Courtney Love does the math (2000)
salon.com
salon.com
It's worth the read if only for the amazing end line: "Some of your friends are probably already this fucked."
Apparently, he'll be updating it for the digital age soon based this article from January: http://www.mhpbooks.com/steve-albini-to-update-the-problem-w...
I used to do music and a lot of my friends and I discussed the economics of music a lot.
The funny thing is...some of my friends really ARE this fucked. As in, literally. I have friends who are signed and tour a little over 50% of the year all over the world. They get depressed and always ask us to email them to keep them from getting too depressed or from going out of their minds.
I'm not against advertisements, just wish these big sites would devote some front end development to having them load smoothly.
Experienced the same problems here. I was pleading the gods to please strike down whomever gave birth to such an atrocity of a design.
(Wal-Mart. v. To use access to a massive sales channel as a tool to squeeze margins away from suppliers, often brutally.)
Maybe the artists' roles in producing value is overrated.
Maybe consumers just lack any real sense of discrimination so can't be bothered to find the good independent artists when the music industry is throwing a ton of crappy acts their way.
In a world where an over-produced non-talent like Justin Bieber is a huge sensation, I really wonder how much we can't just blame consumers for not expecting better.
The Internet has provided plenty of models for "artists" to form closer connections with their fans and eliminate the gatekeepers. Why hasn't it worked?
Don't confuse contributed value with value extraction. Completelty different things. Extraction requires legal/social leverage, which is independent from anything else. eg. Legal Authority == right to tax. There is no correlation that gov't "adds value", except insofar as there is/not (over the long-run) an political revolution.
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etc.
The so called gatekeepers seem to be providing some other value proposition since they don't appear to have much of a monopoly any significant portion of the system.
The role they played was more like a movie studio (where the artist might be something like a leading actor, as the face of a production). And like movies, the economic model is a classical publishing one where most productions lose a ton of money and the whole enterprise is supported by the runaway successes.
The percentages you hear about (e.g. 10-20) are calculated on dealer price and might equate to closer to 30-40% of profit - and are meant to be easier to count this way (per unit sold). There were some shocking deals in the 60's and 70's, many of which were exposed in court, but since then most of the real evil has lain in the complexity of the system and therefore how easy it is to squirrel money away and make highly questionable deductions e.g. record clubs, or more recently spotify (often legitimately, within the bounds of a poorly negotiated contract).
I've read Albini and know he worked in the industry. I think it's good that he put this out there to make bands think twice but at the same time I think he gives an extremely one-sided and misleading impression, largely telling people what they want to hear.
With Apple she made decent living wage ($80k for the year) while the revenue from all the other services, esp the subscription ones, was barely a blip on the radar.
No, this is a sign of competition. Music has a problem, any given person can only consume so much of it. When music was hard to make and distribute it was easy to fix the price. Now that(at least bad) music can be made by anyone there is an oversupply of music.
As a supplier to Wal-Mart you don't have to agree to lower prices. You just get replaced by another company willing to make 5 million units for .003 cents less.
But Pokerface is now 4 years old, not sure if the numbers are still representative.
https://www.prsformusic.com/users/broadcastandonline/Radio/P...
http://davidtouve.com/2011/12/13/uk-radio-versus-spotify-a-c...
And what were/are their alternatives? Things are theoretically different with the internet now, though I'm not sure how well well-paying outlets for artists have advanced as of yet.
> the scarcity at the early stage is the set of people that can make the system work (promotion, marketing, producers)...
I doubt there's a scarcity of these people. Nor do I imagine they reap a huge profit from their work anyway. And surely the whole point is the quality of the artists' work, not how well crap can be pushed to preadolescent girls a la Justin Bieber?
> Once artists prove themselves not to be a commodity (i.e be stars) they reap great profits and have much more negotiating leverage over labels. I don't understand this rant.
If you read TFA you'll find that this is often not the case, even the stars get screwed out of vast sums of money.
As a fan of good music, I try to maximize the impact of every last dollar I can afford to spend on music. My goal in doing this is to pay as little as possible to Apple, amazon, or major record labels and as much as possible directly to artists. That means almost every album I buy is through band websites or at concerts. I make use of the "new radio" and don't feel the least bit bad about it because I make a point of supporting the bands I like in a way that sees far more of my money reach artists than comes from any "honest" iTunes user. In my view, this is the most ethical route.
The record labels' "war on piracy" is really just a war on competition, and is a great example of how the letter of the law can be subverted by a greedy few to defeat the spirit of the law. Even the term "piracy" is very deliberately chosen to squash this valid new promotion channel. I really wish people would take a cue from Neil Young and call it the "new radio" because that's a far more accurate term.
Seems like business as usual for the music industry.
All those "We're going to change the world" artists have just stood in line those 12 years waiting for their turn to get screwed by the recording industry.
Doesn't feel a damn bit different to me.
EDIT: On the other hand, Kevin Shields of the My Bloody Valentine whom Courtney mentions has made some great choices by waiting for digital distribution to mature and self-releasing his long-awaited album. Good work.
I'm no fan of 'submarine contracts' but more often disputes like this tend to involve someone (such as a camera person) holding the IP hostage as leverage in a payment dispute. Whether a project will be financially successful is often a matter of pot luck, so many people just sign whatever comes their way and don't review the terms unless a dispute arises and the stakes make it worth winning. For one thing, you can't make people read contract terms carefully and a lot of creative people don't like reading turgid legalese in the first place; for another, the ratio of paying producers to wannabe creatives is low enough that many employment offers may as well be contracts of adhesion, and until people achieve enough success to get an agent the attitude is often that it's better to sign a bad contract than to be passed over for someone more accommodating.
Maybe I misunderstood what sort of work for hire situations you had in mind?
How then would someone buying my services end up with the copyright of that work?
But we have to make sure Spotify, Rdio etc are transparent about their payouts. The big labels are probably making deals to ensure they live on as gatekeepers to these services and right now they have the leverage. We have to demand openness so we don't see a situation where Warner gets 5 cents and smaller labels get 1 cent per play.
What makes it even worse is that Spotify itself doesn't make money! They are losing tens of millions of dollars per year, it's crushing all other distribution models, and artists aren't getting paid. It's basically the worst outcome for everybody all at the same time.
And all we know is some artists are getting screwed. Warner, Universal, EMI might have made a deal where they get a decent percentage and smaller labels get peanuts, we have no way of knowing.
For starters, Google: https://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=major%20labels%20invest%...
Doesn't take long at all to find out that the deals struck with majors included not a decent percentage, but actually ownership. Ownership means access to a revenue stream — good for labels, bad for artists who don't receive royalties on investment revenue.
Go beyond that one Google search, you can quickly learn that indie labels — the folks who win more than half the Grammys — don't get the same arrangement. So the music one their labels actually subsidizes the competition. They're not all that happy about that.
And lastly: artists. You can listen to them. Plenty are outspoken. For every Metallica getting onstage with Spotify there are many others essentially saying that they receive nothing — and that makes sense because the payouts are designed to work at scale, not at the level most working musicians operate.
Saying all this without judgement. I think the streaming market could be a good one for artists if it were more geared to driving direct purchases — but thinking about it as the answer is a problem. It's the start of exposure, like radio used to be, not the end goal.
Grizzly Bear, a very successful indie band recently had an interview where they spilled out everything. The band that opens for Radiohead and Paul Simon, is featured in ads for Volkswagen and Peugeot and sells out Radio City Music Hall.
They can't afford health insurance. After a tour they just about break even, and they make most of their sales from touring. Here are a couple of quotes from Twitter: "Mog and Spotify do not help bands or labels or indie stores. Not shaming you, just stating the facts since someone asked" and "Buying an album helps a band ten fold over buying a t-shirt, no matter what format. Again, answering questions".
The vocalist, Edward Droste, says that he doesn't even make a middle class living.
Here's the money quote from the interview: "“There’s a ceiling that independent artists hit,” he recently told NPR, “and the only way past it is radio.” And radio “still feels very much controlled by major labels’ ability to use leverage—you still have to have the muscle. Very few indie acts actually have breakthrough radio hits.”"