"Even superstars have it tough . . . "

[shoodBworkin]

How One Generation Was Single-Handedly Able To Kill The Music Industry

http://elitedaily.com/music/how-one-gen ... ry/593411/

My favorite takeaway: Music discovery is at an all time high.

Don't forget to read the comments that follow that article. Lots of interesting views shared

[SirJamsalot]

How One Generation Was Single-Handedly Able To Kill The Music Industry

http://elitedaily.com/music/how-one-gen ... ry/593411/

My favorite takeaway: Music discovery is at an all time high.

Don't forget to read the comments that follow that article. Lots of interesting views shared

Item two: "Supply"

Most of the equipment required to create music has been absorbed into the DAW, while the software continues to get easier and easier to use. The end result is that artists can create music more quickly, more efficiently and less expensively than at any other time in history.

I wrote an article about 3 years ago on a similar topic, different industry - photography. The gist of that article was that if you never tasted sugar, you won't miss it. Since everyone is a self-proclaimed professional because they can now afford professional equipment, then the "true professional" who actually spent 20 years learning, cannot compete and so the professional product disappears from the market, and the consumer grows up in an world without that professional taste, so they don't miss it. I can't count the number of Professional Photography cover pages that makes my wife scratch her head "why is that unprofessional looking thing on the cover of a professional photography magazine?). If you hadn't guessed, my wife is a professional photographer who used to use actual medium format film in her portrait studio!

I guess you can also liken the phenomenon to the Vinyl vs CD sound debate (which will soon disappear altogether - I know if I had not explained to my 20 year old son what a vinyl record was, he would have never imagined it existed).

Anyways, very interesting article, thanks for sharing. Really reminded me of how print-media, photography and quite a few other fields are being replaced by technology that puts it in the hands of amateurs who think they are professional.

Me? I'm an amateur song-writer, but at least I know that I need to research!

Chris!

edit: p.s.
I read the comments after that article - there is a *lot* of animosity out there. People don't know how to deal with the explosion of freedom - sure you can make a song cheap now, but with 10 million radio stations, how do you air your music to more than 20 people, let alone get them to buy it when they can just listen to it for "free". There's a business model that hasn't surface yet, and people I think are feeling it, just like the professionals I talked about up there. How do you make money?! haha.

I think another interesting question is, what big industry is next in line to suffer the fate of record labels? I'd say the movie industry. We still have movie theatres, but I don't see how they can weather the free-for-all independent movie movement, and every computer / iphone being a home-movie entertainment center to watch them (for free). hmm.

[shoodBworkin]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I believe you're right about the movie industry being next. Piracy, diminishing attention spans, home theaters sporting eighty inch screens . . . it'll be an interesting couple of years . . .

[jonnybutter]

I couldn't see the comments (maybe it's the browser I'm on) but I found the post to be of limited value. It's an interesting artifact though, so I'm glad you shared it.

Some of it is obviously a correct statement of facts, but there's lots of vague stuff in there too. For example: " A new generation of artists has hit the scene and they thrive on attention rather than units of music they sell.". Is 'thrive' the right word there? I'd say 'no'. And part of the article is really about how there *is* no 'scene' to hit; it asks a rhetorical question it then doesn't answer.

In fact, it doesn't answer any important questions at all, that I can see, or stake an opinion on them.

We already know the music business has changed radically - is changing radically. AND?? The only answer I see here is "get sponsored by a big brand, which will get you attention, and then you can try to sell a lot of t shirts". I know merch matters, but that doesn't sound like a plan to me....

'Free content' AKA "You are the product" is the worst idea to come along in a long time. It's reverse jack-and-the beanstalk - in exchange for a few free beans you give up a magical beanstalk.

[themichaelscott]

Now that everyone can make music can we start weeding out the generic?

I "accidently" got sucked in to the latest documentary of Nikki Minaj on MTV. She mentioned something about how no one really puts any effort into their raps anymore. I think her words were "they are just getting by."

I am surprised radio is at 65% for the source to keep up to date. I have really never understood mainstream radio. I understand payola but why can't stations play a variety of music. Does Maroon 5 really have to be played EVERY hour? Maybe it comes down to the Spotify situation where ad revenue just isn't enough to keep the ship afloat so radio has to rely on major label money. All my life I have never really listened to the radio because there is no variety and mainstream music is so redundant. Now that I'm older and out of the peer to peer referral of great, lesser known music I have to search for originality. With music discovery at an all time high why can't radio catch on to this and ignore all the crap?

I guess my generation and younger have muddied the waters, but there is still some great fishing. Thank you internet.

Michael

[SirJamsalot]

Now that everyone can make music can we start weeding out the generic?

I "accidently" got sucked in to the latest documentary of Nikki Minaj on MTV. She mentioned something about how no one really puts any effort into their raps anymore. I think her words were "they are just getting by."

I am surprised radio is at 65% for the source to keep up to date. I have really never understood mainstream radio. I understand payola but why can't stations play a variety of music. Does Maroon 5 really have to be played EVERY hour? Maybe it comes down to the Spotify situation where ad revenue just isn't enough to keep the ship afloat so radio has to rely on major label money. All my life I have never really listened to the radio because there is no variety and mainstream music is so redundant. Now that I'm older and out of the peer to peer referral of great, lesser known music I have to search for originality. With music discovery at an all time high why can't radio catch on to this and ignore all the crap?

I guess my generation and younger have muddied the waters, but there is still some great fishing. Thank you internet.

Michael

I agree - but radio has always been a "same 50 songs a day" industry. It is the product of what song-writers on this site I think are trying to study/leverage - the mainstream listener (and let's just acknowledge there is such a thing) expects a familiar pattern, no matter what the genre is

As for music discovery - where does one even begin to advertise their music? Everyone and their uncle has an internet music site now, and I don't know if there is a centralized submission point like was the case back in the day for getting your site listed on all the major search engines. We're in the thick of figuring things out - so while it's a mess, there's lots of opportunities, but you gotta put your thinking cap on as a song-writer (or anyone for that matter) to get heard in that rather large sea.

didn't intend to hijack if I veered slightly off topic, but it's one of the difficulties in this discussion I think.

[Len911]

The music industry is dead?

Surely the broader economy affects the music industry. Also the economic system. There's probably more money being made but not distributed in the same way.

[eliforshort]

Honestly, I'm pretty sick of hearing about what's "killing the industry". All industries change. Everything is changing constantly. We are at a point as a species that our technological advance is measured in weeks and months, instead of years and decades.

I think it's great that "superstars have it tough". I'm wishing and praying for the day that you don't have to spend $1000000 just to promote a song to radio, because it's not physically possible to earn that much back afterwards. All this stuff about "Oh, the artist doesn't get paid because they got a $400000 advance to make a video". WHY DID THAT VIDEO COST THAT MUCH!? There's no reason for it. You also don't need to spend $300000 to make a record. Or at least, you shouldn't. The majors really NEED to 'crumble' for this industry to make the change it needs to make.

In the meantime, as an artist, it's all about adaptability. Find a way to create something that people will want, then find a way to get it to them. It shouldn't cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars, therefore you shouldn't expect to make hundreds of thousands of dollars. What the record companies are still selling to artists is this weird dream that we're supposed to aspire to, the rock star lifestyle, the screaming fans, whatever, when they know full well the value of an artist at a major label level is really no more than a grass roots level. I'd rather spend a bit of money and make more than spend a lot of money and make it all back.

Anyway, I'm sorta ranting now. I just know that all that matters is a dedication to learning your craft and a ton of hard work. It doesn't matter how much money you spent on a video if you have a supremely creative idea or an amazing song. It doesn't matter who produced your record if it's undeniably great. Seems to me that the artists that are complaining about a broken system are either A) Not very good, B) Great, but signed a shitty deal, or C) Haven't arrived where they thought they would be, probably due to inflated expectations.

Good luck out there, TAXI friends. It's a tough business, I guess, but you can choose to be upset about that, or choose to be challenged and therefore better for it. I'm going to keep on choosing the latter.

-Elias

[jonnybutter]

Seems to me that the artists that are complaining about a broken system are either A) Not very good, B) Great, but signed a shitty deal, or C) Haven't arrived where they thought they would be, probably due to inflated expectations.

Yeah, all those disgruntled losers like Taylor Swift, David Byrne, Black Keys, The Beatles (Northern Songs), ASCAP, etc. It's a VERY long list.

The article that spawned this thread isn't exactly complaining, despite the headline, which is just clickbait. And I would characterize it not as a broken system, but as no 'system' at all.

The problem here, IMHO, is the model: content is free (or, your share of .08 cents per 1000 streams). Of course it doesn't cost $500k to make an album or video anymore, but it still takes time to gestate and realize. The current model is: your time and ideas are worth $0. Sell tee shirts.

Everybody has tee shirts. Everybody has a studio. Everybody has a website. 'Free' is not a business model. All I'm sayin'.

[shoodBworkin]

So Taylor Swift drummed up some media churn by taking all her music off Spotify, big deal. Isn't her stuff still available on Youtube? And even if it isn't you can always go to the local library, take home 1989 and burn yourself a copy, right?

Ever since they stuck dual cassette decks on a boombox back in the early 80s music has been 'free'. Lots of folks made wonderful mix tapes off the radio, and wonderful album mixes (like The White Album WITHOUT "Why Don't We Do It In The Road" and "Wild Honey Pie" lol). To non-audiophilic ears does the music on those tapes sound appreciably worse than stinky mp3s? Sticking a CD burner on every computer didn't help the industry either. The 'Honor System' isn't much of a business model.

If you're in a band with a heavy touring schedule over a large geographic area you can probably still make money selling CDs at gigs (and T-shirts!!) but how many of the folks who hang around this forum still do serious gigging? Once you hit 40 and your back starts to hurt from humping the PA and the B3, and your spouse starts bellyaching because of your late hours and you missed the PTA meeting, well . . .

So thanks to dual-cassette boomboxes and CD burners and Youtube, Spotify, Pandora, Rdio, 8tracks, Songza, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, your local library etc . . . music is a free, and due to today's "liquid attention" span, an increasingly disposable medium, and until the EMP goes off and takes down the grid it will remain so, imo.

But isn't that kinda liberating for those artists who simply can't NOT create music? Knowing music is free frees the artist to make whatever music she feels, without having to compete with the (by my rough estimate) 250 billion other people out there also making tracks, and without having to constantly 'adapt' to suit whatever silliness these darned whippersnappers like to hear nowadays lol.

And, if you need a paycheck once in a while to show the wife you can always crank out stuff for libraries like those guys you read about in taxi's "Success Stories".

Above all, enjoy life! You never know what you're gonna come back as . . .