What's the future of the music industry?

richard butler reads tQ.

Illegal downloading is a total bore unless it is rare or out of print stuff. IMO. I like mp3 sites but let's face it they are full of re-recordings and poorly packaged material, dampening the enthusiasm of shopping online. These sites need to be more sensitive the cultural and social appeal of music consumption.

As massive as Amazon is, they have good stuff, but I hate going there and reading the same old crabby reviews. When you're selling music you ought to be more sensitive to fan culture. Also there is something weird about getting music at the same place you order dog food.

Some useful points in that article, esp. poking holes in the idea that touring is the cure for all musicians' woes. But a lot of caca too: "How tragic is it that the man behind ‘Anarchy In The UK' will now be forever tied in the collective imagination with Country Life Butter, even though he used the cash to help fund the reformation of PiL?" Seriously? And which collective is this? I've never heard of Country Life Butter until today. Is it even for sale in the USA? And why didn't they get Bryan Ferry to sell it?

Still this is a fine sentence: "Telling people that profit margins are at stake doesn't speak to the average music fan, but explaining how the quality of the music they enjoy is going to deteriorate, just as water would become muddy and undrinkable if no one invested in it, might encourage them to participate in the funding of its future." It'd help his argument, though, if he told us which music isn't muddy and undrinkable. If it isn't, and I quote, Lady Fucking Gaga, then who? Sigur Ros? Hmmmm...

In re: first paragraph -- Kevin, the Quietus is a UK-based publication and while the audience may be worldwide one can assume that a fair amount of its references will be UK-specific, like that is.

that article is really long. all i can remember from it is lady fucking gaga.

xpost. Right. I got that. But that weakens any sense of a collective imagination.

This article is beautifully written.

Something that isn't talked/written about, to the best of my knowledge, and I'm interested in reading about, is an investigation into 'community music'. An increase in the popularity of local scenes, what somebody derisively once called "friend-rock"-- which is absolutely my favourite kind of music.

Many of my favourite bands in the world are ones that my friends are in, play every week somewhere in this city, make records at home that sell 200-500 copies to their fans, and barely ever tour, if ever. This was not the case before 2003 or so.

I theorize that this is the product of two things: first, more realistic expectations on the part of the musicians, re: career. Second, the fact that the 'availability of all music to everyone' has informed people about What Music Exists Out There, and those people are creating better music as a result.

For example, in 2000, I had a handful of friends who had heard of the band Neu! and maybe two who actually owned something of theirs. In 2011, if your band has a motorik beat, even a casual listener can recognize that it is pastiche. To me, this isn't a signifier of any sort of upswing in Neu!'s popularity, but rather an indication that the availability of downloadable media has only served to keep artists more informed.

I'm not really in a position to gauge whether these observations are strictly site-specific or otherwise... but I have noticed that "Talk About Your Hometown Music Scene" threads are pretty popular on other message boards, and the enthusiasm seems genuine, rather than nepotistic.

Is this a dumb theory?

not dumb at all. it will all be in my new book entitled The New Yokelism:Free-Range & Organic Music Scenes In America & The People That Build Them

but for real i have been thinking about this a lot lately and the whole back to the land hand-made candle chapbook lathe-cut farm share revivalism thing and where i am and live is a long-running example of this where people do what they do for their friends and onlookers and their is creativity to spare but no desire to make it bigger than it is.

THERE is creativity, etc...

I think a strong home town scene just needs some focal point be it a fanzine or, these days, websites. My home town (oxford) has had a very lively local scene for the last 20+ years with most bands (until recently) performing just for the enjoyment rather than to make a living out of it.

Even before everyone was online there were odd little bubbles of bands influencing each other developing completely outside of what was happening elsewhere.

Great all I can think about now is "is it local" xp

RIAA President Cary Sherman Made $3.2 Million In 2009

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/052211riaa

http://www.csindy.com/IndyBlog/archives/2011/05/23/music-monday-riaa-ceo-earns-3-million-salary-for-suing-evil-downloaders
In case you're wondering why the RIAA has to go around suing grandmothers for downloading music, it may have something to do with the annual $3 million-plus the record industry trade group pays its CEO.

In addition to big chief Cary Sherman's multimillionaire lifestyle, the RIAA supported its staff of executives, lobbyists and minions in 2009 with a reported $16.2 million in "salaries, other compensation, and employee benefits."

Thank goodness the RIAA is tax-exempt!

And Sherman's pay was DOUBLE that of the next-highest-paid lobbyist.

Scott OTM.

I really don't see how this is the music industry's fault. If they're obviously making far less money than they used to, then of course they're going to do everything they can to cut costs. And if touring was as expensive as the article claims it is, why haven't we heard any complaints or interviews or twitter or facebook posts from the musicians about it? It can't be as bad as when Steve Albini wrote that "Some of Your Favorite Bands May Already Be Fucked" article.

uh plenty of musicians complain about how difficult it is to tour - the price of gas alone...

If the artists and record companies are happy to pay this kind of money for this guy, by all means let them. After all he & his crew are the ones actually collecting the money. The repo man always gets a cut.

Anyway, labels big and small have proven to be spectacularly bad at making money off digital music and unable to prevent piracy. They used to make somewhere around $1-2 per CD on average, but from Spotify they're receiving somewhere around $0.00005 for every song played - so even if all the pirates go legit this will never pay back a recording either. There is no money in selling records. The deals that they're making with Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are the future where labels license their catalogue completely to the IT wizards who've found the way to manage to pry money out of listeners wallets by bundling it with all kinds of mobile phone plans, electronics and cloud services. So they'll be out of the distribution business, drop all pretense of 'selling records', and turn into wholesale financing, publishing & marketing companies.

All this obv for professional musicians, for amateurs who essentially pay to play the current situation is fantastic. It's never been so cheap to record and distribute yr own stuff.

And if touring was as expensive as the article claims it is, why haven't we heard any complaints or interviews or twitter or facebook posts from the musicians about it?

well for one thing because when you get to make a living as a musician it's gauche, and also kinda embarrassing and humiliating, to complain about costs - I know that coming off as gauche isn't really a concern for a lot of people but I think that musicians who're making a living at it generally know that it's a shitty look to complain that (for example) if you take out a bus for a month-plus you're going to be working every night for two weeks before you see a nickel in profit - everybody not in the biz immediately goes "but you didn't have to go to a shitty day job," and comes up with lots of ad-hoc solutions that aren't really practical, it's an unwinnable argument and most people sort of instinctively figure that out & say you know what, fuck it, I get to make a living playing music so I will not complain about how much it costs

wait what? plenty of musicians complain about how expensive it is to tour! Or they complain about the conditions of touring that are largely related to the expense of touring (e.g. sleeping on floors, eating like crap, infrequency of bathing/showering, etc.).

that said I have some major issues with other bits of that article:

Of course touring has always been a next to obligatory part of the job for most musicians. Some are even inspired by the experience, while many improve their craft by playing in front of audiences. But the daily rigmarole of playing the same songs over and over again can also render the process joyless for both musician and fan, and increased touring again means reduced time spent working on new material, conjuring up bewitching sounds, expressing the inarticulate speech of the heart. The romantic vision of the musician in their bus writing new songs is rose-tinted, to say the least. Most are simply too worn out from the tedium to do anything other than talk shit, watch films, listen to music and sleep. Insisting that artists earn their keep by performing the role of wandering minstrel keeps them from exercising the talent that brought them attention in the first place, rendering music valuable only when it's performed live.

if you're going to be an artist, it is your responsibility to yourself & to your craft & to the people who respond to what you do to rise above the "daily rigamarole" etc. You got really tired & cranky and spent your downtime talking shit, watching films, etc? Well, shame on you, then. That was a choice you made. Everybody's job gets tiring - yours wasn't supposed to? If you're going to trade on your inspiration, it's your responsibility to guard it zealously, and that means nurture it at all times.

"friend rock"....yikes anarcho-utopia is just around the corner!

It's also career suicide for a musician to say on Twitter "if you motherfuckers just bought my cd instead of lining it up in Spotify, I wouldn't have to sleep in a van for three months".

i dunno if it's career suicide, it depends on the musician, really.

I can only imagine that most bands lose money touring, short strong t-shirt sales. From gas to lodging to food to other incidentals, it just doesn't add up unless you're earning big guarantees. Or touring solo, I imagine. Maybe Aero or Owen can illuminate/refute.

That Quietus article is just an elaborate way of saying that everything was better in our time and they're scared of the future.

this could also be an argument in favor of thinning the herd.

Well, it's also never been easier/cheaper to record and release a record for free, with no expectation of recompense, so I don't know if the herd will ever be thinned. One ramification of that is that the glut may devalue music, in the sense that so much free music may condition people to expect free music.

may condition? it already has!

xxp I'm actually planning to run for POTUS in 2016 as the "there is just too damn much music" party candidate

i feel like for the most part, music has entered the realm of folk art. It's something everyone can do, and more people are doing it than would make for a healthy economy with music as a commodity.

wrt thinning the herd

i don't think so. the desire to live like that doesn't correlate to the most talent

m@tt, agreed, as in "the herd should be thinned" because that's what the situation is right now

i feel like for the most part, music has entered the realm of folk art. It's something everyone can do, and more people are doing it than would make for a healthy economy with music as a commodity.

^^^ding ding. I've been saying this for years. oddly we're going to reverting back to the system that was in place PRIOR to recorded music - massive amounts of people making it at their own cost for their own amusement, with an upper strata of paid musicians financed by rich patrons (ie corporations)

going to

If every cd was $5 I would start buying music, I guess. Sorry musicians but I'm a poor skeezbag too

Many of my favourite bands in the world are ones that my friends are in

You must either have an amazing circle of friends or really bad taste in music.

... or a different relation to the concepts of "music" and "taste" than you

right, "bad taste in music."

mebbe taste doesn't even enter into it

so... no taste?

Joking aside though, there's something about that statement that bothers me and it aligns with the arguments here in favor of amateur music or music as a purely folk practice. Clearly by any measure of greatness, the greatest musicians in the world at any given time are not all going to live in the same city and be acquaintances with you (apart from a small group of people who do personally know the greatest musicians in the world). So if you find yourself only listening to music made by your friends, that seems like a conscious decision to restrict your listening and just settle for mediocre music.

The "anyone who has a different concept of music or taste than me obviously has bad taste" thing was a joke (funny because it's true). But I do think that limited and narrow tastes can never be as good as broader tastes.

they can make people happy tho

I'm not trying to argue in favor of closed-mindedness or anything, just saying — the reason I have such "good taste" is that, as a teenager, I felt alienated from the pop music on the radio and the people around me who consumed it, so I spent a lot of time and effort looking for things I liked better, and I learned a lot about what's out there. but unless yr end goal is to become a music journalist or musicologist or something, I don't see why that approach is inherently better than getting together with some friends to make our own music. (NB: I heard a lot of mediocre music during this period of my life, too)

I have been rereading that Jacques Attali book lately and it has me thinking about all this stuff

also taking a jazz history course

and: the reason I am giving you such a hard time is that I felt your first post was a beautiful example of the very things that Bourdieu criticized about the notion of "taste"

I'm sure the whole "friend-rock" thing is absolutely fantastic if you live in a city like Toronto or Oslo.

Or indeed a city which is large enough and prominent enough in its country to 1) attract the caliber of people to form such a scene in the first place and 2) have enough money sloshing around the city to provide the kind of dayjobs that enable people to participate in such a scene. And yet not large enough or prominent to force rents and living prices up high enough to drive those people out, or cut-throat enough to inspire the kind of unhealthy financial competition that ruins scenes in, for example, NYC or London. (Also, geographically isolated to not have the gravitational pull of a larger city or scene, hence why places like Portland, OR or Hull sprang great local scenes, but cities of similar size closer to, for example, LA or London just don't.)

But why some local scenes are great and others are barren is a whole topic in itself.

I'm always impressed by how smaller countries whose government arts programs actively foster music talent end up with music scenes that punch so far above their populational weight (thinking of Toronto and Oslo) - I don't know if Canada going conservative have erradicated their whole grant system, but I do think that had a lot to do with how Canada kept a thriving music scene (also the whole Cancon system.) That in larger countries like the US and UK there's this notion that the "market will provide" for good music, while in smaller countries there is the understanding that the market will just overwhelm you with cheap imported goods if you give it half a chance, so you have to make some provision for local artists to have some other source of funding if you want your own culture to thrive. That even folk art needs perservation and support.

I don't know how this idea will fare in austerity cutback climates.

The UK is fond of entirely symbolic gestures towards this like the whole miserable "musicians dole" thing while dismantling structures to support it. (But then you see people like Adele who have benefited from going to schools with government arts support turn around and say they don't want to pay taxes to support the next generation, but that's a whole nother kettle of fish beyond the remit of this thread.)

"^^^ding ding. I've been saying this for years. oddly we're going to reverting back to the system that was in place PRIOR to recorded music - massive amounts of people making it at their own cost for their own amusement, with an upper strata of paid musicians financed by rich patrons (ie corporations)"

I could be okay with this, but (at least here in Italy) the circle of friends you're playing with/for is becoming every year smaller and smaller - and the change in how we listen to music has certainly a major role.
Also, traditional folk music implied the existence of a community sharing experiences, culture, ethics, and this explained its deep resonance: again, playing with/for a number of friends in your living room isn't exactly the same.

I agree with that completely.

This is a great thread!

I'm quite happy playing music, and occasionally promoting gigs, for my own, and friends' pleasure. Helped by, as Kate(?) says above, a pretty ok music scene here. But then I get mails from only-very-slightly-more-popular bands demanding guarantees in the mid-hundreds and think, are we doing ourselves an injustice - by being happy to play for nowt, for fun, are we shooting ourselves in the collective feet?

Or are the [BAND NAME REDACTED] just a pair of greedy fuckers?

>Or are the [BAND NAME REDACTED]

My wife just went through a weird booking experience with a benefit she's help run for years. Someone higher up in her organization really, really wanted her to get a particular local band, and for several months, the band had agreed to play. By the time it came to arrange the show, they explained that they'd just let go of the day jobs, and they'd need to be paid. My wife thought it was implicit that the show was a *benefit*, looked for alternatives, but she was then informed to book them at all costs. Then they mentioned that they also needed a certain sound guy. And so the price rose to the mid-hundreds, which they said was standard for them. Of course, looking at their schedule, it's places like The Book Nook, Fredericksburg.

Now, if you play socially-acceptable music, its really nice to get a city parks gig an get a reasonable payout and such. But I think bilking a not profit's benefit, especially when it's the bake sale that makes the cash for the organization, is pretty darn gauche.