Feeding the Starving Musicians of Tomorrow

Music used to make millionaires. There was a time when Rock Stars were right up there with Russian Oil Oligarchs, a steady stream of champagne and cocaine trailing behind them as they traverse the globe on their private jets. Nowadays ‘rock stars’ are more commonly found lining the pavement leading up to the Job Centre. I know, I’m one of them. And whilst I, like most people, didn’t get into making music to be rich, as I sit and eat my Tesco Value beans on toast, I can’t help but ponder what the future holds for us all. So how did we get here? What went so wrong?

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Music, The Distributed Economy

I am an Rdio premium subscriber (switched from Spotify recently), I also use SoundCloud a lot and… I still have to buy music from iTunes. It’s not that I like to own stuff but just sometimes it’s the only way to listen to what I want, like the recent release of Ludovico Einaudi, “In a Time Lapse” (which I highly recommend by the way).

Yes, “In a Time Lapse” is available on Spotify, still there is a lot of stuff which is not on Spotify but, for example, on SoundCloud. But that makes me think that there is some cool music which doesn’t hit SoundCloud and so on…

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Winner Takes All - If We Let Them

What is this weary feeling I get when I read so much of the commentary around at the moment about music streaming, and the replacement of the desire to own music with the ‘ease of access’? It’s not just about the fact that the easy access to a vast ocean of music leads to choice paralysis and a lack of involvement and appreciation. It’s that there seems to be this big push towards paying a subscription for an ‘all you can eat’ style streaming service … ONE service … whichever one wins the battle for hearts and minds, or should we say ears and wallets.

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What I Learned From Justin Bieber

 

Baby, baby, baby oh…Ok I’ll stop right there.  So the story goes that Justin Bieber and his mom uploaded videos of Justin singing at a talent competition on YouTube in 2007.  The next thing you know he’s having a meeting with Usher and on his way to stardom.  Wow!  That is one crazy story!  So anyone can do the same thing and just wait for that major record label to call them,right? Lets just say the odds are not good!

Instead of kids getting their new favorite artists from pop radio, kids discover music on the web. We live in a fast instant gratification world and there is a vast amount of information.  Which means for artists that your 15 minutes of fame (AKA Vanilla Ice) is now 15 seconds of fame.  So as artists, how do we use internet marketing in a way to get real results?

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Ten in Ten: New music industry poll launches 08.02.11

Horace Trubridge, MU Assistant General Secretary, says: ‘Although we can guess, none of us know what the next ten years will do to the music industry – that’s why Music Supported Here will be launching Ten in Ten. The concept is simple. Ten questions that will be answered by experts from the music industry – musicians, fans, managers, labels etc – to give an overall picture of what we think is going to happen.

“Will illegal downloading become less of a problem? Will recording contracts be fairer? Will there be less new talent emerging? None of us can really be sure of what 2021 holds for the music industry, but we think that the opinions of thousands of people who live and breathe the music industry will produce some pretty accurate predictions’.

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