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The Music Biz Is the New Book Industry
jonerik writes "The new issue of New York Magazine includes this intriguing article by Michael Wolff which makes the case that the music biz will soon be going the way of the book industry. Arguing that larger-than-life characters such as Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Dorothy Parker were the rock stars of their time, Wolff points out that 'where before you'd be happy only at gold and platinum levels, soon you'll be grateful if you have a release that sells 30,000 or 40,000 units -- that will be your bread and butter. You'll sweat every sale and dollar. Other aspects of the business will also contract -- most of the perks and largesse and extravagance will dry up completely. The glamour, the influence, the youth, the hipness, the hookers, the drugs -- gone. Instead, it will be a low-margin, consolidated, quaintly anachronistic business, catering to an aging clientele, without much impact on an otherwise thriving culture awash in music that only incidentally will come from the music industry.' Wolff also relates a recent lunch he had at Sony Music in which a sort of paralyzed acceptance had set in; 'The recent past was very bad; the future was likely to be worse. All money earned from here on in would be harder to earn. This felt like acceptance to me: We simply don't know what to do.'"
Being a musician the thing I find most wonderful about music is that it can cross all genre's. Every CD that is made (with the exception of spoken word in some cases) can be enjoyed by anyone anywhere in the world. With book sales there is often language barriers or even literacy barriers. You don't have to know anything to enjoy music, and that will keep the music industry alive.
That being said, I would have no problem with the "death of the rockstar." Have the musicians creating music out of passion, not out of greed. Maybe the only people to get hurt by this would be the big scary record companies.
I would say that the interesting thing that was overlooked in this article was the fundamental role that music has played during the existence of the human race.
:)
Music has an ability to reach places that words often fail. The book business of course fundamentally depends on earning it's money from a customer base that is at least educated to the point of having a base reading level. Music doesn't require this at all.
Music finds a way to tap into the inner feelings that humans have and allows us to communicate direnctly if even for only a moment. We have grown up with music as a component of our daily lives, we will continue to consume it.
What will change is the pricing for sure. Things will be more reasonable, which will allow for more and wider competition.
All I can say for sure is that those kids hanging out at MTV during TRL are buying into an image and a way of life driven by the music ( no matter how misguided that may be)
Saying that the music biz will be extinct is like saying that there will be no more kids who discover Dark Side of the Moon and imagine that they are the first people to discover this cool music.
Music is just too important to humans. If the record industry knew this and took the time to drop the prices, I think they would make even more money and people wouldn't want to "borrow" the next Eminem record off the net...
Yeah, there are. About twenty or thiry of them. Everyone else sells dick.
The thing the author has missed is the trend in the publishing industry, which is moving more like the music industry, trying to aquire strangleholds on authors' works, doing deals with bookstores to charge authors for promotion and shelf space, and a whole bunch of nasty shit they've learned from EMI.
Seems like the "bleak" future described was also a fairly accurate description of the music industry prior to 1950. No real pop-superstars or bazillion-dollar promotional campaigns.
That's the way things were.. and we liked it!
The music industry could start earning more income, perhaps, by improving the quality of the music it generates.
Sure, production value has improved, but today's music sounds much like a movie with great special effects but no plot; it lacks substance. The industry has concentrated so hard on vacuous marketing techniques aimed at various demographics, as well as absurd lobbying activities amongst politicians that it should truly come as no surprise that folks have become disgusted with today's music, by and large.
Truly, look at what they're coming up with these days; the better tunes are rehashed oldies (where they've taken advantage of improved production techniques to bring you better sounding copies of old tunes that folks are familiar with). And even some of those are downright offensive with 'corporate appeal'.
I could only think of two more possible solutions to their problems (although it may be too late).
First, recognize that the Baby Boomers are getting older. You aren't going to see that kind of explosive buying power again (at least not until the next major disaster that wipes out a third of the population, making room for another baby boom). So don't even bother. Go with a wider range of musicians and spend a little less money on production (something that's getting easier these days). Quick little hint: scarcity of resources breeds artistic endeavor. Some of the most clever bits of music ever crafted came from truly small production budgets. No need to starve their resources, though, just force your talent to grow their techniques and composition skills before exposing them to the big production dollars.
Second, instead of lobbying your congressman for these truly insulting and offensive abuses of law, put your money into the education system to improve the state of music education in our schools. If folks have no appreciation for music, what makes you think they're going to bother to listen to any of it? Branding? Today's youth barely grasps the concept of counterpoint (multiple melodies played on top of each other), can't appreciate a good groove (preferring an obnoxiously repetitive 'beat' instead), and do not have an iota of an appreciate for music without lyrics.
And so it goes.
"Here are the choices:
If you're providing free entertainment, which is obviously what the music business is doing, then you have to figure out some way to sell advertising to the people who are paying attention to your free music. But nobody seems to have any idea how that might be done. Or you can provide stuff that's free, and use the free stuff to promote something else of more value that people, you hope, will buy -- now called the "legitimate alternative." (Putting video on the CD is one of those ideas -- though, of course, you can file-share video too.) Or sell the CD at a level that makes it cheap enough to compete with free (free, after all, has its own costs for the consumer)."
Here's a more realistic choice:
You're rich, powerful, influential and arrogant. Theft of your product is rampant. You buy a Senator, say Senator Hollings from SC, and you have him draft a bill that forces all hardware and operating systems to incorporate some form of anti-coping technology. It becomes impossible to copy music/video files without hacked hardware. You make it illegal to run hacked hardware and vigorously prosecute those who have the audacity not to bow to your will.
Your sales remain high. Problem solved.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
or all the large corporations will end up ruling the world and we will all be slaves serving under their tyranny listening to Nsync 24/7 with little advertising devices implanted into our eyes and ears.
...or you could just stop listening to the radio altogether.
Personally, I can't wait for my own personal add implant! I love Nsync, and where's my coke?
I discovered the power of Frank, Patsy, Dean, Hank, Sammy, Tony and Bing about twelve years ago, and life's been groovy ever since. Do you know any radio stations where I can hear *that* 24/7? I didn't think so.
Hell, I just found out about Aqua and Vengaboys!
P.S. Who the hell is N'Sync?
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Get Real!
Music is a very individualistic art form. It isolates in a crowd.
You very rarely find li'l ol' grannies rockin' with "The Cramps" and "They Might Be Giants".
You rarely find bikers gassing on the latest "Conway Twitty" or "Boxcar Willy" CD.
I'd ruin an evening trying to find Mexicans really geting into Susanne Vega. Nor will you find much salsa music in Norwegian taverns.
Music is idiocyncratic and idiomatic.
Just to help things along, most music is sold to and bought by people who don't like it and don't listen to it.
Its everywhere at every fuckin' mall the planet over, in every bazzar, every souk, every gallery, "gallerie" and galleria. The people who shell out the bucks are merely shelling out for the "least unpleasant noise" to fill in the void between commercials.
Your buying a couple of CDs every year is squat compared to what the commercial outfits shell out for canned muzak every single hour of every single day.
That's what the media companies are protecting. They don't give a shir about you or your ears.
Bruce Springstein's "Born In The USA" was not saying that you should be PROUD of being "Born In The USA."
Nobody listen's to Marylin Manson's lyrics. Nor Trent Reznor's either. If they did. There's be nobody at the fuckin' shows.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
The "industry" is, was, and always will be about making money, not music.
Making music has zero barriers to entry.
Tickets for the pop star lotto are expensive.
Let me get this straight - rather than the musicians providing you a service, you stole their material; therefore, you don't have to pay for it because they didn't serve it up? I might pay less money per gallon when I pump my own gas, but I'm still paying for the fuel itself. I wouldn't blame musicians for not "providing a service" if you aren't going to pay for it anyways.
If you work hard, you can make good money as a live performer. Especially if you don't let the record labels steal it all.
Unless you allow the labels to do what they will, who's going to book the shows? Many groups tour precisely because that's the only way they can make money; but they can't get lucrative tour deals or promote the shows without a media titan (a la Clear Channel) pushing them through. The Internet has done some incredible things for indie artists, but I think it'll be a while yet before we see P2P technology booking summer concert tours to play sold-out arenas.
On the same note, programmers should get paid to write software. Not to just sit around and sell the same software over and over again.
So, let's say I write a piece of software and decide to sell it in the hope of making a profit. Everyone who pays me money is doing so to obtain the benefits of my product - regardless of how long ago I made it, how much money it's made me, or who else has bought it. I don't know how it would make sense to charge some people for a product but not others simply because "they did it once." It is a service, it was a one-time creative act; but if you want it, you have to pay like everyone else (ideally for copyright holders).
I'm not trying to start a flamewar, but there are scores of artists/programmers out there who are have to stick to predetermined distribution methods, just because there's no other way. They don't wanna starve for justice, or fairness - they just want to make a living. If you want to assign blame, pin it on the realities of capitalism.
.sig
I've always believed that the future of music was in Live music, i.e. performers must play to get paid.
Or to phrase it an other way: In the future, the composer of music will have very little ability to get paid.
If the composer is also the performer, he will get paid, but only in his capacity as performer, not composer.
the future lies in performers doing actual work
Obviously, composing music is actual and difficult work, requiring talent, training and considerable effort.
Many /.ers have said that technology is either going to hurt current business models, make them available to more people, or make artists rely more on live performances than any tech/recording based business. But after all this talk about business models, can't technology make the actual art of music better?
Think of broadband. Right now it's used mainly for copying files and playing violent games. But imagine if it was used for music: Just as you can assemble a team of players online to go shoot up other teams, you could assemble a team of singers or instrument players. Once telephony goes CD-quality and grows from one-on-one chat to many-to-many chat, it could be used as a way of singing!
There's also surround sound. Dolby is working on surround sound through headphones. Imagine putting a tilt sensor on your headphones so you could turn your head at any angle and the sound would seem to stay in place, rather than follow your head as it does with current headphones. This would require music to be stored in a MIDI- or MOD-like format with XYZ tags rather than as a waveform recording, but it would allow a lot of flexibility and interactivity. This could soon be used in games; imagine if it was used in the creation and listening of music.
These are just two examples I can think of off the top of my head. You can probably think of much more enticing ways. But the main idea is that while everybody is talking about how technology affects the distribution process, the most important thing, in the long run, is how it'll enhance the actual art of music.
After all, what was rock and roll before the electric guitar?
The link between books and music is confusing to me, and it doesn't seem like the author follows the logic. He opens and ends the article stating that musicians will become as modern authors, then moves on to say that the music industry is facing shrinking profits with the technological changes. Huh?
I agree with both ideas. Today's titans of culture will become yesterday's classics of culture, and the music industry will surely figure out more novel and brutal ways to lose money. But how is this related?
Most famous authors were not particularly rich, to my knowledge, unless they came from money or were complete and utter superstars (Lord Byron is an example of both). Faulkner, Poe, Keats, and most other authors you can think of did not die with a lot of money in their pockets from their works, even though they are remembered as literary giants today. Then there are those who are not discovered until after their death, such as Blake and Kafka, who really did not make money off of their writings.
And then there's the idea that music replaced books as the driving force of popular culture. I would grant that only in part, but I would also say film and TV took equal parts of that massive share once held by books (and religion). Besides that, books still drive an incredible portion of culture. If you don't believe me, think about the sheer number of movies that are based off of books while you drive down to your local Barnes and Noble or Borders book superstore.
The thing that really bothered me about the article though, was that the author does not present anything to take the place of music as a dominant cultural mover. There will be some cultural form to replace music if it truly falls by the wayside, but until something actually comes forward to replace it, music isn't really going anywhere. The industry will change, as the article asserts, but musicians will not become mediocritized until something else comes forward. Given that internet distribution is making artists more popular than they likely would have ever been (watch TRL for evidence) I find it doubtful that music will lose its cultural power with the advent of the internet. If anything, it'll be strengthened.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
No, it is copyright violation. That's been discussed here many times before. If I steal the CD from a record store, I've committed theft. If I copy a CD or download an MP3, it's copyright violation. You might call it semantics, but it's a big difference.
Either you understand the basic tenants and contracts that maintain this thing we call society, or you believe that it's all some anarchy held together by the strings of technology.
You attempt to define this as a legal and social issue. It is not. It's technology and the free market.
In 1900, musicians made and played music live. That was it. Some made money, some didn't, but that's the way it was.
Technology came along and provided a way for both the artists and their distributors (recording industry) to make even more money by recording the music and selling it.
Now, in 2002, technology has come along and obsoleted the previous technology returning musicians to the legal and practical situation they had in the year 1900.
Technology giveth, technology taketh away.
Here's the problem: the entertainment industry is extremely rich, and politically powerful. They won't go down without a fight. In case anybody hasn't noticed, the U.S. political system is still dominated by big business, through various mechanisms, such as a system of legalized bribery based on political contributions to the two ruling parties. So while they entertainment corporations are postponing the inevitable, they'll fight a rear-guard action that will make the law even worse than it is now. IP law will become even more unbalanced in favor of IP owners. Hardware copy protection will continue to be written into federal law, possibly with the eventual result of making free operating systems illegal. It's not going to be pretty.
Find free books.
Without sounding too "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" I've two words for you, "Residual Income".
You do realize that if you hold on to this concept of only being compensated for what you personally build/create/work you will be able to calculate your maximum income.
(based on a US 40 hour work week)
2080 hours a year X your hourly wage = your maximum earning potiental.
so $20.00/hour gives you about $41600 Gross.
While this is pretty good for a single person living an apartment, it's by no means what you could possibly be earning. Nor is it what you need to support a couple kids in daycare, college funds, a nice car (something above a beater, not a Lexus on a lease), a nice house, and a few extra toys.
Personally, I think that dollar amount is way to low for my abilities.
So, if for instance, you went about to become a consultant and managed to bill out 100% of your 2080 hours per year @ $100/hour. You would then be looking at about $208000 per year. Now we are talking about some serious cash. But, really, who's @ 100% billable?
The bottom line is that there is no way that you can make quantum dollar income based *soley* on your personal effort. It is just not possible. You must find a way to make your money work for you as this will allow you the time to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
Now, before I'm slammed for having this disgustingly capitalistic view, let me set one thing straight. It's not the hording of money that I'm after, it's what money can buy--TIME. I know that money ain't everything, but having a lot sure sdoes make things easier.
Because the more you gots the more it works for you, (Mutual Funds, Investments), and the more you can enjoy it.
money = time = quality of life that *you* choose, not chosen by someone else.
Are you working for someone else? Got a nice salaried job? Well, then you are contributing to someones compensation that is making a ton more than you by doing less. Not fair you say, well, I say take some time and originate a unique idea!
Oh, one final thing, you should probably not be contributing to a 401k/IRA, because those financial vehicles are *designed* to pay you money after you stop working. I mean, you *do* want to stop working for "the man" someday, right?
w3rd
Musicians should get paid for providing a service just like everybody else. If you work hard, you can make good money as a live performer. ... To anybody who insists that they should keep getting paid after they stop working, I say "Screw you. Get a real job."
:) In fact I would have assumed it was satire, a smidgen more subtle than Swift.
As a writer (and programmer), I have to argue here... extending the analogy to the [semi-defunct (or should I just say semi-funct)] book world, I guess the logical parallel for us 'wordsmiths' is that we should be on book tours (giving readings and signing autographs) all the time? Considering the phenomenal amount of effort required to write a decent novel--or for that matter, record an album, I believe--what you're saying is one of the most absurd rants I've seen on Slashdot in a long time. No offense.
In the future I'm getting the Parker Brothers to personally MC every game of Monopoly I play--lazy bastards.
That's bullshit. Touring and performances are much harder work that you appear to think. Musicians sacrifice a LOT to tour.
Then, there's only so many venues, and everybody from the local stagehand unions to TicketBastard take their ever increasing cut of the action.
And then when you get down to it - you're not talking about a musician, you're talking about a performer. The appeal of a live show is often fundamentally different than the appeal of a music video, or recording. The live show has costumes, dancing, scenery, pyrotechnics, lights, all kinds of bullshit that the serious musician and music affictionado doesn't really need. So why be burdened with that? What if a really really good, I mean earth-shatteringly GREAT musician, for some reason, cannot tour, or cannot perform.
One example I've often mentioned is Andy Partridge from XTC. He's got a crippling anxiety disorder, and just plain can't get up on stage and perform. His contribution to music is non-trivial. He's not just another fluff stage performer like Madonna etc.
Are you saying that people like that CAN'T make a living doing music, and must flip burgers?
Granted, there's an awful lot of bullshit music out there that is not worthy of copyright protection, and there are some performers who are simply - performers. But there's also a lot of really fucking great musicians who deserve to be paid for being "recording artists" - and not be required to tour. And it's important that their recordings be protected somehow.
I'm not going to climb down THAT slippery slope, because no matter how you look at it, it's either the honor system (which apparently doesn't work) - or the untenable ugliness that is enforcement of copyright. I'm not here to solve that problem. I'm here to shoot down the absolutely brainless notion that people who only write songs and record them in studios aren't really working, and therefore don't morally deserve to make a living.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.