I'm just waiting for ONE major artist (Madonna, Phil Collins, Elton John, etc.) to publically refuse to resign with the RIAA and to go to a pure Internet-based distribution system and playing concerts.
A mild correction is in order: The RIAA works with record labels to set standards, not artists. The RIAA is there for the traditional recording industry and is there to establish standards on physical or mechanical recording formats. Digital file formats was apparently not something they considered "distributable."
If an artist like Madonna wants to do her own thing, she'd have to do it outside of the bounds of the traditional industry. The songs would never be "released" on a record label (and thereby within the jurisdiction of the RIAA, etc.) but would be let loose on file sharing or other means of digital file download. Royalties, etc., would have to be tabulated in a whole different means. Billboard would never report it if one million people downloaded the song since that is not a "traditional" method of distribution, but you can guarantee that people would all know how the song went.
This is a key thing to note though: This was a letter from EMI Music Germany, to a customer who complained. This was not the RIAA, this was a label. (Keep in mind the RIAA only has jurisdiction over American labels, not German ones. EMI Germany is a separate entity from EMI US or EMI Canada. They're related but they all do their own thing in their own territory.)
The RIAA has as much to do with that particular letter as I do with the signing of the declaration of independence. (ie: nothing.) I still think this particular point - about non-traditional distribution taking over - is completeley valid. However it isn't the RIAA that would fold, it would be labels who don't fall in line with whatever "standard" is in place. Napster leaps to mind as one such standard which would have been perfect.
Wrong. Covers are royalty free when played live, even at a paid concert.
That, actually, is incorrect. Or at least partially. If the ticket price is above a certain threshold (in Canada it's $7, in the US it's $8,) and the artist is performing songs live and wishes to gain performance royalties from the concert, they can submit their setlist to the performance rights organization (BMI / ASCAP / SOCAN / GEMA / Etc.) and in a few weeks: $$. All of this has to be verified with the live venue (someone from the venu has to sign something verifying that this setlist actually was performed and that the door price was indeed the $7 / $8, etc.)
This has worked out wonderfully for some artists who have their works performed live by other artists. Lou Reed claimed in 1993 that he made more money from live performances of "Take A Walk On The Wild Side" than from actual record sales, and he barely performed live at all that year. As it happens: U2 performed a rendition of that song during their ZooTV tour. Therefore: Lou Reed could make money at home doing nothing.:)
Many artists have filed their setlists to performing rights organizations and for some artists who have horrible record contracts it's a huge way to get compensation, since record labels get no cut of that money. This is a large part of why some lesser-known artists ask for a higher cover fee at the door.
Now if you mean, why don't major artists like Michael Jackson take some of his Millions and start a label that is fair to artists (and not racist like Sony as he claims)? I don't know. Maybe they know that the chance of losing all of their investment is probable...
Michael Jackson still owns MJJ Productions and used to run MJJ Records. It initially was started so he could own all his own publishing under his own single roof, instead of under the various others that owned it at the time (Motown, Epic, etc.) The only semi-well-known act his A&R department signed was called Brownstone, kind of a Destiny's Child thing. That was in 1990 or so.
In a Spin Magazine article it was mentioned that he was selling MJJ Records. But every record he releases on his own is a co-production of his own "label" and production company with Sony / Epic Records. He certainly hasn't had any successes with MJJ Records since he started it, so I'm sure he knows pretty well (or his business managers do) how much money it costs to run it versus how much it will make.
Bottom line about artist-created labels: they are often created as a tax shelter so that when they make a billion dollars in record sales, which the IRS would definitely want a piece of, their "failing" record label can write off most of that through operating expenses. Happens alll the time, including Reprise, and Mariah Carey's new label, and Madonna's label, etc. The only labels that succeed are the ones that still play the major label game. Probably always will be.
I am not a fan of Michael Jackson, I just ended up hearing about a lotta this from Billboard, etc.
Radiohead did this with their Kid A CD in 2000. I worked at a radio station in Vancouver and heard how many stations across Europe heard a preview of the album via a sealed (and I mean hermetically, melted, gaf taped, etc.) cassette walkman. That was sort of a double-edged attempt because the assumption was that nobody would bother to copy a cassette version of the album.
And even with that: the songs *still* showed up online.:)
But the album still debuted at #1 anyway. I don't get the music industry suits.... Just bewilders me.
Remember that the record companies are selling the CDs to local record stores for something like $5-8, so they aren't making as much profit as most people think.
Really?
Every store I've ever worked at (and that makes most of the major music retailers across Canada, so yes I'm thinking in "metric money" terms here) all paid over $11 a CD. In 1995, prices were actually raised by labels like PolyGram. Huge revolts ensused with some retailers stopping the selling of any PolyGram CD's of any sort (quite a huge selection. This is before PolyGram was amalgamated into Universal.) The prices remained higher though, so we could estimate that CD's are now sold for something more like $13 a pop to retailers.
Yes: retailers do get a bit of a break if they pre-order a new title in mass quantities, but we're talking about thousands of copies. If the album fails to sell, retailers end up taking a huge hit for it.
My $0.02 (CAD)
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Re:Their price model is BAD too.. $15 a CD?! NUTSO
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Napster Not To Blame
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So, you pay $15 and you listen to your CD hundreds of times. You pay $15 and you watch your DVD 5 times? 10 times? 20 times?
Sure. Some DVD's I actually re-watch for things like the director's commentary (can even put that on in the background while I work) or the numerous other extras which exist. This is in fact something which makes me *WANT* to re-watch a dvd. The cheap price just makes it that much more attractive to me. And here's another example: Nine Inch Nails released an amazing live DVD which I bought for $26.99. This is a two hour plus live show with a much higher quality of audio output than any CD, mixed in 5.1 surround specifically for the DVD release. Oh yeah: and it has video.:)
It blows away any cd recording possible because both the bit rate and the sampling frequency were much higher than was possible with CD's. The CD price? Same day I bought it? $28.99.
You tell me: does that make sense?
Re:Their price model is BAD too.. $15 a CD?! NUTSO
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I notice James Taylor and Elvis Presley are on their way to the top and they are both deceased.
Uhhh.... dude?
James Taylor is alive and well. His new cd really is a new cd.:) I don't like James Taylor, but he is not dead.
I had long been uninterested in supporting the mega majors despite the fact they were what I grew up with, musically speaking. This whole Napster / file sharing issue has only furthered my distaste for major labels and the major music industry. If there is an artist I like who happens to be on a major label, I absolutely will not buy their CD. I will instead buy a ticket to see them live (and have. Often. All the time.) Occasionally - if it's not over $40 - I'll buy a t-shirt at the show. That's becoming too expensive for a measly t-shirt though.
I think the day is fast approaching where more and more people will follow this pattern of semi-support and it's entirely the labels' fault, if you ask me. Yes "theft" is wrong. But this is precisely what the labels have been doing since the inception of the CD format. It was released at 2.5 times the price of LP's and cassettes and has never dropped significantly enough. This is only made clearer when comparing DVD prices to current CD prices.
I purchased the new John Mayer CD for a friend two days ago at HMV. (Canada's major music retailer.) The "sale" price was $18.99. Regular white-tag price: $26.99. No joke. I had the option of buying two fairly new DVD titles for $40.00. Which do you think is the better deal? For me to be "thankful" that the price was *only* $18.99 is a scam. Major labels are ripping me and other consumers off and I hope they all suffer a hefty demise. It might be just the kick in the pants the entire industry needs. Think of the positive reorganization which would ensue? Producers and managers would scramble to figure out legitimate means of prividing music to consumers and would more than likely come up with something close to what Napster was in its earliest inception. They might also create some new formats while they're at it. Radio wouldn't go away, so the demand would still be there, for those who like to listen to radio. I do not. Well: with the exception of BBC1 now and then. Radio is horrible. I'll take ShoutCast any day. Producers and artists, given the choice, would probably like any option but the existing major labels. This is unfortunately the game they're forced to play.
Babbling. I know. To people who already feel this way. But man: bring it on.
Music labels have not ruled out suing individual users, and have pushed for the right to flood peer-to-peer networks with bogus files, or disrupt them by other means.
"Have pushed for the right"? How about: have already been flooding peer-to-peer networks.
That's just lame. I mean yeah: protect your copyright and all that (whatever,) but seriously: if they would just shut the hell up and embrace the fact that free mp3's leads to people eventually supporting an artist (and if the price is right, their labels) this would cease to be converted into a "fair use rights" issue.
Something about a head and an ass and one thing being inside the other?
What happens to the music industry's bread and butter when 15 year olds discover they like Bop instead of Pop?
The bread and butter is still what's going to be played on radio / Total Request Live / everyone's car stereo. Kids definitely are still surrounded by that culture, it's not like that will die off just because out of print stuff is available for cheap. If you think a company like ClearChannel will suddenly switch from Britney to some 20-years deleted song overnight you're dreaming.:)
Go to any store and look at their cut-rate bin of $6.99 deleted disks. It's not as if the sales of those cut-rate disks are making any CD store their bread and butter. This is merely another avenue is all, and a means of taking the training wheels off of the labels' attempts to legitemize downloadable music. I think it's a decent enough experiment to try. Who knows: it might lead to (gasp) even more download features down the road. Something to keep people coming back. Doubtful but who knows?
See: In Canada: no Tivo. No ReplayTV either. Not available as a product, and the subscription is US only.
I *wish* we could get something like a Tivo for $450 (canadian.) By the time it does finally come out, it'll end up costing Canadians $999 with a $50 a month subscription and only if you happen to go with one cable company (probably Rogers.)
Rip off living in this country.:) So I guess this Linux PVR is the way to go. [shrug]
One reason is that a lot of music is only released on vinyl, and its really really hard to find it in mp3 form, mostly because its a bigger pain in the ass to convert from vinyl to mp3 compared to CD to mp3.
Not with this it isn't.:) (A turntable with an optical digital output.)
Not that I have one yet, but that's a big reason I would get one.
Also: Why do we need DJ's? Is this person nuts? Do they even go to dance clubs at all? I mean I'm not the crazy freak-out flared-pants-wearing clubgoer that I see everywhere these days but let me assure you: there are some awesome DJ's out there who can take the same six records, on six different nights, and produce a completely different and highly dynamic set that makes you want to not only move but puts a massive smile on your face. On the flip side, there are some DJ's who do what this guy suggests: play songs in a sequence. Period. Fatboy Slim (as only one example) has elevated DJ-ing to a very high level in my opinion. He mixes extremely disparate recordings and makes them sound completely natural, and he does it 100% live. Sasha is another one I like. Same deal. DJ Shadow. David Holmes. Etc. etc. etc. Kid Koala, for god's sake - although admittedly he's pretty "out there" but the man is a phenomenon to watch live.
I say go check out more live DJ's before you make a statement like that. It's like saying "why go see a pianist? All they do is play notes in a sequence."
I'm with you. I keep hearing about the "outdated business model" that the RIAA are using. Ok, I'll stipulate that, so what's a model that works?
I'm gonna make a bold sweeping statement as a potential answer to that question, and I think most people (particularly in the industry) will see it as hogwash. But I still think it's the best option. It's already how I see the industry now (since the fall of Napster and AudioGalaxy.)
I suggest that the industry should gradually move towards the concept of the recorded CD as a total loss leader. Almost a giveaway in fact.
If we consider that the average major label album costs over $80,000US to record. I'm talking about the Korns, Limp Bizkit's, Madonnas, *N'Syncs, etc. For an album to be "radio-friendly" by the major industry, etc. So if we consider that, and then also consider that a single video for a song costs upwards of $100,000US for one video of one song and the artist owes that and they never make any actual money from that video: why not treat the CD the same way?
What this might do is cause the record labels to really seek out the kind of marketing avenues that customers are now ready for and really expecting the music industry to provide. Concert tickets, yes: but not for $75.00 a ticket. T-Shirts yes - but not for $50.00 for a flimsy poorly-printed shirt that will shrink.
And then online music downloads might actually come about in a way that's feasible, since it might become the real thing that makes the labels and the artists some cash they never expected, particularly in terms of one-off recordings. A band could demo a song on the road, release it to the network and see how well the demo recording does. Or a new remix. Or an actual completed new single, not timed with any album release schedule but just a song on its own.
One of the best things about Napster (to me) was discovering bands whose music has stopped being distributed on CD's. I was amazed to find even one song by someone like say Nik Kershaw and then to discover that there were hundreds of thousands of fans of his music. MCA Universal stopped releasing Nik Kershaw in 1988. Think of how much they could still be making (and Mr. Kershaw for that matter) if they had latched on to the idea of this online distribution as the real money maker?
So I say to the labels/RIAA: give away CD's. Treat them like you treat videos: they are still owed for the recording but they do not, of themselves, make money. Look to new and very creative marketing schemes.
The people listening to station A hear each song twice during each week. They are exposed to 70 songs, and buy an average of 7 CDs due to this. 7 * 1000 = 7000 CDs sold.
Yeah but *which* CD's. Based on specifically which songs.
People seem to miss the point here. The reason Payola / independent promotion is a bad thing is this: it's there to ensure that a specific song will debut at a certain chart position, and hopefully maintain that position, at as many stations as possible, during a crucial marketing push for that artist or release. To the labels it is totally unimportant that they sell 7000 CD's *overall*. It's important that the Spice Girls debut - out of the gate, with nobody having heard their music before - at #1, across the country. What that does is ensure that the labels can state with certainty "This artist will go to #1 and will sell x number of copies in their opening week." This is the nature of the industry. It's much less about how many copies they sell overall.
I just thought that needed clarification.
Payola really is much more about chart position than just getting a song *on* radio. You hire indie promoters because you are expecting the top stations to add you in high rotation out of the box. Period. If that doesn't turn into monster sales for you as a label, you have wasted your money, so it has to ensure that you're getting at least top 10 placement. The fact that none of this involves an actual listener of radio at all is what's preposterous about it. You can request a song until you're blue in the face: it still won't get added at radio. But pay an indie $70,000 and it will.
Heck, it's the same price as the PS2, and I don't see anyone trying to hack that.
Are you kidding?
There are millllions of sites out there shucking either a PS2 mod chip or a mod disc (insert disc, startup ps2, disc ejects, insert any burned game, thank you have a nice day.)
No there isn't a media player yet ofr ps2 but they have definitely been hacked. I hear there's an mp3 player for ps2 but I haven't tried it. Only a matter of time before someone tries a DiVX player as well.
Does anyone out there buy a record because it's on Island vs. Maverick vs. Sony?
I sure used to.
I was a massive fan of several smaller labels even though they were distributed by majors (no other way to get their stuff internationally distributed.) In particular Rough Trade, Beggars Banquet, 4AD and Island. Later on I was a fan of stuff like Elektra, Geffen / DGC, and Virgin. After the whole merger mania happened and a lot of those labels either were shuttered or sucked into the Interscope / Polygram / Time Warner AOL maelstrom, tons of their artists were let go. Talking hundreds of them. Made me lose faith completely in the ability of any label to have any identity at all. Also meant to me that the newer larger merged labels really didn't care much about exactly who they were signing musically, as long as the "product" sold. That's not my idea of a good label.
These days I still follow Warp, V2 and Astralwerks as labels (Yeah, I've become and electro-snob.) But beyond that: I don't much pay attention anymore, and it's 100% due to the damage that these large-scale mergers caused. And of course I certainly follow indie artists much more these days.
Sony is perhaps the very worst label I've ever seen. They're the worst example of what I'm talking about. Columbia used to be an okay label, now it's merely a subdivision of Sony Music. Boring. Nobody has any ears at these companies anymore.
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Interesting thing about AudioGalaxy and the labels
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... Is that at least one of them (Universal) has been placing "decoy" mp3's of new releases on that system. It's the only one they target in this way. By "decoy", I mean that the songs are named the right way and they are the approximate size you would expect the file to be, but when you play the songs it's just the chorus or some other portion of the song infinitely looping. I noticed this on specifically Interscope / A&M releases (No Doubt, Sheryl Crow, Vanessa Carlton.) Interesting. Makes me wonder if they did this in hopes of tracking how many people took the bait so they could go back and sue AG with all this "proof" they have. When they say they base this suit on the successful downloading of 416 songs, I wonder how many of those were the actual versions they were attempting to get.
I tend to think that AG is bottom of the barrel as far as accuracy goes. More often than not you'll get something completely different than you were looking for. There are *much* worse offenders out there, FTP being among them. Bottom line is it's like saying you'll stop air from being available because way too many people are breathing it for free. Even if AG is knocked out, what next? Shut down the entire internet?
Of course, all the labels will have to agree to do this, since if all but one stops, and this payola really works, that one label will have tons of airplay.
Uhhh... isn't that practically the case already?
I just went and checked the Billboard top 200, which is based in part on sales and radio play. Here's how the top ten breaks down as far as distributed labels goes:
BMG #1,#4 Universal #2,#3,#5,#7,#9,#10 Time Warner #6 Sony #8
Key thing to remember is that no matter what label you're one, if your distributor makes one of your artists a priority, they're going to use the tools at their disposal to get that artist played on radio. If that means "independent promotion" then they use that. Who ends up owing that money? The artist.
So basically between Vivendi Universal and this ClearChannel thing it most certainly *is* a monopoly. If the industry at large had been focusing on that instead of copy protecting CD's and shutting down Napster we might actually be able to afford to buy a CD or tickets to a concert.
Remember Vanilla Ice and Queen? The bassline from 'Ice Ice Baby' was found in court to be close enough to 'Under Pressure' that Vanilla had to pay over a large amount in royalties.
Uhh... that's quite wrong actually.
Because that was an actual sample, from the actual "Under Pressure" recording. The lawsuit was because that sample wasn't cleared, not because the song "sounded close enough." Sample clearances are a huge industry all to themselves. Vanilla Ice and his label settled out of court and had to pay huge sample licensing fees. Single went to number 1 anyway so it was no big strike against them.
A better example would be the Ghostbusters vs. I Want A New Drug lawsuit, where Huey Lewis and the News won a quite large settlement because it was proven that the bassline was identical. (Even in the same key and tempo.)
Anyone with ears (and not very good ones if they're listening to Vanilla Ice) could tell you that was a sample from the original Queen / Bowie recording.
But trying to stay on topic: I actually wrote an article two years ago about how Napster could become the download distribution standard if only the industry would adopt exactly this model. It works for radio, it could certainly work for Napster. Only thing missing would be advertising revenue. And what company wouldn't want to advertise to such a captive audience? (Using non-intrusive, small banner ads of course. In my twisted little reality.)
If I burn a disc, and it's faulty, my iMac knew to eject that as an "unreadable" or "improperly formatted" disc. That would also count as a "non-CD format" disc. Pretty straightforward. I use OS 9.2, but really any pre-OSX system wouldn't have an issue with it. Out it comes, after a few seconds of trying but failing to read it. If it doesn't, and I reboot, it pops it out since it knows it can't boot from it either.
This Celine Dion non-CD should not be treated any differently. In my opinion: iMacs Should be ejecting the disc. If you want to send a message about how much you dislike this form of copy protection, you don't penalize your customers. Hasn't Apple learned anything in the past couple of years? Their customers are becoming less and less satisfied with their choices when using the Mac OS or Mac hardware. This is another nail in the coffin.
As it is I've moved so far away from Macs now that this is irrelevant for me anyway. I have no plans to move to OSX til Photoshop 7 comes out, but even there I may just stick with Windows anyway. At least I know how to deal with crap like this.
How does anything get well known? You don't necessarily need a record label for this to happen. You do if you want really tightly-run distribution of regular physical copies of a recording.
If we remove the necessity for that by allowing files to be downloaded as a teaser, then sell cd's online: there goes the distribution problem. Then all you have to worry about is: Marketing.
The only reason anyone has heard or not heard of any artist is how well or how poorly they were marketed. Unfortunately, record labels are now so consumed by this fact that all they ever worry about is the marketing, when they should actually be worried about how good the music is in the first place. One has now superceded the other.
Forget all this "guild" stuff, just get enough artists to pool enough $ to hire a decent marketing firm. Then you're off to the races.
Your plan is bang on and covers most of the things that people have been begging for, and not just since Napster came about: they've been asking for some of these features since the beginning of major-label-run recorded music. Ever wonder why it is you never see a single Beatles track on any 60's comps? There's a long-standing rule at EMI that they will never allow any Beatles tracks to appear on anything but a Beatles release. This would clearly be a huge selling point for anyone wanting an actual 60's disc. (Not that this is my personal beef, I'm just saying that customers have been asking for this for decades now.)
How the royalties get distributed would naturally need some thinking.
Yes and no. The thing is that the recording industry - worldwide - could decide to follow a very well-known model for this. It would be a mixture of what's already well entrenched at both radio and retail. BDS (Broadcast Data Systems) and SoundScan. These two services keep track of every single song which is played on any radio station and any CD which is sold at any (participating) store in North America. That's a huge task. Here the industry had a solution like Napster - which even cross-referenced everything - and they shut it down. This was - and probably still is - the answer to the problem.
Let's amend the outline you proposed to include a tracking service which could now allow for multi-tiered subscriptions. I am a "heavy" user of music and would not be upset over shelling out a monthly fee to use the pre-existing Napster format, with the same range of selections available to me as before they were shut down. I would expect to pay around $40 - 50 a month for that service. Lighter users could possibly expect to pay $20 - 35. It might go up (kinda like ISP prices) if you go over your quantity limit. So: $20 a month for x number of songs, $0.50 - $0.75 for each additional song.
The benefit here should be obvious. The next time someone like N'Sync (or really, insert artist name here) releases a new single, not only does it get instantaneous downloadability into your household - possibly with numerous mixes etc. - but now the industry has a tack on who is downloading it, in which regions, at what time, over what period. Maybe we add in tags for when you dispose of an MP3. That means a single is possibly not "hitting its demo" as well as the marketing team thought. All of this data could be used to plan the next N'Sync tour, etc. Or better yet: which markets are falling off.
Most notably, we would start to see some singles debuting with hundreds of millions of copies "sold". This would be unprecedented and would usher in a real shift in the industry, probably changing the nature of what is considered a "platinum" single. Best of all, it would now be a truly international system, so bands might discover they have fans in places like Lagos or New Zealand or Japan, even though they were really only focusing on North America.
This is not unfeasible. When we all signed up for Napster, we gave up teensy marketable info. Who's to say that Napster didn't have this exact model in mind so they could present the whole thing to the industry, showing that it worked? I wouldn't doubt it. They had investors and business types, just not music industry types.
I tend to run off at the mouth on this topic but I think this is still the best option. It might even (!) bring the price of CD's down over time. It couldn't help *but* make money if it was launched this way.
This whole PressPlay / RealOne thing strikes me as hopelessly inadequate.
I always think of these things in terms of what most people are used to: brick and mortar.
Who would support a record store that only provided you with 200 titles that you could actually walk out of the place with? And what if only a few artists were available at this store, instead of all the artists we all know about and currently wish to collect? Oh: and we can actually only listen to them in the actual record store, and if we want to listen to them again we have to return to the store and pay for the ability to do so again.
I think pretty much every normal human being knows this model would never fly in the real-world-merchandising scenario, why on earth does anyone assume it will in the online-marketing world? Dumasses.
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I'm just waiting for ONE major artist (Madonna, Phil Collins, Elton John, etc.) to publically refuse to resign with the RIAA and to go to a pure Internet-based distribution system and playing concerts.
:)
A mild correction is in order: The RIAA works with record labels to set standards, not artists. The RIAA is there for the traditional recording industry and is there to establish standards on physical or mechanical recording formats. Digital file formats was apparently not something they considered "distributable."
If an artist like Madonna wants to do her own thing, she'd have to do it outside of the bounds of the traditional industry. The songs would never be "released" on a record label (and thereby within the jurisdiction of the RIAA, etc.) but would be let loose on file sharing or other means of digital file download. Royalties, etc., would have to be tabulated in a whole different means. Billboard would never report it if one million people downloaded the song since that is not a "traditional" method of distribution, but you can guarantee that people would all know how the song went.
This is a key thing to note though: This was a letter from EMI Music Germany, to a customer who complained. This was not the RIAA, this was a label. (Keep in mind the RIAA only has jurisdiction over American labels, not German ones. EMI Germany is a separate entity from EMI US or EMI Canada. They're related but they all do their own thing in their own territory.)
The RIAA has as much to do with that particular letter as I do with the signing of the declaration of independence. (ie: nothing.) I still think this particular point - about non-traditional distribution taking over - is completeley valid. However it isn't the RIAA that would fold, it would be labels who don't fall in line with whatever "standard" is in place. Napster leaps to mind as one such standard which would have been perfect.
Anyway there's my take on it.
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Wrong. Covers are royalty free when played live, even at a paid concert.
:)
That, actually, is incorrect. Or at least partially. If the ticket price is above a certain threshold (in Canada it's $7, in the US it's $8,) and the artist is performing songs live and wishes to gain performance royalties from the concert, they can submit their setlist to the performance rights organization (BMI / ASCAP / SOCAN / GEMA / Etc.) and in a few weeks: $$. All of this has to be verified with the live venue (someone from the venu has to sign something verifying that this setlist actually was performed and that the door price was indeed the $7 / $8, etc.)
This has worked out wonderfully for some artists who have their works performed live by other artists. Lou Reed claimed in 1993 that he made more money from live performances of "Take A Walk On The Wild Side" than from actual record sales, and he barely performed live at all that year. As it happens: U2 performed a rendition of that song during their ZooTV tour. Therefore: Lou Reed could make money at home doing nothing.
Many artists have filed their setlists to performing rights organizations and for some artists who have horrible record contracts it's a huge way to get compensation, since record labels get no cut of that money. This is a large part of why some lesser-known artists ask for a higher cover fee at the door.
There ya go
ad (ex music industry non-big-wig.)
Now if you mean, why don't major artists like Michael Jackson take some of his Millions and start a label that is fair to artists (and not racist like Sony as he claims)? I don't know. Maybe they know that the chance of losing all of their investment is probable...
Michael Jackson still owns MJJ Productions and used to run MJJ Records. It initially was started so he could own all his own publishing under his own single roof, instead of under the various others that owned it at the time (Motown, Epic, etc.) The only semi-well-known act his A&R department signed was called Brownstone, kind of a Destiny's Child thing. That was in 1990 or so.
In a Spin Magazine article it was mentioned that he was selling MJJ Records. But every record he releases on his own is a co-production of his own "label" and production company with Sony / Epic Records. He certainly hasn't had any successes with MJJ Records since he started it, so I'm sure he knows pretty well (or his business managers do) how much money it costs to run it versus how much it will make.
Bottom line about artist-created labels: they are often created as a tax shelter so that when they make a billion dollars in record sales, which the IRS would definitely want a piece of, their "failing" record label can write off most of that through operating expenses. Happens alll the time, including Reprise, and Mariah Carey's new label, and Madonna's label, etc. The only labels that succeed are the ones that still play the major label game. Probably always will be.
I am not a fan of Michael Jackson, I just ended up hearing about a lotta this from Billboard, etc.
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Radiohead did this with their Kid A CD in 2000. I worked at a radio station in Vancouver and heard how many stations across Europe heard a preview of the album via a sealed (and I mean hermetically, melted, gaf taped, etc.) cassette walkman. That was sort of a double-edged attempt because the assumption was that nobody would bother to copy a cassette version of the album.
:)
And even with that: the songs *still* showed up online.
But the album still debuted at #1 anyway. I don't get the music industry suits.... Just bewilders me.
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Remember that the record companies are selling the CDs to local record stores for something like $5-8, so they aren't making as much profit as most people think.
Really?
Every store I've ever worked at (and that makes most of the major music retailers across Canada, so yes I'm thinking in "metric money" terms here) all paid over $11 a CD. In 1995, prices were actually raised by labels like PolyGram. Huge revolts ensused with some retailers stopping the selling of any PolyGram CD's of any sort (quite a huge selection. This is before PolyGram was amalgamated into Universal.) The prices remained higher though, so we could estimate that CD's are now sold for something more like $13 a pop to retailers.
Yes: retailers do get a bit of a break if they pre-order a new title in mass quantities, but we're talking about thousands of copies. If the album fails to sell, retailers end up taking a huge hit for it.
My $0.02 (CAD)
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So, you pay $15 and you listen to your CD hundreds of times. You pay $15 and you watch your DVD 5 times? 10 times? 20 times?
:)
Sure. Some DVD's I actually re-watch for things like the director's commentary (can even put that on in the background while I work) or the numerous other extras which exist. This is in fact something which makes me *WANT* to re-watch a dvd. The cheap price just makes it that much more attractive to me. And here's another example: Nine Inch Nails released an amazing live DVD which I bought for $26.99. This is a two hour plus live show with a much higher quality of audio output than any CD, mixed in 5.1 surround specifically for the DVD release. Oh yeah: and it has video.
It blows away any cd recording possible because both the bit rate and the sampling frequency were much higher than was possible with CD's. The CD price? Same day I bought it? $28.99.
You tell me: does that make sense?
I notice James Taylor and Elvis Presley are on their way to the top and they are both deceased.
:) I don't like James Taylor, but he is not dead.
Uhhh.... dude?
James Taylor is alive and well. His new cd really is a new cd.
I had long been uninterested in supporting the mega majors despite the fact they were what I grew up with, musically speaking. This whole Napster / file sharing issue has only furthered my distaste for major labels and the major music industry. If there is an artist I like who happens to be on a major label, I absolutely will not buy their CD. I will instead buy a ticket to see them live (and have. Often. All the time.) Occasionally - if it's not over $40 - I'll buy a t-shirt at the show. That's becoming too expensive for a measly t-shirt though.
I think the day is fast approaching where more and more people will follow this pattern of semi-support and it's entirely the labels' fault, if you ask me. Yes "theft" is wrong. But this is precisely what the labels have been doing since the inception of the CD format. It was released at 2.5 times the price of LP's and cassettes and has never dropped significantly enough. This is only made clearer when comparing DVD prices to current CD prices.
I purchased the new John Mayer CD for a friend two days ago at HMV. (Canada's major music retailer.) The "sale" price was $18.99. Regular white-tag price: $26.99. No joke. I had the option of buying two fairly new DVD titles for $40.00. Which do you think is the better deal? For me to be "thankful" that the price was *only* $18.99 is a scam. Major labels are ripping me and other consumers off and I hope they all suffer a hefty demise. It might be just the kick in the pants the entire industry needs. Think of the positive reorganization which would ensue? Producers and managers would scramble to figure out legitimate means of prividing music to consumers and would more than likely come up with something close to what Napster was in its earliest inception. They might also create some new formats while they're at it. Radio wouldn't go away, so the demand would still be there, for those who like to listen to radio. I do not. Well: with the exception of BBC1 now and then. Radio is horrible. I'll take ShoutCast any day. Producers and artists, given the choice, would probably like any option but the existing major labels. This is unfortunately the game they're forced to play.
Babbling. I know. To people who already feel this way. But man: bring it on.
BTW: a funny allegory is here.
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Music labels have not ruled out suing individual users, and have pushed for the right to flood peer-to-peer networks with bogus files, or disrupt them by other means.
"Have pushed for the right"? How about: have already been flooding peer-to-peer networks.
That's just lame. I mean yeah: protect your copyright and all that (whatever,) but seriously: if they would just shut the hell up and embrace the fact that free mp3's leads to people eventually supporting an artist (and if the price is right, their labels) this would cease to be converted into a "fair use rights" issue.
Something about a head and an ass and one thing being inside the other?
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What happens to the music industry's bread and butter when 15 year olds discover they like Bop instead of Pop?
:)
The bread and butter is still what's going to be played on radio / Total Request Live / everyone's car stereo. Kids definitely are still surrounded by that culture, it's not like that will die off just because out of print stuff is available for cheap. If you think a company like ClearChannel will suddenly switch from Britney to some 20-years deleted song overnight you're dreaming.
Go to any store and look at their cut-rate bin of $6.99 deleted disks. It's not as if the sales of those cut-rate disks are making any CD store their bread and butter. This is merely another avenue is all, and a means of taking the training wheels off of the labels' attempts to legitemize downloadable music. I think it's a decent enough experiment to try. Who knows: it might lead to (gasp) even more download features down the road. Something to keep people coming back. Doubtful but who knows?
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See: In Canada: no Tivo. No ReplayTV either. Not available as a product, and the subscription is US only.
:) So I guess this Linux PVR is the way to go. [shrug]
I *wish* we could get something like a Tivo for $450 (canadian.) By the time it does finally come out, it'll end up costing Canadians $999 with a $50 a month subscription and only if you happen to go with one cable company (probably Rogers.)
Rip off living in this country.
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One reason is that a lot of music is only released on vinyl, and its really really hard to find it in mp3 form, mostly because its a bigger pain in the ass to convert from vinyl to mp3 compared to CD to mp3.
:) (A turntable with an optical digital output.)
Not with this it isn't.
Not that I have one yet, but that's a big reason I would get one.
Also: Why do we need DJ's? Is this person nuts? Do they even go to dance clubs at all? I mean I'm not the crazy freak-out flared-pants-wearing clubgoer that I see everywhere these days but let me assure you: there are some awesome DJ's out there who can take the same six records, on six different nights, and produce a completely different and highly dynamic set that makes you want to not only move but puts a massive smile on your face. On the flip side, there are some DJ's who do what this guy suggests: play songs in a sequence. Period. Fatboy Slim (as only one example) has elevated DJ-ing to a very high level in my opinion. He mixes extremely disparate recordings and makes them sound completely natural, and he does it 100% live. Sasha is another one I like. Same deal. DJ Shadow. David Holmes. Etc. etc. etc. Kid Koala, for god's sake - although admittedly he's pretty "out there" but the man is a phenomenon to watch live.
I say go check out more live DJ's before you make a statement like that. It's like saying "why go see a pianist? All they do is play notes in a sequence."
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I'm with you. I keep hearing about the "outdated business model" that the RIAA are using. Ok, I'll stipulate that, so what's a model that works?
I'm gonna make a bold sweeping statement as a potential answer to that question, and I think most people (particularly in the industry) will see it as hogwash. But I still think it's the best option. It's already how I see the industry now (since the fall of Napster and AudioGalaxy.)
I suggest that the industry should gradually move towards the concept of the recorded CD as a total loss leader. Almost a giveaway in fact.
If we consider that the average major label album costs over $80,000US to record. I'm talking about the Korns, Limp Bizkit's, Madonnas, *N'Syncs, etc. For an album to be "radio-friendly" by the major industry, etc. So if we consider that, and then also consider that a single video for a song costs upwards of $100,000US for one video of one song and the artist owes that and they never make any actual money from that video: why not treat the CD the same way?
What this might do is cause the record labels to really seek out the kind of marketing avenues that customers are now ready for and really expecting the music industry to provide. Concert tickets, yes: but not for $75.00 a ticket. T-Shirts yes - but not for $50.00 for a flimsy poorly-printed shirt that will shrink.
And then online music downloads might actually come about in a way that's feasible, since it might become the real thing that makes the labels and the artists some cash they never expected, particularly in terms of one-off recordings. A band could demo a song on the road, release it to the network and see how well the demo recording does. Or a new remix. Or an actual completed new single, not timed with any album release schedule but just a song on its own.
One of the best things about Napster (to me) was discovering bands whose music has stopped being distributed on CD's. I was amazed to find even one song by someone like say Nik Kershaw and then to discover that there were hundreds of thousands of fans of his music. MCA Universal stopped releasing Nik Kershaw in 1988. Think of how much they could still be making (and Mr. Kershaw for that matter) if they had latched on to the idea of this online distribution as the real money maker?
So I say to the labels/RIAA: give away CD's. Treat them like you treat videos: they are still owed for the recording but they do not, of themselves, make money. Look to new and very creative marketing schemes.
ad (the windbag)
The people listening to station A hear each song twice during each week. They are exposed to 70 songs, and buy an average of 7 CDs due to this. 7 * 1000 = 7000 CDs sold.
:)
Yeah but *which* CD's. Based on specifically which songs.
People seem to miss the point here. The reason Payola / independent promotion is a bad thing is this: it's there to ensure that a specific song will debut at a certain chart position, and hopefully maintain that position, at as many stations as possible, during a crucial marketing push for that artist or release. To the labels it is totally unimportant that they sell 7000 CD's *overall*. It's important that the Spice Girls debut - out of the gate, with nobody having heard their music before - at #1, across the country. What that does is ensure that the labels can state with certainty "This artist will go to #1 and will sell x number of copies in their opening week." This is the nature of the industry. It's much less about how many copies they sell overall.
I just thought that needed clarification.
Payola really is much more about chart position than just getting a song *on* radio. You hire indie promoters because you are expecting the top stations to add you in high rotation out of the box. Period. If that doesn't turn into monster sales for you as a label, you have wasted your money, so it has to ensure that you're getting at least top 10 placement. The fact that none of this involves an actual listener of radio at all is what's preposterous about it. You can request a song until you're blue in the face: it still won't get added at radio. But pay an indie $70,000 and it will.
There ya go.
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P.S.: I know I'm a day behind.
Heck, it's the same price as the PS2, and I don't see anyone trying to hack that.
Are you kidding?
There are millllions of sites out there shucking either a PS2 mod chip or a mod disc (insert disc, startup ps2, disc ejects, insert any burned game, thank you have a nice day.)
No there isn't a media player yet ofr ps2 but they have definitely been hacked. I hear there's an mp3 player for ps2 but I haven't tried it. Only a matter of time before someone tries a DiVX player as well.
$0.02 (Canadian, even)
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Does anyone out there buy a record because it's on Island vs. Maverick vs. Sony?
I sure used to.
I was a massive fan of several smaller labels even though they were distributed by majors (no other way to get their stuff internationally distributed.) In particular Rough Trade, Beggars Banquet, 4AD and Island. Later on I was a fan of stuff like Elektra, Geffen / DGC, and Virgin. After the whole merger mania happened and a lot of those labels either were shuttered or sucked into the Interscope / Polygram / Time Warner AOL maelstrom, tons of their artists were let go. Talking hundreds of them. Made me lose faith completely in the ability of any label to have any identity at all. Also meant to me that the newer larger merged labels really didn't care much about exactly who they were signing musically, as long as the "product" sold. That's not my idea of a good label.
These days I still follow Warp, V2 and Astralwerks as labels (Yeah, I've become and electro-snob.) But beyond that: I don't much pay attention anymore, and it's 100% due to the damage that these large-scale mergers caused. And of course I certainly follow indie artists much more these days.
Sony is perhaps the very worst label I've ever seen. They're the worst example of what I'm talking about. Columbia used to be an okay label, now it's merely a subdivision of Sony Music. Boring. Nobody has any ears at these companies anymore.
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... Is that at least one of them (Universal) has been placing "decoy" mp3's of new releases on that system. It's the only one they target in this way. By "decoy", I mean that the songs are named the right way and they are the approximate size you would expect the file to be, but when you play the songs it's just the chorus or some other portion of the song infinitely looping. I noticed this on specifically Interscope / A&M releases (No Doubt, Sheryl Crow, Vanessa Carlton.) Interesting. Makes me wonder if they did this in hopes of tracking how many people took the bait so they could go back and sue AG with all this "proof" they have. When they say they base this suit on the successful downloading of 416 songs, I wonder how many of those were the actual versions they were attempting to get.
I tend to think that AG is bottom of the barrel as far as accuracy goes. More often than not you'll get something completely different than you were looking for. There are *much* worse offenders out there, FTP being among them. Bottom line is it's like saying you'll stop air from being available because way too many people are breathing it for free. Even if AG is knocked out, what next? Shut down the entire internet?
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Of course, all the labels will have to agree to do this, since if all but one stops, and this payola really works, that one label will have tons of airplay.
Uhhh... isn't that practically the case already?
I just went and checked the Billboard top 200, which is based in part on sales and radio play. Here's how the top ten breaks down as far as distributed labels goes:
BMG #1,#4
Universal #2,#3,#5,#7,#9,#10
Time Warner #6
Sony #8
Key thing to remember is that no matter what label you're one, if your distributor makes one of your artists a priority, they're going to use the tools at their disposal to get that artist played on radio. If that means "independent promotion" then they use that. Who ends up owing that money? The artist.
So basically between Vivendi Universal and this ClearChannel thing it most certainly *is* a monopoly. If the industry at large had been focusing on that instead of copy protecting CD's and shutting down Napster we might actually be able to afford to buy a CD or tickets to a concert.
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Remember Vanilla Ice and Queen? The bassline from 'Ice Ice Baby' was found in court to be close enough to 'Under Pressure' that Vanilla had to pay over a large amount in royalties.
Uhh... that's quite wrong actually.
Because that was an actual sample, from the actual "Under Pressure" recording. The lawsuit was because that sample wasn't cleared, not because the song "sounded close enough." Sample clearances are a huge industry all to themselves. Vanilla Ice and his label settled out of court and had to pay huge sample licensing fees. Single went to number 1 anyway so it was no big strike against them.
A better example would be the Ghostbusters vs. I Want A New Drug lawsuit, where Huey Lewis and the News won a quite large settlement because it was proven that the bassline was identical. (Even in the same key and tempo.)
Anyone with ears (and not very good ones if they're listening to Vanilla Ice) could tell you that was a sample from the original Queen / Bowie recording.
But trying to stay on topic: I actually wrote an article two years ago about how Napster could become the download distribution standard if only the industry would adopt exactly this model. It works for radio, it could certainly work for Napster. Only thing missing would be advertising revenue. And what company wouldn't want to advertise to such a captive audience? (Using non-intrusive, small banner ads of course. In my twisted little reality.)
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Y'know I find this interesting.
If I burn a disc, and it's faulty, my iMac knew to eject that as an "unreadable" or "improperly formatted" disc. That would also count as a "non-CD format" disc. Pretty straightforward. I use OS 9.2, but really any pre-OSX system wouldn't have an issue with it. Out it comes, after a few seconds of trying but failing to read it. If it doesn't, and I reboot, it pops it out since it knows it can't boot from it either.
This Celine Dion non-CD should not be treated any differently. In my opinion: iMacs Should be ejecting the disc. If you want to send a message about how much you dislike this form of copy protection, you don't penalize your customers. Hasn't Apple learned anything in the past couple of years? Their customers are becoming less and less satisfied with their choices when using the Mac OS or Mac hardware. This is another nail in the coffin.
As it is I've moved so far away from Macs now that this is irrelevant for me anyway. I have no plans to move to OSX til Photoshop 7 comes out, but even there I may just stick with Windows anyway. At least I know how to deal with crap like this.
And no: I do not listen to Celine Dion.
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How does anything get well known? You don't necessarily need a record label for this to happen. You do if you want really tightly-run distribution of regular physical copies of a recording.
If we remove the necessity for that by allowing files to be downloaded as a teaser, then sell cd's online: there goes the distribution problem. Then all you have to worry about is: Marketing.
The only reason anyone has heard or not heard of any artist is how well or how poorly they were marketed. Unfortunately, record labels are now so consumed by this fact that all they ever worry about is the marketing, when they should actually be worried about how good the music is in the first place. One has now superceded the other.
Forget all this "guild" stuff, just get enough artists to pool enough $ to hire a decent marketing firm. Then you're off to the races.
H'ray for Wilco! That's a wicked article.
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Your plan is bang on and covers most of the things that people have been begging for, and not just since Napster came about: they've been asking for some of these features since the beginning of major-label-run recorded music. Ever wonder why it is you never see a single Beatles track on any 60's comps? There's a long-standing rule at EMI that they will never allow any Beatles tracks to appear on anything but a Beatles release. This would clearly be a huge selling point for anyone wanting an actual 60's disc. (Not that this is my personal beef, I'm just saying that customers have been asking for this for decades now.)
How the royalties get distributed would naturally need some thinking.
Yes and no. The thing is that the recording industry - worldwide - could decide to follow a very well-known model for this. It would be a mixture of what's already well entrenched at both radio and retail. BDS (Broadcast Data Systems) and SoundScan. These two services keep track of every single song which is played on any radio station and any CD which is sold at any (participating) store in North America. That's a huge task. Here the industry had a solution like Napster - which even cross-referenced everything - and they shut it down. This was - and probably still is - the answer to the problem.
Let's amend the outline you proposed to include a tracking service which could now allow for multi-tiered subscriptions. I am a "heavy" user of music and would not be upset over shelling out a monthly fee to use the pre-existing Napster format, with the same range of selections available to me as before they were shut down. I would expect to pay around $40 - 50 a month for that service. Lighter users could possibly expect to pay $20 - 35. It might go up (kinda like ISP prices) if you go over your quantity limit. So: $20 a month for x number of songs, $0.50 - $0.75 for each additional song.
The benefit here should be obvious. The next time someone like N'Sync (or really, insert artist name here) releases a new single, not only does it get instantaneous downloadability into your household - possibly with numerous mixes etc. - but now the industry has a tack on who is downloading it, in which regions, at what time, over what period. Maybe we add in tags for when you dispose of an MP3. That means a single is possibly not "hitting its demo" as well as the marketing team thought. All of this data could be used to plan the next N'Sync tour, etc. Or better yet: which markets are falling off.
Most notably, we would start to see some singles debuting with hundreds of millions of copies "sold". This would be unprecedented and would usher in a real shift in the industry, probably changing the nature of what is considered a "platinum" single. Best of all, it would now be a truly international system, so bands might discover they have fans in places like Lagos or New Zealand or Japan, even though they were really only focusing on North America.
This is not unfeasible. When we all signed up for Napster, we gave up teensy marketable info. Who's to say that Napster didn't have this exact model in mind so they could present the whole thing to the industry, showing that it worked? I wouldn't doubt it. They had investors and business types, just not music industry types.
I tend to run off at the mouth on this topic but I think this is still the best option. It might even (!) bring the price of CD's down over time. It couldn't help *but* make money if it was launched this way.
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$10 a cd?! Let's just keep in mind that the average music cd released in Australia costs well over $30. (Usually more.)
Their figure is probably based on Aus$ figures.
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That is correct: the "fee" (they call it a surcharge) goes to SOCAN. (The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada)
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This whole PressPlay / RealOne thing strikes me as hopelessly inadequate.
I always think of these things in terms of what most people are used to: brick and mortar.
Who would support a record store that only provided you with 200 titles that you could actually walk out of the place with? And what if only a few artists were available at this store, instead of all the artists we all know about and currently wish to collect? Oh: and we can actually only listen to them in the actual record store, and if we want to listen to them again we have to return to the store and pay for the ability to do so again.
I think pretty much every normal human being knows this model would never fly in the real-world-merchandising scenario, why on earth does anyone assume it will in the online-marketing world? Dumasses.
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