There Is No Model
There’s a question I’ve sort of stopped asking myself lately. That question is, “What is the future business model for the music industry?” I’ve stopped asking because a) I don’t think there is a model or at least one that works for artists and b) I’m losing interest as I spend more time thinking about making my own art and less time pontificating abstractly.
In a sense, the only model is talent and I guess my guess is that there will be no standard formula but a million different strategies for people with talent to become known and maybe make some money. Monte was emailing me and telling me that the future of the music business is writing screenplays around album concepts. Maybe. I’m not sure that’s a model, per se. It’s more like a good idea that will work for the person that does it right and won’t work for most everyone else.
There is probably a model for a big company to aggregate music from songwriters if they can get enough market share to own the space. iTunes or Spotify, assuming they can find a way to pay the right royalties to the labels. For that winning business, the future is a monthly subscription for unlimited streams and downloads and no DRM and any song you want at any moment in any format to take wherever you please.
But the bottom line is that the pie for any one musician will be incredibly small and professional musicians will do what they’re doing now: they’ll teach, they’ll perform other people’s material for all kinds of different gigs and some will choose to use their savings and their money to periodically put out songs to their email list, play gigs featuring their own original material, and maybe call something a record. Again, that’s not a model per se.
If we were to say there is a model, the model might be licensing songs, playing live gigs and giving recorded music away for free. But even that is not a big money maker. It’s something to slightly offset the substantial cost that artists will make to create music but not enough to pay their rent.
It’s not a bad thing. It means less art will be constrained by commercial concerns, because there will no commercial concerns to speak of.
But there is no model.
One idea I had this morning was just to start a 501c3 and try to raise money to give grants to musicians to create music and, I suppose, to live. It wouldn’t be an advance. It would just be a grant. Try to raise a few million bucks and then give out grants of $20-30K for artists to create music and try to make it something special.
But that’s not really a model either.
Mostly, these days, I’m just focused on writing new songs, thinking about this next record, and getting better at performing live. And it’s not a hobby but it’s also not something where I have an expectation of being able to pay rent. If I can, that’d be great, but it seems unlikely.
More likely is that I’ll continue to get better and the songs will improve and we’ll have fun performing and expanding the boundaries of whatever is that we’re doing and that’s all. It’s been fun to make music these past few months and it’s been fun to play with incredible musicians and it’s been fun to keep growing new songs and it’s been fun to blog and send out emails and tweet and that’s all. There’s money here and there. But mostly it’s a money losing endeavor and the point isn’t riches but spiritual fulfillment and that moment at the end of Broken Bow when the cymbals are crashing and the band is in unison and everyone’s playing that line that starts in D and the spines are shivering and we’re right there in the pocket of a higher calling.
Not sure “business model” is the right way to describe the search for that moment.
