How Iron Maiden found its worst music pirates - then went and played for them
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Most of us have been saying this for years (and some in defense of the Napster model, for better or for worse), and it still seems like a no-brainer to me. As one poster here pointed out, if artists treat the music experience as a service instead of product (and, to expand on that, give the music away for free), I would be interested to see the impact.
Also note that Iron Maiden has never had a song on the radio and they pride themselves for it, so I don't necessarily buy the argument that artists need the conventional music business model to succeed.
(You might think this is an unfair comparison, but touring does pretty much demand your whole life. Your effective wage from touring is typically not very high when you consider how many hours it consumes.)
So instead of being famous and having millions of dollars and a huge tour train, you'll produce music on the cheap or electronically and sell it via you-tube, streaming deals, shows, and direct album sales for the super fans.
Innovation always has its side effects good and bad, but those who want to entertain and be famous will still have all the motivation and incentive to be creative and strive for the spotlight. They won't be making off too bad for themselves, either.
It's side effects will also be increased automation, which means unions shouldn't use the government to inflate wages of jobs that could otherwise be automated with a machine.
This isn't a new model. Most artists already rely on both performance and recording revenues (some add licensing and/or merchandising). So we're essentially talking about the old model, except with the apparent proposal that we remove revenue from recordings.
That's removing a leg from a stool that's already frequently shaky to begin with, except for mass-market pop acts that have already made it (Iron Maiden is, more or less, one such act).
> Innovation always has its side effects good and bad
Can't make an omelete without breaking a few eggs, eh?
You can, of course, break eggs without making an omelete, and so far, it looks to me like the instructions for the recipe under discussion stops at cracking them open.
"You can, of course, break eggs without making an omelete, and so far, it looks to me like the instructions for the recipe under discussion stops at cracking them open."
Wrong question.
The correct question is, "How much are you willing do distort the rest of your society in order to support one relatively minor, if wealthy, group of people?" Or possibly, "How much damage do you want to do to other, more important industries in order to protect a small one?"
I can only assume that's what's going on here, given that nothing I've proposed would reasonably prompt your questions.
I suppose I'll respond anyway, though:
> How much are you willing do distort the rest of your society in order to support one relatively minor, if wealthy, group of people?
Wealthy? I suppose there are some pop acts that make it so big that they become pretty wealthy. These are indeed folks (like Iron Maiden) that could continue to enjoy good business even without much recording revenue at all, but they're no more a representative sample for the sake of discussion here than most hackers are (or ever will be) Mark Zuckerberg wealthy.
As it happens, I am willing to distort society a little, in much the same way that the original copyright bargain does, for the same reasons. I think that the norm should remain that recordings are something people should pay for. That's it. No need for SOPA or DRM required everywhere by law or million dollar fines for vigorously prosecuted individual violations. Piracy still exists, and may even be often treated as discussed in the article, but people who do it know it for what it is and that the approved (and supportive) way to participate in getting recordings is to either purchase or download from where they're explicitly free.
Probably wouldn't do terrible damage to other "more important" industries.
Seems like developers and open-source. There's no proven instructions on how to have a profitable career developing open source software. There's a few exceptions, but mostly it seems to require selling services, or intentionally crippling the software and using open source as a marketing scheme.
(Go on surprise me and prove me wrong - let me know you are in a band that is well known).
Drake/OVO did this with Abel Tesfaye (The Weeknd). His first three albums -- House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence -- were all released for free, over the internet.
To say that he's been a success in the R&B world would be an understatement.
What do you mean by "never had a song on the radio"? They get played all the time on Local Radio Station's metal section.
Here's an example from two days ago: http://bonemetalzone.tumblr.com/post/70661430266/now-playing...
That is definitely not true, I have heard with my own ears Iron Maiden playing on UK radio and by looking at logs I can see that at least 8 stations have recently played them.
I think it would be foolish to take pride in not having radio airtime - you get revenue and you get heard.
I can't tell what country you're from but in the UK we've always had a diverse selection of music broadcast on the BBC. Back when Iron Maiden were in their late-formative years (after Paul Di'Anno joined in '78 and when "Iron Maiden" was released in 1980) you heard them played on Radio One by presenters such as Tommy Vance [1] on The Friday Rock show [2] all the time.
They also got plenty airtime on MTV and Top of the Pops back in the 80's when their first album was released, for example:
"Running Free" was released as a single on 23 February 1980, reaching No. 34 in the UK Singles Chart. The band also performed the song on the UK TV show Top of the Pops, refusing the usual tradition for artists to mime and thus becoming the first group to perform live on the show since The Who in 1972
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Vance
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_Rock_Show
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Maiden_(album)#Songs
On the other hand, this attitude is a privilege afforded exclusively to bands with the resources to travel the world, capitalizing on international interest. For an indie band on a small label, record sales are all that matter if they hope to not get dropped.
A band like Iron Maiden has the luxury of not caring as much about recording because they have visibility, they have leverage, they have an existing market, and they already profited directly from "music as a product." Smaller bands, however, only matter when they are doing new things -- releasing albums, specifically -- and the budget for that is the direct result of sales if it is coming from a label. Music as a Service only works when demand is massive. Since most bands are working primarily DIY and taking whatever little budgets they can get, it is not a reasonable model for anyone other than those with existing resources.
This has been probably every band's emphasis for years, and for non-mainstream acts, it's not really an emphasis because it's the only way to make it in the first place. Hardcore/punk bands live on t-shirt sales, and CD sales are often break even if even that (I haven't stayed in touch with the friends who are now selling vinyl). Any potential cut from the door (or from bar sales) pays for gas. At the end of the tour, t-shirt profits either pay down your debt from the last record, or go towards booking the next studio session.
The tours are the meat and potatoes of income for most artists because of this, unless you go completely independent.
Those crooked contracts?
It is better, moneywise, to be a record label than it is to be a musician. It's better to be a VC than an entrepreneur. But don't confuse that with the fairness of the deal those people offer. It's better to be a financier than a worker for reasons beyond contracts.
"The band [...] has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month."
Edit: In light of tptacek's third paragraph, perhaps it's more like a variation on the same take.
Also, I like Big Black a lot, and even listen to Shellac every once in awhile, and while he'd probably piss all over these selections as boring college rawk, Surfer Rosa and Rid Of Me are two of my favorite albums, in large part because of what he did to both those bands in recording them.
However: I think Albini is extremely biased in his take on the music industry.
First, he's a punk artist and a purist and not inclined to look favorably on mainstream music of any sort (I especially highly recommend the longrunning thread on his forum where his users tried to sell him on hip hop; it features capsule reviews of something like 100 different famous hip hop tracks. Spoiler: Albini wins, hip-hop loses.).
Second, he got screwed over by label management multiple times, most notably during the production of In Utero, where he was scapegoated for Nirvana's own artistic decisions and (unfounded, as it turns out) concerns that the band couldn't possibly live up to the hype from Nevermind. He does. not. like. the kinds of people who work for labels.
Third, he worked almost exclusively with the kinds of musicians who do not end up making a living creating music. This was especially true when he wrote "The Problem With Music". Albini's take on the music scene makes perfect sense if you assume that, with the possible exception of a small collection of engineers and other support professionals, nobody is going to make any money producing music. Albini's favorite band, The Jesus Lizard, is/was headed up by someone who had to leave music to become a lawyer.
But I look at things like the Mega scam, or, for that matter, Youtube and Facebook, and see giant corporations who had no hand whatsoever in creating music of any sort, who couldn't give a rotten god damn about music, and who nevertheless manage to extract tens of millions of dollars from the efforts of people who dedicate big parts of their life creating it.
I find myself unwilling to accept the idea that "it's all the labels fault" and "well people should just sell t-shirts" (and, as it turns out but isn't popular to say, sleep in the back of a dirty van) as a defense for tech companies trying to exploit music.
If you want to start a music startup on the Internet, do at least what the labels did: fund a couple acts and wait for one of them to break out and become a huge success.
Not all labels are corrupt - there are some I've heard bands praise effusely. However, all I have heard about the big 4 is pretty damning. Some of the smaller ones out there also suck too.
I speak this as someone who is passionate about music & has many more friends who do music for a living than most. I don't like some of the exploitation of artists by tech companies either, but that's a completely different topic.
This must be science fiction. They could afford to record their album and maybe go on tour is more like it.
Nevertheless, compare a music label advance to a business loan, a mortgage, or VC investment. With a loan or a mortgage the financier takes a risk and puts money behind someone buying a house or building a business. But the obligation of the person on the other end of the risk is to pay back the loan plus interest, and the interest is how the risk of the loan is mitigated. With VC an investment is made in a venture and in exchange the investor is given a share of the venture, when the company is acquired or goes public the investor then owns a decent chunk of a now liquid asset and can either continue ownership or cash out and effectively earn RoI on their original risk taking.
But a music label advance is a very different and far more unreasonable beast. First the label loans the artist money in the form of an advance. Then the label takes majority ownership of the artist's works. Then the label requires the artist to fund production of their next album, music video, etc. out of their advance. The label gives a small share of the profits from the artist's works back to them which they must use to repay the advance. Meanwhile, the label takes a larger share of the profits for themselves. Additionally, the label may or may not spend money promoting the artist, but we should not look at this as virtuous because they are promoting their own products at this point.
The genius of this system is that the amount of money the labels take in from their share of the album revenue is effectively hidden, so artists can't tell how profitable their work has been for the labels. Moreover, by forcing the artists to pay back the loan out of their smaller share of the profits and forcing the artists to pay for album production out of their advance it minimizes the overhead the labels have to pay and increases their profitability while simultaneously making albums look less profitable than they actually are for the labels. Hollywood pulls similar accounting tricks with movies to dick people out of their rightful share of profits.
Imagine a world where VCs took complete control over startups, took the lions share of the profits, and forced founders to pay back initial investments out of a small share of company profits, while also requiring the company to pay developer salaries out of that small profit slice and the initial investment money. Nobody would stand for such a crap system, but many artists continue to allow themselves to be suckered into a similar exchange because it's the norm in the music industry and because most artists tend not to be business savvy.
You might consider that the acts you & I tend to have heard of are, relative to the market, breakout successes. For acts that achieve unexpected and spectacular success, label contracts probably look pretty terrible; a band generates a huge amount of sales revenue but captures only a small part of it. But for the midlist and down, that might not be the case at all; again: Lowery suggests that the labels lost money on midlist acts while subsidizing a lifestyle that allowed those acts to work in music full time.
Certainly, we can see that in the absence of a thriving label system for music, being a midlist independent musician isn't exactly lucrative. The Arcade Fire can probably afford very nice cars and private jet rides now, but how well are Savages or Low or Grizzly Bear or Spiritualized doing? It's not the labels squeezing them anymore.
Personally, my musical tastes run more towards the long tail so I am quite familiar with many musicians who have never been on the radio and are acts you would classify as "midlist". By far the dominant feature of moderately successful musicians in the modern era is that they tend to own the entirety of their businesses. They produce their own music, they sell their music and merch on their own websites and at gigs, and they have an intimate relationship with the planning of their tours and appearances. If they need to they use kickstarter to help fund albums or other projects.
And they make a good living, often at levels of popularity that would be unsustainable if they had to sign away so much of their rights and revenues to a record label.
A perfect example is Jonathan Coulton. You're not going to hear him on the radio but he has monetized his music in a way and to an extent that would not be possible if he were tied to a domineering label. He sells shirts and prints, he does variety shows with friends sometimes, he sells his music by track, album, and box set in mp3, ogg, and flac. He also sells karoake track versions of several of his songs. And he even organizes Caribbean cruises along with several other acts.
Jonathan Coulton is a bit unusual but fundamentally his control over his own music, his "brand", and his business is not unusual these days. A great many musicians across the entire success spectrum have such control, and by and large I think they are doing better than they would under the label system.
When you break it down the label system doesn't make much sense. Somehow they convince artists to sell their work and themselves in trade for a loan. They were able to do that in the past because production and distribution of music was hard to get into and they had an effective oligopoly on the system. Today those functions are not just commodities, they are so inexpensive as to be effectively inconsequential.
I would argue that today signing on to a big label actually benefits the artists that become the most popular far more than "midlist" artists. Many extremely popular artists are not actually terribly musically talented, but they are either interesting, controversial/infamous, or pretty and thus benefit greatly from having a big corporation constantly promoting them. Whereas for artists who have legitimate talent it doesn't seem to help very much to have to wrestle with them over ownership of their "brand" and to be elbowed out of most of the revenue of album sales.
I happen to think that in-store sales are a red herring, and overall sales are more interesting, but that's not what the introduction laid out. But even total sales aren't cited, just a number of social media friends.
I'm also not sure how much we can take from observation of mega-bands like Maiden. I doubt that their experience will translate very well into the long tail of musicians.
Oh I'm sure it does. I certainly wouldn't know as many bands as I know today without piracy - and this translates very much into buying CDs and going to shows, though I can't afford to buy every CD from every band I like.
For smaller bands, getting known is the most important. It's what gets them bigger gigs, better labels, better production, better press coverage, better invitations to festivals, better endorsement deals... There's a very strong analogy with start ups there : focus on growth, take VC money, and you'll get the conversion rate sorted out when you're bigger.
Not in the lean-startup movement!
But now how does a smaller band sustain themselves if they don't want to sign with a major label? It now almost forces them to if they ever want to make a living in music.
personally, i'm with you. in-store sales are a red herring.
for the entire history of music -- aside from the last 60 years or so -- musicians have been paid for performances or on commission. music, my friends, is a service, not a product. and it has been for century upon century.
it's really this recent machination created by the recording industry that is the anomaly. music piracy is really just the correction back to the mean.
What does it matter if making a living as a musician through record sales is a historical anomaly? And can you really call it an anomaly if previous generations didn't have the option of selling records as the technology didn't exist? That's like saying "cars are a historically anomalous mode of transport". Great. So?
And by the way, in the early 20th century Broadway made a lot of money from sheet music. A product.
on the cars -- horses were bought and sold. trains. boats. you name it. buying a product that is transformed by technology is not the same as trying to take a service and transform it into a product through technology. you can augment the service (large margins) or automate the service (thin margins), but you can't turn it into a product.
on the sheet music -- precisely! that's the exact analogy. note the incredible consumer demand for sheet music today! it's not exactly a booming market outside of the niche training/instruction arena.
edit: btw, that last bit about the incredible demand today for sheet music was sarcasm. just in case it didn't come across....
Why not?
so, like the whole ideas and sharing flames analogy.
now, note, this does not pertain to products that perform services. that's a whole 'nuther ball of wax. but, in our example, that'd be like cloning the musician rather than the music.
This is exactly what a recording does, though -- it automates a performance.
the music recording is the manifestation of the performance/service. so, not viable as a product.
cd players perform the service of playing the music. (aka automates the performance) totally viable as a product.
think of it like a many-to-one relationship. the "one" is what can be productized. the "many" cannot. scarcity is key for what can be economically considered product-viable.
It's like the government tearing out everybody's plumbing in order that the outhouse builders can still make a living.
>And by the way, in the early 20th century Broadway made a lot of money from sheet music.
By harassing and imprisoning people who would play music without buying it first; a vile little historical chapter.
False dichotomy much?
Artists are unlikely to quit making art even in the absence of direct economic benefit to doing so. We'd lose some great art; we won't lose all of it.
But I sure am glad only musicians are asked to forfeit the benefits those 100 years brought us all.
To sustain a business, we'll need to figure out new services and revenue streams to take place of at least some of what's been going away for some time.
You're not really talking about a return, though. Under a true return to the previous state, there would be no piracy for the same reason there was no music piracy before recorded music: no recordings to pirate.
What you're talking about instead is still having music be a product, but just one that you expect should apparently always be given away for free.
Personally, I don't see why music can't be both a product and a service that people support by purchase. Piracy (particularly individual piracy) probably should be handled more like the article describes, but that doesn't mean the new norm should be completely free when it comes to recordings.
where are the true fans? they're where all the piracy is happening. what do true fans pay for? live performances and a chance to connect with the artists. hence, the epic money they're making in a place you wouldn't normally think of as a money-generating location.
>Musicmetric noticed Iron Maiden's placement and ran its own analytics for the band.
The firm wouldn't be the only one capable of drawing such conclusions.
I find the piece to be OK and interesting if not exhaustive and airtight.
I invite less familiar readers to watch their Flight 666 documentary on how they've toured all across the world, including countries where the Catholic Church has previously stepped in and banned them (over a song titled Number of the Beast, which is in fact, about doing battle _against_ the devil). Anyways, their music is a treat, and while Bruce can't belt out the same high notes he used to be able to, the sheer musicianship of the band is incredible; virtuosos the whole lot.
Up the irons, earth dogs!
Iron Maiden is a great example, a "thinking man's" metal band that often produced music inspired from famous books (Dune), movies (Where Eagles Dare) poems (Rime of the Ancient Mariner), and tv shows (The Prisoner). Their mascot is very distinguishable.
Brilliant move on his part.
I agree that since the article was just about someone adapting to changing markets, it was kind of an unneeded setup --- but just gloss over it - it's like how in wired articles where they talk about the kind of coffee table and rug the person has.
Is this supposed to be irony?
”record companies are suffering from ouright theft"
So are we talking about physical doors and physical shops selling CD's, or are we talking about online shops, or are we talking about record labels? Each has their own economic model.
A physical shops selling CD's is indeed having troubles, but its has verifiable nothing to do with pirates. Second hand shops get constantly bins of CD's, often reselling them for cents. They can barely give the CD away, and selling it as the main source of income is not a hot venture. The few ones that derive some income is those focusing on convenience, like convenience stores, malls, and petrol stations. CD positioned in the same place in a store as other impulse purchases, like candy.
Specialized online music shops has to compete with online shops that are more broad in their service. Internet has yet to favor small shops over large brand names. Almost all online shop for electronics also sell cd's, as its extremely cheap to have a catalog over.
Last we got record labels. Like with movies and games, publishers tend to be large and few between. There are not 10000 movie publishers in the UK (what I know of). There are not 10000 game publishers. Why should there exist 10000 music publishers? Whats the business model that support such diverse number of publishers?
I'm sure many that still own independent record shops will disagree, including my friend who happens to still work for once which is still surviving.
Americans didn't just somehow stop listening to music and buying it around the same time that the mp3 came out in the 1990's because they became enlightened and said "all of this music is crap, I'm not buying it anymore." No, most physical sales have been replaced by piracy and also digital purchases thanks to itunes, amazon mp3 after these stores were finally setup and gained traction, but music sales are overall down and that in part is due to piracy.
if its all about price, surely buy 10 for $1 is a should sell out in seconds? Heck, I would not be suprised if some places refused music CD's to be gifted to the store, just because its not worth the space.
CD and VHS is sharing the fate of obsolete physical medium. We did not stop watching moves when VHS died, nor did we become enlightened and said "all this films are crap". Nor did we say it when DVDs started to fall, nor should we claim piracy when the doomed VHS store had to switch to DVD, which had to switch to blueray, which had to become a streaming service.
> music sales are overall down
Fewer people buy a full track compilation CD to get a single good song. Rather than spending $70, they spend $7 and get the song they want, or they spend a monthly fee and get unlimited songs each month.
If the overall music sales are down, its because the market has changed. I strongly doubt that the number of individual purchases has gone down at all, and would speculate that it has gone way way up. Feel free to contradict with number of songs sold and listened to by subscribing members, vs number of CD's sold in the 1990s.
Also I seem to remember in the early 90s rummaging thru second hand $1 bins of music. There is always excess crap or discs that are obscure and are hard to move.
This is now false, from what I've read. In the last year or so, recording revenues started rising again. Which means either lots of people started buying CDs again, or revenue gains from digital sales are greater than decreasing sales of physical media.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/technology/music-industry-...
A lot of people seem to have have looked at the steady decline in sales over the last decade or so and have assumed this means in a digital era, recordings as products are over. The CiteWorld Iron Maiden article hints at it (and the idea that all your act needs to enter this new era is an analytics package like MusicMetric analytics!). Some people are saying this in thread outright.
That conclusion is more than a little premature when all we've got to look it is a period which started out with adoption of digital music and the informal sharing/pirate economy getting way out in front of vendors... and then right as they did get onboard and we started to climb past the early birds on the adoption curve, we had the biggest economic crisis since the great depression (which tends take a bite out of disposable income and entertainment spending).
(I think there might also be a reactionary phenomenon at work in the tech community: because the content industry freaked out and insisted copyright control and revenues were more important than anything including software/internet freedoms and civil liberties, a lot of tech people seem to decided to fight back by taking the contrary position that copyright control/revenue isn't worth anything at all.)
It's not like there were no warning, no signs. When Internet took of, the very first great IP battle was against software piracy. Even an industry that has the technical means to prevent piracy didn't really prevail, why would the music industry win it? Studying the struggles of the software industry could have learned them a lot on what was going to happen, and given them some leads on how to evolve: hardware protection with dongles can be translated in improved goodies and packaging; the shareware (ID Software, anyone?) model can be translated in crowd-founded music like My major company. They could even take a look at what the gaming industry is doing nowadays: subscription and micro-transactions.
But let's talk about radio broadcasting and tape recorders, because that might actually be an example of where we reached a reasonable equilibrium on this. It was understood that people did use them to get copies of recordings they didn't buy, but everybody learned to live with that, and the norm remained that to legitimately obtain a recording, you bought it.
Software's like that too. Nobody's suggested the time for charging for software of any kind is over, that the end of software development is a service not a product. Some people choose to emphasize services (which is fine), some people choose the product route. Some people do both.
Many who choose the product route do try for some defense against piracy -- it's the lock on the door of your house that you know can be broken with enough effort, but is still a good idea. Everybody knows there's still some piracy anyway, but the norm stays that software publishers can claim the right to have their stuff purchased.
That's what I think we should be going towards for a healthy music industry.
"After all, fans can't download a concert…”
What about live bootleg recordings?
But they cannot download the concert experience.
While of course not accounting for 100% of his success, I think his strategy was simply brilliant.
Anyway, Iron Maiden is a very clever band. Never seen a band with more merchandising. Also, they play games with their fans. This is a nice example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reincarnation_of_Benjamin_B...
SO MANY Iron Maiden shirts. its ridiculous