What's the future of the music industry?

great article here -- http://nplusonemag.com/chiquita-banana-jingle

that's a good read. lots to think about.....

yeah, anyone read that jonathan sterne / mp3 book? that one sounds pretty interesting...

It's funny to me how this writer insists that "back in 2007" it was still uncool to sell out, whereas I remember having virtually the same conversation about there being "no such thing as selling out anymore" in the late 90s/early 00s when I was in college

yeah i dunno, you don't think it changed somewhat in the 00s? I guess it seems like there are a lot of bands/artists from the 80s/90s milieu who would never have done the "song in a commercial" thing, but at some point it became less of a thing?

I think it may have changed in the early 00s. 2007 seems awfully late to me -- so many bands I liked had songs in commercials by then. I think the Volkswagen ad campaigns were kind of a watershed.

I remember reading an article in Alternative Press magazine back in like 1996 (I was in high school) about an indie band, I forget which, selling a song to a commercial and they were like "this allowed us to buy the things we needed for our baby" (it was a band with a husband and wife in it). At the time it still seemed like a novel idea to me that there might be a justification for "selling out," but I was also a teenager.

VW ad is def some kind of turning point, but it had been ramping up since the 90s (during which I remember thinking the only indie bands of note that hadn't made a commercial were Pavement and Beck)

The Volkswagen "Pink Moon" ad (featuring the nick drake song) was the first time I remember people talking about actually finding out about music from commercials. That ad and the ones that followed definitely convinced a lot more bands to ride the gravy train, especially since Volkswagen's ads seemed "cool" and "artistic"

which was 1999 btw

xp Shakey you don't remember the Supercuts commercial that used Cut Your Hair ;) ?

i guess the shins did mcdonalds pretty early in the 00s and iron and wine did m&ms... but I don't know did that many indie bands in the 90s do commercials? Did guided by voices? i remember they tried to get a budwesier sponsorship lol.

I remember reading an article in Alternative Press magazine back in like 1996 (I was in high school) about an indie band, I forget which, selling a song to a commercial and they were like "this allowed us to buy the things we needed for our baby" (it was a band with a husband and wife in it). At the time it still seemed like a novel idea to me that there might be a justification for "selling out," but I was also a teenager.

for some reason i had it in my head this was Low? can't remember if they were pro or against..

Who Killed the Music Industry: An Interactive Explainer

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/07/05/137530847/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-hit-song

But it's not a hit until everybody hears it. How much does that cost?

About $1 million, according to Daniels, Riddick and other industry insiders.

"The reason it costs so much," Daniels says, "is because I need everything to click at once. You want them to turn on the radio and hear Rihanna, turn on BET and see Rihanna, walk down the street and see a poster of Rihanna, look on Billboard, the iTunes chart, I want you to see Rihanna first. All of that costs."

That's what a hit song is: It's everywhere you look. To get it there, the label pays.

Article is from 2011, so I wonder if that's changed slightly, after Spotify and other streaming services. I'd imagine it's harder to recoup a million dollars today than it was even 5 years ago.

Is there any tracking of "flop" hit songs, the way the track flop blockbuster movies? I've always been curious if it's possible to follow the formula, get it to all the outlets at once and still just have no one want to hear that shit to the point that you lose money.

also, good call Alfie:
The logical next step is for record companies to embrace download culture. It would be a big change for them though. The profit margin on CDs is so high that record executives can be pretty wasteful and reckless. For data, which has no tangible commodity, you can't realistically expect people to pay £12 for an album.
In the last ten or fifteen years, many artists have had a load of money spent on launching them. Record companies are unlikely to have the funds to do this in the future, so perhaps there'll be less manufactured pop.

With the increase in bandwidth rates, you don't really need to download. I reckon we'll have devices that play, on demand, tracks from a central database, through a subscription service. ― Alfie (Alfie), Friday, October 18, 2002 11:15 AM (12 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

damn, nice. I read a book called The Future of Music: A Manifesto which makes the same argument, but it was not published until 2005.

I finished David Arditi's iTake-Over recently. I thought it was pretty strong, although it's clearly coming from a particular perspective. Arditi does a fairly convincing job of challenging the narrative that the music industry has been struggling in the digital era as a result of piracy. He argues that i) the major labels drove and promoted the digital transition. They were thrown off by Napster but ultimately made use of the situation to strengthen their position, both through aggressive legal action against customers (which functioned more as an intimidation/propaganda campaign than it had a strong grounding in the law), and by actually using P2P technology to develop customer surveillance techniques.
ii) there is no evidence that industry profits have declined and plenty of evidence that they have actually expanded in a number of ways
and iii) the industry has been pushing this narrative in order to push for increased corporate control over intellectual property.

Seems the only constant is that the fat cats get fatter and the artists get a pittance; albeit, maybe, with less chart manipulation by the industry. Some musician was on Charlie Rose last week talking about the disparity between the royalty check he received as an artist versus the (same) check he got as a label head.

Yeah, Arditi argues that the industry have used this 'crisis' to justify even more exploitative '360' contracts with artists, where the labels get a cut of revenues from performance, merchandise, etc, as well as recordings, ironically, while having justified their increased control in the name of protecting artists from 'stealing'. Also, labels collect mechanical royalties from Internet streaming, which they don't from terrestrial radio.

...it also makes sense that the "industry" would be in support of digital media so they don't have to deal with the overhead required with a physical object (to say nothing for for all those pesky people who manufacture, ship, and sell their wares -- more resources focuses on pushing whatever "the flavor-of-the-week" might be).

While i certainly don't fit the demographic that execs aim for, it's likely i spend at least as much money on music as any 10 random teeny-boppers.

Overhead = IT, ie tech firms, which is who really runs the music industry at this point

Arditi discusses the overhead issue quite a bit as well. The music industry, if defined as the major record labels, really traffic in intellectual property so I'm not clear on how they'd have significant new IT expenses that have replaced their previous manufacturing and shipping expenses. If iTunes/Amazon Music/etc have been replacing record stores and Spotify/Pandora/Apple Music/Youtube have been replacing radio, it would seem to be cheaper for the industry to get their product to those outlets (not to mention performance rights wrt things like games, ringtones, ...)

That would be my guess yes

I'd assume the new overhead is in maintenance of all the official accounts and relationships with the tech firms to make sure your new A&R content drops at the right times and places, which seems like a lot of work in itself

...to say nothing for all the realtors, architects, interior designers, automotive sales professionals, and coke dealers you can shake a stick at.

That's not new though. Those amenities are how you retain top talent, been true since wax.

Trying to imagine wax cylinder record industry associated coke lords.

"My card, good sir."

http://www.toptenz.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/cocaine.jpg

I have been looking for a cure for Scald Head for years - they told me it was not to be. Thank goodness we have found each other on this blessed day.

I say my good man if you could see your way clear to grant Scott Joplin's latest rag a few morning drive time spins I daresay Scald Head shall not darken your door again, if you catch my meaning

I assume Joseph Burnett there was the original Whitey Bulger.

back then the real money was in sheet music

"First one's free, kid." *hands over sheet music of "Alexander's Ragtime Band"*

$69 for an ebook seems a little excessive, no?

It does. I borrowed it from the library at the college where I work tbh.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/long-distance-rocker-miller

When they’re feeling particularly ungenerous, the company will cut you out altogether. Google did that to me when they used the guitar riff from my song “Question” as the bed music in a commercial for one of the company’s crappy phones. Google hired an ad agency. The ad agency hired a jingle house, probably giving them “Question” as a reference track. Grateful for the work, some dude in a windowless room at the jingle house (probably himself another victim of the modern music biz; maybe he used to be in bands but was now trying to feed his kids by making innocuous instrumental music to go under Google ad voice-overs) re-recorded my riff, cleverly adding an extra note at the end of the progression—just enough to absolve his employer of any obligation to compensate me for having written the thing to begin with.

I did what any aggrieved artist should do when their work has been ripped off: I contacted my publishing company’s lawyers to threaten these digital brigands with a lawsuit. Within the ranks of the publishing company, it was unanimously agreed that we had Google over a barrel. But then they hired a musicologist who specialized in copyright infringement and he pointed out the almost imperceptible difference between the two recordings. His prediction was that it was possible but unlikely we could win in court. After my publishers sized up the odds of going against the great content leviathan, they advised me to drop the idea. I agreed reluctantly, and lost a few nights’ sleep thinking of how lucky the Nick Lowes of the world had been: here, some untold millions of ad viewers would be hearing a nearly note-for-note rendition of a song I wrote, and all I was getting in return was teeth-gnashing insomnia.

I considered making a video documenting the Google heist, featuring an A/B demonstration of the two versions of the song. I would certainly have prevailed in the court of public opinion at least. I could have told the story of how I’d written the song after spending a day in London falling in love with the woman I’d go on to marry, maybe show some pictures of our sweet kids that I’m busting my ass to feed in this barren new musical landscape. But in the end I didn’t want my career narrative to be overtaken by an Ahab-like quest for the leviathan’s unlikely destruction. I took a deep breath and let it go.

Music saved my life. And musicians. And club owners, record store clerks, college radio DJs, and rock critics who owed a thousand words to the local weekly. We were often reckless, short-sighted, and profligate, but we were all in this together. And now there’s no more this.

Another interesting article from that publication that fits in this thread:

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-muzak-pelly

What indeed.

https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/a32360709/coronavirus-music-industry/

Covid-19 might catalyse reform for the benefit of those who do stick it out. Musicians have asked Spotify to triple payments to cover lost concert revenue, which would enlarge the pie, although it’s unlikely that any streaming platform will offer up significantly more on a long-term basis – Spotify was still barely profitable at the start of year, and rivals like Apple Music are basically loss-leaders, designed to get more users into their ecosystem (as Tim Cook put it in 2018, “we’re not [doing it] for the money.”)

So musicians have to hope for more $ from streaming, more fair record contracts, and a vaccine

become a massive superstar, stick to music as a side gig, or something something YouTube variety act.

Someone should start a non-profit that teaches musicians how to transition into Minecraft youtubes. Has anyone done that?

The future is terror

https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/classic-rock-biopics-holograms-catalogs-1172087/

I can't even begin to describe the amount of dystopic visions here -- and I know not all of them will pan out but good god.

Also this is the most fundamentally depressing bit

And a lawsuit Chris Cornell’s widow has filed against the late grunge superstar’s bandmates cites her interest in tours with a replacement singer, hologram concerts, and “deep-fake renditions of Chris’ vocals drawn from extant recordings by artificial intelligence that could mint brand new Soundgarden hits.”

“The film was a wrecking ball that knocked walls down,” says Greg Lin, senior VP of marketing and reporting for Sony Legacy. “And then you’re hearing their music in all these other places because there’s a big uptick in licensing and sync requests. With Queen, you’ve got songs that are instantly recognizable. You have a compelling story. And credit where credit is due, they just nailed it.”

'nailed it'

last couple years i really started to understand why UK people of a certain age hated queen so much, they were cool as this kind of b-level, campy classic rock band oddity, but there's something so grating and oppressive about them when they are rated so highly by everyone again

"The fans only want to hear our old stuff, not our new AI-extracted deep fake renditions"

I can't even begin to describe the amount of dystopic visions here

lol does this article touch on climate change because you know

It's funny that Queen were hated by certain critics for playing the opera bit of "Bohemian Rhapsody" on tape onstage. How could anyone anticipate what levels of artifice would be accepted today.