For Taylor Swift, the Future of Music Is a Love Story
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
Paul Graham's nightmare scenario...the entire adult world becomes a high school popularity contest, forever.
Let's talk semantics. Who is an artist?
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts, and/or demonstrating an art. -Wiki
"The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination,... to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power:" - New Oxford American Dictionary
So then one could say that art is simply the human expression of beauty.
So, if someone doesn't find any beauty if the work of Taylor Swift, perhaps she's not an artist to them. Not that absurd considering beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Fans and followers will make one an artist, not art alone.
The creation of art is a necessary, but not sufficient requirement to becoming a successful modern artist. For that, you need art and fans, both of which TSwift has in abundance.
Side ramble: I've never understood why people paint "real" bands as being lo-fi, guttural, punk and romantic. It's a goddamn privelege to afford all that equipment. Here's your true punk: pirate Ableton and upload a tune to YouTube for free.
Back to the point, for a lot of styles, the only point of a label is marketing. But this can be a very useful tool -- even just acting as a quality filter is useful.
I know people doing electro, and they pay people to do this job. It is really hard to do it correctly.
Even people like DeadMau5 and Daft Punk do not do the mix/master by themselves. They just monitor the people doing it (look at some of their interviews).
This is happening on Bandcamp already. A smaller label called Jade Tree put their entire catalog up there and as a fan of the label it was awesome to see them do this.
Back to your point with labels, they do benefit the artist despite it seeming like they don't. While 360 deals may be worse for the artist the labels provide them with a recording studio, mixer, producer, distribution, endless supply of industry contacts, merchandising companies, etc.
> We all know that bootleg DVD stands are doing something illegal, but the internet literally went black to protest SOPA, a law designed to crack down on digital bootleggers.
That paragraph completely misses the point about the SOPA protests.
Reminds me of how Louis CK under advise from George Carlin (I believe) throws out his material and starts fresh every year.
For creative people now, the key will be those who continue to be creative, not those attempting to ride on one creation to the end.
The same is happening in the mobile world in app stores now. People expect to get the initial offering, and then see continuous improvement through their free updates for life.
How will people manage to get their continuing creativity and effort supported in this market?
edit: as I recall, the demand for tickets was so great it crashed the bar's website. So Louis added a third show that night to accommodate as many people as possible.
What's happening in the mobile world is in-app purchase.Where you are coerced into buying digital goods one way or another. And it's coming to non-gaming apps,trust me.That's the future.
As for Taylor Swift,she represents everything that is wrong with the music industry.She is a mass market product,not an artist.
But one day she'll be living in a big ol' city and all you're ever gonna be is mean.. :)
definition of coerce is "persuade (an unwilling person) to do something by using force or threats." Obviously there are no threats or force applied by the app developers to sell digital goods.
Not a fair characterization, IMHO. She writes her own songs, and manages her own career. She might have mass market appeal, but I don't see how you can argue she's not a legitimate artist.
Just because she is referred to as an artist by an industry attempting to profit from her production does not defacto her as such. Perhaps Taylor is just a shrewd business person who has a natural understanding of what has strong social appeal. What if she openly admit that was her intent? Would you still call her an artist? I would not, and I imagine a great many others wouldn't either. There is a lot to being an artist and this automatic labeling is misleading and perhaps, if you are extra paranoid, nefarious in intent.
Music in the form of a physical or digital copy of a recorded track is not rare. Album pricing is based on supply and demand. The latter has decreased significantly in the past decade. Short of pulling a Wu-Tang[1], it would be futile for artists to try to fight market forces.
If Swift really wants to discuss the value of music in the context of music as an important, rare art form, focusing on what consumers pay for physical and digital copies of recorded music makes about as much sense as valuing Monet's Water Lilies series based on how much Water Lilies posters sell for.
There are several rights associated with music and people have been buying and selling these rights for decades. Royalty Exchange[2] is an online marketplace for these transactions, and there are even focused funds[3] that essentially give investors the ability to treat these rights as an asset class.
Savvy artists focus first and foremost on ownership, not what consumers pay for a song or album.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/for-5-mi...
Second, and most importantly, not all royalties are tied to CD and digital music sales. These are mechanical royalties. There are also performance and synchronization royalties, which can be significant. It's is entirely possible, for instance, for a song that generates little in the way of mechanical royalties to generate eye-popping performance or synchronization royalties.
The point she does make, though, is that art IS rare, and I agree with her. Sure, there's lots of art. But the moment when you find someone who makes something that really means a lot to you for no particular reason, that's valuable in the new music era.
Especially since one of the changes of the network age is that music is no longer resellable like a CD/tape/record. That means it no longer has value once you buy it.
That's evidence that net music IS a service, like water or gas, just something you pipe into your house to get consumed and used. (You can't practically re-sell the water from your tap, nor your gas or electricity).
On the flip side though, it has to be more than that, because different glasses of water don't tell stories like songs do. Hmm Deep Thoughts.
Art is a service. You might view an individual movie as a "Good" but I view a director's filmography as a living, breathing thing. If you want a technical term, you can consider an oeuvre a form of Marshall McLuhans's cool media.
In addition, if I'm paying for media, I want the rights to remix, reuse, and sell derivative work. Period. No DRM, no license restrictions. Just freedom.
Her point re: 'people bonding with an artist over a lifetime' may well be salient. I must admit a touch of that with zeppelin / prodigy etc.