| Good thread.
The recording industry is dead and already stinking. When can we bury her and how? Would any among us begrudge dwindling royalty checks if we were just paid a comfortable living wage for playing gigs?
Though I am an avid recordist / producer whose phone still rings with offers to work, the business of mechanical / publishing royalties has never contributed much to my bottom line. I have 87 releases behind me now-- many of them on major labels… Only one is still generating a royalty check and this is but a pittance. Meanwhile, the very same business model has ensured that fat cats get fatter on the back of work I contributed to.
Why do we as independent musicians fight for this business model to continue? Barring the smallest sector of our business, the wildly famous, most of us never really benefit from the intellectual property side of the business or if we do its such a small contribution as to be negligible. Add it up over 10-20 years in the business- what percentage of your total income is from royalties or publishing agreements. For me, its less than 10% and the bulk of my compensated work has been in the studio! For most of these royalty generating projects, I actually made less per hour in production due to the fact that I had points on the back end. IOW, I would have earned much more had I just been paid the going rate for the production work rather than reducing this rate to negotiate for publishing or mechanical royalty.
Given this, a big part of me welcomes the demise of our recording industry. Speaking for myself, I would be happy to give away all of my recorded works for all time were I just paid a living wage to perform my art. Or, as a producer/engineer, paid a living wage to make the recordings that promote other artist's work.
Perhaps its time local musicians insist on a living wage to play bars and restaurants who rely on us to make a scene happen (not that I am advocate for musician unions.)
Recently, I was pitching a band to a wedding event. A great band. 5 Pro musicians. The bid was for 3 sets, w/ PA and lights. We pitched at 1000.00 A total bargain for 5 pro musicians w/ sound man and all the gear to create the spectacle. The gig was given instead to another local band who pitched similar service at $250! That's about 20 bucks per person after gas to the gig. WTF?! Musician poverty consciousness bringing down the wages of all musicians in the community! This kind of thing hurts us much more directly than greedy fat cats squeezing the dying breath from their Babylonian industry. Local musicians cannot do all that much about fat cat greed. But we can stop playing out for dirt wages. No pearls before swine.
Daniel
On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 10:23 AM, Dean, Hal <HDean@wcupa.edu> wrote:
Eno is not god despite our occasional stabs at setting him up as one. I find his analogy not apt.
I don't think he's a god (I mean, have you heard him sing? Yow.). I find his comparison astute.
The guys “making” whale blubber were not going to persist in doing it once the market caved, and no one would continue to be interested in their product. If
the analogy is to the selling of recordings, not records. i.e. not to a physical product necessarily, then one must point out that the workers do continue to be interested in the making (that would be everyone reading this), and there continues to be a pool
of folks interested in the results.
They may be interested in hearing the results, but the number of people interested in paying for them is dwindling, and continues to dwindle.
I don’t think it is entirely true that the people who purchase decide value. I’m no economist, but surely the economy of music distribution has an element of
the “race to the bottom” about it. Amazon’s bending of the publishing world to its will is a parallel that has received a lot of attention – the real sufferers there are authors. BTW, to the extent that theft is a “purchase”, then the value is zero. Hmm.
Correct. If no one is willing to pay for something, and they can get it for free, the value of it is zero. It's illiquid. I can say my new record is $100, but if no one buys it at that price, it has no value. Outside of a select circle of folk, people seem to be throwing their discretionary income at other things.
But Per makes a compelling case for what I’ve seen Chris Cutler call a “post-musical” world… well, maybe that isn’t what Chris means by the term, but it sounds
good… I have not really thought much about that. If that is where we are headed or have arrived, I will hope there remains a market at least sufficient to support the undeniable geniuses of the world.
There probably will; though the definition of genius may vary. Amanda Palmer, who I don't consider any sort of genius, made a million bucks by rattling a tin cup on the internet. Any 'revolution' in the way we consume music is going to have to come with the understanding that almost anyone can get a recording of what you make for free, and will probably listen to it in a manner that will make you shudder (over laptop speakers from a youtube stream, over earbuds in a poor mp3 rip, etc). The notion that people will pay for high quality, or some tangible format, or something like that is wrong-- outside of a small group of nerds, no one cares. Maybe that small group of nerds can sustain you, but they are fickle.
'Getting music out there' is very easy to do. Getting people to pay for it is only going to get harder. You can ask nicely for money for your recorded music, but that horse got out of the barn years ago, and is probably married and living in a different state.
The record companies before, at least came from a standpoint of loving music, now the music business is being strangled by the distributors (Apple, Spotify etc) Its of course ther own fault for not jumping in quick and building their own online music services, and spent too much time stamping on Napster instead... Now the CEO of Napster is a Board member of Spotify and hes considered a legit businessman... Go figure!
Nope. Record companies have always been in the business to make money (even Dischord, or whatever your favorite punk rock label is; they at least want to cover their own expenses, which involves selling things for cash). They got better at it over time (pop music is now largely a series of formulas, with as many as 8 songwriters working on something). The basic, original business model of record companies relied on them controlling distribution. When people figured out how to (re)distribute it themselves, they decided it wasn't worth as much as the record companies were charging. When it became easy to get for free, they decided it was free.
T
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