As Music Streaming Grows, Royalties Slow To a Trickle

concealment sends this excerpt from the NY Times: "Late last year, Zoe Keating, an independent musician from Northern California, provided an unusually detailed case in point. In voluminous spreadsheets posted to her Tumblr blog, she revealed the royalties she gets from various services, down to the ten-thousandth of a cent. Even for an under-the-radar artist like Ms. Keating, who describes her style as “avant cello,” the numbers painted a stark picture of what it is like to be a working musician these days. After her songs had been played more than 1.5 million times on Pandora over six months, she earned $1,652.74. On Spotify, 131,000 plays last year netted just $547.71, or an average of 0.42 cent a play. 'In certain types of music, like classical or jazz, we are condemning them to poverty if this is going to be the only way people consume music,' Ms. Keating said. ... The question dogging the music industry is whether these micropayments can add up to anything substantial. 'No artist will be able to survive to be professionals except those who have a significant live business, and that’s very few,' said Hartwig Masuch, chief executive of BMG Rights Management."

Comments

Demand More

[jdastrup]

Is negotiating a higher price not possible?

Re:Demand More

[darkmeridian]

What alternative does the artist have in selling her music? It sucks making pennies, but would she be otherwise selling her music in concert, on CDs, etc.?

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[EvanED]

...but would she be otherwise selling her music in concert, on CDs, etc.?

Yes. And Bandcamp. :-)

[Disclaimer: I am unaffiliated with Keating, but a large fan.]

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[beelsebob]

I don't actually understand why demanding a higher price is necessary. As an example, if I bought a CD for $10 with 15 tracks on it, I'd likely listen to those tracks a good few hundred times. That's a likely 15,000 plays for $10, aka between 0.6 and 0.06 per play. When you consider that only 10% of that is likely to ever see the artist, that's gonna be 0.06-0.006. By that metric, this woman is getting great value from the streaming services compared to me actually buying the music.

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[kheldan]

It's almost like people have forgotten what broadcast radio was, still is, and that online streaming is more or less the 2013 equivalent of broadcast radio. Remember how we had to pay a subscription fee to listen to the radio? You don't, because we never did and never will. Places like Britain where you pay a license fee for owning/operating receivers doesn't count, and I'm not talking about satellite services like XM, either. The way it used to work is radio stations would give public exposure to artists' work, and in turn if people liked it they'd go to a record store and buy a copy. Of course that entire business model is now hopelessly broken and everyone wants everything to be digital and stored on their PMP, and so-called 'internet radio' is not in any way equivalent to the broadcast radio of old, in part because you need an internet connection to receive them, so you're already paying for that -- and why should you have to pay twice? I don't think that internet radio is going to ever be a viable sole income source for artists, and frankly I don't know what's going to end up replacing the old business model, but I am of the opinion that expecting to make a living off your music being played streaming online is not realistic. We are in a transitional era for the music business, as the old industry is still in it's death throes, and it's replacement hasn't risen out of the chaos yet.

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[yurtinus]

Mod parent... Ironic?

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[Stoutlimb]

This is the value the market has decided in this case. To quote the whiner: "'No artist will be able to survive to be professionals except those who have a significant live business, and that’s very few," (emphasis mine).

That's right. Unless you're actually willing to put time and effort into the industry, you're not going to make very much money. There's nothing wrong with that, welcome to the real world. No more free rent. The rock star lifestyle just slammed into the real world where people work hard every day to pay their bills. Why shouldn't musicians have to "sing for their supper" like everyone else does?

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[icebike]

Is negotiating a higher price not possible?

It will have to come to that, eventually. A higher percentage of the gross seems reasonable.
This situation is becoming common knowledge.

The cost to the streamer companies is substantial, in terms of storage, bandwidth, and billing/payment processing. They will not want to give that up willingly, but as numbers like this become common knowledge, they will have to start paying more back.

The problem I see is that if there is a Label involved the Label is going to get the bulk of the micropayments as well. (They already take the bulk of the money from CD sales, even the big name artists are hard pressed to garner 12% of the revenue from a CD sale).

It appears to me that from an economics point of view that the price of music has been pushed down to the lowest point until a technology change allows artists to get into the streaming business for the price of a web site. The revenue just isn't there to hold the artist's interest.

The idea that artists can make a living performing is just not going to happen. Too few venues and too many wanna-be artists and nobody wants to go sit in some smokey bar every time they want to listen to music. Live music is great and all, but when you end up paying $30 for a nobody artist and suffer thru the entire evening for 3 good songs you quickly sour on the whole idea.

Re:Demand More

[ZipK]

Streaming services like Rdio, MOG and Rhapsody are poor analogs to broadcast radio, as the listener chooses exactly what they want to hear from a vast library of music. Given the ease with which these services can be streamed through home music systems, as well as the growing connectivity of mobile devices, these services become more of a replacement for a personal collection of music than the advertising service of broadcast radio. Even services like Pandora, which don't give you specific choice, provide individualized programs that are a great deal closer to a library replacement than is/was the single-program of broadcast.

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[s.petry]

I would not even think of it as transitional. Some big bands did charge Radio stations royalties for playing their songs. Obviously, those fees were payed by Radio stations with revenue from advertisers. This allowed larger radio stations to play "the big new song by ...".

Seriously though, this person is getting upset because they don't have a large volume of listeners, not because the songs are not paid enough for listening. Example: A big Radio show in Detroit hits roughly 200,000 listeners every time it's played. For a month, the song gets played a couple times a day, then vanishes from the air as a "new" song takes it's spot. Rather quickly, over the course of a year a "good" song goes from twice daily to never. Such is the way of music.

Now as an artist, I don't count on listeners for revenue and never have. Like you mentioned, I rely on them to like the song enough to go buy it. Whether that's a CD/DVD, Vinyl, or itunes makes no difference. The "PURCHASE" is the revenue. And it's always going to be nothing -> lots -> nothing. This is why artists put out "new songs" and "new records". They even make money from concerts because you know.. people like the artist enough to want to go see them "Live".

This person is complaining about two things: First is revenue that has _NEVER_ been there for artists. The second is that they don't get enough of that revenue that has never been there.

To be a bit more concise, I don't mention royalties intentionally. In fact there are numerous potential revenue boosters I neglect. Not important for what the artist is complaining about.

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[nzac]

Not everyone listens to their CDs 100s of times.
I don't think i have have even come close for any CD, i might make it to 20 - 40 for a good album. Think how long 4500 min (100 plays of the album with 3min tracks) is if you believe that is the norm. No average artist will be listened to the required amount to achieve the breakeven price.

Streaming eliminates the required investment to listen to something else so unless you get advertised on the front page and your whole album is worth listening to you wont anywhere near the same number of plays as a CD does.

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[s.petry]

Oh, and another quick point. Some forms of music are always condemned to poverty. If it's not popular, people don't listen or buy the music. Comparing "Pop" or "Rock" to Jazz has always showed a wage/income disparity with musicians.

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[CohibaVancouver]

That's okay. Slashdot will whine and cry about how they don't even want to pay for streaming music and fully advocate piracy.

Exactly right, they'll tell you all music 'wants to be free' and that artists like Ms. Keating should make all her money from paid performances.

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[Trogre]

A slightly more realistic option might be to cut out the middleman.

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[Velex]

Undoing a mod to open my gob (sorry there kheldan), but I find this right here the most interesting part of the whole mess.

14th century: You're probably not a musician, not in Europe anyway. Or at least if you are the hit of the day goes something like this: Pie Jesu Domine, donna eis requiem *thwack*

15th century: You're a musician. You get paid to perform. You perform to get paid.

16th century: You're a musician. You get paid to perform. You perform to get paid.

17th century: You're a musician. You get paid to perform. You perform to get paid. If you're very lucky, you might get a fat patronage, but chances are you probably aren't one of the few composers who gets this deal.

18th century: You're a musician. You get paid to perform. You perform to get paid. If you're very lucky, you might get a fat patronage, but chances are you probably aren't one of the few composers who gets this deal.

19th century: You're a musician. You get paid to perform. You perform to get paid.

20th century (at least the latter half): You're a musician. You probably get paid to perform in a local cover band or in a generic orchestra. You perform to get paid. Or hit the jackpot, get signed on to a label, and become a quad-zillionaire and ensure your great-great-grandchildren will never need to work a day in their lives.

21st century: You're a musician. You get paid to perform. You perform to get paid. People on the other side of the globe can be exposed to your music. Most people won't give you a dime for the copy of the recording they have no matter how much it brightens up their day or helps them define who they are, but some people (like me) will still be willing to hand over some cash to get an official CD (SD card with FLACs or similar in the future?) with printed artwork and a lyrics book with more artwork and photos of your band. There's no need for us to meet in person. We can conduct this exchange entirely over the internet and via courier services. If you're very lucky, you might land a nice deal for a movie or video game, but chances are you probably aren't one of the few composers who gets this deal.

So, basically, what I'm trying to do is illustrate what I'm assuming your point is. The 20th century with its quad-zillionaires is the abberation here, but at least the 21st century is brighter for the average musician when compared to any century before (except the 20th).

The MAFIAA and artists who think they're entitled to be quad-zillionaires or whine about how the quad-zillionaire rock star is a dying breed as though that's always how it's been since the beginning of time (which it hasn't) deserve absolutely no sympathy. There's a reason I'm learning new frameworks for my day job instead of getting serious about learning how to play more than a few simple tunes on my guitar. One of those activities gets me paid; the other does not. (Although it might get me something that rhymes with paid--maybe I'm actually a starving artist too! Look how clever I am! Give me quad-zillions too!)

I really only have a passing understanding of music history and don't listen to nearly as much classical as when I was a teenager, so please feel free to correct my timeline if I'm off, but I'm pretty sure I've got the gist of it (I hope). *ducks*

Re:Demand More

[foniksonik]

Why does some random cellist deserve my money? If she's a great artist then yeah, people will go or they'll buy the music. If she's an also ran then she should go get a job. The same holds true for any job. Either your good enough to get paid a living wage or you're not.

Re:Demand More

[the_Bionic_lemming]

I currently own a sixth copy of Pink Floyd's "The final cut"

And yes, after three decades of listening to to that album, I have easily heard it over a thousand times.

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[MaskedSlacker]

No, but most people listen to the same 20 albums or so for their ENTIRE LIVES, with a smattering of whatever's current at the moment mixed in. At least everyone I know (none of them major audiophiles either) fits that profile. They all have 20-30 favorite go-to albums they're always listening to (usually concentrated in whichever decade they were in their early 20s, but not always), and then 4-5 other albums (or 4-5 albums worth of singles in many cases) they're currently listening to.

So, the same 20 songs for five years is extreme, but the basic principle still applies to most people.

Re:Demand More

[tipo159]

$0.42 per play is not a bad price ...

The summary says ".. or an average of 0.42 cent a play ..." (like under half a penny), not $0.42.

Re:Demand More

[Pseudonym]

I agree with the point you're making; outside of the 20th century and very start of the 21st centuries, nobody is going to become mega-rich being a musical artist.

However, I do note one important caveat:

21st century: You're a musician. You get paid to perform. You perform to get paid. People on the other side of the globe can be exposed to your music.

There are a lot of Internet indie musicians (Zoe Keating is one of them) who have a world-wide following, but don't perform live in other countries because it's still uneconomical to do so, and the vast majority of fans would not travel to said artist's home country just to see them perform. And for quite a lot of music, especially classical (including neo-classical) and jazz music, recordings are a poor substitute for a live performance.

There are a lot of artists that I would pay good money to go and see, if they ever toured the country where I live, or the "one night only" performance was on a night when I could actually make it (kids, you know). The mega-quadzillion big-name acts who can justify multiple performances in the same place still have an advantage there.

Re:Demand More

[stephanruby]

Is negotiating a higher price not possible?

That's not what she's asking for.

This is what she's asking for:

"...to incorporate the needs of artists, not just record labels. What are those needs? Linking of avid listeners with artists for concert tickets, merch, music purchases, etc; crowdsourcing tours; providing listener stats and location data, maybe even emails; your idea here, etc, etc. Lift all the little boats. If this quixotic strategy doesn’t work, then I guess I’ll have to change my perception instead.

I was disappointed in the NYTimes article.like I’m often disappointed in the press. A 30 minute interview full of nuance squashed down to one sentence taken out of context and used to prove some other point. I know, I know, I’m naive. I’ll keep trying."
http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/

Here is her revenue breakdown:

45.55% Music sales
26.38% Live Performance
23.90% Sync/Master Licensing
2.69% ASCAP
0.89% Soundexchange (i.e. Pandora)
0.38% Spotify
0.21% Google Adsense
http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/

No wonder she's trying to use streaming to try to maximize her other much more significant revenue sources.

Re:Demand More

[Seraphim1982]

$0.42 per play is not a bad price when you consider that many (most?) popular songs are available for purchase for $0.99.

$0.42 per play is also 100x what the artist is getting paid. They are getting 0.42 cents ($0.0042) a play.

Re:Demand More

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a likely 15,000 plays for $10

From my experience at marketing music from myself and my friends which spans a wide range of genres and popularities; expecting a CD to get played for 20 times it's length is generous. I would even estimate between 10 and 20 percent of CDs never make it to a full playthrough.

If this seems shocking consider the more widely available rates of players finishing a video game. On major single-player games it's now the norm to have only %10 reach the end.

The switching of more and more music to an on-demand model has, for better or worse, removed more and more of the money from from the system as much of it was being spent on music that no one listened to. No more getting paid for an album if people only listen to your single....and you don't even get much for the single if they only listen to it twice.

Re:Demand More

[Jane Q. Public]

"It sucks making pennies..."

Now, wait a minute. Seems to me this isn't bad at all. I don't know that this is "down" from the past at all... in the radio days (not very long ago), 0.1 cents per play would have been a pretty good return. Especially when you consider that each play was probably heard by thousands of people on average, while Pandora (for example) probably only averages about 1.2 people per play. As much as 0.4 cents or so per play back then would have been a dream come true. And if you figure it on a per-capita basis, why, she's committing highway robbery.

I see nothing in the article that indicates this is a lower royalty rate than back then. Further, in the article someone said:

"In certain types of music, like classical or jazz, we are condemning them to poverty if this is going to be the only way people consume music,"

... okay. But please explain to me how this represents any kind of change. How many rich cellists do you know? For that matter, how many cellists make much of any kind of money by actually selling their music to fans? Yoyo Ma and maybe at most a few others?

If you ask me, this is non-news.

Re:Demand More

[EvanED]

The alternative is to switch to a job that actually pays money. Frankly, she should quit her whining. A cellist?

Sigh. For the nth time in this thread, the article was misrepresenting her opinion and she is not negative on streaming. Her data dump was much more in the style of "here's information so you can have a more intelligent conversation" than "wah wah Spotify should be giving me more money". At this point I think I'm too lazy to even go get the link again.

Nobody is going to pay money to listen to a cellist at a concert, or buy her CD.

The last laugh is on you apparently because she's doing pretty well for herself. Statistically speaking, she appears to almost certainly make more than you.

Re:Demand More

[greg1104]

What does talent have to do with sales? Did Psy make millions of dollars because he's more talented than your average avant cello player? Of course not. Successful music companies sell what people buy, by definition. If they didn't they wouldn't be successful, in profit terms.

The idea that the music industry ever cultivated "talent" rather than sales is a historical fiction, based on selective memory. I first started getting albums in 1976. My first was the Blue Oyster Cult album with the cowbell epic "Don't Fear The Reaper". Know what was actually the top selling song from 1976? "Afternoon Delight" by the Starland Vocal Band. And then we had disco. It's been like that for a long time; most people only remember the good stuff from the past though. For every "Dark Side Of The Moon", there's a "Love Train"--those both from 1973.

Re:Demand More

[Grayhand]

This is the value the market has decided in this case. To quote the whiner: "'No artist will be able to survive to be professionals except those who have a significant live business, and that’s very few," (emphasis mine).

That's right. Unless you're actually willing to put time and effort into the industry, you're not going to make very much money. There's nothing wrong with that, welcome to the real world. No more free rent. The rock star lifestyle just slammed into the real world where people work hard every day to pay their bills. Why shouldn't musicians have to "sing for their supper" like everyone else does?

"The rock star lifestyle just slammed into the real world where people work hard every day to pay their bills." Really? A cellist leading a rock star lifestyle? Are you that desperate to make a point that you don't bother to think about what you are saying? Her point is there's very little demand for live performance so it's not that's she's being lazy as you claim. Her living in the past would have come from modest sales which have been replaced by streaming her music which has resulted in a drastic reduction in income. This constant claim that only live performances are worthy of your hard earned dollars is irrational and a claim that only showed up when the internet provided an option to paying for music. I haven't been to a live performance in 20 years but I still buy music regularly, all be it most of it is from the 60s,70s and 80s. The only ones that will survive are big corporate backed groups and indies that strictly do it as a hobby, translated not very good. It takes time to become good especially when it comes to learning an instrument. They say Jimmy Hendricks would walk down the stairs then to a local movie theater and watch a movie the whole time playing his electric guitar without an amp. Hard to have that kind of dedication when you have to work 8 hours a day at a Starbucks. The whole take away should not be that artists are greedy rock stars it's that the streaming model only makes money for the companies streaming. Where's the righteous indignation at artists being taken advantage of? So it's okay for corporations to make money, it's only greed when artists make money?

Re:Demand More

[PuckSR]

It was played 1.5 million times, but that isn't 1.5 million people who wanted to listen to her. That is 1.5 million plays because it matched a station. Consider that she is a cellist and a has a rather eclectic style, I would imagine that anyone who created an "Amanda Palmer" radio station heard her quite a bit.

This is the problem with using her Pandora plays as a "counter". How many of those were skips/ thumbs downs/ etc? Pandora frequently will loop a few select artists if they fit into a narrow bandwidth of music. That doesn't mean that people are demanding her music at that particular level. She may just show up a lot for anyone who creates a classical station and thumbs up more contemporary pieces.

Further, she has been #1 on the Itunes classical charts a number of times. I wonder if all of that Pandora exposure from her 1.5 million plays contributed to that success? Can't be, people were buying her tracks on iTunes for no reason. She is just that fucking popular.

Re:Demand More

[Stoutlimb]

I worked in a creative profession that requires a hell of a lot more knowledge, skill, creativity, and responsibility than a mere cello player. And you know what, I'd be happy for half of that in royalties for every time someone used one of my works. But because this is the MEDIA industry, they are masters at getting the public ear and whining until they get what they want.

I say that half a penny per use is ridiculously HIGH for the kind of work she does. Apparently the market has found a balance somewhere in between her and my opinion of what the price should be. (Not that I think my opinion has anything to do with it, but surely the collective opinion of the general populace and the marketplace surely does.)

Re:Demand More

[PopeRatzo]

Ugh, Slashdot ate my units.

That sounds painful.

Re: Demand More

[PuckSR]

because of technology. Technology has made many careers obsolete or obsolescent. Did you realize that there used to be an entire profession dedicated to producing replications of documents? We still have some people who do this job, but when the local printing press became obsolete the printers moved on and found other work. We don't pay nearly as much per copy today as we did in the past, and we don't pay it to the printer. This applies to so many technological advances.

Technology has outpaced the music industry. It is unfortunate, music enjoyed a golden era. Moving on

Re:Demand More

[Anonymous Coward]

Or the other solution is, that now she knows what her music is worth, she now knows how many albums she needs to produce to hit the magic number for her retirement. Instead of whining, she should get to work!. . .With most creative professions, like architects, web designers, interior designers, cake decorators, hair stylists, tatoo artists, custom harley shops, floral arrangers, etc etc.... the motto is "Create! Create! Create!" When you stop creating you starve.

It's time musicians were cut down from that huge pedestal they have put themselves up on.

Let's break the numbers down. Ignoring soundtracks, she has recorded on 14 albums in 14 years. Her Pandora and Spotify payments netted her approximately $4300 together last year. Assuming one album per year, this gives us a yearly income of $307 per album. So when she retires in 25 more years (at 65), her oldest, and so most profitable album will have made her a grand total of $12,000 or so, assuming that listening stays constant even as her listener base dies off. For an album a year (let's say one song a month), which is about as much as you can expect from any artist (most give us a lot less), that seems like an awfully small number.

Re:Demand More

[MagusSlurpy]

The problem is that people are only streaming music now, not buying albums and listening to the radio. So she's losing all of her sales income, and having to subsist more and more on her $4K/year streaming reimbursements and nothing else.

Re:Demand More

[MagusSlurpy]

The CD player in his car must be broken, and he's forced to listen to the radio.

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[jrumney]

No, the problem here is that she gets to see her raw listenership numbers. In the days of radio, she would have got a $50 cheque from ASCAP once a year, and not had any expectation of making a living off her music. Now she sees "OMG, 1.5M plays of my song, that's a lot!" and expects to become a millionaire rockstar overnight.

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[hairyfeet]

Its simply gonna go back to the "old days" of the traveling troubadour, going from town to town and singing for your supper. The problem is the cartels have made damned sure you can give up on any kind of indie collective bargaining, they make sure they are the gatekeepers to the radio, MTV, etc so that you have to sell everything you have worked so hard to create for pennies to get anywhere.

So this really doesn't surprise me, its either live hand to mouth or sign with a label and risk losing everything, see for example Meatloaf having to file for bankruptcy after "Hollywood accounting" said Bat Out Of Hell I, which still holds the record for longest charting on the billboard top 200 BTW, didn't make a profit, or how Cheap Trick is having to sue their former label for not getting a single cent from any digital sales.

So its not like the big names get treated much better, the Internet has given all the tools to the musician but the downside of that is with so much competition the actual amount made per song is lower than its ever been and will go nowhere but down. The smart musician will be selling everything from t-shirts to keyrings and will have to do a LOT of traveling to make ends meet, if you are the kind of act that can only exist on recordings? Well things aren't gonna be good for you that's for sure.

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[Farmer Tim]

Not if you listen to prog rock.

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[MagusSlurpy]

So because she's making twice chicken scratch instead of chicken scratch, that means it's okay? I don't think wanting to make a wage above the poverty line counts as "millionaire rockstar."

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[sco08y]

Having written all that, I would like to say I agree that in general, it's deplorable what the music companies pay artists, and that should change. But I'm not seeing anything new here.

How? It's a field with an overabundance of supply and not that much demand.

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[rockout]

Whether it's "okay" or not is purely a matter of opinion. The stark reality is, that's what streaming services are paying artists. If they get together and form some kind of union, they'll be able to extract more. Until then, they'll have to hit 40 million+ plays per year of their songs in order to make a living solely off of getting played on streaming services. Allowing your music to be streamed and getting paid for it beats having it downloaded off the Pirate Bay.

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[godrik]

I read the blog of Zoe Keating[1], the artist whose quote was extracted in the new york times article.

You said: "Seriously though, this person is getting upset because they don't have a large volume of listeners, not because the songs are not paid enough for listening."

This is not what Zoe Keating is complaining about. She complains that the artist on streaming platforms are made per play. Though, depending on who you are, you don't get paid the same per play. She claims that this is unfair. Basically because she is independent she can not negogiate a higher rate.

As for live performance, it appears to only represent 25% of her income, while music sales represent about 45%.

[1] http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/

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[Fred Ferrigno]

The fact that she's making chicken scratch is a price signal indicating that the world has more cellists than it realistically needs or wants. If more of them would quit and seek more profitable employment, the ones who are left would make more money.

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[jameshofo]

I'd hesitate to call it a problem, conceivably she signed a contract and had time to understand what she was going to be paid and how. I play pandora all the time some songs circulate on there several times, so a million is probably easy to achieve.

This is probably also a case of not enough data she only actually posted one month (the first) of returns. here not to mention she notes it was only her older works.

I’ve posted all my streaming data for the month my “content” went live.

Just take a look at the typical compensation

Internet royalties With the explosion of the Internet and the ease of downloading music onto your computer, a whole new royalty arena has opened up in recent years. Record companies usually treat downloads as "new media/technology," which means they can reduce the royalty by 20% to 50%. This means that rather than paying artists a 10% royalty on recording sales, they can pay them a 5% to 8% rate when their song is downloaded from the Internet. In the case of downloaded music, although there is no packaging expense, many record company contracts still state that the 25% packaging fee will be deducted.

this reeks of non-news trumped up (by the new York times) with a jab at the scale goat, I mean piracy, for good measure..

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[rtb61]

In reality that is the problem with streaming, too much competition. Too much music is available hence supply is far out weighing demand and the price is falling away to basically nothing. Old mass media rules, they could bury and kill off old content, limit the amount available and thus falsely or more accurately anti-competitively limit supply, raising prices and profits for the limited few, the majority of course got nothing. All that's happening now is the artificial barriers to competition are being erased and returns are dropping. How much does a busker get paid per performance by each person that hears part of it, can performance guards beat people up who heard a performance to make a payment, can people be fined for not paying. Wake up to reality drunken, drugged up minstrels the corruption of the system created by publishers for their benefit is collapsing. The busker is in reality who you were and who you will be again.

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[Eskarel]

I'm also slightly confused. Your average US CD goes for what? About $13 or so? over approximately 10-13 tracks on average? So you're looking at about a dollar per sale(which might then be listened to a few hundred times or more). So even if we presume that the artist was getting 100% of the price of the CD, which they sure as heck weren't, if you can get someone to listen to your song 200 times(which isn't exactly unreasonable) and you've got a good solid album with songs people actually want to listen to as opposed to one song people can hear just by turning on the radio and 12 tracks no one cares about, you're pretty much in the same boat you were before.

Given that artists weren't getting anywhere close to 100% of the CD sales and that you could probably get more than 200 listens per customer out of a good song, artists could actually do a lot better than before.

It's not a panacea to allow bands with a few thousand listener to make a living out of it, but short of people massively changing the way they value entertainment, that's just really not going to happen.

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[meerling]

Beethoven worked in music for about 45 years.
He wrote 9 symphonies, 5 concertos, 32 sonatas, 16 string quartets, and an Opera.
Don't forget he did a lot of performances as a conductor, music director, and even bass singer.
He's even known to have supplemented his income by giving piano and violin lessons.

Ok, so one of the worlds greatest in the field of music, that had even gained royal patronage for some years, and even he couldn't always make do with just his music income. I know Beethoven didn't have access to audio recording, but they had lots of performances and sold sheet music.
Now you want to look at the work of 14 albums over 14 years from a rather unknown artist, and complain that there isn't enough money. Did she write all the music herself? I'm guessing her work only comprises the cello due to the name. What is the total duration of those 14 albums? How many tens of thousands of other musicians are there currently looking to get a piece of the action?
Sounds like she's doing pretty good for the limited amount of work she's doing in the over saturated field of which she's only targeting a niche group within.

Copyrights and Patents weren't made to let you do something once and sit on your laurels raking it in for the rest of your life. They were intended to give you enough time to make just enough money off of it to encourage you to go out and do more.

So, how much is she making from her radio play, since they have even lower royalty rates, and why isn't she raising a fuss over those?

Re:Demand More

[dunkelfalke]

Well, maybe you are the one who is not a Pink Floyd fan after all, since TFC is, in fact, a Roger Waters solo album.

Re:Demand More

[Grishnakh]

Exactly. Playing a cello is one of those "careers" that's really a "hobby career", just like being a pilot. It's not something you go into expecting to make any money at. If you can manage to eke a living out of it, more power to you, but expecting to earn a good living doing that kind of job is expecting way too much. It's one of those jobs you do on the side, as a hobby, either with a spouse supporting you, or supporting yourself with another "day job" like waiting tables, until you can hopefully build it up to the point where you're making enough money at it to do it full-time without starving.

Most people don't get to do their dream jobs. Most people do jobs they don't like. That's why it's called "work". It's a minority of the population that gets to do something they like some of the time and get paid decent money for it. A lot of people here are in IT or engineering, and these jobs aren't exactly all fun and games either: some of the technical aspects of these jobs may be fun to us, but sitting through boring meetings and dealing with moronic or asshole managers isn't, but those are part of the job. Dealing with a daily commute isn't fun either, but most of us have to deal with that too. Why someone would think that they can record themselves playing an instrument, upload it to the internet, and then expect to sit back and collect massive royalty checks and live a luxurious middle-class lifestyle without lifting another finger is beyond me, and this woman frankly sounds like a spoiled brat.

If you're a musician and want to make a living at it, you need to work. That means you need to do less-fun jobs, such as getting out and touring, meeting your fans, selling CDs in person, etc. Expecting to earn a nice income off of internet sales alone is just asinine.

Shuffle

[jythie]

Every time there is a change, every time there is something new, every time there is a shift, the publishers find a way to twist the numbers so artists get an even smaller cut of the profits.

Re:Shuffle

[Kenja]

why is the money going to the industry and not the artists?

Because the "artists" signed the contract. It's the same reason the money goes to the company selling the software I write and not me.

Re:Shuffle

[icebike]

Exactly, again, why is the money going to the industry and not the artists?

Because they signed with the industry when they were young and foolish.
Those that take the early money generally lose.

The Bar Has Been Lowered

[ackthpt]

No longer do you need a sleazy music company executive to steal your rights and material, a posh recording studio, expensive band or studio musicians. You can now make up your own music in the comfort of your own home and sell it yourself. Perhaps, after all the megastars and millions and billions extracted by an industry, we are coming back to the common music of the people, no more difficult to obtain than to go down to the pub and listen to a band of minstrels who wandered into town.

You want quality music, you pay for quality music. You want garage music, you pay far less.

Re:The Bar Has Been Lowered

[cdrguru]

Those minstrels got paid - and generally paid pretty good. They got to eat while many of their fellows were starving on the little plot of land they were working for the Earl or whatever. And they wandered from town to town because no town could afford to keep them very long.

Make no mistake, these folks were living pretty high compared to the rest of society in those times.

Sure, you can make your own music for yourself. Don't plan on selling it, though, because everyone else can make their own music also. Or, you can listen to other people's music for free - just pay the membership fee for the service and you have your choice. Of course, not even the streaming service is very profitable, much less the artists - there is no money in it anywhere.

Music for the last hundred years or so has been driven by promotion. You hear about it because people are paying to make sure you hear about it. There are (were?) magazines dedicated to music promotion. AM and FM radio have been driven because of promotion. Free concerts have existed because of promotion - where the artist gets paid but nobody paid any admission. This is all coming to an end and the end of the road is no more promotion - you hear about what you hear about and you don't hear about anything very much.

Maybe it is a more eglitarian form of entertainment, but it means the end of things like a common cultural reference. A band is never going to escape their locality, which might be geographic or it might be a very narrowly focused group of people, or both. It means that you can never talk to someone that you just met about a band you both have heard of.

Re:42 cents a play?

[FrankSchwab]

0.42 cents - $0.0042.

Half a cent per play.

Doom and gloom, except when it isn't

[grasshoppa]

I have a hard time getting worked up about their dire predictions. Let's pretend the worst comes to pass; as a consumer, the downside for me is that the crap being produced is even less varied than previously. If that's really a problem, then a need will develop for more interesting music, and inevitably, someone will address that need.

These "artists" are not owed a living. They are not exempt from capitalism because of their chosen profession.

Re:42 cents a play?

[pushing-robot]

You might want to read that again.

Wow

[doroshjt]

I'm surprised that an Avant Cello musician isn't pulling in the coin

Re:Wow

[QRDeNameland]

I'm surprised that an Avant Cello musician isn't pulling in the coin

I read the article when it first appeared on the NYT site a few days ago, and even though my taste gravitate to things like 'Avant Cello', my reaction was quite similar.

I mean, she got 1.5 million plays in six months. Even if she didn't get a dime from it, at what point in the past could anyone playing Avant Anything get that kind of exposure?

Then I checked out her website, to see that she seems to have pretty full touring schedule, and on her Press page there are at least two articles acclaiming her success at leveraging online marketing.

I like your music, lady, but sheesh, cry me a river, will ya?

Musicians Can Make A Living

[flyneye]

The royalty model is screwed, old, antiquated and invites corruptions from many sources.
Provide your music free to the world and charge for live performance.
Your free music is your very best promotion.
Musicians now have the power to control their own destinies on a level playing field. The cream will rise and the crap will fall, thus guaranteeing much better entertainment than the music industry would provide when it was relevant. If your "avant cello" music doesn't bring crowds to performances, you are either performing at the wrong venue , or perhaps you should practice. Perhaps targeting your promotions would be a better consideration. New York will have better opportunities to fill rooms than say, in Cleveland or Oklahoma City.
Free the music and charge for performance, you can't go wrong. It's nearly idiot proof.

Re:Musicians Can Make A Living

[kheldan]

There's only one problem I see with your blue-sky thinking: People will gladly accept music for free (have for decades and decades, it's call RADIO) especially if there's no risk to getting it, but under your model concerts would probably be even more expensive than they already are, and they're expensive right now. Most people will say "Ugh, that's too much money, I'll just listen to the free recording, it's almost as good" and leave it at that.

Re:Musicians Can Make A Living

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I don't think artists should be given a certain income level, but live performances aren't a garuntee of success. I pay for all of the music I consume. The last concert I went to was in 2003. I'm not a big concert guy. The bands I would want to listen to are only playing in a city, late on a week day night with bad traffic, poor parking. Its just not worth the effort. You have a much bigger audience that just wants to listen to music on demand. There essentially is no way to entice a customer like me to go to a show. The promotion of free music ends up being a lost sale, because that's what I really wanted in the first place the music, not the crappy stage show.

But like I said, its not a problem I created, nor one I can fix. A good number of musicians are just basically screwed. They'd be better advised to make a living some other way that pays better.

Re:Musicians Can Make A Living

[spire3661]

Well then thats a shitty business model and he should rethink it.

Re:Musicians Can Make A Living

[Asmodae]

I think the concert model is incomplete. There is the associated fandom stuff as well. I've been calling it the web-comic model but it's been around longer than that in various bits and pieces. Give away the culture. Build fans, loyalty, credibility, and goodwill. Sell stuff. By 'stuff' I mean real physical goods. The kind you can't DRM, the kind that require limited resources. T-shirts, album art, custom concert posters, limited edition signed cover art, etc. Mugs, hats, pens. Things from cheap memento to collector items (e.g. Used guitar picks, drumsticks from concerts, just signed versions of same) and everything in between.

Fans like to give their heroes money. But people are still people and like to feel they're getting something out of it. A music track no longer really qualifies as that something (if it ever did on it's own). But various bits of 'stuff' would work fine. Heck invest in a 3D printer and start knocking out one offs or limited edition bits and pieces.

Culture is what people do, who they are; you can't charge people for access to it forever. What you can do is make a living from providing access if you do it in a reasonable way. Provide value for money.

Musicians are historically a low paying profession

[the_humeister]

This has been the case throughout history. For every Mozart or Beethoven, there were 1000s more just singing or reading poetry aloud to a small drunk audience at the pub.

There is no income guarantee for anyone

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Manufacturing workers in the US lost their jobs by the millions through no fault of their own. Thats the way the economy works. We aren't condemning anyone to poverty. If you want to do nothing other than make music, you get what the job pays. You can try to do something else to earn more money, if you'd like. The economy of a free society in uncertain times is a harsh mistress.

42 cents per play is bad?

[DSS11Q13]

A CD costs ~$13 retail which normally works out to about a dollar a song. Subtract things like the record labels cut, distribution, physical materials (I don't know how much these are normally) and I imagine you'd end up with something like 50 cents per song for the artists. Anyone have figures on this?

Then you have to figure that this artist's music is getting far more exposure than they would through any kind of physical media or brick and mortar store...

What am I missing?

Condmening them to poverty?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, we're condemning them to getting a fucking day job like the rest of us mopes.

Alternatively, our dear cellist can get a gig in a house band, though that may clash with her sensitive artists' feelings.

It may pain all of us a bit, but perhaps as a society we can't afford to have full time professional avant guard cellists no one has heard of.

Re:Condmening them to poverty?

[thesameguy]

Gotta agree. The vast majority of people can't get paid what they want for doing things they also want to do. Most of us choose a career with a happy intersection of "good pay" and "not terrible job." Many are not even that fortunate, and have to go with crap pay for a crap job. Crap pay for a good doesn't seem all that terrible. I would also put forward the notion that if the only thing you are qualified to do is make music AND you have specific income requirements, consider making popular music. Being upset about low pay rates for obscure music is akin to getting upset about slow steam engine sales or the low street price of the abacus. Wanna get paid well? Best bet is getting involved in something that everyone needs, not something a couple people want.

Re:Cry me a river

[EvanED]

To be fair, Keating feels that the NY Times article was not very representative of her opinions; the article is a lot more down on the streaming income than she is.

Her statements on the income from online streaming are pretty neutral; she's not totally gung-ho about it (like, say, maybe Johnathan Coulton would be), but she's also not really putting it out there in a complaining, "wah wah Spotify should be giving me more money" sense.

Re:Get a real job

[Marxist Hacker 42]

What the AC said. I seem to remember this concept, but I don't remember which founding father said it:
"I study agriculture so that my son can study medicine or engineering, so that he can make enough money so that his son can study art and liturature".

I'm sory, but nobody ever intended artists to be rich in a meritocracy. Art is too easy. It is what you go into when you are *already* reasonably financially independent.

The radio plays it for free, go cry somewhere else

[0xdeadbeef]

This is propaganda for the RIAA.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/katy-perry-rihanna-sign-ad-attacking-pandora-for-copyright-proposal/

Re:42 cents a play?

[zblack_eagle]

Do you work for Verizon?

Re:Not a bad start.

[Knuckles]

There is music that cannot be played live, or which does not work in a live setting, and which is still worth having (as a cultural contribution to humanity, I mean)

Profit margins

[hardtofindanick]

There are a lot of musicians and there is a lot of music around. Like it or not the field is saturated, competition is fierce and music is a commodity (and there is in fact a lot of free music around in case you were not paying attention). You need to deal with profit margins like we all do.

The part I don't like is, we are supposed feel bad and sympathize because you are high and noble with your "art" and "culture".

If you can't make enough money you are supposed find a different job (shocking, right?). A lot of people deal with it every day. You can still play your music on the side.

Quit Whining and Follow Metallica's Example

[ClassicASP]

Ya, Lars Ulrich led the charge against Napster way back in the day and got stomped like a fool for it.

Since then he's wised up and got back to work and today Metallica makes its bones doing bigger and better shows and more touring with more musicians along side them in the big 4 concerts.

The point is: if you aint making money, your music is probably just boring background music and nobody is willing to pay extra to see it live no matter how many times they play it over streaming radio.

Music itself has its own evolution and natural-selection and survival-of-the-fittest kinda thing going on out there. Thats why the harpsichord aint as popular as it used to be.

Re:42 cents a play?

[Toam]

I see a career opportunity...
http://www22.verizon.com/jobs/

Re:Revenue streams other than streaming?

[cdrguru]

Why would you purchase something that you can select to stream to a mobile device any time you want? Seems silly to me.

What streaming has done is given the power of the radio "request" to everyone and they all get their requests instantly. No need to buy anything, just make your selections and listen.

Oh, and if you want an MP3 file (for some unknown reason), that's what BitTorrent is for.

So who is getting paid here? Well, the streaming service is getting something, either a membership fee or ads. Both are a pittance because nobody is going to pay a high membership fee and the ads aren't generating lots of sales so they aren't very valuable. With that, the streaming service can pay the artists something - something like $0.0042 a play or about $500 a year.

There isn't any money in it. And there isn't anything that can be done to somehow push more money in or take more money out.

The problem with the "up and coming" band just getting by with touring is that there is no "coming". They might get enough exposure to net a better grade bar or two but nobody is paying for promotion. They are probably lucky if they can afford to stop off at Office Depot to run off some flyers to pass around. What the record label is for is paying for promotion - and making money by backing a few successful and a few more unsuccessful bands. They have seriously fallen down on that trying to control their risk, just like the rest of businesses today.

No risk = no reward. But that formula hasn't been taught very well in MBA class.

What "publishing" in general was 50 years ago was taking on 10 things, be it books, bands or whatever and promoting the heck out of them With reasonably good selection up front you had something like 7 flops, two moderate successes and one pretty good performer - which altogether paid for the promotion of all ten with some profit left over. The problem is the MBAs came in and decided they could make more money by getting rid of the seven flops without considering how you do that. So we have the entire spectrum of "publishers" trying to find the three successes without encountering any flops at all. Lots of really smart (and successful) people figured out a long time ago that you can't do that reliably and this lesson is being relearned every day. Unfortunately, MBA schools taught that you just had to be smart enough to find the three successes and all would be good. We are experiencing what happens when this is being applied across the spectrum of publishing - books, movies, music, software, magazines, etc.

There is this thing called a Union

[decora]

when you hear old Jazz musicians talk about New York, they frequently reminisce about the day they got their Union card.

the tech industry is so anti-union it would make people from the 50s blush.

so basically thats the end of music. except for auto-tuned horse shit puked out by quasi strippers who can't sing.

Truly, this is the Triumph of the Nerds.

Re:There is this thing called a Union

[Dishevel]

Absolutely.
Because as we all know there was no such thing as "Music" before the artists were protected by Unions and Major Labels.
Now as the major labels and the unions are going down the amount of new music available to the public has dropped precipitously.
Much like when the VCR killed the movie industry. Wish we never got those damned things.

Re:There is this thing called a Union

[cpt kangarooski]

I'm all for unions. And for copyright reforms. But not so much for propping up unviable business models and industries. If being a professional musician stops being something that can pay the bills, then so be it. If it's important enough, we'll figure something out. A negative income tax for all persons, maybe. (Because there's nothing about artists that makes them more deserving of welfare than anyone else in similar financial straits)

Re:There is this thing called a Union

[tlambert]

when you hear old Jazz musicians talk about New York, they frequently reminisce about the day they got their Union card.

You know that the reason you got your union card was so you could play clubs, right? It wasn't so you could play your song once in a studio, and then kick back and collect a monthly royalty check for the rest of your life.

Re:There is this thing called a Union

[gilgongo]

MOD. PARENT. UP.

Really. If we were taking about nurses, or teachers, or even miners or ship builders, the urgency of this issue would be a thousand times more intense. But in the grand scheme of things? This is - I am afraid to say - JUST MUSIC. It's music. Fun if you can write a nice tune, great to listen to. But frankly, not worth our angst here. You don't make a living making nice music? My commiserations, but perhaps you should not be expecting to make one any more than I do in my profession (UI design, if you must know).

Re:There is this thing called a Union

[dbIII]

Collective bargaining. It's easy to screw one person over but not so easy with a few thousand.
Yes, "commie talk" and the opposite of what some fake "libertarians" would say - some would possibly say some shit about bringing your gun to the negotiating table and about how wonderful a society run by the strongest warlords would be.

Pandora's fees

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Pandora pays at least 2 cents per listener hour. That's the minimum. The maximum is 25% of revenue generated during that playback. So the artist should be getting paid whichever is larger.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/music/does-the-riaa-even-want-pandoras-golden-eggs/

$1,653 equals 82,650 hours.
82,650 hours over 1.5M listens means average length of song is 3.3 minutes.

So, if her average piece is longer than 3.3 minutes, she's getting ripped off.
Otherwise something fishy is going on. Is BMG taking a big cut?

It seems to me that 25% of revenue is way more than fair for what is essentially radio play.

Re:Revenue streams other than streaming?

[EvanED]

Why would you purchase something that you can select to stream to a mobile device any time you want? Seems silly to me.

Um, maybe because of...

There isn't any money in it.

If I like someone's music, and want them to make more of it instead of giving up because they want to be able to eat, why wouldn't I give them money? They have provided me with enjoyment.

Re:Get a real job

[Howitzer86]

Many jobs manage to be difficult and unprofitable at the same time. Often art is one of them. While I agree with the spirit of your post, I assert that art is not easy.

too much offer, too hard competition

[godrik]

I am not really surprised. It looks like the amount of offer in music grows with time. There is more directors and composers than before. According to [1], there are 2.5 more music director and composer than 3 years ago while the number of musician appears to have decrease by roughly 10% in the same time. Since 99, it went from 52K people to 67K people. So there are 15% more people to pay. Meanwhile the US population only increase 12% [2].
I do not think the average entertainement of famillies changed a lot but if anything the music budget went down. So I am really not surprised.

Moreover, I feel like Internet concentrated music interest on a smaller number of artists which performs better than anybody else for no good reason. I mean gangnam style from psy shipped more than 6 millions albums in not even a year [3].

I do not know the artist that is speaking and I never listen to her music. But she is a cello artist which is not a popular style. So of course making money out of it is difficult. Yet her income increased according to her own numbers [4].

The real numbers we lack are the numbers from 10 or 15 years ago. How much money did an independent artist make in the 90's ? Is it really worse in 2013? (I ma not saying it is not, I am asking a real question)

[1] http://money.futureofmusic.org/how-many-musicians-are-there/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangnam_Style
[4] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkasqHkVRM1OdGhjdExSMzYyMXFZUkZNSUJrY3MwNXc&pli=1#gid=0

Hard to feel sorry for her...

[asmkm22]

I just looked at the spreadsheet in question (found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkasqHkVRM1OdEJFUnhyNFFkZjVSUWxhWGl1dE9lQXc#gid=4) and found that all told, she made 82k in a six month period. She's hardly living hand to mouth at some dead end job she hates.

Does her income from streaming services compare at all to what she gets through iTunes? No, but it's just a little extra icing on the cake for basically no work on her part, especially considering her style of music is unlikely to have much of a traditional fanbase (radio, top 40, etc). The nice thing about it all is that, as she gains more media exposure and traction, the basic infrastructure is already in place for her to make more as she gains new fans.

Again, 82k in six months is hardly a starving musician, especially considering the fringe nature of her music.

Re:Hard to feel sorry for her...

[EvanED]

As I've posted a couple times [I'm a fan so feel somewhat compelled to clarify that she's not really complaining (I have no further affiliation with her her)], Keating's views aren't well-reflected in the article and she's a lot less negative on the streaming model than the article seems to suggest. The vibe I've gotten is much more of a "here are numbers so you can have more intelligent conversations about things like changes in federal licensing regulations", and pick up basically no "wah wah wah Spotify should give me more money".

Re:The radio plays it for free, go cry somewhere e

[asmkm22]

What's interesting about that is how black and white the music industry is. If you're a top act, like the ones signing that ad, your label really does take good care of you. You make tons and get to basically blow your life away doing whatever you want, for the roughly 10 years you keep putting out new records and selling out venues.

It's the rest of the musicians, the majority, that get shafted by the RIAA business model.

So....

[boethius]

We're using an "avant cello" artist to make a point about how dismal fractional royalties are? Should we also be outraged if a "classical banjo" artist or "neo-Accordionist" also aren't making a sustainable living on completely passive revenue streams like Pandora, Spotify, iTunes, etc. etc.?

While we're at it why doesn't the guy who races dirt-track on the weekends complain that he's not making a sustainable living at what he does. What about painters, sculptors, writers, actors, and other artists... perhaps they should be complaining too that someone isn't providing them with a sustainable living.

Should they, realistically, be making $50-$80K a year selling streaming music? More importantly is there even a remote shot that an "avant cellist" would have made that kind of money in the pre-Internet days? I'd say the chances are essentially zero that an avant cellist would have a break-out year and make even a sustainable living. There's an occasional break-out classical artist - VERY occasional - but most of them make money from performing not from CD sales.

The truth is that artists - even the most talented - from time immemorial have had to do something else to make a real living and pay the bills. Perhaps not the best example but I was watching a little thing on luxury RVs - ah, my idle TV watching habits - and they interviewed Bret Michaels. He spends over 200 days a year on the road performing. THAT is how he makes a living - by working his butt off. If this gal expects to make survival income from just creating music and watching the big bucks flow in from Pandora or Spotify she's just dreaming. If she really wants to make a living she'll have to do it by building a reputation performing and, as the article indicates, that is very, very hard to do.

Honestly $2000 for 6 months of doing absolutely nothing to promote your music - ESPECIALLY "avant cello" - doesn't seem like a bad chunk of change to me.

A fairer perspective might be huge artists like the Rolling Stones or Rihanna or Katy Perry or Justin Bieber - what kind of money are they making on these services? No doubt it is much much more and are they and their business managers content with the revenue streams from these sources? Probably.

Re:Not a bad start.

[aaaaaaargh!]

Funny coincidence. I just had a nice evening with two old friends who are both professional jazz musicians, and also talked about copyright issues with them. While they definitely do support getting some compensation for record sales and broadcasts (but do not support large record labels or criminal lawsuits for copyright violation), they make their living first and foremost from live performances and secondly, less money but in a more relaible manner, from teaching at music schools. So do all of their colleagues. They are neither rich nor poor and generally have a very good life.

So at least this little anecdote confirms your opinion.

Re:Not a bad start.

[asmkm22]

Actually, the comment you quoted was just a scare tactic by BMG to make it sound like artists that don't have the big labels to protect them from the evil streaming sites simply can't survive.

What he fails to mention is how she made 82k in that same six months through iTunes, Amazon, and Bandcamp.

This is just RIAA fearmongering trying to make her sound like she's in the poor house due to regulations.

What's wrong with licensing to DIY videographers?

[solune]

As video equipment explodes in variety and lower cost, and Joe Schmoe gets an idea for a "killer you-tube" video — or a wedding videographer edits last weeks video — I'm constantly struck by the complete lack of options for the DIY cinematographer.

When you post something on YouTube with a musician's music, you get the take-down; yet, people persist in trying it.

So, why hasn't the RIAA, who *supposedly* represents the better interests of content providers, come up with a licensing plan that would enable the would-be Spielberg to legally use music in the production of their comedy/sci-fi/drama/whatever video?

I've talked to a *lot* of people who don't keep up on copyright/patent/trademark issues, and overwhelmingly they say they wouldn't mind paying $25—or more—to license a song for their video. Baby showers, weddings, and other home-made content are ripe for a balance of producer and user, yet the music industry thinks suing people will solve their problems.

Dammit, we live in an age where setting up a system of home-user licensing commercial music should be easy. Not only that, but the mechanism for indie artists to profit from this system should be relatively easy to set up!

Why is this not happening?

Re:The radio plays it for free, go cry somewhere e

[0xdeadbeef]

Coffee shops are a totally different licensing scheme, usually ASCAP, and they're assholes too:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100518/2341299481.shtml

As per radio:

Music industry groups also want one standard, but one that keeps rates high. For years they have also been pushing for laws that would require terrestrial stations to pay royalties to labels and artists. (In the United States - and almost nowhere else in the world - radio stations pay royalties only to music publishers.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/business/media/fight-growing-over-online-royalties.html

publisher = songwriter

It's the same with broadcast radio

[tlambert]

With Spotify, you can hear the same song over and over without buying it. And you don't have to listen to the rest of the album.

It's the same with broadcast radio, only you don't get to pick the song. Broadcast radio plays what Clearchannel has been bribed to play because that's what they want in the top 40. They want specific songs in the top 40 because they come from bands which, while mediocre, are capable of churning out nearly identical songs periodically to keep the pipeline full.

Re:Live Performances

[icebike]

I wonder how much time these artists actually spend on live performances. Intellectual property creation is the only business that I know of where you can do something once and get paid for it forever.

Can you suggest a different model?
(Don't start with performance. How many times a week do you go watch a live performance? Who has the time, the money to do that?)

The benefit of a performance lasts till the house lights come back up.
The benefit of you raising a pound of beans lasts a shorter period of time than the time to grow and harvest them.
The benefit of you making a shirt lasts a couple years on average.
The benefit of you building a Car lasts only 10 years or until the first crash.

The benefit of recorded music or written literature, or architectural plans lasts forever, or at least as long as they continue to be sought out and used. Why shouldn't the artist/author/architect get paid more than once, if society benefits forever?

Should we have a Panel of Judges decide which songs should be published, then pay the artists some estimate of the total value, and have them forever relinquish rights and the music is forever the property of society?

You might make the case that copyrights last too long, and I might agree, but to imply that IP should be paid for exactly once per consumer stopped working the day people figured out how to make books, record music, or draw building plans.

Re:Live Performances

[Genda]

This is like farming during the era of the giant RailRoad Monopolies. Farm all you like, be a great farmer and make exceptional produce. Need to get that to market. No problem, we're charging 99.9 cents on the dollar. "But", the farmer says "I can't live on that...", "Not my problem." says the Railroad.

You folks talk about garage bands. That's crap. The music business today is pretty faces and prepackaged homogenized sewage. If you're an amazing artist, world class, first rate, you're still boogered if you don't fit the current recording artist mold. You only truly succeed if you have your own publishing company and you only publish if your already a success. We need a way for great artists to make a decent living, I don't mean getting stupid wealthy (unless I guess they are in that top 0.1%) but a good living, so people can be artists without having to saw off an ear from the frustration and heart break of it.

As for getting a job, most artist have day jobs, because you can't live on being an artist... you've heard the term starving artist? Most of those starving artists died poor and their art today is priceless, because our society appreciates art but raises a middle finger to artists. Artists create and the hoards of middle men buy cheap, sell, resell, re-resell and suddenly this original print is worth a million and the artist can't afford coal to keep from freezing his fingers off. This is one of the reasons we created a National Arts Foundation, to support, sustain and promote the arts. This is the failure of the for profit model. How's the quote go "What profits a man if he should gain the world and lose his soul..." We don't need art. We don't need beauty or love or compassion either. If however we choose to have these things, then we should be accountable for their existence and subsidize the process through time, labor and money to ensure their ongoing presence. Or we should not complain when these precious things go away. In the end, as always, it is our choice.

Re:I have a problem with this...

[GuB-42]

Unlike a song, a chair cannot be copied for free. If I want a meeting room with 10 chairs, I need to buy 10 chairs, I can't buy a single chair and copy it 9 times. This is the reason why intellectual property and physical objects cannot operate under the same rules.

To hell with that, WE demand more!!!

[Nexion]

I agree, and I also find it odd that so many musicians feel like they should not have to work. Compare to me as a programmer. Both have to build their skill set, both have to use creativity and logic, we both have to produce works and others consume these works. I have to go into work at least 5 days a week, and they want to sit on their ass and plunk away on an instrument while getting paid a ransom for what they put out. Me, I'm constantly improving what was done, producing more and supporting those consumers. This applies to a programmer in a large corp all the way down to a lone wolf. We fail to do this we end up not making money.

Maybe I should go in to work on Monday and tell them they need to pay me my salary for the rest of my life for the work I've already done. I wonder how well that will go over.

Not all musicians are like this one who laments not having "a significant live business". No, I like bars with live music where some guy I've never heard of is plugging away at his trade. If he is cool I'll buy him a drink, and if I like his music I'll perhaps buy a CD. This person is actually working... they show up for work dressed, skilled and with equipment in hand. I respect this person for it. If you want my cash you better be offering more then some recording tweaked digitally, mastered and mass produced with zero engagement from you.

IMHO, Zoe Keating and musicians with the same attitude are the patent trolls of the music industry. If Ms Keating wants to earn more she needs to engage her fans more. Do more shows... hell, some rappers make their money just walking up to people in public, meeting them, to sell them their CD for 5$. They have their hustle on, where is yours Ms Keating? I find it ironic that some thug ass gansta rapper politely asks me if I would like buy his CD to support him... signed at no extra charge, yet at the end of this posted story we have a group who would love to reach into everyone's pocket and just take our money.

I'm a musician too Zoe... check this out, I'll play the world's smallest violin for you.

Re:To hell with that, WE demand more!!!

[EvanED]

Me, I'm constantly improving what was done, producing more and supporting those consumers.

And the artists aren't?

IMHO, Zoe Keating and musicians with the same attitude are the patent trolls of the music industry.

"As the artist featured in this NYTimes article, I feel horribly misrepresented and I have to straighten out a few things. ... But I'm truthfully, extremely happy and thankful, exactly where I am right now. ... I'm not against streaming by any means. I've put my music wherever someone might hear it; including onto filesharing sites (gasp)."

Re:To hell with that, WE demand more!!!

[Vaphell]

But saying their ability to earn a living should suffer because of something not directly related to their skill as a musician seems wrong.

deal with it. Many people don't get awesome jobs because they are perceived as awkward or whatever by the HR drones, even if they have all the raw skills required. It happens daily and musicians are not some special breed of people.

Re:To hell with that, WE demand more!!!

[Americano]

I also find it odd that so many musicians feel like they should not have to work.

So making music isn't working? Let me guess, you think it's limos everywhere, all the liquor & drugs you can consume, private jets from city to city, and a nonstop parade of 18 year old supermodels through your bedroom?

Compare to me as a programmer. Both have to build their skill set, both have to use creativity and logic, we both have to produce works and others consume these works.

So the jobs are very similar! How much does an average programmer make, versus an average working musician, again? And would you take a programming job offering the same wage as a working musician, without grumbling about how little you got paid?

I have to go into work at least 5 days a week, and they want to sit on their ass and plunk away on an instrument while getting paid a ransom for what they put out.

As opposed to the average programmer, who doesn't sit on his ass all day and plunk away on a keyboard, while demanding a ransom for his work because he knows Visual Basic? I don't think Ms. Keating suggested she wanted a "ransom" for what she put out - she's saying "this style of music distribution sucks for musicians," and she's right - it does.

Thought exercise:

Your employer calls you in and says, "you know, we're moving to a streaming model. You're going to get half a cent every time somebody uses your software, instead of a salary. And since nobody loses anything by copying it, we're going to also take the software you produced, and share it online so that customers can download it for free. Unfortunately, we can't track that usage, so you won't get paid at all for those - but it's not like you lost a sale, if the software wasn't free, they probably wouldn't have bought it anyway! But cheer up, you should be excited just to simply have the skill to be a creative computer professional with the skills to do this - the effort is its own reward!

What's that? You're upset? Why should anybody pay you a ransom every year just so you can keep the same buggy piece of shit running while making a few enhancements and playing with yourself in a bunch of useless meetings? If you want to get paid, get out there and write NEW software that will delight and amaze our customers in return for fractions of a penny per software use! You gotta HUSTLE, son!"

Think that sounds like a great way to live? Would we be justified in telling you to "shut up, you're not entitled to a living writing software, be better at it and you'll probably get paid," or would you take issue with that?

Your general attitude that the creation and performance of music isn't "work," and thus has no value or right to be compensated, Is especially delicious, given the obvious parallels to the comparative physical & mental efforts between music & programming. Do you REALLY think your boss pays you 75k/year to "show up in your cubicle 40 hours a week," regardless of what you actually produce during that time?

Re:To hell with that, WE demand more!!!

[jafac]

You misunderstand what musicians do.

And the "market" for live music is pretty limited actually.

At least for "bar" music - most people just want to hear cover bands play music they know, by "pop" bands, and they want the music to be not TOO loud, so they can converse, and not TOO aggressive, or challenging, because - frankly, it's background noise for their drinking.

Many musicians study their art in depth, working through their primary, secondary, and postsecondary education, and also attending special training on the side, then qualifying for highly competitive programs, to go to 4 year schools, often going on to get a Master's. Their equipment is not cheap. The services they need, to record, are not cheap. These musicians are not playing what 90% of people want to listen to at bars. And you might want to apply your libertarian "free market" ideals to that, and say; "well these people need to go flip burgers and wait on tables or something." But there's a significant audience of people who want to listen to those recordings, and these musicians do contribute significantly to our culture. (a great deal more than your average lying car-salesman or steroid-junky sports-star.)

So let me tell you where you can put your world's smallest violin.

Re:To hell with that, WE demand more!!!

[Nexion]

Apparently I owe Ms Keating my apology. Uploading her own works to build her fan base definitely qualifies as "getting her hustle on". As for any artist making around 40 cents for someone simply hearing their music; I would have to say that is an excessive payment and the diminished royalties should come as no surprise to anyone once whatever error that caused it was fixed. As for the misrepresentation on the part of the New York Times I will quote her on this:

"like I’m often disappointed in the press."

Lets just add that on to taxes and death as the only things certain in life.

Thank you for the clarification EvanED.

Re:To hell with that, WE demand more!!!

[Kielistic]

That's a good rant but I believe the point was a programmer doesn't get paid per execution of their program. They get paid once to write it. Possibly additionally to continue to support it.

Re:To hell with that, WE demand more!!!

[ATMAvatar]

The time and effort it takes to record a single album of 10-15 songs each year is nothing close to the 2000+ hours you spend on a full-time job. Touring is where the hard work happens for a musician. The argument made down this comment thread is that recorded music by itself should not constitute a career in itself - it should only act as supplemental income. I've yet to see anyone here say that a touring musician should be unable to support themselves.

Re:To hell with that, WE demand more!!!

[Compaqt]

While I appreciate that certain musicians might add variety to the cultural scene, if nobody wants to listen to them, what are we supposed to do for them? Put them on musical welfare?

It would be useful if you tried to non-violently persuade people to listen to your preferred brand of music, so that it could become popular, and your favorite musicians would have an incentive to continue. (Basically the same thing that Linux distro fans do. Speaking of which, I haven't heard people asking for handouts for distro maintainers.)

Re:To hell with that, WE demand more!!!

[Rinikusu]

That's .40 cents, not 40 cents. Not even a half-penny per play.

But the difference is that you can make the same parallels between coding and music (I do both). You produce works-for-hire. You come in to your regular job, you get paid to produce *something*, typically specced out by someone else based on someone else's needs/ideas, etc. The equivalent of this in the music world are the studio musicians who get paid a salary (or contracted out) to perform a particular piece of music, usually composed/written by someone else, and you hear these pieces of work in commercials, movies, corporate training videos, whatever.

On the other side, you've got coders that aren't getting paid that are working on their own software, their own website, something they think that might make a million dollars or might make them zero. many programmers do this because they love to program and have no expectation of financial reward, others think this is the next google and want to be billionaires, and a whole swathe of folks in between those mentalities. I think screenwriters call this kind of work "spec" work, in that there's no paycheck in the creation, with the expectation that it might be valuable once it's complete. Same sort of deal with musicians. They write their own music, they put together a band, rehearse, and then go out and play it live. For many musicians, they do this because they love to create music and have no expectation of financial reward. Others think they're going to be the next Radiohead and will make millions and can spend the rest of their lives writing music on their own time instead of working around the 9-5 grind (and seriously, I know some folks think that musicians are lazy fuckers, but most of my bandmates all work 2 and 3 jobs leading up to tours so they have enough money to pay bills while they slog from show to show on a daily basis. It's fun, but breaking even is a good tour, much less profitable. My last tour turned a profit of about $20/person after 3 weeks on the road. It happens.) In my particular instance, I program because it's a steady paycheck, and a really nice one, at that. But that means that all my musical pursuits are basically a hobby. I'm too old to tour 9 months out of the year and then try to find a shitty part-time job for the other 3 months so I can help pay rent on whatever shithole apartment I have to share with a girlfriend of *shudder* the fucking drummer. And just try figuring out what kind of jobs you'll be hired for knowing that you'll have to quit after 3-5 months to go do another multi-month tour to support your new record you probably paid for yourself.

I like to get paid for whatever work I do. I do not create musical "works for hire", although it's true that many musicians do this for a living. I'd also compare them to the cube coder: the guys that come in for the paycheck, but you know they've already clocked out a long time ago. It's sad, really. I'm sure some genuinely love doing it, or put up with it, but just like all the programmers I know, almost every one of them has a personal project they'd rather get paid to work on and not some bullshit report generator so the executives can pat themselves on the back and give each other a nice blowjob.

It's not your fault, it's not my fault, but that's the reality.

Re:To hell with that, WE demand more!!!

[Veroxii]

You misunderstand what the rest of the world does.

You think programmers get to write fulfilling awesome pieces of code to stimulate their creativity? No... they write boring back-end database and financial software.

You think lawyers all get to smartly outwit each other in their cerebral battles in court? No... it's mostly drafting contracts from templates and doing boring papery things.

You think that doctor gets to save lives by cleverly doing differential diagnosis and finding the obscure diseases that no-one could? No... it's mostly the same snotty noses and strange genital rashes day in and day out.

I could go on, but I think the point here is that work is not glamorous for most people.

So if you have to play a pop cover in the bar to make ends meet - suck it up! Go experiment and be deep on your own time and dime. The rest of the world does too.

Re:To hell with that, WE demand more!!!

[Americano]

I've yet to see anyone here say that a touring musician should be unable to support themselves.

And you think they're going to magically make a living touring? For most bands playing small venues, touring is not a moneymaker, especially if they're not selling CDs and other merchandise AT those shows. And then after making very little money on the road for 3 months, they go home, to find a $47.83 check from Spotify waiting.

Royalties from streaming are shitty, and a bad deal for musicians. The suggestion that recorded music should be free, or that fractions of a penny per play is some sort of great deal for artists... sort of turns into an argument that "touring musicians should be unable to support themselves."

Re:To hell with that, WE demand more!!!

[Americano]

I don't collect massive royalties off everything I create.

That's great - neither does a musician. More similarities!

Are musicians going to start sending me music updates?

Sure, it's on a subscription model. You pay them for a copy of the original CD, and then they tour around and you can buy a ticket to hear reworked versions of those songs. And they deliver it to you - sounds like a bargain.

I had some friends who had a band they each got around 150-200 for four hours work... in a bar... drinking free drinks. Yes... yes I would.

No, they made 150 to 200 for a DAY OF WORK.

Actually I average in excess of 50 hours a week. I often have to work at odd hours... travel... hoist 50lb+ servers into racks... blah blah blah... you don't know much about the demands of a career in technology do you? It's not music distribution, it is advertising at best.

Great, so even more similarities to your job then - touring musicians will spend the night driving to their next show; when they arrive in town, they will often have a press appearance of some sort (un-paid), where they'll spend an hour or two at the local radio station, or a local record store, etc., hoping to generate a little buzz for their show later tonight. They might get to walk around town a bit, or they might not. They'll be carrying their gear into the club, setting it up, doing soundchecks, breaking everything down, loading the van up, and driving for several hours to the next gig. Plenty of audio gear will weight 50+ pounds, and they're carrying it in and out of places that are a lot less safe than your server room. You don't know much about the demands of a career in music, do you? You seem to think that it's all just "limo brings me to the red carpet, I lip sync for 15 minutes, then the blowjobs commence." There is at least as much physical labor, a shitload more discomfort, and plenty of long hours and shitty working conditions.

LOL, so .005 dollars everytime clicks a link to a new page?!?!? Sign me up!!! Do I get the same for each library too!?!?!?

Only if musicians get .005 dollars for every note you listen to. And as we all know, since Amazon gets millions of users per month, EVERY web site must get millions of users per month! You're trying to be cute and dodge the point by being glib, but being glib simply makes you look stupid.

Re:To hell with that, WE demand more!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it is.

Take a typical metal band. For every song, it has to be rehearsed, this may take months, then we have to record it, this entails around a 60 hour week in the studio, 5 musicians, an engineer, his assistant, a producer, that's 900 hours times 8 people. Then you need to put out a music video or two to promote the album, count on a month to produce something of sufficient quality. Add on the publicity events, and you pretty much have a fulltime job.

This is exactly the trouble, people think that because copying music/movies is easy, that producing it must be a similar walk in the park. It's not. Even more so for films than music.

You can make the claim that people don't want quality music or films, and therefore musicians should just pick a different line of work. I mean after all, no one wants to pay for music or films (though they still want to listen/watch them), but it's disingenuous to claim that producing quality music isn't a difficult fulltime job. Maybe we should all just stop producing music, and get jobs in fast food restaurants, but don't ask us to continue to make music for your consumption in our spare time, that's just not going to happen.

Re:To hell with that, WE demand more!!!

[Kjella]

Touring is mostly meat grinder work, getting on location, getting all the gear in place, connecting all the equipment and sound testing, rigging down equipment, on to the next location or back home. The actual performance is not the hard work, or rather all the hard work behind it you'd have to do in order to record an album too. If you want to argue that producing great music without travelling around to play it is failing to cash in on it that's fine, but it's not quick or easy. I know a few musicians and it's practice, practice, practice, both solo and with the band - you think sounding that good comes for free even if you have talent? It doesn't. And not everyone can or will spend most of the year on the road, even if they're willing to work 2000+ a year on their music. What they can offer is to create music, if the market puts any value on that. Or not, it's a free market.

Re:To hell with that, WE demand more!!!

[Grishnakh]

Touring is hard work. Maybe the performance itself isn't that hard, but traveling around that much is very tiring. And the performance itself isn't exactly easy: professional musicians aren't like us amateurs who miss some notes and it doesn't matter: the good ones can deliver virtually flawless performances over and over, and that's their real skill (and being able to do it on-location, not in some comfy and familiar office).

Recording music is easy by comparison. Miss some notes? No problem, just record that section (or the whole song) over again. A recording musician doesn't have to worry about playing 2 hours of music straight through flawlessly, he can take bathroom breaks whenever he wants, he can take breaks between every song, etc. And now with today's tools, you don't even have to get the sound exactly right on the first pass, as you can digitally edit it afterwards.

If you're not willing to spend your time going from place to place ("on the road") to make good money playing music, then maybe you should get a different job. The rest of us have to go "on the road" every single weekday to go to our jobs that we don't even enjoy that much so we can earn a decent living.

If this lady can upload a few songs to a single website and make ~$3k in a year from that, that's a pretty good deal IMO for so little work. I don't get paid recurring royalties for the code I write for work; I have to keep showing up every day and doing more work.

Internet services are how I discover music

[steveha]

My main use for Rhapsody and Pandora, and even for streaming "radio" stations, is to discover music. When I find stuff I like, I try to buy it on CD (and then rip the CD to FLAC and never touch the disc again).

What I like best about Rhapsody is that it is a world-wide web for music, where I can listen to the entire track or entire album and decide if I like it. (Sometimes it takes me a few listens to decide whether I like something!)

For example, on Rhapsody I went to the "Electronic Music" section and looked at what was most popular, and found a band I had never heard of called "Zero 7". I bought a CD by them. (It's called Simple Things and I do recommend it; I like every song on that album.)

I go to the page for bands I like, and click on one of the "related" links, and find bands I had never heard of. And sometimes I buy CDs.

When I was in college I pretty much bought music by bands I already knew. Now, with the help of the Internet, I'm branching out and finding all kinds of new stuff.

Trust me, I have never heard of this avant garde celloist, but with an Internet service there is at least a chance I might. So, instead of looking at this as lost revenue, she might want to look at it as advertising that pays her (albeit not very much).

Re: Clear Channel

[almechist]

I have been listening to the same 20 songs for 5 years.

Congratulations, you appear to be perfectly qualified to work as program director for any contemporary commercial music-playing radio station. Now if you can just get that down to 15 or even 10 songs, your future with Clear Channel seems assured.

Basic income is the future of the arts

[Paul Fernhout]

http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
"A basic income is an income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement. It is a form of minimum income guarantee that differs from those that now exist in various European countries in three important ways:
        * it is being paid to individuals rather than households;
        * it is paid irrespective of any income from other sources;
        * it is paid without requiring the performance of any work or the willingness to accept a job if offered.
Liberty and equality, efficiency and community, common ownership of the Earth and equal sharing in the benefits of technical progress, the flexibility of the labour market and the dignity of the poor, the fight against inhumane working conditions, against the desertification of the countryside and against interregional inequalities, the viability of cooperatives and the promotion of adult education, autonomy from bosses, husbands and bureaucrats, have all been invoked in its favour.
But it is the inability to tackle unemployment with conventional means that has led in the last decade or so to the idea being taken seriously throughout Europe by a growing number of scholars and organizations. Social policy and economic policy can no longer be conceived separately, and basic income is increasingly viewed as the only viable way of reconciling two of their respective central objectives: poverty relief and full employment.
There is a wide variety of proposals around. They differ according to the amounts involved, the source of funding, the nature and size of the reductions in other transfers, and along many other dimensions. As far as short-term proposals are concerned, however, the current discussion is focusing increasingly on so-called partial basic income schemes which would not be full substitutes for present guaranteed income schemes but would provide a low - and slowly increasing - basis to which other incomes, including the remaining social security benefits and means-tested guaranteed income supplements, could be added.
Many prominent European social scientists have now come out in favour of basic income - among them two Nobel laureates in economics. In a few countries some major politicians, including from parties in government, are also beginning to stick their necks out in support of it. At the same time, the relevant literature - on the economic, ethical, political and legal aspects - is gradually expanding and those promoting the idea, or just interested in it, in various European countries and across the world have started organizing into an active network. "

See also:
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/11/16/can-unions-and-strikes-still-make-a-difference/index.html
"What good is it to get more money and more benefits for fewer and fewer remaining workers while they wait for their own jobs to be lost to automation and improved design? Yet, this has been the strategy of most unions for many years. The failure of the US American automakers in Detroit shows how, in the long run, unions creating private welfare states within individual corporations does not work well anymore for union members or anyone else in society these days. The companies become less competitive relative to other companies that pay less and embrace automation and better design, and so they fail, taking all the union jobs with them.
    We are possibly past the point where union actions related to single companies make much sense. If unions are to have any major role in the future, it may likely be as part of larger efforts to rethink the underlying basis of our economy and society, like by somehow being part of a national effort for a basic income, or comprehensive single-payer health care reform, or reforming education, or things like that."

Re:Basic income is the future of the arts

[Kjella]

Basic income will not happen any time soon, and the reason is people like me. I make pretty good money, I pay quite a lot of taxes and while I could possibly take the burden of a sabattical year myself the financial impact on the rest of my life isn't worth it. Give me a decent basic income and I'll easily take a year off for a double whammy to the tax system, not only do you not get my tax income you'll be paying me instead. The theory is of course that you'll get someone else off basic income to take my job and pay the same taxes I did, but I really doubt it's going to work that way in practice.

Re:Basic income is the future of the arts

[Paul Fernhout]

Why do many millionaires still "work" then? A related essay I wrote: http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html

Re:Basic income is the future of the arts

[Kjella]

Why do many millionaires still "work" then?

Lots of reasons I'm sure, but not because they don't get basic income. If you're poor you'll probably keep working since the basic income is well.... basic. If you're filthy rich, it doesn't matter. It's the middle class who'll take the opportunity to not work because it costs them less. The examples in your essey seem excessively high, I don't know if you realized but nobody will work for minimum wage if you can sit on your bum ass all day and still make the same. If basic income was set at $20k, you probably couldn't need closer to $30k to get anyone hired as otherwise people would more earn more on basic income and use their 2000 hours worth of spare time to live cheaper.

Re:Basic income is the future of the arts

[Paul Fernhout]

A basic income goes to everyone whether they work or not. If you work, you get whatever you earn (less taxes) on top of the basic income. So, it is not the same as the current welfare system where you lose "benefits" if you work. That is one reason it is a much better idea. There is no explicit disincentive to work with a basic income for all as opposed to income-dependent welfare or unemployment insurance.

I think there will be less and less paid work as we automate more and more. So, I'm not too worried about people not having much of an incentive to do extra work beyond unpaid child-care and volunteer work and civic participation and so on.

Just like anything else

[Sycraft-fu]

Some forms of music, or any art, are condemned to poverty because nobody gives a shit. Same with really any other trade. Maybe you absolutely love writing some kind of obscure program that very few people have a use for, and none are willing to pay for. That's wonderful, just don't expect to make any money on it. You wanna make money programming? It needs to be writing things people want/need which may not be what's fun for you.

If you want to follow your dream, there's fine, just don't expect anyone else to want to give you money for it. If you want money, do something that others want or need done.

Re:Get a real job

[WastedMeat]

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

-John Adams

I am not sure it really means what you were going for though.

Re:Ya well

[EvanED]

I like classical music, but I'm not interested in that. Solo strings is all kinds of not my thing.

Since you like classical, I encourage you to check it out... it's just solo in the sense of one performer, but not in the sense of the Bach suites or Paganini caprices. She layers several recordings on top of each other using looping software*, so it's music that, without technology, would require an ensemble to play.

(* I think most of her stuff is done through looping, but there are some tracks, including my favorite, where I don't see how that's possible; there are too many layers too soon. So I'm not quite sure what the rules she uses are exactly; maybe sometimes she's fine using tracks that can't be played live, or the "extra" layers are from earlier on that album, or something like that.)

I'm not saying you'll necessarily like it of course, but I think it's great. (In fact, I played cello back in elementary through high school but sort of fell out of it. There are a handful of artists who have inspired me to get it back out and play a little bit a couple times a week, and Zoe is one of them. That's why I've gone a bit overboard defending her -- her attitude toward the Spotify income is way less negative than the article implies it is.)

Musicians ?

[Taco Cowboy]

Here is how I see it ...

Music sheet is like a database

Composers are like the people who key in the data into a database

Musicians are like people reading from a database and then interpreting the dataset into something else

And the so-called "Musicians" want to be paid for doing that ??

How about us, the geeky programmers, the ones who made the database engines?

We got paid ***ONCE*** for building the databse engines.

And those Musicians?

They expect to get paid every-single-time someone else looked or listen to whatever interpretation they did from the dataset they got from the database?

Exactly. Why "should" anyone make money?

[popo]

There's no "should" in earnings. Some things make money. Some things don't. You can spend the next 8 years working on a book of poetry, and sell a mere 75 copies for $5 a pop. Would such low earnings warrant a Slashdot article on the "tragedy of working poets"? Would poets then demand more money from society with claims that one "should" be able to earn a living wage scrawling free verse?

This is a story about an "avant cellist". Of all the categories of music that don't make money, that sounds like it's right up there at the top of the list. Good music? Maybe! Maybe great music. But great music and a buck fifty gets you a cup of coffee.

How many readers here would rather be designing an indie game for mobile devices, or making a blog about their favorite topic? (Maybe you are doing that). Chances are that's not something you're doing with expectations of a living wage. It would be nice, but to "expect" it would be ridiculous.

This is a topic that is controversial only for soon-to-be disillusioned teenagers.

Hi there! This is Zoe replying

[zoecello]

I expect you've all swarmed off by now, but in case you haven't I will hopefully either clear up some of your misconceptions.

I am not complaining about my royalties. I put my data out there to show how things work for a moderately successful unlabeled non-mainstream artist. That I am not big was exactly the point. There is little out there in the way of facts as to how regular artists actually make their livings (but lots of opinions on how they should). And as far as streaming goes, most artists are not getting royalties directly, but through a label. Those artists might not be not allowed to talk about royalty splits in their contracts, and in some cases might not even know what they are. I am my own label, and so for better or worse I can talk about these things.

In doing so, I've attracted a lot of attention from the press and that is how I ended up being interviewed by the NYTimes. The author took a snippet of our conversation and used it to his own ends. I am sure most of you have taken a critical reading class and so you must know that you shouldn't believe at face value everything you read. Most authors have a story they want to tell and they use their subjects to prove that story. If I had been more wise and had a PR handler, I would have demanded a transcript to publish at the same time as the article. Believe me, I'll do that from now on.

I was not talking about me in that quote. He asked me: Do you think income from streaming will ever replace income from sales? I remember that I said....as the number of listeners grows it will be lucrative for a mega-artist who has millions and millions of listens. I said in Spotify's case it will be even more lucrative for that mega-artist's label because they have an equity stake in the company. I said that I don't think streaming will ever be a money maker for non-mainstream genres like classical or jazz....because there just aren't enough listeners of fringe genres to reach critical mass. So, given that it takes 200 listens on Spotify to make the same money as the sale of 1 song on iTunes, I said we could be condemning these genres to poverty IF streaming is the only way people will listen to music.

Now here's the other part of that interview that was left out....as awesome as it is, I don't think streaming is the only way people will listen to music. No matter how much of a killer app Spotify is and how Daniel Ek would like it to be how "every single person on the face of this planet" listens to music, I don't think that will happen. But SINCE YOU ASKED dear interviewer, if streaming was the only way we listen to music, then yeah, the fringe could be in trouble. So what fringe artists have to keep doing do is this: make sure fans know they should express their enthusiasm for an artist's music through either direct music sales and/or attending concerts, because streaming isn't enough to live on.

That's roughly what I said. Now, do feel free to tear THAT apart, because I'm very interested in the discussion and love a good debate.

Anyhoo, there are two things miain I'd like to change about the current system....and neither of them is about getting more royalties.

1) When someone buys my music on Bandcamp, I get an email address (and an address if they purchased a physical copy). On iTunes, I get a zip code, from streaming services, I get nothing. I'd like to see music services help artists solve the problem of figuring out where their listeners are...so artists know where to tour. Controversial: who does listener data belong to? The listener, the music service, the copyright holder, some, all or none of the above?Discuss

2) I'd like to make the basic royalty calculation the same for all parties. It's not clear that is is. Also 18% of Spotify's profits that goes to labels (4% to each of the big 4 and 2% to Merlin). On a balance sheet Spotify doesn't have profits today because they're investing in growth (although I'm sure no one works for free). If you can't reverse the label equity problem, and you re