Music is entertainment, and people want to be entertained. The great artists know this and create persona and brands that transcend everyday life. To a large degree, it is all make believe. If you want to be successful as a artist, you have to entertain people and make them feel you and want to associate with your brand. The trick is to create art (music) and a persona that reflects you and what you are all about.
Why Should Anyone Care about You?
Ask yourself the following questions until you find the answers. To create your brand, take a hard look at what you are good at and what you stand for. What is the overall mission behind your music? What are you trying to say? What is your message? Why should anyone care? What do you want them to remember?
All the best bands, all the best music, are manufactured, thought up, packaged, and brought to market. What is your vision? How do you see yourself, how do you want to project yourself onto your audience, and what are your ultimate goals?
You want to create a musical “character” that people can relate to. They don’t have to like you or want to be like you, they just need to be able to understand what you are about. Think of your favorite artists and what their character is like. Prince, Kid Rock, Jay-Z, Sting, Usher, Marilyn Manson, Norah Jones - all have personas that they bring to market in different ways. It is pretty easy to see what they are all about and this is achieved by careful packaging.
Present a Genuine and Unique Story
It is very important that your character and your story be genuine. That does not mean that you shouldn’t make something up, or project an image that is much bigger than life, but there has to be some substance behind it and something that is a reflection of you and what you are all about. You will have to live with the brand that you create, so make it something that you are comfortable with. What do you believe in, what is important to you, where is the well from which you are going to pull your material?
It is also important to be unique. If you are “just like” another band then it is going to be hard to differentiate yourself and stick in people’s minds. How can you be different? This is especially important when entering the marketplace. There is so much music out there, and so much noise to cut through, that you have to give people something to grab onto and really notice if you are going to have any chance of breaking through. Something different is the key.
Find a Need and Align Yourself
Many artists/writers sing and write about issues that they believe in and create songs that can create a difference in someone’s life. This does not have to be your entire career or the focus of your brand, but creating music that reflects societal issues and challenges can help you find and build an audience. Music has a long history of driving social change. What do you care about?
By thinking through these issues and trying to wrestle a brand definition in your mind, it will help you with all the rest of the marketing and promotion that you have to do. You will know where you are coming from, what your message is, and how to present yourself. It will guide the creative work of designing your packaging, web site, videos, messaging, and publicity campaigns, and give you direction and substance.
Develop Direct Relationships With Your Fans
One of the greatest advances in music marketing and promotion is your ability to go directly to your fans and engage with them in information exchange and commerce. For the most part, the major record labels of the past thought that their customers were WalMart and Tower Records. Even the big direct music operations like Columbia House and BMG Direct did nothing to connect artists and fans. Now, all that has changed, and you, as an artist/writer or business person, can go directly to your fans and engage them primarily through the Internet, PCs, and mobile devices.
By developing direct online relationships with your fans, you can make and keep more money, and begin to amass a wealth of data on their buying habits, preferences, shared interests, and behavior. This data can be extremely valuable to you as you expand your fan base and grow your musician business.
There are many ways to leverage direct-to-fan marketing, and the advantages are powerful:
Use widgets and social media to market your music all over and leverage your fans as distributors
Use email, twitter and text messaging to directly market your music to fans.
Leverage the power of the web to create links to your music everywhere.
Have ownership of the fan relationship and develop it over time. Drive people to your web site.
Gather and build the data required to build lifetime fan value and drive your musician business.
Integrate your marketing across social media with widgets, email, and SMS.
Provide instant gratification to your fans and a connection between you and them.
There are many companies available to help you address the direct-to-fan opportunities, and you can choose among them to meet your needs including Topspin, Nimbit, Bandzoogle, Artistdata, Mozes and lots of others. You may find that one company has everything that you are looking for, or that you are better off picking and choosing certain features and capabilities from different vendors to build your own direct marketing machine. There has never been a better time to take control of your career and drive it forward.
Source
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Monday, April 12, 2010
RIAA spent $1.38 million lobbying Congress in 4Q
The Recording Industry Association of America, the lobbying arm of the major recording companies, spent $1.38 million lobbying the U.S. government in the fourth quarter of 2009.
The amount is less than the $1.62 million it spent in the same quarter of 2008 and the $1.44 million it spent in the third quarter of 2009, according to a filing the RIAA made Jan. 29.
Among other issues, the organization has been lobbying strongly in favor of the Performance Rights Act, which would make terrestrial radio stations pay a royalty to performers and recording companies.
Previously, they only had to pay songwriters and publishers for playing their songs on air. If the bill becomes law, it could create a pool of hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue.
From October through December, the RIAA only lobbied in Congress, according to the report submitted to the House clerk's office.
Source
The amount is less than the $1.62 million it spent in the same quarter of 2008 and the $1.44 million it spent in the third quarter of 2009, according to a filing the RIAA made Jan. 29.
Among other issues, the organization has been lobbying strongly in favor of the Performance Rights Act, which would make terrestrial radio stations pay a royalty to performers and recording companies.
Previously, they only had to pay songwriters and publishers for playing their songs on air. If the bill becomes law, it could create a pool of hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue.
From October through December, the RIAA only lobbied in Congress, according to the report submitted to the House clerk's office.
Source
Obama administration endorses performance royalties
The Commerce Department sent a "views" letter Thursday to the Senate Judiciary Committee that expressed the administration's "strong support" for the record labels' No. 1 priority: legislation (S 379 in the Senate, HR 848 in the House) that would require radio stations to pay royalties to recording artists. It's not a huge surprise, yet it's still a win for the Recording Industry Assn. of America and performers in their pitched battle with the National Assn. of Broadcasters. (Download the letter here)
At issue is whether sound recordings should carry the same performance rights as musical compositions. Today, sound recordings have performance rights online and on satellite radio, enabling labels and recording artists to collect royalties from webcasters and Sirius XM. But those rights do not extend to over-the-air broadcasts, so local radio stations pay royalties only to songwriters. Opponents of the legislation call it a tax that could crush many stations. They also contend that the promotion artists receive from stations that play their music is compensation enough.
In Thursday's letter, the Commerce Department's general counsel, Cameron F. Kerry, noted that the department had urged lawmakers several times since the 1970s to create a public-performance right for sound recordings. Such a right would be "a matter of fundamental fairness," Kerry wrote, and would bring the U.S. into compliance with the rest of the world. Because radio stations here don't pay performance royalties to foreign artists, foreign stations withhold royalties they would otherwise be paying U.S. artists. In addition, Kerry wrote, extending the performance right for sound recordings "would provide a level playing field for all broadcasters to compete in the current environment of rapid technological change, including the Internet, satellite and terrestrial broadcasters."
The NAB responded, as usual, by blasting the RIAA. Said Executive Vice President Dennis Wharton:
We're disappointed the Commerce Department would embrace legislation that would kill jobs in the U.S. and send hundreds of millions of dollars to foreign record labels that have historically exploited artists whose careers were nurtured by American radio stations. The good news is that 260 members of the House of Representatives and 27 U.S. Senators are standing with hometown radio stations and against the RIAA.
Last year the judiciary committees in the House and Senate approved HR 848 and S 379, respectively, but neither bill has advanced further. They both enjoy bipartisan backing, which is unusual for this Congress. But then, the opponents are bipartisan as well. Stay tuned.
Source
At issue is whether sound recordings should carry the same performance rights as musical compositions. Today, sound recordings have performance rights online and on satellite radio, enabling labels and recording artists to collect royalties from webcasters and Sirius XM. But those rights do not extend to over-the-air broadcasts, so local radio stations pay royalties only to songwriters. Opponents of the legislation call it a tax that could crush many stations. They also contend that the promotion artists receive from stations that play their music is compensation enough.
In Thursday's letter, the Commerce Department's general counsel, Cameron F. Kerry, noted that the department had urged lawmakers several times since the 1970s to create a public-performance right for sound recordings. Such a right would be "a matter of fundamental fairness," Kerry wrote, and would bring the U.S. into compliance with the rest of the world. Because radio stations here don't pay performance royalties to foreign artists, foreign stations withhold royalties they would otherwise be paying U.S. artists. In addition, Kerry wrote, extending the performance right for sound recordings "would provide a level playing field for all broadcasters to compete in the current environment of rapid technological change, including the Internet, satellite and terrestrial broadcasters."
The NAB responded, as usual, by blasting the RIAA. Said Executive Vice President Dennis Wharton:
We're disappointed the Commerce Department would embrace legislation that would kill jobs in the U.S. and send hundreds of millions of dollars to foreign record labels that have historically exploited artists whose careers were nurtured by American radio stations. The good news is that 260 members of the House of Representatives and 27 U.S. Senators are standing with hometown radio stations and against the RIAA.
Last year the judiciary committees in the House and Senate approved HR 848 and S 379, respectively, but neither bill has advanced further. They both enjoy bipartisan backing, which is unusual for this Congress. But then, the opponents are bipartisan as well. Stay tuned.
Source
Pandora's success means more bucks for artists
For years, Pandora and other Web radio stations fought to reduce the royalty rates they were required to pay artists and record labels.
Last July, the music industry and Webcasters reached an agreement and it now appears both sides are reaping the benefits. On Friday, SoundExchange, the group appointed by Congress to collect royalties on behalf of artists and copyright owners, said it has begun distributing $51.7 million, the largest quarter the nonprofit group has ever recorded.
The amount represents a 135 percent increase over the same period last year and is nearly $10 million larger than the previous largest quarter. In addition to Web radio stations, SoundExchange collected the money from satellite radio and cable TV music channels.
The negotiated agreement on digital royalty rates called for large ad-supported radio services, such as Pandora, to either share 25 percent of revenue with the music industry, or pay a per-stream rate of 0.08 cent retroactive to 2006, whichever is greater. The terms called for a number of rate increases until topping out in 2015 at 0.14 cent.
Sure, SoundExchange stuffed its piggybank, but the settlement also appears to have worked out for Pandora. The Web's top radio station said in January that the private company posted its first quarterly profit last year. The number of Pandora's subscribers has reached 48 million.
Westergren told Digital Music News last month that Pandora accounts for 44 percent of SoundEchange's non-interactive streaming hours. Non-interactive streams describe when a service chooses the songs that are heard--similar to traditional radio. Interactive streams are when users are enabled to choose the songs. Westergren said Pandora and SoundExchange's success is largely due to the fact that a settlement was reached.
"It is not that absent a settlement there wasn't an established fee structure in place (by the Copyright Royalty Board)," Westergren wrote in an e-mail. "It's more that absent a settlement no one would have survived to pay it."
Prior to last summer, Westergren had warned many times that without pricing concessions from the music industry, Pandora and others would have been forced to close their doors.
Should traditional radio pay, too?
Maybe traditional radio stations and the music industry can learn something from that deal.
Over-the-air broadcasters pay publishing rights but don't pay royalties to artists or copyright owners. That's a significant competitive advantage over Pandora and other Webcasters. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is backing legislation in Congress called the Performance Rights Act, that would require traditional broadcasters to pony up.
"(SoundExchange's record quarter) is great news for the music community and a sign of the importance of these platforms to the future of music," said Mitch Bainwol, chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America. "It also highlights the lack of parity in the marketplace. Why should one form of radio appropriately compensate artists and labels, but not the other? That's exactly why the Obama administration said recently that there should be a performance rights for AM and FM radio."
Last month, the Obama administration said it would offer "strong support" for the music industry's efforts in requiring traditional broadcasters to pay royalty rates similar to those collected from online stations.
Dennis Wharton, a spokesman for the National Association of Broadcasters, said the RIAA wasn't interested in parity or fairness. He said the group that represents the four largest recording companies wants money.
"All of those other platforms combined, if you added up their listener base, would pale in comparison to the 239 million listeners of free local radio every week," Wharton said. "The bottom line is that this is a money grab by foreign-run record labels whose business model was destroyed by the Internet and they are looking to bite the radio hand that has nurtured both the artists and labels for the last 80 years."
Source
Last July, the music industry and Webcasters reached an agreement and it now appears both sides are reaping the benefits. On Friday, SoundExchange, the group appointed by Congress to collect royalties on behalf of artists and copyright owners, said it has begun distributing $51.7 million, the largest quarter the nonprofit group has ever recorded.
The amount represents a 135 percent increase over the same period last year and is nearly $10 million larger than the previous largest quarter. In addition to Web radio stations, SoundExchange collected the money from satellite radio and cable TV music channels.
The negotiated agreement on digital royalty rates called for large ad-supported radio services, such as Pandora, to either share 25 percent of revenue with the music industry, or pay a per-stream rate of 0.08 cent retroactive to 2006, whichever is greater. The terms called for a number of rate increases until topping out in 2015 at 0.14 cent.
Sure, SoundExchange stuffed its piggybank, but the settlement also appears to have worked out for Pandora. The Web's top radio station said in January that the private company posted its first quarterly profit last year. The number of Pandora's subscribers has reached 48 million.
Westergren told Digital Music News last month that Pandora accounts for 44 percent of SoundEchange's non-interactive streaming hours. Non-interactive streams describe when a service chooses the songs that are heard--similar to traditional radio. Interactive streams are when users are enabled to choose the songs. Westergren said Pandora and SoundExchange's success is largely due to the fact that a settlement was reached.
"It is not that absent a settlement there wasn't an established fee structure in place (by the Copyright Royalty Board)," Westergren wrote in an e-mail. "It's more that absent a settlement no one would have survived to pay it."
Prior to last summer, Westergren had warned many times that without pricing concessions from the music industry, Pandora and others would have been forced to close their doors.
Should traditional radio pay, too?
Maybe traditional radio stations and the music industry can learn something from that deal.
Over-the-air broadcasters pay publishing rights but don't pay royalties to artists or copyright owners. That's a significant competitive advantage over Pandora and other Webcasters. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is backing legislation in Congress called the Performance Rights Act, that would require traditional broadcasters to pony up.
"(SoundExchange's record quarter) is great news for the music community and a sign of the importance of these platforms to the future of music," said Mitch Bainwol, chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America. "It also highlights the lack of parity in the marketplace. Why should one form of radio appropriately compensate artists and labels, but not the other? That's exactly why the Obama administration said recently that there should be a performance rights for AM and FM radio."
Last month, the Obama administration said it would offer "strong support" for the music industry's efforts in requiring traditional broadcasters to pay royalty rates similar to those collected from online stations.
Dennis Wharton, a spokesman for the National Association of Broadcasters, said the RIAA wasn't interested in parity or fairness. He said the group that represents the four largest recording companies wants money.
"All of those other platforms combined, if you added up their listener base, would pale in comparison to the 239 million listeners of free local radio every week," Wharton said. "The bottom line is that this is a money grab by foreign-run record labels whose business model was destroyed by the Internet and they are looking to bite the radio hand that has nurtured both the artists and labels for the last 80 years."
Source
How a generation of file-sharers is ruining the future of entertainment
It’s official: 2009 was the worst year for the record labels in a decade. So was 2008, and before that 2007 and 2006. In fact, industry revenues have been declining for the past 10 years. Digital sales are growing, but not as fast as traditional sales are falling.
Maybe that’s because illegal downloads are so easy. People have been pirating intellectual property for centuries, but it used to be a time-consuming way to generate markedly inferior copies. These days, high-quality copies are effortless. According to the Pew Internet project, people use file-sharing software more often than they do iTunes and other legal shops.
I’d like to believe, as many of my friends seem to, that this practice won’t do much harm. But even as I’ve heard over the past decade that things weren’t that bad, that the music industry was moving to a new, better business model, each year’s numbers have been worse. Maybe it’s time to admit that we may never find a way to reconcile consumers who want free entertainment with creators who want to get paid.
Reflecting on this problem, the computational neuroscientist Anders Sandberg recently noted that although we have strong instinctive feelings about ownership, intellectual property doesn’t always fit into that framework. The harm done by individual acts of piracy is too small and too abstract. “The nature of intellectual property,” he wrote, “makes it hard to maintain the social and empathic constraints that keep us from taking each other’s things.”
In other words, we kept to our rules about IP as long as it was attached to a physical object: a book, a CD, a videotape. Now that it consists of endlessly replicable electrons, we are ethically unmoored. Younger generations expect music and now video to be free—and when it isn’t, they feel entitled to take it anyway. College students see no problem with downloading music without paying for it—an attitude even more prevalent among younger students. Pew’s surveys indicate that 75 percent of respondents aged 12 to 17 agree that “file-sharing is so easy to do, it’s unrealistic to expect people not to do it.” They are Generation Free, and they just might kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
Optimists argue that the music industry has coped before with disruptive new technology. Until recordings came along, songs, not singers, were Big Business. So while copyright law allocated royalties for performances, it said nothing about what happened when you recorded those performances and sold thousands of copies of the recording. Only after protracted legal maneuvering did we work out an arrangement that allowed both businesses to thrive.
Can we do it again? Can the market evolve fast enough to keep up with the expectations, and predations, of Generation Free? Even if the music industry manages, what about all the other businesses that depend on intellectual property—including (gulp) my own?
In 2007, Radiohead famously allowed their extremely loyal fan base to download their new album, In Rainbows, on a pay-what-you-like scheme. Sixty-two percent of those who did so liked to pay nothing. The rest paid an average of just $6 apiece. And more fans downloaded the album from file-sharing services than from the band’s Web site.
Pish-tosh, say the optimists; Radiohead made money, didn’t they? The optimists offer alternative explications for the sorry state of the recording business: it’s a cyclical downturn, plus all the music from the big labels just happens to suck right now, and anyway MP3s are becoming loss leaders for concerts.
True, collectors switching from cassette and vinyl to CD swelled the music industry’s coffers in the 1980s and ’90s, so the eventual softening of sales is hardly surprising. The concert industry is indeed booming despite the downturn. And people who admit to downloading music illegally may actually spend more money on recorded music than people who don’t. One assumes they plump up concert revenues as well.
Yet even if die-hard music buffs spend more on albums than the guy who buys one box set a year, they’re still buying less than they used to. Moreover, spending less on recorded music doesn’t necessarily mean you spend more on shows; the savings could just as easily go toward beer. And even avid music lovers in urban areas can see only a few shows a week. To raise revenue, you have to get new customers in the door or raise ticket prices.
Concert-promotion mogul Michael Rapino has said that just 2 percent of Americans attend more than a couple of concerts a year, which leaves plenty of room to increase attendance, but also suggests that most people don’t particularly care for live music. It’s far from clear that free MP3s increase the number of concertgoers, instead of just changing the mix of shows they attend.
Higher ticket prices are already a fact—but not necessarily for the ordinary bands that grind their way through small and medium-size venues. In 1990, when I first started going to see live music, you paid $5 for a new act, $10 for solid performers, and $15 to $20 for hot favorites. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about what I still pay.
Tickets to major shows can cost hundreds. But that doesn’t promise much for the future of music. Here are the top 10 touring acts of 2009, according to Pollstar: U2, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John and Billy Joel, Britney Spears, AC/DC, Kenny Chesney, the Jonas Brothers, the Dave Matthews Band, Fleetwood Mac, and Metallica. For most of the demographic that attends these shows, sex, drugs, and rock and roll now means putting on a Beatles album and popping some Viagra—or asking Mom for permission to see an R-rated movie. All that these blockbuster concert revenues really tell us is that Baby Boomers have credit cards and their children have access to them.
To be sure, today’s 20-something file-sharer may someday pay $200 to watch Vampire Weekend rock the Astrodome. Or maybe not; the Internet tends to fragment audiences. Generation X, of which I am a member, was probably the last to grow up with the Top 40 and only a few TV stations—and the kind of common taste that this structure instilled. The bounty of the World Wide Web encourages niche interests. If you look at the Recording Industry Association of America’s top albums, only two of the acts who debuted this decade have sold 10 million albums, and one of them was Norah Jones, who has deep fogy appeal.
This fragmentation has been good news for performers like Jonathan Coulton, who makes a decent living selling quirky songs and related merchandise on his Web site. But the broader music industry, like other entertainment fields, has always worked on a tournament model: a lot of starving artists hoping to be among the few who make it big. What happens to the supply of willing musicians when the prize is an endless slog through medium-size concerts at $25 a head?
Moreover, whatever the sins of the big labels, they invest heavily in finding, promoting, and recording new music. Thom Yorke, Radiohead’s lead singer, has said that their experiment wouldn’t have worked as well as it did if they hadn’t already been through “the whole mill” of the old system. People tend to underestimate the extent to which the old industry supports things like … concert attendance.
These problems will even more deeply afflict the other industries that depend on IP. A smaller, more amateur music business is possible, if not optimal. But I doubt that YouTube can substitute for Hollywood in a world where “cheap” indie films can cost millions. Children’s films might be made at a loss to sell action figures—but how do you finance The Godfather? With a co-branded line of frozen cannoli?
As for the publishing industry, a year is a long stretch to spend typing without some prospect of financial return. Time was when authors could make money from sidelines such as public speaking; Mark Twain pulled himself out of bankruptcy by going on the lecture circuit. But Twain wasn’t competing with home-theater systems. Some journalists manage to make big money from corporate speaking fees, but that’s not an option for novelists or poets.
We have yet to figure out how to make IP work in the new era. Even if we don’t, people will still make pictures, sing songs, and write stories—just not as frequently, or as lavishly. But even if we do, file-sharing will probably alter the form of the works we do create. The popular arts may come to look more like the rest of the Internet: many labors of love produced quickly and cheaply in spare moments, and a few high-end productions that can be monetized.
Forms are already changing. The movie industry is moving into 3-D, which is harder to reproduce at home. Studios are also relying more on blockbuster movies that maximize the theater experience—and the revenues they earn from toys and comic books.
When the printing press was invented, many monks mourned the decline of vellum and the loss of the illuminator’s art. They were right, of course—but they were even more wrong. Maybe something better is coming, even as the transition racks the nerves of writers and artists. As the old joke goes, we may be losing something on every unit—but perhaps we’ll make it up in volume.
Source
Maybe that’s because illegal downloads are so easy. People have been pirating intellectual property for centuries, but it used to be a time-consuming way to generate markedly inferior copies. These days, high-quality copies are effortless. According to the Pew Internet project, people use file-sharing software more often than they do iTunes and other legal shops.
I’d like to believe, as many of my friends seem to, that this practice won’t do much harm. But even as I’ve heard over the past decade that things weren’t that bad, that the music industry was moving to a new, better business model, each year’s numbers have been worse. Maybe it’s time to admit that we may never find a way to reconcile consumers who want free entertainment with creators who want to get paid.
Reflecting on this problem, the computational neuroscientist Anders Sandberg recently noted that although we have strong instinctive feelings about ownership, intellectual property doesn’t always fit into that framework. The harm done by individual acts of piracy is too small and too abstract. “The nature of intellectual property,” he wrote, “makes it hard to maintain the social and empathic constraints that keep us from taking each other’s things.”
In other words, we kept to our rules about IP as long as it was attached to a physical object: a book, a CD, a videotape. Now that it consists of endlessly replicable electrons, we are ethically unmoored. Younger generations expect music and now video to be free—and when it isn’t, they feel entitled to take it anyway. College students see no problem with downloading music without paying for it—an attitude even more prevalent among younger students. Pew’s surveys indicate that 75 percent of respondents aged 12 to 17 agree that “file-sharing is so easy to do, it’s unrealistic to expect people not to do it.” They are Generation Free, and they just might kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
Optimists argue that the music industry has coped before with disruptive new technology. Until recordings came along, songs, not singers, were Big Business. So while copyright law allocated royalties for performances, it said nothing about what happened when you recorded those performances and sold thousands of copies of the recording. Only after protracted legal maneuvering did we work out an arrangement that allowed both businesses to thrive.
Can we do it again? Can the market evolve fast enough to keep up with the expectations, and predations, of Generation Free? Even if the music industry manages, what about all the other businesses that depend on intellectual property—including (gulp) my own?
In 2007, Radiohead famously allowed their extremely loyal fan base to download their new album, In Rainbows, on a pay-what-you-like scheme. Sixty-two percent of those who did so liked to pay nothing. The rest paid an average of just $6 apiece. And more fans downloaded the album from file-sharing services than from the band’s Web site.
Pish-tosh, say the optimists; Radiohead made money, didn’t they? The optimists offer alternative explications for the sorry state of the recording business: it’s a cyclical downturn, plus all the music from the big labels just happens to suck right now, and anyway MP3s are becoming loss leaders for concerts.
True, collectors switching from cassette and vinyl to CD swelled the music industry’s coffers in the 1980s and ’90s, so the eventual softening of sales is hardly surprising. The concert industry is indeed booming despite the downturn. And people who admit to downloading music illegally may actually spend more money on recorded music than people who don’t. One assumes they plump up concert revenues as well.
Yet even if die-hard music buffs spend more on albums than the guy who buys one box set a year, they’re still buying less than they used to. Moreover, spending less on recorded music doesn’t necessarily mean you spend more on shows; the savings could just as easily go toward beer. And even avid music lovers in urban areas can see only a few shows a week. To raise revenue, you have to get new customers in the door or raise ticket prices.
Concert-promotion mogul Michael Rapino has said that just 2 percent of Americans attend more than a couple of concerts a year, which leaves plenty of room to increase attendance, but also suggests that most people don’t particularly care for live music. It’s far from clear that free MP3s increase the number of concertgoers, instead of just changing the mix of shows they attend.
Higher ticket prices are already a fact—but not necessarily for the ordinary bands that grind their way through small and medium-size venues. In 1990, when I first started going to see live music, you paid $5 for a new act, $10 for solid performers, and $15 to $20 for hot favorites. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about what I still pay.
Tickets to major shows can cost hundreds. But that doesn’t promise much for the future of music. Here are the top 10 touring acts of 2009, according to Pollstar: U2, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John and Billy Joel, Britney Spears, AC/DC, Kenny Chesney, the Jonas Brothers, the Dave Matthews Band, Fleetwood Mac, and Metallica. For most of the demographic that attends these shows, sex, drugs, and rock and roll now means putting on a Beatles album and popping some Viagra—or asking Mom for permission to see an R-rated movie. All that these blockbuster concert revenues really tell us is that Baby Boomers have credit cards and their children have access to them.
To be sure, today’s 20-something file-sharer may someday pay $200 to watch Vampire Weekend rock the Astrodome. Or maybe not; the Internet tends to fragment audiences. Generation X, of which I am a member, was probably the last to grow up with the Top 40 and only a few TV stations—and the kind of common taste that this structure instilled. The bounty of the World Wide Web encourages niche interests. If you look at the Recording Industry Association of America’s top albums, only two of the acts who debuted this decade have sold 10 million albums, and one of them was Norah Jones, who has deep fogy appeal.
This fragmentation has been good news for performers like Jonathan Coulton, who makes a decent living selling quirky songs and related merchandise on his Web site. But the broader music industry, like other entertainment fields, has always worked on a tournament model: a lot of starving artists hoping to be among the few who make it big. What happens to the supply of willing musicians when the prize is an endless slog through medium-size concerts at $25 a head?
Moreover, whatever the sins of the big labels, they invest heavily in finding, promoting, and recording new music. Thom Yorke, Radiohead’s lead singer, has said that their experiment wouldn’t have worked as well as it did if they hadn’t already been through “the whole mill” of the old system. People tend to underestimate the extent to which the old industry supports things like … concert attendance.
These problems will even more deeply afflict the other industries that depend on IP. A smaller, more amateur music business is possible, if not optimal. But I doubt that YouTube can substitute for Hollywood in a world where “cheap” indie films can cost millions. Children’s films might be made at a loss to sell action figures—but how do you finance The Godfather? With a co-branded line of frozen cannoli?
As for the publishing industry, a year is a long stretch to spend typing without some prospect of financial return. Time was when authors could make money from sidelines such as public speaking; Mark Twain pulled himself out of bankruptcy by going on the lecture circuit. But Twain wasn’t competing with home-theater systems. Some journalists manage to make big money from corporate speaking fees, but that’s not an option for novelists or poets.
We have yet to figure out how to make IP work in the new era. Even if we don’t, people will still make pictures, sing songs, and write stories—just not as frequently, or as lavishly. But even if we do, file-sharing will probably alter the form of the works we do create. The popular arts may come to look more like the rest of the Internet: many labors of love produced quickly and cheaply in spare moments, and a few high-end productions that can be monetized.
Forms are already changing. The movie industry is moving into 3-D, which is harder to reproduce at home. Studios are also relying more on blockbuster movies that maximize the theater experience—and the revenues they earn from toys and comic books.
When the printing press was invented, many monks mourned the decline of vellum and the loss of the illuminator’s art. They were right, of course—but they were even more wrong. Maybe something better is coming, even as the transition racks the nerves of writers and artists. As the old joke goes, we may be losing something on every unit—but perhaps we’ll make it up in volume.
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