May 8, 2012 For more and more musicians, the idea of stardom seems to be further and further away. While some still see stars in their eyes, a great number have come to the realization that the goal is now a lot different, since just making a living in music can now be considered a success.
January 20, 2012 We read so much doom and gloom about the record business every day that it’s easy to think that pretty soon the whole thing will come crashing down. Cheer up. It’s not as bad as you think.
October 25, 2011 A question was brought to my attention after a chat with a friend, and I’m not sure I have an answer… So of course, I’ll turn to you. It went something like this: Friend: Spotify and Rdio both seem to either limit your amount of free music or play ads. I guess I’ll have to switch back and forth between them. Me: Or you could just pay for one? Friend: We pay after we know it’s good. We listen for free. Isn’t that the new standard?
October 6, 2011 This essay is neither for nor against subscription music services, and will focus on answering four questions. 1) What is the revenue potential for subscription music services? 2) What are the most likely rates per stream? 3) How much money can an artist expect to make from subscription music? 4) Is a compulsory rate a sustainable business model?
September 19, 2011 Future of Music Coalition (FMC) has launched a groundbreaking research project called Artist Revenue Streams, where we ask US-based musicians and composers, “How do YOU make Money from Music?” Project Co-Director Kristin Thomson from FMC explains in this MTT post where they idea came from for this research and why it’s so important that every musician or composer in the US takes this online survey, which is available at http://futureofmusic.org/ars until October 28, 2011.
August 25, 2011 Embedding your music in another product - a mobile app, for example - is going to be the way to sell music in the future. Consider this article, published just 5 months ago in the New York Times. It highlights the major labels’ mad dash to get into the mobile app market. Bjork new album will be a collection of apps rather than a list of songs. UMG is creating an app for Nirvana’s “Nevermind”. And it makes sense. Just last month news surfaced that Apple has now sold more apps than song downloads - even though iTunes had a nearly 4 year head start on the App Store.
How to Make Money, The Future of Music tagged Marketing, mobile, money, social media | 1 Reference August 18, 2011 How important is it to know who really cares about your business or your music?
Until very recently, most successful businesses would aim to market their goods or services to the ‘safe centre’, the large section of society that follow the crowd in seemingly predictable ways.
Trend setters, geeks and super-fans were not worth marketing to directly because there are never enough of them to sustain growth.
July 26, 2011 Derek Sivers revolutionised the way music is distributed when he created CD Baby. Since then many others versions have popped up. Is there scope now for another CD Baby-esque venture?
July 11, 2011 Every year there’s a rush in the music marketplace after one trend or another, and in the past year it’s been cloud services and the concept of ‘music as water’ subscription services. While the notion of selling music subscription like cable TV may be appealing at first glance, it is proving hard to monetize on for both the companies that launch such services and the content owners who participate in them. There are several reasons why I have always been very skeptical about the future of all-you-can-eat subscription services and cloud service models:
May 6, 2011 We can all stop waiting for the “new music industry” to arrive. The new music industry is not coming, it is here already. The only thing that will change is change. New models reshaping the way music is marketed and distributed will continue to change the landscape, and there will be many. Right now we have an emergence of abundance within the music industry. There are countless new artists emerging and the same goes for the ways of consuming those artists. This will not change; the emergence will continue to evolve as humans will continue to evolve. With that being said, there will be a shaping and weeding out process. The shaping and weeding out process will define which artists and which models work best for you individually, the consumer. The process of definition for the music consumer will cross all boundaries including race, gender, and age. I would like to include money, but I can’t help but to imagine the rich kid who only wants to see their favorite artist live, so they pay for live shows whenever they decide to.
April 6, 2011 I. Where Salvation Lies
Upon discovering that I had relatively poor vision in the seventh grade—difficulties seeing the whiteboard and anything from afar—it was understood that I would need to get glasses. Not just any glasses though, the specific style that I wanted were those worn by the front man of the rock group Linkin Park, Chester Bennington; they were thick-framed, black glasses, and in my mind, they looked amazing—on him. As it would turn out, the glasses looked less than stellar on me and I got a completely different pair.
Back then, I was an adamant fan of Linkin Park. In desiring to align characteristics of their identity with my own, the thought of looking like Bennington and wearing his glasses seemed like a logical expression of self.
I knew all the lyrics, saw every music video, and owned all of the albums.
Members of Linkin Park were not aware of my existence—camped out on a farm in the backwoods of North Dakota—but I felt a compelling bond towards them and their music. Social scientists characterize this kind of one-sided relationship as “parasocial” in nature. I knew everything about Linkin Park, but they were not privy in the slightest way to the particulars of my life. Much of my relationship with the group slanted more towards the illusion of interaction than of actual social interaction. Mass media outlets served as intermediaries between us.
January 6, 2010 It’s easy for me to imagine high margin digital music products that can’t be stolen (as they will be infinitely attached to some server somewhere). If you have not seen this already, take a look at the Sports Illustrated’s tablet edition (concept video below). Start planning your digital music industry future now. Like all things internet, this stuff will eventually be accessible to everyone. And, here are eight things I would put into one of these products…
January 6, 2010 
If you have not tried MOG’s new streaming music service, then take a few minutes and watch the demonstration video. MOG’s streaming music service features a fader that enables music fans to simply adjust the flow of new (relatively unknown) music that’s inserted into any MOG music stream. I believe Echonest powers this feature. Enabling music fans to completely control their music experiences is no longer a pipe dream, it’s now a must-have feature that will appear everywhere over the next twenty-four months.
Quality faders will change the promotion game.
I think it’s relatively easy to enable consumers to control just about any part of their musical journey, but what about quality? Quality is subjective (or maybe it’s not?), however with artists creating over a million songs a year, the absence of a quality fader (filter) reduces the flow of new music to a trickle (the new music fader stays pinned to the left), as no music consumer wants to be burdened with the need to sift through a truckload of poorly written or poorly produced songs. (Note: I believe Echonest is already (somewhat) filtering for quality (hotness)?)
In my opinion, a quality filter-fader that everyone can trust - changes (ends) the promotion game for everyone. When we get to a point where quality, combined with other attributes, can be faded in and out, the entire industry will terminate the marketing department and hire a gaggle of people that can improve quality (subjective or not, it will me measurable). Promotion will become something you (possibly) do after you measure “quality”, not before.
December 29, 2009 If there’s any doubt about the disarray and desperation afoot in the music business, just check out the Internet’s affect on the media business – music, print and broadcast – overall over the past decade. A recent article in the New York Times covers the waterfront on this issue quite well.
While the devastation of digital democracy vis-à-vis the Web made its first blitz through the belly of the music biz, the print media was next in line, and the battlefield there rivals Antietam.
Advice from the Experts, Developing a Strategy, Effective Publicity and Promotion, Internet Strategies, Resources, & Websites, Marketing Strategies, Music Business Models, Music as a Business, The Future of Music tagged A&R, Blogging, Digital, Internet, Music, PR, Web 2.0, music business, musician, record labels 