Apologies in advance. This is a long post.
Take the weekend to think about it, and I’d be delighted for you to weigh in with your thoughts and comments. I’ve linked to some other reading, which I think would also be helpful. This is one to mull over, and I’d love your take on it.
In a roundabout way, it’s about this recording.
Piracy revisited
I wrote a post back in April called ‘Should I Be Worried About Piracy?‘, to which my answer was, in a nutshell, “no”.
This was meant to be a bit of a controversial post, though at the time I didn’t get much of the flak that I was bracing myself for. So I figured that most people saw the sense of it. I even had some good feedback about it elsewhere.
But today, I received a passionate and very angry comment on that post – and it highlights some important issues and it raises some things that are both emotionally charged and based in the world of real, day-to-day economics.
I’m going to republish that comment here in full, and then I’m going to respond to it directly.
But first, some music.
That’s the music of Ellen Sift and her production partner, Kurt Goebel. They record as Worldwide Groove Corporation, and that’s their album ‘Chillodesiac Lounge Vol. 1: Fever’. Listen to the whole thing, if you like. The whole album is there to be listened to. You can read on while it plays, of course.
[RSS and email subscribers - you may have to go to the blog itself to hear the music. Click to go to the page on New Music Strategies]
Now, in response to my post about piracy, Ellen contributed the following comment on New Music Strategies today, which I present here in full:
This is an interesting perspective and worth considering for me, since I’ve been so upset by finding complete strangers in far away places who have posted my entire album for free download. And by the time I track it down, it shows that my record has been downloaded TENS OF THOUSANDS OF TIMES. Seriously.
I gotta say, I have some issues with your perspective and I truly wonder if YOU have ever released a record. Have you? Have YOU ever spent your own money producing a record in the evenings after you’ve worked all day on the paying gigs, and finally got the kid to bed and you’re really tired? Have YOU spent 4 years staying on task, and investing thousands of your hard earned dollars producing your own record, in hopes to make some money with it and get yourself ahead in your career? Because I think if YOU ever did that, and then encountered dozens of instances where people have taken it upon themselves to give your entire record away for free to thousands and thousands and thousands of people, you might feel a little bit differently.
That’s not to say I completely disagree with your points. I think mp3s can be a splendid way of PROMOTING your music, however it should be at the discretion and control of the ARTIST. NOT complete strangers who have no intellectual stake in the work. I have made songs available for free on Last.fm etc. But it’s at MY choosing, which songs. I know you say that they need to hear/like/buy your music in that order, but once it’s downloaded, who needs to pay for it? That’s why people can hear my entire record for free through my STREAMING PLAYER on my website. They can even embed that player on their blog or whatever, and that’s great. They can listen to in an infinite number of times, but they will not be able to download it to their drive or iPod. This distinction is essential because they still might buy it then.
It does me absolutely NO good to have a million fans who have not paid one cent for my record. I have bills to pay and expenses in creating that music. How the hell are we supposed to make a living??
It’s the message you’re perpetuating that makes things way worse for us. Have YOU ever tried to make a living as a musician/artist? Because if you haven’t then you’re really stepping over the line in justifying free downloading, unless it’s at the artists discretion.I must respond to the following points:
1) People who share your music are recommending you to people who respect their taste and opinion;”Yeah… so THEY can download it for free. That does me NO GOOD. I need to pay my bills. It cost me huge amounts of time and my hard earned money to create this music. This is a business. For profit.
” 2) The vast majority of people who have unauthorised copies of your music would not have ordinarily paid for it anyway;”
Really? Is that a scientific fact? Have you asked them, or been looking over their shoulder? I think this is a gross assumption, based on a commonly held opinion, and it’s entirely irrelevant!!! It’s irrelevant. If they don’t want to pay, then they don’t need to have it. What other industry is expected to just hand it over without a fight? NONE! You are completely devaluing our work. If it’s worth nothing to you, then you don’t need to have it.
” 3) Do you really want for people who cannot afford your music to be prevented from ever hearing it?”
ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME!? This is music, not life saving medicine. Anyone who owns a computer and has the technology to download music for free surely has the $.99 to pay for a measly download. “Can’t afford it” my ass.
I appreciate many of the things you have said, but your spreading this opinion to the public makes me as angry as finding my album posted for free download.
It should be at MY discretion and no one else’s.
And here’s my response:
It was a lot longer, but I’ve cut it right down in the interests of what passes for ‘brevity’ on this blog…
Hi Ellen,
I rather like your music. And I take your point. But I respectfully disagree.
You’ll be pleased to hear that I have made records – as a producer and as a musical collaborator. I’ve invested money in recordings – thousands of dollars, as you have – and I’ve run an independent record label. You might have liked some of it – it was jazz.
I don’t think I’ve ever had any right to tell people they couldn’t listen to a piece of music I made.
But the important thing is not whether or not people download your music. They do, and you can’t stop them, no matter how much you might want to.
You can either get really angry and upset about it, demand that they behave differently and insist that people pay you for the work that you did. Or, you can accept the world as it is, realise that you can’t change everyone’s behaviour, and instead look for other ways to make money from the recordings you have made.
Personally, I’d be delighted with tens of thousands of people liking my music enough to download it. I know I’m not alone in that. I don’t know for a fact that there are no people amongst all of free downloaders who may have found and bought your album had there been no free copies available anywhere – but a large part of my research in my day job at the university suggests that this would be a rare case indeed.
Most of the people who downloaded your music for free discovered your music by downloading it for free. As good as your internet strategy may be, it most likely hadn’t reached these people.
We’re on the same team
The thing that I hope you realise is that the point of this blog is to help musicians make money doing what they do – not to prevent them from doing so.
We actually want the same thing here. I’d be delighted for you to make far more money from your music than you would ever have been able to by simply selling discs or mp3s one at a time to individual customers.
You’ve probably got what must be just about the perfect music to be able to do that on a massive scale. And the more people who will find it and download it for nothing, the more chance you’ve got of making a lot of money as a result.
It’s not rocket science, but you do need to think about the business angle a little differently.
If I was your consultant / coach – I’d be strongly pushing you in the direction of synchronisation and corporate co-branding opportunities – and that’s just for starters. The fact that thousands of people already like your music enough to seek it out and download it online? Awesome.
Alternate scenario: imagine a world in which you had received the same amount of cash sales as you have in reality – but zero instead of tens of thousands of free downloads. Would you consider this a greater or a lesser success?
Anyway. To my mind, you are a prime candidate for shifting to a new business model. Selling individual tracks to individual consumers as if they were buying a virtual copy of a CD is NOT the only way to do this.
That said, I still believe there’s a place for selling mp3s online. I still buy them and so do most people I know – and not because of any moral compunction to do so, or because I want to “help out the artist”. I do it because it suits me to do so. Where it’s convenient, reliable and straightforward, it’s so much easier to just fork over a few dollars rather than spend a few hours trawling through the various download sites. But then, I’m not 14 and bored.
And I do want to briefly touch on your incredulity that some people might not be able to pay for music.
Let me introduce my undergraduate students. They have a very limited budget. 99 cents for a track is nothing, really – you’re right. But they don’t want one track. They want hundreds. Thousands. Their appetite for music is voracious.
The people who get the most enthusiastic about music – all music – are the very people whose budgets are strapped so tight, they have to decide what music they CANNOT pay for. And so their choice is either do without, or source another way.
In those circumstances, I would rather they had my music in their collections than were prevented from doing so. Your opinion may differ. But I did want to make the point that it’s not about whether they can afford a single track or a particular album – but instead, it’s about getting hold of all of the music their input-hungry brains can handle – and for that, your imaginary 99 cents is a drop in the bucket.
I do understand your frustration and anger – but to borrow an analogy from Clay Shirky, it’s the same frustration and anger that the scribes felt when Gutenberg created the printing press. The point is, when the game changes, you can’t just keep insisting that everybody pay you for your valuable services in the way they always used to.
I spend a great deal of time these days helping musicians and record companies implement new strategies for their music business, in an environment where lots of things – especially digital things – are free. For most of them, it’s frightening, emotionally fraught and entirely nerve-wracking.
I really recommend you read Lawrence Lessig and Chris Anderson on this stuff.
You’ll get some fabulous ideas about how you can make money with your music – all without trying to stop ‘pirates’ from ‘stealing from you’.
Which they’re not. You’ve lost no money, and you are short no stock. Mp3s are like a magical product. If I download one from you, we both have it. If I give it away to another person, all three of us have it. We’re not running out here.
I know it cost you time, energy and money to create it (and I agree you should be rewarded many times over for that). But each individual copy costs you no more each time to provide.
You’re angry about not having made the money that you would have hypothetically made if all of those people who downloaded your album for free had handed you cash. Which they were never going to do.
You are annoyed about not having imaginary money.
How do I know? This is what I do. Research and engagement with an industry, its participants and its consumers. I don’t claim to know a whole lot about a whole lot, but if there’s one thing I’ve managed to establish with a reasonable degree of certainty, it’s that the ‘lost sale’ is a romantic, tragic myth.
So – to return to my point here – let’s instead channel that energy toward actually making actual money, dealing with the world as it is, and making a living as a clearly talented composer, arranger and vocalist.
Keep selling your mp3s online by all means. But stop fretting about piracy, and get out there and make some money.
Let me know if you want any help with that. I’d be delighted, and reasonably inexpensive… :)
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107 Comments
Andrew, I love your blog. Seriously.
On that note, my artists and myself give away all our music. Case in point, I’m up on a Friday night working on promoting an album now. We spend money and man hours on our music too. And you know what? We give it away free right on our site! And you know what else? I still sell CDs and downloads via iTunes, et al. And instead of people swapping our albums on Soulseek, they get it from us directly, giving us the opportunity to directly engage our fans, and my email newsletter grows like crazy (which always equals more sales/downloads on the next release).
I agree with everything you say here. I deal with SO MANY musicians that are seriously angry about people downloading their music. And I keep reiterating these exact same points. Specifically: you can’t stop people from downloading your music, so figure out a way to use this IMMENSE power to your advantage. But, they don’t. They just keep being angry, even getting into flame wars online with their fans. It is just absurd to me. Anyway, thanks for continuing to discuss this topic, because I think more artists need to understand that the momentum that comes with thousands of people downloading your music for free.
The thing is: no one can stop music piracy. No one. The record companies tried with DRM, and it irritated the very customers they’re trying to service. Sony tried with their root-kit scheme. I, in fact, got that very root kit on my recording computer when I wanted to listen to one of those discs on my studio monitors. And that scheme backfired horribly for Sony.
There is no workable technological answer to music piracy. None. Every DRM scheme I’ve seen has drawbacks that negatively affect the paying customers.
And that’s the point: you’re not inconveniencing the pirates — they’re technologically savvy enough to get around anything — you’re inconveniencing the very people who love your music and want to pay for it. In essence, you’re punishing the people who want to support your art. That’s economic suicide.
The good new is that It seem probable that most people don’t pirate music, they still buy it. Music consumers aren’t idiots. They know that if they support the artist and reward them monetarily, the music will keep coming.
So if Ms Sift did indeed find that tens of thousands of people pirated her music, it’s likely that many times that number will pay for it, if they can hear it. That’s a massive number of potential sales.
And that really is the question, isn’t it? How do you get those people to hear your music? Maybe piracy is one of those ways.
I heard pirated songs from Ricky Skaggs’ latest disc, and I had to have it. I even bought it twice, as I was in such a hurry I bought the CD DRM’d on iTunes and then purchased un-DRM’d tracks on Amazon.
The internet is in some ways a double-edged sword. It offers unlimited distribution, promotion, etc, and on the other side it allows piracy.
I’ve received fan mail from Japan to Connecticut to Liverpool to Warsaw. All of these people purchased our music on CD Baby or iTunes or some other online store. These are people who would never have heard our music, let alone bought it.
I’ll put up with some piracy for that.
I’d suggest applying the serenity prayer:
God, Grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
> And by the time I track it down, it shows that my record has been
> downloaded TENS OF THOUSANDS OF TIMES. Seriously.
i use last.fm for brief, not as a most reliable obviously, check how much some particular music/band/artist is popular.
last.fm says: WORLDWIDE GROOVE CORPORATION 21,826 plays (381 listeners) 3 shouts etc.
can someone explain me how the claims from the artists and stats from last.fm goes together?
i don’t want to say that artist lies or something i’m just interested in opinions how much last.fm could be used for brief check of popularity?
what would be good approximations on numbers from last.fm to real world?
here are the other stats i could get:
facebook page – 66 fans
myspace -
* profile views: 45484
* total plays: 37783
* friends: 12055
i hope http://www.bandmetrics.com/ will bring some good instruments to measure popularity..
uf.. just now realized that there is a “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail… sorry for this extra comment which is here just to notify me..
i wish i had some great joke to put here so this post is not completely worthless to read…
Marcell, I use Last.fm as a popularity meter from time to time as well. You’ll notice for the most part that some bands and styles of music simply do not get much attention by the last.fm demographic. Additionally, small to mid sized independents that don’t do a lot of internet PR don’t do well there, either.
However, a band that puts their music on there and pushes people to that site should have a whole lot more than a few hundred listeners. I have one artist I manage ( htp://www.last.fm/music/BL%C3%86RG ) that gets a ton of play on there, and he doesn’t push Last.fm at all (I do, but sort of passively). Anyway, I’d think an artist with ten thousand downloads and 12000 Myspace fans (Blaerg has just over 2000 Myspace fans) would see a LOT of sales.
My experience is you need to find the “golden ratio”. How many downloads do you need to achieve to see a sale? My ration for Blaerg seems to be, on the last release 1 CD/iTunes sale per 21 free downloads. The way I see it, if you aren’t getting enough sales, you aren’t getting enough free downloads.
great post Andrew!
The fact that tens of thousands of folks have downloaded the record is amazing. As Daniel noted, I think developing a way to engage with, and form a deeper relationship with, those people who have downloaded Ellen’s album is the way to go. If she is successful in this, Ellen (and her music) go from being merely a digital file, to being appreciated as an artist that the downloaders feel a connection and relationship with. And ultimately, as everyone as has noted, spending time being angry about illegal downloading is simply time taken away from figuring out new ways to monetize consumer behavior.
I understand the frustration though, because things do seem really messy right now. Quick monetary transactions are such an easy and clear cut way to get a sense of ROI. I am in the midst of starting a media company, and I do feel that this “messiness” is forcing me to re-evaluate what constitutes success. Being able to post and read comments from all y’all really helps me along in this process, so thanks everybody!!!!
BTW,thanks for the link to lessig’s new book. I can’t wait to read it.
I’m with you 100%. As an artist who just released his first album, I can tell you, I’m happy to get whatever attention I can, free or otherwise. Stopping bittorrent is like telling the radio not to give you exposure, it’s counter-productive in the long term.
Of course I’m happy to have people pay for my music, and I’ve made it easy as possible to do so, setting up shop on last.fm (ad revenue), iTunes (digital download), Amazon (digital download), CDBaby (physical CD), and a number of other services, but hey, I’m not Radiohead. People aren’t asking me “how can I give you more money?”
My first step is to get known enough to have turning my hobby of music writing into any kind of money at all, and to do that, people have to care enough to listen.
I’ve put my music up on ThePirateBay (http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4371957/) and MiniNova for exactly that reason. I *want* people to torrent my music, play it for their friends, get it out there. Sure, I want them to *buy* it even more, but no one’s going to buy something they’ve never heard of. I just hope that people that find my stuff interesting enough will throw a donation my way, and purchase it outright if they like what they hear.
Yes, great post!
My last record received over 2500 plays from terrestrial radio stations across the US and a few plays overseas. I received a single royalty payment from a single play in Finland. Am I mad? No, the radio generated sales from CDBaby and iTunes and gained me valuable credibility. I also got a real world education on what ASCAP can and cannot do for me. To your point, it taught me where the money really is, as opposed to where I thought it was. I continue to rethink my strategy and rebalance my awareness generation activities with my money making activities.
“Where the money really is…”
Take that and also Andrew’s suggestion of “single song licensing” and evaluate (or re-evaluate) how to monetize your music. It has been mentioned here before and a few other worthwhile sites, that the age of the massive rock star / cult of personality is fading fast. Saturation and digital convenience are to blame…but really “blame” is not the word I should use. For me the more appropriate term would be; “Saturation and digital convenience are to THANK”.
I used to get sickened by the saturation in the music environment and the piracy. For the piracy issue I simply did what many here have suggested: I gave up on trying to change the inevitable. As for the saturation issue, I take solace in the fact that great music combined with smart strategies and good connections will trump the saturation problem.
I think several here have hinted to this but I will come right out and say it. If Ellen’s music has truly been downloaded for free over 10,000 times then I would really like to believe that she would be using that as momentum for bigger and better things rather than complaining about her popularity. I understand if in her excitement she may have exaggerated the numbers but I also like to think if my music had been downloaded for free over 10,000 times I would have made some moderately respectable money from shows, licensing, merch, etc. etc.
If I were Ellen, I would take that popularity and exploit it thoroughly! Accept that recorded music has lost the value it had just 5 to 10 short years ago and begin to find the value of your music in other forms.
Milton
PS – WTF do I know?
Hello Andrew,
First of all, I sincerely thank you for your thoughtful and fair response to my impassioned comment. I don’t normally fire off things like that [and actually sign my real name to them ;-) ], but this is a topic which has been quite persistent and I just felt the need to state my case. I had no idea that I would be the featured topic of a blog post, nor the subject of internet investigating on my popularity claims.
While we are on that topic, let me just reassure those who question (MARCEL), it is actually true that my record was downloaded tens of thousands of times. I have a “google alert” set up and any time the word “chillodesiac” shows up on a page, I get an email about it which is how I found these bloggers (and this post too). I don’t have printed evidence, but I did happen to copy paste this from ONE site, of which there have been at least about 20, conservatively:
Here is the tally this site shows of how many times our record has been downloaded under various file names. Just from this one site.
Chillodesiac Lounge 1 Full Version* 362 Times
Chillodesiac Lounge 1 (April 2008)* 485 Times
Chillodesiac Lounge 1 ISO* 747 Times
Worldwide Groove Corporation- Fever Chillodesiac Lounge Vol … 974 Times
Worldwide Groove Corporation- Fever Chillodesiac Lounge Vol … 191 Times
That’s over 2500 times. So I think estimating over at least 20 other sites like this, it’s safe to say tens of thousands isn’t an exaggeration. As for our popularity on Last.fm, I have no idea… It’s not under my control. We are completely independent, so I think it’s the fact that we are NOT experiencing a large number of digital sales that has frustrated me so. We are apparently more popular with the free downloading crowd, as opposed to the paying crowd.
Andrew, I also want to thank you for your suggestion about pursuing co-branding and licensing. That has been a huge part of our vision, and we are making efforts in that direction. We have licensed tracks to various compilations, perhaps a dozen or so. And we gave about 500 discs to Peer Music, who published two of the songs on our project, which they have distributed to music supervisors and advertising agencies on our behalf. We have yet to see anything from that, but are still hopeful. We’ve had a couple bites, but nothing that’s gone final. It’s all about connections… so many things to spend time on. And I have not invested a great deal of TIME on chasing down these people [free download bloggers], but I supposed I must be a personality type who is more operating on principle, and in principle it’s just so maddening.
But I do hear you. This is how it is, and I can either get with the program and rework my strategy accordingly to use it to my advantage, or I can keep being mad. So, I know I need to have a shift in my perspective… sigh…
I guess what still bothers me is, I don’t feel like we really are selling that much. How do I know what is a good return? I just looked it up on CD Baby (I’ve already been more transparent than I’m really comfortable with, so why stop now), and it looks like since we released this and it has gotten out there digitally, we are making between $30 and $150 a month in digital sales. That doesn’t seem like much considering all of the work, time, and money we put into it.
Our best source of revenue has been actual unit sales to upscale retailers like Bergdorf Goodman, who just place their third order, and say it’s one of their top sellers. But really considering our production and packaging expenses and what we are charging them wholesale, we’re about breaking even on disc sales in that way. Plus, how much longer is that going to continue? It’s not looking good in today’s marketplace.
So, I think my fundamental issue still is, if we are that popular in the free realm, then where is all this money that should be coming in?
Thanks so much for your time. I spent the rest of the day yesterday questioning my judgment on being so unfiltered. I’ll stop beating myself up now.
Ellen Tift
@Ellen,
That is great about the actual numbers for downloads…at least regarding gaining popularity and momentum. It does suck that things are not like they were 10 years ago when your music would have been easier to sell as a LP product. Probably even lots of 12″ remixes on vinyl. From what I heard in the tunes they would be prime “remix” material!
As for the other money that could be coming in: Live shows, licensing and merch. And about the licensing, it has been my experience that contacting directly the companies with production libraries will get better results than having a third party shop you to them. In fact the music production library company should be the third party shopping you to music supervisors.
If you like you can follow the links (via my name at the top of this comment) to my very poor web presence, and shoot me an e-mail or comment on my blog and I will give you at least one contact to e-mail at a respectable music production library company.
I sympathize with your reluctance to accept the state of the music environment. It kind of sucks in so many ways…BUT, “glass half full” perspective is the way to go!
Milton
Hi Ellen,
As a musician myself I can understand your frustration at not seeing immediate monetary results from “tens of thousands” of downloads.
However you must adapt with the changing times of the industry.
Your music is now being listened to by thousands more people than it was before your album was blogged and downloaded. While you may not be making any money right now, who’s to say that these people if they do become new fans will not flock to your live shows when you come to town, or will not eventually purchase your album for the experience of having the physical product.
Most music fans that I’ve encountered enjoy the experience of opening a new CD and looking over the artwork in their hands not on a screen. Even being a songwriter myself, I admit to downloading music free all the time and if something catches my ear I usually end up becoming a fan of the band and purchasing their CD’s and seeing them live.
My band, the Mississippi Kings recently just labored over our new album spending thousands of dollars and countless hours recording and now releasing and promoting our new songs. However, we decided being a fairly new band that we would offer our entire album FREE through our website http://www.themississippikings.com.
It’s definitely a hard decision when you have invested so much time, energy and money into a project only to release it for free. However, we think that this will only help the band in the long run. We are giving people a chance to decide for themselves whether the music is crap or not, and if they decide to become fans then like any fan, I’m sure they will seek out more music from the band and tickets to see them live.
My advice to you would be to stop wasting time tracking down these bloggers and downloaders and encourage them. You will not be able to stop them and you may only be harming your image by berating possible fans about their downloading habits. Instead encourage and embrace those fans and hopefully you will see the rewards.
Cheers,
Mike
Download the new Mississippi Kings album Long Time Comin’ FREE at http://www.themississippikings.com
Thanks Milton and Mike for your responses.
As for making money from live shows, that’s part of the problem. We are not doing any live shows, our lifestyle isn’t conducive to that. First of all, I’m the mother of a 2 year old, so traveling around the globe and gigging until the wee hours is out of the question.
Also, anyone who’s on the road these days is painfully aware of the reality that being on the road costs money, it does not make money. Kurt was on the road all summer with two country artists, and the expense of travel and paying the band pretty much always exceeded the money they made from the show. One artist had to use her published advance to pay the band after a while. So someone becoming a fan from downloading our music for free and then coming to our show to support is, that will NOT translate to money in the bank. Even if we WERE on the road, it likely wouldn’t make up the difference. Heck, even if I didn’t have a toddler, I don’t think we could afford to be on the road. And if you’re not on the road, you probably aren’t selling much merchandise.
It just seems like the work is endless: Writing/producing/recording the new music, packaging it and marketing it. Building a fan base, communicating with fans, etc. Keeping up with how things are changing. Maintaining your various profiles. And for those who are doing so, booking and performing live shows. Making and maintaining industry relationships. And on top of that, somehow figuring out how to actually keep your bills paid and pay for your indie music, which is NOT achieved by any of the previously mentioned things. It’s exhausting and absolutely consuming. How do we break out of this cycle?
We’ve had offers for distribution and also a record deal offer, but they weren’t a good business model for us, so we declined. Is it actually possible to pull ahead as a truly independent artist, or must we partner with a label? What if we have no capital to hire outside help?
It seems like this really is a yucky time in so many ways in this industry, but at the same time, there are so many new opportunities as well. I’m not sure the scales are balanced yet, and I’m pretty sure they’re not yet tipped in our favor.
I think we’re going through a time of transition and because of this confusion is established .
It is all very recent . Online music is something new . Charge for this music is even more recent . So this confusion .
To gig live is what matters and in this aspect there is no prejudice to the musician . Maybe the only solution to handle the merited money is to gig live .
Everything has a price and the ‘comfort’ to have the music online worldwide is showing the price …
I do not see how to control , today , the illegal distribution .
The good thing is: if the person have the track , it is because liked the music .
But I need pay my bills !
And now ?
Great stuff… should be an open debate on a radio station.
hmmm…. Mr Dubber?
I’ve debated this one before. Many times. Trouble is, the people they usually get in to put the other case just tend to shout, threaten and get cross. It ends up being no fun.
Best to just let them do their thing, keep posting stuff like this, and carry on in the hopes that one day they’ll figure it out…
If I’m going to be on the radio, I’d far rather be playing jazz records to people who are having a nice time with food, drink and friends.
Ellen,
First – you’re right, the scales aren’t tipped in your favour. And nor were they ever. This is just a different (and, I would argue, preferable) variety of unfair than the old one. Could be MUCH fairer – but attempting to return to the old way is not the path to make that happen.
Besides, I tend to find that when people complain ‘It’s not fair!’ often what they actually mean is that it’s not sufficiently unfair in their favour.
And second – in my opinion, probably the best thing you’ve done for your music career this week is to be unfiltered: to let people get to know you a little bit.
I’ve written about this a little in the past, but I think I may have a decent sized post brewing about the personalisation of music online.
In the same way that digital media are conversational (where electronic media were allocutionary) – online music relies on interpersonal peer communication (where offline music relied on stardom and fandom).
I’ll explain in more depth (and with more clarity) – but in the meantime, rest assured that introducing yourself and having something to say were good things to do.
Much appreciated – and nice to meet you.
“Besides, I tend to find that when people complain ‘It’s not fair!’ often what they actually mean is that it’s not sufficiently unfair in their favour”
WOW. How precise a statement. You sum up in one sentence what many spend months trying to deny and defend against. The playing field is most certainly being leveled. When we all have access to the tools needed to achieve our sonic goals as well as our PR and marketing, well it is going to get thick as pea soup out there…And it has!
In my perception it requires two main ingredients to make progress in this game: Superior music and the right connections. All the multi media marketing is great, the global access via the Internet is great. The reason those I do not consider those to be the most important aspects of making progress is because We All Have Access To Them. Therefore it is going to take exceptional talent and shrewd communication skills before the Internet or the media marketing will do any of us any good.
But that is just one opinion. Also for the sake of the discussion; Ellen, I am a husband and father of two and playing live is not the option for me that it is for others. Having said that, let me say this: I play local shows (tri-state area) and even those are few and far between. But they are a source of revenue and it is my choice to dedicate the time to them or not. You always have a choice.
” It cost me huge amounts of time and my hard earned money to create this music. This is a business. For profit.”
This is where you fail. in my honest opinion.
That one statement stuck out like a massive sore thumb for me when reading this article.
Is this the only reason you write and create music? Simply to make money? As a business woman I’d say you;ve failed from the very start then, becasue anyone with any business sense would realise that music is the LAST place you start a business to make money!!
Music is not a business, period. It has ‘become’ a business for many corporations and compaines, but music is not, in and of itself a business.
Music is about emoting, about expression, about conveying to others a feeling, a thought, a memory.
Music for me personally is like therapy, its cathartic. Each song i write is a diary entry in my life. I cant talk about my feelings, I cant express how i’m feeling to people who care about me, the only way i can get my pain/joy out is in song format. I need to play and write music to satisfy my own emotional needs. I play my music in front of other people at gigs becasue i feel I have something valid to offer others, either to say ‘your not alone in how you feel’ or as my way of asking ‘does anyone else feel like this? I am not alone in this?’
I currently give all my music away for free, I’m currently recordign my first album, and so far i’ve given away 2 lots of beta mixes, actual ‘as its being recorded’ mp3′s so if anyone out there is interested in seeing how an album is created and progressed then they can download it all, and see each itteration of each song as it grows and develops.
It also means that people can hear my music NOW and I can actually develop a fan base rigth now instead of waiting another 6-10 months until the album is finally released.
When it is released I’ll probably do a physical release, maybe a full retail release, thats way down the line right now, but i know i have plenty of good info to help me make the right choice.
Money from my music is a bonus, what drives me is making an emotional connection with people. What gives me the greatest sense of comfort and satisfaction is someone telling me that my music moved them, connected with their own experiences and vocalised their own feelings/pain/joy that they couldn’t vocalise themselves.
And for me that is more valuable than any amount of money.
Leon.
http://www.leonlive.co.uk
I wish artists would quit complaining about people downloading for free – I mean seriously, get over it.
There are plenty of ways to make money via your music, but if you’re relying on it to support your life then why not get a job? Do you really not possess any other skills that people are willing to pay for?
Once everyone stops worrying about making money from music and only those who really make it for musics sake are left I’ll be happy.
=)
Robx
The problem here is ignorance, and I don’t mean that as an insult. It’s not understanding business principles, i.e. how to monetize intellectual property correctly.
Yes, you spent thousands of dollars creating music. That was YOUR choice and YOUR risk.
It’s also YOUR responsibility to learn how to make money off of your intellectual property.
Any smart business person knows you have to create multiple revenue streams. Different ways of making money.
It’s ALWAYS been this way in the music industry, and selling an album used to be one of those streams.
Now it’s been (slighty) taken away because of the web.
But at the same time, the web has opened more revenue opportunities that you can take advantage of.
Take some time to educate yourself and the money will come.
Well, I really had no idea I would be summed up and raked over the coals like this. Part of me doesn’t even want to take the time to respond to each negative point some of you have made, though I do feel the need to hold my ground.
First of all, if you’re ideology is that you should NOT be making music to make money, that is your free thinking, and you can go do your thing. You are welcome to feel superior to me, that’s not my concern.
If you think I’m ignorant or expecting the wrong things, let me just say the following…
No one goes to college and spends thousands of dollars on tuition to simply be better at what will be a hobby. [Though that may happen to some, it's not the original intent.] I have a bachelor’s degree in commercial music with an emphasis in composition and arranging, and a master’s degree in music production, orchestration, and composition. I have worked professionally in the music industry since 1995 in the following capacities: post score composer, vocal arranger, string arranger, big band arranger, studio singer, jingle writer, songwriter, and producer. I also teach various courses for the school of music at a university.
If I had borrowed $36K [as I did] to get a master’s degree in music without intending to actually pay the bills with the skills I was acquiring, I would be an idiot.
Regardless, the expectation of creating intellectual property and not have it infringed upon in ANY realm is not unreasonable. At all.
I stand by my position. Judge me if you will.
your music degree is irrelevant in terms of producing your own music and ‘expecting’ it to sell. Music is such a subjective and personal experience ‘to the LISTENER’ that making music to simply make money is the biggest gamble.
I’d think that most of the biggest artists out there who write their own music dont have music degrees or music ‘qualifications’. Now if your looking to use that degree to get yourself employeed by a songwriting house that do nothing but write and compose ‘hits’ then that is a better use of your degree. Teaching music would be a better use of your degree if all your interested in is making money to pay your bills.
Making your own music purely to make money is a gamble with bad odds. Do you not realise that? People who ONLY download and pirate music are not lost sales as they would never pay for it in the first place, BUT they might just be friends with someone who also hears your music through the pirate and DOES have some moral fibre and actually likes paying for music and would buy it.
A download is not a lost sale, its a sale opportunity, maybe not from the person who downloaded it but from anyone within that persons sphere of influence, and word of mouth is still one of the strongest sellers out there.
No-one is raking you over the coals, we are merely pointing out that some of your ideaology is still stuck with outdated idea’s.
You spending 4 years and 36k in college was your choice and has NO bearing whatsoever on how many units you sell, or whether your music will be any good. you dont suddenly get some ‘right’ to sell more simply because you have a degree and others dont.
Think about this for a moment.
Be pissed off if the illegal downloaders were making money off your music. instead of being pissed off because someone downloaded your music when they have no intention of paying for it anyway.
Be pissed off when downloaders start buring your CD’s and then selling them locally. THAT would be lost income to you and THAT would be a genuine infringement of your intellectual property.
Let your music be listened to by as many people all over the world as possible, because most of them do have moral fibre and do pay for things they enjoy. If your music doesnt sell, then take it on the chin and accept the fact that maybe your music isnt as ‘great’ as you want it to be.
it’s useless to tell to people that gambling is not rational and that most of the time they lose. it’s so obvious. we are for sure not the first and most probably the smartest dudes who said that to poor gambler.
what is important is how much the gamblers would support big industries in transforming our (digital) world to hell by drm, surveillance and all kind of controls needed to protect the outdated, unappropriated and (even in the past) unfair-for-the-artists business models.
if they lose their investments it’s not really relevant for the society but when these desperate souls push the policies in their interest’s direction the society in a whole pays off.
luckily, hackers, pirates, thiefs, kids, together with all of the gamblers share the files in p2p networks so the policies are always one step behind… i would like to see policies in the future fit the social norms and develop the society in the long run… the looong fucking run, yes ;)
The college degree is definitely not any kind of insurance or assurance that “Your” songs will get you paid. The degree and the money you spent to obtain it only insures and assures that you have skills to use tools to record music. If you really want to have some stability in your music career then I would suggest that you begin to engineer and produce others and have them pay you for your services.
Popularity guarantees are not to be found with the disposable income of music consumers.
I actually think that Ellen gets the points that Andrew has made and I do not think it is fair to verbally assault her for her perspective.
Let me try and clarify a few things that I think are important here, because there are several valid points of view that are being treated as if they are at odds, when in actual fact, they’re perfectly compatible ideas. And where there are ‘sides’ emerging, there’s nonsense being spouted by both.
You can make music as a sole means of making money, and there’s no shame in being ambitious about it. Most people who read this blog could make music six to eight hours a day, not have another job, and earn well above the national average. It takes a good deal to get there, but if that’s your target, it’s entirely achievable.
Making money from your music and being passionate about your music are not mutually exclusive propositions. So perhaps you’re not going to get a high school career guidance counsellor steering kids towards a life in rock bands, and nor is running an independent record label necessarily the greatest get-rich-quick scheme in the world – but people who do what they’re passionate about tend to do better in the long run than people who hate their job.
I know that none of the comments made here are meant as personal attacks, but from now on, I’m going to come down pretty hard on people who ridicule someone’s ambition to make money from music. Not because they’re ‘being mean’ but because it perpetuates a ridiculous notion that I’ve been trying to squash on this blog for two years now.
It falls into the trap of thinking about music as EITHER “Art” OR “Commerce”. Where, of course – as most New Music Strategies readers have realised by now – it’s neither. And both.
Music (at least, recorded music) is MEDIA. Go back and read this post. It’s an easy concept to grasp, but it seems to be an easy one to forget too.
In short, without music business, there would be no popular music. But that doesn’t diminish its artistry or its value as self expression. Quite the opposite. But to think you can be in a rock band and be somehow separate from the world of the music business is just as naïve as thinking that just because you released a record, you deserve other people’s money.
Having said that, I want to make a few extra points here:
This blog is about something
The first thing I want to say is that it’s entirely possible and acceptable to make music as a career, and many people do. To do so usually requires a good deal of talent, years of study and practice, and an investment in time and energy to make the music. Those three things are pretty much mandatory.
On top of that, as far as I can tell, you also need at least ONE of three more things: a salaried job as a musician; extraordinary luck; or entrepreneurial skill and strategy. Most people do badly at making money from music because they don’t have one of these. The first one’s a matter of finding the right job, applying and being the best person for the job. The second one – well, I can’t help you with that.
The third one is, in large part, what I talk about here. It’s about understanding the context you’re in, seeking and capitalising on opportunities. You might think this is a blog about technology and the internet. It’s not. This is a blog about entrepreneurialism.
Universities are not technical colleges
As to the investment in time and money over four years at university… let me say this: While it’s true that a lot of people go to university to learn skills for a career, it’s not the reason people SHOULD go to university.
Universities are not simply about vocational training. They are places to expand your horizons, learn about the world, become an independent, critical thinker – all that good stuff. While you’re there, you might as well study things you’re interested in and increase your prospects and commercial value, but they should not just be training you for a job – and nor does having been to university give you any particular entitlement in that respect.
Going to university is not an ordeal you endure so that one day, people will give you the respect and money you deserve. It’s not training – it’s education.
Sorry – you caught me on one of my hobby horses there.
Intellectual property is part of the problem
A lot of people talk about intellectual property as if it’s some sort of natural right. It’s not. The clue is in the title. It’s a property right, and one that hasn’t existed for all that long. We invented it as a society to fulfill a need.
That need was to encourage people to be creative and make things. Because society is better when that happens. Moral rights over use of that music aside, ‘ownership’ of the music was supposed to be a way of letting people charge for what they did, so that they’d be inspired to go back and make more stuff. And so that other creative people would be equally inspired to go and make stuff too. To contribute to culture. For the sake of a healthy, intellectually nourished and culturally rich society.
It’s turned into something else now. A nasty sort of ‘it’s mine and you can’t have it’ concept of property. I’m talking about what has happened to copyright in the 21st century here – this is not directed at anyone.
I understand that when you are a professional recording musician, it seems that controlling the rights over distribution is a matter of feeding your child, and earning a living and putting food on the table. And when those rights are breached, that threatens your livelihood. So you tighten the grip, and spend a lot of time angry and resentful – and it all just becomes no fun at all.
The point of all this
Ellen is my target audience. When I write this blog, my purpose is to try and help people who are finding it difficult to do the kinds of things they want to with their music.
I want this site to be helpful when the music world seems like it’s gone mad; when the technology seems to be stacked against your prospects of success; and when, despite your best efforts, you can’t seem to make use of the fact that people love your music and convert that into something tangible.
But New Music Strategies is not just me talking. In fact, it’s mostly not me talking. And that’s one of the most powerful things about it. Because what I want NMS to be about isn’t necessarily what it’s only about.
There’s a diversity of opinion here, and these opinions are strongly held – because this is a community of people for whom music is vitally important. It’s pretty much the most important thing.
So it might get a little bumpy in here from time to time, and thick skins are sometimes required. But as my target audience, Ellen, I’d be delighted if you’d stick around – work through some of my ideas, and learn (as I continue to do) from a pretty substantial, vocal and really scary-smart community of ‘New Music Strategists’ – all with a wealth of experience, ideas, marketing advice, knowledge and advanced technical skills in the area of online music.
Without wanting to sound too much like a cheap hack business management book, let’s see if we can’t turn this problem into something more like an opportunity…
Wow – another interesting post and discussion – good on you Ellen for being so candid with the world but don’t take the ‘negative’ replies too seriously though hey? You might have different expectations/interpretations from the words the men are writing. Breathe.
Anyway – great tunes – nice covers of ‘Fever’ and ‘The Man I Love’. I would never have heard of you were it not for this post. Your life/education story is really similar to mine – (minus the child and the tens of thousands of downloads!).
SO I would never had heard of you were it not for this post. I teach several classes at Uni and Polytechs in New Zealand – this is the kind of thing I could well talk to many of my students about – young musicians and engineers – potential audience members for you.
There just HAS to be a way of turning international promo/advertising like this into revenue somehow. That’s the real point of interest here don’t you think? Mostly contributors to these discussion are looking for win/win outcomes.
good luck
mailing list me – karen@karenhunter.com
Great post as always Andrew. (I’ve been a silent reader for a while and thought now’s as good a time as any to join in).
I don’t want to labour the point as it’s been said by a lot of you that piracy is inevitable, but one thing I wanted to say, is that those that work against it only seem to increase piracy and often reduce sales.
If you look at other forms of media such as film, software or games, a whole load of cash has been spent on stopping people getting hold of it for free and none of it has ever (to my knowledge) worked. I’m pretty sure I could get hold of any song, software, film or anything that has a digital manifestation on the internet if I felt the need to.
Yet, every time I buy a DVD, I, the money-spending consumer, have to watch a stupid video about how I wouldn’t steal a handbag or a car or whatever. This annoys me very much because I have clearly bought it, or I wouldn’t be watching the video. Anyone who copies it illegally will remove such video’s and adverts and just upload the film. So those that do download it, get a more succinct and enjoyable viewing experience.
EA recently made the decision to use DRM on one of their latest games SPORE, which meant those that decided to buy it could only install it on 3 machines (they later gave in to increasing it to 5). This lead to it becoming one of the most illegally downloaded games ever.
Like Andrew said, an illegally downloaded MP3 isn’t a lost sale and you haven’t lost any physical product. This is a bad thing in one way, because it makes it very unlikely that anyone (such as the Police as with physical theft) are going to come to your rescue, because you haven’t really lost anything. It’s a good thing, because it means you’ve got your music out to people who wouldn’t have normally listened to it.
To me, there are two ways to look at piracy:
1) As an evil force that much be stopped (which it clearly can’t). In which case you’ll likely waste much of your effort trying to concoct wonderful ways to prevent pirates (and possible put off paying customers). Rather than putting effort into your product (music).
2) As a force of good, because all of those people that wouldn’t or couldn’t get hold of your product now have it.
The question is, how do you regain some control of the situation and convert all of these new listeners into paying fans?
I think that the artist control of the music given away free needs to take a different form than which tracks are up for grabs. You can take control as an artist by making sure all those tracks direct people to you, by putting them on torrent sites yourself (so that they are titled correctly and give you credit) or by giving them away on your website.
Both of these are mentioned above, but the next thing to do is to make sure you’ve done your inbound marketing homework and got your website to the top of Google for your band name, genre, location and whatever else you can. So that those listeners have an avenue to pursue your music further and hopefully pay for it (or at least raise a little ad revenue).
Work with your new listeners and make it easy for them to find you.
P.S> Andrew: Cheers for putting the whole album on stream, there were a lot of comments to read through. Ellen: Liked your version of Mas Que Nada.
Ellen, if you’re reading this – a couple of comments.
I clicked on the /chill/digital.html link in Dubber’s post, and it took me direct to the page where I can either buy the physical product or purchase the album or single tracks as MP3.
As a potential drive-by customer, here’s why I’m not convinced to part with my money:
1) there are no easy links to preview each track by their respective buy buttons (sure, by manually navigating back to the /chill main page, there’s a player at the bottom of the page, but having clips on the actual purchase page is far more important). Why should I want to buy tracks if I can’t easily hear them with a single click? A simple Flash player (or direct links to preview MP3s) would work perfectly.
2) $14.95 is a bit steep for someone who has no idea of your work… I’m a newcomer to your music (listening to Butterflies right now and it sounds ok). As a consumer who doesn’t have any compunction about going elsewhere for music, here’s some more realistic price points:
$9.99 for physical CD
$6.99 for digital album
$7.99 for digital album with bonus bits
I’ll bet you a fiver (so $10!) that you’d get more sales at this price point, even though you’re making less per sale I’ll bet you’d still be getting more on aggregate.
Also, how is your music being distributed to online sales platforms? Is it on all the other popular music retail sites as well as iTunes? There are many companies who will do all the legwork for you, for a percentage of sales (if you are a good businessman/woman you can often beat them down to a lower percentage of sales than their walk-up price, but be prepared to give as well as take).
In short, be more aggressive. Even if $14.95 for a physical album includes the postage, it’s still too much for an artist I’ve never heard of. If you haven’t already done so, be prepared to ‘experiment’ with retail prices. Make your digital download page MUCH more consumer-friendly – offer them every possible feature they may want in terms of easy to access audio previews, more details about the bonus goodies, and a better way of purchasing. What if I want to order some tracks but not all of them? Right now I have to go and click Buy Me for each track, which isn’t great. How about tickboxes next to each track which I can tick and THEN hit “buy these track(s)” to buy just those?
You may be losing sales because you have not streamlined your digital purchase page. Also, if you are selling your digital files through a third party retailer, consider selling them yourself from your own web site as the percentage they may be taking for sales is likely cutting into your profit margins (which from what you’ve said previously sounds a bit meagre at present).
Hopefully being more aggressive behind the scenes will yield increased sales for you. Perhaps also offering a free MP3 ‘megamix’ which has portions from some or all of your tracks as a taster would be a good idea – put it on Last.fm too, cross promote and consider putting one or two of your most popular tracks onto Last.fm for full streaming too as you will accrue royalties if they are played (not as much as a full purchase I agree, but lots of little somethings are better than lots of nothing, right?)
Best of luck with your endeavours, your music sounds quite good and fairly well produced, although it’s not quite up my street I may know a few people who would like this so I’ll bear it in mind for later recommendation.
You need to crack the recommendation nut. I know you might consider them anathema, but have you considered the music discovery blogs? Get in touch and actively promote one of your best tracks and accept the potential lost sales as thousands more people hear your music, and then go to check out your album.
Also, as a tie-in to this idea, if you have the album and/or tracks available to buy elsewhere, LINK TO THEM ON THE DIGITAL DOWNLOAD PAGE! It’s trivial to link to a track in iTunes – use the iTunes Link Maker (google for it), and iTunes has also rolled out a feature where you can use ‘plain english’ links to link to a single track or a whole album, which they announced to Label Partners a week or so ago. Though I’m not sure if it’s publicly viewable yet, this is the important part of their mailout:
You can link directly to any band, musician, actor, or developer page using the convention: itunes.com/artistname
You can also link directly to albums using the convention: itunes.com/artistname/album
Here are a couple examples:
itunes.com/fonzworthbentley
itunes.com/m.i.a./arular
So take advantage of this and offer iTunes links for all of your tracks if they’re already up there (and be sure to test them beforehand).
It sounds like you’re *almost* there – but people are inherently lazy, so you may be losing sales just because people either can’t easily hear your music or easily click to buy on their preferred sales platform.
Also consider offering your album for sale in other formats – an increasing amount of people are after true CD-quality audio; whenever possible I only buy digital music in FLAC format now, or very occasionally 320kbps if the track is unmissable – because I know I’m getting an exact copy of the CD audio. 192kbps MP3 just doesn’t cut it for me now. You could even consider it a premium option, and charge 10/15 cents per track more for it (or discount your MP3s by 10cents each and sell the FLACs at the former MP3 price). Why do I (and others) like FLAC? Well, I can burn a CDR for my car and not worry if it gets scratched or broken, and I can also encode MP3s or Oggs for my portable player from the original FLACs (and archive the FLACs if I need/want them later.) Storage and processor power is now not an issue, you can play FLACs in most media players with a single install of the correct codec – and your geek credentials would be significantly increased if you sold FLACs alongside lossy formats.
I suppose the entire gist of my suggestion are that it’s all about finding ways to make yourself a little more unique than the next artist… Most online stores have sold the same types of files at the same quality for years now, and people want something a little more now, a differentiator. Appeal to the widest possible customer base and you’re onto a winner, and be prepared to sacrifice some (assumed) potential sales by gifting some of your creations to the general public for no cost to them, because you may well hook and reel in some people who wouldn’t otherwise pay much attention. Some record labels are already experimenting with giving away their albums in MP3 and FLAC on BitTorrent – go to Demonoid.com and look at the most recent news articles and you will see what I mean, and that’s before I even get into the Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails stories. I could go on for a LONG time, but I hope what I’ve said has given you some more ideas to extend your appeal and improve your future sales.
Keep up with the synch and licencing work, your material has cross-format appeal and might make good music for films or TV programmes. But don’t forget: pander to your potential customers’ every whim when selling them your music, otherwise they’ll just click on to the next page and forget about you. Your web site is a bit lacklustre, and you don’t seem to be linking to all the other obvious avenues of cross-promotion – make the sales experience unforgettable, and bingo: you (may) have more customers. I cannot guarantee you success, but there is surely no harm in trying… And everything I’ve suggested are things I’d do myself if I was in a similar situation.
Best of luck. :)
It’s been said here already, but its worth repeating, new web technologies are never going to replace relationships with real people. They are the ones that take time to build, and sometimes they lead to nowhere, but you have to start with what you’ve got.
Ellen, the people who run the blogs you mentioned seem to control a substantial portion of your ‘route-to-market’ – they know who your fans are – would it not be worth forming relationships with them to see how you can work with them?
You could ask them to share data on who is downloading your music, or perhaps create a ‘special edition’ package that has higher value to fans and give the blogs a 5% cut for referring sales.
At the very least this will give you more leverage when pursuing the more profitable suggestions above.
This has already been well covered in the blog and comments, but as a starting out type of singer songwriter, the idea of even 100 people finding me and enjoying me enough to download my songs makes me very excited. Maybe I’d feel differently if I was a more successful artist, or if there was a lot of people getting my music for free.
I wonder if musicians used to get upset about people recording their songs from the radio “instead” of buying the cd/cassette? The truth is, I guess, the people who were going to buy it still did, and a whole load of other people knew and enjoyed the music, and some of them became gig going fans…
Another thought, I became a big Eric Clapton fan after borrowing a friend’s Cream CD. I’d never have bought it myself because I’d never heard of it, but I got into the music through the borrowed CD. I copied the music, which I’d never paid for, to my PC. Years later, I’ve bought most of his discography, DVDS and I’ve just bought tickets to see the man next year. If I hadn’t copied, or even “stolen” that first CD, perhaps I’d not have been a fan and spent money on a load of his stuff.
Well, I never thought [url="http://juggernautbrew.blogspot.com/2008/10/long-tale-ten-years-in-life-of-digital.html]this guy’s[/url] comment that artists’ only incentive in making music was money was actually partially true.
Huh.
Hello, my name is Charlie North and I’ve been following this website for a long time. I’ve never commented before, but I feel that now is the right time to contribute. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly I’m currently involved in creative and business negotiations with Ellen and her band. Secondly I have implemented a series of concepts described by Andrew into my own music career.
By Ellen having a strong professional and business approach to her work, I feel confident that the work/art/music I create for her is both worthwhile, useful and beneficial to both parties. In short, she won’t be wasting my time. I would propose that this is good thing and something that all parties desire in a collaboration?
Secondly, the band have shown an ingenious, pro-active and inspiring approach to exchanging files, remixing, and exchanging contracts. This is a creative act. Not all creativity is to be found in music. I would propose that creativity can be found in all things, including business?
In conclusion I have seen Ellen to be creative in both business and music. In my experience it is hard to achieve both. There will always be personal/internal conflict. This is maybe why we all enjoy this blog so much?
However, for me the water is still murky on this issue of MP3s for free! I have implemented Andrew’s suggestion and willingly given away a series of MP3 tracks. You can download 3 tracks on my website, http://www.charlienorth.co.uk/music.html – yes, that’s my plug! This has led to greater exposure but has not really translated into greater sales, in fact sales have slowed down! However to be fair, exposure has grown, and if harnessed with a different emphasis on publishing, things may pay off.
Why should things pay off? Well, two point: Firstly if you make music, then you’re a musician and no one can take that away from you. If you decide you’re a musician, then you are. How good you are depends on how much you practice; but you don’t need to be in the music business to be validated as a musician.
Secondly: I want to continue being a professional musician/producer. Some people think business and music is a compromise, some sort of ‘watering down’ of their talent. In my experience I have found it to be a VERY powerful combination. Pursing music AND business makes you less selfish, more focused, very creative (and in other related areas), more sociable, more diplomatic, more disciplined and happier.
As Derek Sivers said:
“Money is nothing more than neutral proof that you’re adding value to people’s lives. Making sure you’re making money is just a way of making sure you’re doing something of value to others.”
I agree with that statement and I support anyone who adopts that approach.
In conclusion, for me, the best thing here has been everyone’s passion. It’s great to read that so many care! Apathy is the real enemy of us all.
So, I wish you all well.
Finally I would like to thank Andrew for this excellent Blog, and his great sense ‘fair play’.
Thank you for reading my response.
Charlie North.
http://www.charlienorth.co.uk
http://www.myspace.com/charlienorth
show them what you’ve got. that’s the deal. like it always was. nothing has changed. giving away music is what Sony is doing as well, but they give it away to the press for free. and now the press = us. so, this is how it works.
Great damn post!
In 1995 I released two vinyl records with almost no promotion and sold about 3000 of each through TRC for distribution.
I re-entered the game again in 2006 in which i adapted my model to whats currently going on.. giving out the music for FREE through my site and places like Jamendo. Having my music on Jamendo opened up a lot of doors as my music has been featured on DVD’s in Europe and other places that would have never had my music had I sold it.
And I still put my music on iTunes, because even though the albums were available freely… there were still people who paid for it.
Do I wish the climate was still like it was in 1995? Yes.. because now older and wiser… I could capitalize off it better… but it’s not..
so one has to be willing to try a variety of different things to succeed, even the major labels are finally beginning to understand this.
Just another small point about your website Ellen; users have to make an effort to listen to your music. If I am visiting an artists page, I want to be able to listen to their music straight away, otherwise I’ll just go to their myspace page and then find myself wondering off listening to something else.
If your music is there to stream on the front page, I know I’m on the right page if I came looking for you, or if I didn’t, I get the opportunity to listen to it straight away. On a similar note, when I clicked on your Killers string remix, which I’d be keen to hear, nothing happened other than a pop-up with the same information I’d already seen.
The other thing I’d say is that as someone interested in what you do, I’d have to click through your contact page and scroll to find your mailing list. This is something I should be able to sign up to straight away, with no effort.
Your news section also seems like it’s updated monthly, that’s not going to make me come back very often to see what your up to. I’m back on Andrew’s site for the second day in a row because since I was last here, there’s loads more comments/content to read.
Give your fans a reason to come back, because your website is much more important than your myspace or facebook page. Create a community for your fans there so they can come back and see what’s going on and make it easy for them to get involved, speak to you, join the mailing list etc.
That way you can own your fanbase and will rely less on other means to get information to them/encourage them to buy your music. It also means you’ll be in their head more often, which will increase the likelihood of them recommending you to a friend.
Ok, that wasn’t such a small point, but I hope you find it helpful.
Mark
You can’t force a generation who have never paid for music to have the conscience to pay for it, they do value music, but in a different way – gigs and merchandise. you can, however, still make money from digital music if you give them legal, safer and easier to use alternatives, than the pirate sites they use.
Steve Purdham
CEO – We7
http://www.we7.com
Hmm I’d also be interested to note how many people have been making money through downloads and internet sales? Having just released our album I am obviously no authority on the subject, however we have a plan for promoting the free downloads and hoping to build on a fanbase from that.
Do any of you have any real success stories that you’d be willing to share. Has internet promotion or online digital/CD sales made you any significant money?
Ellen don’t listen to anyone saying you can’t make artistic music and not make money and benefit from your creations.
Cheers
Mike
Mississippi Kings
Free Album Download
http://www.themississippikings.com
Thank you again Mr Dubber for such a great post. I was about to comment a little ways back before the comments started going south, glad to see it back and I’m glad that you stepped in and moderated. It should suffice to say that if you want to give away your music for free, that is great but don’t come down on those of us who don’t necessarily feel that way.
So I’m a little unconvinced that the internet is the best medium to sell ANYTHING digital. Two points I’d like to add:
1) I recently had a conversation with a younger musician who told me he had (‘illegally’) downloaded the latest ‘Disturbed’ album and he was unhappy with the sound quality. He has told me out that he feels no need to buy music anymore and refused to believe that he got an inferior copy of the album. He’s very web savvy, which is why I was completely surprised at his reaction . Things like this concern me almost more than download per se because the fan tends to think that anything with you’re name on it mean you sanctioned it. Having NO (good) way to make sure your art is presented in a way you want it to be received is a huge issue in my mind.
2) I’ve accepted the fact that the only influence you can have over your work is in analog form or with a captive audience (merch/ CDs for example) in our digital world of instant gratification. Mr Dubber-have you put up a post on this income stream yet?
Ellen,
Listened to your music today. I really enjoyed it. You have a beautiful voice.
MIKE,
The Mississippi Kings album is good as well though you should actually have samples on your website as opposed to taken people to your Myspace page to hear them.
I hate Myspace and immediately closed the browser. But I did download the album because I was curious…
Ellen: My experience in the business itself began recording & producing 3-track (4-track was a wonderful luxury) I’ve always considered the Music starting as a personal thing, when the inspiration comes to you to write down a click happening in your brain that has a music attached to it. Music starts becoming a commercial thing when you have perfected that click and it becomes a song, a suite or even a symphony. When you have it to a perfect point you want to sing it or play it to someone. Once you make that step your personal thing has grown up and is a commercial entity. You have to determine the best version of your song to give to the world, and you have think about copyright because you’re singing or performing it in front of people who may not be as scrupulous as you are. BUT YOU CAN’T LOCK A SONG (OR A RECORDING) DOWN! Let it fly free, Ellen. It may come back to you bringing everything you wanted to have in life.
To begin with, let me state that I full-heartedly agree with Ellen. Andrew, and others who’ve seen me around the blogs will know this.
It would take more time than I can spare to comment everything that has been said by the opposite side, often completely ignoring the fact that the point has already been addressed. I’ll stick to what I think are the important points.
DISCLAIMER: This is my typical angry-rant-type comment (I’m thinking about starting a blog for them). It’s a tad more tongue-in-cheek than it appears, so don’t take it too seriously. But, do, DO think about it. Alternatively, if you disagree with Ellen and know that you are right – skip it. You’ve got better things to do with your time, believe me.
1. Piracy is not a good thing. Regardless of how many people have downloaded something they did not really want (as in “I’ll have a listen once and then consign it to the depths of my hard drive”) or couldn’t afford, there is a fair number that wanted it and could have bought it, but decided to save money for something they couldn’t steal. There’s your lost sale, Andrew. (You could say that since in fact they didn’t buy it, it really isn’t, but that’s advanced anthropics).
2. Piracy is here to stay. Fair enough. I think most of us have reconciled ourselves with that. There’s no need, however, to whitewash the phenomenon. These people are doing the artist no favours. We may accept them in the same way as we accept football hooligans on the public transportation, but I think we have every right to label them for what they are: a nuisance at best, at worst – a meneace.
3. The comparison about scribes, Andrew, is really, really bad. Scribes didn’t have a job because there was no more demand for their services. There is no decline in the demand for music; quite the contrary, I believe. The thing is that people are no longer willing to pay for it. What is despicable to me, is that they still expect to get it in bulk.
4. The product in question isn’t an individual mp3 – it is the entire record. The record costs a mint to make. Imagine what the price of a record would be, if it could not be duplicated. Since it can be duplicated, the cost of the record for the individual consumer can be miniscule – if enough copies can be sold. Unless you manage to at least recoup the recording costs, you are in big, big trouble (especially, if you financed them out of your own pocket). Therefore, it is not true that if an mp3 is downloaded illegaly, you’ve lost nothing. You’ve just lost a contribution to your recording costs.
5. We have a saying here in Poland: “The fish rots starting from the head”. I’m already seeing a trend with the audience over here towards demanding ever cheaper tickets. Since recorded music is free, live music should be too, right? It stands to reason.
6. I don’t need to make money making music to make music. I’d wager that most people who make music do it with no financial interest – real or anticipated. I’d go as far as saying, that the best musicians never get into any semblance of the music business, because they’re too busy making music and don’t want to corrupt their art by mixing it with commercial concerns. That is a valid choice. I’ve made – and continue to make – quite a bit of music that was never intended for any form of commercial release. I do it for myself. It costs me nothing and I don’t give stuff if anyone ever hears it. With regards to my other work, I’m not running a charity. I’m not here to provide the “input-hungry brains” of Andrew’s undergraduate students more free input. Who are they to me? Do they send me cards on Christmas? Do they ask me out to the pub? Why should I be doing ANYTHING for them? We’re talking about masses of anonymous people who essentially expect their favourite artists to shell out huge sums for their benefit. Why would anyone do that?
(While we’re here, I have no patience with stories about people wanting thousands of tracks and not being able to afford buying them. That is a really *expletive deleted* reason. I’d like to have a couple more guitars. So what? I have what I can afford. Hard luck for me. It makes me think twice before acquiring something new.)
7. We’re in deep… trouble, head downwards, because for the time being recorded music is threatened as a marketable commodity. Recording something with no view of selling it is a hobby for the rich or foolish. As things stand, I’ve yet to see a strategy that makes large-scale output of recorded material (think Eighties album cycles) financially feasible. I try to keep up with the blogosphere on the subject, but much of what I read is wishful thinking, along the lines of: “If enough people hear your music, maybe enough of them will buy it” or “With this new revolutionary product, things are going to be peachy in a couple of years” (with respectful nods to the respective authors). There are several feasible propositions – licencing being the most obvious – but the problem here is you stop making music for fans (who are no longer paying customers), you start making music that will license best (at least, if you want to get a decent return – there are writers that have been making money off that for years). I shall discount live performance and merchandise from the outset: hoping for those income streams is a sure-fire way to get yourself deeper in debt (both of them rely to a greater extent on your success as a recording artist; illegal downloads are no measure of success: if someone didn’t pay for your recordings, what’s to indicate that they’ll pay for anything else you have to offer?)
Perhaps we’ll ride it out and we’ll really be able to monetize free music. I’m waiting to see if that will happen. My gut feeling tells me, however, that I shouldn’t hold my breath just yet. In conclusion, I reiterate what I said in a comment on the original post (the one that sparked Ellen’s comment being discussed here): if you hope to make money by recording music, you should worry as hell about piracy. If you’re prepared to essentially throw money away on recording (it is fun and better for you than getting drunk or fat) every now and again, then you can sleep well. Oh, and with regard to comments about nobody being able to stop piracy, I’ve always wondered what China’s results might be if the Party ever saw the issue as one of importance.
Side note: Andrew, together with Ariel Hyatt you’ve managed to actually get something into this stubborn and opinionated head of mine. I’ve started using Twitter (which is how I came across this post BTW). I’m especially chuffed that I can use my mobile to tweet here in Poland (I dreaded the possibility of another great service that you can only use in the civilized world – i.e. not here). The international SMS rate is a bit of a killer, but I don’t have to look at the numbers, do I?
To Universal,
Thanks for the tip, we’re still working out some of the kinks in the website as it was just launched but I will definitely add some kind of music player to the site.
As to some of the other comments posted. I don’t think we’re in deep trouble at all. In fact there are so many more opportunities now to release and distribute your music then ever before. Recording costs have fallen dramatically, as has packaging music. Digital packaging costs are non-existent.
The internet has made it fairly easy to get world wide distribution, get access to millions more listeners, get the contact information of Booking Agents, Managers, Record Labels, in mere seconds and send them news releases or whatever you want.
You don’t have to spend nearly as much money on postage anymore mailing CD’s to be reviewed as email and mp3 hosting has made this much easier.
This is a fantastic time in music. There is no better time to be an independent artist and the amount of control I feel over my own career is staggering. It’s a great time for music right now because it makes us lazy musicians get off our asses and book tours ourselves, record and release our records and figure out marketing plans to go along with a release. 10 years ago I would’ve recorded my record and sent it to all the major labels hoping for a bite, what a waste of time.
The next few years are definitely going to be interesting, to see if the Majors can regain any of the control they’ve lost, or to see what direction music really goes. There is more music available to you right now then in any other time in history, sure a lot of it is crappy, but much of it is good as well.
I’m tired of the same old fashioned way of thinking that is always presented in these arguments. The people who downloaded your music illegal most likely would not have bought it anyway. However, if they do like it, they will share it amongst their friends, burn it and blog about it. These actions can and WILL create lasting fans of your music (or TRUE fans if you will) who will purchase your CD’s, vinyl, t-shirts, concert tickets and whatever else you throw at them. The results definitely will not be as immediate as someone just buying your CD at a gig, but they will come, if the music is good and you are properly marketing yourself.
Cheers,
Mike
Free Album Download
http://www.themississippikings.com
Hard to argue with Krzysztof Wiszniewski points…I have had all these thoughts myself. I have my own ideas about how to deal with them but they are far from proven.
Can anyone site an example (and DO NOT say the Arctic Monkeys) of an independent group that has had significant success in the past two years…?
Everyone just keeps saying that people don’t want to pay for music, but that is simply not true.
Since I’ve started to offer my “old” music as free downloads from my own website, people have been signing up for my fan club, putting 20, 50 or 100 euros a year (!) directly in my pocket. The biggest draw (right now) is that fan club members get early download access to the songs on my forthcoming album. In effect, I’m making money of an album that hasn’t even been released yet!
I’m not in the green yet, not by a long shot, but my music business is definitely on the right track!
@J when you say ‘significant success’ – do you mean ‘is now a star’?
Because that’s an argument akin to claiming that nobody in my street makes a decent living because nobody in my street has won the lottery.
@Dubber-
I mean significant financial reward without getting picked up by the majors…I would love to find out who the ‘Too Short’ of the internet has been-someone who was independent and savvy enough to parlay popularity to financial success and still stay independent…
@ J
John Taglieri… ???
@J
have you heard of Ani Difranco ( USA ) or Ember Swift ( CAN )?
Also, success is also subjective. One man’s success is another’s failure, success is the completion of one’s PERSONAL goals, not anothers goals.
Do you want your music to be a virus or a cure? a cure costs money and is only available to the privilaged, whereas the virus spreads, infects and multiplies regardless.
I know i personally would rather my music was a virus.
Dont get me wrong, i want financial success the same as everyone else here, I have yet to quantify that success to the minute, but i know I’d like it. I know i’d like to be rewarded for my efforts in a way that allows me to quit my day job and create music full time.
But until i reach a certain level where i can sell x amount of units then viral infection and the exposure that creates is far more useful to me than locking my music away and only allowing a privilaged few listen to it becasue they meet some high and mighty moral/financial criteria.
@Karen
Ani Defranco was signed a long time ago and has parlayed Righteous Babe into an internet company.
I don’t know Ember Swift…
I’ll look these people up and analyze their paterns.
@Leon Live-
I’m not familiar with John Taglieri.
I understand your perspective but I also have to look at cost of investment and risk/reward. I can step back and be happy that I have gotten great compliments, made people’s day, etc I can also redefine ‘success’ to fit a circumstance differently, but there does come a point where it all becomes too finacially punishing to continue. I’m not at that point but that perspective has to be included in how you define ‘success’.
@Karen-
Correction-Ani Defranco might not have been signed but she had a pre-existing career and simply expanded her model online.
I want toput somethings out there that I normally wouldn’t say…
I’ve been around the media industry for years in various forms/capacities. Let me leave it at ‘you guys would be shocked at some of the people I know’. That’s not meant as a trump card but really more of a convolution of the issue. I had a conversation with a 20+ industry vet yesterday about how to break a band. He wasn’t even aware of Dubber’s and his work (he is now!).
Here’s the reality-
NO ONE KNOWS HOW TO BREAK A BAND ANYMORE.
Great songs? Not really.
Exposure? Not really.
Timing? Maybe.
The list goes on…As I said, I have my own ideas but we are in a very weird time. Though the Music Industry was its own worst enemy I have to say as a music lover and fan it is SO WEIRD to talk to people today who have this sense of entitlement towards music. I always thought it was cool to support bands I liked. As I mentioned in a post above, I talk to people who really truly believe that should not have to buy music simply because they have the option not to. It’s not useful to lament the old days but there are few proven pathways for new artist and its not getting better… I’m sure ingenuity and creativity in art and marketing will rule the day in the end in our currnet situation but I understand anyone’s frustration with the issue who’s put a lot of time and money towards a financial end.
Nobody discussed about the price to pay as a listener :
1- computer
2- mp3 player
3- Hifi system, good headphones
4- hard disk storage
5- internet connection
Relevant companies get a huge money for that…
As a musician i give my music for free, thanks to that they get a huge money.
So, who is the stealer ?
>”I really recommend you read Lawrence Lessig and Chris Anderson on this stuff.”
Case in point: how come those respectable authors’ “in praise of art-for-free”-type books are not freely downloadable anywhere??
Anybody cares to do a scan-to-pdf and put it on some torrent sever please?
Come on, don’t be afraid, put your money where your mouths are, gentlemen, and set an example for everybody…. you’re still getting paid for conferences and stuff, right, so where’s the problem?
; D
Big thanks to Ellen Sift for posting for all of us angry music producers.
Here’s a link to Lessig’s book Free Culture:
http://free-culture.cc
Download the whole book for free. Or go buy it. Either’s fine.
Chris Anderson gives his writing away for free every day here:
http://www.thelongtail.com/
It’s not the book itself – but it contains far more words, and expands and explains the principle in far more detail and with far more examples than the paperback did.
Both of these authors have found that giving stuff away for free has contributed greatly to their album… I mean… book sales.
@Dubber – Your longtail.com link has an extra http// in there and doesn’t work (I’ve found the site, just letting you know the link is broken).
I can’t help but think that a lot of people complaining about piracy wouldn’t have had the chance to a few years ago. Bands have always had to fork out a load of money to record their music and a lot of them (most) have not made any money out of it.
No one has the right to make money out of their music in the same way that no-one who releases any product into the market deserves to make money from it. The ones that do make money are the ones that are decided by the world-wide crowd to be “good”.
Obviously marketing has always skewed this to some degree, in that there are some products that have failed despite being good and there are some less that great products that sold better than they should (X Factor?). But there are a hell of a lot of bands out there these days and a lot of them are spending money recording their music. They can’t all be in profit as this would be a physical and economical impossibility.
If people are downloading your tracks, listening to them once and then dropping them on their hard disc never to be heard again, chances are they just didn’t like it. Plus, Andrew’s input-hungry undergraduates will one day be busy professionals who have a greater need for convenient music than free music as they’ll have enough money not to worry too much about their music costs (and not enough time to be hunting them down to save that extra £/$).
Another point worth mentioning is that our definition of stardom as success is no longer sensible. As communication has improved, our access to information has increased and therefore our consumption has diversified. No longer do we all look to the top 40 radio show to see who the new artists are or read the local music rag. You can find music or anything you want on the internet and so people find their own things to pay attention to, rather than what they are directed to by mass media.
The days of the star are on their way out, sure there will be stars or successful people in their own fields, but there will be a hell of a lot more of them (due to the diverse nature of people’s interests) and so there can’t be stardom on the scale we’ve seen in the past.
If you look at artists that have made it to “stardom” in recent years, none has been as lasting or peaked as high as artists of the past. This isn’t because they aren’t as good, it’s because people have access to more information, more music and more places to spend their money.
Personally, I’m just happy I can get my music out there by putting in more and more effort rather than more and more money (on cd production etc.). If I end up making money from it, great, people obviously think I have something worth paying for, if not, then I spent what money I did having a REALLY REALLY good time.
@Mark:
I’m afraid you’re muddying the issue somewhat: there is a world of difference between your product selling poorly because there is no demand for it and selling poorly because people want it but decide to get it for free illegally (I know a lot of people here are adverse to the word “steal”, so let’s just continue to disagree on this point).
While piracy is indeed irrelevant to acts who wouldn’t have sold any records anyway, there’s reason to believe it’s also slowly killing those who otherwise would have a chance at a modest career. Hoping that one day the pirates will turn into paying customers is unrealistic – they may not and you may not live to see the day. What’s worse, these people are being educated, as we speak, that demanding payment for music is wrong. That’s what irks me most.
The question is one of philosophy on the one hand (pertaining to the nature of piracy, intellectual property and everything related – we’ll leave it for now) and business on the other. Business happens when there’s money involved and what artists need right now, are ways in which they can maximise their income streams. Otherwise we may one day find there’s nothing left to steal.
@ Leon Live-
According to his Reverb Nation Page John Taglieri made his career ‘playing the pig races’ ie Live performance.
@Karen
Ember Swift has a pre-existing career dating back to 1997 at least according to her website.
and as I stated before Ani Defranco also had a pre-existing career.
______________________
I guess I should explain better what I’m talking about…
The legend of the Arctic Monkeys is that the hard working lads positioned themselves on MySpace, and through people loving their songs and the snowball from that they became ‘successful’.
The reality is that palms were greased, people were paid all around by the label that is how the snowball got started.
I don’t entirely have issue with the way it ultimately happened, but it makes it very clear that the ‘your song as promo’ model doesn’t really work without MASSIVE numbers and endorsement from people in a better position than you. Obviously, if I were in that position with my project I would work to position and license off the fame, but I’m waiting to hear about a situation where someone did this without having to deal with the industry gate keepers.
So what is an internet success story in my mind? Kimbo Slice-the MMA fighter who is now a fallen hero, is one. The fact that he could not maintain his position not withstanding, the fact that he went from a backyard Florida brawler to almost a house hold name is an extreme and phenomenal example. I don’t think everyone (anyone?) should expect this level of success but I think the point is valid.
Having thousand of people enjoy your work and make NO attempt to contribute to your career and reward you for your work to me does not thrill me. I like the idea of bringing joy to people’s lives, but not based on me taking a loss. For those who want to spend hours, days, weeks and months of their time thousands of their own money for a pat on the back, I admire your gumption, I just don’t have it…or want it. I don’t think anyone here, including me expects to put out songs and make millions, but I have to agree that it is insult to (self?) injury to have someone say “I loved your songs so much that I stoled every one! Music should be free anyway…”
I have to get back to one of my many jobs (the life of a free-lancer) but I intend to make my next post about what I see working-hopefully it can turn into a fun little idea jam!
Hi all,
I just wanted to say thanks to those of you who have complimented my music and also who have articulated my feelings better than I could.
I also want to thank Christopher and those who gave me some helpful pointers about our website. Some of those things I hadn’t thought about, and some of them I just hadn’t gotten around to fixing yet. [I do the website... I'm self-taught, but I'm free.] But making those changes just moved higher up on my ” to do” list.
My head is spinning from so many comments, and I don’t think I have anything brilliantly insightful to add which hasn’t already been said by someone else. But the bottom line for me, I think, is the basic fact that there is a huge contingent out there taking away our right to be upset. They’re telling us we are wrong to be mad. So all of the other philosophies and viewpoints aside, it just seems really violating, not only of the control over our own work, but of our very emotions. That’s the part that is so hard to get past.
Andrew, I appreciate you maintaining a fair approach and will check out the links mentioned.
Great blog, great responses.
Tough, complex, and evolving subject, and I kind of flip between opinions.
Licensing is mentioned as an income stream – note however that this is being eroded very quickly, as many production companies no longer feel that they should be paying for music, either, and that the exposure should be payment enough. Next on the chopping block – royalties. It’s happening already – in addition to not wanting to pay, production companies want you to split royalties with them. Attitudes regarding perceived value of music go beyond the individual consumer.
Some thoughts on marketing your music as an artists….
I was thinking about streaming v.s. giving away tracks. Is streaming the new ‘radio’? It would be great if you could stream anywhere. I used to tape songs I liked from the radio. I’d buy the album, not just for the songs, but as mentioned elsewhere on this blog, because of artifact – owning something tangible, feeling like you had a real ‘piece’ of the band, you belonged. You couldn’t call yourself a fan of a group if you owned none of their records, could you? You don’t buy songs. You don’t buy music. Really, you buy an artifact, and legally speaking, you buy a license to use the music for personal purposes.
So a question could be, what’s the new artifact? What is non-reproducible, unique, experiential, in-demand, that artists can offer? How can they tie it in to their music product?
I think Mr. Dubber has offered some interesting ideas – the “metatagging”, offering more ‘information’. But there is something beyond that, too, something beyond merchandise. Lots of challenges and opportunities.
SO MANY GROUPS… so much good music… how to differentiate? What makes you worthwhile? What’s your angle? How many angles could there possibly be? So many do the same thing – for instance, the band photo. They say ‘make it dynamic!’, yet what do you see – shot after shot of the static band, nicely arranged and composed, staring earnestly into the lens.
GET IN A DAMNED BATHTUB or something already!
In any case, I think you have to be smart and agile, and come up with some pretty interesting ideas to make people give a care about you and what you do. New thinking will likely win, regardless of right/wrong re: piracy. BUT – it could be slim pickin’s, too…
Woah, RAMBLE ON why don’t I?
I don’t think anyone is saying it’s wrong to be mad, or that you’re unjustified in being frustrated, only that it’s pointless. You can either be annoyed that the industry changed out from under your college aspirations and intentions, or you can find a way to work within the new system.
Fascinating discussion ! I’m really interested in these issues because they affect many of my independent customers.
@Ellen, you said “there is a huge contingent out there taking away our right to be upset” and I completely understand what you mean.
Actually I don’t think people are denying your right though, I think they are saying your reasons for being upset are misguided.
Regardless – whether you have “a right” to be upset or not, the fact is you’re angry, what can you do about it ?
I think you’ve made a good start by posting here and expressing yourself well about it. But having done that, you need to take action to move forward. If you don’t, nothing will change and you’ll just end up feeling worse.
How can you feel less angry ? My guess is by making more money from your music, and I think that means trying some of the suggestions above and elsewhere on this site.
For example, here’s a fantastic podcast about how the internet makes a new “personal” approach to music and fans possible, and may show a way forward:
http://social-media-and-music.easyurl.net
Rather than moving those ideas up your to-do list, I think you should pick the ones you like and prioritise them. Hopefully then you will see some results and can feel better about things.
DON’T try and stop being angry, that’ll only make you miserable. But start taking steps to improve the situation so hopefully you don’t have to be angry in future.
Ian
@Krzysztof
In response to not having time to wait for those who are now stealing music instead of buying it growing into buying consumers, there are those that were in that situation that are now buying, so it’s not a case of waiting. They’re already out there. My point really was that it’s easy to point the finger at piracy.
Either way, piracy has always been around and I’m sure it always will be. So personally, I’m not going to spend my time worrying about it.
One of the real issues these days isn’t so much that people are being educated that they don’t have to pay for music, but that recorded music seems to be heading towards free even for those that are willing to pay for it.
The lala service that has recently been introduced is looking to sell tracks in the cloud for $0.10 per track. At that rate I’d need to sell a good couple of thousand before getting close to recouping recording costs on a simple track, let alone one I’ve slaved over.
Rather than worrying about piracy, I think we should be looking at ways to reduce costs and come up with innovative ways to sell our music. Adrian makes some good points about how bands and artists are going to have to come up with some new ideas if they’re going to make the cut in the digital world.
I actually agree with most of the points you made about giving your music away to increase your fan base and ultimately finding other ways to monetise but please….talk about double standards.
Alright so she may have been telling a few porkies but let’s give her the benefit of the doubt.On the face of it here is an artist who seems to be genuinely concerned about paying the bills and making a decent profit from all of her hard work and yes you are right to point out that file sharing and piracy of relatively unknown artists music can actually lead to increased sales and income from other sources like sync licensing but to end your post with this comment…..
“Let me know if you want any help with that. I’d be delighted and reasonably inexpensive”
Shouldn’t you be practicing what you preach and offer to help her for free, after all it could lead to increased sales and income sources for you!
I also found this in “The Twenty Things You Must Know About Music Online”
Yes, I’m a university lecturer. Yes, this probably concerns me more than it does most people — but you’re trying to business here, right?
Once again I found myself nodding in agreement with many of the points you made in this article but please, if you are going to criticize people for poor grammar you had better double check your own work.
Surely that should read
“but you’re trying to do business here, right?”
Your sentence doesn’t really make any sense
Pete http://www.antiqcool.co.uk
Wow, that was an amazing read. I’ve nothing of my own to really add, just that on reading Ellen’s post I was drawn in and started saying “Yeah, we artists have such a bum deal!”, and THEN, reading your reply Andrew, I now feel that it’s an exciting time with so much more potential than the old industry, and it’s in MY hands! Which is how i was at the start, but I’m definitely motivated for the day!
Exciting stuff, thank you :)
@Pete Smith-
I think we’ve gotten past the ‘snarky’ phase of this post. Everyone (including you apparently) is entitled to some typos…
@ everyone…
Think about Ellen’s post for a minute…
Let’s say her numbers are way off-let’s say only 100 people downloaded her music, is it too much to expect 1% to buy? Let’s say its only 1000…too much to expect .01% to buy? I guess what I keep seeing is that the friend’s friend’s friend who’s the buyer doesn’t seem to materialize in most digital enviroments with the exception of ITunes and Amazon…I’m very interested in what digital places produce ‘results’-i.e. $’s, and why?
@ Dubber-
Love to have your input…!
J,
I don’t claim to even be a model for sales seeing as how my last album was released as a free download but through Tunecore, I put my music on iTunes and eMusic figuring that would be the best places for hip hop. I haven’t garnered one sale from eMusic… but I earn on a monthly basis $30 – $50 from iTunes. Not astronomical numbers by any means… but not bad for an album that you can download for free from my website.
@Universal…
That’s good to know-my question is ‘is that because you already had fans because of your site’? Not that that is bad-I’m just curious…It’s really the ‘RadioHead/NIN’ download thing-it doesn’t count for us independents because we don’t have that kind of status. I’m really interested in what actually makes someone buy in the digital realm…
At the time I didn’t have any fans… I launched everything around the same time, the site, the blog, and my Tunecore campaign…
I got the idea from reading a post at http://www.digitalaudioinsider.com
in which he stated that even though he was giving away his album… he still garnared sales through Itunes…
Hmmm-
Very interesting. I’ve got some Internet, indie and (low level) terrestial radio play through ‘musicsubmit.com’. It hasn’t been long enough to know if we’ve made sales off the single.
I used Tunecore for placement but I didn’t see any promos they were doing that seemed worth the time/money. I might have to reconsider…
Thanks!
Andrew, or anybody out there listening.
Reading all these wonderful blog posts always gets me super excited about my band and my music. But from there i just cant take it anywhere… i have no idea what the next step should be, we have a strong online following and we have (thanks to your blog and my course at university) diversified into many of the social networking sites on the web. But were struggling to find the next step… a serious manager, an adoring A&R rep, someone that can guide the future of 5 unruly young men. We are very confident in our songwriting ability if you want to hear it go to http://www.myspace.com/sierramontana we have even self funded a video to promote.. but thousands of interested fans has led to no interested industry professionals…
We need guidance and we’re even happy to pay for it.
Matt
sierramontana.matt@gmail.com
@Matt
I’m in a similar situation (though a few steps behind you, but not much ;-)
I just recent gave in and checked out ‘www.sellaband.com’…I’m starting to think it’s not half bad…
J
“but thousands of interested fans has led to no interested industry professionals… ”
Right now, the major labels only seem to be interested in artists who are good at generating their own buzz (at least in hip hop it’s that way). I’m referring to beyond having some “plays” on MySpace and YouTube.
But why wait for a label to pick you up? It was always a gamble that a major would pick up indie acts even before the industry was in the shape that it was in….
Fantastic read.
Theres an old saying that goes “Innovate or Die”. And it would seem this artist should.
I am currently re-vamping my website (http://www.kirbysings.com) so it can be more intune with the new music consumers.
Keep up the great work.
Kirby
In my opinion, a good targeted marketing plan would be much more effective than just throwing your free music out there, hoping it lands somewhere. I realize there’s nothing that can be done about piracy at this point in time and it costs nothing to reproduce mp3s, but you can just as easily control your music (to a point) and still keep you and your fans happy. It’s just going to take more work than copying your mp3s many times over and uploading them somewhere.
There’s nothing “innovative” about giving away your product for free to the public. That’s just the easy way to mass marketing and has been done to death, and has been proven to get very little returns. You may get a few interested fans you would have never gotten otherwise, but are they fans that ACTUALLY care about you & your music? Don’t you think you would be better off targeting the audience your trying to reach?
Writ large, Andrew’s position appears to be “rape is inevitable so you must now learn to enjoy it and profit from it.” It’s a position that is sensible in the face of unstoppable piracy, and an abhorrent one to anyone with a conscience, a sense of fairplay or like Ellen, an investment in a business. Recorded music is just the sick canary in the coal mine. Movies are next. Books after that. This canary is lost, no question, but the incredible backload of potentially digitized product from a huge variety of industries now stalled to the network because of piracy speaks to how filesharing is not really the future of digital distribution at all, it’s actually the cause of stopping all that. It remains to be seen if the “coalmine” is saved, or even save-able, as a viable sales platform.
If digital in the future must mean free, then all digitized product is forever lost and the network becomes about promotion only, never again sales, and we must all find new and enjoyable, profitable ways to be raped. Welcome to a new generations concept of value and conscience. I feel for you, Ellen, and I’ll purchase your cd because real fans in any area of interest will always put their money where their mouth is.
@Sam I Am
Ok-Dude-c’mon. This is an emotional issue for a lot of people but stating that Dubber perspective is that ‘rape is inevitable…?’ is not only wrong but unnecessary. Dubber has repeatedly said that this is a forum for ideas and entrepreneurs to discuss ideas and has been not only kind enough to host it but also provided a place to have the discussion. Attacks like that are not going to make people listen to your point any better…
J, (and to all) my sincere apologies, perhaps I’m misunderstood. I’m not trying to be disrespectful, nor alarmist but I AM responding to Ellen’s feelings of “violation”. She is far from alone in this new assault of taking without paying.
I do not work in the industry, but earlier this month I attended the Future of Music Coalition’s seminar here in New York City and after 12 hours of horror stories, I came away shellshocked and deeply upset.
Here in Manhattan the general loss of royalty from falling sales/piracy is stripping indi freelance musicians of basics like their ability to afford health insurance, or purchase studio time, and it is driving Broadway musicians right out of town. Royalties from sales are an inherent part of the equation. Without sales and royalty, they can no longer afford classes, attend seminars, even pay Manhattan rent. They take straight jobs to survive and then cannot be available for recording work. It’s a nonreconcilable path to failure.
As a result, the musicians are less geographically available now and so the League of Producers is again seeking to use recorded music in the pits based upon the reality that these musicians can no longer afford to live near the theatres in which they work, so bad weather or transportation issues become obstacles to reliability. Trust fund kids are the new class of working musician here, because few others can compete with free and the overall feel of demoralization in pro music is as heartbreaking as it is furious.
The rollout from piracy will continue to be loathsome and damage more and more established musical careers because acceptance is the new “common sense” morality. It’s a very good thing past generations had a different integrity and a firmer resolve when faced with global issues of right and wrong. We’ll see–in all industries– where rolling over to infringement leads us. I apologize if my language has offended.
It’s an emotional issue, but at this point, anger isn’t going to help much. It’s understandable to be angry about some of this, and/or scared. It’s better to be smart and creative though, that will get more done…
J
many of you have been asking where the proof is that free mp3′s work for small bands.
I have a good buddy whose band (which i will not name) has never sold a song. Despite that, he myspace page has over 3,000,000 page views, 600,000 song plays and over 11,000 friends. Instead of spending money on expensive studio and busting his budget, he invested in t-shirt designs and prints, in which he successfully sold out of. To date, he has made around $2,000-$3,000 bucks. Although that isnt much, to me, that’s like getting paid by fans to be walking billboards. Comparitively speaking, Ellen, you make what? maybe a hundred bucks a month? He sold those shirts in less than 3 months.
I say his profit and success margin seems to be much higher than yours at the moment.
which also brings me to my point of the example:
1. Piracy, or at least how i have always used it as, is a good tool to understand what type of fans you have.
My buddy only succeeded because he constantly talked back to his fans and watched for what type of people who would download his music. He knew what was going to work, beyond just his liking for t shirt designs.
2. He was thrifty and he kept things simple.
Overall he spent no more than, 5,000 dollars on music, recording, computer equipment. Which means he breaking even right now. I stress the right now, because he has a proven growing fan base.
Secondly, he primarily operates out of his FREE myspace profile. Which might not work for you because you fans will be a different age demographic. Nonetheless, he doesnt make it overly complicated to get a hold of him and his free music.
3. Do as the Romans do. Romans were notorious for stealing opponents weapons, replicating them, improving them, and then using those same weapons against their opponents. Steal everybody elses strategies that work and try them out. Pride does not make a successful business.
My buddy tried the Radiohead “pay what you want” method. it didnt work, so he made his music entirely free and sold shirts.
there’s other things a could say, but none of it would pertinate enough to this specific topic.
hope this helps,
Austin
oh by the way, the band i am referencing to has only been around for a brief TWO YEARS
@Austin
Thanks for that suggestion. How does he sell the shirts? Did he have several hundred produced and then ship them out himself? Or did he sell them at gigs? Was the $2-3K actual profit?
Just curious.
Ellen
My neighbour wrote a book based just on this idea!
http://thepiratesdilemma.com/
Great stuff!
@Ellen-
I’ve been looking into this model myself, I’m not sure how he does it, but I highly suggest ‘drop shipping’ which allows you to only ship when necessary. There are a few companies that do this…
J
He sold just about all of them online. He has only played live a few times. he had maybe around 70-100 produced in the first batch, where he made about 1k. im not too sure about the second pressing, but i think he made around 1.5k. he has two designs, the first design was pretty popular which is why he pressed it twice. the second design he did wasn’t as popular therefore it didnt sell as fast, so i do know now how much he’s made off it.
im guessing actual profit was around $2,000-$2,500. He shipped them all himself, only using google checkout as his exchange medium, which probably saved him quite a bit of money.
It works for him, because of the context of his genre, metal, where band t shirts show some sort of respect/knowledge/etc. Also, he has extremely loyal fans, which is some ways was caused by his interactions with them.
Another simple suggestion that would work is going back to vinyl, but also give fans a means to get a free version of the album on a high quality mp3. Really it all depends on the fans you have and what you like and what they like.
Metallica / Ice Cream / Taxes
http://www.thesoloalbum.com/news/metallica_icecream_taxes.htm
BTW, it’s Ellen Tift, not Sift.
@Austin:
I’m cynical, so I have to ask: wouldn’t your friend have saved around $5000 if he ignored the music and just made the shirts? Alright, you can’t make t-shirts for a band you don’t have, but he could’ve made them for another band and split profits (he’d have earned less, but he’d have spent less) or simply made some cool designs that would’ve worked in the metal community without being associated with a particular artist. This strikes me as better business when you are selling clothing. Merch companies have been doing this for years and they’re certainly in a better position than musicians these days.
yes, he could, but the topic is not about how somebody could make t shirts for a living, its about how musicians can succeed without selling their music. furthermore, it only worked because he created the demand for the t shirts in the first place.
Another suggestion, Ellen, is that you could get extremely creative with actual package designs such as
Of Montreal’s Skeletal Lamping:
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=45596634
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/news/145992-of-montreal-unveil-skeletal-lamping-collection
Sometimes the best way to sell you album is if you make a demand for it. Heck, I might buy this album and i have no particular desire to listen to of montreal.
@Krzysztof Wiszniewski
If you think of it as Band=Brand, it makes perfect sense. After all, what makes someone buy your stuff twice? The fact that the recognize that you produce good product.
@Ellen-
Tried to put this up yesterday, but I kept getting knocked off…
A big thing to consider is how your audience may respond to merch. Metal bands can sell T’s all day, that’s their fan base. Hip Hop groups went more for clothing lines, not just the group themselves (but their was some of that).
I would put a lot of time into seeing which groups like yours merch and make sure you don’t invest in something that won’t produce results.
@Jay – that’s a really great book. A little bit loose with the definition of ‘piracy’, perhaps – but it really explains things very well.
Great chapter about the nun who invented disco… :)
@Austin: The thing is though, that the business your friend is in fact in is selling clothing. The music may have created the demand, but that could have been done in countless other ways, as I was trying to point out. He didn’t succeed as a musician, but as a T-shirt producer/retailer. He could’ve worked as a plumber with exactly the same result in relation to his music.
However, going back to vinyl is actually a pretty good idea if you can afford it, especially if you don’t offer a digital download. Digitising vinyl is more trouble than most people would consider worth their time for a relatively unknown artist.
@J: The argument about Band=Brand falls apart when the Band part ceases to be anything but a marketing expense in your business. You can probably achieve better results financially if you don’t brand through making your own music, because it’s simply too expensive to be sensible. I’m thinking that a $5000 advertising budget for a small startup business is pretty huge. You can do a lot of things with that kind of money.
krzysztof, it has become apparent to me that you do not know the music business and the people that follow such business very well. either that, or you are just playing the devils advocate.
the reason why one would also include a digital download with a vinyl is the sake of convience, the nice convience for the consumer. I have come across (and downloaded some) literally THOUSANDS of lps ripped to digital. why? records go out of print, but people, like me, would still like to hear their music. some of my favorite bands have been introduced to me that way. providing a high quality digital download not only ensures that the majority of the illegal downloaders are getting a good version of your music, but it also insures that somebody doesn’t rip a half-assed version of your lp that could thus hamper your progress.
for example, there is a band called empty silos echo war (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6321229984212977027), who released two lps with, what i think is, a 600 lp and 600 album pressing. luckily for me, i had a buddy who picked up the first lp and the second cd from them. I got to hear them, but can i say that for all of their onlooking fans? no, im betting most have not.
it all comes back to knowing your fans. many many of you go out of your way to explain how the average fan isnt going to get this, the average fan will buy this…etc…look, the “average fan” really only applies if you already have a substantial fan base! most bands (especially if you play in smaller genres) will only have fans, those who already actively watch what you do, who simply want something new and unexpecting to listen to. if your band is pulling 200+ (that’s pushing it) people each night you play you MIGHT be able to have an “average fan base,” but at that point piracy is probably not your major concern.
to put it simply: if you a jazz musician and affectionato, are you aiming to capture a kenny g fan or a jaco pastorius fan? im betting its the latter.
as for pointing out that he could try to make money by just selling tshirts , without a relation to music:
yes he could, but he is not trying to make a living sell t shirts. he makes music he cares about and profit happens to be the by-product of his success.
im sure you represent how a few people feel about the music industry, which is great, but at the same time, those are the same people who are flailing about right now.
Hi there,
Just came across this two-edged sword. I agree, there’s no point getting angry, resentful and bitter about less-than-legal downloads, and working with what we have, and trying to turn it to your advantage.
On the flipside, you have to admit it’s a pretty pathetic moral state we’ve reached when personal property, albeit “intelectual property”, is open slather. If you caught a person swiping your mobile phone, it would be on. No-one walks past a street sketch artist and just takes a charcoal drawing with $5.00 on it. You’d get punched out. So who decided it’s “cool”, “OK”, or “it’s just what happens” for people to just walk off with your music? Hmmm. Technology clearly overstepping the right/wrong boundary?? Personally, I’ve experienced heartbraking financial lows in the pursuit of music. And we’re not even seriously selling our music yet! I can see the point of the cyberspace ‘street sketchers’ having people just walk off with their property – but morally it’s even worse – the indy artists are in wheelchairs and can’t even chase the thief….
Working with a system you have is important – but still beggars the question – who decided that people have an inherent right to steal intellectual property?
Cheers
I know what you mean – except for the stealing bit. Copyright infringement is not theft.
For the drawing analogy, use a digital camera to take an identical copy of the artist’s work. No charcoal drawing has been sold – but the ‘infringer’ gets to take home the picture. Annoying as hell, perhaps – depending on your outlook. But still not stealing.
Digital camera owners are a swarthy bunch! (could not resist)
First of all worldwide groove is great…personaly i just love it… but from my perspective as a user.. they will get a lot more attention and feedback if they just let the damn thing get stolen..if you look at it this way: the only downside is that they wount get money from true fan’s that’s it… which they wount get it anyway.. if they dont spread their music… + points to: – their music will spread faster throughout the world – they will get more attention from the public – that leads to business opportunities and that leads to… that.. true fan’s will defenetly buy the cd and belive me at least 5% of the world listen to this kindof music.. so if you addup the equasion they will get their payback.. and besides their music is realy great.. i see no reason why they would’nt succeed?… and for all you idiot’s with comment’s about stealing and what’s who’s and what’s right.. in our modern fucked up society…its called commercialization & marketing.. live with it… take use of it.. spread the damn thing and let ppl know… you cant sell a banana to a monkey if the monkey doesn’t even know the banana exist’s….
Well, I just discovered Worldwide Groove Corporation because of this post and I’m listening to them right now. :) They officially have a new fan.
As a struggling musician myself, I’m am one of those who has, on the odd occasion, “acquried” music without paying for it and I have to agree with Andrew that I wouldn’t have actually paid for those particular mp3 anyway. I also figure that I am adding to the pool of music that people rip off the net so why can’t I take something back every now and then?
However, I must also say that I have also paid for some music this year too – I raced out and bought Sia’s CDs even though I knew I could find her stuff online for free. Why did I make an exception with her? Because I got REALLY excited about her music and I wanted to support a fellow Australian in her musical endeavours. I also bought Pomplamoose’s dongle since they are making a grass roots effort and have enormous talent. (You’ll notice I enjoy promoting my favourite musicians too ;)
I still haven’t worked out what the next step is for myself either – I haven’t invested much money in my music yet because I haven’t been able to afford it – I’ve just got some fans who like my raw and rough mostly live acoustic recordings of cover songs on Youtube and are telling me they are waiting for me to release a CD. I’m just worried I will spend money I don’t have on making professional recordings and buying mechanical licenses only to find that few people actually end up paying for the music. That would irritate me too!
So until I work out how to survive in the industry today, I won’t feel guilty too about enjoying other people’s music for free (I still buy the music I really want) and I’ll try not to be irritated that I don’t make money from the recordings I do which people rip off the net.
Kali Azzura
personally the only song I’ve ever been bothered to listen to is by the band ‘Come Down Jenny’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLm2RvAwiVo
http://www.musicthinktank.com/blog/the-new-music-industry-is-not-coming.html
Music piracy has it’s good and bad things.
For one, pirating music may give something to do instead of other crimes (but that’s kinda a stupid point).
Two, pirating music introduces people to new types of music, which they may enjoy a lot, and end up buying many albums of the same type.
Also, it gives a good idea of what to expect. Most people (with limited cash at least) won’t go into a music store and buy a random record. Usually it will be something they’ve been recommended or heard on the radio. “Piracy” gives people a chance to hear music that isn’t “popular” enough for the radio, hence promoting smaller, newer bands and artists.
The Cons:
It takes money away from people who have tried hard to get in the industry and create a record.
It helps spread computer viruses. :P
And more that I can’t think of.
mate, suck my right nip. you all bang on about this shit- cut it out little boys. and stop being counts to brad, he’s really cool you know! and hung
:P
At the end of the day music piracy is happening and its only going to carry on, and the industry can either change with the times and find other means of generating an income stream or end up fighting a loosing battle. Miilions of people arent just going to stop illegally downloading tracks.
http://www.musicthinktank.com/blog/the-new-music-industry-is-not-coming.html