July 9, 2015 Apple’s statement that they would not be paying artists and the consequent backlash from performers like Taylor Swift has been generating a great deal of commentary regarding revenue from music streaming services in general. This article examines some of the issues relating to streaming, piracy, and the difficulties associated with profiting from recorded music in the digital age.
November 19, 2013 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?
January 13, 2010 Check out the post Jeff Price (CEO of TuneCore) just put up (quote below).
“According to Nielsen (self defined as “…the world’s leading marketing and media information company.”) there were: “…106,000 new (music) releases in 2008”
In 2009, TuneCore released approximately 90,000 releases. This means, if their numbers hold true, almost every single new music release in 2009 was distributed via TuneCore.”
January 13, 2010 2010 is - rather tragically - shaping up to be the year when Rock Stars (and old-industry millionaires) complain about the state of music on behalf of ‘the little people’.
Here are three examples: Peter Waterman, in an interview with The Times, said that Spotify was a terrible thing. It, he says
“devalue[s] our artists, they damage this country economically, culturally and morally”
Why’s that then, Pete?
“The big stars are a tiny percentage; the rest are broke, including a lot of well-known faces. Who is developing new talent? Without money, new acts are strangled before they mature. We all suffer.”
This, from the man who made a multi-million pound career of writing and producing ‘hits’ for soap stars
December 1, 2009 I’ve read two very interesting related articles this week. The first suggested that people who download music via peer-to-peer services spend more money on music than their non-filesharing peers. The second insisted that the net drop in CD and download sales overall has increased concurrent with, and as a result of filesharing.
It’s difficult to argue with either, since they’re both backed by respectable-seeming research and surveys - and yet they can’t possibly both be true. Until you realise the fundamental logical flaws in both positions: the presupposition that unauthorised downloading of music has a causal effect - indeed, is the only causal factor - on the fortunes of the music business.
Clearly, as soon as you take a step back and think about it logically, so-called ‘piracy’ cannot possibly be anything more than one of a whole range of factors affecting the music industry as a whole, simply because the world is a complicated place and people are complex and interesting. There are political, economic, social, cultural and technological factors all influencing the industry’s affairs - and it stands to reason that different influencing factors are pulling in all sorts of different directions.
November 14, 2009 OK, I’m going to try and explain why Big Music genuinely doesn’t get what’s happening with the online stuff. It’s easy to dismiss the thoughts coming out about ‘3 Strikes Laws’, and Bit Torrent being to blame for the death of musicians’ livelihoods etc. as being a bunch of really rich people want to keep their massive piece of the pie - and there is some of that, for sure. But there’s also an entire way of thinking that explains why they feel the way they do.
The problem is to do with the difference in response required between transformative change, and incremental change.
Sticking with the music industry, let’s have a look at some examples of both, starting with incremental change:
September 21, 2009 This is an exclusive early post from my Juggernaut Brew blog which every day this week asks a big question of the music industry…http://juggernautbrew.blogspot.com/
Back in 2007, Radiohead exited its record deal with EMI and promptly self-released their new album In Rainbows as a ‘pay what you want’ download. This I know did not escape your attention.
The genius of the strategy was multi-layered. The move generated such a huge wave of PR that the record hardly needed a marketing budget. And ironically, the band themselves avoided the need to do the usual round of publicity appearances and interviews – an established system the band loathed. It made them look forward thinking and brave. I’m even convinced that the distribution strategy for In Rainbows had an impact on the critical reception of the album itself which garnered four & five star reviews across the board and was number one on many critical lists for that year (it was a good record but was it a great one?).
August 26, 2009 There are plenty of artists that would like to rollback the clock to the days prior to illegal music sharing. I have come to believe that this would be a colossal mistake. I don’t say this because I believe that illegal sharing is justified; in fact I am against the ‘attitude’ entirely. Confused yet? This post is going to bring up a pile of unanswered questions like how would one solve the conundrum of enabling yet disabling? So please just consider the philosophical argument.
To eliminate or to throttle file sharing is an assault on your rights as an artists. Moreover, to eliminate or to throttle file sharing (in my mind) is an act that would reduce competition in the marketplace.
August 3, 2009 Perhaps with some tweaking, here’s what current wisdom tells you:
As new interactive digital products enter the marketplace (and they are), your digital future will look something like this:
July 13, 2009 In March, I wrote a post titled “Remember the mullet? File sharers are next.” Since that time, several studies have been posted that more or less demonstrate that the Google Trends I cited can be used as a forward-looking guidepost.
Google Trends for the music industry are not perfect indicators, but they are worth examining occasionally.
Here are two links to information on the recent surveys on file sharing.
March 13, 2009
Updated on April 1, 2009 by
Bruce Warila
Can you say stuck in the past? According to the news, the new U2 album has been downloaded illegally over 400,000 times since it was released. While this isn’t a number to sneeze at, it reminds me of the mulletheads that put hood scoops and air blowers over their carbureted engines in the early 1980s. When the rest of the world switched over to fuel injection, the mullet-powered Camaro became a thing of the past.
Someone click over to Torrent Freak and tell darkshare, labeldeath and redfilephantom to garage the Camaro and trim the mullet; fuel injection has arrived. Sorry angry dudes, the cost of acquiring a music collection is approaching zero
December 20, 2008 Let me see if I’ve got this right.
A grocery store sells potatoes. Makes their living by providing a regular supply of potatoes to hungry customers. Trouble is, some of those customers use those potatoes to make potato prints of Mickey Mouse. Disney’s response is to make an agreement with grocery stores to limit the supply of potatoes to customers and possibly stop selling them altogether.
“Dear repeat potato print offenders - you continue to make infringing potato prints of Mickey Mouse and other lovable characters. Doing so steals from the creators of these lovable characters, funds terrorism, and means that these lovable characters will no longer be able to have hilarious adventures. So no more potatoes for you. Stop giving us money immediately.”
November 24, 2008 Digital distribution as well as promotion has undoubtedly been the best thing that could have happened to music fans as well as musicians. Even bigger content owners are finally seeing the opportunities (instead of the threats) that come with the technical change of delivering ‘media’ over the last ten years. It is now easier than ever for artists to connect to their fans and delivering the music to them, gatekeepers have been eliminated and (in theory) artists can reach out to millions of music fans out there through the internet. So far, so good.
Everyone who works in music knows that there are various new challenges that have developed through new digital delivery methods and those challenges can make it difficult to monetize digital music. I won’t be going into the issue of file sharing (there are enough people out there who have something to say about that) but I want to explore a common misunderstanding about digital media: “digital distribution is free” (or at least very cheap). It is not at the moment.
November 13, 2008 Ideas about how to monetize P2P activity – as opposed to trying to sue it and its users out of existence – have been discussed for years, and several companies have attempted or are attempting to do it. Thus far, the results haven’t been all that encouraging. Within the past month, BitTorrent, Inc. announced that it is abandoning its paid P2P offering, and P2P search advertising service SkyRider pulled the plug on its business. There were certainly flaws in the way that both of these companies executed their services, but nevertheless it got me thinking: Can file-sharing be monetized effectively over the long-term? Or is it a strategy that, while appealing in theory, is destined to fall short in practice?
