Recording is easy. Mailing CDs to people or letting them download your MP3 is easy. But have you ever tried to market an unknown record to total strangers? Good luck...
What in the world do Bayesian filters have to do with this? How is a Bayesian filter going to tell you that "Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about" is cogent, and "Clear that what describes your message subject is a use about" is not? Bayesian filters may be able to guess at the genre or subject matter of a text, but they're never going to have any hope of telling whether it's valuable for any particular reader or use.
We started from Janis Ian and Ani DiFranco, from which you jumped to Chopin, so I don't think I'm moving goalposts so much as trying to get you back on the right playing field. Ani is a very clear example of an independent musician with her own label building critical and commercial success. Genesis, Floyd and REM are not. IRS, for example, was distributed by A&M from its inception.
King Crimson had major-label distribution for their early albums, without which Discipline Global Mobile might never have existed, so these people still aren't the examples I'm looking for.
I don't know where you've been, but there are plenty of examples of musicians signed to major labels on the basis of demo tapes or less. See, recently, Vanessa Carlton or Avril Lavigne.
You're pretending you were serious? And it was me that got accused of being a troll? I meant a current musician, one who has prospered completely outside the major-label system during the period of history in which the major-label system has existed. And not a classical musician, a soundtrack composer, a music teacher, the leader of a wedding band or a military bugler. I mean a person who has had a successful musical career of the same type as a major-label signee, but without any major-label connections.
The main barrier to entry is not the cost of production, it's the cost of getting people's attention, and technology hasn't changed that and never will.
Yes, patronage by the nobility is another viable economic model. It has kind of fallen out of use since the examples you cited, though. And it wasn't much different than the major label model in spirit, anyway.
I'd love to believe that any decent musician should be able to make a comfortable living making music independently. But that really does not appear to be the case. Ask Ani DiFranco how "comfortable" her relative success has been. You're going to need tens of thousands of fans to support you, and making tens of thousands of fans is hard enough that most people won't ever manage it, no matter how good their music is.
I'm with you on declining production costs, though. If there's a revolution coming in the music business, I suspect it has next to nothing to do with file-sharing, and a lot to do with more musicians having the sense and resources to fund their own recordings, and then sign distribution deals under much more advantageous terms. We'll see.
The label gets paid out of the proceeds. The artist's debt gets discharged out of the artist's share of the proceeds. The mechanics of this depend very much on the exact details of the contract, but usually the record company will have more expenses than the $20,000 they gave the artist, and even in Albini's classic breakdown, the label only gets $4 for each CD sold, not $11, putting the label's breakeven point, in your simple example, at somewhere over 5000 copies. A lot of albums don't ever sell 5000 copies. (So who pays for them? Britney.)
Also, I certainly don't want to imply that the structure of the standard record contract, today, isn't insane. Why any rational person ever signs one, I do not know.
People are sick of the pop-star industry? You and me, maybe, but millions still seem quite taken with it. Maybe radio-listening is falling, but I bet TRL-watching has more than compensated.
And when you're doing your payment accounting, don't forget all the money "big fat corporations" spend on getting albums made. 1000 people paying an artist $5 each, directly, may not even cover the money the artist already spent on studio time. To state the converse of what I said in another reply, just because an artist makes a tangible amount on an incremental sale doesn't mean they aren't losing money overall.
OK, now I'm just repeating myself, but I'll try one more time: The 1% are not the only ones who might suffer. Those major labels who aren't paying Janis Ian any royalties? They paid for her to make her albums in the first place. They bought her studio time, paid her producers, and probably even paid her a royalty advance. Her saying she doesn't get any money from one additional CD sale is only one part of the balance sheet. She's been paid, and arguably more than her output turned out to be commercially worth. She had opportunities, paid for by others, that a precocious 15-year-old today might not get, because the people that would have given it to her are spending their time and energy trying to figure out how to copy-protect the next Britney album.
I'm not saying that the RIAA are justified or sane, I just don't believe music-sharing is going to lead any kind of populist revolution. Little self-contained subgenres existed before Napster, and will keep existing no matter how many variations on Napster get shut down, but very few of the musicians working in them will make livings that way. It that bad? Is it OK if music turns into an entirely amateur/semi-pro enterprise pursued by people whose livelihoods come from other jobs? Perhaps not, but that's a different debate.
A record company can easily lose money on an artist. That's the way the system is set up: the record company fronts the money for making and promoting the album, and gets paid back out of the proceeds. If the proceeds never equal the costs, the record company has lost money. Just because the incremental revenue from a CD sale goes 100% to the record company doesn't mean it's profit. If the accounting is done fairly and correctly (and I'm not saying it is), then if an artist isn't getting royalties it's because their record never did make back its costs. Major-label artists may be getting ripped off, but they're also getting to make albums in real studios with real producers and go on real tours they never could have afforded or arranged on their own.
Yes, that's my point, the major labels are creating their stars. I'm not endorsing this system, I'm just observing that it's very entrenched and very hard to fight. I don't listen to the radio, either, and you'll be hard-pressed to find anybody who knows and supports more commercially-obscure bands than I do. But very few of them stand to make a professional career out of producing music.
Remy Zero were on Geffen, which counts as "major" in my book. Ash's debut was on Reprise, Soul Coughing started on Slash (distributed by Warner), TMBG have been on majors for more than a decade, Waits got his start on Asylum, Moxy Fruvous were on Velvel (itself small, but started by major-label veterans). These are exactly the sort of artists that might suffer at the other end of the major-label squeeze. Even the Nields, whose story seems to have more Ani-ness to it, have benefited from the resources of Razor & Tie and Zoe, both of which exist somewhere in between the majors and random people with CD burners.
OK, so "troll" now means "person who has thought about the situation for longer than thirty seconds". I agree with you that the RIAA are assholes, and top-40 is crap, I'm just trying to explain why the major labels are right to be worried for themselves, and to point out that "minor" artists stand to lose their record deals or not get them to begin with as a trickle-down result of whatever happens to Britney et al.
As for proving that Janis Ian wouldn't have a career without her major-label time, obviously I can't run an alternate timeline in which she writes the same songs but just mails them to friends on cassettes, but the near-total absence of counter-examples (famous musicians who got famous without major-label support) is pretty suggestive.
As Janis almost realizes in this piece, the currency major labels deal in is attention. Sony can get songs not just onto the radio, but into movies, played in supermarkets, used in commercials, etc. They buy exposure. "the Internet, a CD maker and a bit of exposure" is all you say an artist needs. The exposure is the hard part. Without it you're working a day job and feeling lucky when putting a couple free MP3s on your band's website leads to selling 180 of the 2000 CDs you had made.
What several groups of people are trying to do, as a result, is create music-promotion companies that are run by artists, with contracts structured for the benefit of artists. Someday, maybe these companies will be able to compete with current major labels, the artists will flock to them, and the RIAA will die a long-due death. But not soon, and don't be too surprised if in the process of defeating the major labels these alternative companies become them.
1. She wouldn't have a career at all if it weren't for the exposure she got on major labels in her early years.
2. The major labels are being facile if they ever pretend to care what happens to the Janis Ians of the world. Those are the artists they're losing money on. What they really care about is what happens to the Britneys, because that's where the bulk of their revenue is coming from. But the money Britney earns them is their fund for giving other artists a chance. If downloading cuts into Britney's sales (and that seems quite possible to me), it will lead to "marginal" artists getting dumped and fewer getting signed in the future. No exposure, no career. Make a list of all the successful professional musicians who have succeeded without any major-label help. Kind of got bogged down after Ani DiFranco, didn't you? So yes, until there's a viable promotion infrastructure outside of the current major labels (and efforts at this are underway), downloading can hurt the Janis Ians, and the aspiring Janis Ians, despite her simplistic observation that incremental downloads aren't currently costing her anything.
Either you're being sarcastic about LDS.org, or they've changed it since you liked it, but as of today, in my browser (IE 5.5 on Windows 2000) it's a graphic-design disaster. The front page has a 3/4-width column with just sections links and a 1/4-width column with all the content (scrolling, naturally, way down the page next to an enormous blank space), and the main navigation is done with nearly unreadable black and blue text on navy backgrounds throughout.
You might have trouble selling a car with the hood literally welded shut, but the bulk of the cars sold today are effectively only a step or two removed from this for most of their owners. And if you think the "solution" is to sell engines and wheels and seats and glove compartments separately, so that people can assemble the car they really want themselves, you're living in some other universe. Linux vs Windows on the desktop isn't the battle, and thinking it is is the surest sign Linux will lose. The mass-market battle is about applications and setup, not operating systems and customizability. If people can walk into Circuit City and walk out with a $599 Linux machine that runs Office, IE, email and IM the moment they plug it in, they'll be happy to. In theory the corporate market has another layer of IT requirements that might lead them to different decisions, but in practice they almost always want basically the same thing.
The easiest (and maybe only) way Linux will succeed is not by convincing people that it's better than Windows, but by asserting that it's basically the same as Windows, just cheaper or faster or something, ala AMD vs Intel. "Different but better" is a much harder sell. Witness Apple's struggles, and they've got marketing and money, two things any open-source project will likely be short on.
3.85 Australian dollars, which is slightly less than US$2. Still seems high to me. I suspect some of them thought they were being asked how much they'd pay to download an entire album. This is a really easy question to totally botch in an opinion survey.
Napster may or may not spur CD sales, but this survey doesn't prove anything one way or another. The respondents weren't even asked about how many CDs they bought before and after, they were only asked whether they thought downloading music had stopped them from buying the corresponding single or album. I submit that the answers to this question are not interesting.
Besides, as has been pointed out time and time again, the major labels are at least as concerned with future downloadable-music revenue as they are with current CD revenue. 71% of the people in this survey said they would not pay to download music, and quite possibly some of the ones who said they would also wouldn't. I believe the worst threat Napster poses to the RIAA is that it establishes the precedent that downloaded music should be free.
Actually, I think the reason so much software sucks, and so many web pages, is the exact opposite: that it's fairly easy to learn to code, even to code well, but much harder to learn how to apply these skills in some way that will actually improve anybody's life, instead of contributing to the parade of annoyances. The best argument for majoring in some liberal art (or, for that matter, a creative art like writing or photography) is that if you do it right you will learn how to think about people, who are by far the hardest parts of any interesting problem, technological or otherwise.
A child would be better off fully aware of the situation and how to recognize it and its implications
Right, and a posterboard display in a crowded science fair is probably not the best environment for "full awareness" and a helpful discussion of the implications of the situation.
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Recording is easy. Mailing CDs to people or letting them download your MP3 is easy. But have you ever tried to market an unknown record to total strangers? Good luck...
What in the world do Bayesian filters have to do with this? How is a Bayesian filter going to tell you that "Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about" is cogent, and "Clear that what describes your message subject is a use about" is not? Bayesian filters may be able to guess at the genre or subject matter of a text, but they're never going to have any hope of telling whether it's valuable for any particular reader or use.
We started from Janis Ian and Ani DiFranco, from which you jumped to Chopin, so I don't think I'm moving goalposts so much as trying to get you back on the right playing field. Ani is a very clear example of an independent musician with her own label building critical and commercial success. Genesis, Floyd and REM are not. IRS, for example, was distributed by A&M from its inception.
King Crimson had major-label distribution for their early albums, without which Discipline Global Mobile might never have existed, so these people still aren't the examples I'm looking for.
I don't know where you've been, but there are plenty of examples of musicians signed to major labels on the basis of demo tapes or less. See, recently, Vanessa Carlton or Avril Lavigne.
You're pretending you were serious? And it was me that got accused of being a troll? I meant a current musician, one who has prospered completely outside the major-label system during the period of history in which the major-label system has existed. And not a classical musician, a soundtrack composer, a music teacher, the leader of a wedding band or a military bugler. I mean a person who has had a successful musical career of the same type as a major-label signee, but without any major-label connections.
The main barrier to entry is not the cost of production, it's the cost of getting people's attention, and technology hasn't changed that and never will.
Yes, patronage by the nobility is another viable economic model. It has kind of fallen out of use since the examples you cited, though. And it wasn't much different than the major label model in spirit, anyway.
I'd love to believe that any decent musician should be able to make a comfortable living making music independently. But that really does not appear to be the case. Ask Ani DiFranco how "comfortable" her relative success has been. You're going to need tens of thousands of fans to support you, and making tens of thousands of fans is hard enough that most people won't ever manage it, no matter how good their music is.
I'm with you on declining production costs, though. If there's a revolution coming in the music business, I suspect it has next to nothing to do with file-sharing, and a lot to do with more musicians having the sense and resources to fund their own recordings, and then sign distribution deals under much more advantageous terms. We'll see.
The label gets paid out of the proceeds. The artist's debt gets discharged out of the artist's share of the proceeds. The mechanics of this depend very much on the exact details of the contract, but usually the record company will have more expenses than the $20,000 they gave the artist, and even in Albini's classic breakdown, the label only gets $4 for each CD sold, not $11, putting the label's breakeven point, in your simple example, at somewhere over 5000 copies. A lot of albums don't ever sell 5000 copies. (So who pays for them? Britney.)
Also, I certainly don't want to imply that the structure of the standard record contract, today, isn't insane. Why any rational person ever signs one, I do not know.
People are sick of the pop-star industry? You and me, maybe, but millions still seem quite taken with it. Maybe radio-listening is falling, but I bet TRL-watching has more than compensated.
And when you're doing your payment accounting, don't forget all the money "big fat corporations" spend on getting albums made. 1000 people paying an artist $5 each, directly, may not even cover the money the artist already spent on studio time. To state the converse of what I said in another reply, just because an artist makes a tangible amount on an incremental sale doesn't mean they aren't losing money overall.
OK, now I'm just repeating myself, but I'll try one more time: The 1% are not the only ones who might suffer. Those major labels who aren't paying Janis Ian any royalties? They paid for her to make her albums in the first place. They bought her studio time, paid her producers, and probably even paid her a royalty advance. Her saying she doesn't get any money from one additional CD sale is only one part of the balance sheet. She's been paid, and arguably more than her output turned out to be commercially worth. She had opportunities, paid for by others, that a precocious 15-year-old today might not get, because the people that would have given it to her are spending their time and energy trying to figure out how to copy-protect the next Britney album.
I'm not saying that the RIAA are justified or sane, I just don't believe music-sharing is going to lead any kind of populist revolution. Little self-contained subgenres existed before Napster, and will keep existing no matter how many variations on Napster get shut down, but very few of the musicians working in them will make livings that way. It that bad? Is it OK if music turns into an entirely amateur/semi-pro enterprise pursued by people whose livelihoods come from other jobs? Perhaps not, but that's a different debate.
A record company can easily lose money on an artist. That's the way the system is set up: the record company fronts the money for making and promoting the album, and gets paid back out of the proceeds. If the proceeds never equal the costs, the record company has lost money. Just because the incremental revenue from a CD sale goes 100% to the record company doesn't mean it's profit. If the accounting is done fairly and correctly (and I'm not saying it is), then if an artist isn't getting royalties it's because their record never did make back its costs. Major-label artists may be getting ripped off, but they're also getting to make albums in real studios with real producers and go on real tours they never could have afforded or arranged on their own.
Yes, that's my point, the major labels are creating their stars. I'm not endorsing this system, I'm just observing that it's very entrenched and very hard to fight. I don't listen to the radio, either, and you'll be hard-pressed to find anybody who knows and supports more commercially-obscure bands than I do. But very few of them stand to make a professional career out of producing music.
Remy Zero were on Geffen, which counts as "major" in my book. Ash's debut was on Reprise, Soul Coughing started on Slash (distributed by Warner), TMBG have been on majors for more than a decade, Waits got his start on Asylum, Moxy Fruvous were on Velvel (itself small, but started by major-label veterans). These are exactly the sort of artists that might suffer at the other end of the major-label squeeze. Even the Nields, whose story seems to have more Ani-ness to it, have benefited from the resources of Razor & Tie and Zoe, both of which exist somewhere in between the majors and random people with CD burners.
OK, so "troll" now means "person who has thought about the situation for longer than thirty seconds". I agree with you that the RIAA are assholes, and top-40 is crap, I'm just trying to explain why the major labels are right to be worried for themselves, and to point out that "minor" artists stand to lose their record deals or not get them to begin with as a trickle-down result of whatever happens to Britney et al.
As for proving that Janis Ian wouldn't have a career without her major-label time, obviously I can't run an alternate timeline in which she writes the same songs but just mails them to friends on cassettes, but the near-total absence of counter-examples (famous musicians who got famous without major-label support) is pretty suggestive.
As Janis almost realizes in this piece, the currency major labels deal in is attention. Sony can get songs not just onto the radio, but into movies, played in supermarkets, used in commercials, etc. They buy exposure. "the Internet, a CD maker and a bit of exposure" is all you say an artist needs. The exposure is the hard part. Without it you're working a day job and feeling lucky when putting a couple free MP3s on your band's website leads to selling 180 of the 2000 CDs you had made.
What several groups of people are trying to do, as a result, is create music-promotion companies that are run by artists, with contracts structured for the benefit of artists. Someday, maybe these companies will be able to compete with current major labels, the artists will flock to them, and the RIAA will die a long-due death. But not soon, and don't be too surprised if in the process of defeating the major labels these alternative companies become them.
So go ahead, give me a list of musicians who have built viable professional recording careers without the major label help you say they don't need.
1. She wouldn't have a career at all if it weren't for the exposure she got on major labels in her early years.
2. The major labels are being facile if they ever pretend to care what happens to the Janis Ians of the world. Those are the artists they're losing money on. What they really care about is what happens to the Britneys, because that's where the bulk of their revenue is coming from. But the money Britney earns them is their fund for giving other artists a chance. If downloading cuts into Britney's sales (and that seems quite possible to me), it will lead to "marginal" artists getting dumped and fewer getting signed in the future. No exposure, no career. Make a list of all the successful professional musicians who have succeeded without any major-label help. Kind of got bogged down after Ani DiFranco, didn't you? So yes, until there's a viable promotion infrastructure outside of the current major labels (and efforts at this are underway), downloading can hurt the Janis Ians, and the aspiring Janis Ians, despite her simplistic observation that incremental downloads aren't currently costing her anything.
Either you're being sarcastic about LDS.org, or they've changed it since you liked it, but as of today, in my browser (IE 5.5 on Windows 2000) it's a graphic-design disaster. The front page has a 3/4-width column with just sections links and a 1/4-width column with all the content (scrolling, naturally, way down the page next to an enormous blank space), and the main navigation is done with nearly unreadable black and blue text on navy backgrounds throughout.
You might have trouble selling a car with the hood literally welded shut, but the bulk of the cars sold today are effectively only a step or two removed from this for most of their owners. And if you think the "solution" is to sell engines and wheels and seats and glove compartments separately, so that people can assemble the car they really want themselves, you're living in some other universe. Linux vs Windows on the desktop isn't the battle, and thinking it is is the surest sign Linux will lose. The mass-market battle is about applications and setup, not operating systems and customizability. If people can walk into Circuit City and walk out with a $599 Linux machine that runs Office, IE, email and IM the moment they plug it in, they'll be happy to. In theory the corporate market has another layer of IT requirements that might lead them to different decisions, but in practice they almost always want basically the same thing.
The easiest (and maybe only) way Linux will succeed is not by convincing people that it's better than Windows, but by asserting that it's basically the same as Windows, just cheaper or faster or something, ala AMD vs Intel. "Different but better" is a much harder sell. Witness Apple's struggles, and they've got marketing and money, two things any open-source project will likely be short on.
I don't think the problem with school history is that kids don't know what happened ten minutes ago.
3.85 Australian dollars, which is slightly less than US$2. Still seems high to me. I suspect some of them thought they were being asked how much they'd pay to download an entire album. This is a really easy question to totally botch in an opinion survey.
Napster may or may not spur CD sales, but this survey doesn't prove anything one way or another. The respondents weren't even asked about how many CDs they bought before and after, they were only asked whether they thought downloading music had stopped them from buying the corresponding single or album. I submit that the answers to this question are not interesting.
Besides, as has been pointed out time and time again, the major labels are at least as concerned with future downloadable-music revenue as they are with current CD revenue. 71% of the people in this survey said they would not pay to download music, and quite possibly some of the ones who said they would also wouldn't. I believe the worst threat Napster poses to the RIAA is that it establishes the precedent that downloaded music should be free.
Actually, I think the reason so much software sucks, and so many web pages, is the exact opposite: that it's fairly easy to learn to code, even to code well, but much harder to learn how to apply these skills in some way that will actually improve anybody's life, instead of contributing to the parade of annoyances. The best argument for majoring in some liberal art (or, for that matter, a creative art like writing or photography) is that if you do it right you will learn how to think about people, who are by far the hardest parts of any interesting problem, technological or otherwise.
A child would be better off fully aware of the situation and how to recognize it and its implications
Right, and a posterboard display in a crowded science fair is probably not the best environment for "full awareness" and a helpful discussion of the implications of the situation.