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)
HAHA! truly fantastic. give this guy a blowjob!!
Yeah its great how you're telling everybody to give up on their hopes of making bread off of their music...then they all eventually won't have time to focus on making mediocre music because their jobs make them want to go home and numb their minds...and as they get older and get into serious relationships and more focused on a non-music career, they will eventually stop flooding my damn market all together! More room for my success more reward for working ceaselessly at my music and avoiding a day job. Thanks!
- Sapient
Buy my new CD: "Make More" at CDBaby.com/sapientkills4
Rhodri. Interesting article but I have some points which I think need to be made.
First of all the goal of the artist is not necessarily to mp3s but to drive visits to their website, eyeballs, web status. On their website they should then monetise the site by leveraging free
downloads and music for something people do still want to buy. Build a relationship with the fans and then advertise product that people want to buy. This could be a physical embodiment of your album or it could be a t-shirt, clothing etc. Of course ads on your site are a MUST.
The economics of the web has not been understood by artists. With your experiment, your mistake was to link to iTunes. To be honest your song was always going to be a hard sell but the video was good and many people (myself included) would have liked to go to your website to read more about you and in fact I did. I was more interested in your story than your song.
But had I visited your website, enjoyed your vibe I might have been persuaded to buy a ringtone or visit your page everytime you released a song online.
I agree with you stop trying to sell the music instead sell the convenience around it. Embed this widget, for the freebie hunters, buy the designer t-shirt for the fashion conscious but here is the big money spinner, trade eyeballs for licensing. Many people would have wanted to put your song in their movies or even on their site.This is where you make your money.
Check my site out for more music tips from MrFuturistic.
some times boring did not always understand what you were trying too say
I'm a lot happier when I'm not online on music sites, or checking email, or looking at my web stats and yes Its been over 2 years since I've sold an mp3, or even a cd, and suicidal thoughts are a lot closer to hand when I'm listening to that Bob Baker guy, and yes John Taglieri is even more soul destroying to stomach. I don't know how he can enjoy his music or if it can mean anything to him. Meanwhile i haven;t gigged in nearly all that time, although to tell you the truth your picture of the "joys" of gigging is definately not attractive to me. I do enjoy playing my music when I get a chance though, and it gives a lot back. Theres real health there in interacting with people and letting the music out.
Anyway, its good to see your viewpoint. Someone needed to say it, although I still don't feel like putting my music up for free even though no-ones buying it. It would be even more depressing if nobody bothered their holes downloading it even when its free. Which is quite possible these days with all the free stuff around.
well im gonna try it anyway and no one is gonna stop me..
Doomsday Clock Debut album will be released 11/17/09 on amazon mp3 and itunes
Anyone can listen to "Afriad Of Heights" in its entirety for free www.mysoace.com/doomsdayclock08 until the album is officially released.
HI Please help me to sell my cd
I see what your saying but,I can't keep putting my time and money into something that's not paying me.I'm artist to the core and I feel like I should get payed for my talent.I don't think it's all about the money but,as a grown man time is money especially when other ppl are living in mansions and driving cars off of their indie hustle.I disagree it can happen
"I'm artist to the core and I feel like I should get payed for my talent."
Damn, man, I hear you. I've been telling that to anyone who would listen since I was about 11. Trust me, I way awesomer, smarter and better looking than you, I should definitely be getting paid just to exist.
However, a few years ago, I decided to experiment with "working" instead and let me tell you: the results have been surprising...and so encouraging that I kept going. It's been going great ever since, and I make way more money than I did panhandling with all the other "artists."
entertaining and endearingly honest insight! i quite like the idea of "pay as much as u want" - gonna try it with next album if i get it printed..will let u know if it works. still buy CDs meself tho and enjoy makin em, and cannot let the MP3 ear dumb, numbing totally triumph...
Caro,
"the MP3 ear dumb, numbing..." that you maybe dislike, is actually preferred by today's teenagers - http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2009/03/09/kids-increasingly-prefer-mp3s/1
This is a poem in response to this excellent article.
Music
To help with my thoughts and understanding
To get through each day with free abandon
I strummed a mortal chord
Which flowed like a meandering fjord
I abandoned all hope and set myself free
Destined to appear on MTV
With three chords and a black gig bag
I joined a band and tried to be rad
In our bubble of toil and trouble
We rehearsed forever The Wild Rover
With shut eyed ears to the outside world
And an arrogance from within us took over
I’ve been in that room of copyright doom
Where friends yarn endless about a musical boom
The notion to sell and get heard by the masses
And then sit back, drink and talk about lasses
Really we’re lazy, bone idle, just below par
But we think our music will sell and fill up our jars
With waning interest, no striving to be the best
Instead lots of rest, getting stoned and barely getting dressed
I’m in a band that nobody’s heard of
And we blame it on everyone save ourselves
With a drawer of CDs that nobody bought
I’ll stick it to the man who put us on the shelves
He tries his best to sell our records
Alongside others that are often a little better
And yet we’re all blind to the truth that we’re really quite lame
It’s ourselves we should blame in this musical game
A true musical success
Is to make people dance and feel their best
So cast ideas of fame clear from the mind
And continue along a creative line
Distract, entertain, enrich and uplift
Was my prerogative as I picked up the guitar
To be remembered for all the above
Not to think businesslike and buy a big car
I have SO much to say about this, and I keep writing something and then deleting it because I end up going onto tangents.
But basically I am shocked that Bruce Warilla and Andrew Dubber gave kudos to this article. I am wondering what they think of this article now, in 2010? And I'm wondering what the author thinks of it now?
Where is the optimism? Where is the can-do attitude? Why the cynicism? Is that mode of thinking that will help us overcome challenges?
I could list dozens of things a pro-level musician with a professional attitude towards the 'business of music' could be doing to do to lay the foundations of a profitable music career. None of them include being cynical, or giving up. Many of them do include being business savvy. Or getting professional consultation if your brain chooses not to process business-related thoughts. We are building an empire, and Rome wasn't built in one day..
And I say 'lay the foundations', because the building that is built above it is made of the same materials that have always been used - writing, recording, gigging and promo. The foundation is what helps to monetize the side-effects of these three activities (i.e. the traffic that your traditional 'music related activities' generate). For 2010 the foundation is your website. Not your myspace, or your facebook or your itunes page, or your whatever else. Get your shit together and make a fucking good website. If you don't have a fucking good website, well don't expect to be making money (AKA if you claim to be in business, act like you are - build a website that facilities your business activities, silly).
There is nothing stopping you creating your pure art (i.e. solely for personal expression) which you do not need to sully with marketing etc, and at the same time creating music that might also take the audience into consideration (AKA 'selling out'), which you do market. Many side projects of many commercial musicians (AKA musicians that are making money) are of this pure nature. However, the choice is yours. And if you choose to pursue non-commercially viable music (the definition of which hasn't changed with the advent of filesharing - if anything, its the opposite), then you are running the risk of not making any money from it. By all means, go for it - but please don't complain that you aren't selling anything. The internet is not the problem here.. It's your commercially non-viable music (which I might love and buy if I really like it).
And there is time. There is enough time, no matter how busy you are. We all know it - we waste time on all kinds of bullshit. If you think there isn't enough time, you need to speak to someone to help you with your time management. And if music is your priority, then you will find time for it. If it's not, then don't quit your day job darling..
Ok, I just realised there was another whole page of comments...
Anyway my question to Rhodri - Do you believe with complete faith that you have done everything possible to make a living from your music? And do you believe that it is possible that a talented musician with more business smarts might have a better chance of generating a livable income from their music?
If so, than would you take back the suggestion to give up on trying to make money from recorded music, and rather spend time on one's marketing and business strategy?
Can't speak for Bruce, but I can tell you why I stand behind this article.
1) It's a brilliant piece of writing;
2) It underlines the importance and wonderfulness of music as a cultural practice and not merely a job - without prettying it up and pretending that it isn't also an ordeal at times;
3) It speaks for the vast majority of people who play music who do not end up making it their career.
If you play a musical instrument, and do not make a living at it you have NOT failed. You do something that makes life worthwhile. Profit is not the only measure of value.
Honestly, I think this is one of the most important pieces of writing about music that I've seen on the internet. It's a reality check, a humour check, and a flag raised to alert you to the fact that if you make this your career, you've done something amazing that most people can't or won't do.
The odds are not in your favour. REALLY not in your favour. THIS MUCH not in your favour.
Going to do it anyway? That makes you mighty.
Dubber -
While I wholeheartedly agree with the points you like about the article - and I do feel that it needs to be said that music is an art form that should be above financial motives etc - I still think that overall message is one of 'don't bother trying to make it your career. It's over - give up on trying to do so and move on'.
But come on, this is Music THINK TANK - an INDUSTRY (as in business) think tank - and think tanks usually analyze situations and develop strategies and solutions. Which is what most of the contributors and many commenters do. But this article doesn't.
I think THE most important aspect to the dilemmas being faced by the author, and the commenters, is something that only they can answer - is their music up to par, and are they treating as a business in the full sense of the word.
If you are not managing your music career in a professional and business-like manner, well what CAN you expect beyond a miracle?
Without having data on the subject, my assumption is that many of the musicians who have established stable musical careers with prospects of longevity, have a professional attitude and approach to their endeavors. And that includes musicians who were signed (to majors and indies). No doubt there are exceptions, however as far as we should be concerned, we have no one to account for but ourselves at the end of the day (unless you believe in a supernal, omnipotent and omniscient being commonly known as 'God').
Dubber, you're the dude. It's truly awesome what you've built here (with a little help from your friends)!
And Rhodri - please don't take what I'm saying as insults etc. I am just trying to have a constructive discussion, and if I've been offensive - even if your not offended - I apologise!
Well, at least I enjoy the "misery". Thanks for making me get back in touch with why I started playing in the first place. I'm gonna go play now.
So yes, there is a lot in what you're saying.
I'm going for a balance: record an EP at home, assemble 200 CDs, do it for less than 200 euro. Sell the CDs at gigs - it gives you something to talk about, even at open mics, anywhere. Just get out and play and let people know they can buy it. If you meet a blogger or someone with an involvement in anything that can help you give them a copy.
After a few months, when I'm about to record a second EP I will give it away online and will use up any leftovers from the first run of 200 CDs by giving them away freebie with the second EP.
Rinse and repeat.
So long as I can minimise the spend on making those CDs and, who knows, break even then all is good.
So far I've managed to recoup my costs on the first EP I released last year. I have about 100 copies left and will give them away with the next EP. If I'm lucky I'll break even on the next one.
The best part of this... I get to play, record, write, perform. And I keep my sanity and self-respect.
How bad is that ?
Well, it seems the only way to be "making money from your music" is if the sites and programs that so freely give it away (filesharing etc), start charging subscription, in which each person who gets x amount of listens gets paid ... I dunno, half a cent? (Last.fm) But i've noticed almost every single download manager on the planet can download from any player that will play... anything. mpg. .flv .mp3 ... you name it, someone can come to your website, listen to your free preview (hopefully it wasn't the full song if you wanted to sell it) and download it with a download manager, or check their temp directory before they close their browser, people saying no one wants a 128k mp3 is bull too, I know so many people who cannot tell the difference between a cd, a high quality .wav file, or a 128k mp3. they just don't put that much thought into it, they aren't audiophiles like so many of us.
It seems funny though the "rockstar/popstar" image has always been a load of crap hasn't it? how many of them really had that much money, it's all advances (later debt as mentioned) and smoke and mirrors, marketing think tanks and so forth, it's easy to make someone look glamorous for $10,000+ in a nice film studio and then fabricate some bull crap statistics about their album sales (read a few blogs about that system too!)
What I find is, it seems to be 'succesful on the internet" you comment on, write "interesting" articles about, and generally help other people's name's/bands/blogs to magically help your own, but don't advertise your band where it's not wanted (which is essentially nowhere) or you'll get a bad name as a spammer Oh and spend hundreds(?) on things like google adwords etc.
Now it seems to me, that someone out there has figured out musicians are DESPERATE to sell their music, and are more than willing to write ANYTHING to scrape a few sales towards their ebook, advertising method... etc and so on, but I've never seen any real result from trying any of these things (not saying I was that great at it though) - I find logging into IRC, Paltalk, or anywhere you can directly interact with real people to be more successful, sure you don't get sales, but you might scrape a few fans out of it! (wow, could've done that gigging without wasting so much time at the computer!)
I will say this, tunecore talks a great game don't they?
In the beginning the world was quiet, save for bird chirps and the occasional wolf howl. Then some ur-human lifted his or her voice and sang, or thumped the proverbial hollow log, and 'music' was born.
For tens of thousands of years, humans combined the creative imperitive to make music, with the need to eat and survive. There were many choices for day jobs, including both hunting AND gathering.
There is no evidence of Division-of-Labor until the late Neolithic, when the urban-lifestyle developed, which at some point became Civilization (the definition of which can lead to heated arguments). The first "career musicians" were most likely _slaves_ (frequently the blind) who played in the temples and the courts of the great houses. The common folk, by contrast, have persisted until the present day with combining their day job (tilling the soil in most cases) with making music for themselves after the day's work was done.
(variant: check on iron-age celts, where musician/bards were accounted the 3rd and lowest grade of Druid. These bards provided professional music and poetry in exchange for temporary room and board. They wandered a lot.)
In classical (greco-roman) civilization, professional musicians were again slaves. The well-to-do, however, considered music to be but one part of a decent education. They did not, however, make a living at music.
By the high middle-ages, Minnesingers and Troubadors continued the professional wandering-minstrel schtick: exchanging songs in the evening for temporary room and board.
By the Renaiscense (sp?), professional musicians were _retained_ (room and board) by the wealthier nobility. The church frowned on _slavery_ at this time. Serfdom was more in vogue throughout the middle-ages: so the commoners still combined tilling the soil with making their own 'folk-music'.
Watershed events: the development of music notation by monks, and that Gutenberg contraption. Sheetmusic was the original mp3.
Mr. Mozart gained an early reputation as a child prodigy painist/composer (the original Brittany Spears -- never quite right after his upbringing). His father carted him and his sister all over Europe on tours as a trained-monkey to play for the nobility. After a bout of fever, he lost the ability to play in public (messed up his dexterity). He sold his services as a composer on comission to wealthy patrons.
Mr. Beethoven was the first arguably-successful musician/composer to break the mold of being a "retained-musician". By the power of his music and personality, he created the career paradigm of composing music and making his living through sheet-music sales. His life was not happy, starting with his father trying to turn him into another young Mozart through careful application of the business end of a stick. Whatever money he did manage to accrue usually went to the support of his less-than-successful extended family members.
The next century was littered with would-be composers. The lucky few had talent and managed to get recognized for comissions and by sheetmusic publishers (the original record labels).
Chopin gave piano-lessons to young ladies, sponged off his author-wife, and was lucky enough to come to the attention of a wealthy patroness who sent money occasionally.
Wagner pulled a P.T.Barnum, and presented his music as large operatic endeavours, very much a showman. In the days before television, going to a show was entertainment.
etc.etc.
Meanwhile, the majority of musicians had a day job, and perhaps played music in the local ensemble -- more often for free -- pre-recording, the world was a quiet place: Music didn't happen until you made it happen.
Scott Joplin played in whore-houses in Kansas City for a living. He made some little money selling sheetmusic of his 'Rags'. He was hounded by less-successful fellow musicians for a way into the sheetmusic industry. He died early of syphilis, as the pay from the houses-of-ill-repute where he worked didn't always pay in cash.
Mr. Edison's Wax-Cylinders.
Recording changed the paradigm, and not necessarily for the best. The opportunities to be recognized improved, if you got a record deal and your record got out there. But at the same time, this diminished music. Why hire a musician, when you can just put a phonograph on? Why go to a show when I can turn on the radio?
Big Business moved in. Millions of dollars were made -- but who got them? What did the Suits contribute to the process? What did the musicians contribute?
Big Business is all about marketing, no? Rock-stars are 'created' not perhaps because they are bigger than Jesus, but because it is easier for the businessmen to make money if they have a well-known product by which to reap THEIR profits, not those of the musicians. The spin and the hype are business, they are not intrinsic in good music.
As an interesting aside, the whole Generation-Gap thing of the 1960's was a marketing ploy by big business. "Pssst! check out this music! I'm sure your parents will hate it!!!" Suits got rich, society in general became a bit more disfunctional in a divide-and-conquer sense. That naive 20-somethings bought into an evil plot to make middle-aged Suits richer only adds to the irony of the whole movement.
To further diminish the music, observe that recorded music really is in many instances 'better' or at least more polished, than the music made by real people. I suspect many would-be musicians give-up because they can't get a perfect-recording-sound out of their garage or basement.
The current mp3/internet paradigm shift is most interesting, in that it re-democratizes music to the folk. I am greatly amused to see the big labels squirm about declining profits. Please remind me exactly what it is that they contribute to the _MUSIC_? I understand that they contribute marketing & distribution skills and infrastructure, but do they make the music _better_? Do they innovate, or do they stick to tried and true genres? Big Business abhors change. Sure profits are desired, risk and uncertain-futures are not.
So after a brief recap of musical history, several facts should be more obvious.
Throughout the majority of human musical history, a musician had a day-job and made music for themselves and their friends (for tens of thousands of years). Please note that this option never ended.
Starting about 5000 years ago they could be a professional musician / _slave_ / servant.
During the 1800's, professional musicians could struggle through the sheetmusic industry. FAD.
During the 1900's, professional musicians could struggle through the recording / vinyl / CD industry. FAD.
And now into the 2000's, we have the new mp3/internet paradigm, and folks can setup home studios for not a lot of cash. Where will this go? How will it play out?
My contention, is that we are back to the original paradigm of "musician with day-job makes music because they like to, and they share it with their friends". The mp3/internet paradigm just lets our circle of friends be spread to the distant reaches of the internet.
When the big record labels go the way of the buggy-whip manufacturers, this will NOT be the End of the World. This will really just be a return to the normal human state of music.
Most of us will simply have to get used to an audience of family and our circle of perhaps 100 friends. Still some very few of us will be bigger-than-Jesus, and they will still percolate to the top as the world takes notice, and word spreads. But, too, will this be these uber-musicians' complete discography? Or will one of us just have that one-hit-wonder with the golden mp3 that the world can't get enough of, but likely can't be duplicated?
HAHAHA...absolutely nice post...it seems we have a lot of professional musician..I hope they can give an sample video to us..
It is very frustrating being an indie artist,working your ass off to make a great sounding record,financing the CD and video-getting lots of great comments on it on youtube but almost no one is willing to buy the album.
I may end up having to do what the author of this article did and recycle some 800 CD's sitting inside cardboard boxes in my room.
Robert Nix Rock/Pop/Experimental Artist
http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/robertnix4