Slashdot Mirror
An Artist's View of the Modern Music Biz
An anonymous reader writes "A member of the band OK Go wrote an interesting open letter giving an artist's perspective on the current state of the music business and how labels finance producing, distributing, and marketing music and music videos. A very insightful perspective of 'both sides': the argument that music and music videos are meant to be heard and, in the case of the latter, seen by a wide audience; and the argument that the money needs to come from somewhere. Unfortunately, the letter doesn't address the perspective outsiders have of outlandish salaries in the music labels, but it is interesting nonetheless." Their new video is not bad either.
David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) did a fantastic article for Wired a few years ago about this. He discusses (with details!) how the music industry works, some of the "models" of releasing music, and the economics/incentives to each one. Great read.
On a semi-related note, it's also worth looking at Steve Albini's now classic essay "The Problem With Music", which showcases how horrible the modern music industry is to musicians. It was written before the whole "digital revolution", but it helps remind me why I don't feel sympathy for suits in the music business.
There's another old article going as far back as 2000 from Courtney Love. Although I find her and her music distasteful she sure does open up a lot of numbers that -- although larger -- probably work the same way today. If that isn't condemnation of the music executives milking artists like animals and then dumping them, I don't know what is.
My work here is dung.
What can labels & conglomerates provide that can't be provided by other already-existing companies or persons?
Studio time isn't necessarily done by the labels; there's tons of independent and in-home studios out there. Ditto on mixing.
Marketing? There's tons of marketing agencies.
Advertising? See above.
Pressing CDs? Although the technology will likely be obsolete in the next 20 years, all the labels do is make the order and pay for it. I don't doubt an artist with sufficient money could make the order themselves.
Music videos? Look at the work, say, Monty Oum does by himself on his free time. Imagine what a single man employed in that field (or a small company) could do.
In short, there's nothing labels do that artist couldn't contract out themselves. Labels will collapse under their own weight soon enough, I'm sure.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Labels write checks. That's what no one else does. They are very much like loan sharks, the interest rate on the checks they write are terrifying, but if you are a small band, or a young band, many times you can afford tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to do all those things you mentioned above.
As someone mentioned above, the alternative is to "grow organically" which really means grow very very slowly. In many cases, these bands have grown slowly. They have had regular jobs to pay for their equipment. They play tiny gigs at small bars in their home town, and they've probably worked really hard doing, essentially, two jobs, for a long time to get to the point of being recognized by a label. They have barely enough money to buy guitars and a car to get to the next gig, much less move their recording and promotion to the level that a label can offer.
Your example is obviously flawed - libraries do not cost each person $1000 a month in taxes, besides the fact that it would be pretty difficult to eat $1000 worth of sweets in a month (by yourself), meaning the value proposition is so low that no one would take up that offer.
It's not really necessary and I doubt anyone will even read my post, but I've always wanted to do a slashdot style back-of-the-envelope calculation... so here goes.
Let's assume the previous post was correct, and libraries cost $1.1 billion a year. To keep it simple I'll use state taxes only, which is listed as $895 million. Wikipedia says total state tax revenue (in 2007) was $749,785,186,000 ($750 billion). So, 0.001% of state tax revenue was spent on libraries. Very likely there are local/city taxes that could be significant, but the previous poster showed that states provide the largest source of library funding.
In 2005, at $38,206 per capita the average state tax rate was 9.8% (source). So, about $3,750 in taxes was paid per person, on average, to the state(s) where they did business (these numbers include taxes from states besides those the person resides in, such as sales tax on out-of-state purchases, but doesn't include federal taxes). 0.001% of that is 4 cents, and that's for the whole year... 0.3 cents/month.
Let's assume my math and the figures I used are bad, and it's actually significantly higher. Say, one hundred times higher... $4 a year is still a heck of a good deal for everything that libraries provide to those who use them, and if you never ever use the library, you can write off the expense (pun intended), considering how small it is, as part of "buying civilization" as the well-known slashdot sig goes, just like you probably don't directly use a lot of the other things state, local, and federal taxes pay for (and you don't get to pick and choose what your money goes toward).
Your sweets example is obviously different, because sweets can't be almost endlessly re-used like books and DVDs from the library can (I suppose you could try with sweets, but...) That's why, of course, such a pre-payment scheme as you suggest wouldn't work for food (although all-you-can-eat buffets are an interesting thing to consider), but why the original point stands... you are pre-paying for the library, but it's a minuscule amount that more or less equals nothing, especially when compared to the value it potentially provides to you.
I'm all for live performances, but ticket prices lately have gotten insane. A stadium that can seat 50k and yet they still charge $100 a ticket like many acts do? No thanks- that is greed pure and simple. I have no problem dropping $10-$20 to see a good band, but thanks to greed and Ticketmaster, live music seems just as much a scam as the recorded stuff.