Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok
tedgioia.substack.com
tedgioia.substack.com
A change in negotiation power seems like a good evolution of the industry for anyone but record industry execs.
But this "record industry is committing suicide" story that the software world likes to read about is even older than the "hollywood is committing suicide" story, since Napster was just music to start with. And yet here we are. Other than the shift in the cut (which is great!), what's going to change? There's still going to be centralization around platforms (TikTok, Spotify, radio) and a need for a partner for things like touring and marketing etc. So will the new boss look that different than the old boss?
https://musically.com/2020/07/20/steve-stoute-if-drake-goes-...
The sales figures are quite exaggerated... 99% of artists never sell anywhere near the volume that Drake does.
I think it's important for artists to call out and quit pushing the mostly false profit models that the industry keeps pushing to put artists on a pedestal and to keep artists worshiping the big music industry machine.
If Russ was making $1m a week, he would not be doing self-produced promotional videos and tiktok posts about how to succeed in music. Even $1m a week for a well known music artist is not realistic in a good economy when Spotify only pays a fraction of a penny per play.
but also independent labels have much less negotiating power and human power to check for infringements or unauthorized reproduction, let alone legal authority.
All in all a good deal for them it's peanuts for a mainstream label.
(I have co-founded a small independent label)
When the software world can convincingly create new songs that sound like the hit songs people like, but sufficiently different to dodge copyright law, then it's game over.
We don't blink an eye at efforts to do things like complete one of Beethoven's symphonies. But that is going to be increased treading a thin line when it's something like create a new album by pseudo-David Bowie. And arguably over that line when it's extending the hit debut album of a living artist who just isn't recapturing that magic.
A wall of disruptive change is barreling towards the creative industry (as well as many other industries), and yet most are blissfully unaware, fighting over marginal changes to their status quo - maybe looking at demonstrations of what can be done today saying "that's neat, but it doesn't replace me" without properly looking at how quickly the other is improving.
Copyrights are about to become worthless, and so the fight over their management is going to be a short lived victory no matter who wins.
I'd like to think the future is the opposite -- artists/bands managing themselves as disparate entities, forming around small labels or even their own labels, and having someone in charge to bring the resources they need to bear for touring or performance related stuff so that they can focus on their music.
On the flip side, Eve Selis is an example of an artist who broke on the scene during that time and maintained control over her art https://www.eveselis.com/ I agree that it would be great if more artists followed that path.
Will computers replace EDM and elevator music? I don't know, maybe, who cares?
edit: I'm imagining what they would say. I'm not here to offend Bowie fans.
until it's new again, because young people of today are going to become old too and their kids are going to think tik tok hits are old, but will remember when their grandparents took them for a walk in the park listening to David Bowie.
You can't generalise to pop in general, because being a pop headliner is as much about glamour, lifestyle, fashion, and branding as it is about music.
No one wants an imaginary Bowie album, because it's a glamour-free proposition - a curiosity at best, most likely irrelevant.
People have been trying to make an Idoru for decades for now, and they always fail. You can only sell fantasy and identification when they're implicit. When you try to attach them to an artificial marketing concept it becomes impossible to suspend disbelief and make the fantasy stick.
They're all going mad for an imaginary Abba concert
It seems like the formula for an acceptable song is well understood. With the necessary push provided by Spotify these songs get streams in the millions easily. Perhaps it's cheap enough to have this music produced that they don't even have to move on to machine generation.
The Internet leveled the playing field for many years.
The industry has found that social media's dominance allows them the opportunity to distract independent artists from releasing their own quality music and also distract the public from hearing indie music through the illusion that social media helps them to be seen more.
The real question that anyone who works on these platforms needs to ask themself is "Is the platform really helping me?"
The only way they help people now is if you choose promoted ads, and it takes a ton of money for an unaffiliated indie label to break into their main feed on each single post, and that's true for any of the platforms that facilitate sponsored ads.
In what way?
This is already a thing in shoes, clothes, handbags, watches... Yet the original brands thrive. I'd counter that listening to "cheap knockoff" music will have a similar appeal (or lack thereof).
I don’t imagine many people subscribing to an AI who can generate and release countless songs on it’s own without some sort of filter to discern desirable content from undesirable.
Barring some large development, having a human to curate the generated material will be a requirement for success, or else drown your audience in a torrent of unchecked content.
I like your analogy of the tidal wave but without computers being able to generate the culture I don't see it coming.
Take football [or soccer]. Whole sports seasons can be simulated and are in games like Championship Manager. But these have never changed the collective & cultural shared experiences of real world sports.
Bands have been creating music like that since forever. Most of small bands are like this.
As long as it's generating everything on past data it won't. New stuff is interesting because it doesn't sound like old stuff, and usually that takes over and further mutates. I'm not a fan of trap, but it wouldn't have existed if everything was generated by the current gen of software. It moves fast towards an optimum of the current generation, but we're not at actual AI, so I don't think what you describe will happen (at least yet).
I'd imagine trying to ever-broaden the concept of "derivative works", so your "completely new that sounds like Bowie" falls within their catchment.
Or aggressive license mandates on the data set used to train your ML model, so you aren't legally allowed to use it to produce competitive products in the first place. (In that scenario, I can imagine a run on used-CD stores as people rush to get unencumbered source material for that purpose).
On the other hand, it definitely feels like chasing local maxima. Yeah, they can try to fence in "the best song David Bowie never wrote", but that will just drive experimentation to unowned corners of the market. The AI-driven music industry might be a pivot on the scale of going from, say, Mozart to EDM in a matter of years.
I joined because I wanted to figure out how it worked and luckily I have been able to mostly resist the addictiveness of it by manipulating search on YouTube to find the content deeply buried on that platform.
As a label runner myself. it quickly becomes apparent that TikTok is gamified, and it really only cares about promoted content, and everyone is at the mercy of the 5 seconds of fame rule. Even people who do go viral get exhausted by the content consumption factor of the platform, but the truth is that TikTok is just the most recent and updated iteration of the social media model that really does not work for new music discovery.
Listeners, the people that actually buy music are too used to playlist culture now, no one goes searching for music because of the sheer tediousness of the process, and when any music, even total drivel is played repetitively to people, it simply ends up selling.
These platforms are a distraction from our lack of choice and individualism, and it also highlights a time when being a successful independent entrepreneur is totally under threat because not only can you be let down by the illusion that success is possible on these platforms, you can also waste lots of money on ads that don't work for much other than generating bot stats, and years of fruitless promotional work on these platforms through the opportunity they promote as "being possible". These platform timelines are focused on single posts you make, they have no interest in allowing people to follow up on your music, and they do absolutely nothing to help listeners to find your music, the work is all on us... The process from scratch every time a new platform rises is excruciating when you don't pay a lot for shortcuts, and those "shortcuts" are what skews every stat you see on platforms.
That being said, I mostly go "viral" for the memes I post over our actual music videos... It's allowed me to polish my video production skills and I do get slightly more music sales than the old days of selling CDs out of my trunk.
I think there is a magic here that is under appreciated. The reality is that music often takes a few listens to appreciate, or perhaps the right mood/moment to really connect. indeed it seems to me that we learn to like that which we are exposed to, irrespective of whether someone with "taste" thinks it is drivel.
Seems like a feature not a bug
A feature for the platform and a select few artists, but not a feature for the listener.
Elitism isn’t the issue here. Limited access outside of funnels is
But if you are going to claim its an actual genre, like I've seen many do, then you will need to provide a description of the style that manages to include what people generally consider pop while excluding what they don't. And I've yet to see someone succeed. Because pop isn't a genre.
> Identifying factors usually include repeated choruses and hooks, short to medium-length songs written in a basic format (often the verse-chorus structure), and rhythms or tempos that can be easily danced to.
BTW, Wikipedia also draws a distinction between "pop music" and "popular music", where the latter is defined as you describe.
This is impossible for any musical genre that isn't effectively dead. Genres change over time as artists experiment. Hip hop today isn't hip hop from the 90s, but both are hip hop. Rock in the 90s was different from rock in the 60s, and both are different from you'll see released by rock bands in 2022.
Pop isn't just a genre, it has tons of subgenres - bubblegum pop, synth pop, dance pop, hyperpop, K-pop, J-pop - that have distinct differences. There's crossover with other genres sometimes (which is also true of every other genre), but not all popular music is pop, and not all pop is popular.
John Peel's show on Radio 1 in the UK was practically the definition of counter-culture music at the time, yet that was the mainstream music radio station.
We don’t need another semantic battle over who gets to gatekeep what defines a genre. It’s all subjective but you can also get the gist on the general case pretty easily.
This made me laugh pretty hard for a few minutes, I had tears in my eyes. Thank you.
Your humour is of course all the more pithy for exactly capturing the situation. Further, it applies everywhere that industrial-scale (internet-scale?) culture exists. Music, art, film, tv-shows, news, writing. We min-max everything at the altar of the algorithm, because... "reach". Or something. Money. I don't know. Whatever. It's hard to care about taking a shit.
I can't describe it other than "sensors overloads" (maybe I am a robot...). Too loud (the sound, but also the crowd). Too many peoples, too crowded. The smell of cheap beer, sweat, smoke... It's simply too much for me. I feel the urge to go far from that place, as quickly as possible.
I know your point was more about "a simple thing to support and enjoy your local artists", but live events are'nt for everybody sadly.
The Big 5 are not quite there yet, but you can almost feel it gestating in the minds of those executives: "publish your book yourself, and if it's a hit, then we'll reprint it and do your next one."
In the other article by Ted Gioia (the talk with Rick Beato), Ted said, back in the old days, half the people in the record business were Mafia, and Rick said "literally Mafia." I don't think ethical standards in the music industry have risen materially since then.
Try to find him doing one of your favorite songs if you want to hear stuff like "here they go from an F sharp into a diminished 7th and that shouldn't work but they make it work." I know nothing about music but I love to hear master craftsmen, no matter the craft, talk about their trade and not dumb it down.
Unless you are acting for reasons of charity, the answer is no.
It still takes a lot to produce a hit and the money is still made from concerts
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/07/11/137705590/the-...
> This is no humblebrag bedroom studio that turns out to have been professionally outfitted. It’s just a regular bedroom, with a bed against one wall, where Eilish sat to record her vocals, facing a desk and bookshelves and O’Connell’s modest production setup: Apple Logic Pro X, a Universal Audio Apollo 8 interface and a pair of Yamaha HS5 nearfields with an H8S subwoofer
They eclipse whatever she was doing in her “regular bedroom”
Many of the most popular influencers on social media are corporately backed with songwriters and million dollar production units behind the bedroom cameras. You can usually only tell this when you search BMI and see how many songwriters and engineers names are listed on hit songs.
The hit making "bedroom producer" with 50k+ followers is now mostly smoke and mirrors...
It doesn't cost $45B these days to be loved by a few bot accounts.
Spending years on an indie game was never going to be that profitable. I hope you build the game for other reasons aside from profits.
Oh, perhaps you thought I was talking about the platforms like Apple, Google, Steam and the like. I don't begrudge them their 30%
I created a “Substack for fiction” because I wanted to publish myself without having to beg for attention of a few gatekeepers.
They can also get your book reviewed in the few publications that still review books, and they can send their catalogs to bookstores. But yeah, they take more of the money than a self-publishing arrangement will take.
Now it's owned by Chinese technology companies, hedge funds, and regional telephone monopoly conglomerates and run by musically deaf accountants that only care about next quarters numbers.
Unlike Spotify, where the ideal customer subscribes but never listens.
Related tangent: VCs are trending in the same direction. Even YC increasingly wants to “see more” all the time before funding. That’s what they tell founders who are rejected in the interview phase. Come back with users, revenue — proof of a market. The more traction, the higher the chances you’ll get in next time. Simultaneously, the more traction you have, the less incentive to give YC 7%.
It seems they’re trading one type of risk for another: the risk that promising founders with little traction will fail vs. the risk that promising founders with traction will not apply again.
It doesn’t seem at all clear which type of risk is “riskier”.
Edit: An additional, obvious type of risk: Promising founders who are running out of personal runway will get a job and not apply again.
So, like you said, VC are digging their own grave, but I reckon they know it and can't do a damned thing about it.
Those platforms more often than not demand constant care and effort in order to build and maintain an audience the artists can live off. Gone are the days where a band retreated into hiding to work on a new album while the label had their backs. If you stop feeding whatever opaque algorithm the platform runs on, you'll just slowly disappear. Worst case is that artists are forced to release nonsense because it's faster to produce.
Of course, that exact same problem always existed. But I think it's not hard to see how algorithm-driven platforms push this trend to the extreme.
And good luck appealing to Google when some bot decides to demonetize your videos.
Is there something that Facebook/YouTube/iTunes etc doesn’t provide?
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The article is talking about how Record Labels are no longer doing upfront funding. The artist has to become a viral sensation on TikTok __BEFORE__ the record labels put up the money for them.
they’re not gonna let him make an album unless he reaches a million followers on instagram and then changed this number to 6 million
he just accidentally made a hit song “Life goes on” and only then was he allowed to make the next album
If you want to play a live show somewhere big (reach the most fans, sell merch and earn the big bucks), Live Nation owns the venue. Live Nation is Clear Channel and Ticket Master. Live Nation also owns radio, where your show would be advertised.
The big labels all have deals with Live Nation.
It is all super super shady.
If you’re not already part of the family, your chances of successfully competing against is nil
Case in point, check out Insomniac...
Insomniac produces some of the most innovative, immersive music festivals and events in the world. Enhanced by state-of-the-art lighting, pyrotechnics and sound design, large-scale art installations, theatrical performers and next generation special effects, our events captivate the senses and inspire a unique level of fan interaction. The quality of the Headliner experience is our top priority.
Insomniac produces 10,000 concerts, club nights and festivals for seven million attendees annually across the globe. Since its inception, Insomniac's events have taken place in 13 countries across five continents. The company's premiere annual event, Electric Daisy Carnival Las Vegas, is the world’s largest dance music festival and attracts more than 525,000 fans over three days. The company was founded by Pasquale Rotella and has been based in Los Angeles since it was formed in 1993.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insomniac_(promoter)
Such a close creative partnership that LN hosts the jobs page for Insomniac... for example...
https://livenation.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/InsomniacExternalSi...
If your record label isn't in cahoots with these guys, you aren't playing anywhere public. There is nothing that YouTube and TikTok can do to help you there...
While we're probably better known as a consumer app for buying tickets, SeatGeek also builds the full set of software you need to run a major venue. Everything from issuing and managing season tickets for the resident pro sports team, to working with promoters in selling tickets to their national tours and hosting the big, high-demand concert on-sales that accompany them.
A big component of our path into the market is that it's often the resident pro sports team that operates the venue and makes the ticketing decision. They tend to be very focused on the fan experience, particularly for season ticket holders, and that's our strong suit.
I'm pretty intimately familiar with the whole industry. I once owned a small (~2k person) club / live music / multiuse venue in San Francisco as well as built a ticketing SaSS for USCF (us cycling federation) sanctioned events.
From the club days, I got subtly screwed by Clear Channel on an event once and it really left a bad taste in my mouth. From the cycling ticket stuff, I got to deal with another type of promoter and that was horrible in a lot of ways too. Both businesses eventually failed from external factors.
I don't envy your sales team at all.
It's amazing how many ticketing systems of various forms have been built over the years. It seems like one of those things that should be simple, but there are just so many ways to slice it.
The slightly longer answer is that we'll probably be the strongest option for smaller venues that want to do more complex stuff. To the extent that there's always some tradeoff between simplicity and power, we're likely to continue to lean pretty heavily on the power side for our core ticketing system.
(smart move bailing on Billy Beane’s SPAC btw)
Vulfpeck, an independent funk band, played a sold out show at Madison Square Garden with no label and no manager and that was in 2019. Things are slowly changing.
- Marketing - Industry Connections - Cashflow
The majority of the modern Musician's job is marketing through social media. A label helps to alleviate that burden.
Who gets the massive streams for the next release? It doesn't matter to label. That's the nature of pop music. There's always the next big thing right behind the current big thing, which pushed out what is not the last big thing.
Artists? Artists don't play these type of games.
It's neat that your song went viral on TikTok, but that didn't get you any dosh.
So, your band just went mega-viral and you need to do a tour. How do you get Ticketmaster to call you back so you can book venues bigger than 100 people?
"I just want to release songs" is great. Just release songs. Easy.
Ah, but I see you want to release songs and actually not starve while doing so. That's a completely different problem.
So, what are you willing to trade for that?
Discoverability is a huge issue, more songs get made every year.
How do you recon the ”Hot new artists” list on Spotify is created? There’s a ton of deals, payments and polics behind it - and getting placed on a list can make/break a career.
Imagine you where a startup and you go to a VC. The VC tells you that they want to invest. However, they want full ownership of your IP, they want their investment money repaid by taking 100% of your startup's earnings before the company can use any profits (read; It must be entered as an expense in the accounts), and you are not allowed to take out any personal salery until they have their money back. After they have gotten their initial investment money repaid, they want 85% of all profits forever. In return they will maybe try - and this is important - they will MAYBE try to help you succeed. Basically you must accept that you need to do all the lifting, not only the heavy lifting but all lifting.
Would you take their investment money? Probably not. These terms are ridiculous. But artists, writers and other creative producers of their own content have had to live with these kind of terms since forever. The reason has been that the publishers controll the market. They own or control the distribution, and they have the market budgets and connections (often even ownership) to get access to media, whether it is the radio or TV shows that promote your content through talk shows and airplay, or it is the magazines that write about you and your product. Almost no content on the commercial media platforms are there by chance or because an editor found them interesting. It's a market in play.
We might think (and maybe hope) that social media and different self publishing platforms will change this, but the market and industry has gone from too little distribution to too much distribution. There is so much content put out into the market every day that it it is next to impossible to get enough attention to your product. On top of this the attention span on platforms like TikTok is very short. Warhols' 15 minutes is today 15 seconds.
I do not believe we will see the end of publishers like record labels. We will see a shift in their role, and maybe in power distribution among the different players in the market. However, so far it seems like it is the media companies that take all the profit nowadays. Spotify is an excellent example of this, but also "older platforms" like YouTube.
People accept these terms but others do not. Independent artists and collectives exist. Publishers control the fame and stardom market. They do not control the entire creative market.
In some cases this has arguably significant downsides, say in the news industry where traditional outlets have many social functions that platform owners don't feel obligated to provide, but honestly record labels with their at times mafia like behavior shaking young artists down have it coming.
If this is true, why are the distributors making bank while the (median) creators are barely scraping by? Your ideal doesn’t match reality.
> record labels who sign TikTok stars initially demanded complete ownership of all the master recordings, and tried to keep 85% of future revenues. [Musicians] wouldn’t even collect the paltry 15% until they paid off their advance.
> but TikTok influencers now have so many labels chasing after them, they can play them off against each other [...] labels are now offering a 50/50 sharing arrangement, while also agreeing to return ownership of the masters to the artists at some later date
do you think people really care about TikTok artists?
one example i’m familiar with are the Island Boys
they’ve got their 15 minutes of fame, but no more than that
TikTok audience is practically trained to receive a new dose of serotonin on every swipe and if they’re seeing the same person again, that ain’t gonna do it
K-pop, like pop is only popular because it’s forcefully shoved down your throat by marketeers who’s goal is to recoup the investments for the hit factory
obsessive teens is merely the result of marketing efforts
this is what happens when capitalism takes over culture
the cheaper you can manufacture the product, the more profit you can make from sales
pop music sounds the same, because labels want to be insured they can sell it in right amounts (based on what sold good in the past)
no risky art experiments are allowed here, only boring, formulaic manufacturing process
rinse and repeat until the pockets are full
Whether it actually coverts to dollars may remain to be seen.
TikTok has session times almost as long as Facebook which means users are watching a lot of videos. I imagine this allows users to be targeted very effectively and that's why TikTok is talked about a lot as a platform that makes random stuff go viral quickly.
So the idea that they want to "gatekeep" instead of promote new artists with engaging content is suspect.
There's even a bot you can summon that can identify a song like shazam does.
I have been experimenting with Tiktok and it is quite a feeling to put yourself out there.
Maybe one about tries, those are cool