How bands are escaping the music industry snake pit
bbc.com
bbc.com
But Bandcamp feels fair, I pay the artist/band the amount they wish or I wish to, and in return I get flac files I own with correct id3tags.
(Maybe it's just that Bandcamp was made when I started getting revenue, two unrelated events that just happen to coincide.)
One man and a guitar have much lower overheads than a four-piece band with a trailerload of equipment - you can't take a drum kit as cabin baggage. The band have to sell four times as many tickets to make the same revenue per person.
Even if a band can draw a bigger crowd and sell more tickets, the economics are still stacked against them. Small venues generally provide a house PA system and lighting rig, but larger venues don't. Equipment hire or a touring road crew take a huge bite out of ticket sales. Bigger venues also offer less favourable terms to artists, because they're far more likely to have a local monopoly.
I think this is a hugely overlooked factor in the decline of rock music. Young musicians are smart enough to realise that drummers and bass players need to be paid, but drum machines and looper pedals don't.
I sold $330 worth of tickets (small sunday night show), paid the soundperson $160 ($40 an hour), $50 for poster design and printing and then $100 to hire a set of drums... works out that each band ends up with $5???
I want to support the artists, so i usually get one if I liked the show, but sometimes I wish they would get more creative with merch options. I know there's an upfront cost and focusing on t-shirts is a pretty safe option. But I just love it when they get creative with patches, stickers, hip flasks, rings, belt buckles, skulls, necklaces, booty shorts, all kinds of stuff.
It may be a little bit odd, since I usually don't like obvious branding and advertising, but doing something different will absolutely make me consider buying more merch.
But it feels sort of condescending to just hand them money at a show.
Though I think a lot of places around here have a beer allowance for performers. I'll give it a go, though :-)
And yes, the fact I can support beautiful music makes me happy. I want to support these artists so they make of more of these beautiful tracks.
The problem is like with all alternative distribution channels - if you actually want to sell your music, marketing is more important than the music itself and very few people have the ability and time to do the creative work and the marketing at the same time. If nobody knows about your music, nobody will buy it. It's the same with self-publishing platforms for books.
Traditional publishers have all the marketing channels already set up, so marketing is easier and more affordable to them than for startups, let alone individual artists.
Bandcamp takes 15%/10% (depending on your yearly sales). Combined with the payment processing fees, that gives a return of around 80%, as mentioned in another reply to your post. I think that's perfectly fair, considering the hosting costs for thousands and thousands of hours of music, and their entire platform.
What Bandcamp offers is a sales channel that is already configured, all you have to to is give it a theme, upload your music in a lossless format, name the songs and choose a price. Bandcamp handles the layouts, the tagging, the multiple formats, the embedded album art and the whole shopping experience. You do the art, they do the technical stuff.
You're spinning a yarn that the traditional labels are necessary in order to do marketing, but with the rise of social media and the huge trust people have in word of mouth, the big in-your-face advertising campaigns of yesteryear are simply outdated. The only reason the big labels still have some kind of clout is that they own all the big radio stations. But the rise of streaming and internet radio has eroded that power.
And even if what you say was true, it only holds up for mainstream pop artists, not the much more interesting indie artists out there.
Not at all, I'm an independent artist at Bandcamp. What I am saying is that without marketing you have 0 sales.
I'm also not saying that there are no artists who can do the marketing themselves (through social media, etc., as you mention). Most artists, however, neither have the time nor the connections to do that.
It's the same effect as with app stores, where also just a very small number of developers make any money. You're right that Bandcamp offers a sales channel,of course. That's essentially all that these alternative distribution channels offer. We can debate whether that's worth 15% of the sales, though. As I've said, it works for some people who are well-connected and have a natural talent for self-marketing. For most of the artists, it doesn't work.
The sales pitch from the big labels is that they will use their connections to get you noticed, but the prerequisite is that you should already be reasonably established before they want to pick you up, or ridiculously lucky that you just caught the right person's attention at the right time.
The best way to get your name out there is still to play tons of smaller shows, build a local fanbase, and get on festival lineups, either through competitions or because your fanbase pesters the promoters into booking you.
15%, or 10% if you're really successful. That means 85% of the money goes to the artist. This is better than e.g. Steam and the app stores, and far better than the old physical-media based sales.
I think Bandcamp is fair in that it enables all those people to make their production available and get something, however small, for it; and enables other people to find art which would otherwise not be accessible. All in all I think it's a cultural plus for the world.
It's just a really convenient way to make your music purchasable for download.
If you don't sell anything, you don't pay anything.
Their last two albums (+ an EP and a few singles) got released as a free download on their site, and they've released a pretty cool music video[1] in which they've encouraged people to get their music for free (the video was on the front page of The Pirate Bay for a while), featuring lyrics such as "we don't give a shit about the copyright law" and "we do file share like we don’t care, throw music industry in despair".
Also, the Dubioza guys are really cool, thanks for the links!
My dad played for a living in the 60s and his band played TWO shows a day (afternoon and evening, so the schedule was get up around noon, breakfast, show, lunch, show, dinner, sleep) 6 days a week during the summer, it's just like any other type of physical labor and listening to him it definitely beat working 12 hour days in the fields which is what he did before...
Most people listen to music on streaming services. In terms of making money from streaming services, you don't. There are a zillion artists on them, and the vast majority ends up with pennies.
You can sell on bandcamp etc, and that will probably generate more than streaming services, but still very little for the vast majority -people don't really buy downloads/physical music anymore, it's free on streaming services.
You could try Patreon, and that might generate a bit of recurring revenue if you're active on social media.
If you start getting mainstream radio play, you're doing good as the royalties from that are still pretty nice. But very few artists get there. Also, tracking publishing rights and actually paying people for radio play (or publishing in general) is an arcane, paper based mess.
If you're lucky, you'll get your music licensed to TV/film/games, and that can also be a good source of revenue.
But sales of recorded music, as a way of making a reasonable amount of money, is pretty much finished.
That's a true snake pit, and there are very few attempts to untangle what goes on.
Cortney Love does the math
Ms. Love appeared to be inspired by this piece written seven years earlier by the engineer who recorded Nirvana's "In Utero".
One of the very last interviews Charlie Rose broadcast before his disappearance was a fascinating interview with Live Nation's CEO: https://charlierose.com/guests/12447
hmm. his site is down along with his entire show archive. That is a loss for the Internet.
Rapino talked about how Live Nation has gotten into managing artists directly, buying venues, and doing promotion and logistics for a wide array of artists at a range of scales.
It's a big change now that artist's have a direct microphone to their entire fanbase through Twitter, Instagram, etc.
The end result is truly if you care for the music and the art, buy the merchandise directly from the artist. Go to the local concerts. Help reduce the variance in the artist's income stream. Show them that despite not having a big label, they can succeed. Once I realized I had this kind of power to my favorite metal artists, it was nice to give back.
This is because they've signed to Kobalt, a technology-driven music services company that gives songwriters and bands complete ownership of their work and a greater share of income than has traditionally been the case in the industry.
"We never used to make any money because we were always paying off our advances," recalls Haggis, whose band formed in 2003. "We'd get about a 20% share of revenues and the label would keep the rest.
"Now we get to keep about 90% of what we earn ...it's such a difference, it just made sense."
[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/guidelines/editoria... [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/contact
It's the BBC. They aren't allowed to take money for articles. Of course, they aren't particularly fussy about what press releases they run, so you can still sneak in an ad for your company if you make the effort.
I have read the article and I'm miffed you'd suggest otherwise. Please read HN guidelines where it explicitly asks you not to suggest other posters haven't read the articles but to stick to the facts.
If Mr Entrenched gives you the same canned statement they've been giving you for years, and Mr Newcomer is willing to sit down and give you a good chunk of his time because "holy crap, the BBC are talking about us"; then the article can choose between being devoid of content, or looking like it's all about Mr Newcomer.