The Record Industry's Decline

as a musician who grew up wanting to make albums - you know, pieces of music that came with artwork and an aesthetic and functioned as discrete objects - I don't really feel liberated so much as confused.

altho I'm glad to see major labels fail. Hooray!

I think most musicians who aren't shifting lots of records (i.e. over 99% of them) aren't bothered about filesharing because no-one ever gets paid anyway. It just means you have to admit it's a hobby rather than something you might make a living out of someday.

well, i think we're only only just getting into a time where musicians are starting to understand how they can make a living out of music. its only in the last few years where its been affordable to record you own music to a quality that rivals major releases. plus i think we're likely to see audiences grow.

i'd agree with shakey, its confusing. but most musicians either don't want to, or don't know how to run themselves as a business. i'm looking forward to having a decent van, studio, good enough tunes and a few hundred quid saved to see how well i can do. its like starting a business, a big risk, but i'm sure its possible... if you're any good that is

Like, what is should be next?
How to make money through the celestial jukebox (TM). All music streamed from anywhere, no storage needed. Please don't tell me phone companies will rake it all in due to sheer bloated- & cluelessness of all other major players.

The Celestial Jukebox (every piece of music ever recorded) has GOT to be the model of the future. All-you-can-stream over ubiquitous broadband wirless for a monthly fee. The big question is - how far are we from this? And is satellite radio a similar model that we can learn from?

Subsidiary question: will it give us cancer (the ubiquitous broadband).

http://kellycrull.com/bottledwater.jpg
http://kellycrull.com/bottledwater.jpg
http://kellycrull.com/bottledwater.jpg

did u guys know you can turn on the tap and 'download' a glass of water???

i have trouble getting all 'cry for me RIIAgentina' about this

uhh RIAAgentina

People (bands) are working (leasing rehearsal/studio space, buying equipment, spending time) to get you that tapwater (good music) deej, whether riaa-affiliated or not.

yes but the point is that you can market shit that people can get for free, and they will buy it

we do love buying stuff

http://www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/bw/fig1.gif

bottled water sales ^

point taken.

spoken like a true Volvic addict.

shit is addictive

To take the bottled water metaphor seriously, and examine it very closely, it is not so much that people are prepared to pay for something that's free - there would be uproar if people were expected to pay large sums of money for turning on their taps - but that, when a person is on the move, water is rather hard to obtain easily. One can of course duck into a public toilet and swig from a tap; or, take a flask of water from home; or, duck into a cafe and beg for a glass - but these are not really practical solutions for most people.

Now as we know, people can and do download large quantities of music at home, on their computers, for free. However, when on the move, they may well be prepared to pay a very small amount for music, as they may have the impulse to listen to an artist, and yet have no convenient access to their own computer. It may be cost-effective, therefore, to have music-dispensing online vending machines at train stations or in corner stores. One would duck into one, plug in one's portable listening device, download some tracks for a very small fee, and move on.

I'm an old codger, and well out of touch, and this is not what I would like to do. I would like to just turn on the radio and listen as I walk. However I would want to select the tracks myself, as per Last FM and Pandora. Neither of those models really suits me though, as about 80% of the music I want to hear won't be on those stations. They are hoist by the petard of their selection processes, which are getting more and more stringent - just like a record company lockdown on a station playlist - not nearly as bad, but heading in the wrong direction.

No, my radio station would have exactly what I wanted, and most of that would be unreleased music I've found on the web. It does not matter to me whether it's been released on CD or not. It must not be a service biased towards US and UK rock music. I want to select, say, 'Ugandan music', or 'power noise', or 'Partch', or 'unreleased Myspace' as a search phrase and then listen to that all day as I walk around. I think this would be a kind of Google radio station. How does anyone make money out of me? Well, I'd pay for the device, but it would need to be no more expensive than an iPod. I'd also pay for internet access, perhaps with a small subscriber fee for the right to do this. I wouldn't tolerate any ads, but perhaps there might be a cheaper subscriber rate for those who would.

<i>yes but the point is that you can market shit that people can get for free, and they will buy it</i>

this is key

I don't think the whole thing about bottled water is mobility - that's part of it, ok, but people also drink bottled water at home, and in restaurants instead of water they could have for free even though a restaurant's tap water is required by law to be drinkable - people in NY drink bottled water even though the tap water's famously good! So, there's more to it than that. It has to do with brand identity, or even product identification ("I am the kind of person who enjoys bottled water").

at any rate, I think that artists establishing a personal connection to listeners is the way forward - that making the product personally attractive to the consumer is where the labels have failed so spectacularly: such a connection can fairly be called a business relationship; filesharing dictates that recording artists consider listeners their employers. I think this is a healthy development, even though I dislike 1) the whole "I got the album the second it leaked and here's my opinion of it as I listen to the first track" blog/board-culture vibe that's come to be a big part of things and 2) the ethics of "look, no harm's done to anyone, so I'll do what I like" but that's a horse not worth riding

there are some depressing things about this of course - would one really have wanted to see a Joy Division myspace? Isn't some enigma a good thing? less so in the new market it seems.

About fifteen minutes ago I drove past the nearest McDonald's to my apt. Outside there's a brand new DVD kiosk where you can rent DVDs for $1. Yet again, there's nothing remotely like this offering music. Someone in Hollywood is trying to think ahead whereas the record industry...

A Joy Division myspace? I'm not sure I can get my head around that concept.

Branding is something the smaller labels do well. As a previous poster said, when you think of Universal or Sony, music isn't the first thing that pops into your mind. It's more like movies, consumer electronics, or "Ugh, corporate bloodsuckers." Music isn't part of the brand. Smaller labels, on the other hand, do this quite well. Think of the classic labels, Chess, Sun, 4AD, Rough Trade, Factory, Touch and Go, Mute, Motown, or Blue Note, all of them had distinctive looks, sounds, and at least in their early days, stringent quality control. They were able to make that connection with the consumer; something larger labels haven't been able to do.
Small labels are also better at niche marketing, since most of them are started by music fans. Music fans who are often closely connected with a particular scene, record store, studio, or band. This gives small labels an inherent advantage when building brand identities. Back in the day, every jazz fan knew that if you bought a Blue Note record it was likely to be good. Not to mention nice to look at. The same holds true for many other musical genres. There are dozens of small labels selling to noise, metal, psych, dubstep, reggae, or indie fans that make that link everyday by knowing their markets well.
The downside to all this, small labels are notoriously sketchy and unstable, since music fans are often lousy businessmen. Most of the successful ones are gone within ten years due to mismanagement (McGee snorts the profits and signs rubbish, Tony Wilson can’t pay the bills or his artists.) or swept away by changing markets. But, if you're a believer in the long tail theory, small labels might have a better chance of pulling through the digital collapse than the majors ever will.

Joy Division MySpace

JOY DIVISION has 119479 friends.

Awesome!!

One definite by-product of all this change is a change in the way fans will relate to artists. It's definitely much harder to be an enigma these days. It used to be that not only was it a lucky break to find the album you wanted by the artist you wanted (unless you ordered it, which was still a long anticipation process), but that you couldn't even find *information* about the artist until some magazine happened to have a story or interview, except whatever was in the Trouser Press book or whatever guide you had.

So artists, especially lesser known ones, lived on small, distant islands and once in a while you were lucky enough to find a bottled message from them.

Myspace and Google certainly take away that experience - give me a day and I could probably become proficient in knowledge of almost any artist. But artists can't afford not to be on Myspace, because the audience's attention span is too short and they have too many other choices, and if they don't find you there they'll just look for someone else. And you just can't escape Google.

That line is heard and accepted too often without challenge. I know artists not on MySpace who are still doing well in terms of sales and recognition.

Well, I hope that's true. Maybe it's much more important for certain demographics than others.

Lots of good posts, where to start?

John's observations re: the relationship with the audience and the question of mystery strike a chord precisely because they grapple with the indisputable grey zone that now exists in 'the music business,' however conceived, and the rhetoric around it. From my perspective, I am conflicted a bit about wanting to remain an enigma/function away from (for instance) Myspace, to bring in blunt's point too.

Generally speaking as a fan of a fair amount of acts and performers I do not obsess over the minutiae of their lives, nor do I demand constant tracking and updates. I don't think it's incumbent on anybody to provide it, no matter who you are -- this ties in with my general belief in not blogging about every facet of my day, for instance. At the same time, wanting to be able to easily direct people to something of interest in a quick and easy fashion is kinda key for me -- I see it as a logical extension of my time as a DJ, and my switchover from that to concentrating on writing first and foremost was precisely because the AMG and other locales allowed me the chance to do so in a very broad fashion. This is still the case -- I encourage bands I like [many of whom I found through MySpace] to submit stuff to the AMG precisely so it can be listed and their name spread out further to folks, and hopefully I am also able to review it for the Guide then as well.

Hurting's description of the island metaphor resonates as a result because of my own experience -- I *did* use Trouser Press extensively in the late eighties and early nineties to get a grounding in more obscure acts and a toehold on a variety of styles I would not have otherwise known. Information availability was restricted not by intent but by default, a situation now irrevocably changed. And as I mentioned I actively seek to encourage ways to get, if not every detail out, then at least *something* out -- to my mind, the question seems simple: don't you want people to hear your music? If so, why not use the means available? MySpace in and of itself is ripe for all sorts of questions about what it is and who it benefits, but its usefulness in sharing music readily to those who are curious about a newly discovered name or band seems beyond question, though of course the distinction between official and unofficial pages is important.

And that said, two portraits of widely differing approaches (and I could cite plenty of other examples): the Maine band Visitations -- not the Elephant 6 group -- has been a favorite of mine for some years, and they have studiously avoided creating any sort of internet presence, not just a MySpace one. Their releases have all been limited edition CDRs that quickly sold out, they've not shown any interest in interviews, etc. I respect that but at the same time I'm also frustrated a bit, because to my mind they make excellent music and I'd love to share that more with people; when talking with Nemo of Time-Lag, who distributes their stuff, he indicated that sharing a few songs via YSIs was no problem with the band, so I did so on a thread on here. But that's only a temporary measure at best. Can I force them to do more? Of course not. Should I? Don't be ridiculous. That's the artist's decision. But that always runs up against my desire not to have the music be 'lost' -- especially in this time of sheer information overload, something I welcome but something that means to my mind that places have staked out somewhere, an attitude clearly the band does not agree with.

The complete flipside is a band like VNV Nation, who I saw last night. Like about ten million other bands they rely tightly on that loop which John rightly notes re: the personal connection to the audience, and they've done so extremely well from what I can tell. They're hardly the first group to so prioritize this way but when they finished their set and flashed up a 'thank you' screen to the audience, this was followed by two separate screens listing their website and their MySpace site -- and the MySpace site was first. They encourage people to visit and participate in that particular model, to use it the best of everyone's abilities -- again, not new, not unique, merely the most immediate example to my memory because I just saw it. But it is a cogent reminder of that embrace of a context and Net-based 'place,' radically different from Visitations, and doubtless reflecting a similarly radical split in what the two groups intend in terms of their audience relationship.

Ultimately neither approach is right or wrong but my sympathies clearly skew towards the VNV approach. A couple of weeks back, meanwhile, I got into an intense, interesting argument with a fellow attendee at the Bottling Smoke Festival about how I want to spread the word about shows, bands, etc. and how he felt that was an invitation to cheapen what was being done, that people would show up with the 'wrong' attitude or mindset, that they wouldn't appreciate what was being done. I appreciate where he was coming from but instinctively I kick against this vision, I think that runs the danger of a certain kind of elitism -- which is interesting too given my example just cited that a band like VNV clearly aims for their own particular 'right' crowd and does so very well. But ultimately I just feel you've got to allow for the possibility of welcoming all, of the *potential* if you like.

This said, by one's own thoughts, actions, deeds, one might find oneself creating a limitation on that potential without consciously trying to do so -- and for all I know I've done that myself my entire life, I wouldn't be surprised if that were true. So I don't think there's a final word on this, there can't be, and definitely not now. But the issues therefore remain all the more potent as a result.

you've got to allow for the possibility of welcoming all, of the *potential* if you like.

yeah! this would seem so obvious, a given in any creative endeavor, yet what turned me off about "indie rock" as the 80s wore on was its ridicule and/or outright abandonment of this principle. not so much for elitism implied as the built-in crippling limitation. but as ned also says, there's a sort of natural human inclination toward self-defeat. subconsciously we all shoot ourselves in the foot w/o knowing it.

do the visitiations object to the internet itself, or do they want to stay local, remain at a certain level because of other committments?

"it's hard to be enigma these days" -- hurting write this as a song!

speaking of self-defeating behavior: the initial article posted validates much of what I wrote in Playback four or five years ago but I take no satisfaction in the collapse of the big music companies, no matter how richly deserved or self-inflicted.

as scary and challenging as this all must be for musicians it's also got to be inspiring. like the post-punk era writ large, or the days just after the berlin wall fell the chaos presentes a chance to...

RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN. tho as that hoard old rock song went "it ain't easy when you're on your own."

do the visitiations object to the internet itself, or do they want to stay local, remain at a certain level because of other committments?

I'm guessing more the latter -- there is a small record store one of them runs which is on the Net, for instance, but it doesn't seem like said Net presence is the core of their business approach. And they do do a lot of local work and collaborations, so that might well fit into it too.

I take no satisfaction in the collapse of the big music companies, no matter how richly deserved or self-inflicted

I admit to schadenfreude, but it's kinda hard to resist after all this time. As it stands the bit in the article that strikes me the most is Rosen's 'having no economic value, just emotional value' bit -- it's pithy, sums up a fairly accurate state of affairs, and in light of all of Rosen's statements at the time she headed the RIAA incredibly telling.

everything that comes out of hilary rosen's mouth strikes me as disengenious and self-serving. I think it's less a question of "value" than ownership -- intially at least didn't p2p filesharing feel like souped-up tape trading rather than a grassroots assertion that information should be free? as spokesperson for the RIAA she never seemed to comprehend the basic nature of napster and file sharing, as evidenced in her quote from 2001 "What we want is someone to think twice before they start a business." wasn't the whole point of napster that it wasn't started as a business but as free software?

related lols:

NBC: 'Movie piracy hurts corn farmers'

Sunday, June 24 2007, 15:26 BST

By James Welsh, International Editor
NBC Universal has suggested that America's corn farmers would see a benefit from a government clampdown on film piracy.

The company made the claim as part of a filing in which it encouraged the FCC, America's communications regulator to force internet service providers to implement blocks that would prevent their subscribers from downloading pirated content.

"Because of our nation’s interlocking economy, two-thirds of the lost earnings and lost jobs are in industries other than motion picture production," NBC Universal's filing said. "For example, in the absence of movie piracy, video retailers would sell and rent more titles. Movie theatres would sell more tickets and popcorn. Corn growers would earn greater profits and buy more farm equipment."

In rebuttal of the claims, Washington DC-based advocacy group Public Knowledge pointed to statistics showing higher corn futures and an annual consumption of "17 billion quarts of popcorn" in the US.

The Celestial Jukebox (every piece of music ever recorded) has GOT to be the model of the future. All-you-can-stream over ubiquitous broadband wirless for a monthly fee. The big question is - how far are we from this? And is satellite radio a similar model that we can learn from?

i want this too, but we're EXTREMELY FAR from the "every piece of music ever recorded" piece of the puzzle. as long as someone (consumer) is paying and someone (artist, via their label or their distributor or their manager or whatever) is getting paid, someone needs to control the rights to the music. and as long as someone controls the rights to the music, stuff is going to be going out of print in the celestial space just as often as it goes out of print now in the physical space. check itunes or rhapsody or any such store and notice how often records get pulled by their labels. the celestial jukebox will not change this; if anything it will make it worse, because it will be easier to pull records from print than it is now. when bruce springsteen gets his rights back from columbia, or when amy winehouse gets hers back from universal some day, they'll be able to pretty much hit an "off" switch and make the music go away in a matter of seconds, until they find another distributor willing to pay them more. as long as any kind of money is involved, that's how it will be.

i wonder what this might mean for music journalism...

recording artists wanting to make a living out of their music shock horror

http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=428162

Clear Channel Accused Of Making Artists Forfeit Performance Royalty

June 22, 2007

The Future of Music Coalition, an artists' rights group, is accusing Clear Channel Communications of forcing musicians to give up their digital copyrights in order to get the airplay that the broadcaster is required to give under the payola consent decree. The Coalition claims that Clear Channel is forcing independent musicians to sign a contract that gives up the artists' right to a performance fee when their music is broadcast over the Web.

"This is outrageous," Coalition Executive Director Jenny Toomey said, according to the Hollywood Reporter, Esq. "This is like the fox getting caught in the henhouse a second time and arguing that he shouldn't get in trouble because he was leaving the hens alone. He was just eating all their eggs."

However, a Clear Channel spokesperson said the Coalition has it wrong. "Clear Channel Radio has gone above and beyond to make this artist-friendly," explained spokeswoman Michele Clarke, according to the Reporter. "The artists are in complete control of their musical work. They control whether they just want it considered for broadcast over the air, whether they want it considered for streaming online, whether they want it to be available for download or all three, and (most importantly) they have the right to terminate their license at any time upon notice to us."

The language in question, obtained from the license agreement on Clear Channel's WWDC/Washington, DC, says, "You grant to Clear Channel the royalty-free nonexclusive right and license in perpetuity (unless terminated earlier by You or Clear Channel as set forth below) to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, digitally perform, publicly display and distribute any sound recordings, compositions, pictures, videos, song lyrics ..."

The digital performance royalty, mandated by Congress as part of the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recording Act in 1996, provides money for artists and copyright holders for songs played via the Internet, satellite and cable. In March, the Copyright Royalty Board voted to increase the rates that Webcasters must pay each time a song is played, and the stiff increase has been a hot button issue among Webcasters ever since.

WAHT!

Good 'ol Clear Channel...And then there is this...

Internet Radio Makes Noise With Day of Silence
You may not hear the Day of Silence creeping up until it pounces on Tuesday, June 26.

You also may not believe there is much to be gained from having a day when most webcasters kill their streams. But, as protests go, this had better work. The Copyright Royalty Board's move to award so much in royalty rates for the right to play music online threatens the online radio industry's existence. To fail means that come July 15 you'll have far fewer interent radio stations.

If you're stuck in that broadcast arena, you will pay the amounts required by the new CRB rates if you stream your station's signal. And, simply shrugging your shoulders as the Day of Silence rolls by is going to set you up for similarly explosive royalty rates on the broadcast side. The RIAA-backed MusicFirst Coalition has already made that clear.

Despite this, broadcasters seem ambivalent to the new online royalty rates. Scanning Radio & Records and Radio Ink archives reveals no stories - June 1 to present - about how these new online rates will affect broadcasters. Industry leaders have only come out in the last few days to acknowledge the RIAA-backed MusicFirst Coalition's "performance" rate proposal as a "tax." (This is the same style of rate increase, but it's applied to over-the-air broadcasts.)

If radio doesn't ratchet up lobbying power concerning the online royalty rates, thousands of broadcast radio stations' streams will go silent. Then, over-the-air programming better look out.

If these royalty rates stand, there's a very good chance the online station you listen to will fold. Back payments, due through Jan. 2006, will force thousands of internet stations to give SoundExchange more money than they currently have. The word "bankruptcy" has cropped up many times over this fact, just about as many times as the phrase, "We'll just turn off our streams and walk away."

Here's the gist of what's happening, according to Kurt Hanson at RAIN: "...the rates set by the CRB judges equate to roughly 50% of revenues for large webcasters like Yahoo! LAUNCHcast (and probably many terrestrial station streamers), 150% to 300% of revenues for small webcasters like AccuRadio, Radioio, and Digitally Imported, and, for webcasters with large numbers of channels like Rhapsody and Pandora, well more than 1,000% of revenues."

I'd like to hear the discussion in a college finance course about the above increases. I'd be happy to supply a discourse with facts concerning the lack of revenue in the online radio world (how advertisers are few, and agencies aren't interested yet).

The Day of Silence is Tuesday, June 26. Spread the word that unreasonably high royalty rates are going to crush the online radio industry; do this whether you're a webcaster, broadcaster, or audience member.

Call your Congressman and Senators. You can find their phone numbers at SaveNetRadio.org. Tell them to support their version of the "Internet Radio Equality Act." Then call a friend and have them call Washington, too.

You may not hear the Day of Silence creeping up on June 26, but then you won't be hearing many internet radio stations on July 15 either if people fail to make their voices heard today.

http://www.audiographics.com/agd/061907-1.htm

(x-post)
i have no idea who's right in the first article curmudgeon posted -- notice that nothing the clear channel spokeswoman says refutes anything the future of music coalition is saying -- but this is interesting. artists have never received a fee for having their music played on terrestrial radio (songwriters get paid, but performers and labels do not), and whether they SHOULD get paid is far from a settled matter. if clear channel is asking artists to willingly give up their digital fees, so that they can play them on an internet radio station freely, just as they can already play them on a terrestrial radio station, that might piss off artists and record companies but it might be a good thing for consumers, no?

I guess it's a bit unclear what "royalty-free" means - no royalties to the performers or no royalties period?

From another posting on the Clear Channel thing:
http://reclaimthemedia.org/arts_activism/clear_channels_plan_to_stick_i=5314

As part of the settlement with the FCC, the radio networks agreed, among other conditions, to air 4,200 hours of local and independent music on their stations. ...

Per the settlement, the broadcaster set up an online application for local and independent artists to submit their music for airplay on each of its stations. The applications are on a web page attached to each Clear Channel station web site (i.e., www.dc101.com/cc-common/artist_submission.)

further irony is that Clear Channel’s move to require artists to sign away their performance rights is kind of redundant. In the United States, the commercial broadcasters have managed to avoid paying performance royalties for over the air broadcast of music. This means that when a song is played on the radio, only the songwriter is paid whereas in 75 other countries both the songwriter and the performer are paid.
.....
You may wonder why Clear Channel is asking artists to sign away rights they normally don’t have to pay because of their already negotiated exemptions. Well it may just be because Clear Channel’s move comes as strong momentum is developing in the artist community to demand that radio broadcasters come in line with the rest of the world and finally pay a public performance royalty for terrestrial and digital radio.

Ah ok, now it makes more sense.

The whole royalty system is based on somewhat outdated ideas about "songwriting" and "performance" that still fit certain music very well and other music not at all.

Hurting that's so nicely put that I have to tip my hat to you

Thx. I'm no expert on the nuances of royalties, I just always find the basic definitions kind of weird.

basic definitions kind of weird.

It comes down to the sheet-music peddling roots of the music industry mentioned in the article that started the thread. They haven't fully adapted to that last change in the 1930s, I guess.

Clear Channel’s move comes as strong momentum is developing in the artist community to demand that radio broadcasters come in line with the rest of the world and finally pay a public performance royalty for terrestrial and digital radio.

wait, "artist community" as in "RIAA" rite?

Thx. I'm no expert on the nuances of royalties, I just always find the basic definitions kind of weird.

The thing is, I don't know how weird they are at core - I think fifty or so years of theory has clouded the waters a little, and that you're right that there are some areas where the definitions get a little weirder, especially now that producers/production teams have so many tools at their disposal - dubs/remixes, for example: aren't they so far from the original that the writer's credit should be diminished and the producer's increased? But again, at core, one does write a melody and one does write lyrics, and if those are being used, then "authorship" isn't that slippery an idea