Secondary Ticketing: The Bane Of Live Music

by Juan Carlos Cardenas from Berklee’s Music Business Journal, thembj.org. 

Music Business Worldwide (MBW), a fellow publication, estimates that Mumford & Sons, the acclaimed British alternative-rock band, lost a minimum of three million dollars to the hands of scalpers and secondary ticketing sites in 2016. The figure could be half of that and still give pause for thought. As MBW suggests, moreover, it may well be that other prominent artists including Adele, Chance the Rapper, Radiohead, Iron Maiden, and The Pixies, are suffering a similar fate.

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Long Live EDM

By Matt Mannino from Berklee’s Music Business Journal.

The electronic music industry has grown up. Attendances at Electronic Dance Music festivals in the United States exploded between 2007 and 2014, going from 145,000 people to 1.4 million. This has made EDM the poster child for the millennial music industry, for no other music genre or industry sector can compare in performance (a tenfold increase in audience is equivalent to a staggering 34% annual growth rate).

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Nielsen's Music 360 Report

By Spencer Ritchie from Berklee’s Music Business Journal, thembj.org. 

Nielsen recently published its annual Music 360 Report, detailing consumer spending in music, especially subscription services. According to Nielsen, the appetite for music in the United States is high. Apparently, 91% of the US population is listening up to 24 hours of music a week, a much larger number than reported for similar surveys in the 1990s.

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SoundExchange Explained

SoundExchange is an independent nonprofit organization that is dedicated to collect and distribute royalties resulting from digital performance rights of sound recordings. When it was created in 2000, this organization was a division of the RIAA but in 2003 it became an independent organization, currently representing the interests of more than 110,000 artists and copyright owners. As reported by SoundExchange, they have already successfully paid nearly $3 billion since they first started doing business.

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Spotify's Clout

By Spencer Ritchie from Berklee’s Music Business Journal, thembj.org.

In the last four months three new streaming platforms were launched: Apple Music, Tidal, and Google Play Music. Others, among them YouTube, Deezer, and Rdio, still compete for market share. The Freemium camp, with Spotify, Google Play Music, and Pandora, collects revenue from advertising & subscriptions. The Premium camp, with Apple Music and Tidal, produces receipts exclusively from paid memberships. Spotify is the very embodiment of Freemium, and the release of Apple Music will undoubtedly be a big challenge—coming, as it does, from the largest company in the world, with a remarkable market cap of more than $700 billion.

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Artist Merchandising Made Simple

With recorded music sales in free fall and touring being a very expensive gamble to try to end up in the black, it has never been more crucial for up-and-coming artists to find non-traditional revenue streams to keep their art alive. There are many ways for musicians to make money – private lessons, doing session work, or even writing jingles. However, none of these are actively helping build an artist’s career, and the time spent working on those endeavors will ultimately take time away from their own art.

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Fair Use: A Manual

Fair use has always been a contentious concept. A great number of musicians, as well as artists of other varieties, include copyrighted material in their own works through techniques such as sampling and parodying. However, many of these works do not fall under the scope of fair use. In fact, there is a lot of uncertainty regarding what constitutes fair use and what does not. A recent study by the College Art Association (CAA) found that “37 percent of artists use third-party material and that one in five avoids or abandons a project over concerns that they’re not doing it right and that number is much higher for editors and academics.”¹

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The Cost of Free

By Athena Butler

When it comes to recorded music, today’s consumers enjoy a free ride and seem to have all the answers.  Song sharing is there for the taking and, in any case, the old music sales model is archaic. But if out with the old and in with the new is stylish in music, the same is not true of music recordings.

For the business, it seems, free is good. However, the decline of recorded music sales has been catastrophic since 2001, when piracy became rampant and the single song Apple economy banished the album. Now, hope for the sector requires a giant leap of faith. In the meantime, the tough job of finding new ways to compensate for this loss of profits falls to the record companies. It may appear that artists are gaining more exposure as music changes hands often and easily. But is the moneymaking of old within the reach of the business?

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