Posts tagged music industry

CASH Music: Knowledge is power.

cashmusic:

We’re ready to announce the next phase of our mission: EDUCATION.

The long term goal of CASH Music is not just to build open source tools for artists, but also teach them how to use these tools, help them navigate the ever-changing music business, and create a community of like minded thinkers…

This sounds like another thoroughly good idea from the CASH Music people.

Six reasons why "if you want to get paid for music you should play it live" is an idiotic argument.

maura:

Some bad-ass dude replied to Damon Krukowski’s breakdown of how much money he makes from streaming services with a sneer and a windy response that basically boiled down to “duh, quit yer bitching and make your money on the road, old man.” Which… are we really still having these arguments,…

So true. ;)

pitchfork

We are in the last years of a huge empire, one that was beholden to a myth woven around the miracle of amateurs becoming icons. At some point all the jesters suddenly expected to be kings. But the primordial soup that spat out the rockstar phenomenon was originally cooked up in the music hall – jobbing entertainers with their props and patter playing for a wage. There were big names and little names, there were hierarchies and egos and ambition but everyone in the end got paid for their act.
Musicians Exposing Themselves In Public « Louis Barabbas

louisbarabbas.com

gordon withers :: cello rock: Reflections on White/Lowery and a Way Forward

gordonwithers:

Like every other musician and/or music consumer on the internet, reading the fallout from the Emily White/David Lowery exchange has made me consider my own ~~IMPORTANT OPINIONS ON THINGS~~ and try to come to grips with conflicting views on the topics of music sharing, piracy, and intellectual…

A very intelligent and reasonable post. It’s all about stepping back and having a conversation, not engaging in a shouting match.

Emily and David – Jonathan Coulton

I believe this is the long-term future of all things, not just music. Here is where I will lose a large percentage of my audience, because I’m now going to get a little science fictiony and start talking about the future of nanotechnology and 3D scanners and printers, and the eden of abundance that awaits us in a glorious future of machine saviors. Stay with me though, because I’m going to bring this back to the David Lowery post in a bit.

Brilliant. Read it.

“When honesty becomes too difficult, dishonesty is easier” (via The Piracy Threshold - Matt Gemmell)

“When honesty becomes too difficult, dishonesty is easier” (via The Piracy Threshold - Matt Gemmell)

mattgemmell.com

A round-up of stuff I’ve been reading about music recently

My mind’s spinning with interesting thoughts, so I’m going to spew them out here in case they make more sense when I see them. Fingers crossed…

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Record company debt

Record company debt isn’t like normal debt. They lend you money to make your album. If you sell loads of copies, they make loads of money and you don’t owe them anything. If you don’t sell loads of copies, they make quite a lot of money and you get dropped so you don’t owe them anything.

Record company debt is what enables people to make business plans that involve large amounts of imaginary money. If you hit a snag in your plan (like lacking a massive marketing campaign, or not being on the radio all the time) you can just get a loan for it. The record company can write it off against some other loan and so on until everyone loses track of where the money was supposed to come from in the first place. That’s if they even bother to do their accounting.

It’s brilliant really.

With a strong ecosystem, one also doesn’t need to worry about gatekeepers that one traditionally would need, such as the people who decide what to play on MTV. Now gatekeepers are more likely to follow the trends instead of determining them. Besides that, the ecosystem should be like the cool party happening down the street; it just makes you want to go up to join in and if it’s fun enough, you will call your friends to abandon whatever party they are attending and to come to this one. Soon enough, the party will be attracting people from all over the area, perhaps stopping by a shop to buy some drinks for their friends and making sure the party stays fun; the fun of the party depends on its own existence and therefore the party protects its continued existence.
I can’t remember if I linked to The Answer Is The Ecosystem before. It’s a university thesis on the music industry, and well worth bookmarking for a rainy afternoon…

basbasbas.com

DIY vs. “DIY”

I’m having trouble getting my head around the business side of the music business. And not just the Old Music Industry part of it – the new independent DIY bit too.

I’ve long been a card-carrying subscriber to the DIY, independent, sustainable way of being a musician. It makes sense – you control everything about how your music is made, packaged, shared, sold and appreciated. In return you agree to do all the stuff that other people might do in a Big Industry situation. You do the accounts, stuff envelopes, control your merch stock, organise artwork and videos, order vinyl, promote your music online. Oh yes, and play music.

It’s not easy to make a living doing that. Most people make money doing other things too. Teaching, studio engineering, video making, website building. Stuff that you happened to have become good at while you were learning how to be a musician. I make websites which is doubly useful, first because we could never afford to pay someone to do all the online stuff we do, and second because I can occasionally make some money.

But there’s a big difference between true DIY and “DIY”.

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I see it all the time, people telling me that no-one values digital music any more, that Spotify will kill it, that we’re all doomed, that iTunes is the only model that works, that blahdiblahdifuckingblah. Droning on and on about what the ‘trends’ suggest. You know what? When I’m listening to music, I’m not thinking about trends.
Tweet-Rant #2 : 23 Tweets About Bandcamp — Steve Lawson: Bass 2.0 — the soundtrack to the day you wish you’d had

stevelawson.net

How to Structure a Company to Succeed in the Current Music Industry - Music Think Tank

This makes a lot of sense, generally. It’s a long-term vision of how music companies (not record companies or publishers or merchandise companies) could be structured to make everything simpler for artists and for people who want to use music.

It’s surprisingly similar to Little Fish’s new setup…

Tour blog Pt 2 – This is The End (or ‘how we lost money on a successful tour’) — Steve Lawson

Steve is one of the few musicians I know who has the confidence to openly share his successes and failures so that we can all learn. He may not have made much money on his last tour, but he’s figured out why…

Fanatics

Now that Little Fish is independent, we get to do more stuff with the fans that the record label would previously have frowned upon. I can’t see how this could be a bad thing but people still react strangely when we talk about it, as if music fans were all psychopathic stalker weirdos.

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I’m pissed off about the press. Not the news press - I gave up on that scaremongering nonsense years ago - the music press. I rarely read it these days, but as a musician I’m forced to engage with it all the time. Little Fish is working on the second album, so we’re going to be releasing things soon. And when you release something you have to do the press thing. You have to find the angle. What will make the press write about you? The usual options (Triumph Over Childhood Adversity, Mental Illness And/Or Drug Addiction and Sleeping With Celebrities) won’t really work for us. Eventually we’ll find a catchy way of telling our story and when we do, we’ll hopefully be lucky enough to get some reviews. I used to think there was a point to music reviews. When I was younger I remember reading lots of them, building a mental map of which bands sounded like which combination of other bands and borrowing ideas and arguments from music journalists about bands who I mostly never listened to. I didn’t listen to much current music, so the only magazines that ever reviewed the albums I was discovering in the racks at Avid were Record Collector and Rolling Stone and reading those only reinforced my own inherited ideas about the music of the 60s and 70s. But I also used to religiously read Nightshift, Oxford’s local music magazine. Its mix of snarky reviews and snarky news always made for an amusing read, and it was the glue that held the local music scene together. I was really rather proud when Papa Yam & the Moose ended up in the Demo Dumper back in (May?) 2001. Nightshift (and Ronan, who has written most of it since day one) was never really into sincere, middle of the road faith-flavoured songs, so we weren’t expecting a glowing review. Speaking of bad reviews… Two musician friends of mine had their releases reviewed in the May issue of Nightshift and I can’t help thinking that, ten years later, the exclusive snarkiness seems almost absurdly immature. Miriam Jones is a Canadian singer/songwriter living in Oxford. I’ve recorded some great video sessions with her and she’s supported Little Fish at a couple of small acoustic gigs. She recorded her previous albums in Nashville, but her latest album Fire Lives was made here in Oxford. It’s a beautifully produced, Nashville-esque album of incredibly well-crafted country songs. I can see why Ronan doesn’t like it. Indeed he tells us in the last paragraph: ‘Fire Lives’ is everything contemporary Nashville-centric country music has become – tasteful and polished, mawkish and ultimately asinine, a world away from the raw, dirty soul of its 1920s origins. But for the previous 300 words he wrote it off completely without even trying to write a sensible review: Thus, as local singer-songwriter Miriam Jones drawls, “And I hear the helicopter drowning your life out with every beat of its terrible wings,” we can only sit in gobsmacked awe at the utter what-the-fuckedness of what we’ve just heard. There are tins of food in our kitchen cupboard that know helicopters don’t have wings, and if they did they’d be aeroplanes and aeroplanes’ wings don’t beat. It’s a metaphor, Ronan. Helicopter as bird of prey. Not too difficult to understand. Still, it’s no more than we’d expect from someone who’s recently supported Sandi Thom, a woman whose contribution to literary genius was “I wish I was a punk rock girl, with flowers in my hair.” I thought getting a support slot for a famous artist at the Academy was exactly what local bands should be trying to do. And as a singer/songwriter you can’t afford to be picky, especially when the scene is dominated by spiky indie boy bands. Right next to Miriam’s is a review for When The Crisis Comes, a new EP by Roger Dalrymple, an ex-bandmate of mine. His review is not bad, but carries an almost identical ending: the most lasting impression of the entire EP is that next time maybe dump all the attention to detail and create something that come out of the speaker at least looking like it’s prepared to put up a fight. It’s not what you know… I get it. Ronan like his music with a bit more bite. So do I for the most part. I also get that Miriam and Roger aren’t cool. Neither am I. But I also love listening to Miriam and Roger’s music because I know them. I know them through the local music scene, and I know them as friends. When I think about it, all the music I’ve ever loved is by people I know, either as a friend or a fan. If Ronan had been there when Miriam played in my flat at the Little Fish house concert he would have got to know her. Her music may not be his favourite sort of music, but Miriam’s difficult not to like in person. And once you understand where she’s coming from the music makes a lot more sense. I don’t want to be down on Ronan. He does a great job, and I’d be disappointed if I didn’t disagree with him sometimes. It’s more the whole idea of music reviews and the music press that I have trouble with. In real life people just don’t engage with music by listening to a CD twice in a void and forming an opinion. People connect with the people behind the music. They take time to get to know them. It’s partly a failing of the “CD and one-pager” press release format for albums. However well-written your press release is, it won’t be enough to get to know the people behind the music. All a critic can do with that is slot you into a particular category, pick two bands to compare you with and take the piss a bit. That’s enough ranting. I’m going to listen to Fire Lives again. It may be my Canadian half showing through, but I find Miriam’s voice strangely soothing… Fire-lives by Miriam Jones

I’m pissed off about the press. Not the news press - I gave up on that scaremongering nonsense years ago - the music press. I rarely read it these days, but as a musician I’m forced to engage with it all the time.

Little Fish is working on the second album, so we’re going to be releasing things soon. And when you release something you have to do the press thing. You have to find the angle. What will make the press write about you? The usual options (Triumph Over Childhood Adversity, Mental Illness And/Or Drug Addiction and Sleeping With Celebrities) won’t really work for us. Eventually we’ll find a catchy way of telling our story and when we do, we’ll hopefully be lucky enough to get some reviews.

nightshift.oxfordmusic.net