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The inevitable rise and liberation of the music industry
nescientist
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
The melodramatic title is a play on the title of the album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust, an album by rapper and poet Saul Williams produced by Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails). I'm only just downloading it, so can't offer much in the way of comment (it isn't really the purpose of the thread anyway, though I welcome opinions) but since In Rainbows has fallen from the page I need a new place to rail against the insanity that is the modern recording industry.
This album is following In Rainbows' lead: offered at any price (free, or any increment of 5$, it seems - there's some irony that these new freer distributions are, at least in the process of payment, restrained by poorly-hashed drm)
This, or something like this, is the future of music distribution. Or rather, it should be. What will actually happen is a bit more controversial. Interscope, BMG, and Sony remain immensely powerful, shaping not only how music is sold but what music sounds like. Saul Williams spent two years waiting for an album to go to press only to be told that it was "not hip-hop" and, therefore, marketable.
Nesctradamus predicts that this open-sale style will succeed profoundly for Radiohead and even for Saul Williams, but that this is partially fueled by guilty pirates (yarr...) and is not sustainable. But will music ultimately go back into the hands of three massive entities with a profound lack of understanding of the series of tubes we so love, or something altogether new? What say you, D&D?
This album is following In Rainbows' lead: offered at any price (free, or any increment of 5$, it seems - there's some irony that these new freer distributions are, at least in the process of payment, restrained by poorly-hashed drm)
This, or something like this, is the future of music distribution. Or rather, it should be. What will actually happen is a bit more controversial. Interscope, BMG, and Sony remain immensely powerful, shaping not only how music is sold but what music sounds like. Saul Williams spent two years waiting for an album to go to press only to be told that it was "not hip-hop" and, therefore, marketable.
Nesctradamus predicts that this open-sale style will succeed profoundly for Radiohead and even for Saul Williams, but that this is partially fueled by guilty pirates (yarr...) and is not sustainable. But will music ultimately go back into the hands of three massive entities with a profound lack of understanding of the series of tubes we so love, or something altogether new? What say you, D&D?
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Really? I actually know nothing about the degree of success of In Rainbows, though I'd be extremely skeptical of a claim about it being the most heavily pirated album ever. I mean, if they're just taking the number of people who put "0.00" into the thing, half the people who paid for it (myself included) have probably gone back and done that at some point to get it on a different computer, or something. I know I've downloaded Windows a dozen times or more even though I own something like 4 licenses for my two computers. That's the criticism of iTunes and similar DRM-protected distribution schemes: they're not nearly as convenient as theft.
Web distribution has (nearly) no overhead. And thanks for the threadshitting, but where the money goes is a totally relevant discussion.
Incidentally, despite In Rainbows being heavily pirated, the official site "sold" some ungodly ammount of "records". Now it is hard to tell how that translates into actual money, but the whole experiment was far from a bust.
In Rainbows apparently was hit 1.2 million times the day it became available. (Ironically, the day they begain pre-orders they actually sold more of the box set than the download itself. This probable has more to do with the hardcore fan rushing in the first day more than anything else.) 1.2 million downloads is an astounishing feat. While piracy was an issue, it still doesn't discount from that acheivement. Even if everyone paid an average of one dollar, that means they made more just selling it online than they ever would have through a record label.
However, most artists are not as well established as Radiohead. They are critical darlings and fan favorites accross the world. I've heard some reports of them giving U2 a run for the "biggest band in the world" title. Smaller artists probably wouldn't be able to pull it off simple because of the lack of buzz behind them. Selling music is as much about selling a name and image as the music itself.
Saying here are no overheads is bullshit. Have you heard of bandwidth costs? Not to mention the servers and staff to maintain them (you can't tell me the average musician knows how to operate a web server). That shit can get real expensive real quick, especially for some starving artist traveling across the country in a station wagon to play FREE live gigs hoping to garner just a little buzz.
There a book you should read:
Dirty Little Secrets of the Record Industry (Why So Much Music You Hear Sucks)
I meant relative to printing vinyl, or running a TV ad campaign, or putting jewel cases in a wal-mart. I'm sure Radiohead spent several thousand dollars on their setup, or more, but the thing about bandwidth costs is that they scale to volume. If you are in fact a starving artist, $9 will rent you a server and deliver enough bandwidth for 2,400 direct downloads a month - or if you have more than one brain cell rubbing together, you seed a torrent and all your bandwidth is for your site itself. Source income through band merchandise, have a donation button - I don't know. I'm talking mostly out of my ass (and one quick google search) but the point of this thread isn't for me to push my own insane view of "the way things oughta be" but to solicit predictions from people with a clue. What does that book have to say about the way things are going?
I find the situation fascinating, and I'd like to hear your ideas.
Thanks for the link, anyhow. that book's now on my reading list.
EDIT: I read a couple of reviews of that book, and it seems not to mention the internet, though that might be the reviews. I find this puzzling. I just don't see how the most elaborate and efficient copying machine and distribution system ever conceived becoming a nearly ubiquitous tool could possibly fail to affect this industry. Especially now that we have a decade of people becoming used to listening to music on their computers, burning CDs... what's the market penetration of the iPod? How many people actually buy CDs and rip the tracks and then put them on their iPods?
How the hell is it pirating when it's offered for free?
Let's say you're a band, you've been doing shows, you have a small but non-negligible fanbase. You start recording your album, paying for it out of pocket and using the money you're making from shows.
At some point, the album is ready. Instead of releasing it as-is, you seed a "single" or two on your website and over p2p, and on your website, you call for "donations" or "pre-orders". Basically, you ask people to donate money until you reach an announced threshold. For example, say you calculated that the album cost you 10000$ to make. You set the threshold for 20000$, say you're not going to release the whole album until the donations reach 20000$. Maybe you set it so that, at every 5000$, you release another single.
Then, when you reach 20000$, everybody who donated, say, 5$ or more, gets a link to download the album, and everyone who donated 10$ or more will receive an actual CD in the mail. Anyone who wants to donate past the 20000$ is welcome to, as the band can then set that money aside to fund their next album.
Assuming the fanbase has grown, in the meantime, the band can set the threshold for the next album to 50000$ or 100000$.
If a threshold isn't reached within a pre-set amount of time, the band has the option of extending the delay, or cancelling the project. When a project is canceled, all the money is refunded to the people who donated.
There are actually websites that already do that kind of "donation escrow". I can't be bothered to look it up, at this point, but actually implementing what I'm suggesting is already possible.
Also, I guess it would be expected of artists that make it really big in this way, reaching a "critical mass" where the surplus from a previous album is enough to fund the next one (and support the band financially in the meantime) so that the band would be able to release a "free" album, once in a while. Well, either free, or using the "In Rainbows" model.
Using the method I've outlined essentially makes "consumers" understand that there is a cost for music, and that if they don't pay at least some money, the music stops.
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Uh, what? "Oh no, the unregulated music will all be sucked out the internet tubes!"
Are you trying to use the tragedy of the commons as shorthand for people behaving selfishly? Because that is pretty daft.
I'm actually using it as what it is intended for - the consequence of trying to produce a non-excludable good in the free market.
It's only a tragedy if it's a finite resource. Otherwise it's just, "the commons." And it has no relationship to the history of music pre-recording: music was excludable then since the patron typically had primary access to the art - and the artist.
As for digital distribution vs. hardcopy discs, just this year alone the sales of CDs has decline another twenty percent. Digital distribution (iTunes, eMusic, Rhapsody, etc.) is expected to double by the end of the year. It appears as though the industry is finally catching on to the trend, shifting their resources but it maybe too little too late. They estimate that the number of music pirates grows something like twenty-eight percent (and that's a low-ball estimate).
Oddly, the demand for vinyl hasn't been affected. It seems to have increased, in fact. Modest Mouse's We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank was offered on vinyl, and I never considered them part of the "vinyl revolution". Garage rock revivalist groups like The White Stripes and The Strokes or punk rock bands like Operation Ivy never surprised me releasing on vinyl. Even Radiohead has jumped on board the trend, with the vinyls being a major selling point of the In Rainbows box set. It's an interesting trend, one worth watching seriously. Done right, the industry could save itself, but it means completely rethinking the business model and definitely scaling down.
We really don't need optional payment albums or other such gimmicks to fix things.
I have a little bit of an issue with this business model. It assumes that upstart musicians have time to manage these sorts of things. They don't. For a band to be successful it requires constant touring. A band stopping a tour when they're generating a buzz can be the deciding factor between success and failure. It means the band still needs a manager to handle all that. But, managers are one of the major problems with music today. You can either end up with a really good manager or a really crooked one who will take off with all your earnings. What's too keep them from taking off with those donations, leaving the band high and dry? Right now the only thing keeping some managers clean is the record label behind the deal. We need some laws protecting the artists and fans from this sort of thing before it would work. Unfortunately, right now, all the laws are actually stacked AGAINST the artist. Managers get away with taking off with the money all the time.
Can you explain this part a bit more?
Music is, in some way, a finite resource. If musicians can't make enough money to survive, they'll stop making music.
? iTunes?
iTunes plus is nice since they lowered the prices, but MP3s are more widely supported and Amazon's store has a united front: everything works everywhere. Apple is still a bit stuck in their closed ecosystem mindset.
Well then, I'm sure we can also move to voluntary contributions for food instead of payment.