8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

How Much Is Music Really Worth?

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Pitchfork:

In 1889, when the first “phonograph parlor” opened in San Francisco, saloon patrons could listen to a song through a tube for a nickel. When Thomas Edison began manufacturing wax cylinders of recorded music for home entertainment in the late 1890s, they cost 50 cents each, played at 120 RPM, and could hold only two minutes of music. Loosely speaking, what cost a nickel in 1889 would cost $1.29 today, and what cost 50 cents in 1900 would go for $13.89 today. (Then as now, how much money ever ended up in the hands of musicians remains murky.)



We create the value of music through a sort of community consensus, whether in terms of its emotional impact or its monetary worth. As units of music have become difficult to price, they’ve also lost their economic value—so I agree with a recent Future of Music Coalition op-ed arguing that “the music business has a transparency problem.” Would more detail about dollars and cents restore the music economy’s spirit? Maybe. The industry has recovered before, and there are reasons for optimism, but ultimately music and business, though inextricable from each other, aren’t the same.


A useful article here from last April, just discovered thanks to contributing article-finder Jon Curtis, that doesn’t quite answer the headline’s question but does lay down some interesting facts and figures. And the historical information on formats and pricing that comprises the middle section of the article is fascinating as well as providing some context.

The vague conclusion from the writer seems to be not to think in terms of a recording’s worth, but in the overall income an artist can wrangle through his / her creative endeavors. One can also reach the assumption that artists controlling their revenue inputs – that is, not sharing huge portions of everything with a label – come out on top. But one might want to have a trusted manager to handle the numbers, to keep artist types from getting creatively derailed, as one interviewed musician put it. As I like to say, managers are the new record labels.

We Now Return To The SoundCloud Soap Opera …

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FACT:

The Performing Rights Society for Music has taken legal action against (SoundCloud).



In an email sent out to PRS members, the body explains that “after careful consideration, and following five years of unsuccessful negotiations, we now find ourselves in a situation where we have no alternative but to commence legal proceedings against SoundCloud.”



PRS is responsible for collecting publishing royalties for musicians, for radio plays, public performances and more. Its issue with SoundCloud stems from the fact that despite having over 175m unique listeners per month, SoundCloud “continues to deny it needs a PRS for Music licence for its existing service available in the UK and Europe, meaning it is not remunerating our members.”


Now here’s a thorny situation for SoundCloud to address, especially if other PROs (BMI and ASCAP especially) choose to follow in PRS’s lead. There are rumblings that indeed these US counterparts are also considering action. I’m thinking an amicable resolution is required as part of SoundCloud’s impending alliances with the three majors (see below) but, if not, is it a realistic possibility that litigation from the publishing royalty collectors could finally bring the site down, Grooveshark-style? Do the majors, with their shiny new percentage stakes in the company and cash advances, even care?

Let’s reminisce about the early days of SoundCloud, pre-2010. It was a godsend to producers and musicians, promising a social network where they could not only post and share their own material, but also create embeddable players for their own sites. I know I was excited and, like many, ponied up the $500+ a year fee for the convenience and potentially powerful new avenue for self-promotion. I believe this was the early intention of SoundCloud: a place for audio content creators to share and promote their own material, and royalty and rights weren’t a concern. The fact that we’re uploading our own material implies compliance, and how easily we can spread our SoundCloud players was an agreeable trade-off.

Of course, SoundCloud’s growth seems to have gotten in the way of that good thing we took for granted. Remember the numerous times the site was down five years ago? Running all those audio streams isn’t cheap, and I’m figuring the powers that be saw mainstream adoption as a way to solve revenue drought. The nearly $1000 a year ‘Pro’ accounts suddenly were reduced to about $99. SoundCloud was becoming less of an exclusive club, and it seems a lot more users – and not just ‘content creators’ – came on board. (Side note: I remember, a mere few years ago, telling a friend to check out my SoundCloud account for my new music. This friend – not a musician, but probably a bigger, more obsessed music fan than me – had no idea what SoundCloud was. Never heard of it. It was an interesting realization that SoundCloud was kind of this insular club house, and this was probably the root of its woes at the time.)

As SoundCloud’s earliest adopters were electronic musicians (who, more often than not, double as DJs), DJ mixes have always been a major part of the offerings on the site. Growth meant that DJ mixes were becoming more commonplace, especially as mixes were the sole offering of many accounts (it would be interesting to know how much DJ mixes make up the total percentage of site content). The issues with these mixes weren’t completely under the radar in the early days – I received a take-down notice for a DJ mix containing a Marvin Gaye track about four or five years ago – but there certainly seemed to be a permissiveness, or at least a fingers-in-ears “nah nah nah” approach to the problem. PRS, in the article above, claims to have been speaking with SoundCloud about this for five years … probably mainly about their represented tracks included in DJ mixes.

It’s far too late, but it would be great to see SoundCloud try to pivot back to their content creator-focused days. Perhaps they can have a two-tiered system – a paid option for musicians to post and embed their own work without the hassle of advertisements, and then one for the DJ mixes and whatever else is being posted outside of the uploader’s copyright authority. I can’t imagine this happening … now that the majors are stake holders I’m not sure that they would like to see SoundCloud re-focus back towards independent and unsigned artists.

But it’s not all bad news for SoundCloud … or is it?


Digital Music News:

Universal Music Group and SoundCloud are now ‘days away’ from finalizing a momentous agreement, with sources close to the negotiations pointing to a pact potentially by the end of this week. The deal follows a massively-protracted, multi-year and cantankerous tug-of-war over licensing costs and a range of other issues, with critical financiers and a stable of lawyers hovering on the sidelines.



According to key sources with knowledge of the negotiations, the deal with Universal contains a substantial percentage stake in SoundCloud, with a significant upfront payment likely but not confirmed. That bears similarity to ongoing major label licenses with mega-streamers like Spotify, and reflects an interest in capturing an elephantine payout around a ‘liquidation event’.



“The majors are getting more interested in making money around the acquisition or IPO,” one industry lawyer told Digital Music News. “That’s more important than the huge advance but a lot of times they’re getting both.”



Indeed, we may be looking at the beginning of an entirely different SoundCloud, one that would replace billions of unpaid streams with actual payments to rights owners. Great news for artists, right?



Not exactly. Fast-forward a few months, and a fully-licensed SoundCloud is likely to replicate the problems currently dragging rival Spotify, with artists seeing tiny micro-payments while labels hoard gigantic lump sum payments. That includes proceeds from a massive acquisition or Wall Street IPO, something the largest rights owners will now enjoy as part owners.


The entire Digital Music News article is worth reading, as it goes into great detail about these sorts of deals and the aggressive maneuvering of the major labels. As a music publisher myself, I certainly know and applaud the benefit of royalties accrued from DJ mixes – especially those reaching thousands of plays – but I’m not certain that the deals that are being made will deliver for songwriters, especially independent ones. These agreements aren’t being made with the artists in mind, as evidenced by the lack of distribution of the upfront cash payouts (at least the PRS grievance is legitimately in representation of affiliated songwriters). Instead, my concern is that SoundCloud will become crippled or useless as a ‘level playing field’ promotions platform, and we’ll look back wistfully at the site’s golden days as we receive yet another tiny ‘micro-payment’ for our trouble.

8D Projects: Chris Forman – Presents ‘Reaching Out To The World’, Part 1 (Them On The Hill)

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New Zealand’s Them On The Hill label has charted a path towards a top notch catalog of modern house music tracks in a classic style, often created by criminally unheralded veteran producers. This upcoming release, and our latest project at 8DPromo, continues this string by enlisting New Jersey’s Chris Forman, who has previously worked with renowned imprints like Nite Grooves, Vega Records, and King Street. The single features two terrific tracks, and there are definitely some nods to house music’s celebrated past, especially in the familiar vocal sample in the second.

The Heat Is On: Reactions And Response To ‘The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t’

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Slate:

Musicians, writers, and other creative folk are still scratching their heads over the cover story in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine: “The New Making It” — packaged online as “The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t” — looked at how the Internet economy, instead of destroying creative careers, had redrawn them in “complicated and unexpected ways.” The story’s author, Steven Johnson, is an engaging writer, and the piece is told largely through statistics, which most readers assume to be beyond criticism. So why are so many people who work in the world of culture wondering why the article seemed to describe a best-of-all-worlds planet very different from the one they live on?


The tone of the Slate article is a little off-putting for me though I understand where the author is coming from. I do agree the trope of musicians making more money on the road, thus compensating for lost recording revenue, is a bit of a wrong turn, and isn’t encouraging to us studio hermits or songwriters. That was a trap that Johnson fell into. But I feel there’s too much focus in these complaints on the traditional occupations – session players, record store clerks, and so on – without acknowledging the newly emerging opportunities. It is melancholy to see some of these professions fade (and I was a happy record store clerk for many years), but I accept this is what happens as society and technology evolves. Again, I feel we should be focusing on the prospects of autonomy and what it can do for creative people. This is the real story for me … the possibilities that are now available, when before we had to deal with labels, and distributors, and (yes) touring, and publicists. There’s now a freedom to opt out of any or all of those and still make a living.

Here’s another paragraph from the Slate article about a larger trend that I do agree is troublesome:

It’s worth looking at the world of culture as an environment: As rents in cities that have traditionally made creative life possible – especially collaborative creative life – jolts up by 10 percent or more a year, musicians, writers, actors, and others get forced out to make room for financiers and trustafarians. If I can extend the eco-system metaphor for a second: For most people working in film, music, television, or books, that is hardly sustainable. David Byrne has made this point about the one-percenting of American cities and its impact on culture quite eloquently; “The New Making It” does not even engage his argument indirectly.


The part about ‘collaborative creative life’ really hurts. Much of the music I listen to wouldn’t exist if not for the downtrodden arts community that inhabited New York City in the ’70s. This concern is a bit outside of Johnson’s original article, in my opinion, but is something that will have an impact on the quality, and regional meaningfulness, of American art moving forward.


Meanwhile, Bob Lefsetz weighs in:

Expect a flurry of naysayers to come out of the woodwork shortly. The Trichordist will freak out, all those agitating for a return to yesteryear. But the truth is we’re never going back, even if everything Steven Johnson says in this article is wrong. So why can’t we just accept it and move on, certainly the public has done this.



So stop complaining. You can make money in music, many are. Yes, the spoils are going to the 1%, but that’s true in all walks of our economy. Turns out there’s a limited number of top-notch execs and a limited number of top-notch musicians.



The public is happy. Instead of trying to get people to change their minds and go back to a past that you want, better to give them what they want, even better, give them MORE than what they want, new and different. That’s what turns people on, not when they’re corralled and ripped-off, but when they’re enticed.


And then Steven Johnson has posted his promised response to the criticisms from the Future Of Music Coalition.

Via The New York Times Magazine:

Interestingly, in all the responses to the article, no one so far has been able to suggest a data source that suggests that mean or median incomes for musicians have declined since 1999, adjusted for inflation. Everything that I have uncovered in many months of researching this article suggests that the story of music since 1999 is one of steady but small growth for musicians. Not some glorious renaissance, but certainly not a crisis.



As I wrote at the end of the article, I do not think this data should be used as a mindless defense of the status quo. For what it’s worth, I think musicians (and other creators) deserve to see an even bigger piece of the pie. I get that groups advocating on behalf of musicians may worry that a modestly optimistic story will make it harder for artists to negotiate better deals with their labels or new streaming services, or will encourage consumers to return to their old music-piracy ways because they read some article that said the musicians are doing just fine. But I think it’s just as important to point out that it has turned out to be a very exciting time to make music for a living, one filled with many new opportunities that didn’t exist 15 years ago. It’s important, for starters, because it contradicts a (false) theory that many smart people still hold about the state of the culture. But it’s also important for the music itself. I worry that there’s a whole generation of musicians out there who will be scared by all the doomsayers toward more conventional career paths, when there is so much evidence of opportunity all around us.

(Previously) and (Previously)

In a Land Before iTunes

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A review of Michael Denning’s new book Noise Uprising – which sounds fascinating – in New Republic:

Denning’s story starts in 1925, when engineers perfected the technique of electrical recording and the 78 RPM phonograph record supplanted sheet music as the basic unit of the music industry. A handful of Western record companies spent the next five years recording local music across the world. Some of the music they recorded—Indonesian kroncong, South African marabi, Shanghainese huangse yinyue—remains unfamiliar to most Americans. Others, like jazz and tango, have become ubiquitous. The quantity and diversity of recordings from this period reflect the record companies’ basic indifference to the music they put out: They were willing to record anything that might persuade local consumers they needed a record player.



The varieties of local music recorded during the phonograph boom were not quite “folk” music rooted in the rhythms of rural life. Instead Denning calls them “vernacular” music—music performed and listened to by the people, as opposed to the high tradition of “classical music,” guarded by a small, highly trained group of musicians and mostly performed in formal settings. Vernacular music, like vernacular languages—Spanish, Italian, etc—belongs to everyday life, whereas classical music is more like Latin, used by officials and in high art. And just as vernacular literature gained strength with the invention of the printing press, the rise of vernacular music began with the phonograph.


As the article points out, the fact that the publisher has supplied a follow-along Spotify playlist for the book creates a comment about the continuing evolution of these themes:

But accessing these songs as streaming data, rather than shellac 78s or expensive CD reissues, also suggests that the way we experience music is still being relentlessly transformed. Like the phonograph boom, the digital era combines elements of democratization with the persistence of large corporations and the commodity form. Perhaps more than any of its specific conclusions, Noise Uprising is valuable as a challenge to think through the audio politics of today.

8D Projects: Christy Love – Internal Waves (Get Up Recordings)

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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

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Cuepoint:

“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.

Future Of Music Coalition Responds: The Data Journalism That Wasn’t

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Future Of Music Coalition:

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.

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.

(previously)