Slashdot Mirror
Musicians Have Many Money Options Online, Says Talking Head
Time Slows Down writes "Scottish born musician and former record label owner David Byrne says the future of music as a career is wide open and identifies six different distribution models now available to musicians in an article in this month's Wired magazine. At one end of the scale is the 360, or equity deal, where every aspect of the artist's career is handled by producers, promoters, marketing people, and managers. At the other end of the scale is the self-distribution model, where the music is self-produced, self-written, self-played, and self-marketed."
no wonder peopel still sign with labels, your soul for some easy money.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
...that (actual, talented) musicians could actually be successful without a record label!
I drink to make other people interesting!
And that is that iTunes (and their ilk) brought the power of the single-song purchase to millions of people who did not have it before. Before iTMS came out, I had not bought any music in several years, close to a decade. Mostly, because, while I love the concept of whole albums--I cut my teeth on Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here, for example--a lot of what comes out from the majors these days is indeed one or two good songs on an album of cr@p.
So since iTMS came out, I have bought at least 100 songs from albums that I never would have purchased. So those artists aren't getting $1.40 instead of $1.60 because I bought their album on iTMS; rather, they are getting $0.09 instead of $0.00 because I bought a song.
I know my $0.09 isn't much, but neither was my $1.60. And if there are millions of people like me--or even hundreds of thousands--I would guess that the introduction of the a la carte $0.99 song has been a boon for lots of artists.
Another thing to think about is that iTMS doesn't just sell artists from the majors; they also sell independents (search for "Cousin Isaac", a buddy of mine who sells a couple of albums via iTMS). I don't know the details of how that works, but it seems like there are opportunities for artists in some of Byrns' "control your own destiny" plans to take advantage of that infrastructure.
The CB App. What's your 20?
So far so good then?
I saw this happen in independent film. Low budget horror films virtually turned into a non profit industry because everyone with a video camera started making them and Blockbuster and other vendors starting accepting crappy ones because they could pick them up cheap.
Could it be: I saw this happen in film. Low budget films virtually turned into a non profit industry because everyone with a video camera started making them and Blockbuster and other vendors starting accepting crappy ones because they could pick them up cheap.
Or just that cheap horror films are made so because people don't really want to see them anyway. Cheap horror movies seem more like a cinematographic "meme" than a side effect of technology.
I used to be a fan of the genre but I don't even bother to rent them anymore because they're all bad.
Or that the greatest part of creativity period of the genre has passed. Like Peplums, Westerns, Buster Keaton and alt genre movies, etc. No music, movie, painting genres are forever, none of them. Cheap horror movies could rather be the tail of the genre than any cause in itself to its demise. And frankly, wasn't the great era of horror movies made from "Evil dead" and "Bad taste" ? or "The Exorcist" and "The Sixth sense". I don't sense here the kind of pattern that you are invoking.
It used to be that if you were going to shoot a film you needed half a mill to a mill so you had to maintain a certain quality or no one would touch it.
Most movies in this list haven't been made with nearly that much money: http://www.amazon.com/Best-of-Low-Budget-Cinema/lm/17HEU9NSRSU95
Now large numbers are made for 10K to 50K and a 100K to 500K are considered real budgets.
Like the bugdet of Monty Python's movies you mean, surely. Those movie sucks because they are so cheap. I'm exactly following you there.
It's going to get harder and harder to get recognized as the market floods. As a part time bedroom composer, I've had my first disinterested listeners thanks a recent Digg-like music site. As a musician, I therefore highly disagree with you, as people have used their social site points to bump my music which is the best thing to happen to my music since my last track and until the next
Lets says there are 10X as many bands that now can get their music out there. In five years it'll be 100X and in ten years it'll be a 1000X. There are tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of garage bands in this country alone. How many hours a day do you have to listen to music? Lets says there are 10X as many online shops that now can get their stuff out there. In five years it'll be 100X and in ten years it'll be a 1000X. There are tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of artisan's sites in this country alone. How many hours a day do you have to search for stuff?
See what I did ^^ ? frankly, that's the point of Internet, to organize a whole lot of stuff. No need to spend more time that you want, you'll find something for you quick enough (a proverb by here: "the perfect is the enemy of the good", read: you're not supposed to find the BEST stuff everytime, and because you do will not make or break the day of the person on the other side).
Yes some of the good ones will shine through but the irony is it probably just got radically harder to succeed. People may find it easier to hear your music but it's going to get harder to make a living at it and instruments and recording equipment cost money. I have lots of relatives or friends (including a band of about 15 persons) that have very good recording equipment (much better than anything that helped to produced great music 30 years ago) AND a dayjob. Go figure.
In fact, I would say that making a living as a recording musician has become more accessible to more people than ever. There are many more ways to sell your music, and many more customers. For those of you who believe in economics, there is more demand for music than ever before.
Elitists like David Byrne are just pissed because making a living as a musician no longer means you get crowned like royalty by a recording industry that doesn't know the first fucking thing about music. That, and he's a little put off that nobody's paying attention to him any more. You'll notice that the Wired magazine article didn't mention any recent hit records. In fact, it had to bring in Thom Yorke to sit next to him so the Young Ones would pay any attention to the puffy Mr. Byrne's complaints.
Here's an excerpt from the article -
----------
David Byrne:"In my day, we could get to be rock stars with bad voice and lousy guitar playing. All it took was being lucky enough to live in Manhattan and be friends with the guy who books CBGB, and sucking up to the elite rock "media" who were all in New York anyway, sitting in the front row at CBGB. Hell it was easy. Now, any fruit in a basement can make good records, but he's actually got to work hard to get someone's attention."
Thom Yorke: "Uh, David, but now they've got the Internet to get people's attention. They don't have to be well-off art students who's parents pay for them to live in Manhattan and hang out in clubs."
David Byrne: "Oh, right."
You are welcome on my lawn.
Mod me totally off topic, but this post highlights EXACTLY why the current state of music is where it is (from a pop quality standpoint). Even if you are only 20, how can you have NOT heard of the Talking Heads? Bands like The Talking Heads are what make me right when I argue that 80s music is better than 2000s music.
Yes, true, anyone can make anything very cheaply, I try to do that myself all the time!
I also know that it didn't used to cost "hundreds of thousands" necessarily. That was the domain of the over-inflated mega-rockstar budgets. I've worked on many albums that had those kinds of budgets. Most of that money went to food, hotels, airfare, transportation, "handlers", personal chefs, etc., all of a very lavish nature. (Not begrudging them either, I think people should have fun with their money). But it would have been possible even in the 70s to go into a studio with a well-rehearsed band of people that could actually play and sing and crank out ten songs for less than 5000 bucks.
Also: use a cheap ($100) mixer and "a little bit of imagination" is not a guarantee of really great sound. Mic'ing is most definitely a science and an art. I don't for the life of me know how the really good engineers in the world do it. And very cheap mixers have too little dynamic headroom. Not to mention that a really good chamber orchestra costs an awful lot (especially in the US).
But there is quite the spectrum however. And that's what I love about music - it covers the entire range of end users, from the guy in the old Buick playing his music through a little 2-inch speaker to the HD home theater buffs.
And having said all that (gasp), an old adage: If the singer is amazing, it doesn't matter what microphone you use. If the singer is lousy... well.. it doesn't matter what microphone you use.
Your absolutely right, the costs for those particular things has definitely come way down, thank god.
It's a bit different for a band or singer-songwriter these days. I could do an album right now, for free, with the technology we have today. As long as I have the software. Which could range from free (very poor choice), cracked or stolen (even poorer), a couple of hundred dollars to about $10,000. Oh, and a good mic if I want to actually sing. I should also have a couple of backup drives (200-300 bucks), because if my main hard drive crashes, I have to start over again. And that would mean more time, which actually does equal money. (I am excluding other things like good pre-amps, plug-ins, cost of a computer powerful enough to run the software, etc). Oh, and a couple of hundred dollars if I want to actually put it on a CD and distribute it at my shows, as well as the time that it will take to actually burn all those CDs. Hmm, should probably have some kind of artwork, I suppose.
Or I could use a replication house, like Discmakers. Actually a pretty good deal, 1000 discs for about $1000, artwork, jewel case and labels included.
Maybe I'll just forget CDs altogether and distribute Internet-only. Cool, 99 cents for every song! Minus, of course what CD Baby and iTunes takes from that. But it's still way better thhan what major labels used to screw artists with.
But how do I distinguish myself from the 30,000 other artists out there who did the same thing?
and so on...
The most beautiful and the most frustrating thing about music is that it is by far the most abstract and invisible of all the arts, shrouded in one of the most opaque and cloudy business models ever.
Whee!
I must have thought about the costs of the buying studio equipment then vs now, because people were talking of purchasing computers and gear.
I remember though, in the old days, when a 16 or 24 channel 2 inch recorder(+controller gear and Dolby NR units), a then requirement for any serious mainstream recording studio to compete, could cost from 20-30 000 dollars to much, much more to purchase. And tape costs were actually high enough to constrain the productions.
The same equipment would nowadays equal some pretty ordinary multichannel sound cards(ok, maybe not totally ordinary then).
Of course nothing is a guarantee of great sound, mic'ing is still an art, or maybe more of a science... However, now, at least, people can afford to try(and maybe fail).
My point is anyway that what you are talking about is quite large productions(i mean, choirs?), most are not like that, they are 5 weird dudes and a tape recorder that want a better sound than what they got recording using one mic during rehersals. And that whats he talked about, if I understood, TFA correctly.
You're right about the singer. What sucks, sucks even worse when you hear it better.
It's a horrible revelation for some bands....always fun to watch....moaaahaa
Baboons are cute.