8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

On Exclusives and Windowing

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Jonathan Galkin, Co-Founder of DFA Records, in PIAS Blog:

“All of these ‘streaming exclusives’ are for the 1%. This is not my fight. It sort of feels awful all around, regardless of the scale of the artist. It’s like having to join a gym in order to buy a pair of sneakers.

“This is the least democratic way to hear discuss and enjoy new music. It shouldn’t be a scavenger hunt to find an album, and albums shouldn’t be used as bait to build tech companies.

“But, you know, good for Kanye and Drake and Beyonce. But it leaves little room to focus on the discovery of new music, which is what DFA is all about.”

Music Business Worldwide:

Per Sundin (Universal): “It’s exactly what happened in the US with physical product. Best Buy said, we’re going to buy 2m AC/DC albums, and it was: ‘Wow, 2m albums.’ But eventually when you looked at the real record stores, the Towers that closed and others, you’re killing the people who feed you.”

Mark Dennis (Sony): “It’s the wrong thing, without a doubt. People who believe that exclusives are going to bring the market forward are the most naive people in the world. We have to learn from what’s happened in the past: when people haven’t been able to consume music in the way they want, they turn to piracy. We’re just not learning! We’ve got to be realistic. What will move the market forward is having content across all platforms, giving the consumer the ability to make their decision and use great products.”

So, not much love for streaming exclusives. However, windowing may soon have a new champion. Via Music Ally:

With no free tier, Apple Music has been able to pitch itself as a premium-only option for album releases, as has Tidal. SoundCloud, meanwhile, made premium-windowing part of the industry pitch for its recently-launched SoundCloud Go subscription tier.

Sources have told Music Ally that Spotify was in advanced discussions with Radiohead’s management company Courtyard and label XL Recordings about a deal to make A Moon Shaped Pool the first album to be windowed to premium subscribers on the service.

“We are always looking for new ways to create a better experience for our free and paying listeners, and to maximise the value of both tiers for artists and their labels. We explored a variety of ways to do that in conjunction with the release of Radiohead’s latest album,” said {Jonathan} Prince {of Spotify}.

“Some of the approaches we explored with Radiohead were new, and we ultimately decided that we couldn’t deliver on those approaches technologically in time for the album’s release schedule.”

Reading between the lines of Prince’s statement, it seems that this is less a case of getting cold feet about premium windowing, and more a case of Spotify wanting to make sure the technology to make it work was robust.

Hard Times for MP3 Sellers

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I missed this article from almost a year back, and it’s an extra-interesting read in light of industry events that have taken place since. Beyond that, there’s some valuable food-for-thought to process here.

5 Magazine:

Unless you’re Amazon and the market takes your lack of interest in making a profit with good-hearted cheer, this is a tough time to be selling goods in the music industry. It’s even harder if those “goods” happen to be music files.

I’d heard it said as recently as a year ago that a DJ-centered market would be protected from the massive shift in consumer expectations driven by streaming, to a world in which every sound ever committed to tape can be listened to for free. This is clearly not the case. After all, it was once claimed that DJs would always have a “need” for vinyl, too.

This is a bitter pill for people with some skin in the game, who look and see a larger market for music than has ever existed before. There are also more DJs now than at any time in history, but selling that market on a product with zero duplication costs and unlimited supply has been a tough racket.

Recorded music was once the foundation of billion dollar corporations – corporations which were largely gutted by sexy tech start-ups that could do everything better… except turn a profit. Now we’re entering the next stage, in which the business of selling “records” (however you want to define that) is simply too low-margin to attract the big, dumb money of a Robert Sillerman. The precise shape of that next stage of the recorded music industry is unclear but one would like to imagine it characterized by artist-centered services like Bandcamp existing in the shadow of the streaming services – a business big enough for you or me or a guy doing this out of his bedroom or a bigroom but too small for the lumbering giants to bother with.

The True Story of the Fake Zombies

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Buzzfeed:

Before the decline of the major label system and the rise of the internet and social media, enterprising and less than scrupulous businessmen ran the industry with relative impunity, with artists serving primarily as commodities to be exploited. Famously, Elvis’s manager Colonel Tom Parker pocketed anywhere from 25 to 50% of the star’s gross income for the duration of his career. Allen Klein, who managed the Rolling Stones after the release of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” in 1965, promptly signed the band’s publishing rights to his own company ABKCO, resulting in a string of lawsuits spanning decades. If this treatment was the norm for the era’s biggest stars, it’s not hard to imagine how lesser lights would fare.

The Zombies, unaware of their stateside success — this was possible in 1969 — had already moved on to new musical projects or day jobs. This vacuum meant anyone could tour the United States pretending to be the Zombies, even a four-piece blues band from Dallas.

There were in fact two different bands touring the United States in 1969 calling themselves the Zombies. Both impostor groups were managed by the same company, Delta Promotions, the owners of which insisted they’d legally acquired the songs of the Zombies and other bands. It was an operation that would be impossible to attempt today, perpetrated in an era when fans didn’t have unlimited access to artists’ whereabouts, or, in some cases, even know what they looked like.

The plan was simple: Find competent musicians, convince them Delta was on the level, get them to a reasonable point of Zombies-like ability, and send them on the road. Once the prep was completed, they’d send the bands on tour while Delta took a healthy slice of the profits.

As for the fans who were getting swindled, {Delta Promotions employee Tom} Hocott says, “When they were told, ‘Here’s the Zombies,’ they bought it. Even the strange parts, like the fact that they were touring without a keyboardist.” Fans left disappointed and the bands left town as quickly as possible. The less remembered, the better.

The full article is totally worth a read. And, of course, shenanigans like this aren’t unique to the ’60s / ’70s … remember fake Frankie Goes To Hollywood?

Ad-Supported Optimism

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Pitchfork:

When asked about the near future of free music streaming, Robert Kyncl, YouTube’s chief business officer, tells me, “What’s next is more ad revenue coming into it.” For instance, the advertising conglomerate Interpublic Group recently revealed it was shifting $250 million in TV ad spending to YouTube. Kyncl suggests advertisers could increasingly take money off traditional radio, too, and put it on the service’s clips. The record industry’s business model always differed from TV and radio in that fans bought specific songs or albums, but now it’s being tied into that same advertising-based model through free streaming.

“The music industry as a whole hasn’t earned that much from advertising, and now that’s changing,” Kyncl says. The reason industry coffers haven’t previously spilled over with ad revenues is partly a quirk of U.S. copyright law. Unlike in some other nations, radio broadcasters here pay royalties only to the songwriters, not the labels that own the recordings. But on-demand streaming service providers like YouTube and Spotify must pay both types of royalties. So, according to Kyncl, as listening goes from analog to digital, the music industry can look forward to a bigger share of the revenue from a larger market. In other words, labels—and artists who own their own master recordings—have gone from “monetizing only the super fans, by selling them CDs and LPs and tapes, to making money through ads from everybody that enjoys music,” he explains. “And that’s a big deal.”

The Era of the One-Word Song Title

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Yet another way that Talking Heads’ Fear Of Music album was ahead of its time … via Priceonomics:

Over the last several years, pop music has been inundated by massive hits with one-word song titles: “Happy”, “Fancy”, “Rude”, “Problem”, “Jealous”, “Chandelier, “Hello”, and “Sorry” are just a few examples of this trend.
We are in the era of the shrinking pop song title. The transition has taken place slow enough that you may not have noticed, but when you look back at the history of pop, the change is stark.

We analyzed Billboard Hot 100 song title data and discovered a steady upward trend in the number of one-word titles. Today, the probability of a one-word title is two and a half times greater than in the 1960s. The average number of words per song title has also declined substantially. The increasingly industrialized pop machine likes its song titles short, sweet and on brand.

Why might shorter song titles be better commercially? Mostly because they are easier to remember, particularly if they are repeated over and over in the song. The last thing the music industry wants is for you to love a song but be unable to remember its name when you go to stream or download the song. But it’s tough to forget “Hello” or “Happy” when Adele and Pharrell keep repeating the one-word title throughout the song.

The pop industrial complex is focused on making the consumption of its product as easy as possible, and that has meant making song titles ever more simple and memorable. Expect to hear a lot more one-word title hit songs with lyrics that will drill that title into your head.

The Music Industry Isn’t Ready for the Blockchain

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Medium:

Every day there are headlines about companies in the banking industry employing blockchain technology. Technologies like this could make the music industry more fair and transparent, and reduce a lot of friction around rights and payments, leaving more money to flow from fan to creator. The biggest obstacle, however, is the music industry itself.

The problem in getting the music industry to adopt the blockchain for anything beyond metadata is that there are competing interests. For instance, if you’ve invested a lot of money into marketing a sub-licensed work in a certain territory, you wouldn’t want everyone to be able to see when your right expires… because then you’ll have a lot of competitors who might try to secure those rights.

There’s a lot of interest in making payments transparent, so that it becomes clear how much a party like Spotify actually pays to certain labels, and what happens to that money along the chain to the creators. Creators are likely to have privacy concerns about having their income being public though.

Other organisations have a risk of redundancy — although they might secure a new role for themselves by participating.

When Classic Rockers Embraced The New Wave

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Writer Stephen Thomas Erlewine has tackled a fascinating (to me) subject for Medium’s Cuepoint: the odd collision of classic rockers and the emerging ‘new wave’ in the late ’70s.

Cuepoint:

Three or four years after the revolution, all the upheavals of the back half of the 70s were no longer contained in the underground. Disco and punk, synthesizers and drum machines, hip-hop and new wave — these strange new sounds started to seep into the mainstream and not just through new acts. Baby boomers facing their forties decided to try to dig the new breed, albeit on their own terms.

Erlewine goes on to document amusing efforts of varying success by Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop (working with XTC / future Shriekback keyboardist Barry Andrews), Robert Palmer (collaborating with Gary Numan and Chris Frantz), and even Shaun Cassidy (who enlisted Todd Rundgren to help with his attempted transformation). But he saves most of his wonderment for Paul McCartney’s unlikely embrace of these sounds:

Of all these odd records reckoning with new wave, none were as surprising as Paul McCartney’s McCartney II. Decades later, its cloistered, claustrophobic single “Temporary Secretary” can still startle and so can its accompanying, misshapen album.

On “Temporary Secretary,” McCartney sets his whimsy — which arises in the form of a rhyming, murmured sing-song appropriated from Ian Dury — to a frenzied synthesized loop that undercuts whatever cutesiness he utters. Sounding like a computer in collapse, that loop leaves the lasting impression that McCartney really was attempting to be fashion forward.

Watch on YouTube

The results of these pre-synth era artists coping with onrushing trends would make for a fun compilation album … has anyone done this? Anyway, this is a fine article and worth some time and thought.

SoundCloud Partners With LANDR

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With the introduction of SoundCloud’s paid ‘Go’ service and external pressure to become a more commercial enterprise, there’s been heated speculation that the site might forgo its commitment to the independent musicians and DJs who have been SoundCloud’s emphasis. Today’s news, though a minor announcement to most, may be a signal that music creators will remain the focus of SoundCloud’s long game. Via FACT:

SoundCloud has announced a partnership with online mastering service LANDR that means all users can get free track optimization for the streaming platform. The partnership sees SoundCloud focusing once again on its original market of music creators rather than consumers after the launch of its paid subscription service, SoundCloud Go.

A LANDR spokesman said: “We use exactly the same algorithms but we did some research to find the best output for optimizing the sound of any track on the SoundCloud streaming format. The optimized tracks will only be hosted on SoundCloud and not in LANDR’s track library. It is really aimed at streaming on SoundCloud."

Professional mastering is regardless still mandatory for commercial release (seriously … please), but this is a smart move that not only gives the music uploader a little something extra out of using SoundCloud, but also improves audio consistency throughout the site.

Update, via Ars Technica:

Landr’s landing site describes the mastering process as “complicated and elusive,” then insists that its product, which is almost entirely algorithm-driven, delivers a quality product for small-fry musicians by intentionally limiting how many options they can pick from. “Great design is all about limiting the field,” Landr says. As a result, the company touts that “we’re confident you’ll hear the difference” between professional mastering work and what Landr can pull off.

After our tests of SoundCloud’s new Landr functionality, we can safely agree with that statement—in every bad way possible.

Encouraging Steps Towards Closing The Publisher Data Gap

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Music Industry Blog:

Artist concerns about transparency in streaming services are well founded but it is an eminently fixable problem because virtually all of the necessary data is in place. When a record label or distributor licenses music to a service it literally provides a data file of its music which is then ingested (uploaded) by the service. But when service licenses from a music publisher or PRO there is no such data file, because the recorded works are owned by the labels. Publishers do not even provide a comprehensive list of what works their license covers. So music services instead do a ‘best efforts’ licensing effort, licensing all the key publishers and PROs.

The problem is that until there is a market level solution that sort of action won’t go away. This means any music service operating in the US, where there is a statutory damages system, cannot operate with certainty that it will not face another legal suit with potentially vast damages awarded. The nightmare scenario is that streaming services start pulling out of the US, or restricting their catalogue to identified works (which largely means major publishers only) rather than face potentially fatal legal challenges.

The music industry needs a solution and now just like busses that never come, two arrive at once: Google’s Open Source Validation Tool for DDEX Standard and Canadian PRO (Performing Rights Organization) SOCAN has acquired Medianet essentially as a digital rights reporting play.

Previously.

I sort of feel like the old guy grumbling “we can land a man on the moon but we can’t even (insert impossible thing here)”, but in this data-obsessed age we really should have a centralized publishers database that can be updated and utilized throughout the industry. Hopefully multiple companies getting involved (there are also rumors of Music Reports entering the fray) will finally bear some fruit, and we can begin slowly stumbling our way out of this wild west phase of the streaming economy.