolly Parton. I mean, Dolly isn't that hard to find; she's got an amusement park and everything.
Prince has devised a rather interesting way to sell his latest CD:
The storyline began weeks ago when Prince announced that a free copy of his new CD, “Musicology,” would be given to fans who attended his concerts, a promotional promise repeated in advertisements for his now-under way tour.
It turns out that was an imprecise description … according to promoters, the cost of the CD was in fact figured into the ticket prices. In essence, fans were buying the album (although it was at a discounted price), and they had as little say in the transaction as they would on ticket surcharges.
The entire matter took on much more interest for music industry executives last week when Nielsen SoundScan decided that each “Musicology” disc handed out at shows would be counted as a sold CD, the same as one sold at retail.
There's something to this. The increase in price wouldn't be all that much, and the people who were going out to see him were almost certainly going to buy the album anyway. It just might catch on.
Did you know that you can find unsigned bands on the web? Amazing. Even more amazing that this qualifies as news. Perhaps next they'll report to us about some new fangled technology that's really close to a CD, but can hold more data. Movies, even.
Online music file-sharing and other forms of piracy haven't gone away, but a gradual turnaround in U.S. music sales that began in the fall has picked up in the first quarter of this year, resulting in the industry's best domestic sales in years.
Overall U.S. music sales -- CDs, legal downloads, DVDs, etc. -- were up in the first three months of the year by 9.1 percent over the same period in 2003, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Album sales were up 9.2 percent. Sales of CDs, which represent 96 percent of album sales, rose 10.6 percent. For the first time since 2000, two recording artists -- Norah Jones and Usher -- managed to sell more than 1 million copies of their albums in a single week this year.
Yet more evidence that the good folk at the RIAA are just full of crap.
Thanks to Wendy for the tip.
Mel C, of Spice Girl and UK Older Poeple Idol fame, is starting her own record label. She has chosen this tack rather than reunite with the rest of the Girls.
I don't know whether to be happy for the lack of a reunion or sad for the new wave of bad music about to be unleashed on the world.
Maverick Records says that Warner's statement is "hogwash". Well, that settle it.
Although you would have thought that the wannabe Brit Madonna would have hired a barrister who would have dismissed the claim as "poppycock" (or some other Briticism).
NGB didn't rehearse tonight (I think Mike couldn't make it), but I headed out there anyway. Nick and I have talked a time or two about me teaching at his new academy. Well, he's opened his doors, so I dropped by to check out the place and work out the details.
It's a nice place, located in Dunkirk MD off of MD Route 4. Formerly inhabited by what I think was a medical firm, Nick's starting out with a pretty good place. It's a bit of shoestring effort right now, but the grand opening's not for a while, so I expect things will even out by then.
It looks like I'll proabably be teaching one or two days a week at the Academy. I guess I'll have to add a lessons section to the site, but that's probably going to take me some time. More updates on this as it develops.
Wendy has some good stuff on the RIAA as well as online copyright issues.
Maverick, Madonna's label, has lost 66 million since 1999.
-- Update --
And Madonna herself owes $20 million.
Kurt Cobain's guitar sold for $117,500.
Sony has yet to find the magic song on Brion's latest production, Apple's new record. The album has been finished for months but sits on the shelves at the label as, Brion says, execs search for a single.
Eppy has an interesting take on some of the reasons why Fiona Apple's latest album may end up being shelved by Epic and a few of the business concepts that go into that decision process. It's worth a read.
As far as the album itself goes, Billboard gives a street date of July 22, while Rolling Stone lists "winter" in an article written in October 2003. Your guess is as good as mine as to when it might ever see the light of day.
I rather liked Apple's first album, and the second was disappointing (in that typically sophmore jinx sort of way), but I'd be open to giving her third outing a try.
From the desk of Simon:
On reading the Guardian Review charts page today I learn that Now 57 would have been the biggest selling album this week, but is ineligible for the chart. So then, Mr Record Label blames the drop in single sales on all the kids who are DLing or getting the ringtone (yeah right). Yet somehow a compilation of all these singles (which everyone presumably already now owns thanks to Kazaa) is outselling all the other album chart drivvel.
It just doesn't make sense...
Hmm, and, of course, compilation albums have been doing so well for so long, they had to ban them from the charts because it's not just the Now franchise, but for years everything from New Woman's All Woman W-O-M-A-N album to the second Trainspotting Album has been outstripping sales of 'proper' albums. It is curious, isn't it? But surely the record companies wouldn't have been the architects of their own destruction, would they? It can only be coincidence that the tanking in US single sales came at the same time as America belatedly imported the Now Thats What I Call Music masterplan back in 1998, can't it?
AT&T Wireless is piloting a program that will allow users to
hold their cell phone close to a speaker for 15 seconds, and then a song's title and recording artist is sent via short text message to their phone.
While this seems like a good idea, I'll believe it when I see it.
And, in a drug dealer -like display of corporate greed, "It's free of charge for now, but in the future AT&T plans to charge 99 cents for each use, the company said."
Real Networks and Apple computers might be joining up.
RealNetworks made a direct appeal last week to Apple Computer, its Internet music rival, suggesting that the two companies form a common front against Microsoft in the digital music business.
And, in a related story, Apple is now selling more iPods than iMacs.
Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chief executive, [said] "We sold a lot of Macs, but we've sold more iPods in the quarter than all the Macs put together."
Off the top of my head, that kind of change in Apple's focus should have some pretty interesting implications to the industry.
Suprising to, well, no one, the RIAA has come out with negative comments about the recent study showing that file sharing does not hurt sales.
Amy Weiss, RIAA senior VP of communications, calls the Oberholzer-Strumpf study's results, released March 30, "counterintuitive." The study appears to absolve illegal downloaders of negatively impacting the music business.
Weiss also says the study is "anomalous" in that it contradicts the findings of five other studies of P2P activity conducted in 2002-03. All suggested file sharing as a major element in the decline of industry sales.
Simon does a masterful job fisking the RIAA's response. Some highlights:
First, she dismisses it as "counter-intuitive" - in other words, it runs contrary to what the RIAA needs to believe. But a lot of people have been saying for a long time that downloading helps, not hinders, music sales, so it's not counterintuitive to what our gut instincts believe. Besides, even if it was - since when has a scientific study been without value because it doesn't prove an assumption? That's what science is for, isn't it?
Second, the report is "anomalous" because it doesn't agree with "five other studies of P2p activity." Now, we've spent some time poking about the RIAA website - it's actually online at the moment - and can't find any figures relating to this, so we're assuming that Weiss is talking about opinion poll type surveys, which aren't as rigorous as the sort of investigation undertaken by Oberholzer-Strumpf. (For example, the ludicrous BPI poll from a couple of weeks ago where a sliver-thin sample group, and a bunch of leading questions still produced "facts" that need to be spun more than buttermilk in a churn to try and help the BPi justify it's planned bullying of its customers.)
Read it all.
It never ceases to amaze me how little the music business has changed in the last 20 years. Independent labels have been around forever. The godfather of guerilla music marketing, Russell Simmons, has taught well to those who are willing to listen. We independent minded folks learn and innovate. The majors buy... and well, they just buy. No matter how many records you sell, your business plan is just a fad and can be bought, or so they think.
I don't know when it started... It probably was Russell Simmons, but now independent labels are stronger than ever. In the last decade they have become a force to be reckoned with. They embraced the Internet revolution and pinched their pennies while majors squandered their fat bank accounts on lawsuits and competitive startups.
Good advice from a good source.
I guess all the controversy that she generated just wasn't worth it. Her latest CD isn't doing all that great.
A whole host of independent music labels are joining together to provide an alternative to the RIAA.
Executives from more than 150 independent music companies have discussed a preliminary framework for the association, which has a working title of American Music Independents.
Those labels account for almost $2.5 billion of annual music sales in the US, or 19 per cent of the country's near-$13 billion music sales. But they have a far larger proportion of online music retailing at closer to 30 per cent of the small but growing market, executives involved in the negotiations said.
Hopefully, the addition of this new group will allow for a more representative view of the music industry, instead of bought and paid for allegiance to the majors.
I was recently asked by a reader (check the comments) what it is that I want from my music. I've been thinking about it for awhile, and here's my stab at an answer.
For starters, I'm going to answer this from a standpoint of what I want professionally. What I want from the music in general is to be able to express myself, to share what I have and to have fun while doing it. What I want artistically is to play challenging, tuneful music and to grow into new styles and idioms of playing (jazz, reggae, world, etc.) as well as improving as a player. However, I can do both of these independently of any professional goals. But, when a reader asks for something, I do my best to try and make good on the request (and, to stop anyone with a bright idea, this is not a carte blanche offer for you to be asking me to do stuff). Although what I want artistically may follow on as a later post.
Also, these are my goals right now. As many musicians (and other people, for that matter) can no doubt relate to, one's goals change over time. When I was sixteen, my musical goals were to be a really big band and meet lots of girls! Once I hit 19, my musical goals were to make it big and pick up lots of babes. Right around 22, all I really wanted to do was break into the majors and get with lots of chicks. These days, hitting the charts sounds really appealing, while the other part just sounds tiring.
And, with no further ado (because I know that some of you are just begging me to shut up already and get the point), here -- in no particular order -- are some of my professional goals.
Be On A Recording Distributed By One Of The Major Labels
It doesn't even have to be my own, or even the whole album. I would love to be able to walk in to a record store, see a CD that I have played on and know that my playing has been recognized by other people as worthwhile. I really don't need the affirmation that someone else has judged me worthy (I like what I do, even while I know it can be better), but it's still nice to hear.
Having one of those recordings distributed by a major just adds to it. I've played on a number of albums already, but they were onesie-twosies for local bands, either for a demo or for a friends and family release (more on this later). Anyone willing to spend some money can make a CD. You can make one yourself in the comfort of your own home for a few hundred dollars, if you want.
Having the backing of a label means that someone other than the artist thinks that the work is good enough. Good enough to put up some hard cash in what amounts to a bet that enough people are going to be willing to buy the CD to make back the sunk cost. Once the CD is made, though, the label has to be able to distribute the CD to the actual stores. Most of the time, they do this through the majors.
The major distributors pretty much only care about one thing -- will this release make more money than it is going to cost us to send it out? When a musician is asked to play on a release at that level, it's because the producer in question thinks that you are good enough to play the song(s) in a minimum of studio time and with the sound that he/she wants.
Play A High Profile Venue
In the same vein, I'd like to play at least one high quality venue. For all my comments about playing at Jaxx, it was probably one of the better quality stages I've played on in quite some time -- good lights, lots of real estate to move, average sound (for that night, at least -- I've been told they normally do a better job). I'd like to do more of that. The 9:30 club, Wolf Trap, the MCI Center in the DC area, the Blue Note in NYC, somewhere like that. Those places have so much history there that I think it would be an honour just to share the same stage upon which some of the legends stood.
There's also something about being able to say, "Yeah, I played Blues Alley a few times." ::sniff:: "It was okay."
Be On A Recording Played In A Major Market
And, continuing along the same train of thought, I've been told by quite a few people that there is nothing like turning on the radio one day and a song on which you played just happens to come on. I'd like to experience that for myself, please (if everyone else wouldn't mind). And not just any radio (your brother's cousin's pirate radio station that he runs from his tree house doesn't quite count), but a prominent station in one of the major US media markets.
Tour With A Recognized Act
I'd love to hit the road with an act that's made it. I know, I'm not asking for too much, now am I? I don't think I'm ready for Stevie Wonder or anything (but, if he's reading, call me).
I have done some touring, and I'm sure that I'll probably do a few more local/regional tours with the occasional band. But, as a goal, I like to head out on the road for awhile with an established act. I know that if I achieve this goal, it will probably be as a result of working with a band consistently for a while, doing the regional tour thing and then graduating with them to the next stop of the train. But, the end goal is to do a major tour.
I think I'd really like to do the sideman thing with a jazz act. Now that would be nirvana for me.
Part of this is my age; I'm sort of past the point where the idea of sleeping in a van and eating baloney sandwiches for four months would be quite the romantic notion it would have been for me before. Another part is, like I said before, I'd like to play a major venue. You sorta have to be established to do both of these things.
Put Out My Own Material On An Album That People Who Aren't My Friends And Family Would Want To Buy
Yeah, it's a long title. Sue me.
I know -- with utter certainty -- that if I were to record a CD of eight songs tomorrow, I have a pool of people who would pony up some cash for a copy, no matter how bad it was. And, most of them would be kind and gracious, telling me how wonderful the music was, even if there was the sound of a cat coughing up a hairball during the middle of a pentatonic run of the big solo. While I know they mean well, it just wouldn't amount to all that much.
When someone goes out and plunks down their hard-earned money to buy a CD of some musician that they've never met, don't know and probably never will, they are basically saying that they think well enough of their work that they are willing to pay for it. If you think that doesn't mean something, well, you're very wrong.
All this to say that I want to be able to present a CD full of music that I have written, with my own expression and thoughts, and then I'd like to have people welcome it into their lives.
Grow As A Musician (Not Just As A Bass Player)
I do a decent job as a bass player. I can even manage to find my way around a drum kit when I have to. What I want to be able to grow into a better understanding of all the other instruments in a band better. Not to mention developing a better feel for the support side of the show (live sound engineering, producing albums, etc.). I've done a bit of this already, and I'd like to do more. Also, I am fully aware that the better feel I have for the other aspects of the music, the more appealing I am to potential producers and artists.
I think that anything insights that I can gain from these other influences can only improve my approach my instrument better. Getting a better feel for how the trumpet sits in the mix will help me select the best way to play my line. Knowing how sound carries in a room allows me to fine tune my effects and amp settings for the best possible performance.
Well, I think this is probably enough for right now. Sheesh, if I were able to accomplish any two of these, that would be pretty darn good.
Previously on the Complaining Record Industry channel, the Austrailian version of the RIAA cried loudly and longly with regards to their falling music sales. Small problem here is that they are, um, slightly stretching the actual truth of the matter.
The Australian record industry has just had its best year ever. But it doesn't want you to know about it. This month ARIA announced its sales figures for last year. In its press release, it talked about Delta, it talked about falling CD singles sales, it talked about the rise in DVD sales, but at no stage did it tell us it was the industry's best year ever. Why bury the good news?
Record industry types aren't usually shy about success. But this time their success is a little embarrassing. For the past few years the industry has argued that file-sharing and CD burning is having a negative impact on sales. But, unfortunately, their own sales figures don't back up their arguments.
Hmm. Imagine that. The record industry is telling a tall tale to try and get people on their side.
I have heard a rumor that Guitar Center may be purchasing Fender guitars. More on this later.
It seems that the BPI (Britian's version of the RIAA) is going to be heading down the same road with suing their customers.
-- Update --
Simon has a great analysis of this turn of events from a British perspective (which is probably a bit more accurate than me sitting over here on this side of the pond).
Both XM and Sirius satellite radio networks are losing money quite profusely, but all the censorship mess might be raising their outlook.
Some violinists are claiming that should be paid more. Their reasoning? They play more notes than the other instruments. Brilliant. Why didn't I think of that?
The world music industry has it's own awards show in the UK. Some people are wondering why.
Any record label executive worth their salt will tell you that you can have as much critical acclaim as you like, but if an album sells next to nothing then it counts for very little. And the reality is that most world music albums do indeed sell next to nothing.
Webcasting tunes (and other things) across the web has started to reach a point where there are now enough people listening to justify advertisers in buying air time.
According to a report by Arbitron, a media ratings service, 20 million Americans aged 12 and older listen to Webcasts at least once a week, and about 39 million do so at least once a month.
Between this and satellite radio, traditional broadcasting may be heading for a hard time (as I go to sell my Clear Channel stock).
Want to start a new band in the US? You'll probably end up in the West End of London while you're paying your dues.
The blueprint for breaking US bands [in the UK] includes a 12-date tour, a limited edition single, a PR campaign and some specialist radio. "It's still not cheap," says Dave Bedford, who manages sensitive British crooners the Tindersticks, "but it's cheaper than America because the UK is smaller. If you do have success in the UK you're more likely to get a better budget from your label when they do finally decide to launch you back home."
This is an interesting twist on globalization, I suppose. It's odd, though, because the cultural tastes of Britain hardly mirror the US. What's the old saw; "...two countries divided by the same language?" Given some of the popular items in the UK that just never quite made it here (Robbie Williams, AbFab just off the top of my head), this seems like a huge bet. But, at the same time, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and Survivor have both been runaway hits, so maybe there is something to this after all.
Ever since the Strokes breezed into Britain and left six months later, suitcases bulging with rave reviews, executives in the States have started to eye the UK as a test market for its alternative bands.
"It can cost upwards of $300,000 [£165,000] to take record to radio in the States," says one US Radio Promotions representative, "so going to Britain is a more cost effective way of building a band's reputation."
The Strokes, who played New York's Bowery Ballroom for two years without success, returned to America to find a queue of major labels at their door. Oddly, while the Stateside media has become suspicious of British press hype, their own tastemakers look to us as a type of buzz barometer for US bands.
At the SXSW conference in Austin, TX, more and more industry professionals are begining to accept the coming nature of digital media.
Digital music and its availability over the Internet has opened the door for entrepreneurs who can make the best use of online resources, panel members said.
"The whole physical aspect of the business is going to cease to exist sometime in the future, and there's tremendous opportunity there because you can your lower your costs," McDonough [a lawyer with Washington-based Future of Music Coalition] said.
At least one radio network is waking up to the potential business challenge from satellite radio.
The industry bigwigs at the SXSW conference have spoken with regards to online music:
All that content is out there but nobody's telling people what to listen to, what's next, what to buy, what to download," he [Don VanCleave, president of the Coalition of Independent Music Stores] said. "You can have millions of choices, but without some kind of a filter it's very tough to get turned onto anything new.
Why, they're right! If only there was someone (other than yours truly) who could dare suggest to readers music to listen to. As Simon puts it, "Perhaps the RIAA and its friends has got such strong filters to ensure there's no bad file sharing happening within the music industry, it takes, like, five years for pages to download."
Here's a story about a service that will rip your CDs to mp3 files for you (I wonder if they happen to make a copy or two of said mp3 files while they're at it).
I'm sorry, but this just strikes me as unbelievably lazy. I can understand the motivation; I have a thousand (or so) CDs of my own that are taunting me to turn them in mp3s. I think I can find the time, though.
An Austrailian Idol winner learns that the music industry is full of people who will lie, cheat and steal.
She should know, Bardot [her former band] was the first act in Australia to win an Idol-like show. "When it comes to album sales, when you take the money away from the costs you never see any money yourself" she says. "You are always recouping it. You are always paying the record company back for the film-clips they do, the publicity they do. It is like a never-ending credit card. I think people have to vary [sic] of that".
Tiffani says winners should know up front that they are paying for everything. "They want these amazing big budget clips but if you do that you are never going to earn anything through the sales because you owe them so much" she says.
Actually, there is something to take away from this. Royalities are hard to come by -- particularly if you do not have writing credit on the songs.
Here's an interesting article on the state of radio these days.
When you tune in to radio today, at best you’ll listen to a live DJ reading song lists off of a computer monitor, at worst you’ll listen to a recording of a DJ reading song lists off of a computer.
The creation of computerized programming and voice tracking technology made live radio obsolete. A music director picks the songs, a technician programs them into a computer, and a DJ comes into the studio, looks at a computer screen, sees the song list, and records—or voice tracks—the talking breaks into the computer. It might take half an hour or less to voice-track a four-hour show, which can be run at a later time. The computer inserts the commercials as well.
I can recall my days as a DJ. This fits with what I remember as being the direction of the industry, and it goes a long way towards explaining why most radio stations have a depressing sameness to them (right now, Evanescence's My Immortal will be playing on at least one or two DC radio stations pretty much any time of day).
Thanks to Bat Boy for the tip.
For those who didn't already know this, Guitar Center is now officially the three hundred pound gorilla in the music equipment business.
Guitar Center Inc. is the nation's biggest purveyor of music equipment in a $7 billion industry in which most of its competitors are still mom-and-pop stores or small regional chains. The company has thrived by bringing a big-box approach to the business, using its size and buying power to offer more variety and lower prices than its rivals - a strategy that has allowed other retailers, like Wal-Mart Stores Inc., to dominate their industry segments.
For the most part, I have had good experiences with the folks at Guitar Center. It's were I bought all three of the electric basses I am currently playing. Quite a few of the staff that I have encountered have not been all that good -- they were pretty clearly focused more on selling my gear that I probably didn't need, but I have ran into some that make returning worth the trip.
Tower Records will be coming out of bankruptcy. So we can still have a place to purchase overpriced CDs and movies from people with a three piercing minimum.
Apple has sold 50 million songs through iTunes.
Monday's announcement underscores a truth about today's paid music download market: Apple still rules. But the company said its iPod audio player is still the real moneymaker in its music strategy.
That's because, while Apple makes a thin profit percentage from 99-cent song sales, it gets a healthier boost selling iPods, which start at $249.
Kind of like the cell phone people, but in reverse.
Independent labels are doing far better than the majors.
The majors largely blame the downturn -- from which the industry finally started to rebound in late 2003 -- on digital music piracy, online file-sharing and competition from video games.
But music entrepreneurs say the big labels' obsession with profits has led them astray from nurturing the cutting-edge talent that sells records. This has made it easier for independents to get their music onto radio and the charts.
"Now that the major labels are being forced to be more fiscally responsible, they're not spending the wild sums of promotional dollars to get mediocre artists up the charts," Gottlieb said. "I think what you're seeing is more music that appeals to the public breaking through the top of the charts."
Again with that nasty boogeyman File Sharing. Couldn't have anything to do with bad business management or other factors.
Note to the RIAA: This is a real pirate. A twelve year old girl who downloaded one Britney Spears song from Kazaa is not.
For those who haven't noticed the charts, what's a hot single and what's a hot album are being to become more and more disassociated with each other.
Guns & Roses, apparently thinking they are far more relevant today than they actually are, have filed suit against Geffen records to prevent the studio from releasing a greatest hits album.
The band claims it was not consulted on the track list, artwork or the remastering of the chosen songs. In a statement released by the group's management at the Sanctuary Group, [Axl] Rose [lead singer for G&R] expresses concern that "not only will [the] audience be misled into believing that the planned compilation is an authorized release, but that it will hinder the release of the band's long-awaited new studio album, 'Chinese Democracy.'"
Actually, this is probably true. Given the average IQ of today's G&R fans, they probably would be confused if the studip were to release a greatest hits album.
-- Update --
It seems that G&R lost their attempt to stop the release of the album.
The Miami Herald give a summation of some of the lessons learned from the music conference held there.
According to Forrester Research, the online music market will soar from about 3 percent of sales currently to about 30 percent by 2007.
''Downloads are going to be huge,'' Seattle DJ Derek Mazzone said.
In Europe, downloads to mobile phones are taking off and a new format of combination CD/DVD is available, enabling artists to put sound on one side of the disc and video on the other, said Antony Hall, who heads the London label Mint Sauce Recordings.
''The movement's going very much to MP3,'' he told an audience at Tuesday's discussion about European trends. "And kids love to get the new hit and download it on their phone.''
As a promotional tool, the Internet, too, is essential, speakers said. ''You've got to have a personal website and start your own e-mail list from people at clubs,'' Nashville DJ Ron Slomowicz said at Monday's session on marketing. "You build your legion of fans that way.''
Apple used to claim that they were fair to the musicians. They have since changed their mind -- at least to making that claim.