The Future of Music Coalition Looks to the Past to Understand How Musicians Make Money [Part I, Interview]

Whether or not you’re a musician, over the past ten years or so there have been incredible shifts in the music industry.  It wasn’t very long ago that you probably didn’t buy your music over the Internet, or have the ability to listen to any song you wanted to hear with a couple touches of the button, or if you were a musician have an incredible range of tools to promote and record yourself that weren’t ridiculously expensive.  All these changes have been welcomed thus giving greater opportunities to musicians and their fans alike to create and consume music.

While it seems these opportunities are being taken advantage of, how do we know these opportunities are leading musicians to a fruitful life of creating and living off of their art?  In music circles, we often hear about the “middle class musician” and how much easier it is to be a musician today than it was 15 or more years ago.  Yet, most of the evidence backing these claims in anecdotal and does not give a complete picture to the changing landscape in the music industry.

Click to read more ...

T Bone Burnett vs. the Internet

T Bone Burnett shook up the Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit at Georgetown University on Monday by boldly declaring at the beginning of his segment: “The future of music is…” wait for it, here it comes…”analog”.

While much of the conference focused on digitization as slayer or savior, and the Internet as love child of the universe and musical cash register, T Bone turned the conversation towards the quality of recorded music. Portions of the audience seemed stunned by some of T Bone’s thoughts, here are a few highlights:

• He finds it shocking that artists allow their music to be distributed in such a degraded form as MP3s.
• MP3s should be free, because they’re not worth anything.
• The Internet is a broadcast medium, not the omega point.
• Any musician who uses the word “monetize” should be ashamed of themselves.
• Musicians should not spend time marketing and analyzing data, they should be focused on making great music.
• To someone starting out at as an artist today, his advice would be “stay completely away from the Internet.”

Click to read more ...