Serious essay on the music biz

Some cursewords, but very informative.

GuitarSquid.com | Why it's still f*#%ing impossible to be a successful musician in the digital age...

Interesting article. I don't disagree with it, but there are other factors to consider as well.

For instance, playing live pays at best $100 a man for your average cover band. Originals bands don't get paid, they usually have to pay to play or to the multi-band-whirligig to play a set.

This pricing is the same now as in the 80's, except a touring cover band could actually get booked for a week at time at venues, and now, at best they can get one night. Which means to tour, it is much more difficult to get a string of rooms booked to keep you working as your tour.

The barrier to entry for recording has gone down. Yes, going to a pro studio still costs about the same, despite advances in technology. But folks can buy a Mac that ships with GarageBand for free, and some mics and DIY in their house. Youtube is chockfull of examples of talent recorded on a web-cam mic. And classic records from the 50's or before were recorded with classic sound that today would be identified as bad mics if we saw it in a youtube video. Basically, our ears will accept what sounds good, hearing past poor recording quality, sometimes equating that poor quality to part of the charm.

the last link in the chain is the volume of artists has increased. While it is true everybody has wanted to get discovered and become a famous rock star, the number of people able to try was naturally smaller by virtue of total population headcount, people who could afford instruments and people who could time on stage. Now, instruments are cheaper, recording is cheaper (DIY is free as in beer) and every body with an instrument has an album (I do, wanna hear it?).

What this gets to is the market is flooded. Bars don't pay more for bands, and they don't promote the bands they book. They expect the bands to bring the crowd (which how do you do that when its your first gig)? Top that off with how many bands are willing to play for free because they are dad-bands who used to play, or crappy bands looking for the last venue to let them on. things changed in bars and clubs where they used to screen their talent such that people went to the club to SEE who the club chose to put on. Now, clubs expect the band to bring the crowd to them, and they expect to pay less than they ever did before.

This basically kills the support network for beginning bands. Which is where record labels would have discovered them. This is why talent scouts would go to The Whiskey in LA to spot talent like Guns-n-Roses. Now, the Whiskey is largely a pay-to-play room.

Right up there with actual live performances being flooded out, is recorded product. Like the article said, there were like 75,000 new albums and 60,000 of them sold less than 100. Everybody and their dog can put out an album (mine is not on iTunes, it has dog hair on it). As such, people would have to wade through to find artists they are interested in.

What you basically get is songs on the radio get bought, meme songs that somebody spread around get picked up, songs that made it tv shows. Anti-mainstream listeners (people who always do the opposite of what's popular) will still surf the web and find odd picks, and that's where your indie band's 3 fans come from. becuase they randomly found your band instead of my band's page of eclectic songs that don't sound mainstreamy.

That is basically, more of what's wrong with the industry. As learned by me when I researched this stuff and recorded my own album with the help of my dog who sang, played drums and produced it.

There is only so much you can cram in a single article! For instance, he didn't even touch the piracy effect, at least, not explicitly.*

I had a client whose album moved 3x more pirated copies (Russian mob website) than legit ones. That not only got the band dropped from their label, it was a big factor in their breakup. And Ani di Franco has gone on record about how she is spending increasing time fighting piracy to protect her self-owned label- enough that it is starting to affect her as a musician.






* he does discuss how artists are bearing all the risks in the digital era of the music biz, but that's it. It would have been interesting to hear some of his war stories.

I think it's an interesting article also. But it does touch on something I've always personally felt about music as a musician myself:


It all depends on what your definition of success as a musician is.


Sure, many thought that the digital age would completely change the game. But I'm sorry Mr. Lowery, nobody ever promised any of us anything. We may have all had expectations, but there were no promises. And if one views music as a business, one where money is the motivating factor (or by extension, fame), then the game hasn't really changed at all.

I've always felt that as a musician, one almost always has to, at some point, make a choice to either be successful at the business of music, or be successful as a musician. There are those rare few who's personal style and expression just happens to be what the public wants, and they're able to market it. For most though, it's a matter of finding out what the public wants, and then providing that...even if it means repressing or leaving behind one's own musical vision.

It may not seem fair, but it's just a fact of life. One that I'm not surprised hasn't changed with the digital age.

I thought the author had a very strong point when he talked about search engines funnelling traffic to patently illegal sites and then profiting off the advertising on those sites.

However, his attacks on things like Apple's 30% cut of legal music sales were far less effective. If he thinks Apple charges too much he can always chose to not sell to them. He can roll his own service or point of sale, or sign up with one of the businesses that take a smaller cut.

Second, he undercuts his own moral argument a few paragraphs above. Just like he has to pay sound engineers, roadies etc. Apple has to pay their own engineers and support staff as well as dev staff for future products. Just as the cost of producing music is not zero, the cost of producing iTunes, etc is not zero.

He also badly hurt his argument with that slide that shows that artists used to earn $2.50 of a $15.00 album, and now earn $2.50 of a $10.00 album. Is this not a huge argument in favor of Apple's effect on the market? The artists are earning the same amount of money, but Apple has cut the cost to the end consumer by 33%.

As well, his attacks on Youtube and Facebook are just laughable. He whines that Youtube and Facebook have made very popular sites so he feels that he needs to utilize those sites to be successful. And that somehow indebts Youtube/Facebook to him? He has the choice not to put videos on Youtube, or not to make a Facebook page. People still have browsers, they can still navigate to his website. If his website isn't as good as Facebook/Youtube, or he has to pay for bandwidth or technical expertise, well, that's the point of going with the professionals.

Finally, I think the essay would have worked a lot better if it had been better written. It was hard to follow his points as he jumped around a lot. And his tone was very arrogant and condescending, which did not help at all.

Dannyalcatraz said:

There is only so much you can cram in a single article! For instance, he didn't even touch the piracy effect, at least, not explicitly.*

I had a client whose album moved 3x more pirated copies (Russian mob website) than legit ones. That not only got the band dropped from their label, it was a big factor in their breakup. And Ani di Franco has gone on record about how she is spending increasing time fighting piracy to protect her self-owned label- enough that it is starting to affect her as a musician.

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I would never assume piracy helps an artist. It most likely does not have significant benefits for exposure (that is, bringing in lots of new fans who buy your stuff because they found your pirate material first).

I do have a theory that large percentage of pirated material holders were never going to buy your album anyway. There are MP3 collectors who just grab everything they can, whether they listen to it or not. The fact that you can nail them in a legal suit for posessing millions of dollars of material, doesn't mean they would have spent millions of dollars at the store for that music had they lived a legit life. They would, in fact, go without.

There are certainly people who got a copy of an album from their friend that they enjoy, but did not purchase and have the means and almost intent to pay for it, except, well, they alredy have it for free. In a way, those are the real thieves.

Dannyalcatraz said:

* he does discuss how artists are bearing all the risks in the digital era of the music biz, but that's it. It would have been interesting to hear some of his war stories.

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Sure, many thought that the digital age would completely change the game. But I'm sorry Mr. Lowery, nobody ever promised any of us anything. We may have all had expectations, but there were no promises. And if one views music as a business, one where money is the motivating factor (or by extension, fame), then the game hasn't really changed at all.

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He's not asking for promises. He's just illustrating that the myth of the Internet freeing the artists from corporate greed has run into the hard reality of the smaller artist profit margins, increased risks & capital costs, and a shrinking of the variety within the market since the label system has been under siege. Yes, there are mor musical genres than 10 or 20 years ago, but it is much harder for any of those genres to get a break into mass market appeal. Compare the original 120 Minutes to the new version, 120 Minutes with Matt Pinfield. I respect Matt a lot, and both shows tried to expose MTVs audience to new bands and genres, but the modern version is MUCH more homogenous. (Don't believe me? VH1 Classic reruns the original 20 year old episodes virtually unaltered- they occasionally include new vids by old bands- so you can tape bothe and compare side by side.)

Edit (June 27, 2012): I doubt Matt Pinfield visits this site (so I can't claim credit), but the most recent 2 episodes of his show have been as diverse as any of the originals, expanding the playlist with artists like Nas, Future, and Serj Tankian. Kudos.

I do have a theory that large percentage of pirated material holders were never going to buy your album anyway.

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True, but:

1) the law still considers taking property (tangible and intangible) even without motive to use it a theft and has penalties for calculating penalties. Steal some pants and light them on fire (indicating you never would have bought them) you've committed a kind of theft called "conversion."

2) there is a significant portion of the piracy market that is run by organized crime (such as the Russian site I mentioned above), terrorist organizations (according to INTERPOL & other law enforcement groups) and certain nations (China) that actually sell the pirated material- sometimes at full price- to line their own pockets.

It seems i'm in the devil's advocate position. Mind you, I do agree that piracy DOES hurt the people who's product is pirated. I do challenge that SOME piracy instances are effectively victimless. I'm also not a professional arguer, so not in the face!

Dannyalcatraz said:

True, but:

1) the law still considers taking property (tangible and intangible) even without motive to use it a theft and has penalties for calculating penalties. Steal some pants and light them on fire (indicating you never would have bought them) you've committed a kind of theft called "conversion."

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I of course don't know what the law calls it. But logic says pants are tangible and made of tangible stuff that had to be purchased by other tangible resources (well cash is getting wierd now, but go with me).

If you steal a pair of pants from my store and burn them, you cost me the money I spent to buy them wholesale to sell in my store and lost my opportunity to sell them to recoup my expense and hopefully make a profit.

There is very real loss to me when you steal my tangible good, regardless of what you do with it (burn it, resell it, wear them, it's all the same harm to me).

When you burn a copy of my CD, I still have my original files, my original inventory. Tangibly, I have lost nothing. Like the guy selling pants, I may have lost the OPPORTUNITY to make a profit.

From my perspective, the Opportunity Loss is the only punishable offense.

Which for pants, is reasonably obvious. Assuming they are just like other pants on the rack that have been selling, it can be deduced that the stolen pants would have also sold, and that my Opportunity Loss is equal. That's close enough for me anyway.

With a copy of my CD now nestled safely in your MP3 library, your theft of my IP has not actually stopped anybody else from buying it (unlike pants theft). The courts may rule otherwise, but economically, it is more complex on whether you would have ACTUALLY bought my CD if you didn't steal it. It of course gets fuzzier still when you share it, because while you might be a cheap bastard and seldom buy CDs, the next guy who gets a copy from you might have been a potential sale, or not.

Because of the "dubious loss" effect, what I see is situations where a million copies of St. Anger may exist, but that doesn't mean people would have bought that piece of crap in the absence of piracy. Whereas some pirates off the coast of Somalia who capture and scuttle a freighter full of Levi's are definitely hurting some people's pocket books, at the minimum, the people who currently own and were about to deliver those pants to retail stores once they arrived at the harbor in America.

With piracy, I smell more instances of "if I didn't pirate, I'd go without" which means there'd be no sale, and the artist would still be starving. Which means from a certain perspective, the pirate is invisible to the artist's universe, which only involves people who did or WOULD buy his album.

Dannyalcatraz said:

2) there is a significant portion of the piracy market that is run by organized crime (such as the Russian site I mentioned above), terrorist organizations (according to INTERPOL & other law enforcement groups) and certain nations (China) that actually sell the pirated material- sometimes at full price- to line their own pockets.

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those are bad guys and they need a visit by Jack Bauer. Who is currently not busy since he finished season 8.

Even old-school economists would also count the cost of the time you spent searching, downloading, etc., plus the prorated cost of the ISP and your data storage devices occupied by the pilfered data as well, at the very least.

Modern economists recognize that information itself is valuable, even if it is never rendered into tangible form, and their arguments have been codified into law...which made the rise of companies like Microsoft and Facebook possible. Modern economics recognizes that creation of intangible property requires just as much an investment in effort, time and knowledge as tangible property, and that society is better off if people are able to recover value for their efforts.

And this is not exactly new, "modern" is a fairly wobbly word in this context. This theory actually arose out of the very old idea that information is valuable if it can be rendered into tangible form. That is why before copyright, trademark and patent law, trade groups and governments jealously guarded recipes for kinds of steel, for instance, or kinds of gunpowder! Sometimes with the threat of death. Later, following similar logic, companies protected recipes for drugs, chicken or beverages, but only with the force of monetary penalties and jail time.

Essentially, what IP law does is incentivize investment in IP by protecting a creator's ability to recoup his investment.

An illustration: a fan once criticized Sergio Aragones for charging a fan $50 for an autographed sketch that took him seconds to create. Sergio's response was that the fan was not paying the $50 for just the quickly drawn sketch, but for all of the years and years of practice it took him to be able to render that sketch so quickly.