I owned a SMALL Record Label and Studio. I was (still?) good at picking out talent in bands.
The Whole Industry Sucks
I had two bands that ended up on Major Labels and Toured the World. I met a kid on the street wearing one of my Bands shirts and struck up a conversation. They still love the band 10 years later.
These guys per person made at the TOP $7,000 in profit after expenses were paid. One band did a KickStarter and pulled in $40,000. It was their biggest pay day ever. I knwo a band (Zao) who has the a Label's (Solid State) biggest selling album ever and the band never saw a dime. PS That band was drama and the drummer was the biggest jerk ever BUT they still deserved to get paid.
Steve Albini's essay really illustrates how labels blaming streaming for declining album revenue is akin to the top 1% of income earnings blaming the poor for the middle class's economic problems. The labels always come out ahead, and streaming has become an easy way for the labels to refocus musicians' attention away from the actual source of the problem.
The labels that didn't come out ahead don't exist any more.
Nobody says this: In the 1980s, you could establish the sort of relationships to get priority at CD plants and resell back catalog that was already universally known. So the people who won did that instead of so much trying to break new acts.
The last gasp of a flood of new acts actually getting on radio was the SubPop ... thing in the 1990s. After that, nothing unless you followed R&B or "indie." That monoculture ended than. But to be fair, it only started in the first place because radio transitioned from being mainstream to being a "youth" market.
The labels that didn't come out ahead don't exist any more.
Just one point of clarification, when I wrote “the labels,” I meant the big three major labels and their subsidiaries. As both a life long musician and avid music fan, I don't count truly independent labels as part of the "industry."
Literally anyone can put a streaming app into the major app stores these days and bypass all of this.
Why are the Big 3 still in this chokehold position? Is the market failing, or do they actually provide valuable services that can't be obtained elsewhere?
They own the rights to everything. I believe the RIAA gets paid even if music is played/streamed that they don't own the rights to, until the musicians come claim the money. Movies and music showed how much power they have over the last two decades once Napster and later torrenting lit a fire under their asses. It's not just our government that is in their pockets. The TPP is a good example of them using the US' position as economic superpower to get their wishes imposed on other countries. See also: Megaupload.
There are music performance licenses for venues, such as restaurants and bars. People will come up to you and threaten to sue if you don't pay for a blanket license. And they will do this even if you insist on playing completely original music.
Many of these license fees are done in bulk. The same with countries that automatically collect a tax on USB sticks and optical media. You pay a volume license, but it never filters down to the artists because it's not collected based on which songs are actually stored or played.
This is hardly all of it. There's a huge mass of corruption under the surface. Such as them not actually forwarding over license fees for song collections, or including songs they don't actually have the rights to include.
I'm not an expert but I believe the industry gets paid a chunk for "radio play" in general (and things like radio play) on a per station/location basis, and then that chunk gets divided up not on the basis of what was actually played, but on the basis of how popular it is. Not saying it works, but that type of scheme sort of works for the hits, and much less well for obscure music, but obscure music probably does not get played too much.
but anyway, something like that is how they'd get paid for music they don't own.
These arrangements were worked out back when "radio" was "disrupting" the live music and recorded music industries, and people were trying to "monetize" the "eardrums"
Watch the movie "The Wrecking Crew". Essentially, the studio fixes the nascent tune penned by the artist, and provides studio musicians to play on the recordings. The band rarely plays, or even sings, on the album. The reason is simple, they don't play that well, or sing that well, and the studio musicians do.
This is one big reason why bands/singers/artists need labels. They're not able to turn the lyrics on the back of a napkin into a credible album on their own. They often don't even write the songs - the label has a stable of songwriters to do that for them. The artist is often just a pretty face autotuned in.
Even if a band can produce a CD on their own, they need promotion, manufacturing, and distribution. Who is going to get their CD in front of DJs, etc.? Who is going to set up concerts? Who is going to handle the financing? Who is going to do all the work needed to run a business?
Artists can do and have done all of the above, especially on the indie scene.
The "just a performer" model is only true for that small percentage of singers who are just performers. That model includes some of the bigger household names. Some of them are essentially fashion models who sing and dance, not musicians. Others are singers who also produce, and have a feel for what sounds good even if they can't play all the parts. (This is harder than it sounds.)
There's literally an entire industry of independent artists who record and produce at home, do their own tour management and logistics, maybe mix in a studio for some final polish, handle distribution, and so on.
And an entire related industry of bloggers, DJs, and other online sites that review and curate the most interesting new music.
The labels keep on keeping on, but their business model is very fragile now. They wait for a producer to manufacture a band, or for a band/artist to bubble up from the indie (artist - not musical style) scene.
When they reach a critical mass they try to buy them. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't.
The bizarre thing about A&R budgets over the last few years is that they're as huge as they've ever been, but concentrated on a relatively small number of artists. Because there's a lot of money involved the labels are ridiculously risk averse. If a signing doesn't turn into a cash cow after the first album they're dropped.
This has always happened, but the cycle is so short now that only acts that have instant mass appeal or a guaranteed existing fan base are successful on labels. Everyone else is indie.
Of course. But not that many are successful at it. Even the Beatles floundered for years before success came only after signing with a label. Note that Ringo was a session musician brought in by the label. George Martin made enormous contributions to their music.
No he wasn't. He was the drummer for another local band they were friendly with. He stood in with their drummer on several occasions nearly 2 years before joining, even recorded with them as a backing band for another singer.
Their original drummer, Pete Best, could not keep time when recording. George Martin raised the issue that he needed to be replaced, that's when they decided to reach out to Ringo.
Yeah, but the story as I've heard it is that the Beatles only became successful after signing with that label, and completely changing their style, adopting those stupid bowl cuts, and playing really simplistic formulaic music, all because the label convinced them to. After they achieved a lot of commercial success with this, they started going in the more artistic direction they really wanted to, because they had the money, popularity, and leverage with their label they needed to do so. That's how they went from pop crap like "I want to hold your hand" to "While my guitar gently weeps".
- Those bowl cuts came years before any success, specifically during the summer of 1960 in Hamburg from a friend of the band.
- The suits were insisted upon by their manager, not the label, in an effort to help get them signed.
- When they first got attention they were doing and playing exactly what they wanted to, mostly because they were singularly focused on being successful. Their set list was mostly comprised of ~500 popular cover songs from the time. You can hear much of this on several of their early albums which were heavily loaded with these - those were the same songs you could find them doing back before they made it, that they played in the Cavern Club and strip clubs in Hamburg. George Martin was the one who pushed them to be bold with the material, get creative with the arrangements, etc, and then the London scene pushed them further forward from there.
Yet they still brought in session musicians and George Martin still made enormous contributions. Ironically for your statement, Eric Clapton was a session musician to play lead guitar for "While my guitar gently weeps."
Their pre-label original tunes just weren't that good. They played mostly covers. Can you suggest a pre-label Beatles original tune that was worthy?
They only brought in session musicians for instruments they could not play (ie. orchestral pieces).
They never brought in session musicians to play their own pieces. All guitar, drum, bass, piano, etc parts were played by the members of the band and on very few occasions piano pieces by George Martin.
Eric Clapton was not a "session musician", he was doing an uncredited solo for his best friend George Harrison's song.
If he was paid for it, he was technically a session musician. The fact that he was uncredited shows he was never a band member.
George Martin did a lot more than just play a few piano bits - he had a lot of creative input. Here's what "The Beatles" by Spitz has to say about it:
"Two weeks later, on his way to the Studio from Sussex, scheduled to give the song another shot, he was explaining to Eric Clapton how something radical was needed to light fire under the Beatles. "We were in George's car, driving in London," Clapton remembered, "and he said, 'Do you want to come and play on this record?'" It was an astonishing invitation. The Beatles had used plenty of Session musicians on other albums, but no one capable of upstaging them, certainly never rock 'n roll virtuoso on the level of Eric Clapton. Clapton hesitated, unsure of what to do. He knew the other Beatles "wouldn't like it," but George brushed aside his reservations. "It's nothing to do with them," he insisted. "It's my song, and I'd like you to play on it."
Before anyone had chance to object, Clapton was already in Studio Two, strapping on his Les Paul guitar and listening to the rhythm track mixed down from their work on the sixteenth. The song was pretty much there, creating an effortless, affecting groove, but it lacked dramatic device to liberate the emotional tension that is never far from George's caged expression. Clapton's poignant guitar riff provided everything it needed. The way it weeps and moans, held in check by Eric's incisive phrasing, creates the longing that gives the song its emotional center. George's vocal couldn't have been more enchanting as he squeezes the mournful lyric of all its desperation, until by the end, he seems to be just barely hanging on, just riding atop the surging guitar as it works to strangle his overlapping cries."
While I am really familiar with that film and the players in it, I think your point is rather limited to considering "pop" music, which creates the biggest returns. None of the 'hired studio musicians / songwriters / etc' dynamic applies to a band like Muse, Coldplay or Radiohead, yet still applies to Adele and Taylor Swift. The Wrecking Crew film is a very good summary of the way 'the business' worked long ago - still does to a certain extent, say in Nashville - but the access to instruments and music now has really changed the dynamic.
For fun, listen to David Cassidy's work during the Partridge Family years, when the studio wrote the songs and provided musicians for him, and compare to Cassidy's post-PF work. What, you never heard of his post-PF work? :-) It's because it's awful.
Ditto the Monkees. At least Cassidy could sing (and damn, he was good). The Monkees couldn't write, sing, or play without massive help.
Actually, two of the Monkees were in bands before their "acting career" and they performed live together without assistance.
They broke up because of a no-holds barred fight with their producer/svengali, declining sales and an awful vanity film (think Spiceworld but much worse), but their albums still sold.
And one of them even grudgingly admitted decades later that the studio had been right in not letting him play.
I bought one of their post albums where they wrote their own songs and played their own instruments. Sorry, it's just awful compared with the studio produced albums. Nobody remembers those songs for good reason.
That was true in 1964. It was no longer true around 1974. Because people like me bought those records ( ten years before I did this ) and learned how to play off of them.
That's part of why Tedesco was much less employed and Hal Blaine was working as a ... security guard(?).
Lumpy on the beginner guitar newsgroup (alt.guitar.beginner) wore out Ovations for a living at some time around then.
There are YouTube songs that have no backing from the big labels and make it big without promotion. YouTube has geeat potential if they cater to indie musicians without alienating fans (extra ads would be painful), which was one appeal for me to use MySpace, I held out on Facebook till it became clear MySpace was the odd elephant in the room.
I recommend watching "The Wrecking Crew". It's an eye-opener. Especially the parts where they show what the artist brought them, and what the studio turned it into.
> This is one big reason why bands/singers/artists need labels. They're not able to turn the lyrics on the back of a napkin into a credible album on their own.
You're incredibly mistaken. Yes, the Backstreet Boys/One Direction were exactly what you are describing, as are any major acts. But bands outside "mainstream" music are anything but pretty faces. One can write credible music without production. See: Pixies, The Jesus Lizard, Andrew Bird, ...
Exactly my point. To become a major act (i.e. make money) artists need lots of artistic help. I know this is a brutal thing to say, but if you want to get a band out of obscurity, you're going to need help.
Even Michael Jackson had Quincy Jones help him achieve his breakout album (Off The Wall) and was smart enough to go get the artistic help he needed. And Michael Jackson was one of those incredible artists who could write, sing, dance, and arrange. And he still needed help.
If a band is not interested in making mainstream music, that's fine, but not making money comes with the territory of not appealing to the taste of lots of people.
> Literally anyone can put a streaming app into the major app stores these days and bypass all of this.
Barring circumstances of pure chance, an app needs marketing and promotion to gain any traction, and this costs money. It also usually requires deals with artists of some interest or popularity to get attention, and to ensure the service has enough content.
> Why are the Big 3 still in this chokehold position? Is the market failing, or do they actually provide valuable services that can't be obtained elsewhere?
My theory is that most people actually want to be told what to listen to and don't really care to leave a relatively small comfort zone in terms of music tastes. The current system "works" for consumers so the incentives for anyone to come around to change it are weak. Personally I don't consider this an inherently good or bad thing, just an observed state of affairs.
I worked at Snocap for a while. Like that Snocap wanted to enable indy artists to self publish. But, the major labels wanted to control the "distribution" of their content. "Their" content. I left.
Now, I'm thinking of getting back into it. Maybe enhance live gigs. This talk is really timely and inspiring!
This is fantastic, I think a lot of tech and music interested people would be wise to give this a listen. It's a personal perspective of history, sure, but I think he's got the credentials to have the position of authority.
He goes into depth about the market and business nature of the music industry. It's solid. Whether as an intro or review, it's a quality piece. Thanks for posting this, it's very relevant.
Steve albinism gave an even better, more up to date keynote talk at the Face The Music event in 2014. It's probably the best, most important explanation of what's happened and what's going on I know of. Well well well worth the listen.
https://youtu.be/Lz_CPzuwSk4
I used to work in a record shop and found out first hand how much promotion a band needs just to sell a few CD's. I can't tell you how many insanely good bands died because either the label didn't promote them, or they just ran out of cash and quit.
The only problem I see nowadays is there's virtually no vetting process. It used to be the good bands would eventually rise to the top and the shitty garage bands would be relegated to small venues. Today, there's such an over saturation of music. Artists have thousands of avenues to get their music out. As a huge music fan, how do I sort through all the noise to find a truly good band, and not some guy programming the guitars, drums tracks and bass and then does the vocals himself?
Today, I just stick with a small handful of bands that I can support and just keep an eye out for new bands. There's just way too much noise to signal ratio for me to sit and search for hours on end to find one decent band, only to find out they broke up five years ago.
Though I'm not sure if it meets critical acclaim standards, Tom Scholz basically recorded the debut Boston album in his basement[1] and that thing sold 25 million.
Some of Van Halen's albums were done at home, in his home recording studio named "5150".
I believe the "Beat It" guitar solo was also recorded there. Because there was no legal paperwork with MJ's mgmt., that was a freebie - to the utter dismay of his label.
Yeah, I agree 100%, especially with respect to Wikipedia's description of it. It's just something I've always heard around, but I definitely don't have an even remotely reliable source. Here's what Allmusic says about it: "Corgan eventually played almost all the instruments himself (except for percussion)."
>>It used to be the good bands would eventually rise to the top and the shitty garage bands would be relegated to small venues.
really? Are you sure? Plenty of big bands did not deserve it but were well marketed and plenty of smaller toilet stop tour bands deserved it and never made it.
The question is a good one. How does one differentiate themselves from the pack. The same goes for just about any art form today. There are so many artists and so many works, many of them good enough to tickle your fancy and yet the majority of them will only get a tiny fraction of the consideration they deserve.
I would love to publish music or books, but I know that given my dysfunctional relationship with social media, that I am just about wasting my time doing any of the above, even if I had a shred of talent.
What does your dysfunctional relationship with social media have to do with producing works of art? I honestly just didn't follow your train of thought.
The arts have to be their own reward. If you're making art for money, and not the love, it's probably not worth doing.
For better or worse, the marketplace is finally realizing this.
I do not agree with that. When I produce music of coarse I feel good with what I did and of coarse I enjoy listening to it. The art is what makes me happy. But god I would have loved to make money with my passion. Some people are passionated by numbers, some by art. In the end it's a product and if you want to make money with it it is fine.
I'm not saying that it's wrong to want to make money off of art. I'm happy for those who can.
I'm saying that if money is the dominant motivating factor in producing art, expect to be disappointed. Technology has reduced many costs of artistic production and has led to an oversupply of "content." To the cold, uncaring marketplace, you're effectively being compensated by those good feelings involved in the process of imagining, producing, and sharing art.
Even so, I draw and record music for my own enjoyment, and to collaborate with friends.
I guess I was assuming that there is a link between reaching people through social media and success in the arts. If I want to sell a book or album and I am not backed by a large publisher, I would likely have to market the book myself. The best way would probably be through social media.
Ah, got it. Yeah, publishers and record labels seem to serve primarily as well-oiled marketing machines these days.
But surely you could organize your own precision-strike book or album release via targeted online ads. I'd be surprised if there weren't lots of companies trying to sell this service.
Also, btw, the problem need to be solved for the software industry as well, which at this point is starting to resemble the arts: few big earners stoking the dreams of the many, and many, many others fighting over the scraps.
The world today is still kind to the western developer, but how do we solve this problem for developers now so that we don't have to figure it out in the future?
The old ways of playing local and building a following are still available. Maybe you won't see the same crazy success numbers a teenage girl dancing around with a violin on YouTube can get, but that's the fuggin lottery anyway.
The old ways of building a following are still available, but much, much less so than say in the 90's. Many of the local clubs have gone out of business, as you're more likely to make more money in a commercial space doing almost anything other than staging live music. There are of course exceptions, as in music hubs like LA and Austin, but around the Bay Area for example, I'd say 50% or more of the local clubs have shut down.
Edit: typo.
I've had the opposite experience with Last.fm. I actually realized last week that my scrobbling was broken, and I wasn't particularly disappointed.
Last.fm used to be a place where I could check out bands I had never heard of. It was like the website equivalent of the friend who spends all day listening to new music, and will recommend music that is eerily perfect for you.
I feel like the "similar artists" function has changed to prioritize artists that are already extremely popular, even if a much less popular artists is much more similar to the band you are currently listening to. It's plausible I know a lot more bands than I used to, and that new bands are inherently less novel to me. However, I believe this is a trend that can be followed across almost all websites.
As evidence, you only need to look at the changes Facebook made in the same time period. They study the interactions their users make as much as any company, and they've ensured that their users spend the most time on Facebook and provide them with as much data as possible. Facebook used to show every update on the new feed. Now I rarely see posts from anyone I disagree with. I used to get a lot of my information about bands from their Facebook groups. Now the only updates I get are from the major companies I've liked, because they can pay to send a message.
I totally understand why large websites are doing this. These services are most profitable as an advertising platform. In the case of Last.fm, the people listening to John Doe and the Backup Band aren't going to make them money. This 'cultivation' has an extremely chilling effect on the variety and depth of news, viewpoints, etc. that allowed the internet to foster an explosion in creative expression.
The problem with last.fm (and almost all similar music services) is that a lot of the similarity they encapsulate is chronological and social similarity, rather than musical similarity. For example, a search for Nirvana pulls up Hole (social similarity, the Courtney Love connection) and Pearl Jam (social & chronological similarity) quite high on the list, even though neither really sounds that much like Nirvana. On the other hand, The Pixies, which are musically much closer to Nirvana aren't even on the list.
How do you measure similarity to capture what you want?
The obvious approach is that you look for "people who like this, like that". This is easy to measure and understand. And when you're faced with a person who liked this, it is usually the right answer.
The problem is that you don't know WHY people who like this, like that. Often it is simply, "Heard both at an impressionable age." What you want it to be is, "On the musical criteria that I can recognize, this music is similar." But that's a complex piece of logic, and it is not clear how to do so.
Which makes the tools really good for rediscovering all of the stuff from your childhood, and really bad for discovering new music that is similar to stuff you like.
You do it by objectively analyzing the music from a technical standpoint. That's how last.fm started; it was someone's research project to look for "musical DNA" and then use that "signature" to find similar music. It actually worked well.
> As a huge music fan, how do I sort through all the noise to find a truly good band, and not some guy programming the guitars, drums tracks and bass and then does the vocals himself?
Eh? Do you mean you don't like it unless you know the band is full of good instrumentalists or that you find too much stuff that's not done well?
Not my comment but I had to read that a couple times too - I think it's more a reference to the latter part, as in, things not done well. A one-person shop might make a lot of excuses and not have the ability to reach quality production to the point of hiding the fact it's just a one-person shop.
Fundamentally I don't disagree; it takes a lot to 'sound pro' and a lot falls short...it's been a multi-year learning process on my end and I'm still nowhere near 'pro' engineer level, though some tracks might fool ears here and there.
Just a side note, I saw the founder of Pandora speak and he said their mission is to create a middle class for musicians by making it easier to discover, listen, and support non-hit artists.
I'm not sure if their plan had a broader strategy, but I felt the vision was at least admirable due to its mission beyond just firm profits.
As a non-hit artist, married to a non-hit artist, and who's produced a bevy of non-hit artists, I can say that roughly none of a non-hit artist's income is likely to come from Pandora / Pandora discovery.
At $0.0001/stream typical, Pandora itself cannot ever add up to meaningful income for a non-hit artist. Most of the income for the non-hit artist will come from that core group of committed fans who buy everything the artist makes, contribute to kickstarters, and shows up at all the concerts.
As a discovery tool Pandora's value is debatable. My anecdotal experience is that of all the various ways that I and other artists I know have made fans, Pandora was never one. YMMV.
(Update: I just found a bit a data that states that Pandora accounts for ~10% of new music discovery which is a lot better than I would have guessed.)
To my great surprise, I continue to discover new acts, music thru the radio. Just like when I was kid.
KBCS.fm and KEXP.org have great speciality shows. They also do a good job of posting their play lists, streaming archives, linking to artists, promoting upcoming shows, etc.
I've rarely discovered new stuff from a recommender (Pandora, last.fm, whatever). Now I don't even bother.
But I do rediscover music (from my youth) via YouTube. Which is a delight.
If mining radio playlists stops working for me, I'd be willing to try something like Apple Beat's notion.
I've had the opposite experience from you. I don't listen to much broadcast radio any more. I used to use Last.FM's recommender to find new bands to listen to, now I just use Spotify - after a few weeks the "Discover Weekly" playlist is spot on, even with a very eclectic taste in music (http://www.last.fm/user/voltagex/library/tracks?date_preset=...). I've discovered entire genres via Spotify and last.fm and gone to several live events that I wouldn't have even known about without services like these.
> (Update: I just found a bit a data that states that Pandora accounts for ~10% of new music discovery which is a lot better than I would have guessed.)
This sounds like a version of Russell and Norvig's Mengitis question. The probability you have a stiff neck if you have meningitis is 70%. But what is the probability that you have meningitis if you have a stiff neck? Keep in mind that Meningitis is 1/50,000 cases but stiff necks are 1/100 cases. Answer: 0.14%, quite small.
Similarly, the probability that you are on Pandora if you are discovered is 1/10. But what is the probability that you are discovered if you're on Pandora? Likely very, very, very small.
> the probability that you are on Pandora if you are discovered is 1/10. But what is the probability that you are discovered if you're on Pandora? Likely very, very, very small.
I'm not sure that's what the analysis is saying. I think the analysis is saying, "among discoverers, when discovery occurred, the discoverer was using [CHANNEL] with X% probability".
> I just found a bit a data that states that Pandora accounts for ~10% of new music discovery which is a lot better than I would have guessed
To me this says more about the weakness of the alternatives than about the strength of Pandora. At least it's possible to hear new music on Pandora. It's sad what a lowest common denominator echo chamber terrestrial radio has become.
In the USA, the overwhelming majority of terrestrial radio is owned by ~3 corporate behemoths with profit-sharing arrangements with the Big Three labels and their thousands of subsidiaries. What used to be decentralized to the local market level is now mostly inaccessible to unsigned / independent artists. Instead radio is just a distribution network for the major labels and their subs.
Payola: Payola, in the music industry, is the illegal practice of payment or other inducement by record companies for the broadcast of recordings on commercial radio in which the song is presented as being part of the normal day's broadcast. Under U.S. law, 47 U.S.C. § 317, a radio station can play a specific song in exchange for money, but this must be disclosed on the air as being sponsored airtime, and that play of the song should not be counted as a "regular airplay".
Revenue sharing agreements? SMH.
Imagine you're an independent artist. That's the hurdle you have to be able to cross in order to get access to discovery platforms. This includes access to choice Spotify or YouTube playlists, satellite and Internet radio, and other conventional discovery mechanisms.
Pandora is probably my best mode of music discovery these days, above Spotify and social suggestions. If you actively seek out more from the newer artists it suggests, you'll get good results. If you go there with a genre in mind where you already know most of the groups available, you won't get much.
I was the Owner of the SMALL Label. My friend from college I worked at is a professional acoustic guitar musician. He makes 100% of his money playing guitar. He makes next to nothing from streaming, he says 1% from Pandora, Spotify and others.
Then you may like Kaki King and/or Stanley Jordan as well. As a multi-decade player I can appreciate the technique and talent on display, I really can. However, the reason you haven't heard of him before, and others of a similar level of musicianship, is something that my Dad once told me: "Audiences don't like it when the music goes over their head." His point was that impressing other musicians is a very limited market - not trying to insult it, just being pragmatic.
I don't know if I totally agree about that. Seeing his live concerts there is plenty of Musicians self love AKA He was a feature artist with Martin Guitars several times and music contest. Also in his concert are a ton of people who don't even know how to play guitar. The melody is strong enough to follow.
That's fine, I just have a bit of instinct about markets and the overlap with technically flamboyant playing. Sure I've seen Tommy Emmanuel a couple times in sold out venues, but he's basically the 1% of that market. Buckethead also sort of fits too. I'm happy for your friend's success for sure, making a living is incredibly difficult in the business and the demands and travel I don't envy at all, so much respect indeed.
Pandora genuinely has a channel for independent music acts to submit material for play consideration. They are incredibly obscure about the process of whether they accept or decline to include specific music. But it does actually exist, so credit where it's due.
It sucks when you get declined - I had a seven-song album that I honestly felt pretty darn good about, was co-produced by a buddy that had an album on Pandora. I remember he was nervous about whether he'd get on Pandora and was relieved when he did, said he had an "in" at Pandora but wasn't sure it helped. He felt pretty confident mine would get in if his did - I submitted. They ask for you to pick one song from the album for them to check out first, and if they choose to check out the others from the album afterward, they will. So I picked the one that seemed to have the broadest enjoyment from my friends - fairly straightforward, nice instrumentation.
Months passed, and then I got a form letter saying the album was rejected. No explanation, no details on if the other songs were listened to, etc. I've never been sure whether to conclude if my songwriting just sucks more than I thought it did. Anyway, I haven't really had any ideas of where to submit the album since then, other than just giving up and putting it on Spotify.
Thanks for taking the time to write out your experience - mine was very similar. Submit as close to genre basis as possible, wait, and then get the rejection. Because I'm on the prolific side, averaging a 3-5 song EP about every 2 months, I do feel like I should be trying again and again. They can afford to be picky, which okay, good for them, it helps the 'curated' experience. I'll keep trying (especially with my newer stuff which features vocals) for Pandora but still only see it as one component in a diverse distribution portfolio.
Interesting... EarBits (a YC alum, I believe?) was trying to do a similar "promote indie artists" thing but built around a system of artists paying for increased exposure (I believe they wanted to be the "Google AdWords of Music").
How do you create a 'middle class' when there is no money left in the industry for smaller artists? Pandora pays the superstars well and if you aren't getting millions of plays, you aren't making enough to even provide for yourself.
This all started with file sharing 15 years ago. Everyone thought they were helping out the independent artists, but in reality, it made it so they could no longer compete without a huge corporation backing them. File sharing has only helped big labels by increasing the barrier to entry.
I know so many independent artists that were making a decent living (not rich, but enough to support themselves instead of having to get a job) selling music online. File sharing changed all of this. The value of music (CD/MP3s) slowly approached 0 and now that we have streaming, copyright infringement still hasn't gotten any better, it's worse.
Live shows, the profit model so many people tried to use as justification for sharing, don't really pay much unless you are doing huge venues and have big label connections. A small gig might get you a couple hundred bucks in a night. With gas, time, and splitting it with everyone in the band, there isn't much to be passed around.
This also puts many of these artists in completely desperate situations, where they will sign pretty much any contract. The big labels know this and use it to their full advantage.
The big corporations with tons of cash reserves will always be able to survive the slaughtering of an industry's profits...and we still have all of the major music labels. What we don't have is many of the independent artists and labels.
> Everyone thought they were helping out the independent artists, but in reality, it made it so they could no longer compete without a huge corporation backing them. File sharing has only helped big labels by increasing the barrier to entry.
Speaking about Indie Music
I'm the SMALL Record Label. The money comes in through sales of Merch, Gigs and selling CD/MP3. I think there has never been a time better for Indie Music. There are more people making a "living" in music and not being a big label band or a cover band, but they are all fighting for a very small pot.
Blame
1) Music Fans. The vast majority of people will never give Indie bands a listen and have the listening pallet of a 6 year old.
2) Indie population is high majority college age kids. I would love to see this expand. I am in my 40s and I don't know anyone my age that is into Indie Music. Heck when I was in my late 20s and early 30 I was "Old Man" to everyone.
3) Bands - Don't have enough money sense (Including myself as a studio/label owner). They have a TON of survivor instincts and the tenacity to keep going but they can't figure out how to turn things into money.
4) Streaming - People actively seeking out certain music pays the same as mindless random steams. I think if people search and specifically pick your music it should pay more.
I still write originals but I only put them in my set if they're better than the covers I know.
More indie rock bands should play more covers and stop pretending like they're god's gift to songwriting. More people would go to and enjoy their shows.
The country, bluegrass, jam, americana and folk scenes have tons of fans that support a large number of pro and semi-pro pickers and singers. They play a lot of covers because people do like to hear their favorite songs played live. A lot of them get to the point where they're playing like half their own songs, but some will always play songs written by other people.
The pickers that can play lead on an instrument, sing, and write songs are called "triple threats". These guys are few and far between and end up being superstars. Jimi Hendrix, Merle Haggard, Jerry Garcia, Willie Nelson and Brad Paisley, just to name a few. They play lead instruments on other people's recordings, sing other people's songs, and write songs for other people. Notice the emphasis on "other people". That's kind of lacking in indie music, which instead has a philosophy of solipsism. It's built right in to the DIY ethic. Don't sing someone else's songs, sing your own songs. It's ultimately a losing formula.
I make more money, play to more people and have more fun playing covers to people down at corporate gigs or just down at the local bar than I ever did in whatever indie rock band I've played in throughout the years. It seemed like we were trying to reinvent music from a faded memory in every indie band I was in. Covers were uncool, and we had to define "Our sound". "Our sound" ended up being much shittier than traditional forms like country or the blues.
Oh well, indie rock will be dead in 10 years tops. I've got a lot of refugees from the indie rock scene learning to play more traditional music. Either that or they just hang up their guitars for good. The DIY ethos is just too alienated and embittered to for people who feel like making the transition to adulthood.
Recently went to a one-day festival at a winery. All sorts of genres represented by very capable musicians across the day and evening. Every act played original music except one guy (Max Savage) who, though usually playing his own stuff, covered all of Paul Simon's Graceland.
The crowd was biggest and most engaged for Max Savage. After hearing 10ish songs that I knew back to front, the next act of originals felt very flat, despite being the more well known artist.
It made me very keen to hear Max cover other full albums, even a festival of nothing but interesting covers. Not cheesy covers, but cross-genre tweaks, etc. I'd pay to attend that gig sooner than I would an event of purely originals that I didn't really know.
A cover done well can be very enjoyable. I tire of the album originals of Zep songs, but enjoy the song all over again when it is a cover by someone else.
Then there are covers that reimagine the song, like "White Rabbit" by Sanctuary. Pretty awesome. And who can forget "Tamborine Man" by William Shatner (!)
I'm another person in their 40s that (tries to) primarily listens to Indie. What are you tips for discovering music?
I primarily am using Pandora and it really depends how much time I spend thumbing music up or down. Once I zero in a station it doesn't seem like I hear new artists or songs very often.
I'll also add that in my personal case, pandora led me to finding and buying more music. Spotify and smartphones over iPods (and buying a house) are why I don't by albums very often anymore.
I was going to say discovering music is easy, maybe it's just me, but like anything, just get stuck in?
a) Find some bands you like, go see them live.
b) Get talking to people at the gigs (this helps if they're smaller venues), they'll recommend all sorts.
c) See the support bands, odds on you'll like some of them, then go and see them, see the other bands they're in, it doesn't take long before this gets out of control :).
d) Make friends, go and see bands they like, it might not always be your thing, but if it's a social thing anyway, it doesn't really matter.
e) Go to festivals, listen to all the bands beforehand - i used to generated spotify playlists of glastonbury etc. Ok, listening to stuff on spotify doesn't make the artist much, but if you like them, go see them when they headline, buy merch, recommend them to friends etc.
f) I used to take photos, it's pretty much a dead industry nowadays but it puts you in touch with bands and helps get you kind of noticed which might lead to opportunites you might not get otherwise.
g) Be eclectic, you're spoilt for choice, if you're lucky enough to be in London or SE England or a decent sized city.
h) Follow bands on facebook, soundcloud... often this leads to other similar bands.
i) Personally i don't bother with large venues or bigger bands that much, i might make the odd exception, but there's serious amounts of really great music and musicians well away from the expensive/aircraft hanger venue/popular stuff and there's the bonus it might actually have some meaning because it's not trying to make money :).
I haven't and don't find Pandora to be good for finding new music. Now that I don't have much time to seek new artists I usually hop on people's playlists on Spotify or try radio stations, something a little more hand picked. When I really had time to find new music there are college radio stations that put out podcasts DJ picked music, there are lots of blogs to guide you and you can always use the charts in various countries. The staggering amount of new music that comes out every week makes it extremely difficult to keep up with especially if you like to listen to the entire album.
Music Fans. The vast majority of people will never give Indie bands a listen and have the listening pallet of a 6 year old.
Seems harsh to blame people for their personal tastes. Maybe the product is wrong or the genre limited. Surely blaming discoverability and the like is fairer? Beyond discoverability, I think repetition is very important which is where labels and links to radio/etc are useful.
I think you're spot on at 4). Just the other day I gave up on buying music for this exact reason and went with a YouTube player.
This is the service I'm looking for:
A free service optimized at promoting new music, or just random radio. Medium bit rate MP3 ok if 320kbps can be sold for a low monthly fee instead. Spotify is way too expensive for this, use case.
An added value store for those rare gems I actually want to spend money on. For me, most importantly, high quality recordings in lossless CD-quality. For other it might be fan memberships to get pre releases or other bonus things.
To me the problem is he either or thing. Either I have to buy lots of insanely expensive downloads in iTunes or something, and then listen only to that. Or, I can get the opportunity to discover new things in Spotify or tidal for equally insanely expensive service fee, but have no option to keep discoveries besides keep paying said insane fee.
Bandcamp's Music Feed feature is basically the streaming radio bit you're after, and Bandcamp itself will let you purchase and download lossless copies of the music. I wish Bandcamp was even bigger than it is, because it totally deserves to be.
Thanks, it did pass my radar, will check it out again.
But I realized I left out the hardest requirement, which probably is the killer for most competition, i want to use the same service to listen to mainstream music (at least the old mainstream music I listen to)
Edit: OTOH it might be possible to get by with covers only. A search for Pink Floyd certainly didn't disappoint.
Pandora pays the superstars well and if you aren't getting millions of plays, you aren't making enough to even provide for yourself.
In November 2012, the Grammy-nominated hit song-writer Ellen Shipley reported that one of her most popular tracks got played 3,112,300 times on Pandora.
For this, she was paid $39.61
(Source: the somewhat depressing "The Internet is Not The Answer", by Andy Keen)
Just chiming in to say it's fun to see someone mention Zao. As it turns out, I was just listening to them yesterday after not listening to them for years. I used to be a huge fan. I love that band, and they absolutely deserve to get paid.
As someone who works in/with the music industry, it really pains me to see bands put out great work despite so much pain (and drama) to themselves, only to get underpaid.
the most egregious i'm aware of is when they removed fredrick brennan, the developer behind 8chan from their platform. brennan has osteogenesis imperfecta and had set up his patreon to help pay for a nurse/healthcare (and to get a cat) at the request of his userbase, myself included.
it is worth restating that this patreon was not connected to the development of 8chan at all, but for the support of a disabled individual in need of assistance. patreon decided that this individual was worthy of complete censure from their funding platform.
in my experience, most crowdfunding/e-busking platforms engage in a degree of censorship of one form or another. if the right people don't like you, they will find any number of reasons in their vague CoC to keep you out.
It's just that Patreon is financial agnostic. We need to treat these investments like fungible capital goods. And we need to invest in the intellectual property that artists make, not the artists themselves. Why should we do that? Because it works and its a foundational element of a market economy. We're capable of much more than a simplistic patron model. That's how things were financed in the middle ages. We've got a few hundred years of modern finance to learn from.
> we need to invest in the intellectual property that artists make, not the artists themselves
At first approximation, this sounds like a worse scenario for the artist.
> Why should we do that? Because it works and its a foundational element of a market economy.
Modern finance has already created a model where music artists are beholden to financiers and middlemen. How and why do you expect this to turn out differently?
It's not as productive as it could be if people were instead engaged in the commercial activities of investing in intellectual property.
Financial assets and intellectual property are not something I can teach you in a comment box. I recommend reading these two books and then we can start the conversation back up again.
Tyler Cowen and Hernando de Soto are two economists that are held in incredibly high regard and have done a wonderful job explaining the core concepts of both what constitutes finance and how it applies to intellectual creativity in a market economy.
I do not intend this to offend, I truly would like to share some constructive criticism on this particular comment you've shared.
First, I totally understand how it can feel to share opinions that frequently are not given the seriousness that you feel they deserve, where it seems people may dismiss what you're saying out of hand or disagree without engaging what you're saying at all. The frustration of "spitting into the wind" in this way is totally valid.
However, I would invite you to leave off ending your comments with language decrying or dismissing those who disagree with you.
As I was reading you comment, up to the end I really was thinking "I get the sense that the internet did change quite a lot, I would like to learn more about the reasons others may disagree or why others think it may not apply." But the moment I reached where you call what I was wondering about a "yawn inducing knee-jerk rebuttal" I completely moved from curious to hurt.
I may very well have questions about what you've shared (and indeed, I do!) but disgruntled dismissal of alternative viewpoints makes me feel as though asking to learn more would yield only contemptuous or belittling comments.
I suspect you'll convince many more people if you leave off the needling language.
I'm not going to convince anyone of anything on HackerNews. I'm up against the entire California Ideology on this forum. Every time you guys go to a conference or talk with a coworker or your boss this philosophy is being reinforced. I can't do shit but sit here and throw darts. It's really the only effective course of action. Sorry if it stings a little. If you actually are interested, I've previously said everything I ever need to say about these issues and if you read those two books you'll immediately understand what I'm talking about. It's just too much work to school someone on a fucking internet forum. I'm done. I don't have the patience.
This is the exact opposite of preaching to the choir. Most people on these forums have been leading successful lives by toeing the party line in the tech industry. You all already think you know everything worth knowing and that the Internet has made the pre-networked world completely irrelevant. It is such a strongly reinforced ideology paired with addictions to touch screen devices that control your thoughts and actions so completely you can't seem to notice how ignorant and arrogant you've all become.
I'm here to just plain tell you that you're wrong. I don't have the resources to roll back the brainwashing of 100,000 techies. I can't sit here and be your personal psychologists and hold your hands while I explain the fundamentals of intellectual property in a market economy. I'm up against 25 years of raging idiots screaming about the RIAA and the MPAA. I know this ideology well because I used to be a true believer. I figured out this was bullshit on my own, just by leading life, learning about love, and finding myself a real community, not some digital hideout for run-away teenagers like HackerNews and Reddit. Again, I used to be that, I used to be that kid sitting at home in small town American feeling really left out and finding a group of other rejects on IRC and Slashdot and the open source "community".
So you just keep on thinking that "The Internet has changed everything!" and keep on ignorantly disrupting the entire known universe with your hair-brained schemes, and I'll sit here on the sidelines and call you all a bunch of jackasses, how's that?
Also, I'm trying to get dang's attention because I really want to have a serious sit down talk with the dude in person but I've probably scared him away by cursing like a sailor and talking about hanging out with rednecks in a honky tonks bar. If I make a stink he normally shows up. So dang, buddy, let's get coffee in San Francisco sometime soon. I promise to be polite.
Everyone, go listen to some Merle Haggard and actually try and listen instead of just talk talk talk talk talking the fuck all the time on your dumb ass devices.
I'm not going to convince anyone of anything on HackerNews. I'm up against the entire California Ideology on this forum.
Stop it, now you're just whining! 'lelandbatey' is offering you excellent feedback. The number of people that voted you down (or up) is a tiny fraction of the membership.
Communication is hard, but you've got good things to say, and people that want to hear you. Probably it's true that no one here agrees with everything you believe, but they certainly don't all agree with each other either. Whether or not the person you are responding to directly understands (American?) intellectual property law, there are others that do, and other perspectives that are important. It's a more diverse community than you give it credit.
So you just keep on thinking that "The Internet has changed everything!"
No, it hasn't changed everything, but it's sure changed a lot of things, and music is one of those. While practically free and instantaneous delivery may not change drastically change the business of music, it certainly changes the process of discovery. While it's not quite as major as the first phonograph, I think it's likely to have comparable impact. For example, without the internet, I don't think I ever would have found this[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtX2HPBMcsQ. And now that I have, certainly my life will never be the same?
[1] Antti Paalanen - Meluta (We Wanna Make Some Noise)
Well, I concede that HN is not the forum for in depth debate. I do think your image of who visits this forum is a bit narrow though. Two data points speaking against it, you, and me.
In any case if you'd like an in depth economic analysis of how the Internet actually did change everything that might challenge your view you might appreciate The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Bekler.
Someone had better teach these techies some basic finance, accounting and economics at some point. Right now when someone posts something to Facebook it's basically a dead end for further economic potential. Compare this to how the finances of the book trade worked in the 19th century and it appears as if we're headed backwards. I blame a certain kind of arrogance in Silicon Valley for thinking that "information just has to be free now"... if anyone opened up their history books they'd realize that the printing press made the distribution costs of information comparatively cheaper than the Internet. People used to make copies by hand! Then it took us a few hundred years to fully invent intellectual property as a response to the issues created by cheap copies.
All that's happened as a result of the Internet is that we now have even cheaper copiers, but there's still a cost. Facebook's operation costs are in the billions of dollars a year. That's hardly "free information". Everyone needs to realize that Clay Shirkey and CmdrTaco were full of shit so we can move on with our lives.
It's about time that some adults with some conservative tendencies as well as a functional and practical understanding of the Internet stepped in and showed these techies a thing or to about how the world really works when they're not just spending daddy VC's money.
I'm not sure what triggered this response, but I'm guessing it was the "social production" in the book title. In case that caused you to dismiss the book, do have a look. It's not meant to indicate anything doing with social media.
I guess the intention of the term was more inline with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_production_of_habitat "social production involves people at the community level relying on them collectively to identify, exploit and increase local capital as assets in the development process"
In practice the book is more about what Benkler calls "Commons-based peer production" though.
"Commons-based peer production is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler.[1] It describes a new model of socioeconomic production in which large numbers of people work cooperatively (usually over the Internet). Commons-based projects generally have less rigid hierarchical structures than those under more traditional business models. Often—but not always—commons-based projects are designed without a need for financial compensation for contributors.
The term is often used interchangeably with the term social production."
The book does shows its age in some respects though. At the time it was written p2p, open source, wikipedia and all the other institutions the book focuses on was rather new in the public mind, and perhaps treated a bit too much like magic. A sober follow up would certainly be a valuable addition to the discourse.
I think the biggest take aways from that book in particular is that
- There are other ways to organize human activity than market economies, even when rather large capital assets are involved in the production.
- People are capable of, and actually do, produce many things of enormous value, without any expectation of economic compensation.
- Current legal, cultural, and economic, institutions are somewhat at odds with this mode of production. Thus acting more to suppress (some forms of) valuable economic activity than enabling it.
Framed like this it certainly looks like an argument in a rather old political conflict. But I think that is the wrong way to look at it. It looks more like a synthesis to me, a much more inspiring proposition.
Edit: And Facebook is an interesting thing to study, it embodies both the good and bad parts Benkler talk about. There certainly is a certain amount of social production going on amongst Facebook users. At the same time most of the capital value produced is reaped by Facebook and used to in parts to enable the infrastructure as such, a good thing, but also to cater to Facebooks less amicable interests, essentially destroying the very habitat their users is working to improve.
While I find your vitriol refreshing, I would suggest a change in your reading list. For those that want to examine the economics of IP vs. The Record Business, I would first read Fredric Dannen's Hit Men.
Yup, I've read it. Even at it's most grotesque the record labels were still writing checks to artists. That the artists never saw another dime, well, it's a shame they didn't have better legal representation and that there weren't standardized contracts that gave artists better leverage. You can blame this mainly on the cost and access to legal professionals. As we move to cheaper more user friendly types of digital contracts I imagine this will make these types of contract negotiations much more equitable and just.
It is still better than today where there are no advances and really no way to ever recoup the production costs unless you completely ignore digital and go back to selling vinyl... which is what most artists are doing.
In the next few years we're going to see a wholesale abandonment of digital and social media from musicians because everyone is finally going to figure out that what Silicon Valley has been building for the last decade is an economic desert. Who gives a crap if you're reaching an audience that doesn't come to your shows and doesn't buy any of your wares?
You're right, it's not an argument. Those are the prerequisites to having an argument because I don't have the time nor energy to get you up to speed.
I don't think you even remotely understand what the term "intellectual property" means outside of some narrow and lopsided definition of the term from something you read in Wired magazine or on Slashdot.
From my perspective you're too ignorant to have this conversation and you need to go learn a few things before you should try and engage in a discussion about these concepts.
Right now it's like I'm trying to discuss differential equations with someone who hasn't even studied grade school algebra.
Yup. Currently supporting a future working artist. How to make a living as a working artist is a big topic for her cohort.
I've been optimistic for stuff like etsy.com and artsyo.com. I have some additional notions (use cases) that I probably won't ever have the gumption to tackle, but would love to see happen.
Now I wonder about the marketing magic required for self-promotion and "multi-channel" content. Of her peers is a genius for self-promotion, self-publishing. Another does side gigs teaching art, running events like art parties for children birthdays. And everyone's chasing commissions, of course.
Not so different from being a consultant or small biz entrepreneur , really.
--
Big fan of de Soto. Thanks for the Tyler Cowen link.
can we not financialize everything in the entire world? that seems like a great way to make extra work for brokers, traders, gamblers, accountants, and lawyers. I'm not convinced that this gets anywhere near the goal of making it easier to have sustainable business relationships between creators and their audience.
So maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but how is Zao Solid's biggest selling album? None of Zao's albums lasted longer than a week on the billboard 200. They've had much bigger bands signed - ABR, Demon Hunter, Underoath...
Long tail. I feel like I remember hearing that in 2003, Where Blood and Fire Bring Rest was still selling around 200 copies a week, five year after release. That's around 100,000 a year, and if it's selling that five years after release, that's pretty good. Plus, Billboard charts were notoriously inaccurate for Christian bookstore sales in the late 90's, early 2000s time frame, which is where a lot of Solid State distribution was.
He has to mean Jesse. Gretz didn't play any of the Solid State albums, if I remember correctly.
I'm also fairly sure that Underoath's Define The Great Line has since outsold any of Zao's albums (I'm guessing either Liberate or Blood and Fire were the top seller that bald_fat mentioned).
Never thought I'd see a post involving Zao on HN. That's sad to hear that Solid State did them wrong, regardless of the jerkiness of (I'm assuming you're referring to) Jesse Smith.
I always thought the age of the internet, especially with modern bandwidths, could be the end of large labels for the music industry (or publishing houses for literature). I understand (to a naive degree) that the labels establish large networks, and complex licensing with public avenues like the radio or concert halls.
It is also interesting that that most self published artists get the semi-derogatory term of "Indie-artist", and that there may even be a public opinion which has been molded into expecting a "quality filter" through labels.
The question I always come to is how big can you get without a label? and will there ever be a day when artists have full creative control of their craft? This would mean that the artist would need to value and understand business practices, distribution methods, contracting, etc.
[edit] and the artists that do appreciate this seem to start labels (see epitaph records or Bad Boy Entertainment)
You've done a strong job of describing what I felt years and years ago, and have come to learn is the lay of the land still in the music business. Labels have done a fantastic job of maintaining their gate-keeper status and of being able to break new artists into the mainstream. What didn't change with the internet is, partially kidding here, that 14 year old girls decide what's going to be popular. Outside of that, it's pretty much table scraps.
But...there are some exceptions!
There are certainly a handful of examples of responding to the last question you pose - re: being independent and achieving mainstream success. The ones that I find the most relevant are CHVRCHES (unsigned, SoundCloud got them attention, eventually had their pick of labels) and Macklemore (independent, used major label distribution services though). Also Skrillex - his label had no interest in his bleep-blonk-screech-BASS DROP tunes and he set it free online and got that avenue going - now he's got his own label and millions in the bank. There are some outlier musicians like Prince who are genuinely contentious with both industry and fan expectations.
I think more and more artists who grow up as 'one-person operations' (think Grimes) will navigate a new business platform. Labels will specialize in these artists, or management teams. Eventually though, there does exist a plateau where it seems inevitable to have to deal with a large entity such as LiveNation or Ticketmaster...neither of which are very well regarded as customer friendly in this day and age - at least not as much as direct-to-fan opportunities. The next 10 years should be interesting both in the US and globally.
Oh, and in my opinion, artists tend to start labels as a compensation mechanism to get more power for their own business enterprise, and potentially profit from the success of others signed (see: Cash Money / Young Money Records).
>> "Also Skrillex - his label had no interest in his bleep-blonk-screech-BASS DROP tunes and he set it free online and got that avenue going - now he's got his own label and millions in the bank."
Financially I think artists like Skrillex (EDM producers in general) are incredibly lucky. Production costs are practically zero. You buy a DAW and some monitors and you can do everything at home on your laptop. You don't need to pay a band, all revenue is yours. And on top of that touring costs are minimal (a midi controller and a laptop) so you're extracting the maximum profit from each show. If you want a financially successful career in music this is probably the most sure route to take.
Edit: A lot of people responding are bringing up the point that production costs for most genres are now relatively low. While that's true when it comes to actually making money from the music that's much easier in electronic music for the reasons I gave above (one person, very little gear to drag around, no band to pay).
Good point for sure. It's not just EDM - a basic Pop song can be produced at practically zero cost once an independent musician and producer has sunk the costs of DAW and equipment into the operation. A lot of music, in general, is stunningly simple. Hip-hop can be done with one MPC and a mic (okay maybe AutoTune as well haha). Country only really needs an acoustic guitar, vocals, and a quality mic. Yes, there's a reason studio quality recordings sound great, and I'm not going to deny that at all. But...
Owl City is a great example of a talented person producing their own material (then mastered) which fit the quality expectations and was, pretty much, recorded in one guy's bedroom.
Gotye's "Used to Know" was recorded all by himself in a room over a barn in New Zealand.
These are just a couple recent examples where I think the technology and dynamics of music production are really coming together (Trent Reznor is a great historical study). Personally I really enjoy playing with a talented drummer - which I will do tonight and probably broadcast on Periscope - but when I'm at home, making tunes that I'll eventually release, I can get fantastic results from Apple's GarageBand "Drummer" algorithm thingy.
The tools that exist now would've changed my world as a teenager. I think teenagers growing up now - the ones serious about making music - have more tools and opportunities than ever before. I'm a wee bit jealous, no lie.
Edit: To clarify regarding your edit, the personal production can now extend to live performance. Rappers typically just have a DJ behind them (sometimes a live band). There's a lot of wiggle-room for mid-market musicians to simply bring their box of backing tracks with them to perform live, and I think that is becoming more and more acceptable. I used to get really odd looks using a Netbook + Akai APC40 on stage, and now that's pretty tame compared to some of the other gear setups indies can employ. This way, the musician makes more money because there are fewer musicians on stage that need to be paid (my personal approach).
Teenagers growing up don't only have a plethora more of opportunities & tools -- they also have a plethora of distracting activities that can take away from the careful attention needed to make great music.
Sometimes I believe the guys in the 60s & 70s ironically had it easier because they just sat around, maybe smoking some dope, and played music. There wasn't a smartphone at their hip vibrating every few minutes, so they could really just pour their heart into the music and hey, Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, Beatles, Dylan, etc... you name a great, probably came out of that time period. While I like a lot of stuff today, I do question if it'll hold up to the test of time and personally feel very little of it will when compared to how much did & will continue from the 60s/70s.
Pretty fair point, I can totally see where you're coming from. Music does have a traditionally steep 'learning curve' and it does take focused practice - for good or ill, I do see modern tech and tools being a great short-cut though for a dedicated youngster with enough time on their hands. You're spot on about the number of distractions, that affects even adults who might be working in the industry. Focus is important.
Also, we should keep in mind that there was a ton of silly, throw-away, bubble-gum music during the 60s and 70s. Basically my contention is that the good stuff will, inherently, stand the test of time. Maybe because of, or in spite of, the river of crap surrounding it haha.
But that means there's lots more competition, right? If, theoretically, anybody with a laptop can do what you do, you have to be that much more talented and work that much harder.
It sounds like any other business. It's like saying freelance web developers are incredibly lucky, because their only business expenses are a laptop and maybe some software. That's true, but it also means that high school students can do what they do for free.
Realistically, this is also true of most modern music. Sure it requires a bit more equipment, but with software amp simulation and the plethora of VST plugins you can get, you can almost always get a tone similar to your target for just a couple hundred dollars, at most. Combine with equipment and you're looking at maybe $600 in instruments/equipment and a basic mic for vocals. The only sticking point right now it seems is that drums are still notoriously hard to record, though MIDI/software drums are extremely realistic, and even beyond that. It's extremely easy to find a random stranger on the internet that likes your style and happens to be a drummer with all the equipment for recording drums.
And then again, EDM is cheap, but it can be extremely time consuming if you're going cheap. Good synths don't just build themselves and there's a reason people buy virtual instrument packs.
>you can almost always get a tone similar to your target
Therein lies the rub. You can't beat real circuits and valves especially when you're cranking it loud for a gig. The difference between the (admittedly pretty amazing) VST's and the real deal is the difference between sounding good and sounding great.
Touring a band is still expensive. So much so that it was the difference between going on extensive global touring as a duo or not touring at all (4 piece) for someone I know.
As much as I want to agree with you nostalgia wise on the "real circuits and valves" thing, pretty much every industry magazine interview I've read with the top teir of guitarists basically say that "real amps" are for in the studio and when going on the road just use the Kemper[1] and nobody will be able to tell the difference. Honestly I would buy one of those in a heartbeat if I had the income/need/ability to write it off as a business expense.
>This is the context in which the Kemper truly excels and it proves possible to create amp profiles that are good enough to fool three sets of very experienced ears during our testing process. At one stage, we even find ourselves unplugging the reference amplifier just to make sure that it's definitely the Kemper that we're hearing and there isn't some elaborate hoax taking place!
There are too many nonlinearities in real circuits and valves to perfectly model with current technology(or programming methods), but you're absolutely spot on that 99% of people can't tell the difference, even musicians. It's only the person playing the instrument that tends to care
Muse use Kemper but they also mix it up by having 3 amps mic'd up backstage. I didn't mean to suggest that VST's don't have their place in the signal chain at all.
> The difference between the (admittedly pretty amazing) VST's and the real deal is the difference between sounding good and sounding great.
Honestly I think mixing and mastering each make a much bigger difference with recorded music. In my experience the "amateur aesthetic" usually comes down to these five things:
1) Timing
2) Tuning/intonation
3) Variation or lack thereof
4) Mixing
5) Mastering
The old adage applies to music too: Beginners care about gear, professionals care about technique, masters care about sound.
>Beginners care about gear, professionals care about technique, masters care about sound.
Caring about sound means caring about gear. I don't know any masters (and I know a few) that don't obsess over the gear they use in order to get the perfect sound. Shit in shit out. I think this also applies beyond music: Masters optimise at every link in the value chain.
Generally VST's and top gear are used together. I wasn't suggesting VST's have no place in great sounding records but the initial source needs to be great to sound great. While I'm sure that a great producer/engineer will make a better sounding record with only VST's than an amateur with all the best gear in the world generally the top producers don't compromise at all because they don't have to.
As an aside/complaint, I truly wish there was a way to emulate raw feedback. Back when I lived with my parents in the middle of nowhere, I could crank my tiny amp up to 10, put earmuffs on, and just let the noise wash over me when I crouched next to my amp. Now I'm in a house with a child, and no VST is going to give me that same thrill. I could perhaps buy an e-bow and stand near it when I'm soloing, but it won't be utter chaos.
There's no reason this isn't possible with a VST plugin, if you're willing to do it the old fashioned way of grabbing some speakers, playing(monitoring) the playback out, and standing next to them with an instrument. Now, if you're talking about emulating all of that in a VST, then yea that sounds like an incredibly difficult thing to control with traditional MIDI/sound controls
a lot of electronic shows are more complicated than that, but i think for someone who chooses to be lean, yeah it's basically like being a programmer that throws parties for a living instead of a band.
So, you might say the musicians who are more business savvy (they release independently in one way or another) can do well for themselves. The ones who let someone else take care of that stuff get screwed.
Yes, that's generally my outlook on the business aspect of the music industry. There are of course needed staff professionals - PR, Legal, Booking - but if those can be hired and managed with some good accounting by an artist/management team (and not behind a label's closed doors, subject to contract obligations) then it stands to reason more revenue will be retained by the principal.
Practically speaking, I think it's the musicians who "ask" someone else to take care of that stuff that get screwed. This is more like the "Pop Star Contract" take-it-or-leave-it kind of approach. Sure, the label can make a person a star, but that comes with some significant catches (see: rappers angry their label won't release their new album).
That's what I've thought all along. Artists think they can be artists and make money without learning business. As your parent mentioned with someone like Grimes, I think we're starting to see this change.
What I've seen is that the Internet intensifies the power of gatekeepers in the long run. It overloads people with too many choices, and in choice-overload people fall back to relying on a few filters to tame it down.
The information age is numbing. There is too much of everything, so it's all debased.
The Internet also flattens everything. You get a market with no barriers anywhere. Power and prestige accrete to the winners due to network effects.
Put those two things together and you get an extreme power law market with one or maybe at most two or three winners who own each vertical. I expect Apple Music and Spotify to be the only two "record labels" on Earth here in a few years.
The "Super Artist" level of entertainment requires an army to support marketing, legal issues, mechanical licensing, PR, tours, accountants, video production, publishing...
Only the big labels are prepared to provide this support.
Great point, even if an artist had 'n' skilled people to facilitate those roles and produce the needed deliverables, what would happen to those people when the artist becomes unpopular? so even if there is no way around having these established entities for the purpose of essentially allowing the artist to create, then is it a matter of reform? which really means not signing to big labels in the hopes that if enough artists do the same that the face of the industry changes?
A lot of my work is in music videos. I've got hundreds of millions of views on vevo and even a VMA winning video under my belt. There is almost no one in this industry who works for a single artist. This week, for example, I've got a video coming out from a big artist from a major label, a brand new band a major label decided will be cool, a major YouTube star (top 10 YouTube artist), a tiny artist on a tiny label, and a totally unsigned rapper (busy week). You'd be surprised how close the paychecks for a lot of these are.
Point is all of us work with dozens or hundreds of artists because outside of maybe ten mega artists you can't depend on a single "brand" to support you. Granted this applies to video more than other areas, but even agents and managers will have a few to several artists they work with.
Traditionally yes, but the newer Artist-Management dynamic, most successful in Taylor Swift with Big Machine, but also well-respected in the form of Q Prime Management, can do most of those services and retain rights for artists that labels would traditionally take for themselves (e.g. publishing rights, which Q Prime tells their artists to retain). You're definitely not wrong. I think there are cracks in the system though.
> and will there ever be a day when artists have full creative control of their craft? This would mean that the artist would need to value and understand business practices, distribution methods, contracting, etc.
Well, probably never. Isn't division of labor one of the main reasons for human advancement? :)
It's interesting that you call the term indie semi-derogatory, when the article you're commenting on is about how the music industry is full of monsters. Shouldn't operating independently outside of it be celebrated?
Basically, what's needed is an Image Comics but for music, where the creators maintain control of their works and are paid the lion's share of the profits. Surely there must be a label like this out there.
Why would a label want to do that? How would the label survive? If the creator's are paid the lion's share of the profits, would they also keep the lion's share of the losses?
Well, Image exists and seems to do okay, and the creators benefit to the extent that they are ditching the Big Two (Marvel and DC) in favour of creator-owned. I'm not sure what the exact revenue split is. Image's books don't get huge marketing pushes or movies either.
Re. losses: yes, that's how it works. You do a bunch of work up-front and if it flops, you don't make anything.
Sites like http://noisetrade.com/ recognize that the majority of artists' best chance at a steady income is on tour, so they give away the music as promotion.
> The question I always come to is how big can you get without a label? and will there ever be a day when artists have full creative control of their craft? This would mean that the artist would need to value and understand business practices, distribution methods, contracting, etc.
If you're interested in this question, someone to watch closely is Chance the Rapper.
He started his music career just over four years ago when he received a 10 day suspension during his senior of highschool for allegedly having marijuana on campus. During those 10 days, he recorded the entirety of his first mixtape, 10-Day, and released it to datpiff.com and had relatively large success. The album was angry at times-- mostly complaining about the suspension, but also very fun and nostalgic. It was a third of Breakfast Club, half Dazed and Confused, and a sixth Ceelo-Green Fuck You. The production was sometimes great and sometimes really lacking, but on the whole it was impressive for an 18 year old with nothing but an old Macbook and 10 days of free time.
If I recall correctly, it received something like 10k downloads before his next album, Acid Rap, and that is where he really blew up. It was choir-inspired psychedelic rap with flawless production. It had dark moments talking about Chicago violence and losing friends. It retained the CeeLo-theme of "Screw you, I can do this myself." But this is where he got millions of downloads and became a household name to a sizable portion of 14-28 y/os-- and in only just a bit more than a year since his suspension.
At this point he started getting label offers like crazy, and he didn't like it. He saw the wild success he had in all of one year and didn't want to sign a label, and to today he still hasn't. He talks a lot about making a union for up-and-coming music artists.
Young black boy, how he got the labels scared?
A&R's like, "Chano, you ain't playin' fair!
You gon' set a bad example for the average bear
You a Yogi, you should idle while in child's position"
I be like, naw, these my sons, this prenatal care
I'mma show em how to make it here and make it fair
Take it there, they could kill me and I ain't gon' care
You is just an ankle weight, lighter than some angel cake
Sweeter than some maple syrup, easier than Ableton
Make a plate and make a player
Make em play it
Just don't count your sheep before they hatch
You chickens 'fore your eggs
Eat your dinner 'fore you say your prayer
[...]
Young tactician, just got my taxes finished
Beat the tortoise by a hair in an '04 Ford Taurus
On a spare with a wax finish
There's a lot of metaphors, you just lack vision
You just bad business
UH!
All your shit been lower case
Lower class, lower key
I'm the only minor minority in priority
Sippin' gin and tonic while I plot upon authority
Author of my horoscope, feeling like the oracle
Ain't no rules, nigga
IGH!
Clearly continuing his "Fuck you!" mentality, now aimed at record companies instead of his highschool principal.
He's stated that one of his biggest idols as an aspiring Chicago rapper was Kanye West, and as someone who was watching him prior to Acid Rap, it was really fun to see that on West's most recent album he was featured in multiple songs-- still without a label. His dream was realized in a matter of a few years, and I think that clearly shows that mobility is at least possible in this day and age without a label
The question is if these platforms (soundcloud, datpiff, genius to an extent) can provide enough value to these artists that a symbiotic relationship is sustainable after they become popular. One of Chance's close friends, Vic Mensa, also came to popularity through soundcloud and datpiff, but he signed with a label soon after. Things worked out for him, too-- he has worked with West and appeared on SNL. Chance is more political and principled and is definitely an outlier-- so these platforms can't rely on artists having that mindset.
Miles Davis on Steve Miller: “Steve Miller didn’t have his shit going for him, so I’m pissed because I got to open for this non-playing motherfucker just because he had one or two sorry-ass records out. So I would come late and he would have to go on first and then when we got there, we smoked the motherfucking place, and everybody dug it.” http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/miles-davis-opens-for-nei...
I hate this ingratitude. You know Miller and Young loved Davis. Absolutely loved him, but they were in the business of making radio friendly rock music by that time and obviously very different than the jazz scene Davis lived in. Their mainstream popularity gave Davis a great venue to open up to non-jazz listeners and promote someone they admired. Davis, being a jerk himself (oh the irony of calling Miller a jerk), took it as a personal affront to have this opportunity. An opportunity other acts would have killed for.
Life isn't and shouldn't be "everyone is fake except this one true artist here." They're all artists. If Miller could magically become a better musician he would have. He probably felt tremendously upstaged by Young's and Davis' talents. I'm sure hearing this broke his heart.
Miller himself got his early breaks through concerts backed by Chuck Berry in 1960's. I can't imagine him calling Chuck a low talent nobody, even though by then his music was very much out of style as blues-based and psychedelic guitar rock took over. Everyone has to ride someone else's coattails to make it in this industry. No need to be an asshole about it.
you are absolutely right on one level, but to balance it out... really nobody involved really wanted to be at that concert as it was put together... it was purely a put together promotional gig by the record label...
in other words, it wasnt really 'ingratitude' it was literally, i am not grateful because i dont want this.
Back in the day, all major label concerts were products of label management. Headlining artists had some sway to choose openers, but this wasn't an extraordinary event where Davis was hogtied and forced to play at gunpoint. More than likely Young had a hand in this out of mutual respect for Davis' immense talents.
I do see where some coercion was possible, but by 1970 Davis certainly had the political weight to turn this down if he truly didn't want to do it. The reality here is that he was past his heyday in terms of sales by then and probably wanted to revitalize his career by touring with the current popular bands. Birth of the Cool was almost 15 years old by then.
This has to have been written by somebody who only knows of Steve Miller's admittedly bland hits in the middle 70s. He put out 5 remarkably good albums in the late 60s that sold, well, lukewarm at best. It's hard to blame him for realizing that the great stuff he'd been doing wasn't making his retirement secure. Even in coming out with a string of bland big sellers like he did took a degree of talent that most can't even imagine.
If you say this, you've only listened to early 80s Steve Miller. Check out his blues and folk. Lots are up on Youtube. (Which, to the point of the original article, probably doesn't pay him much)
I saw Steve Miller a few years back in concert. I wouldn't have even considered myself a fan before having seen him, but I came away very impressed. I was even dreading "Abracadabra," but so help me that song was great live.
His singing and playing were both spot on. His sound was terrific. I'm a guitar player myself, and the tones he got from his Les Paul and Strat were textbook examples of classic, excellent tone. The band was tight as a band can be. It was a great night of music. The guy is a first rate musician.
I've been watching many of his live performances on YouTube. He's a great musician, who happened to ride the pop wave. We shouldn't judge him just on that. It's like judging the Dead just on "Touch of Grey" or Bowie just "Young American".
Upvoted because you are right. Sometimes we let the work and creative persona of an artist overshadow their flaws. While I still deeply respect Davis the musician (not that he'd care what some white guy thinks), how he treated some of his wives was disgusting.
Related-ish: someone linked to this fantastic read [1] today in some HN thread, and after going through it in awe, I come across the guy's Wikipedia page [2]. Yikes!
Miles was legendarily difficult, but at the time, he had a point. In 1970 he was asked by Clive Davis to go to the Fillmore and open for Steve Miller to support Bitches Brew, which still stands (even among all of Miles' other legendary work) as a controversial classic.
Having listened to the box set of his 1969 live shows [1] a bunch of times -- wow! What a band. It's been almost 50 years and it still sounds fresh and crazy. It is of course in a whole different musical realm than Steve Miller.
Musicians getting rich was a brief phenomenon. Historically, musicians ranked below bartenders. Making phonograph records was a process with expensive tooling, manufacturing, and distribution costs. Radio was an industry with limited airtime and a small number of stations. These factors created an industry with few songs produced in large numbers, resulting in the "rock star" industry.
That's over. Through heavy promotion, there are still stars, but they have a smaller fraction of overall plays and the margins are lower.
And we haven't even had much AI-generated music yet. That has to be coming soon.
When a Vocaloid learns your job, what are you going to do?
Ha, you had me til the AI part. Personally I figure the musicians will have the last jobs, along with designers. Really artists generally speaking will be the most difficult AI, no?
Exactly. Music isn't algorithms, it's communication, it's emotional connection. You might be able to fake even that, but it's not going to be very good. The best and most potent music is stuff that connects to human experience. You're not going to get something like Adele's "Hello" or Pink Floyd's "The Wall" out of a computer until you get computers that are sentient and share the same experiences as humans. At which point they'll be people too anyway.
It does and it doesn't. The modern pop music that's most formulaic seems to be there mainly because then the managers can concentrate on promotions without worrying about what used to be known as A&R.
As an Olde Phart(tm), what DJs do looks very much to me like "a human avatar" and aggregator.
"All that you need then is a human avatar that the kids can connect to and take as their role model."
Already in production. See Hatsune Miku in live concerts.[1][2] Not only is the performer an avatar, the singing is synthesized by Vocaloid software, which you can buy.[3]
The only problem though with using a strict pattern system is that it will, I believe, more than likely miss the nuances which a brilliant songwriter can weave into a structure. The song might be 90% as good, which makes a lot of difference I think. Max Martin is an absolute genius in this regard, and his years of success reflect that. He's also a musician, though he is truly making his living as a songwriter/producer.
Here's a great break-down of "Shake It Off" from a songwriting perspective, which kind of reveals the simplicity is deceptive in some ways:
The other day I was listening to some random pop song (maybe Demi Lovato, not sure) and it was sounding eerily Max Martinesque. I go to look it up, and there he was in the credits. There is just something there that stands out; I don't know if it can be trained into an AI, but my money is on no.
One thing you might be subconsciously catching on to is that Max Martin is committed to "balanced lines" when it comes to vocals. It's obious in "Hit Me Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears and his fingerprints on "Teenage Dream" by Katy Perry. Here's a great review and comment piece featuring 30 songs by Max Martin, in order to better study the guy's techniques which seem to work so well:
Also, I forgot to mention that the weird thing about music is that it follows trends just long enough to want a new one. Thus, whatever formula might win out for a period of time would likely be usurped by a variation or counter-intuitive trend. A funny thought in this line is that a hit-making, successful "Hair Metal Pop" AI would be going great until the "Grunge Rock Pop" AI started getting traction. Humans are fickle!
I imagine the goal posts will for ever be moving when it comes to defining what art is, but ultimately optimizing for human emotional sentiment does not seem that difficult a problem. Art is mostly just a combination of past works optimized for the modern audience. Seems like the perfect problem for AI. We often judge a future AI in terms of how well it could replicate current things but the real question is what happens after it perfects that replication? AlphaGo alone shows that the AI is likely to discover new styles that we failed to examine before, why can't the same happen with Art?
Generative music already is a tool / method in some artists' portfolio (particularly in ambient or experimental circles). However, it doesn't tend to be the only approach.
AI could perhaps work soon for certain formulaic music (like say bubblegum pop) as well as some forms of synth music (I easily can see generative minimal techno for instance). I will say that people don't tend to like overly formulaic music though; they tend to like the twists, turns, and "personality" that people can bring to art. Even in pop, formulaic pieces are quickly forgotten. But it's probably possible to write an algorithm now that does this sort of stuff really well.
Beyond pop formula, I think AI advocates sometimes underestimate the difficulty. There are no real "rules" in music. The music of the world is very diverse, the "rules" even in pop / folk vary from culture to culture.
Many styles of music are way beyond AI at this point IMHO. They are either much more technically complex (Western classical) or rely on improvisational skills that I would think would be difficult to parametize (jazz, Indian classical) Heck, even with something like say blues music, which pretty much uses the same template for most songs (well, a similar rhythm and similar chord changes at least), you've still got the soloists and the singing. Vocaloid ain't got nothing on Muddy Waters or BB King etc. :)
Also I don't think people in general cares that much about the music as much as the idea of the identity behind the music. For AI music to be popular in a context where the an actual artist has to be emulated you either have to fool people into believing it's a real human behind it, or antopromoprohize the ai sufficiently to be promoted like a human.
Music has meaning, it's a tool for communicating very complex ideas.
I don't think anthropomorphising something that generates pleasant sounds is going to get you anywhere, by the time you get anywhere interesting, you've become the artist.
Here[1] is an interview with Alex Ebert where he discusses a non lyrical song teaching him about death.
Do either of you write or play any music? What supports your arguments other than a few marketing op-ed pieces put out by Google in the last couple of year?
You do realize that Google's self-driving cars and other AI research programs are mainly exercises in show business themselves, right? Well kudos to the people running public relations down in Mountain View, they've certainly convinced their target demographic that Google is the place to be for AI research!
> AlphaGo alone shows that the AI is likely to discover new styles that we failed to examine before, why can't the same happen with Art?
Because Go is a game with set of rules and clearly defined winner. Art has no rules and no winners and no losers. You can only program a computer, be it a neural network or some other machine learning algorithm, to deal with a finite set of inputs. Human oversight is still needed to set up and do the initial training of unsupervised learning algorithms and obviously needed during the entire process of supervised learning.
The number of variables that go in to a music production are pretty astonishing. I'm guessing you have pretty much no experience with writing lyrics, melodies, counter melodies, arranging a song, playing the drums, playing the bass, playing any accompaniment, singing, recording, mixing, and then mastering. There's probably around a billion subtle variables that go in to what ends up being 4 minutes of a stereo recording. I would imagine it would take hundreds of thousands of man-hours just to train the initial complex neural network that could get anything that would spit something out that remotely sounded like the Beatle's Yesterday. Perhaps it wouldn't take as much effort to reproduce some plastic pop star, but you know what? People don't really like that shit. Kids do. For like 3 weeks. Then the plastic melts.
You know what, this is basically pointless. You've made your mind up to remain ignorant about music. That's your prerogative. I'm safe in my knowledge that some genious in the Bay Area isn't going to be taking my job playing covers in a bar room any time soon. What, do you think a bunch of people sitting around in a dive bar want to watch a laptop sing them country music? But who knows, judging by how tasteless and uncultured most techies are, you guys would probably be fine with listening to the world's worst poetry, the world's worst instrumental lead, and the tackiest, lamest, emotionless expression of the inhuman condition a machine could possibly imagine.
Why do AI zealots hate humanity so much? Are you ashamed of our past? Do you treat your parents and friends and family as ultimately replaceable by a machine? Art is much closer to the home and heart than you're realizing. I mean, it's you whose gonna end up driving real love away from your own life. I'm surrounded by a bunch of lovely morons who are fine with their shameful existence and are fine from spending the rest of their years being far from perfect and living side by side with misery and sin. You'd better get acquainted with reality at some point. You're still just a bag of flesh and bones with a set expiration date!
Rest in peace, Merle. It's a shame he never got around to learning about and writing about techies... although if you use your imagination his "Here In Frisco" is pretty damned close:
It's four a.m. in New York City, three a.m. in Dallas
The night is still early here in Frisco
Market street's still going, the same old shows are showing
And I'm still all alone here in Frisco
They say it's raining in Chicago, but it's cold and clear in Denver
Been windy all night long here in Frisco
Trolley cars are clinging, the big Bay Town's swinging
And I'm still all alone here in Frisco
The way I feel tonight, I won't be staying long
But when I leave, I'll leave my heart just like in the famous song
Trolley cars are clinging, the big Bay Town's swinging
And I'm still all alone here in Frisco
And I'm still all alone here in Frisco
---
Yup, and I'm still all alone here in Frisco, sitting around with my Artificial Love Machine and my Oculus VR wired directly in to the Google-Apple-Amazon mothership circling the earth... full-stack, full vertical integration, corporate assisted lifestyle... pumps me full of vitamins and movies made by computers.
That this doesn't sound like the living embodiment of hell on earth, I don't know what the fuck does...
I don't think the future is "totally" AI generated music. Rather, I think that AI will provide tools to enable humans to make music more easily. For instance, taking a basic riff and "jazzing" it up, maybe suggesting a drumline, providing lyrical "autocomplete" suggestions based on the song's subject and rhyme structure, etc.
"Making music" is a very small part of the "musician" package; a lot of it is pure ethos. Difficult to identify with algorithmic output, even if you put a fancy brand on it.
In George Orwell's "nineteen eigjty-four", the Versificator machines cranked out music and cheap lit for the masses (proles). I wouldn't bet against Orwell.
Totally agree. Big music and film stars are a pretty new phenomenon and in the future they will probably be viewed as a short term fad. The big companies probably will keep making lots of money though.
I know it's trite to say, but it is probably good to be reminded how often people held up as being successful are, often, deeply unhappy. Michael Jordan is another canonical example.
To live these lives of unparalleled, almost supernatural greatness, and then end up embittered... The stoics did nothing wrong.
EDIT: to clarify, I'm not dismissing Miller's critique at all, I'm noting that someone living, literally, a rock star life, ends up in a deeply inhumane and, potentially, embittering environment.
How does this apply to the music industry sucking? I didn't take this as Steve Miller being an unhappy person though you are right, many successful people do end up the road down to depression -- Elvis being another great example.
I agree completely. While an adult should be able to choose that life, I consider it practically child abuse for a parent to put their child into the entertainment industry.
That's a shitty, smarmy dismissal of what he's trying to say and that he had the stones to say it. Forget about him, what about all the artists the industry has exploited who didn't end up famous and successful?
The stoics would have thought the music industry is terrible. Because it is.
I am not dismissing him at all. I agree entirely that he is very brave for having said this. I'm simply noting that even a famous rock star, living a literally rock star life, ends up in a horrible environment.
Ha! That sounds like certain for-profit conferences.
"You've been selected a speaker for our super elite conference! You can invite your friends to attend for the paltry sum of $XYZ. Oh and it'll also cost you $ABC..."
Ministry (synth pop/industrial/Alternative metal) frontman Al Jordison in his song "gold diggers":
"You know, they say it takes a whole pack of wolves to take down a moose, cuz one-on-one, that moose would smack them down. It’s like being in the music business — you got your managers, your ex-managers, your ex-bandmates, your ex-labels, your ex-wives, your lawyers, your tax attorneys … hell, that sound more like a pack of hyenas to me. You know, I was once told by an ex-manager, “Son, you’re worth more dead than alive. Cuz when you’re dead, we can sell you off in pieces.” That’s the way it works around here. You don’t believe me? Why don’t you try asking Jim Morrison, or Jimi Hendrix, or Janis Joplin, or Kurt Cobain, or Amy Winehouse? I’m pretty sure they’re gonna take my side of the story. Sometimes I think they’re the lucky ones. They don’t have to deal with these douchebags"
It's unfortunate that Tidal is/was such a bust because that really is the right way forward for artists. The big streaming services - Spotify/Google/Apple Music are all just continuing to prop up this horrible abomination known as the "music business" and their business as usual.
Record companies provide three basic functions to artists:
A source of financing.
A distribution system.
A marketing department.
There are alternative channels for each of these now:
Financing has largely been democratized by things like kickstarter et al.
Distribution is a solved problem via either all the services largely propping up the 3 major labels or else soundcloud, youtube etc.
There's plenty of independent marketing companies that will "work your record" for a fee.
One aspect of this is really funny to me - my friend and I busked in NYC in the summer after high school, and each made roughly $2500 a month until we stopped to go to college. That seems to be more than most actual bands make!
Important context for the hostility toward the interviewer: The founder and publisher of Rolling Stone, Jann Wenner, is also the chairman and founder of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which Miller was railing against.
(Wenner didn't do the interview, of course; he just pays and publishes whoever did.)
I still wonder if Jann Wenner is telling the truth that he didn't cancel Hunter S. Thompson's health insurance while en route to Vietnam for reporting purposes. Hunter was quite adamant that Wenner did it. We may never know.
see: hollywood, video games, venture backed technology startups, fashion.
all these verticals are run by assholes and basically suck unless you become a successful indie outfit.
p.s. it doesn't surprise me the hall of fame was started by a bunch of lawyers and people from rolling stone, a magazine with basically zero journalistic integrity, at best.
The other similarity across the industries you mention is that people want to participate in them for 'passion', in a way they wouldn't participate in, say, accounting.
In the "Gentle and Soft: The Story of the Blue Jean Committee" mockumentary, Kenny Loggins and the show and get their digs in at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in ‘Documentary Now!’ by Lorne Michaels, Fred Armisen And Bill Hader.
In the show, Loggins complains about the one album wonder Blue Jeans Committee that you can be working in the business for 30 years and have many hits and never even get invited to the ceremony (which describes Loggins.)
Steve's band gets paid six figures a year each and flies coach to each gig. Steve flies in on a private jet and takes home multiple millions each year.
I hear what you're saying about the irony, but I'm sure Steve's band doesn't mind. The number of musician gigs that pay six figures is EXTREMELY limited.
The music industry has similar problems to the tech industry, especially game dev. There are a lot of people being exploited tremendously by big businesses. In the music industry it practically works out to a share cropping situation. But the exploited still often achieve more success and more wealth than the median for the developed world, and some of them achieve substantial fame as well. It's hard for the public to get worked up about that, especially considering the degree to which our society dehumanizes and objectifies the famous and the rich.
From the article: "If the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame wants to be taken seriously, they need to put their books out in the public. They need to fucking become transparent"
Am I missing some deeper story? They have an 82 page form 990 on their own website. Most non-profits don't disclose anywhere near as much, and few post it on their own site.
Interesting. I took a quick look and can't say I'm qualified to render any real insight. It is interesting to see they claim $11M of expenses on $6M of revenue for the primary operation.
Steve Miller's success came when I was a teen. No matter how hard I worked, I could afford only a little piece of our shared culture as albums were monopoly priced; someone was getting rich. To add, where I lived we could not pick up much rock music on the radio, and only later were very rare concerts (but they were good and inexpensive; Styx for example). I hear echoes of all this in his statements.
Something that I don't think is addressed enough is how a well practiced and versatile musician can make a living through their immediate community. It could still involve secondary income from the music industry as supplement to a healthy primary income provided by the synergy between them and their community. I can elaborate but I'll wait to see if anyone else finds this interesting.
> how a well practiced and versatile musician can make a living through their immediate community
There are so many barriers to this.
They need a venue at which to perform regularly, which helps somewhat to promote their performance. These are becoming few and far between. They are not likely to make much money for said performances (of course this depends on the size of the venue and the following they've managed to develop.)
Forgot about making any money selling recordings. People expect music to be free nowadays. The days of selling $10 cd's at your show are pretty much over. Maybe if you cater to an older crowd that isn't hip to the streaming/Youtube culture you can sell a few cd's here and there but certainly nowhere near enough to support yourself.
So... the "healthy primary income" you describe would be nearly impossible to achieve in today's environment. Most local musicians need to supplement their income working other jobs such as barista, Uber driver etc.
As a pianist the key here would be musical versatility, there is a lot of work but it is spread across musical domains.
The musical skills might include reading literacy, proficiency in improvisational idioms and the ability to teach these things.
The more difficult realm might be establishing a working band of professionals, per individual the professional attitude would be worth more than sheer musical skill. Professionaly minded people working together can build skills that will eventually surpass what an individual can bring alone.
Networking is important, there's lots of ways to engage with your immediate community and it has always helped me to reach across as many professional aisles as I can. How many high functioning professional musicians do you think the average person knows? You should be one of them for the people close to you.
EDIT: I'd like to add venue versatility. Most discussion seems to be around entertainment venues but what about educational, accompaniment, theathrical, ceremonial, religious (I do not personally partake in this).
As something like a solo pianist, I would say you might be able to scratch out a living using all the various outlets you described -- teaching being primary among them as far as ways to generate income.
Most artists know next to nothing about business, which makes them prey to those who do. I think this explains why the industry is so horribly exploitative.
Bigger question might be why record companies still exist in such a similar form to when they were first introduced/at their most powerful?. I'm starting to think that they might actually be a necessity, whether it comes to them offering:
- Marketing/Promotion
- Distribution
- A barrier to entry for new artists
I've wonder why a service that just let people sell their own MP3s and albums (+/- streaming) on the internet is not enough (assuming the other things a record company offers were split up and handled by other focused companies).
My overly optimistic side thinks it's just a matter of no one having built a service that is transparently, obviously, and enforcably out to do nothing but enable musicians to distribute their own material and profit, but skeptical me is well... skeptical.
It's such a nuanced conversation, I wonder if there are any correspondences between someone from tech and someone from the music biz that I could read.
I'd gather that the 'marketing buzz' which HoF inductees might get are highly tempting for artists to put up with. For instance, would there be a Guns N Roses "reunion" stadium tour without the recent drama around their HoF induction? Maybe, but I kind of think it played a role somehow.
Or, in more simple terms, no musician wants to be seen as ungrateful for career recognition.
One anecdote [0] that show his financial astuteness is that he once split a song so that he could get double the royalties.
I'm a huge Steve Miller fan - his career spanned pop, blues, psychedelic and folk, and his bands have included great talent. But the recording game moved on. The money in music is now in performance. And he's still touring [1].
I think a lot of people are missing a point here. It's not just one sided deals and taking advantage of naive or desperate artists. Its that a lot of the entertainment industry is actually gangsters and crooks.
Music and movies and other forms of entertainment have been fantastic ways to launder money for a long long time. Maybe someone should to create a way for independent artists to "sell" for those who need a way to legally attribute their profit to the sales of something else.
Capitalism is people working hard to set up tolls so they don't have to work hard anymore while people who actually like working and creating things of value day after day get 20-99% of the value of their work skimmed off the top.
Some people write songs about the music industry sucking. Hotel California is one (I bet). It would be fun to study this idea. Oh, another one could be Don't Download this Song by Weird Al.
Edit: I wonder if Mr. Miller ever tried something like that.
When I was in college, I took my girlfriend on a summer vacation. We were both broke, so we decided to camp out along the CA coast. My car was on its last days, and the transmission didn't feel right, but we wanted that vacation. She was a great sport, as I tried to make it work.
It seemed like nothing was working as I planned, except the sight of her in that bikini. I had a bunch of camping equipment, and thought, "Ahh--this will be a breeze. I'll just pitch a tent when the sun goes down. First night--ticket. (The state parks, private parks are completely filled months in advance by smart travelers. I had no idea they were so popular.)
Second night--I ended up in Hotel California. I believe in Santa Barbara. The hotel was horrid, but it looked nice from the outside.
There she was this beautiful, innocent blond, sitting on the edge of the bed. She said, "Well--at least we won't get hassled by the cops?". I went to get dinner, and even bought a candle. This was our first vacation together, and nothing worked out.
Out of feeling bad about the room, I told her a lie. A lie over Chinese food, and the candle.
I told her this is where the musicians stayed when they wrote that song--Hotel California. The look on her face was priceless. I was in too deep, and couldn't tell her the truth.
I remember limping my Chevy back home. I still can't get her out of my mind though. I remember she wore a bikini, and wondered why people were looking. Yes--she was that innocent. We went shopping, and I bought her a one piece bathing suit. I told her this is the fashion here. I lied again. I have no idea what she saw in me.
Man of Constant Sorrow is almost certainly not about the music industry. Its roots haven't been definitvely traced but many people think it was a Celtic folk song.
Anyone watch Vinyl on HBO? I know it's Hollywood but I know Mick Jagger is basing a lot of it on his experiences. To be honest aside from the crime, it all seems totally believable.
I've been working on a project that will be an attempt to provide both musicians and users much better alternative than they got, with radical freedom and also a new kind of economic ecosystem. I don't wanna pitch this idea to VCs, so have a crazy idea about how I'll grow it all around the world. I've been coding for a while and if you're crazy enough, let me know. My e-mail is azer@roadbeats.com.
I really hope Ethereum takes off. I think this will go a long way of cutting out the middle men between the customer and "content maker". I even hear all the code that runs on Ethereum is open source which makes it even more transparent/turstworthy. Its the cure to capitalism ! hopefully
It's not a money problem, it's a marketing one. I work alongside the music industry in the code world (won a VMA along the way) and see how labels really work. The problem isn't so much about album sales and streaming money going straight to the creator (though not enough does by a long shot) but rather that if you're not signed to a label and have access to their marketing engine then no one will ever hear your music.
There are plenty of places like bandcamp where you can find great music and buy it directly from the artist with them taking most of the cut, but the numbers of people buying are so low it doesn't matter. With labels, I've literally watched them take a nobody band and decide they're going to be the next thing. They finish their album, label foots the bill for a big music video, PR team call$ pitchfork or world star or whatever site is genre appropriate, band gets a frontpage feature, radio play start$, and next thing you know album sales are way up, tour tickets are sold out and label made bank.
The problem is discovery and curation and ethereum doesn't fix that.
Not really. Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Mahler, all were were recognized and valued. They didn't make the kind of money that some of the really fortunate musicians of the mid 20th Century did, true.
Okay, I'll edit it for accuracy because you took the time to point it out. Either sentiment applies in my perspective so the transcription was unintnetional.
He's just describing the general tone and state of the US. It's always been crooked. The US is crooked to its core. They've been singing that tune for over a century. People who believe otherwise just buy into their hustle.
The Whole Industry Sucks
I had two bands that ended up on Major Labels and Toured the World. I met a kid on the street wearing one of my Bands shirts and struck up a conversation. They still love the band 10 years later.
These guys per person made at the TOP $7,000 in profit after expenses were paid. One band did a KickStarter and pulled in $40,000. It was their biggest pay day ever. I knwo a band (Zao) who has the a Label's (Solid State) biggest selling album ever and the band never saw a dime. PS That band was drama and the drummer was the biggest jerk ever BUT they still deserved to get paid.