Justin Timberlake Made a Fortune Giving His Album Away
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
I've found that the most vocal proponents of copyright crackdowns and DRM are small-time musicians, authors, etc. Piracy won't affect Lady Gaga's sales, but for that indie band from JP you love so much, it could mean the difference between being able to feed their families with their music, and having to work a shit job and therefore play less, perhaps not playing at all, to make ends meet.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/18/how-a-youtube-sensation-bea...
The tech makes music production much easier/cheaper and publicity/distribution trivial. The flipside of that technology is that it makes mass piracy much easier.
There are probably a lot of people willing to listen to obscure small time musicians for free, but how many of them would be willing to stump out $15 for a cd?
Artists today far more dependent on touring and merch revenue (fun fact: artists sold merch in the 1980s too!). There seem to be a lot of misconceptions about touring revenue. Justin Timberlake might pull in 6 figures from a show. Most indie acts can count on something more like $50 per band member per night.
In other words, are less artists funded through A&R because there is a higher risk from piracy that previously, or is there also a factor that A&R becomes less important if musicians are able to self finance music production and distribution therefore allowing the masses to do talent discovery on their behalf?
I know a few independent small time artists and their plan seems to work on the basis of "do enough shows and get enough youtube hits & twitter followers and someone will offer us a contract".
There are broader lessons in marketing here beyond just the streaming. The streaming is one element.
A recent Billboard interview with JT's manager, Johnny Wright, sort of underscores this: http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/branding/1552474/...
I wonder how many people out there, like me, were converted from hater, to fan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
For the next 10 minutes, I'm going to be a fan girl.
EDIT: which is to say the actual headline is: "Spotify probably better hypemachine than Clear Channel, at the moment"
Justin Timberlake is also an outlier: he has a huge existing fanbase, had positive reviews for the album and received an avalanche of conventional publicity, including a systematic Clear Channel[2] campaign. It stretches credulity to suggest his popularity on streaming services was more a cause of than an effect of the demand to buy his album
[1]http://www.stevelawson.net/2009/11/if-spotify-is-the-new-rad... ... the author's revised opinion of Spotify is also interesting reading
[2]http://justintimberlake.com/news/2013/tune-into-to-your-favo...
EDIT: For typo
Given the number of people involved in the creation of a CD that's pretty good but not exactly a fortune. Many fortunes will be made from this endeavor, and they'll be from things other than direct sales of music content to consumers
Also, Suit & Tie had 9,394 radio spins in it's first week, which is the most in the chart's history, that's a first week audience of 93.4MM people [1]. I'm not sure what the royalties are for radio play in the US, but I imagine it's nothing to be sniffed at.
Keep in mind, this is the first week; Timberlake is absolutely going to make a complete killing from this album and all the related opportunities that arise from it, e.g. touring.
[1] http://mashable.com/2013/01/21/justin-timberlake-suit-and-ti...
Frankly I never cease to be amazed at what a great deal that is compared to how Spotify / Pandora / etc are getting screwed big time on licensing fees.
Traditional radio was / sometimes still is an extremely profitable business. Once you exceed basic costs, it's all gravy minus sales commissions and some production costs on commercials etc. Radio is basically one giant sales business.
It seems as though for radio, from day one, it was heavily a promotional medium for selling physical records, with the added bonus of a sales cut for the music industry. With the move to digital music, I think they stopped looking at it as a means of promotion so much and wanted to own the whole channel (as much as possible). Short sightedness, spurred on by a mixture of fear (eg Napster) and greed (opportunity to rewrite the distribution rules).
And.. he shares his fun times with everyone, SNL, dick in a box, motherlover, 3somes with lady gaga, jizz in my pants etc, he even made the five timers club. Then he hangs out with Jimmy Fallon for 4 days, does a new tune every day and the absurdly funny suit and tie sketch. He tops it all with his medley.
Not to mention his acting career , guesting several big hits during the time he didn't make music himself.
He might have been gone for 7 years, but he really was here all the time building his street cred to unseen heights and backing it up with an album that is worth owning, just like the previous 2.
Bloodhound gang is a good example. They record everything on a laptop, give all the tracks away and sell out a tour for $3million plus a few mln in merch, which is pretty good when theres less middlemen to siphon the income.
U2 made 700million last yr touring. None of their albums come close to that sales figure so they also give away songs to promote the real income of live shows
The album has 12 tracks, so if the whole album was streamed 7.7m times at $0.005 per track streamed, the royalty payment would be closer to $400,000
7.7 million * $0.005 = $38,500, which is the right order of magnitude. Then note that it says "less then [sic] half a cent per listen".
Seriously, it is extremely depressing how low editorial standards have fallen.
(also, this has to be my weirdest HN comment ever)
And, IMHO, that is how it should be. A recording, to my mind, is faked music, produced to an inch of its like. Its like air brushing. A real artist, or musician, can perform live, and that is where they should make their money, performing their art. That is the artist. Buy a MP3 or CD and you are buying 5% artist, 95% corporate skimmed off "tax".
Granted a lot of pop act's tours are fairly faked up, but at least you see the buggers put in the effort!!!
IMHO, "piracy" keeps these artists honest.
Also, producers, engineers, etc. that enable recorded music to be fine tuned to perfection deserved to be paid. They won't go on tours.
The real question is: are labels/distributors paid too much? In this day and age, I think so, and that's why services like Bandcamp deserve to be supported.
Actually, from thousands of interviews I've read from artists, live tours are always a losing proposition money-wise.
Except for big bands (from Rolling Stones down to Kings of Leon or White Stripes levels of big) for any alternative artist, much less a group, it's bleeding money. And, no, merchandise doesn't do it, either.
>A real artist, or musician, can perform live, and that is where they should make their money, performing their art. That is the artist.
So those post 1965 Beatles albums, when they stopped performing live, are not real art. You know, like Abbey Road, Sgt Pepper, Revolver et al.
Or you can take, in contrast, Like Spinning Plates by Radiohead. The music was recorded backwards, then run forwards. Thom Yorke learned the backwards melody, which gives the lyrics a clipped, alien quality. When they perform this song live, they use significantly different instrumentation.
Is the album performance fake? No, it's impossible to do in any other way.
There are many more examples I know, including bands that aren't worth a D live and bands that just record their live performances in the studio and call it a record. For me, hearing an album that is hard to perform live is a thrill, can't wait to hear what the band does with it.
http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/1481408/top-25-tours-...
eg Roger Waters' tour grossed $186 million on 72 shows. Madonna did $228 million.
They obviously don't get to keep that, but they get a very healthy cut.
For small alternative artists (less 1 million album sales, which is the vast majority) it's almost always a losing proposition.
Never did any come back broke a typical tour youd make $1-6k per show, plus around $1200 in merch, then do 20 shows while partying for free everyday at crash pads. Split that 4 ppl you go on a 3mos vacation to europe and return with $9-15k each which is pretty good income for a college band thats going back to school in sept.
If you lose money touring youre doing it wrong