Thursday
Aug282008
August 28, 2008 Please Buy My Record: The Futility Of Flogging Music
This is the rough text of a talk I delivered at Oxford Geek Night, which was held at The Jericho Tavern in Oxford, 27th August 2008. It’s quite long, and despite attempting to use the “excerpt” field when posting this blog, it doesn’t appear to work. Sorry about that. You’ll find the rest of the content on this blog about 3 and a half miles down the page.
***
I was pondering the other day whether I actually have a field of expertise. I thought for ages, and couldn’t come up with anything, and then in a blinding flash I realised, with a slight sense of despondency, what it might be: being in bands that people have never heard of. I’ve been doing it for years, now, and it’s incredibly easy. You get together with a few mates, write some songs, play some gigs, labour over some half-baked recordings, and fail to achieve any success whatsoever. It’s like falling off a log, seriously, and if you haven’t tried it, you should give it a go.
One thing that nearly all my bands had in common was a complete inability to get people to give us money in exchange for the recordings we’d made. As I’ll explain later, the MP3 revolution – if I’m allowed to call it that – has made that failure even more apparent, and the pain even more acute; it’s just few weeks since I went down to my local tip and recycled approximately 1,500 unsold CD albums in order to make room for my girlfriend’s burgeoning magazine collection. Her tatty copies of Vogue and Elle Decoration are worth more, square foot for square foot, kilo for kilo, than my CDs. I’d always suspected this, but that trip to Wandsworth dump confirmed it.
This talk was going to be called The Futility of Flogging Music. I’ve tweaked this slightly, because I’ve noticed that Columbia Records seem to be effortlessly selling CDs by The Ting Tings. So I changed it to The Futility Of Flogging Your Own Music. Although, actually, it’s probably just possible to flog your records to gullible family and friends, so let’s call it The Futility Of Flogging Your Own Music To People You Don’t Know Very Well.
The last time I was at this venue was, according to my diary, the 12th July 1991. I was in a band called The Keatons; we were rowdy, confrontational, and looked something like this. We were here supporting 14 Iced Bears, and if you’ve never heard of 14 Iced Bears, that might give you an indication of how monumentally insignificant we were. One thing sticks in my head about that evening; our guitarist, Dave, sitting on the steps going down from that side door over there, holding copies of our 12”EP, watching audience members leave at the end of the evening, and him saying “Excuse me. Please buy my record. P-p-please buy one. Or th-th-they’ll send me back THERE.”
Dave’s pathetic pleading had magnificent comedy value – although you obviously had to be there, like so many shithot rock’n’roll anecdotes – but he really meant it. We needed to scrape together the petrol money to get home, and if we didn’t, Dave would spend the next week living off instant mashed potato and milk stolen from next door’s doorstep. And we knew that the best chance to get anyone to part with money in exchange for our records was just after a gig, when people were hot, sweaty, disorientated, ears ringing and, crucially, pissed out of their heads. This is probably still the case. But, more often than not, we failed. Not because we were shit, necessarily – we were good enough for Blur to take us on tour as their support act – but as a result we became cynical about the process of selling records. Other bands that I was in just gave up trying to sell them, and just gave them away to mailing list subscribers instead. People couldn’t get their heads around it, in 1996. They didn’t understand. “What, it’s free?” they’d ask. Of course, at the time, we had no idea quite how prescient this was.
The only other way bands had of flogging records at that time was via an indie distributor. Actually making this happen was a soul-destroying, hellish process. For starters, the distributor would come up with a list of incredibly good reasons why they shouldn’t waste warehouse space on you, let alone try and sell in your music to the shops. Firstly, it was always the “wrong time of year”. Now, there was never a “right time of year”. They’d say to you: “Oh, there’s no point in putting out a record in the run-up to Christmas,” as if records by Bogshed or Shitbucket were somehow competing against sales of waffle irons or trouser presses. Then after Christmas, they’d tell you that no-one releases records right after Christmas, it’s a dead time. So, ok, we can’t release records when everyone else is, or indeed when no-one else is. In the summer, they’d say that there’s no point, the students have run out of money and they’re back at home for the holidays. So in September, or April, when they couldn’t really wield that excuse, they’d move to excuse number two.
“No-one knows who you are”, they’d say. “You need to put together a shithot publicity campaign. We need you to get your photo into magazines. We need you to get your record on radio playlists. We need you to arrange a full UK tour, and become album of the month in influential periodicals.” Now, for a DIY act to get a play on Radio Ceredigion in Aberystwyth is hard enough, so to reach the national media was incredibly difficult. You’d send out hundreds of albums at great expense, with a ridiculously overblown, optimistic press release, virtually all of which would be binned. John Peel was a rare beacon of light in this quagmire of misery – but even his patronage was insufficient to remove the ice from the frozen hearts of the distributors. And they’d inevitably move to reason number 3: You’re shit. These people wielded enormous power over DIY acts; they became embittered and hardened to the pathetic pleas of crap indie dance combos, and were perfectly happy to insult them to their faces.
Very occasionally, they would relent. They’d take 200 copies of your record, hang on to them for a few weeks, you’d then pop around and they’d sneeringly hand every single one of them back to you again, along with sales sheet prominently featuring the digit zero. They had to sell records to survive as a business; we failed to understand that. We thought they owed us the right for our records to be in the shops and, if they were, that this would somehow create demand. We laid the blame for our continued lack of success squarely at their door. We hated them. And they hated us.
But wind forward more than 15 years to 2008, and it’s manifestly obvious that they were right all along. Now that we’re put in touch directly with our audience and that distributors can be completely removed from the equation, and replaced by MP3 aggregators who a) don’t need warehousing space for your MP3s, b) will put them into a range of online stores for a flat fee and, crucially, c) don’t care whether you’re brilliant or whether you’re bloody awful, we have exactly the same problem selling the music as the distributors had. Just because the songs are available to buy, doesn’t mean we can sell them – in the same way that (and excuse the often-used analogy) installing a landline doesn’t mean that the phone is going to ring. And we can’t blame the distributors any more. The only people that are left to blame are ourselves. And that hurts.
It hurts because web technology lets us see exactly how many people are listening to our music. We can see the MySpace hit counters spin round, with the total number of listeners for each track. Our stats pages on our blogs show us how people arrived at our page, which country they’re from, even which web browser they’re using. We’ve got information about the reach of our music that we couldn’t have dreamed of 10 years ago, and it tells us that thousands upon thousands of people have their ears open, and they’re listening. But, by and large, and with a few exceptions, we can’t fucking sell music to them. And we’re starting to obsess about it. We can’t stand the fact that we have 2,739 friends on MySpace, several of whom have posted highly encouraging messages such as “thnx 4 the add”, and yet none of them are prepared to dig in their pocket, or Paypal account, and just send us a few quid – despite the fact that we’ve poured our heart, our soul and our cash into the whole endeavour.
But hang on. these people might be listed as “friends”, but that doesn’t necessarily make them fans, let alone fans who want to give us some money. There’s no way of knowing if they think we’re any good – in fact, they might hate us. But even the ones who love your music know that they wield the power, and that you are very much their bitch. As we all know, net-savvy music fans can download a track they love, for free, by any major label act you care to mention in a couple of minutes flat – so why on earth should we expect them to actually give us money for our tunes? The ease of using BitTorrent, Limewire, Soulseek and all these networks is erasing any guilt complex that music fans might have had over enjoying music that they haven’t paid for. There’s nothing we can do about this, that’s just the way it is. Deep down, I probably still believe that rewarding musicians financially for managing to come up with something that isn’t complete shit is the right thing to do – but filesharing is compulsive, it’s a tool you can’t NOT use once you know about it. What I do find hilarious is when people attempt to morally justify it. They either claim that they’re “sticking it to the man” (as if most musicians are swanning around in limousines, when the vast majority are scraping a living by working part time in Halfords) or “it’s OK, bands can make money by touring, instead”. Which is like casually suggesting to the owner of an off licence, after he’s spotted you nicking a bottle of wine, that he can sell a few crisps to make up for it. And anyway, The Rolling Stones might well gross millions on a world tour, but nearly all bands lose money hand over fist while on the road. People might come out with stats about live music revenues being on a gradual incline, but believe me – having been in bands known and unknown, and done tour budgets for countless others – touring represents a black hole of disappearing cash for musicians. Sound engineers might get paid, promoters ensure that they get their cut, but precious little filters down to the musicians, unless they’re lucky enough to get tour support from the record company. Which is actually an advance. Which means that, er, it’s their money in the first place. But anyway, after you’ve pointed all this out, the filesharer just says “well, bollocks, I’m just going to do it anyway.” And this kind of logic is impossible to argue with.
The morality of filesharing is obviously a huge question, and one that people can, and indeed do, talk about all night – but resistance to it is utterly futile, so it’s essentially a moot point. The difficulty I have with being a musician in a Web 2.0 world is the fact that press articles, blogs and web startups are all trying to persuade us that we should somehow be raking in the cash, that the web is providing us with a unique opportunity to earn decent money from our music. One blog called Music Think Tank is entirely devoted to this very concept. The posts, many of which I fundamentally disagree with, provoke comment threads where you can almost feel the desperation, because this holy grail of being paid for your art has been ratcheted up to a preposterous extent. There’s a recent post about a guy called John Taglieri, who has what he calls an “inner motto”. “I want what I want,” he says, “and you are either going to help me, or get out of my way.” John says that he had to disassociate himself from friends who were holding him back by telling him that there was no way he could make it. To me, this utterly joyless statement completely misses the point of playing music. Jonathan Coulton is another one; he is often cited as the king of online DIY music, because for 18 months he has been making a living by spending 6-8 hours a day vigorously social networking and sending birthday greetings to pre-pubescent girls in Wisconsin in the hope that she’ll send him her pocket money in return. Personally, I can think of nothing more soul destroying. And it’s worth noting that if I hadn’t been told that Taglieri and Coulton were supposedly famous internet successes, I would never have heard of them. David Thomas, from legendary American post-punk band Pere Ubu, has these wise words to say to me on the topic of social networking and music:
The internet has entirely switched the focus from making music to sales and marketing. While some might say that this is just the harsh reality, it’s what you have to do to survive, I say bollocks. I’m not just being romantic about this. There’s a choice: play gigs, experience that peculiar bonding you get with fellow band members, feel that curious mixture of love and antipathy you get from an audience – and make no money. Or obsess about selling mp3s – and make no money. My children, and my children’s children, certainly won’t want to hear about my tedious marketing efforts to secure a song that I wrote 250,000 views on YouTube. (Note that I sold barely 100 MP3s as a result of this colossal and unexpected exposure – which certainly made it an interesting experiment, but also a fairly solitary and unfulfilling one.) What would have made a better story would have been to wangle a gig in a Parisian squat where the electrics are dodgy, suffer a massive electric shock off a mike stand, get carried from the building while everyone cheers loudly, be left rubbing your head while slumped against the side of your van, the promoter takes advantage of the confusion by running off with the mixing desk which he’s holding ransom because he claims that the PA company owe him money, at which point you realise that you’re not going to get paid, and you look at your fellow band members, and then you start to cry. That’s the story I’d rather tell, and frankly it’s the story I’d rather hear. Music’s biggest function, from time immemorial, has never been its capacity to make money. It’s its powerful social glue. Without wishing to get all Oprah on your ass, it may be an expensive hobby, but it brings people together in an utterly unique fashion.
In any case, why pursue this mythical pot of cash, when nearly all bands that come into money are inevitably be torn apart by it? Entire musical genres are propped up by people not being quite able to afford to be involved in them, and people who obsess over clawing back cash from the enterprise are entirely missing the point. Slight poverty is what drives music forward. It only works if you’re in the red. You’ve never felt so alive as when you’ve just maxed out your credit card to get your band on a cross channel ferry for a one-off gig in Antwerp. Seriously. You know, it’s like biographies of bands. The most interesting bit is the first bit, you know, the horror, where they’re playing shit venues to small crowds, and the pointlessness of it all is on the verge of driving them insane. When they get to the bit where they turn up at a plush venue and there’s a dozen Cantaloupes and a melon baller in the dressing room, well, that’s when I stop reading. Their passion has disappeared at that point. It’s just not interesting. Of course, there’s probably a valid question to be asked about whether, if the monetizing of music is eventually revealed to be a pointless battle, whether people will be quite so interested in forming bands. But again, it’s not about money, is it. I don’t go and watch Red Pony Clock or Desalvo and imagine that they’re doing it because there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. They’re doing it because they want to show off. And quite right too.
In the unlikely event of anyone wanting my advice, it would be to stop worrying about selling recordings. Just give them away. Let them go. Put them online for free, and tell people that they’re there. And if, against the odds, you’ve been given some cash, you’ve managed to release an album commercially, and you see that someone has posted it on a blog for readers to download – for god’s sake don’t get angry. Don’t see it as being down £20. See it as being up 20 listeners. Yes, your music might conceivably have been stolen, but there are no police. So get used to it. And now you’re freed of this burden, pursue all the other things that you want from being in a band – writing songs, rehearsing, doing gigs, building relationships with other bands, going on wallet-busting tours, receiving unmemorable blowjobs. Because seriously, you’re almost more likely to get a blowjob after a gig than sell an MP3. And remember – just because music doesn’t make you money, certainly does NOT mean that it’s worth nothing.
***
I was pondering the other day whether I actually have a field of expertise. I thought for ages, and couldn’t come up with anything, and then in a blinding flash I realised, with a slight sense of despondency, what it might be: being in bands that people have never heard of. I’ve been doing it for years, now, and it’s incredibly easy. You get together with a few mates, write some songs, play some gigs, labour over some half-baked recordings, and fail to achieve any success whatsoever. It’s like falling off a log, seriously, and if you haven’t tried it, you should give it a go.
One thing that nearly all my bands had in common was a complete inability to get people to give us money in exchange for the recordings we’d made. As I’ll explain later, the MP3 revolution – if I’m allowed to call it that – has made that failure even more apparent, and the pain even more acute; it’s just few weeks since I went down to my local tip and recycled approximately 1,500 unsold CD albums in order to make room for my girlfriend’s burgeoning magazine collection. Her tatty copies of Vogue and Elle Decoration are worth more, square foot for square foot, kilo for kilo, than my CDs. I’d always suspected this, but that trip to Wandsworth dump confirmed it.
This talk was going to be called The Futility of Flogging Music. I’ve tweaked this slightly, because I’ve noticed that Columbia Records seem to be effortlessly selling CDs by The Ting Tings. So I changed it to The Futility Of Flogging Your Own Music. Although, actually, it’s probably just possible to flog your records to gullible family and friends, so let’s call it The Futility Of Flogging Your Own Music To People You Don’t Know Very Well.
The last time I was at this venue was, according to my diary, the 12th July 1991. I was in a band called The Keatons; we were rowdy, confrontational, and looked something like this. We were here supporting 14 Iced Bears, and if you’ve never heard of 14 Iced Bears, that might give you an indication of how monumentally insignificant we were. One thing sticks in my head about that evening; our guitarist, Dave, sitting on the steps going down from that side door over there, holding copies of our 12”EP, watching audience members leave at the end of the evening, and him saying “Excuse me. Please buy my record. P-p-please buy one. Or th-th-they’ll send me back THERE.”
Dave’s pathetic pleading had magnificent comedy value – although you obviously had to be there, like so many shithot rock’n’roll anecdotes – but he really meant it. We needed to scrape together the petrol money to get home, and if we didn’t, Dave would spend the next week living off instant mashed potato and milk stolen from next door’s doorstep. And we knew that the best chance to get anyone to part with money in exchange for our records was just after a gig, when people were hot, sweaty, disorientated, ears ringing and, crucially, pissed out of their heads. This is probably still the case. But, more often than not, we failed. Not because we were shit, necessarily – we were good enough for Blur to take us on tour as their support act – but as a result we became cynical about the process of selling records. Other bands that I was in just gave up trying to sell them, and just gave them away to mailing list subscribers instead. People couldn’t get their heads around it, in 1996. They didn’t understand. “What, it’s free?” they’d ask. Of course, at the time, we had no idea quite how prescient this was.
The only other way bands had of flogging records at that time was via an indie distributor. Actually making this happen was a soul-destroying, hellish process. For starters, the distributor would come up with a list of incredibly good reasons why they shouldn’t waste warehouse space on you, let alone try and sell in your music to the shops. Firstly, it was always the “wrong time of year”. Now, there was never a “right time of year”. They’d say to you: “Oh, there’s no point in putting out a record in the run-up to Christmas,” as if records by Bogshed or Shitbucket were somehow competing against sales of waffle irons or trouser presses. Then after Christmas, they’d tell you that no-one releases records right after Christmas, it’s a dead time. So, ok, we can’t release records when everyone else is, or indeed when no-one else is. In the summer, they’d say that there’s no point, the students have run out of money and they’re back at home for the holidays. So in September, or April, when they couldn’t really wield that excuse, they’d move to excuse number two.
“No-one knows who you are”, they’d say. “You need to put together a shithot publicity campaign. We need you to get your photo into magazines. We need you to get your record on radio playlists. We need you to arrange a full UK tour, and become album of the month in influential periodicals.” Now, for a DIY act to get a play on Radio Ceredigion in Aberystwyth is hard enough, so to reach the national media was incredibly difficult. You’d send out hundreds of albums at great expense, with a ridiculously overblown, optimistic press release, virtually all of which would be binned. John Peel was a rare beacon of light in this quagmire of misery – but even his patronage was insufficient to remove the ice from the frozen hearts of the distributors. And they’d inevitably move to reason number 3: You’re shit. These people wielded enormous power over DIY acts; they became embittered and hardened to the pathetic pleas of crap indie dance combos, and were perfectly happy to insult them to their faces.
Very occasionally, they would relent. They’d take 200 copies of your record, hang on to them for a few weeks, you’d then pop around and they’d sneeringly hand every single one of them back to you again, along with sales sheet prominently featuring the digit zero. They had to sell records to survive as a business; we failed to understand that. We thought they owed us the right for our records to be in the shops and, if they were, that this would somehow create demand. We laid the blame for our continued lack of success squarely at their door. We hated them. And they hated us.
But wind forward more than 15 years to 2008, and it’s manifestly obvious that they were right all along. Now that we’re put in touch directly with our audience and that distributors can be completely removed from the equation, and replaced by MP3 aggregators who a) don’t need warehousing space for your MP3s, b) will put them into a range of online stores for a flat fee and, crucially, c) don’t care whether you’re brilliant or whether you’re bloody awful, we have exactly the same problem selling the music as the distributors had. Just because the songs are available to buy, doesn’t mean we can sell them – in the same way that (and excuse the often-used analogy) installing a landline doesn’t mean that the phone is going to ring. And we can’t blame the distributors any more. The only people that are left to blame are ourselves. And that hurts.
It hurts because web technology lets us see exactly how many people are listening to our music. We can see the MySpace hit counters spin round, with the total number of listeners for each track. Our stats pages on our blogs show us how people arrived at our page, which country they’re from, even which web browser they’re using. We’ve got information about the reach of our music that we couldn’t have dreamed of 10 years ago, and it tells us that thousands upon thousands of people have their ears open, and they’re listening. But, by and large, and with a few exceptions, we can’t fucking sell music to them. And we’re starting to obsess about it. We can’t stand the fact that we have 2,739 friends on MySpace, several of whom have posted highly encouraging messages such as “thnx 4 the add”, and yet none of them are prepared to dig in their pocket, or Paypal account, and just send us a few quid – despite the fact that we’ve poured our heart, our soul and our cash into the whole endeavour.
But hang on. these people might be listed as “friends”, but that doesn’t necessarily make them fans, let alone fans who want to give us some money. There’s no way of knowing if they think we’re any good – in fact, they might hate us. But even the ones who love your music know that they wield the power, and that you are very much their bitch. As we all know, net-savvy music fans can download a track they love, for free, by any major label act you care to mention in a couple of minutes flat – so why on earth should we expect them to actually give us money for our tunes? The ease of using BitTorrent, Limewire, Soulseek and all these networks is erasing any guilt complex that music fans might have had over enjoying music that they haven’t paid for. There’s nothing we can do about this, that’s just the way it is. Deep down, I probably still believe that rewarding musicians financially for managing to come up with something that isn’t complete shit is the right thing to do – but filesharing is compulsive, it’s a tool you can’t NOT use once you know about it. What I do find hilarious is when people attempt to morally justify it. They either claim that they’re “sticking it to the man” (as if most musicians are swanning around in limousines, when the vast majority are scraping a living by working part time in Halfords) or “it’s OK, bands can make money by touring, instead”. Which is like casually suggesting to the owner of an off licence, after he’s spotted you nicking a bottle of wine, that he can sell a few crisps to make up for it. And anyway, The Rolling Stones might well gross millions on a world tour, but nearly all bands lose money hand over fist while on the road. People might come out with stats about live music revenues being on a gradual incline, but believe me – having been in bands known and unknown, and done tour budgets for countless others – touring represents a black hole of disappearing cash for musicians. Sound engineers might get paid, promoters ensure that they get their cut, but precious little filters down to the musicians, unless they’re lucky enough to get tour support from the record company. Which is actually an advance. Which means that, er, it’s their money in the first place. But anyway, after you’ve pointed all this out, the filesharer just says “well, bollocks, I’m just going to do it anyway.” And this kind of logic is impossible to argue with.
The morality of filesharing is obviously a huge question, and one that people can, and indeed do, talk about all night – but resistance to it is utterly futile, so it’s essentially a moot point. The difficulty I have with being a musician in a Web 2.0 world is the fact that press articles, blogs and web startups are all trying to persuade us that we should somehow be raking in the cash, that the web is providing us with a unique opportunity to earn decent money from our music. One blog called Music Think Tank is entirely devoted to this very concept. The posts, many of which I fundamentally disagree with, provoke comment threads where you can almost feel the desperation, because this holy grail of being paid for your art has been ratcheted up to a preposterous extent. There’s a recent post about a guy called John Taglieri, who has what he calls an “inner motto”. “I want what I want,” he says, “and you are either going to help me, or get out of my way.” John says that he had to disassociate himself from friends who were holding him back by telling him that there was no way he could make it. To me, this utterly joyless statement completely misses the point of playing music. Jonathan Coulton is another one; he is often cited as the king of online DIY music, because for 18 months he has been making a living by spending 6-8 hours a day vigorously social networking and sending birthday greetings to pre-pubescent girls in Wisconsin in the hope that she’ll send him her pocket money in return. Personally, I can think of nothing more soul destroying. And it’s worth noting that if I hadn’t been told that Taglieri and Coulton were supposedly famous internet successes, I would never have heard of them. David Thomas, from legendary American post-punk band Pere Ubu, has these wise words to say to me on the topic of social networking and music:
It encourages a delusional state in the audience, a warm and cosy feeling that their opinion matters and counts for a hill of beans. That they’re part of a community, in this case a community of creative endeavour, in which, of course, they have not participated… Screw the audience.This isn’t very helpful if you’re a musician trying to “make it” online in the 21st century, but I’d rather hear that than hear John Taglieri offering advice about “developing income streams”. Form a covers band to play weddings and barmitzvahs, he suggests. Hire out your amateurish music production skills! Buy a CD duplicating machine and charge people to use it! No thanks, John. I mean, sure, I could stay at home and watch my $8 earnings on Google AdSense slowly grow to $8.50; or I could play my heart out, for no money, to a bunch of people in a converted barn in Rhyl who are off their tits on magic mushrooms, have a really shit Welsh pizza for my tea, arrive home at 5am and have to get up for work at 7am. Yes, the latter option may appear stupid, but at least it’s living a little.
The internet has entirely switched the focus from making music to sales and marketing. While some might say that this is just the harsh reality, it’s what you have to do to survive, I say bollocks. I’m not just being romantic about this. There’s a choice: play gigs, experience that peculiar bonding you get with fellow band members, feel that curious mixture of love and antipathy you get from an audience – and make no money. Or obsess about selling mp3s – and make no money. My children, and my children’s children, certainly won’t want to hear about my tedious marketing efforts to secure a song that I wrote 250,000 views on YouTube. (Note that I sold barely 100 MP3s as a result of this colossal and unexpected exposure – which certainly made it an interesting experiment, but also a fairly solitary and unfulfilling one.) What would have made a better story would have been to wangle a gig in a Parisian squat where the electrics are dodgy, suffer a massive electric shock off a mike stand, get carried from the building while everyone cheers loudly, be left rubbing your head while slumped against the side of your van, the promoter takes advantage of the confusion by running off with the mixing desk which he’s holding ransom because he claims that the PA company owe him money, at which point you realise that you’re not going to get paid, and you look at your fellow band members, and then you start to cry. That’s the story I’d rather tell, and frankly it’s the story I’d rather hear. Music’s biggest function, from time immemorial, has never been its capacity to make money. It’s its powerful social glue. Without wishing to get all Oprah on your ass, it may be an expensive hobby, but it brings people together in an utterly unique fashion.
In any case, why pursue this mythical pot of cash, when nearly all bands that come into money are inevitably be torn apart by it? Entire musical genres are propped up by people not being quite able to afford to be involved in them, and people who obsess over clawing back cash from the enterprise are entirely missing the point. Slight poverty is what drives music forward. It only works if you’re in the red. You’ve never felt so alive as when you’ve just maxed out your credit card to get your band on a cross channel ferry for a one-off gig in Antwerp. Seriously. You know, it’s like biographies of bands. The most interesting bit is the first bit, you know, the horror, where they’re playing shit venues to small crowds, and the pointlessness of it all is on the verge of driving them insane. When they get to the bit where they turn up at a plush venue and there’s a dozen Cantaloupes and a melon baller in the dressing room, well, that’s when I stop reading. Their passion has disappeared at that point. It’s just not interesting. Of course, there’s probably a valid question to be asked about whether, if the monetizing of music is eventually revealed to be a pointless battle, whether people will be quite so interested in forming bands. But again, it’s not about money, is it. I don’t go and watch Red Pony Clock or Desalvo and imagine that they’re doing it because there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. They’re doing it because they want to show off. And quite right too.
In the unlikely event of anyone wanting my advice, it would be to stop worrying about selling recordings. Just give them away. Let them go. Put them online for free, and tell people that they’re there. And if, against the odds, you’ve been given some cash, you’ve managed to release an album commercially, and you see that someone has posted it on a blog for readers to download – for god’s sake don’t get angry. Don’t see it as being down £20. See it as being up 20 listeners. Yes, your music might conceivably have been stolen, but there are no police. So get used to it. And now you’re freed of this burden, pursue all the other things that you want from being in a band – writing songs, rehearsing, doing gigs, building relationships with other bands, going on wallet-busting tours, receiving unmemorable blowjobs. Because seriously, you’re almost more likely to get a blowjob after a gig than sell an MP3. And remember – just because music doesn’t make you money, certainly does NOT mean that it’s worth nothing.
Reader Comments (122)
Wow. Quite a lively discussion here, and it goes to show how much this resonates with the musician community. I can relate totally, as I've worked incredibly hard to write and record the best songs possible, and have been consistently disappointed by my total inability to sell more than a hand full of dollars worth of them.
Part of me thinks that, as with any highly competitive industry, there will always be far more stories of failure than success in music, and that any excuse I have for not selling tons of downloads or whatever is just that, an excuse, for my failure to work hard enough, or intelligently enough, to be among the successful few.
At the same time, as I reframe my thoughts from this article's perspective, I can see it as a totally liberating shift. There's a saying in Alcoholics Anonymous about how by admitting defeat by alcohol, alcoholics are able to gain freedom. The idea is to surrender. Stop fighting, and embrace what's left. That seems to be the hopeful message of this post: that my musical pursuits will become much more enjoyable once I surrender to the overwhelming likelihood that my efforts to sell my music at gigs or to people online will be fruitless. In my experience, I have spent uncounted hours trying to "flog" my music, and I have very little to show for it, aside from frustration. I'm thinking that I may embrace what this article suggests, and shift my energies away from trying to sell my music entirely.
When recording my latest release, I was so convinced by its quality that I couldn't see HOW people wouldn't just eat it up. But now that it's out and not being bought, of course I don't regret nearly bankrupting myself to record it. During the sessions, I felt so committed to my vision for the songs, that I would pray to live to see them finished. And for what it's worth, they DO represent the best I was capable of at that moment in time. And how many people get to have something like that?
My music is me, and represents a firm, idealized vision I have for life. Just being able to commit that to a recording is good enough for me. It would be great to make enough money from it to enable me to record more frequently, or not have to pursue other sources of income. But if it's not meant to be, why keep swimming upstream?
I have mentioned this in comments here and elsewhere but I think it warrants repeating; Talent is only part of the formula and the more important part is "Connections". Right place, right time but most importantly "Right Person".
For a blatant example of this just look at the rap musical environment. It is ALL about who you know in the rap game. It's not even dumb luck it is Strategic Socializing.
A highly thought-provoking piece, not that I think I agree with it. When success is measured in impossible terms it is easy to romanticise failure and call that success, pointing in justification to art for art's sake with the same kind of unargauble logic as the 'bollocks I'll do it anyway' filesharer. Surely there /has/ to be a middle ground, where success involves making a fair living from music without necessarily going as far as world domination; I do know people who are quite happily and quietly going around doing this, though a portfolio type career including sessions, teaching, and playing across a wide range of genres seems to be the common theme. Meanwhile, in lieu of a lengthier, more well-reasoned and coherent response, I have made a cheap joke instead.
@Brian
And for what it's worth, they DO represent the best I was capable of at that moment in time. And how many people get to have something like that?
I really like that statement. I feel the same way about my music. Sometimes I look back on things I created in the past and think "wow, that wasn't really that hot". But at the time it was truly the best I was capable of. And, thank God, I can say I see a definite progression in my sound quality over time. Otherwise, I would have no confidence that what I think is hot today wouldn't totally suck when I listen to it a year from now.
Oops. Sorry for extending the italics. The original quote was
And for what it's worth, they DO represent the best I was capable of at that moment in time. And how many people get to have something like that?
Make records that tell stories. Don't fall prey to the giant timesuck that is music 2.0. Focus on making good records and finding an audience. Set up the 2.0 stuff to work for you. Or, find a friend to manage all that crap.
A barn in Rhyl full of people off their tits on magic mushrooms? Were Emily involved?
now playing: The Keatons - French Bench
Thanks again, Rhodri, for turning up and being so fabulously entertaining; and thanks for posting the transcript here. If nothing else we've linked to it, and it's someone else's tiny fraction of bandwidth. It's clearly struck a chord with a lot of people and got a lot of others very angry, which is usually a combined measure of something being at the very least interesting.
Everyone else, we should have a video up soon on the OGN site (for those who remain unconvinced: there's a lot more in the delivery). Rhodri, if you want to send me slides in some form then we'll stick them up too. I can't believe you didn't stick in the video of the chap with bread taped to his head, though: it would certainly have illuminated something or other.
Reality says that making lots of money in today's music industry is impossible. The author of this blog has clearly been defeated and is blantantly trying to convince everyone else to stop trying in order to justify his giving up.
You are defeated if you fail to reach the people. It does not matter how good you think your music is, if you are not in touch with your potential audience, you will bottom feed and beg and WISH that people's minds could be altered into actually liking your craft ENOUGH to spend money on it.
What the internet has done is to make it possible for hacks and hobbyists to further believe they can have a chance at success. Youtube and myspace hits give false confidence to musicians that would never even get a reply from the old school conventional method of submitting pres kits to record labels. It is like crack, or gambling. Those with no business being in the music industry get hooked into this viscious circle while lousy engineers and amateur producers make a killing off the countless wanna be's who think that by making a recording they will be stars.
The author of this blog is 100% correct in everything he says. HOWEVER, I believe his opinions only apply to amateur hacks who never really had the talent or abiliity to strike a chord with the public in the first place. So to all of you out there pandering away in the wallows of the internet 2.0, please for the sake of the great artists out there, GIVE UP AND GET OUT OF THE WAY!
i mainly agree with daniel point of view... you're defeated... but more than that :
i spent a lot of time reading threads, blogs and comments about that marketing 2.0... the new way to business your music, the long tail etc...
so lets' say it : what do you think people want about music ? they want to dream. they're all able to give a lot of money for that... why not spending a thousand dollars for a trip to japan or australia ? why not spending a few bucks on one record... if the record moves you ? ok play a gig, maybe you're just there for beer drinkers.... why should they buy your record ? they just dreamt of a couple of beers... and some noise around, maybe some radio, whatever...
if somebody play something awesome, moving, different, maybe it will be just different for those drinkers... sorry for you didn't succeed in it... maybe you're not as radiohead is talented...
people want a dream, something exceptional... give your music for free you're just crap. struggle for getting signed by a label you get consideration (you can notice i absolutely don't speak about money, i don't care... just consideration leads to money sometimes)... long tail is crap, some bands are far above... for years... if you're not, you're right to give your music for nothing... sorry for you...
and please don't consider amateurs like crap and professionals not... sometimes amateurs are far more talented... not focused on professional stuff only... still able to create some dream for people dreams...
cheers.....
Dear Musical Souls,
-- I love you dearly!
You who strive: ... I've read your hearts here, I read your soul's intent, I hear yr plaintive cries. - I'm sort've one of you, (and yet maybe not?...)
If your soul yearns to make music: Great!
If you just wanna make money and 'show off' well, that's not very socially relevant, and maybe you'd be better off just posing privately in your bedroom mirror? The world already has more than enough of shallow nitwits who are 'empty vessels' and have (-actually) nothing to contribute to the world's cultural heritage. The 'Rap' genre is a good example of that.
On the other hand, if you really REALLY have 'something important to say' which is relevant and *useful* to today's world then, --for heaven's sake, KEEP ON keeping on! ~ we need your voice, and your art, and your originality, your 'perspiration and and inspiration'...
~ ( and all due respect here to you Rhodri, -a good discussion started).
If you don't make money from it all, well, fine: Your ostensible reward will be in heaven! :)
(- and yes, you DO get more than just the one life!) JS Bach dedicated a load of his stuff to 'God' and he, like most other musicians, had to struggle valiantly to do as he needed to do. ~ Ditto many other musical masters. Poverty-stricken John Lennon and Paul 'mugging' someone whilst they were on the road in Germany ? -- stuff happens my dears!
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Unfortunately in our present age, many peeps have been spoiled. They think that *fame & fortune* is a good thing. Talentless, and somewhat vacuous little 13yr old kids, -asked what they want to do in life, often parrot: "I wanna be famous." How very sad! How meaningless and empty! They maybe imagine that they somehow deserve that threadbare status, not realizing that they haven't really got an original, creative, intelligent bone in their bodies! They dine on poisoned media fodder.
I've worked in 'The Biz' - alongside the 'Big Guys' (big name 'stars') --and are they happy? Nope! -they are mostly very screwed-up bozos! I was thinking about getting into the music scene at that time, not coz I sought loads of money, but coz I wanted to put my 'socially relevant message out there', but when working in that field I realised what an empty, shallow load of crud it all was.
I quit working for them and went off to variously do my own thing...
In keeping with the very ROOTS of musical culture, -dating back to the very dawn of time, I am happy to propound polemics, philosophy, fun, and song and original 'peoples' poetry' , even if the hedonistic empty-headed ghost of Freddy Mercury disagrees with that ideological stance.
I still love music... (and my other artistic pursuits), but now I refuse to 'sell out' my art to anyone, any where. I've now developed personal standards and ethics which are immovable. For dosh, I work in other spheres instead.
~ If no one ever heard my stuff, well, -fine! ~ If it garners favour, well, that 's fine too! If it ever got over-famous, well, my main problem would be how I could retain my **much treasured* anonymity, and not have the scummy rat-pack journalists trying to find out who / where I was! Have you ever been interviewed by the Mainstream Media? [I have] They Lie! -big time! They have NO scruples! Don't even go there!
_________________
I once talked to a co-worker, - a roadie for a 'big name' band ( a band you have ALL heard of!) he said he was getting out of the game. "Why?" I asked him. He replied: "I godda a kid, a wife, and this is a CRAP lifestyle! I never see my family, I'm on the road (all over the world) with this bunch of loopy egomaniacs (the band) and living in hotels, motels, with crap food, crap life, crapped out on drugs, drink, tawdry sex etc...! "
I saw the truth of his statement. ~ I quit that life soon after.
I recall a completely unintelligent woman who had traveled right across the world to inveigle her way into the trousers / bed of one of these 'stars'. Yup, she got laid, and was then 'on tap' anytime he was in the recording studio. ~ The rest of the time she tried to dress up fancy, but as she had no skills and hardly any brains, she just got to be a servant to all and sundry, and pestered to make coffee in the band's grotty studio kitchen. What a crap life!
______________
These days I just make my music (and other arts) as per my love and inclinations and inspiration. And I sell my creations where I wish, but I avoid 'Biz' crapheads and the selfish, ignorant rich gits in the in-dust-ry.
And yes, -like you other dear souls, I too am **passionate** about my music! But ... I HATE the idea of my privacy being invaded by the POISONOUS rat-pack press!
I will only now ever release my stuff under pseudonyms. If I play live it will just be little local gigs, just for the pure FUN and JOY of playing! I'm not a prostitute, so will *never* sell-out, - no matter what the money offered, - it's just not worth it.
10cc: "Art for art's sake" - yes indeed! Or as The Nice titled their long-distant album: "Ars longa, vita brevis" (= 'art is long, life is short'). Van Gogh never lived to see snide, bubble-head snob millionaires buy his paintings for a zillion dollars. He died in penury, -but look at what he gave the world! Those fat, rich gits will die, and leave nothing of value to the world. But Vincent died and left lasting treasures...
If like me you've GOT make music my dears, ~ just make it.
If you happen to get acclaim, ~ suffer it!
And listen to the lyrics of the very brilliant Phil Ochs, [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Ochs] when he sings his song, 'The Chords of Fame' which references the early sold-out Bob Dylan, and know that 'fame' comes at a price, -- a heavy price. And know well in advance that endless ego gratification is an addictive, empty cause!
True *spirituality* is much more integral / crucial to human life (and I don't necessarily mean 'religion' by that either, -most religions are now bent out of useful shape). Can you take your big country mansion and your stretched limo and cocaine-addled 16yr-old groupies to Heaven? Fame and fortune is ephemeral, it's a miasma, an empty *illusion*, - its all fool's gold. ~ Trust me --I'm not a doctor! :) I've rubbed shoulders with many millionaires, they are no happier than anyone else. Often they are more miserable than the poorer sectors of society.
These days, by way of extra training and such, I'm an artist, and teacher, a psychotherapist and a spiritually-orientated being. I've spent 40+yrs trying to find out what life is all about. [And importantly I've learnt how LITTLE I know!] - but that 'little' I'm happy to share with you music-prone lovelies who read here.
Serve humanity and your art as best you can! Forget the allures of commerce. (And especially forget the allures of all the dreadful SOUL-DESTROYING drugs!! - I've been there, many years back: they are *truly demonic*! ] Make music which uplifts your fellow beings and adds, not detracts, from human life.
You may not make a lot of money, but your life (and future lives) will be enriched in the process.
As the old 1939's song says: "It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it, that's what really counts!"
With love.
Y.
Thanks for sharing the truth about being a musician these days. Wow. Couldn't have said it better myself! I admire your honesty and spirit, and guts for putting it out there. I tend towards being an optimist but I gotta say, your post here rings very true.
cheers,
Ma Rainey
The author of this blog has clearly been defeated and is blantantly trying to convince everyone else to stop trying
Uh. Read it again. I mean, if you can be bothered, I know that it's 3000 words, but I seem to remember that "give up" was certainly not the over-arching message.
The author of this blog is 100% correct in everything he says. HOWEVER, I believe his opinions only apply to amateur hacks who never really had the talent or abiliity to strike a chord with the public in the first place. So to all of you out there pandering away in the wallows of the internet 2.0, please for the sake of the great artists out there, GIVE UP AND GET OUT OF THE WAY!
Interesting point of view. For some reason I'm reminded of the former German Democratic Republic, where bands had to perform in front of the local council who would then determine whether they had sufficient talent to be able to play in front of a real audience.
Some great indie bands in recent times have had trouble getting work permits to tour the USA because they couldn't convince them they were of any significance, if I recall correctly.
A totally on-point article. I have to admit I have been jealously imagining all my musician friends comfortably housing and feeding themselves with album and gig money. And actually some of them are. But I sure as hell am not.
I can confirm that some people need to create, because I am a total mess if I go too long without playing, writing or even undertaking a non-musical art project. I actually think this is a cognitive issue, in that artists create tangible evidence of a hypothesis in their minds. It's like an argument where you can prove you are right, without anyone being there to interrupt you. Because now this thing exists, you can't deny it—who's to say if it's what you intended and isn't that really kinda the point? But what if nothing you thought ever came true? I guess there are musicians who are more about playing in the moment than writing or recording a little slice of human insight. They are the ones who get the blowjobs, by the way.
But the problem with "abandon all hope and be free" is that, for people who need to create to stave off madness (blowjobs help too), hobby hours are not long enough to find that "truth." A creative spirit is like an athletes body, its full-time or quit; it needs to live in art, not visit it on weekends. Moreover, people write music, consciously or not, as a response to music they have heard. And they have mostly heard stuff made by people who make music for a living, the subject matter of which is not independent from the writer's life experience. So the compulsion to be a meaningful contributor to that ongoing "conversation" can't really be fulfilled without at least trying to walk in the footsteps of our music heroes. If you've heard them, they probably got to quit their day job at some point.
Whoever said this:
Truly great music usually takes a huge amount of work to accomplish - this work is simply impossible to find time for if you have a time-consuming job.
..has seen through the muddle. Making a great pop album is 5 people's full time work for a month (band plus producer. OK the number might be more or less than 5 but in the history of recorded music it has generally been greater that ONE), and that's if you already have the songs and the arrangements ready. So to try & make it (not to mention market it) between supper and bedtime is a wrist-slitting fucking joke. There is a famous anecdote about a conversation between Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, in which Cohen says "I like your song, how long did it take to write." Dylan says "5 minutes." Asked the same question, Cohen responds that his song took 5 years. And so everybody thinks Dylan is the genius (which he is), while the depth of Cohen's writing can take a few dozen listens to reveal itself. (Cohen: good at writing, bad at business. Should we have been deprived?)
I've taken a break, read more comments and put my toddler to bed (don't worry, my wife has a good job).
Folk music (that is, traditional i.e. not composed by the player or singer) is historically made by people who do other things for a living (like be a serf), whereas pop music is a clearly modern, media-dependent phenomenon. But it is consumed in a comparable (if hyper-inflated) way by listeners. Now people expect to hear perfection though, because media are saturated with optimized-for-delivery content. So to actually communicate with people via pop music means a certain production threshold or they can't even hear the music or words. By production I mean not only audio fidelity and mix etc but also compositional and performance "quality," if you like. To become a really good composer takes a lot of time. To become a really good lyricist takes a lot of time. To become a really good performer requires doing it full time, in front of audiences. And now as producers we have a limitless digital palette to choose from, which is a lot of deciding.
We all grew up on records that were made before the digital home studio—the only way those musicians could be part of something that sounded like a big production, was to be part of a big production. Which would be a collaboration of many individuals doing things, each with the skill of a full time practitioner. So yeah, the quality of the music suffers when one person has to do twenty people's jobs. You can't become great at that many things in one lifetime.
I'm not shitting on folk music because I love it, and it lots of ways, indie kids making bedroom and basement albums are the new serfs and I love them too. Their motivation is unique expression, rather than tradition or function. But this is more "art" than "music," really, isn't it? I mean, who would say they can write music as well as, say, Mozart? What makes their music interesting is the unique personality or perspective that comes across in its performance, more than virtuosity or traditional compositional "excellence." But even if we don't measure ourselves against classical music theory, some things work in a mix and some don't. An ambitious vision requires exponentially more time to realize than a simple one. While many of the best songs are simple, does this mean that we shouldn't go after the strange magic lurking behind that tenth note in a chord, if we catch a glimpse of it? Isn't this the only hope of finding "new music," in the permutation of the broadest possible matrix of rhythm and harmony?
Sorry, but I grew up with Beatles LPs, weed parties and a purple fucking piano in the house. What chance did I have?
All this is just an elaboration of the notion that becoming an artist requires an immense commitment, which leaves no time for mastery of another discipline. And its the kind of commitment you make as a child, before you can really fathom concepts like making a living or providing for a family. Everybody picks a trade, and nobody gets good at anything without spending time at it. We don't trade fish and berries for songs anymore, we trade money for services. Musicians should get paid and get political if they don't.
If you are almost as passionate about this (but not quite), you can be in my band.
I guess the real question to ask oneself is: If I'm never going to make a living at it, do I still want to make music? Even if it means I'll never create a masterpiece of incomparable genius for history to treasure? Or would I rather learn html and post bullshit on the web pages of people I will never meet. I think the answer is obvious: Pick a number between one and six billion and cross your fingers. While you wait, give away mp3 singles but sell full-length CDs and really good T-shirts at gigs. Save a couple of the best songs from your CD for live shows and don't post them online.
Jason Ball
Hopeful Monster
http://www.myspace.com/hopefulmonstermusic
PS: I'll be playing in Oxford in November, possibly at The Jericho Tavern (anyone care to put in a word for me?)
Next rant: channelling the zeigeist
+500. Although I don't agree with the conclusion (if someone doesn't part with 50c for one of my songs, they can go somewhere else where music isn't valued and download it for free - I've made my choice), the overall analysis is accurate and correct.
Cheers for saying what needed to be said-
M@
Excellent post and debate. I hope you don't mind, but I've cut and pasted an extract of an old post from my amateurish blog, Catching The Waves, in which I tried to organise my rambling thoughts about the flogging/free music problem.
"I have an amateurish and sporadically updated blog, Catching The Waves, in which I enthuse about netlabel releases that have tickled my fancy. I became interested in netlabel music because it allowed me to hear styles of music that I was curious about but couldn't afford to buy. It allowed me to explore genres that were new to me: chiptune, ambient, minimal, IDM, dub, electronica, breakbeat, experimental and so on. Now that I've heard some of those genres I am far more likely to buy songs/albums in those genres. The other day I bought a song from Jonathan Coulton, an artist I would not have heard of but for his online presence and habit of giving away free music. Similarly, I downloaded an album by Brad Sucks (Brad Turcotte) and liked it so much that I intend to buy his new album. Those are two artists who are going to get my money who would not have done so otherwise.
I don't make any money from my blog. In fact, it costs me money, but it's my way of saying thank you to people who have given away their music: the more publicity they receive, the better. I always link to the netlabel and the artist's own website, and I encourage visitors to my blog to make a donation or pay for some of the artists' other fare, whether that be albums, merchandise or concert tickets. Many netlabel musicians give away their music for no other reason than because they want to, though many use it as a marketing tool, building up a fan base that hopefully will “tip” them for their current music and/or pay for future releases. It's up to them. Either way, these people have made albums that might not otherwise have seen the light of day. The quality may vary greatly but no one is forced to listen.
It's not just one-way traffic. Netlabels spread the music; a website like Eventful allows music fans to “demand” that their favourite bands visit them. If a nascent band learn that 100 people in Nowheresville want to see them then they can stage a concert there, with a very good chance of a great reception and merchandise and record sales.
I'm not proposing an either/or music world. All I'm saying is that the netlabel/own-website scene can complement the existing music industry paradigm, allowing people to hear music without hindrance from financial constraints or perceived wisdom. Perhaps a site like Magnatune is a good compromise, allowing people to stream artists' music as much as they want to and, if they like it enough, to pay for a DRM-free mp3? There's also Jamendo, which offers over 8,000 albums of Creative Commons music, and allows listeners to donate to artists who might otherwise struggle to see any payment for their music.
Piracy is a bad thing. I am fully in favour of paying for music. If I want U2's latest record then I'll hand over the cash for it: I don't want to rip off musicians or companies. But the internet, whether in the form of netlabels or artists' own websites, allied with cheap software, now allows anyone to attempt to make a living as a musician. Most music, like most art, isn't very good. But the “long tail” theory of the internet allows people to find the music that chimes with their taste. Compose an opera for xylophone and noseflute and no record company will give you the time of day – but the internet allows the xylophone and noseflute lovers of the world to search for their favourite genre and discover your opera, which you've recorded and released under your own steam. Who on earth is to say what's good music and what isn't? The record companies?
Admittedly, everything is up in the air; it's difficult to predict what will happen to the music industry in the next few years. If I thought that netlabels were harming music and musicians then I would close my blog. But I don't think that netlabels and “free” music will hurt the Madonnas of this world. The large record companies will continue to dominate the charts and make money from sales, merchandising and tours. But those artists who sell “only” 1,000 albums, and can't continue because their record company has dropped them, might now be able to carry on because, thanks to the methods I've mentioned, they too can make money from sales, merchandising and tours. It depends what you want from your music-making. There might be fewer multi-millionaire musicians in the future but there may be more people who are able to make a living as full-time musicians. And there will be more choice for the listener. That's a good thing, surely?"
Sorry to interrupt this debate. Incidentally, I bought Brad's new album today. :-)
I've produced dance tracks that made the billboard charts in the early 90's and made my full living for years off of it. I've done remixes for major dance/pop acts.
The $$$ in the industry has gotten so bad the last few years that I don't even release my tracks to the public anymore. I no longer make 3 minute radio friendly tracks, I have become free to make experimental 20 minute songs etc. and have been liberated musically.
I now make my living developing "presets" for synthesizers, drum machines and software for companies like KORG, ALESIS, SPECTRASONIX and STEINBERG. Funny all the struggling producers trying to "make it" now pay my bills!
All of the money is now in the Pro-Audio industry. More people are buying music equipment now than music. That is the reality! Most of my producer/remixer colleagues from back in the day are working sound-design for pro-audio companies or making beats for car commercials (usually a combo of both)
I find 90% of the music made today to be totally not interesting at all.....even the " hits" have a half-life of a plastic shopping bag and sound all the same.....no wonder music has become unsellable ....
Great post and discussion, esp. since I just released my first cd (at great expense (recording, mixing, mastering, etc.) and hundreds if not thousands of hours of work on writing, arrangements, etc.) ... my timing is perfect!
Now I've hired a PR firm to promote the cd, since I know nothing about that (I mean you want ME to write MY bio and also a piece on why my cd will shake you to the core of your being? - no thankyou).
I am not ready to just give my music away. I figure that at some point, someone will do that for me on LimeWire. I want to believe that there is an audience for well-crafted, well-produced music. I'm not making music for kids. And yes, I have spent hundreds of hours on myspace, make friends, replying to emails, comments, etc. ... so far, just ONE of my 2000 friends has bought my cd on cd baby (i think a few bought the cd on itunes as well).
But I will not give up in the face of DJ culture ... let's face it, DJ Culture is the manifestation of all that is wrong with the music biz ... music as product, originality no longer valued ... the learning and craft of music trivialized. But would ANY of you be able to look in the mirror in the morning and say to yourselves I AM A DJ? And not slit your wrists, I mean.
Because if ANY of you just wants to make money in music, become a DJ ... then all you have to do is learn how to kiss ass, self-promote, wear cool hats ... and all the other shit those losers do.
I have three cds in the can (all instrumental electronic/classical) but the PR firm says to hold off releasing until we get my vocal cd going ... and I have an idea (and some songs) for my next cd and I think it will be very viable commercially ...
Making music is never work - all the extraneous shit is, but it's still part of the job.
I've just reread this post and realized I have no idea what I am trying to say. Well, fuck DJs, for one thing. Another thing, bring back the sixties ... i mean, bring back the joy, life, exhilaration that energized the music back then ... and the commitment to craft in both songwriting and playing ...
It's like John Lennon said,"I'm an artist. Give me gourd and I'll do something with it."
You need to ask yourself if you are an artist or a dj, at heart. If you are a DJ, be a DJ. If you are an artist, be grateful for your gift and make music!
I've been trying to sell at http://TarniusMusic.com for the last 6 or 8 months and I've found success there because I lowered my prices drastically. Tarnius Music gives 90% of all sales back to the artist, so I was able to lower my CD/full album download below $8 and my downloads under $0.75 (I have a few different albums and the prices are different for each, but all under 8 and .75).
I've had good luck there because I've made up for the lower prices in quantity. People seem more willing to give you a chance if you're music is cheap. I highly recommend it. I've sold more and made more than on any of my other online sites (I use 3 or 4 others).
An interesting post. I'd like to add some comments about some of your premises below.
First of all, I think that the only reason why, in the past, you never had to do marketing and PR for yourself is that labels would do it for you...for the rights to your music. Now that, as you state, those middlemen are out of the picture, you need to do it for yourself, or it just won't get done. I would suggest that the right answer isn't to pretend that Marketing, PR, and any of the other non-music parts of your music career don't exist, or even need to be done. Rather, I'd like to quote Derek here for a moment: "Find people that like to do what you hate, and have them help you." Personally, I love programming, and am happy to work on our website. But I hate anything to do with design. So how do I get T-shirts, logos, or images on our site? I work with a friend who is a fantastic graphic artist.
Second, I don't think that you can use "whether you've heard of a band" as a bar for success in today's music environment. I just wrote a blog post about this that readers of this discussion would find interesting. To summarize the idea, in a new media environment where mass media is shrinking, and the internet means that people can listen to or get any piece of music that they want ("niche media"), as you mentioned above, superstars are no longer likely because people aren't forced into limited choices. For example, Jonathan Coulton, while you might not have heard of him, is incredibly well known within certain communities. Enough so that two of his songs is in the game Rock Band, and he's making his living at doing music.
And, finally, I think that there's an underlying premise to this that needs to be uncovered, and discussed separately. Since we're talking about whether a musician can make money at music, we need to talk about a music career as a business model. A lot of indies, I think, try to copy the major label formulas that are no longer even working for major labels anymore. This model is to try to make money primarily off of their recordings. Indies will not survive by following the majors now-defunct business model. Even worse, it doesn't make sense for them to do so, because the major's model was based on limitations that they had, rather than strengths. They generally only had rights to their recordings, but not the song publishing, merchandise, live show revenue, music licensing, songwriting-for-hire, music teaching, and...the list goes on. They are only now trying to get "360" agreements that try to get into these other revenue streams. But indies already have the rights to these streams, and need to think about them the same way any business would need to think about how it makes money. The most successful musicians that we talk about in our book are very aware of where their money comes from, and manage it well.
It would seem that we keep trying to re-create what success in music meant in the past. We need to rebuild our thinking from the ground-up--in today's music environment, not the reality from the past that meant that music could only be sold as plastic, tapes, or acetate, and there was only limited media, and limited shelf space. So, lets start with the premise that transferring recorded music around the world costs nothing, but is hard to make money off of. I would suggest that this is the place to start, not the place to stop.
Enjoyed the post. Echoes the presentiment I've had for a while now that in ten years time all musicians will be seen as eccentric hobbyists in the same way butterfly and stamp collectors are, or real ale enthusiasts, with a mixture of bemusement and mild disdain.
What's infuriating is being a musician in this kind of transition period. Which I think is reflected in the replies to your post: if the financial bottom had already completely dropped out of the music industry (which I'm certain it eventually will) and nobody was making any money, then in a sense there would be less of an "issue" – there'd definitely be less of a debate. We would just all be organizing and playing gigs in our local pubs and halls and passing a hat round at the end. Rather like fringe scenes like the folk and jazz scenes. For me, that devolved activity is how I anticipate the future of music making actually. Just like it used to be before recording came along. After all, recorded music has only existed for a hundred years. It's relatively recent. Music making has existed for thousands of years. In that sense, recordings, celebrity, money, compact discs and MP3s are all peripherals.
But to get back to the point, what's infuritating and also costly is that we're in a transition period and I've found that I still have to bloody well press up CDs just to get gigs. Compact discs have lost their exchange-value (nobody is prepared to pay any money for them) but they retain a residual value over MP3s, simply because they are physical objects.
An example: I play folk/blues/country type stuff; I contact a suitable promoters who put on those gigs in London via myspace; they all befriend me and say "thanks for the add"; they don't reply when I ask them politely to have a listen to the songs on my page and consider me for a gig; I send them a CD; they love it and are responsive.
In other words, the pissy icing on the shitty cake is that once you've reconciled yourself to the fact that nobody pays for recorded music anymore, you have to reconcile yourself to the cost and necessity of still having to press up a bunch of CDs just to get yourself some decent gigs.
On a related note, I've had gigs (that I've promoted and organized) where some audience members have expressed surprise that they have to pay to get in. They've somehow got the idea that entrance was free, despite all the advance listings publicity making it very clear that it was £4. (Yes, four measly pounds. To see four fadntastically good acts who I put on as a fan of theirs. Who presumably said audience members were keen to listen to.) Now there is quite clearly some disingenuousness there, and its provenance is file-sharing derived.
I've taken to enjoying small and capricious revenges. A guy came up to me after a gig saying how much he enjoyed it. I chatted to him, he bought me a pint, so I gave him a CD. Almost immediately, a bloke sitting next to him asked if he could have one; evidently his "get something for nothing don't care what it is get it get it quick" radar had kiicked in. He didn't even say please. I told him he could have one for 20 quid. He said he thought I was giving them away for free. I said I was, but not to cunts.
a band that i play in was just mentioned in an article written by a guy that played in a band that opened for 14 iced bears.
finally, i have arrived.
Thanks for the great post Rhodri, it's about time someone said all of the above about this brave new world of the Internet that we've been hearing so much about lately. It's also probably the most entertaining post on the subject I have ever read. So much, that I couldn't stop myself from reading it again a couple days later.
Which brings me to the point. Being the resident malcontent, I have to disagree with your conclusion. I've been through pretty much everything that you mention (in a really tough music market - Poland is a killer) and I'm hardly expecting a pot of gold to appear in my life any time soon. But I have no intention of giving my music away either.
The idea that the audience are somehow doing the artist a favour has recently become prevalent. I have to say with some glee that I hate it to the very marrow of my bones. It's also wrong to think that the artist should be rewarded for their talent. The truth is much simpler: the artist should be rewarded for giving his audience something valuable.
Before we became musicians, we were - all of us - listeners. We would not have become musicians if we didn't feel that music gave us something that we wouldn't get elsewhere. I'm sure that everyone here has artists whom they feel eternally grateful to for their work and its part in our lives. That's why we listen to recordings. That's why we go to concerts.
It is possible that my music does not connect with people in the same way as that of my heroes. That's something I can understand and accept. It means I don't have what it takes. If however, the music I make is special to someone, if it cannot be replaced by any other, if that one song clicks in with a unique moment in their life - they owe me something.
That's why I'm not giving it away. I don't care how many people listen to what I create. I'm not here to win popularity contests. I'm not running for president. I'm fighting a losing battle and I know it, but for what it's worth I can say: "If my music is something you value, pay the price."
My current CD costs less than $5 in Polish currency. Over here that's approximately the same as a packet of cigarettes. Or two beers in a really cheap pub. If someone thinks that my music is great, but they aren't prepared to fork out such a miniscule amount, then I simply don't want to know. A person who downloads my stuff off the Net is no fan of mine. They may have my music, but they'll also have my contempt. I wonder what the negative value of the knowledge that the artist you love hates your guts is?
The real beauty here is that by adopting this stance, I am taking no risk. People who are likely to be turned off by it wouldn't buy my music anyway. It won't affect my bottom line in the slightest. On the contrary, I've found that it actually increases my chances of getting paid.
MTT and other sites are always advocating opening up to people. I'm presently more in favour of putting a couple of heavies on the door to check peoples shoes. And get the cash. Given the choice of a free McDonald's or a members-only club, I'd rather be the latter. My art isn't making me much money (though I usually don't make losses on gigs for instance), so I have no incentive to pander the crowd.
I know one more thing, too: once you start giving your music away for free as a matter of policy, you'll never make money off it again. If that's fine with you, it's fine with me. But bear in mind that the difference between the smallest imaginable sum earned and zero is always infinity. At least you'll know that your music is worth two beers to someone. That's a good thing to know.
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"I know one more thing, too: once you start giving your music away for free as a matter of policy, you'll never make money off it again."
Gotta disagree with this. I give away music when I want to. I charge for it when I want to. In a sense, I suppose, this whole discussion is a little superfluous, because the majority of the replies here are from semi-professionall musicians with day-jobs who would probably be in a similar position with or without the existence of file-sharing networks.
I am about to press up 1000 CDs and give them all away. I might write this off as a business expense (under the "promotion" category of my accounts), but I might not – the cost of CD duplication is so cheap now that I can resonably comfortably afford to do this. The majority will be posted out to promoters and journalists etc (promo copies) but the rest I'll just give to anyone who asks for one at gigs. Of course, if anyone offers to give me a donation for a CD, or buy me a drink, I'll readily accept – I'm hardly going to turn down a volunteered payment. But basically if giving someone an album means they are more likely to turn up to a gig, then it justifies the expense.
(I may even get 2000 made, because the difference between 1000 and 2000 moneywise is about £250 – the marginal costs get smaller and smaller the more you press)
oh and one another thing. I notice Rhodri Marsden still permits himself the residual vestige of popstarry ambition: he still records his music. I can't help wondering: if RM is really so confident nobody values his music, why is he still recording it?
Matt,
Uh, because making music is a blast, either on your own or with other people. It's like some fucked-up jigsaw puzzle that has the capacity to make you giggle like an idiot or cry when it's all put together. To quote David Thomas again (sorry): "A song is best the first two or three times it's played. The musicians are excited and eager and there's nothing to remember or get right. Nothing can go wrong." I totally subscribe to this - and I'd hope that feeling came out in the piece. Making music is a total joy. Selling it is a total drag. So don't sell it.
Yeah, totally. I agree with everything you just said in that post. Making music is indeed a blast, either on your own or with other people. But the point I was trying to make is that you don't need to record an MP3 or burn a compact disc to make music.
It bothers me slightly that music is so artefact-oriented. I mean, recording music in itself is a relatively new thing in the history of music: there was music making for thousands of years before the invention of the wax cylinder; before even the development of manuscript paper.
For me, recording songs is an annoying thing I have to do to get gigs.
....in fact I think there's a strong case for simply NOT recording music. If you want to put it in revolting marketese it "adds value" to your gigs. If you want to put it in the language of the non-twat, it makes your gigs more of a special occasion.
come to think of it, the bit in your article where you describe, back in 1996, people not quite comprehending the fact that you were giving away singles ('You mean it's... free?!!") has a sort of analogue: the incomprehension on people's faces when you tell them after a gig that no, actually, not only do you not have a CD, but you don't have any recordings they can listen to either. But they can come along to your next gig. Which, it so happens, you're organizing yourself, so you can actually play with bands you like, and avoid relinquishing the door money to a venal and incompetent promoter.
Awesome conversation. I'll not add to it now. I was just interested in the fact that Google assigns a PageRank of "6" to this post, and only "4" to the core domain of MTT itself. I didn't realize that was possible... Apparently, the topic did a pretty good job of lighting up the interwebs. Nice. :)
Hello
Great blog and great post. Thank you for encapsulating so well the informations.
Ok, I am a musician.
In a music school, being taught by some of the best musicians in England
Ranging from Guitar and Bass magazine editors to professional drummers associated with Bands who I won't mention here but whose names you will undoubtedly be very familiar with.
If you don't pay musicians they will not play for free.
They will not travel to your town, they won't pay for room and board whilst there, they won't buy food on the road, they won't fork out extra money to record.
If they do record their music they will most likely distribute it locally and to a die hard fan base whom you are unlikely to ever become familiar with.
Musicians play music primarily for the love of their music, you might be surprised that they're are not your dancing monkeys.
Most musicians in fact hate recording their music but love performing live.
Why waste money and time doing what you don't enjoy when alternatively you can play purely live, knowing that it will be the only opportunity people get to hear your music.
I mean that's a fact and in this IMAGE IS EVERYTHING society we live in where its not enough to hear the artist, you have to know what he looks like, what he smells like.
How his skin feels on a cold summers morning like the perverse fan base seems to be in today's society.
Who wants to knowingly buy into that without a pay off.
Get real
Great post RHordri!! A lot of Obvious facts summed quite clearly and humourously. I think quite a lot of people needed a reminder of some of the points and barriers you were trying to amplify. Inclusing myself! But no matter what you say, Although everybodys persona is different. some people will always instinctly have a business acumin and motif to make money whether they are musicians, artists, toilet cleaners, Wannabe Butt stunt doubles or wotever. In the same way that they'll always be talented people who enjoy what they do, but havent got a Clue about business, or how to make money, and will eneviatebly miss out on a few tricks or just get plain ripped off by a agent, manager, record label, etc.
O well, thats the ways of the world! But Personally I do think its now time that I will share my music more freely, and hopefully benefit from the social riches! :D
you can hear my stuff at: www.myspace.com/invisiblealex
Goodluck guys!
With all due respect to the author of this article, but wow! What a miserable individual. How can you possibly expect to sell ANY of the music you were making. It sucked! You guys were terrible, for crying out loud!
If there is a REALITY that needs to be faced is that your band sucked! Look, let's be honest. There was a better chance of getting hit by lightning while siting inside an armored vehicle than for your band to make ANY money.
I could see if your band had made some "serious" music, but the labels didn't "get it" or perhaps your music was too complex for the mainstream(Gentle Giant is an example of extremely talented gents who made abstract music with little to no commercial value). But no! Your band wasn't remotely close to being anything good. So your article is tainted by your experience; which is quite horrific, for sure.
Granted, it goes without saying that illusions of grandeur about "making it big in the music industry" are simply that; namely pipe dreams. However, to imply, or flat-out say, that musicians should perform for free and/or give their music away is selfish. It's greed at its very core: Entertain me, muse me, move me, make me cry, make me think, absorb me, make me laugh, make me reflect......do all of these things......and while i am SO HAPPY that you've entertained me....guess what? You're not getting a dime from me! Nice!
When I first read through your article I thought that it had some merit, but I'm glad I walked outside to catch some sun rays before writing my feedback. Perhaps all that the author needs is a bit of sunshine(the UK's bleak weather is behind Rhodri's thoughts?).
Rock stars donning wigs and makeup, living in LA mansions, having whores and groupies lining up outside their homes will probably be a thing of the past. The glam rock days may never again be. But, does that mean that musicians shouldn't get paid for their art? Absurd to even hint at the possibility.
Good music will ALWAYS exist and artists will get paid for their music. The better artists will make good money. Why? Because their art is in demand. It moves listeners to another(better?) place and those with money, and a bit of ethical sense, will pay for music.
But if you're playing alongside the 14 Iced Bears, well, you can only expect to go so far on a three-legged pony. ;-)
Slight poverty is what drives music forward. It only works if you're in the red.
A diluted observation(quite possibly fueled by personal failure and political viewpoint) and an absurd affirmation.
It's very romantic to say such a thing, as visions of Blues-playing cotton farmers immediately come to mind, but the reality is that when artists are relaxed without having to worry about finding the next meal, they typically have more time to make choices about their music. Instead of the same ol': "lost my job....ta-da, ta-da....and my wife left me....ta-da, ta-da......even the dog don't love me no more.......tada-tada...."
Sure, the mp3 age has changed the playing field. It's futile to argue about it, from any side of the court. File sharing is nothing short of stealing. No different than scanning your favorite "life changing" novel and putting it up for downloading.
However, I know very few, if any, people over the age of 30 who download music for free. The common thread is the same: they feel that it's stealing. Now, you may say that I hang around with some puritans, but that's not the case at all. It's really more about the type of music they listen to and the artists they endorse.
Which leads me to another point: have you ever considered that it's quite probable that the type of music you make is not geared for making any money? Again, with all due respect to your art, but your music is quite insipid, thin and immature. Take for example your YouTube video. Anyone putting out that kind of bane crap can't possibly expect to make any money when the only people who'd listen to it don't have jobs! If that's an example of your top work, wow! It erases all doubt as to why you would write what you did.
Headshaker - If this has become about trading insults - and with all respect to your powers of perception - you're a smug, delusional fuckwad who utterly, utterly missed the point of the post. I was about to start arguing and picking apart your utter misinterpretation of nearly everything I said, but you left the comment three weeks ago and there's barely any point.
Why an audience? Why do you need an audience? Why do you court listeners? Making music is a "sartori" - it takes you out of time while you're doing it. Why do you need your art to be validated by a spate of applause? Face it - no one cares, probably not even your brother or your mother (well, maybe your mother cares). Music now is made by corporations, and has been for years. Paul McCartney is a corporation. One night you'll go somewhere and see a pretty girl strumming a guitar and soulfully singing "Master Jack" with flawless intonation, and that's as good as it gets! The problem is the human ego - we always want more, instead of just doing it to escape time, without looking to "cash in". The last thing this world needs now is another "singer/songwriter" (don't I know it). So you're not making any money - neither did Nick Drake, or Mozart for that matter. If you want applause and approval, you can get it bi-weekly doing something that needs to be done, and that's otherwise known as receiving a paycheck. So you're a creative artist - so what? The video was good, but not great - mediocre in my opinion. Perhaps your energy could have been put to better use - like maybe trying to get the government to ban bottled water. You want your cake and you want to eat it now, and that's not how it goes in "the arts". If you're really good, some professor might find that out 20 years after you've departed this vale of indifference. Good luck, buddy!
To those that think that the rock band model is not dead. Please post some MySpace links of bands that are making it. Here's some criteria:
1) They have to be a new band, a few years old. Bands using their previous MTV or FM radio fame don’t count. Super-groups don’t count. Bands that are part of the new model, not the old machine.
2) They can afford to tour for a few months, then go home and record a new album. They don’t have to endlessly tour to survive. Bands touring three times on one album are not making it in my opinion. They are touring because that’s the only way they get paid.
3) All the band members are at least getting paid a full time minimum wage job (ie. McDonald’s wages). They make this money from album sales, merch sales, and touring sales.
4) They can’t be living off of someone else’s debt (living off of a label advance while the label loses money on them). Though, I doubt labels even do this anymore.
I found looking at the largest indie music distributor in the world (CD Baby) was interesting to see how they did in 2008. A handful of these artists (15) were also Grammy nominated.
200 out of 150,000 artists are barely making a living from their music sales $10,000+. $10,000 divided by a four piece is a whopping $2,500 per year. Wait, who can live of $2,500 a year? You can’t.
http://www.cdbaby.org/stories/09/01/15/8158752.html
Going by the logic on this thread, if you suck, you can’t sell records.
Are we saying 148,000 artists all suck? Please prove me wrong and show me some professional bands that make it by not teaching music lessons.
Monty
Bach wrote music for the glory of God. Why am I writing music? Why do you write music? Do you have something you want to express regardless if anyone ever hears it, or is whatever you do a failure if it's not commercially successful? Are you willing to lay it on the line without ever having an audience? A lot of people I know have no respect for any kind of artist because they see them as fueled and motivatied sole by vanity - and there's a lot of truth in that nowadays. If there's a Bach writing music now in this century, what do you think he's doing? Your video was weak because the message doesn't come through - interesting chords, but what are you saying? And is it worth hearing? The fact is the world has more songs and songwriters than it needs - supply and demand in action. What we need more of is relief workers amd pollution fighters - but there's little glamour in that. Do what you love - yes, but don't expect everyone else to love it with you. We've got other things on our minds. Cest la vie!
Brilliant! Bravo.. Nail on head :)
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this, you've got a skill for writing (maybe you should've looked into journalism or some other form of writing for a living, unless you already do that which would explain a few things).
Without meaning to come off the wrong way, because as I said this was a well written piece, I believe you are a little disillusioned with the way the industry has treated you. Don't get me wrong, you have way more experience than me, I'm 21 and I've only been in one serious band, and in my opinion you can't really change people. There will be the people out there who are in it for fame, money, popularity, etc, and there are the people who are in it for the enjoyment of making music. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter which category you come under, both are capable of making good music and both are capable of getting signed.
I'm glad, at least, that you are content with yourself now as far as music is concerned, to be able to say 'I've learnt my lessons and now I just do what I enjoy' is great. Personally I play music for the love of making music, with the band I was in we played hundreds of shows and only occasionally got paid, all our recordings were available for free download on Myspace at one time or another, and we did have some minor label interest though that never led to anything. In all I wouldn't change that experience but I would still like to think I could make a living from being a musician in the future. Don't get me wrong, it's a Plan B, I play because I enjoy it and if anything more came of it I would snap it up, but I don't need it by any means.
So how does one come out of the herd and be heard in the era of music 2.0 ? Obviously the distinction between amatuer and professional is blurry at best. I doubt we'll see many megastars in the future, but we'll certainly hear more King Catfish in their provincial ponds..
And what's so bad about that? The slices of pie are smaller and smaller all the time, but at least more and more folks get a taste..
Wow. I'm amazed that no one has pointed out the good things that came out of Rhodri's eloquent post or asked for more information about his experient. So, I will let out my inner engineer and point out a few things:
While Rhodri laments 250,000 views of his fun little music video, no one has asked why it had so many views, or who liked it, or how long it took to get that many views or how he did it, or what his budget was or anything. 250,000 views is quite the accomplishment, really. I think one of had 25, last I checked.
In any case, getting exposure is important to success, and he at least knows what it takes to get that exposure on YouTube... or does he know how it happened? Was it the quirky video? The song? A story posted somewhere? An email to a friend? His fans spread the word? Nudity? The threat of nudity? Maybe someone in the video mailed it around at the office? I'd love to know. In my case, I have no idea what it would take to get to the same point. And admittedly, I'm not really trying either.
Secondly, Rhodri achieved about 100 sales from his video or 1 out of 2500 views produced a sale. Again, an achievement! Rhodri now knows the relative appeal of his songs relative to a large population of listeners (.04% of listeners love and cherish him and his art enough to buy it). His conversion rate is 1 per 2500 (.04%) and he earns about $1 from each fan. What about the rest of his music? How does that compare?
Can he do better by making a different video? Or a different kind of song? A different audience? Could he get the same sales results again with substantially less effort and views? Did he get his viewers on his mailing list? Did he ask them why they liked it?!
From the business point of view, to make any kind of living, Rhodri first needs to improve his conversion rate. Currently, he has to write 1,000 songs (do what he did 1000x) to earn $100,000 for his band (online). Not practical. I see three options: 1) find a different, narrower audience who is into his band's style, or 2) do popular cover songs that appeal to a broad cross section of the population, or 3) hire a songwriter with a better track record and record that person's songs. In other words, if you can't find your ideal audience, adjust your songs to appeal to the audience you can find.
All of these things will achieve a better conversion rate with less effort and more net income for the band. Imagine Rhodri's post if he had a 1-10% conversion rate for his quirky video....
-Cathy
Very incredible writing!
You got all the points. You should start thinking about writing a book for the rest of us.
I've started a blog on music prices at http://dfmichael-cdprices.blogspot.com/
I'm trying to provoke people (mainly music listeners) and have them think why there is this common assumption that music should be free or be priced all the same. As you mention, majority of people think all artists live in luxury. While the truth is that 97% of us starve and have to do another job to survive.
People are ok paying different prices for many things, but not for music. They are completely unaware that 97% of us do not sell millions of copies therefore don't become rich selling records. But they are ok saying that a mp3 should be priced $0.99
I personally do no think so. Since I won't make a living selling my records anyway I decided to price them higher than average. And I'm no longer putting my music up for digital distribution until iTunes and the others let me fix my price. I'd like to sell them for at least $3 per song. In any case, if people do not like music they won't bother wether is free or very cheap. They would not listen to it anyway. They would not buy anyway.
Best wishes,
DF MICHAEL
There seems to be a stigma about artists who give away their music for free.. to some it just reeks of desperation.. like people playing on the street for pocket change.
However, there are some exceptions, which i wrote about in my blog:
http://enigmafon.com/2009/05/09/can-artists-giving-free-music-away-ever-make-it/
A lot of people delude themselves thinking their music is "good enough" to make a living out of it.. but usually that is not the case. I still think that if your music is good enough it will find an audience if you promote it properly.
Commerce and your music will come together ONLY if it is your destiny. It is quite simple - not an "effort" or "talent" issue - but more like the result of entropy and chance and luck plus the unlikely possibility that the artists is ready, and all of these factors happening at the same time. The best metaphor I could ever conceive of would assert that making money with art is like winning the lottery. Surely no one makes plans to win the lottery, no one strives to win the lottery, no one trains to win the lottery, no one... please let us not continue, I don't want to insult my own intelligence. Truth is someone is bound to win the lottery and it COULD be you so buying the ticket is worth a try. However, putting money into making music is NOT an investment in the strict business sense of the term. See it as more of a metaphysical investment: you are taking the only step that is within your control for the sake of allowing destiny to pick you. But, don’t think you have a say, and don’t get discouraged by dismal returns, as that too was and is your destiny.
By the way, fighting it is also part of your destiny; it was the part of the story where it took you years to get over the fact that stardom sadly enough was not in the cards for you, and that your loved ones had to put up with a sour old puss who is envious of others and hates everything and can’t even watch a video channel without thinking every group featured is shit.
US culture has sold us this most ridiculous idea that we can make our own future, and now that books and films about the “secret” speak of the law of attraction as if it were a proven scientific fact, we know that the message is loud and clear: what, you are not a millionaire, are you trying and visualizing hard enough? Must be a loser, says the self determination freak, if you can’t cash in. But to me that is simply delusional.
I make music and make no apologies. I will continue to make music. Nothing will stop me. I might hate my own music, I might have no fans, but God knows making music is my destiny. Whether making money with my music is my destiny or not remains to be seen. Anyways, here is a song of mine: http://www.eltarot.org that talks about not having a need for the bling bling to feel strong. It's called “No Bling Bling”. It is in Spanish and if you can’t understand the language then do not listen to it or simply close the tab or window. It is not free, but if you want it bad enough then try and let me know and I will give it to you as a present.
By the way, I don’t need you to promote me and my feelings are not hurt if no one read this. To me it’s all part of the script.
Suerte: eltarot
This is my first time here in musicthinktank. And I stumbled with this brilliant post. I am not a musician, actually I am not even able to ring a bell on tune. But, that is a fact, not making money doesn't convert making music into a worthless enterprise. Most bands are out there much more worried about earning fame, fans and money than, and the quality of the music they play becomes secondary.
And it seems that today is the day of FREEmusic. I found a band that offers their EP for free at the internet.
The music is beautiful, and it is worth a look.
X Musa Duo
I apologize about the publicity, but I believe that this kind of initiative is worth supporting. Even when most of the artist start to think that art worthless the effort (and now we have a world full of designers).