Posts Tagged ‘music and the web’
Quit Yer Day Job
There’s a lot of discussion and debate going on right now around the future of the full-time musician. On the one hand, the development of cheaper distribution channels and platforms, and the rise of relatively cost-effective home recording equipment, might imply that there’s been a space created in the low- to middle-market where musicians can make money (and a living) in ways that weren’t possible before.
On the other, and more important hand, these same technologies and distribution platforms have actually had the overall effect of commoditizing recorded music in general. To the point where the expectation that people will actually pay for music is rapidly being removed by the expectation that recorded music will be free. In fact, most musicians are viewing recorded music primarily as marketing for either a live experience or a broader range of recorded music that they hope to one day charge for. Meaning, give away a song. Maybe one day someone will buy an album. Maybe.
Tags: internet, music and the web
The new record label
I mentioned that Pete’s band, Elizabeth and the Catapult, just got signed to Verve. Same label as Brazilian Girls. Great news for Pete and I’ll obviously be following how things turn out for them. They’re all incredibly talented in that band and richly deserve the success they’ve earned.
But I have to admit that I still am not sure what it means exactly to ‘get signed’ these days in the context of helping an artist earn a living playing music. Because record labels, per se, if they’re still calling themselves that, seem (a bit) like an antiquated idea. Record labels made money selling records because people bought records. Now people don’t. So record labels look for revenue in other arenas and the deal (as everyone knows) becomes less about the ‘selling of the record’ than about a venture capital investment in the ‘brand’ of the artist. That has always made sense to me. These 360 deals that everyone is talking about.
I haven’t seen the specifics so I don’t know how onerous they are but the one thing I do hear repeatedly is that they still don’t seem to reflect a basic understanding of reality on the part of the ‘establishment’. It’s still trading a lot of control and creativity and intellectual property for a fairly restrictive contract. And instead of taking really radical approaches to the concept of empowering artists to earn money, the labels and the musical establishment just look for ways to get their hands on more revenue streams. They don’t offer much. They don’t know a lot about enhancing these streams or growing them. But they want their cut. And their cut will be more than it should because they won’t give you accurate accounting.
Tags: music and the web, music recording
Is a feature a business?
It’s not clear to me that a lot of the companies that have received venture funding in the music space (or really the entire technology space) are truly businesses in the way that I understand them to be. Here’s what I understand about business: somehow or some way, a service is provided that somebody somewhere explicitly pays for. It doesn’t have to be the end user, as Google has shown. It can be the long tail of the marketing ecosystem, small businesses and big businesses that will pay for a specific action like the clicking of a link to increase the likelihood that their goods are sold.
But at some point, there has to be an actual and monetizable exchange of value. Looking out across the spectrum of new technology companies that people are kind of using (I say kind of because even for the big ones it’s still mostly a small circle of technology geeks that are the power users of the product) I’m having trouble finding concrete examples where companies are actually effective at monetizing their user base.
Tags: internet, music and the web
Is the web making us more real?
I just finished the book ‘Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unifying Theory of the Web’. Most of it is pretty interesting. David Weinberger paints a compelling portrait of the web as the mechanism through which the human race (perhaps ironically) rediscovers its authenticity. That is a very crude distillation of the themes he weaves together but, I think, not entirely inaccurate.
One specific idea that resonated with me from the book and that seems to be emerging as a trend within the broader communication and marketing medium is the dissolution and erosion of ‘corporate speak’ as the tone through which companies interact with their consumers. We all know that generally when big companies speak we’re being lied to. The web, through social communication systems, has created a platform that breaks down that traditional relationship. As a result, the power of the authentic human individual narrative, replete with all its frailty, imperfection and yearning, seems to be gaining traction as a credible vehicle through which things can be marketed and, of course, sold. More and more people are connecting with the personal voice. The real voice. People getting their news from blogs with opinions, from Fox News, from Andrew Sullivan, from Josh Marshall, etc. (Talking Points Memo is actually a perfect example of a corporate voice emerging that is more ‘authentic’, mixing a transparent point-of-view with actual news coverage)
Tags: internet, music and the web
