8DPromo is presently working this 43rd release for NYC’s Get Up Recordings, the “Internal Waves” single from label co-proprietor Christy Love. Prime time house music elements abound in the original track, ready-made for an extended strobe light work-out. The remix by Londoners Severino & Hifi Sean lays down the swing and the funky 303, while MissB goes into more traditional territory, peppered with pleasingly spacious highlights.
The Discovery Dead End
“Discovery” has certainly been the buzzword for the last few years, but the problem is that we still haven’t figured out the next steps after someone hears a song. I listen to music all day long but not much of it sticks with me, just because I get no direction from streaming platforms. I have to manually search for artists I like when I’m listening at home, and I have to actually remember to go back through a playlist and search for an artist if I hear something I like when I’m out. And I’m someone who cares about music more than most people.
There are a couple of possible remedies for this. One, streaming services could offer more links out to follow artists on other platforms. Spotify and Apple Music both have their own internal platforms, so I certainly understand why they want to keep people in the services — the problem is that both these internal platforms kinda stink.
In the end, just being “discovered” on a playlist doesn’t mean much to an artist. If services truly want to help artists monetize and build careers, the least they can do is direct listeners to other opportunities to follow, engage with, and support the artist. But artists also have a role to play, by making sure that their content is worth engaging with.
This harks back to an earlier post regarding the social Internet unwisely evolving into a series of closed ecosystems. The author’s points are valid, and keeping an artist’s fans within a closed network (and one that’s not that great, i.e. Apple’s ‘Connect’) doesn’t cultivate a positive experience for the user. An excited fan wants access to it all – the band’s social networks, websites, maybe even a Bandcamp link for purchasing the music (of course, I understand why Apple may not consider that last one). This not only helps the artists but I feel a richer, well-rounded fan experience will make users more enthusiastic about the streaming service they are using. This more than makes up for the trade-off of potentially sending users to an external site … they’ll certainly come back knowing that their requirements as music fanatics will be catered to.
Case Study: A Serious Man
Here’s a thoughtful video essay on what may be my favorite Coen brothers film, A Serious Man:
Future Of Music Coalition Responds: The Data Journalism That Wasn’t
Let us be clear: our problem with Johnson’s article isn’t that he fails to conform to some doom-and-gloom scenario for artists working today. Indeed, there are a lot of new opportunities for artists, and those opportunities are worth celebrating. Most frustrating to us is that Johnson reinforces a false binary between pro-technology optimistic futurism and anti-technology digital pessimism. And that simply doesn’t describe the state of the contemporary debate about art and the digital age.
Fair enough. And the Future Of Music Coalition fires off some worthy criticism of Steven Johnson’s numbers, which Johnson in turn has promised to respond to. It’s all very much worth reading.
Thoughtful, nuanced (and very critical!) response to my Times piece from a terrific organization. I'll respond soon. https://t.co/2Vq1X2pYO8
— Steven Johnson (@stevenbjohnson) August 21, 2015
I feel the true state lies somewhere in between. I know a few musicians who are doing quite well for themselves in the present climate, and I know a few who have dropped out of the business due to financial frustration. I’m hanging on, though it’s certainly a stressful arena to be making a living in. But I’m not convinced it’s all that different than it was a couple decades ago, in terms of some musicians benefiting and others struggling into disillusionment. Admittedly, one big change is that there are a lot fewer stable music industry jobs. And artists working within the traditional infrastructure are feeling the pain (which isn’t helped by labels adopting things like 360 deals). But I still think the emerging opportunities for creative people and independent companies, which the Coalition admits are “worth celebrating”, are the real story here, and it’s this shift towards autonomy that will define the future of music.
The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t
Thanks to its legal troubles, Napster itself ended up being much less important as a business than as an omen, a preview of coming destructions. Its short, troubled life signaled a fundamental rearrangement in the way we discover, consume and (most importantly) pay for creative work. In the 15 years since, many artists and commentators have come to believe that (this) promised apocalypse is now upon us — that the digital economy, in which information not only wants to be free but for all practical purposes is free, ultimately means that ‘‘the diverse voices of the artists will disappear,’’ because musicians and writers and filmmakers can no longer make a living.
It seems logical to critics that we will end up in a world in which no one has an economic incentive to follow creative passions. The thrust of this argument is simple and bleak: that the digital economy creates a kind of structural impossibility that art will make money in the future. The world of professional creativity, the critics fear, will soon be swallowed by the profusion of amateurs, or the collapse of prices in an age of infinite and instant reproduction will cheapen art so that no one will be able to quit their day jobs to make it — or both.
(The artists’) financial fate turns out to be much harder to measure, but I endeavored to try. Taking 1999 as my starting point — the year both Napster and Google took off — I plumbed as many data sources as I could to answer this one question: How is today’s creative class faring compared with its predecessor a decade and a half ago? The answer isn’t simple, and the data provides ammunition for conflicting points of view. It turns out that (pessimists were) incontrovertibly correct on one point: Napster did pose a grave threat to the economic value that consumers placed on recorded music. And yet the creative apocalypse (we were) warned of has failed to arrive. Writers, performers, directors and even musicians report their economic fortunes to be similar to those of their counterparts 15 years ago, and in many cases they have improved. Against all odds, the voices of the artists seem to be louder than ever.
This article is a must-read, and not just for its refreshingly optimistic tone about the economic changes in our creative culture. I had to hold back on quoting more from it above as almost every paragraph is fascinating. The author looks at not just the music industry but also the state of film and literature and determines what those in the trenches have suspected: things aren’t necessarily rosy for the legacy media companies, but are looking good for individual creators who know how to ride the landscape. Gee, it’s almost like someone out there has been purposefully controlling the narrative, pushing ‘doom and gloom’ stories for all artists who embrace this democratization through technology.
Also touched on in the article is how there are now so many more opportunities for musicians and content creators to make income on their work. Chris Anderson’s ‘Long Tail’ may not have fully realized, but indeed there are multiple avenues of artist income available now that didn’t exist even 15 years ago. On top of this, the crumbling of the traditional distribution model – which is the source of anxiety for all these big media companies – and the dramatically reduced costs for creating new media open up unlimited possibilities. It’s the punk rock dream come true.
Related, and also recommended, is this latest episode of the Mac Power Users podcast where the hosts chat with songwriter Jonathan Mann about how he makes a living by recording a song a day. Most of the podcast is a lot of technical talk, but the really interesting section starts around 1:08:00 where Mann gets into the business of what he does. Basically none of this would have been possible for him a couple years ago.
Update: The Future Of Music Coalition has some crticisms, and I have a few more thoughts.
8D Projects: Venntaur – Just Once (DeepWit Recordings)
Danish label DeepWit Recordings is one of our favorite deep house labels – and we mean ‘deep house’ very much in the traditional, non-diluted sense – so it’s always a pleasure to work with them. This forthcoming release showcases two fine tracks by Finnish producer Venntaur, backed with remixes from Tokyo’s Datakestra and Jason Mitchell, who is the proprietor of another of our client labels, Australia’s Deep House Aficionado. Lush and melodic stuff here, complete with beefy rhythms and dreamy textures throughout. It’s our latest promotions project at 8DPromo.
How ‘Playola’ Is Infiltrating Streaming Services
Like social media, playlists are viral in nature: A track’s streams will spike after it’s added to a popular playlist; listeners will add the song to their playlists; their friends will do the same. Getting a song onto a hot playlist almost ensures awareness will spread from one social network to another.
Multiple insiders allege that the major music groups have paid influential curators to populate their playlists with their clients’ music. Some third-party users are known to request money to include songs on their playlists. Pay for play “is definitely happening,” claims a major-label marketing executive, one of several who say that popular playlists can and have been bought.
According to a source, the price can range from $2,000 for a playlist with tens of thousands of fans to $10,000 for the more well-followed playlists. And these practices are not illegal, although it would be difficult to find an official policy in the fine print.
In a statement to Billboard, Spotify head of communications Jonathan Prince says its new terms of service, hitting the United States next week, prohibit selling accounts and playlists or “accepting any compensation, financial or otherwise, to influence … the content included on an account or playlist.” Yet policing, let alone enforcing, these terms could be difficult.
Everything old is new again, eh? But then how is aggressively promoting an artist to a playlist different than, say, promoting that artist – through bribery or otherwise – to a music blog? Playlists are sort of becoming ‘the new music blogs’ to streaming fans, so it makes sense. A blog (or a radio station in the ‘old days’) that relies on promoted or paid content gets noticeably watered down in its taste-making reputation, but that probably doesn’t matter to the mainstream targets here. Pay-for-play stinks, but as it is nearly-impossible to enforce (though not difficult to spot by savvy music fans) it’s probably going to be a permanent thorn in the side for these services. When it used to affect your local radio station you didn’t really have elsewhere to go … at least with playlists and blogs there are many other alternatives out there to turn to when the ones you are following start suspiciously including the same lackluster songs at the same time.
This Company Is Selling A “Record Label In A Box” For £249
FACT:
Ditto Music’s label in a box comes in three flavours: the £249 “Premium”, the £399 “Professional” and the eye-watering £3,499 “Enterprise” packages. Each box does most of the paperwork for you, including PPL license for claiming performance rights as well as IIRC codes for registering releases.
You also get certificates, a USB pen loaded with all your company data and personalised management suite software for monitoring and managing royalties. Each package also comes with a business bank account, label web domain and registration as a limited company with Companies House. You’ll still have to find decent music to release by yourself however.
You can find out more at the Ditto website, but it’s worth pointing out that you can achieve most of what the basic package offers for no money, so long as you have the time to spare.
The Argument For Streaming Services To Adopt ‘Subscriber Share’
If you subscribe to a subscription music service such as Spotify or Apple Music you probably pay $10 a month. And if you are like most people, you probably do so believing your money goes to the artists you listen to. Unfortunately, you are wrong.
The reality is only some of your money is paid to the artists you listen to. The rest of your money (and it’s probably most of your money) goes somewhere else. That “somewhere else” is decided by a small group of subscribers who have gained control over your money thanks to a mathematical flaw in how artist royalties are calculated.
There is a better way to approach streaming royalties, one which addresses all of these problems, and it’s called Subscriber Share.
The premise behind Subscriber Share is simple: the only artists that should receive your money are the artists you listen to. Subscriber Share simply divides up your (subscription fee) based on how much time you spend listening to each artist. So if you listen to an artist exclusively, then that artist will get the entire (share of the fee), but if you listen less they get proportionately less.
I bet a lot of music fans – and artists – will be surprised that this is not how streaming royalties are presently calculated. Indeed, the ‘money pool’ method that’s currently in place divides the money that’s available among total plays for all artists. Thus, a hair salon running Spotify on ‘random’ 24/7 decreases the amount paid out to the independent artist who gets repeated plays from dozens of diehard fans.
Sharky Laguana makes some great points in his article – as well as in this earlier article he wrote for The Kernel which I think explains Subscriber Share even better – but I’m wondering how the ad-supported ‘free tier’ that Spotify relies on to attract new adopters complicates things. Would Spotify be able to maintain two tiers of royalty calculation: the pool for ad-supported plays and Subscriber Share for subscribers? Is that necessary?
Of course, the question is whether the services would even consider this change. Sharky is correct in that once music industry folks have something set in stone it’s going to take some really big chisels to get it changed. His idea for ‘Silent September’ proposed in the article is interesting and worthy of conversation, but unfortunately seems a bit quixotic. The idea’s purpose of poking at the major labels carries one big truth: the majors will have to be on board for Subscriber Share to become a possibility. Regardless, I’ll probably still participate to some degree … I’m mainly listening to independent artists anyway.
I feel the best way a change like this could come about would be if a new service adopted this royalty method and made their policy overtly public, attracting artist support and in turn shaming the other services. I assume Tidal uses the ‘pool’ method of calculation … for all their talk of supporting the artist, this would seem like pushing on an open door for them. What about the newly launched Baboom? This service names their payout method Fair Trade Streaming … “we want your fan’s subscription to go directly to you” is a sentence found in Baboom’s press material to potential artists. I assume this means they are adopting some form of Sharky’s Subscriber Share method. I’ll look for confirmation, and this story will certainly continue to develop.
8D Projects: Urian Hackney – The Box (Cold Busted)
The Los Angeles-based Cold Busted label is another imprint I’ve been working with for a while, since its humble beginnings in Denver, Colorado. Cold Busted has been focused on the funkier, often downtempo, edge of breakbeat music, with a visionary ethos that has allowed it to branch out into cool releases such as this forthcoming single by Urian Hackney.
The Box is a meticulously recorded solo effort from Hackney, whose father and uncles were members of cult Detroit proto-punk band Death, as profiled in the acclaimed documentary A Band Called Death. With The Box – named after his studio in Burlington, Vermont – Urian Hackney presents two songs intended to send the listener back in time to the smooth, funky sonic realm of the ’70s. All instruments were played by Urian, multi-tracked one-by-one to a tape machine through microphones aimed at amplifier cones and drum heads. It comes together sounding like some rare 7” that might be found in DJ Shadow’s record bag.
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 53
- 54
- 55
- 56
- 57
- …
- 61
- Next Page »