I’m certain I would have become a right nuisance to the Ramones
November 17, 2014 2:24 PM Subscribe
Steve Albini on the current state of the music industry: "It was the beginning of what we would call the peer network. By mid-90s there were independent labels and distributors moving millions of dollars of records and CDs. And there was a healthy underground economy of bands making a reasonable income owing to the superior efficiencies of the independent methods... So, that was the system as it was. That’s what we lost when the internet made everything available everywhere for free. And make no mistake about it, we have lost it.
But for a minute I want you to look at the experience of music from a fan’s perspective, post-internet. Music that is hard to find was now easy to find. In response I had more access to music than I had ever imagined... This audience-driven music distribution has other benefits. Long-forgotten music has been given a second life. And bands whose music that was ahead of its time has been allowed to reach a niche audience that the old mass distribution failed to find for them, as one enthusiast turns on the next and this forgotten music finally gets it due."
This was the keynote address at this years Face The Music conference in Melbourne.
Steve Albini in 1993: The Problem With Music
This was the keynote address at this years Face The Music conference in Melbourne.
Steve Albini in 1993: The Problem With Music
hat’s what we lost when the internet made everything available everywhere for free.... Music that is hard to find was now easy to find. In response I had more access to music than I had ever imagined...
And yet I still have a not-insignificant list of records that I cannot buy in the store or online, nor can they be found online. (Or so I hear.)
Madness.
posted by entropicamericana at 2:28 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
And yet I still have a not-insignificant list of records that I cannot buy in the store or online, nor can they be found online. (Or so I hear.)
Madness.
posted by entropicamericana at 2:28 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
"To satisfy this requirement and keep the promotional money flowing, radio stations often played tiny fragments of songs jumbled one after the other in any incomprehensible flow during late-night programming hours, to satisfy the programming requirement that they add songs to their playlist."
Does anyone have any recordings of this? Just curious.
posted by JoeZydeco at 2:34 PM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]
Does anyone have any recordings of this? Just curious.
posted by JoeZydeco at 2:34 PM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]
I'm madly infatuated with a certain Norwegian pop/folk goddess. Twenty years ago I probably wouldn't have heard of her and if I had for whatever lucky reason I would have probably had to import her CDs at great expense. Luckily I caught her first two albums on iTunes. But the next two didn't get a release so far outside of Europe. They're not on the two iTunes stores I have access to. International distribution agreements, market segmentation and all that bullshit.
Three steps forward, two steps back.
posted by Talez at 2:36 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
Three steps forward, two steps back.
posted by Talez at 2:36 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
I read this earlier today. Steve Albini is usually good about being cynical and critical, so I'm bewildered that he's so optimistic here. And he's right about a lot of things: it's been better for music fans than it's ever been. We have access to a significant portion of the entirety of recorded music, at our fingertips. Maybe our analysis stops there and we're happy. But I wish he'd tempered his optimism with some of the more sobering realities of how things work now. It's true that you can share your music effortlessly and (more or less) freely (I say more or less because Soundcloud is monetizing, Bandcamp is sure to follow and you're the product being sold). However, actually getting anyone to give a fuck is harder than ever before. The problem now, essentially, is that access and availability is so unprecedented that no one could possibly care about yours. The burden of gaining attention is perplexing and insurmountable, especially now that the artist is expected to bear that burden herself now, by leveraging social media and connections. It's the equivalent of two full-time jobs, and good luck.
One of the great not-so-secrets is that everyone you've heard of in this attention economy, no matter how DIY or fearlessly experimental - Tim Hecker, to use one example Albini mentioned - has a hired publicist. This is how music gets attention, how it gets distributed. After all, people still need curation, especially now that there's a firehose of content getting disseminated. Music gets press and attention when it goes through specific channels - professional PR, publicists, industry connections and favors. The gatekeepers might look different, they might be a little more porous than before, but they're still gatekeepers. If you're Joe Unknown band, you're not going to get by just by uploading something to Soundcloud and waiting for people to discover your unheralded brilliance. Word of mouth is not going to magically happen. The old, traditional ways of doing things are more important than ever before, dishearteningly. The game hasn't changed as much as we'd like to think. In some ways, there are increasing signs that it's getting worse: look at Mark Kozelek's recent trollish press-baiting antics, musicians increasingly getting attention in non-musical ways - causing controversies, pulling Death Grips stunts, sniping at each other, whatever to get in the press. Maybe that beats getting in a van and relentlessly touring, like Albini used to do. But we're more cynical and crass now, and something's been lost.
Again, from the perspective of a music listener who doesn't need to care about that, it's fine - you don't even need new music or discovery of unknown talent. You can live the rest of your life exploring obscure gems from the 60s and 70s. But I wish Albini had at least mentioned some of the realities of how music gets disseminated today. One of his main statements: "It’s no longer necessary to spend money to let people hear your band. It happens automatically" - just reads as patently false to me. He spends plenty of time working with relatively unknown bands, so I would think he's smarter than that.
posted by naju at 2:46 PM on November 17, 2014 [18 favorites]
One of the great not-so-secrets is that everyone you've heard of in this attention economy, no matter how DIY or fearlessly experimental - Tim Hecker, to use one example Albini mentioned - has a hired publicist. This is how music gets attention, how it gets distributed. After all, people still need curation, especially now that there's a firehose of content getting disseminated. Music gets press and attention when it goes through specific channels - professional PR, publicists, industry connections and favors. The gatekeepers might look different, they might be a little more porous than before, but they're still gatekeepers. If you're Joe Unknown band, you're not going to get by just by uploading something to Soundcloud and waiting for people to discover your unheralded brilliance. Word of mouth is not going to magically happen. The old, traditional ways of doing things are more important than ever before, dishearteningly. The game hasn't changed as much as we'd like to think. In some ways, there are increasing signs that it's getting worse: look at Mark Kozelek's recent trollish press-baiting antics, musicians increasingly getting attention in non-musical ways - causing controversies, pulling Death Grips stunts, sniping at each other, whatever to get in the press. Maybe that beats getting in a van and relentlessly touring, like Albini used to do. But we're more cynical and crass now, and something's been lost.
Again, from the perspective of a music listener who doesn't need to care about that, it's fine - you don't even need new music or discovery of unknown talent. You can live the rest of your life exploring obscure gems from the 60s and 70s. But I wish Albini had at least mentioned some of the realities of how music gets disseminated today. One of his main statements: "It’s no longer necessary to spend money to let people hear your band. It happens automatically" - just reads as patently false to me. He spends plenty of time working with relatively unknown bands, so I would think he's smarter than that.
posted by naju at 2:46 PM on November 17, 2014 [18 favorites]
We have access to a significant portion of the entirety of recorded music...
Not questioning you directly, naju, but I'm really curious as to how true this is - out of all recorded music, is most of it available online? Is there any way to really know (especially given invite-only sharing sites)?
Is there a reliable catalog of all recorded music? How does it account for independent/underground recordings?
posted by jammy at 2:56 PM on November 17, 2014
Not questioning you directly, naju, but I'm really curious as to how true this is - out of all recorded music, is most of it available online? Is there any way to really know (especially given invite-only sharing sites)?
Is there a reliable catalog of all recorded music? How does it account for independent/underground recordings?
posted by jammy at 2:56 PM on November 17, 2014
I made sure to say "a significant portion" because sure, there's tons and tons of stuff that's not available online. But a hell of a lot of it is, right?
posted by naju at 2:57 PM on November 17, 2014
posted by naju at 2:57 PM on November 17, 2014
One of his main statements: "It’s no longer necessary to spend money to let people hear your band. It happens automatically" - just reads as patently false to me. He spends plenty of time working with relatively unknown bands, so I would think he's smarter than that.
I think that it's more that from his perspective, that's what it seems like. We tend to forget that what may seem like a "natural" presentation is most likely something very choreographed. And that pulling that off takes a lot of work.
I also think that, considering how much he talked about it, he should be reminded of the old saw about artists dying from exposure.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:58 PM on November 17, 2014
I think that it's more that from his perspective, that's what it seems like. We tend to forget that what may seem like a "natural" presentation is most likely something very choreographed. And that pulling that off takes a lot of work.
I also think that, considering how much he talked about it, he should be reminded of the old saw about artists dying from exposure.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:58 PM on November 17, 2014
Also I think the concerns about streaming music are very merited. The model appears to be unsustainable in the long term - for artists, and for the companies themselves unless they're bought out by an Apple or Google. Theoretically there's a wonderful streaming service model where artists and labels get paid fairly, consumers get a fair price, and the distribution channels get compensated handsomely, but I don't think Spotify, Rdio, et al have managed this yet. Things are very off and I wonder what we'll do about it.
posted by naju at 3:03 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
posted by naju at 3:03 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
Listeners want to take music for free, but if you actually to give them your music for free, they'll freak out about freedom and security and disrespect. Its a conundrum.
posted by Joey Michaels at 3:07 PM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by Joey Michaels at 3:07 PM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
His comment on the price of merchandise and events strikes me as a bit unsupported - I've heard the argument that the arrow of causality is the other way around, that because bands can't make money on the music anymore, they have to make it on those products.
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:09 PM on November 17, 2014
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:09 PM on November 17, 2014
Listeners want to take music for free, but if you actually to give them your music for free, they'll freak out about freedom and security and disrespect. Its a conundrum.
The problem with the U2 album wasn't that it was free, it was that it was mandatory.
posted by dng at 3:09 PM on November 17, 2014 [24 favorites]
The problem with the U2 album wasn't that it was free, it was that it was mandatory.
posted by dng at 3:09 PM on November 17, 2014 [24 favorites]
I guess you could argue for days over what a "significant portion" is, exactly, and whether it's accessible online today, but there's no way that the majority of recorded music is available for download (legally or otherwise).
Hour for hour, the bulk of recorded music probably still lives (or rather, is slowly dying) in studio archives. Very likely not on digital formats but analog tape. Of this massive back-catalog, only some has ever been pressed onto a distribution format like vinyl and sold. Of that, only some is popular enough to merit a re-release on a digital format, and — with exceptions where enthusiasts have DIYed themselves digital versions direct from vinyl or another format — that forms the basis of what you can find online. It's further sorted by the nature of both economics (on the legal music side) and how BitTorrent works (on the greymarket side); stuff that isn't popular basically doesn't exist.
The subset of music that you can find on the Internet gets better the more recently the recordings were made, but it's a little disappointing to me that the "long tail" never really opened up the way some people thought it was likely to.
Both the legal and illegal music distribution pipelines are geared heavily towards getting you the same music, which is often as not recently-released pop. You can listen to Top 40 music in any one of fifteen different ways (including the colossal waste of bandwidth that is broadcast FM radio) but if you want to listen to something really obscure from the pre-CD era you may very well be S.O.L.
It's kind of a strange situation and I don't think it's where anyone thought we'd end up 20 years ago, that's for sure.
posted by Kadin2048 at 3:11 PM on November 17, 2014
Hour for hour, the bulk of recorded music probably still lives (or rather, is slowly dying) in studio archives. Very likely not on digital formats but analog tape. Of this massive back-catalog, only some has ever been pressed onto a distribution format like vinyl and sold. Of that, only some is popular enough to merit a re-release on a digital format, and — with exceptions where enthusiasts have DIYed themselves digital versions direct from vinyl or another format — that forms the basis of what you can find online. It's further sorted by the nature of both economics (on the legal music side) and how BitTorrent works (on the greymarket side); stuff that isn't popular basically doesn't exist.
The subset of music that you can find on the Internet gets better the more recently the recordings were made, but it's a little disappointing to me that the "long tail" never really opened up the way some people thought it was likely to.
Both the legal and illegal music distribution pipelines are geared heavily towards getting you the same music, which is often as not recently-released pop. You can listen to Top 40 music in any one of fifteen different ways (including the colossal waste of bandwidth that is broadcast FM radio) but if you want to listen to something really obscure from the pre-CD era you may very well be S.O.L.
It's kind of a strange situation and I don't think it's where anyone thought we'd end up 20 years ago, that's for sure.
posted by Kadin2048 at 3:11 PM on November 17, 2014
In hindsight, my takeaway of the U2 fiasco is that it lead to a kind of mass realization of the man behind the curtain, and that's where the underlying horror was really coming from. Privacy, the unhipness of U2, these are all red herrings. The real problem is we all collectively realized a truth: the product is utterly disposable, now and forever; the channel of distribution is everything now.
posted by naju at 3:12 PM on November 17, 2014 [7 favorites]
posted by naju at 3:12 PM on November 17, 2014 [7 favorites]
The problem with the U2 album wasn't that it was free, it was that it was mandatory.
They missed an amazing opportunity when they sent everyone the latest U2 album instead of Weird Al.
posted by Kadin2048 at 3:12 PM on November 17, 2014 [7 favorites]
They missed an amazing opportunity when they sent everyone the latest U2 album instead of Weird Al.
posted by Kadin2048 at 3:12 PM on November 17, 2014 [7 favorites]
The concluding five paragraphs are so, so good. And the concluding two paragraphs let you know for sure it's Albini.
posted by mr_roboto at 3:16 PM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by mr_roboto at 3:16 PM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
Steve sez:
As a result [of the unprecedented level of availability] fans are more ardent for this music. They are willing to spend more on seeing it played live. They are willing to buy more ephemera and eager to establish a personal relationship to the people who make the music. Gig prices have escalated as a result. And the merchandise tables at gigs are universally teeming with activity.
This sounds more than a little bit like the "well, sure, the market for recordings have collapsed, but savvy business-minded bands and innovators will figure out how to sell fans t-shirts and other merchandise in order to make up for it -- and no one can duplicate a live performance!"
Live performances have scaling problems relating to geographic density of a fan base, travel costs, and inherent limits in reproducability.
And saying people should sell t-shirts or something else besides performances/recordings is just another way of saying that musicians have to have another job besides actually making music.
posted by weston at 3:23 PM on November 17, 2014 [6 favorites]
As a result [of the unprecedented level of availability] fans are more ardent for this music. They are willing to spend more on seeing it played live. They are willing to buy more ephemera and eager to establish a personal relationship to the people who make the music. Gig prices have escalated as a result. And the merchandise tables at gigs are universally teeming with activity.
This sounds more than a little bit like the "well, sure, the market for recordings have collapsed, but savvy business-minded bands and innovators will figure out how to sell fans t-shirts and other merchandise in order to make up for it -- and no one can duplicate a live performance!"
Live performances have scaling problems relating to geographic density of a fan base, travel costs, and inherent limits in reproducability.
And saying people should sell t-shirts or something else besides performances/recordings is just another way of saying that musicians have to have another job besides actually making music.
posted by weston at 3:23 PM on November 17, 2014 [6 favorites]
Also, there are a lot of us out there who prefer mature studio work to live performance anyway and always have. For me, the only draw to a concert that isn't Shearwater or Low is a chance to meet the brains behind the record. Recordings are just vastly better representations of the underlying musical ideas than live performance to some of us. YMMV.
posted by saulgoodman at 3:35 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
posted by saulgoodman at 3:35 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
I'm willing to bet that 75% of the weird discs you find at a thriftstore probably aren't digitized. So many weird christian albums from the 70s
posted by Ferreous at 3:55 PM on November 17, 2014
posted by Ferreous at 3:55 PM on November 17, 2014
There are some nice things and true things that Albini says, but (with a tip of the hat to naju for spurring me on) the more I think about it the the more alarmingly naive it seems. The idea that there aren't middlemen anymore is insane. As ever, musicians are paying for access and prominence within a system, hoping to break through enough to where money comes back the other way. Rather than a big label controlling the content itself, you have several big tech companies controlling the access and visibility of content. Even if you 100% accepted that you don't get paid for "intellectual property" anymore there are still a thousand other exciting new digital ways for musicians to be exploited.
There are so many ripe targets in the current climate for that old Albini cynicism, but the reality is that he probably just doesn't understand them. I know he's speaking from his own perspective and that of the many working musicians he rubs elbows with at his studio, but...Electrical ain't that cheap. I think his milieu is basically people who already have the access/distro thing sorted out, whether by fortune or pluck, DIY or label-supported.
Nobody oughta be booking time at Electrical without firm knowledge that somebody's going to be able to know about/find/buy the record, else it would be an insane extravagance. And it's that access/distro angle that he just happens not to talk about at all, or he assumes that it just works out magically for everybody.
posted by anazgnos at 3:56 PM on November 17, 2014 [4 favorites]
There are so many ripe targets in the current climate for that old Albini cynicism, but the reality is that he probably just doesn't understand them. I know he's speaking from his own perspective and that of the many working musicians he rubs elbows with at his studio, but...Electrical ain't that cheap. I think his milieu is basically people who already have the access/distro thing sorted out, whether by fortune or pluck, DIY or label-supported.
Nobody oughta be booking time at Electrical without firm knowledge that somebody's going to be able to know about/find/buy the record, else it would be an insane extravagance. And it's that access/distro angle that he just happens not to talk about at all, or he assumes that it just works out magically for everybody.
posted by anazgnos at 3:56 PM on November 17, 2014 [4 favorites]
Recordings are just vastly better representations of the underlying musical ideas than live performance to some of us.
I'll have to differ. Often, when the recording is 'better', it just signals to me how incapable the band is as a live act, and how much influence third parties like hired musicians, engineers, and producers influenced the recording. Often, the big reveal at a live show is, 'hey, those *musicians* actually can't even keep time.'
To get embarrassingly wonky, I often don't even think a studio recording is actually a realization of an idea. It's a more-sophisticated and expensive imagining of an idea - an imagining with better technique, better players, and better arrangement than dude could actually 'real'-ize.
/liveMusicIsMusicPedentry
posted by j_curiouser at 4:22 PM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]
I'll have to differ. Often, when the recording is 'better', it just signals to me how incapable the band is as a live act, and how much influence third parties like hired musicians, engineers, and producers influenced the recording. Often, the big reveal at a live show is, 'hey, those *musicians* actually can't even keep time.'
To get embarrassingly wonky, I often don't even think a studio recording is actually a realization of an idea. It's a more-sophisticated and expensive imagining of an idea - an imagining with better technique, better players, and better arrangement than dude could actually 'real'-ize.
/liveMusicIsMusicPedentry
posted by j_curiouser at 4:22 PM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]
Recordings are just vastly better representations of the underlying musical ideas than live performance to some of us. YMMV.
I can understand saying you prefer listening to stuff at home vs going out to a show, but as far as the music, or musical ideas, etc go, this just seems like a crazy huge generalization. There are so many factors involved in how well any particular musical gesture scans in any particular environment vs another. There are experiences that simply don't translate from one forum to another.
posted by anazgnos at 4:29 PM on November 17, 2014 [5 favorites]
I can understand saying you prefer listening to stuff at home vs going out to a show, but as far as the music, or musical ideas, etc go, this just seems like a crazy huge generalization. There are so many factors involved in how well any particular musical gesture scans in any particular environment vs another. There are experiences that simply don't translate from one forum to another.
posted by anazgnos at 4:29 PM on November 17, 2014 [5 favorites]
I beg to differ, j_artificer. I don't like live concerts and never have as an art form. It's an inferior medium. And I've played hundreds of shows in my lifetime, and have been fortunate enough to see some of the very best. On balance, I would still take a record over a concert any day (it's just honestly much more enjoyable to me to listen to a good recording; my wife and a lot of other people I've asked agree).
posted by saulgoodman at 4:35 PM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]
posted by saulgoodman at 4:35 PM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]
If we're being honest here, we could just admit that both our preferences are purely matters of personal taste and individual preference, but I seldom meet anyone willing to just leave it there at the truth.
posted by saulgoodman at 4:36 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
posted by saulgoodman at 4:36 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
If we're being honest here, we could just admit that both our preferences are purely matters of personal taste and individual preference, but I seldom meet anyone willing to just leave it there at the truth.
I'm surprised to hear that people would more readily accept "inferior artform" than "I just don't like going to shows"
posted by anazgnos at 4:50 PM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]
I'm surprised to hear that people would more readily accept "inferior artform" than "I just don't like going to shows"
posted by anazgnos at 4:50 PM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]
when the recording is 'better', it just signals to me how incapable the band is as a live act, and how much influence third parties like hired musicians, engineers, and producers influenced the recording.
So... what?
I mean, except for the issue that the wrong people are getting credit, which I would totally agree with -- sound engineer / producer types tend to get screwed heavily in the doling out of credit and identification with the music they help create -- why does that matter?
If it sounds good, it is good.
Assuming we are talking about music here, and not the playing of instruments.
posted by Kadin2048 at 4:56 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
So... what?
I mean, except for the issue that the wrong people are getting credit, which I would totally agree with -- sound engineer / producer types tend to get screwed heavily in the doling out of credit and identification with the music they help create -- why does that matter?
If it sounds good, it is good.
Assuming we are talking about music here, and not the playing of instruments.
posted by Kadin2048 at 4:56 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
Cutting out all the middlemen is nice and all, but it brings everything so much more nakedly back to connections. I'm in quite a few small-time bands, know people in lots more, occasionally run and promote gigs or do so sound, and let me tell you, the one major thing that correlates with how 'successful' a band is or will be (in the sense of generating interest and having people actually listen to the music and come to the gigs)? The number of friends the people in the band have, and the quality and quantity of their connections in the 'scene'. Everything is networking now (a word which leaves exactly the same taste in mouth as 'nepotism'.)
posted by Dysk at 5:03 PM on November 17, 2014 [5 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 5:03 PM on November 17, 2014 [5 favorites]
Well, art forms and inferiority and superiority are all pretty subjective and arbitrary things aren't they? (I just automatically append "to me" to any claims about taste in my mental filter. Art is generally incompatible with absolutes.)
Yep. It's more about money and connections now than ever before, Dysk, that's consistent with what I've seen, too. Exactly the opposite of what we were promised when the internet started getting off the ground.
posted by saulgoodman at 5:26 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
Yep. It's more about money and connections now than ever before, Dysk, that's consistent with what I've seen, too. Exactly the opposite of what we were promised when the internet started getting off the ground.
posted by saulgoodman at 5:26 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
Exactly the opposite of what we were promised when the internet started getting off the ground.
But I can type in any band and hear their music in seconds. That's not something you just handwave away. That's monumental.
I can record a perfectly adequate album on my ipad, given to me by a friend who got a better one. That's huge.
I can tap on the keyboard for a few seconds and browse a list of live concert recordings that my finger gets tired scrolling down.
What kind of insane music are the children who grow up with this abundance going to create?
posted by Sebmojo at 5:39 PM on November 17, 2014 [12 favorites]
But I can type in any band and hear their music in seconds. That's not something you just handwave away. That's monumental.
I can record a perfectly adequate album on my ipad, given to me by a friend who got a better one. That's huge.
I can tap on the keyboard for a few seconds and browse a list of live concert recordings that my finger gets tired scrolling down.
What kind of insane music are the children who grow up with this abundance going to create?
posted by Sebmojo at 5:39 PM on November 17, 2014 [12 favorites]
I have google play plus. I spent a good 3 hours going through African jazz of the 50s, 60s and 70s.
Music is awesome. The majors are dying. Nobody is going to make a ton of money on recorded music anymore. Which for 99% of musicians means nothing because they aren't signed. Any band can get there stuff out there now.
posted by Ironmouth at 5:43 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
Music is awesome. The majors are dying. Nobody is going to make a ton of money on recorded music anymore. Which for 99% of musicians means nothing because they aren't signed. Any band can get there stuff out there now.
posted by Ironmouth at 5:43 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
Cutting out all the middlemen is nice and all, but it brings everything so much more nakedly back to connections. I'm in quite a few small-time bands, know people in lots more, occasionally run and promote gigs or do so sound, and let me tell you, the one major thing that correlates with how 'successful' a band is or will be (in the sense of generating interest and having people actually listen to the music and come to the gigs)? The number of friends the people in the band have, and the quality and quantity of their connections in the 'scene'. Everything is networking now (a word which leaves exactly the same taste in mouth as 'nepotism'.)
how else is anyone going to hear your music? Sheer luck? A government agency of tastemakers?
the music business has been about hustle since Mozart was trucked around Europe as a small child. You must be out there to get heard. Flat the fuck out. Nobody hands you an audience. Nothing in life is like that.
That's why this is so good. I just need to tell people and they will hear my new, totally different stuff. . . as soon as we decide on the band name . . .
posted by Ironmouth at 5:47 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
how else is anyone going to hear your music? Sheer luck? A government agency of tastemakers?
the music business has been about hustle since Mozart was trucked around Europe as a small child. You must be out there to get heard. Flat the fuck out. Nobody hands you an audience. Nothing in life is like that.
That's why this is so good. I just need to tell people and they will hear my new, totally different stuff. . . as soon as we decide on the band name . . .
posted by Ironmouth at 5:47 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
What kind of insane music are the children who grow up with this abundance going to create?
They're already creating insane, bewildering, awesome music. Very few people are hearing it though, because it's all getting lost among the millions of pieces of music that get uploaded daily, and the stuff that bubbles to the top ends up being crowd-pleasing, lowest common denominator, and easily understood. How many people have heard Giant Claw's music? That dude's stuff is next level, and you probably haven't heard of him. And he has huge connections, writes for Tiny Mix Tapes, owns an influential record label... lmao. He's an industry insider, without all that even I wouldn't have heard of him, he'd have 12 fans that are all his friends.
We have an abundance, but attention spans are worse than ever. I read the other day about recently collected Spotify data: there's less than 50% chance of someone on Spotify making it through a whole song. We aren't even listening to a single song in its entirety anymore.
tl;dr there's a lot to be scared of, and the kids are going to be alright, but shit's getting weird.
posted by naju at 5:52 PM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
They're already creating insane, bewildering, awesome music. Very few people are hearing it though, because it's all getting lost among the millions of pieces of music that get uploaded daily, and the stuff that bubbles to the top ends up being crowd-pleasing, lowest common denominator, and easily understood. How many people have heard Giant Claw's music? That dude's stuff is next level, and you probably haven't heard of him. And he has huge connections, writes for Tiny Mix Tapes, owns an influential record label... lmao. He's an industry insider, without all that even I wouldn't have heard of him, he'd have 12 fans that are all his friends.
We have an abundance, but attention spans are worse than ever. I read the other day about recently collected Spotify data: there's less than 50% chance of someone on Spotify making it through a whole song. We aren't even listening to a single song in its entirety anymore.
tl;dr there's a lot to be scared of, and the kids are going to be alright, but shit's getting weird.
posted by naju at 5:52 PM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
So write shorter songs.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:55 PM on November 17, 2014 [4 favorites]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:55 PM on November 17, 2014 [4 favorites]
What kind of insane music are the children who grow up with this abundance going to create?
The sort of music made by middle-class dilettantes, because the poor kids who once became ambitious musicians can't afford to get into a field that pays as well as an arts internship.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 5:57 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
The sort of music made by middle-class dilettantes, because the poor kids who once became ambitious musicians can't afford to get into a field that pays as well as an arts internship.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 5:57 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
I think Steve would agree with your tldr too naju. But it's easy to focus on the negative side of music's death as a precious commodity--there are positives too and I'm glad to see them get pointed out. Those of us who liked trash the best to begin with aren't as dismayed I guess.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:58 PM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:58 PM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]
Albini, though I admire his work and attitude, Albini misses a couple key components which both saulgoodman and j_curiouser are touching upon in their statements. One of them is the Nick Drake conundrum, or even Glenn Gould, that some musicians would rather make recordings or compose music rather than perform it. Listening to their recordings, I'm not upset that I will never see either of them, or someone like Madlib, live. Just like poets and authors can choose to do reading tours, but it is not necessary.
The other thing he fails to mention is the remote consumer - just because you consume music in your home doesn't mean you are interested in going to see that artist in concert. Basically, he takes for granted that both the artists and the audiences are bound to participation beyond what they may be interested in producing or consuming. And therefore, content creators should to be compensated appropriately.
Side note - Yesterday I composed an orchestral arrangement for a song and I really don't think it is ever going to be played on a stage by a real orchestra with the budget from the t-shirt sales.
posted by urrduhdur at 5:58 PM on November 17, 2014 [5 favorites]
The other thing he fails to mention is the remote consumer - just because you consume music in your home doesn't mean you are interested in going to see that artist in concert. Basically, he takes for granted that both the artists and the audiences are bound to participation beyond what they may be interested in producing or consuming. And therefore, content creators should to be compensated appropriately.
Side note - Yesterday I composed an orchestral arrangement for a song and I really don't think it is ever going to be played on a stage by a real orchestra with the budget from the t-shirt sales.
posted by urrduhdur at 5:58 PM on November 17, 2014 [5 favorites]
The sort of music made by middle-class dilettantes, because the poor kids who once became ambitious musicians can't afford to get into a field that pays as well as an arts internship.
That doesn't make sense when anyone can record a great sounding album in their basement and instantly distribute it to the earth. That was the case 15 years ago in the LES. it's not true now in Eau Clair Wisconsin.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:00 PM on November 17, 2014
That doesn't make sense when anyone can record a great sounding album in their basement and instantly distribute it to the earth. That was the case 15 years ago in the LES. it's not true now in Eau Clair Wisconsin.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:00 PM on November 17, 2014
Or in Compton.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:01 PM on November 17, 2014
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:01 PM on November 17, 2014
The sort of music made by middle-class dilettantes, because the poor kids who once became ambitious musicians can't afford to get into a field that pays as well as an arts internship.
And 99% of those kids never made a dime back then, either.
If you're making music to make money then you're probably making bad music.
If you're making music because it drives you crazy that no one is playing the music you can hear in your head then you're going to make it regardless, and the vanishing of the barriers to entry means you will get it out there. This is a good thing full stop.
posted by Sebmojo at 6:06 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
And 99% of those kids never made a dime back then, either.
If you're making music to make money then you're probably making bad music.
If you're making music because it drives you crazy that no one is playing the music you can hear in your head then you're going to make it regardless, and the vanishing of the barriers to entry means you will get it out there. This is a good thing full stop.
posted by Sebmojo at 6:06 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
Oh, and another thing that's kind of particular to the UK - you don't get paid for playing live much at all. In Denmark for example, most pub venues will effectively have in house promoters, and if you get booked you will get paid, and at a reasonable rate. Here, pub venues will charge a promoter to book the venue, and they'll also have to source a PA system and sound person, and then they can charge a bit on the door to the back room. Bands get paid travel expenses (most of the time), and if the promoter is really awesome, they'll split their profit equally with the bands (ie one share for them, one share for each band) and everyone walks away with maybe twenty quid. Not per person, per band. The only party really making any money is the pub, who pocket the bar take and the venue hire.
So you can't make money on recorded music any more. And you can't really make money on playing live, either. Which leaves you in a sad situation where even pretty successful bands with big fan bases are only really able to do it as a hobby, and hold down day jobs as well. I'm not convinced this is particularly great for musical or artistic development, and increasingly means access to being able to perform is limited to those of some means. If you're not pretty successful, you'll be damn lucky for it to even be a self-sustaining hobby - paying for practice space, travel to and from practices (even when that's just local buses) and consumables like strings more than eats up what you can make.
You must be out there to get heard. Flat the fuck out. Nobody hands you an audience. Nothing in life is like that.
Playing lots of gigs and getting exposure doesn't really mean much, either. People will come out to see their friends play, and are much more reluctant to go out and see bands whose music they like but where they don't know anyone personally.
posted by Dysk at 6:10 PM on November 17, 2014
So you can't make money on recorded music any more. And you can't really make money on playing live, either. Which leaves you in a sad situation where even pretty successful bands with big fan bases are only really able to do it as a hobby, and hold down day jobs as well. I'm not convinced this is particularly great for musical or artistic development, and increasingly means access to being able to perform is limited to those of some means. If you're not pretty successful, you'll be damn lucky for it to even be a self-sustaining hobby - paying for practice space, travel to and from practices (even when that's just local buses) and consumables like strings more than eats up what you can make.
You must be out there to get heard. Flat the fuck out. Nobody hands you an audience. Nothing in life is like that.
Playing lots of gigs and getting exposure doesn't really mean much, either. People will come out to see their friends play, and are much more reluctant to go out and see bands whose music they like but where they don't know anyone personally.
posted by Dysk at 6:10 PM on November 17, 2014
The music will suffer though, don't kid yourselves. A lot of early blues and rock songs were explicitly about the promise of economic mobility for the poor through music--songs following the Johnny B. Goode pattern of romanticizing the story of a poor country boy made good. Artists no less influential than Woody Guthrie, Willie Nelson and Leonard Cohen (to name just a couple) have acknowledged that economic self-interest were always serious motivators in their careers. A lot of your favorite artists would not have made what they made if there wasn't at least the hope of making money from it. It's an incredibly privileged POV to see the economic motivations behind its creation as inherently cheapening the art itself. Most people don't get shamed for not having their time and energy dismissed as only valuable if it's volunteered enthusiastically. Only artists are ever expected to find "nobility" in such a lopsided arrangement.
posted by saulgoodman at 6:56 PM on November 17, 2014 [12 favorites]
posted by saulgoodman at 6:56 PM on November 17, 2014 [12 favorites]
(Well, and copy editors nowadays.)
posted by saulgoodman at 6:58 PM on November 17, 2014
posted by saulgoodman at 6:58 PM on November 17, 2014
One of the original members of the Irish band The Saw Doctors won the Irish lottery and quit the band. (I think he may have been the one who ended up richest.) The others played together for, say, twenty more years. They filled halls and sold CDs. But the lead singer up and quit last year, too. And now the guitarist, Leo, and a few others are back on the road touring and playing.
I love those guys, and saw them as he Saw Doctors many times when I lived in Boston...but they just won't come to my town, so how do I support them? By proselytizing?
posted by wenestvedt at 6:59 PM on November 17, 2014
I love those guys, and saw them as he Saw Doctors many times when I lived in Boston...but they just won't come to my town, so how do I support them? By proselytizing?
posted by wenestvedt at 6:59 PM on November 17, 2014
Here, pub venues will charge a promoter to book the venue, and they'll also have to source a PA system and sound person, and then they can charge a bit on the door to the back room. Bands get paid travel expenses (most of the time), and if the promoter is really awesome, they'll split their profit equally with the bands (ie one share for them, one share for each band) and everyone walks away with maybe twenty quid.
This often happens in the U.S., too, minus the "paid travel expenses" part.
The thing is, though, is that what you're describing is . . . . . how do I put this? Like the minor minor minor leagues of playing live music; the very bottom rung of the ladder. You've got a pub that really exists only to sell booze, and they & a promoter figure they can make a few extra bucks (pounds) by putting a band in the unused back room.
Now maybe this is the only way any live music happens in lots of the U.K., I don't know. But I do know that in both the U.S. and the U.K. there's a whole circuit of small music clubs where the whole point of their business model is that they get people in the door (to sell them booze) by having some kind of live entertainment, bands or DJ's or whatever.
And often new and/or unknown and/or local bands still have a bunch of the kind of 20 quid (dollar) nights you're talking about when they play those clubs. But these clubs actually exist for the purpose of live entertainment, and they will actually pay real money to many bands, because they want those bands to play their club because people will pay money to come see the band and buy drinks while they do.
Making the jump from 20 pounds to 200 or 2000 pounds is, of course, a problem for many acts, and can depend on luck as much as anything.
I'm just saying that, yeah, you can't make money playing live in the scenario you described, but that's hardly the only scenario out there, even for bands without the backing of a major label.
posted by soundguy99 at 7:09 PM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
This often happens in the U.S., too, minus the "paid travel expenses" part.
The thing is, though, is that what you're describing is . . . . . how do I put this? Like the minor minor minor leagues of playing live music; the very bottom rung of the ladder. You've got a pub that really exists only to sell booze, and they & a promoter figure they can make a few extra bucks (pounds) by putting a band in the unused back room.
Now maybe this is the only way any live music happens in lots of the U.K., I don't know. But I do know that in both the U.S. and the U.K. there's a whole circuit of small music clubs where the whole point of their business model is that they get people in the door (to sell them booze) by having some kind of live entertainment, bands or DJ's or whatever.
And often new and/or unknown and/or local bands still have a bunch of the kind of 20 quid (dollar) nights you're talking about when they play those clubs. But these clubs actually exist for the purpose of live entertainment, and they will actually pay real money to many bands, because they want those bands to play their club because people will pay money to come see the band and buy drinks while they do.
Making the jump from 20 pounds to 200 or 2000 pounds is, of course, a problem for many acts, and can depend on luck as much as anything.
I'm just saying that, yeah, you can't make money playing live in the scenario you described, but that's hardly the only scenario out there, even for bands without the backing of a major label.
posted by soundguy99 at 7:09 PM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
It's also possible to make a modest but decent living playing in cover bands, like a few of my friends do. But that doesn't capture the public imagination the way the promises of wealth do. And even those more blue collar markets are really competitive and dominated by folks who already had money to burn these days.
posted by saulgoodman at 7:22 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
posted by saulgoodman at 7:22 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
If you're making music because it drives you crazy that no one is playing the music you can hear in your head then you're going to make it regardless, and the vanishing of the barriers to entry means you will get it out there. This is a good thing full stop.
The distribution barriers have vanished.
The barriers of having time to spend on refining technique and craft and developing theory and ideas... pretty much still there.
Getting paid to make music means you can focus time on realizing the music in your head and learning to make better music.
posted by weston at 7:38 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
The distribution barriers have vanished.
The barriers of having time to spend on refining technique and craft and developing theory and ideas... pretty much still there.
Getting paid to make music means you can focus time on realizing the music in your head and learning to make better music.
posted by weston at 7:38 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
That doesn't make sense when anyone can record a great sounding album in their basement and instantly distribute it to the earth.
Congratulations, there are hundreds of these albums on bandcamp now. Are you gonna start clicking through them one by one, or do you think you'll wait for a writeup, review or interview or something like that?
Where once there was almost zero chance of being heard, and only a scant chance of getting paid, there's now zero chance of getting paid, and only a faint chance of being heard.
posted by anazgnos at 8:37 PM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]
Congratulations, there are hundreds of these albums on bandcamp now. Are you gonna start clicking through them one by one, or do you think you'll wait for a writeup, review or interview or something like that?
Where once there was almost zero chance of being heard, and only a scant chance of getting paid, there's now zero chance of getting paid, and only a faint chance of being heard.
posted by anazgnos at 8:37 PM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]
Surfing, Drowning, Diving: A Brief History of Inventing New Media
posted by kliuless at 9:41 PM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by kliuless at 9:41 PM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
The pro-Internet argument in a nutshell. Nobody's getting paid for making music ... but there's still tons of great '"records"' made every year. *shrug*
As a record collector (I still buy new and used LPs, but very rarely CDs anymore), the Internet has completely changed music. I have to say it seems like it's devalued it a bit for me, but that might be me just getting older.
The one thing it has really done for me is create a problem of abundance. I have less time than ever to listen to music, but there already exists more music than I can listen to even if I listened constantly for the rest of my life.
So yeah, new music is great, and there's a lot of great new music, but that's what the radio is for, I guess (thanks, KALX). I have more than I can possibly listen to in the 1674(ish)-2009 range. I don't really need anymore.
(And I love love love going to music shows, but if I really want to hear the music, I listen to the album. And most live recordings are crap. /my2c)
posted by mrgrimm at 9:53 PM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
As a record collector (I still buy new and used LPs, but very rarely CDs anymore), the Internet has completely changed music. I have to say it seems like it's devalued it a bit for me, but that might be me just getting older.
The one thing it has really done for me is create a problem of abundance. I have less time than ever to listen to music, but there already exists more music than I can listen to even if I listened constantly for the rest of my life.
So yeah, new music is great, and there's a lot of great new music, but that's what the radio is for, I guess (thanks, KALX). I have more than I can possibly listen to in the 1674(ish)-2009 range. I don't really need anymore.
(And I love love love going to music shows, but if I really want to hear the music, I listen to the album. And most live recordings are crap. /my2c)
posted by mrgrimm at 9:53 PM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
That doesn't make sense when anyone can record a great sounding album in their basement and instantly distribute it to the earth.
Congratulations, there are hundreds of these albums on bandcamp now. Are you gonna start clicking through them one by one
WWJPD (what would John Peel do?)
Yes, you're going to fucking click through them one by one. You don't ever do that? Or listen to DJs who do that?
Then, when you find something special, you tell people about it, and when your friends find something special, they tell you about it, or even (gasp) make you a mixtapeCDUSBdriveetc.
And then their two friends tell their two friends, and their two friends tell their two friends ...
posted by mrgrimm at 9:56 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
Congratulations, there are hundreds of these albums on bandcamp now. Are you gonna start clicking through them one by one
WWJPD (what would John Peel do?)
Yes, you're going to fucking click through them one by one. You don't ever do that? Or listen to DJs who do that?
Then, when you find something special, you tell people about it, and when your friends find something special, they tell you about it, or even (gasp) make you a mixtapeCDUSBdriveetc.
And then their two friends tell their two friends, and their two friends tell their two friends ...
posted by mrgrimm at 9:56 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
I mean, does anyone really want to make the argument that their are untold works of musical genius out there than no one can find or access? Or not being made because of the economics of "the music industry"? I'll grant you that certain types of music aren't being made as much any more, but I won't grant (yet) that anything has been lost in the way of quality.
posted by mrgrimm at 10:00 PM on November 17, 2014
posted by mrgrimm at 10:00 PM on November 17, 2014
I'm a working classical musician. The vast majority of my music income is, and will always be, live performances. Typically $50 plus cartage for two hours at a church, wedding, or corporate background "tapfelmusik".
One of the groups I occasionally play for just signed with BMG. I found out that if I am in any of the sessions, my total payment will be the rehearsal and gig fees. No royalties, residuals, broadcast percentages, nothing.
At least, unlike most of the folks I play with, I don't have $125k+ in conservatory student loan and instrument purchase debt on top of normal life expenses such as house and vehicle. My gigging just barely keeps me in strings, rosin, bowhair and clean white wing-collar shirts.
The internet has changed almost nothing for my kind of music, aside from more rapidly sourcing manuscripts and instrument parts.
posted by Dreidl at 10:25 PM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]
One of the groups I occasionally play for just signed with BMG. I found out that if I am in any of the sessions, my total payment will be the rehearsal and gig fees. No royalties, residuals, broadcast percentages, nothing.
At least, unlike most of the folks I play with, I don't have $125k+ in conservatory student loan and instrument purchase debt on top of normal life expenses such as house and vehicle. My gigging just barely keeps me in strings, rosin, bowhair and clean white wing-collar shirts.
The internet has changed almost nothing for my kind of music, aside from more rapidly sourcing manuscripts and instrument parts.
posted by Dreidl at 10:25 PM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]
I don't do this much anymore due to career/time/apathy, but for a few years, every single Tuesday I'd systematically go through the New Releases section on Rdio and pick out things that seemed interesting out of the 5,000 or so new things that were unceremoniously dumped onto the internet. Every single week I'd find amazing gems that literally no one had ever written about, that no one ever would. Sometimes I'd write about them or share them, but when that received no interest (there's no pageviews for unknown stuff!) I ended up just doing it for my own edification. Hundreds, thousands of amazing things, every week, buried, ephemeral, no one to listen or care, soon to be forgotten. I think it changed my perspective on things entirely. Music that got hyped seemed to get people excited for arbitrary reasons. Or there was some extra-musical angle, a story, a hook to write about, and that stuck in people's minds. You could get this effect with Forgotify too (a site that randomly gave you a song on Spotify with zero listens.) What ends up listened to is curated, is publicized, is worked through the channels. Before it even gets to the Pitchforks of the world (who don't spend time on discovery and trawling like that, really, at all.) The entire thing is just bizarre to me. I've seen the abundance problem first hand for years this way.
posted by naju at 10:30 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
posted by naju at 10:30 PM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
naju, did you post those reviews somewhere you can link to?
posted by weston at 10:37 PM on November 17, 2014
posted by weston at 10:37 PM on November 17, 2014
My now defunct music blog - I let the domain expire a few days ago, actually :)
posted by naju at 10:38 PM on November 17, 2014
posted by naju at 10:38 PM on November 17, 2014
Is it still there on archive.org?
Looks like some of it is! I wrote in it very sporadically though, and there's not much to be gained by exploring it. I mostly discovered this stuff on my own and kept it to myself. The point is that there's more flying by every week than any of us even have time in the day to discover, and there's no pageviews in writeups of unknown bands, and the amateur music blog itself is a dying thankless sort of activity (something that already seems enshrined in the last decade.)
Anyway here's a few things I remember writing about if you're curious... I think I was the first person at the time to write about any of these bands/artists in English that I was aware of. Just random clicks on things that looked interesting.
Plastic Girl In Closet
Nico Roig
Gangpol und Mit
Nyolfen
Wonder World
posted by naju at 11:14 PM on November 17, 2014 [5 favorites]
Looks like some of it is! I wrote in it very sporadically though, and there's not much to be gained by exploring it. I mostly discovered this stuff on my own and kept it to myself. The point is that there's more flying by every week than any of us even have time in the day to discover, and there's no pageviews in writeups of unknown bands, and the amateur music blog itself is a dying thankless sort of activity (something that already seems enshrined in the last decade.)
Anyway here's a few things I remember writing about if you're curious... I think I was the first person at the time to write about any of these bands/artists in English that I was aware of. Just random clicks on things that looked interesting.
Plastic Girl In Closet
Nico Roig
Gangpol und Mit
Nyolfen
Wonder World
posted by naju at 11:14 PM on November 17, 2014 [5 favorites]
Here's something from the new releases section I found just now by random clicking toward the bottom of the pile. I see two blog posts about them. Angular swedish post-punk, sounds pretty good. I'm not sure if I'm trying to prove a point anymore. Maybe I'll reincarnate my blog as a twitter account.
posted by naju at 11:42 PM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]
posted by naju at 11:42 PM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]
Now maybe this is the only way any live music happens in lots of the U.K., I don't know. But I do know that in both the U.S. and the U.K. there's a whole circuit of small music clubs where the whole point of their business model is that they get people in the door (to sell them booze) by having some kind of live entertainment, bands or DJ's or whatever.
And often new and/or unknown and/or local bands still have a bunch of the kind of 20 quid (dollar) nights you're talking about when they play those clubs. But these clubs actually exist for the purpose of live entertainment, and they will actually pay real money to many bands, because they want those bands to play their club because people will pay money to come see the band and buy drinks while they do.
Making the jump from 20 pounds to 200 or 2000 pounds is, of course, a problem for many acts, and can depend on luck as much as anything.
It is, but my experience of playing in the rest of mainland Europe is that you make 200 pounds in the little leagues, not 20, because the pub pockets the bar take and all the money that would be venue hire and outside promoter share in the UK is instead distributed between the performers.
posted by Dysk at 12:53 AM on November 18, 2014 [1 favorite]
And often new and/or unknown and/or local bands still have a bunch of the kind of 20 quid (dollar) nights you're talking about when they play those clubs. But these clubs actually exist for the purpose of live entertainment, and they will actually pay real money to many bands, because they want those bands to play their club because people will pay money to come see the band and buy drinks while they do.
Making the jump from 20 pounds to 200 or 2000 pounds is, of course, a problem for many acts, and can depend on luck as much as anything.
It is, but my experience of playing in the rest of mainland Europe is that you make 200 pounds in the little leagues, not 20, because the pub pockets the bar take and all the money that would be venue hire and outside promoter share in the UK is instead distributed between the performers.
posted by Dysk at 12:53 AM on November 18, 2014 [1 favorite]
(And from speaking to people who've been in the scene for a while, I also get the impression that little leagues used to pay closer to the 200 pound mark here in the UK thirty years ago)
posted by Dysk at 12:59 AM on November 18, 2014
posted by Dysk at 12:59 AM on November 18, 2014
If you're making music to make money then you're probably making bad music.
"Who the fuck wanna be an MC if you can't get paid to be an MC?" -Ol' Dirty Bastard
"Well the best things in life are free, but you can keep them for your birds and bees, I want money." -Berry Gordy
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 6:22 AM on November 18, 2014 [1 favorite]
"Who the fuck wanna be an MC if you can't get paid to be an MC?" -Ol' Dirty Bastard
"Well the best things in life are free, but you can keep them for your birds and bees, I want money." -Berry Gordy
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 6:22 AM on November 18, 2014 [1 favorite]
Yes, you're going to fucking click through them one by one. You don't ever do that? Or listen to DJs who do that?
Sure I do. But my sense is that people invoke universal ubiquity or availability as a panacea without considering the flipside, and then just go back to relying on the sort of traditional, managed, curated, paid-for channels they've always used.
I'm certainly not pining for the old days, I just don't see that much has really changed. The specific middlemen and gatekeepers of the 70s/80s may not exist anymore, but there are new parties serving those exact same functions.
posted by anazgnos at 7:32 AM on November 18, 2014 [1 favorite]
Seems to me this recent Doonesbury strip catches the paradox rather well.
posted by Paul Slade at 8:00 AM on November 18, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by Paul Slade at 8:00 AM on November 18, 2014 [1 favorite]
> We have an abundance, but attention spans are worse than ever. I read the other day about recently collected Spotify data: there's less than 50% chance of someone on Spotify making it through a whole song. We aren't even listening to a single song in its entirety anymore.
So now everyone listens to online music the way my brother used to listen to radio in the car? Dude couldn't even make it all the way through songs he liked.
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:48 AM on November 18, 2014
So now everyone listens to online music the way my brother used to listen to radio in the car? Dude couldn't even make it all the way through songs he liked.
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:48 AM on November 18, 2014
Often, when the recording is 'better', it just signals to me how incapable the band is as a live act, and how much influence third parties like hired musicians, engineers, and producers influenced the recording.
"Music" seems like a woefully over-broad term for what's being discussed here. Some kinds of music absolutely sound better live: pipe organs, steel drum bands, barbershop quartets. A lot of popular amplified music is played so loud that I'm skeptical a human ear is capable of having an opinion about how it "sounds" in that sense, and the whole point seems to be more the physical impact of the music, which seems simply incommensurable to listening to a recording of the music with earphones or normal-sized home speakers.
Watching people play live is a social experience that in many ways can't be compared with listening to a recording. There's also a more immediate appreciation for displays of skill and talent that seems more like enjoying an athletic performance than engaging with an artistic work (e.g. your comment valuing the ability of a band to perform live).
If we're being honest here, we could just admit that both our preferences are purely matters of personal taste and individual preference, but I seldom meet anyone willing to just leave it there at the truth.
I think it goes beyond that. A lot of the time people going to hear live music are seeking a fundamentally different kind of experience than people listening to a recording. Talking about whether a recording "sounds" better or worse would be mostly missing the point.
posted by straight at 10:50 AM on November 18, 2014 [1 favorite]
"Music" seems like a woefully over-broad term for what's being discussed here. Some kinds of music absolutely sound better live: pipe organs, steel drum bands, barbershop quartets. A lot of popular amplified music is played so loud that I'm skeptical a human ear is capable of having an opinion about how it "sounds" in that sense, and the whole point seems to be more the physical impact of the music, which seems simply incommensurable to listening to a recording of the music with earphones or normal-sized home speakers.
Watching people play live is a social experience that in many ways can't be compared with listening to a recording. There's also a more immediate appreciation for displays of skill and talent that seems more like enjoying an athletic performance than engaging with an artistic work (e.g. your comment valuing the ability of a band to perform live).
If we're being honest here, we could just admit that both our preferences are purely matters of personal taste and individual preference, but I seldom meet anyone willing to just leave it there at the truth.
I think it goes beyond that. A lot of the time people going to hear live music are seeking a fundamentally different kind of experience than people listening to a recording. Talking about whether a recording "sounds" better or worse would be mostly missing the point.
posted by straight at 10:50 AM on November 18, 2014 [1 favorite]
So it seems to me that recorded music and live music are in many ways two different kinds of art. I think we're going to see greater and greater distance between people who make recordings as advertisement and to prime people for live shows (many people seem to enjoy live music more when they're hearing songs they already know from recording) and people who make recordings for their own sake.
They will be largely different business models. Musicians who specialize in playing live won't have a hard time justifying selling tickets to people who want a live show. But musicians who just want to add one more recording to the vast sea of great musical recordings that nobody can listen to in a single lifetime (never mind the boundless oceans of lesser music) are going to have a much harder time making a case for why someone should pay them to do that.
posted by straight at 11:34 AM on November 18, 2014
They will be largely different business models. Musicians who specialize in playing live won't have a hard time justifying selling tickets to people who want a live show. But musicians who just want to add one more recording to the vast sea of great musical recordings that nobody can listen to in a single lifetime (never mind the boundless oceans of lesser music) are going to have a much harder time making a case for why someone should pay them to do that.
posted by straight at 11:34 AM on November 18, 2014
I learn about new music from three sources: alt/indie from my NPR station, classic rock from the music section of the Steve Hoffman forum, prog, jazz and classical from Progressive Ears (they cover a lot of ground). That's about all my budget can handle. I still buy CDs, collect vinyl though my turntable went tits up this summer, and will buy the occasional download if it's the only way I can get it. But yeah, it's a helluva time to be a musician.
The music industry is severely screwed. The major labels failed to adapt in the late 90s because they couldn't imagine the shower of money ending. Well, it did. The majority of musicians out there are definitely not making it. They hold day jobs, give lessons, etc. Touring is grueling and that merchandise shelf isn't all it's cracked up to be. Streaming pays pennies. No one is paying their bills with a CD release on bandcamp. A couple years ago I made a Facebook page for members of a music forum, a place where we could check in when the site crashed. Within months we were slammed by itinerant acts from across the globe, all begging for exposure. Listen to me, listen to me, listen to me. For a long time we let them in but eventually me and the other administrators snapped. We banned everyone that wasn't active in the forum. Every time I complain to myself what a bitch publishing is I remind myself, it could be worse, I could be a musician.
posted by Ber at 12:53 PM on November 18, 2014 [1 favorite]
The music industry is severely screwed. The major labels failed to adapt in the late 90s because they couldn't imagine the shower of money ending. Well, it did. The majority of musicians out there are definitely not making it. They hold day jobs, give lessons, etc. Touring is grueling and that merchandise shelf isn't all it's cracked up to be. Streaming pays pennies. No one is paying their bills with a CD release on bandcamp. A couple years ago I made a Facebook page for members of a music forum, a place where we could check in when the site crashed. Within months we were slammed by itinerant acts from across the globe, all begging for exposure. Listen to me, listen to me, listen to me. For a long time we let them in but eventually me and the other administrators snapped. We banned everyone that wasn't active in the forum. Every time I complain to myself what a bitch publishing is I remind myself, it could be worse, I could be a musician.
posted by Ber at 12:53 PM on November 18, 2014 [1 favorite]
But musicians who just want to add one more recording to the vast sea of great musical recordings that nobody can listen to in a single lifetime (never mind the boundless oceans of lesser music) are going to have a much harder time making a case for why someone should pay them to do that.
I can think of a few cases.
For one thing, because it's *their* recording that you're listening to instead of something else from the vast ocean. Presumably that means it has value to you (and may indicate that the artist in question can produce more value for you, assuming they have means to do so, which you could help them with by participating in an exchange of value).
Maybe more, though, I think it's also worth considering that the sea has been vast enough to slake the musical thirst of all but an unreasonably voracious audiophile of means and leisure for at least 30 if not over 40 years.
If we're willing to press the "we don't need more music" button now, on, why wouldn't someone be justified in pressing it in 1994? 1984? 1974? Imagine the catalog of things to listen to more or less stops growing at any of those dates, and you give up every piece of music that's moved you, made in the last 20 years, in order to have insanely cheap on-demand listening of everything before. Are you really OK with that? If not, why is now a better time?
I recognize that I'm talking about a magic button and in reality you can't turn off the tap, just change funding/incentives. Some people with some combination of means and passion will find a way to make it because the activity can be its own reward. But we will absolutely lose stuff at the margins -- and it's a good guess that more of that will be from the best side of the margins.
posted by weston at 3:14 PM on November 18, 2014
I can think of a few cases.
For one thing, because it's *their* recording that you're listening to instead of something else from the vast ocean. Presumably that means it has value to you (and may indicate that the artist in question can produce more value for you, assuming they have means to do so, which you could help them with by participating in an exchange of value).
Maybe more, though, I think it's also worth considering that the sea has been vast enough to slake the musical thirst of all but an unreasonably voracious audiophile of means and leisure for at least 30 if not over 40 years.
If we're willing to press the "we don't need more music" button now, on, why wouldn't someone be justified in pressing it in 1994? 1984? 1974? Imagine the catalog of things to listen to more or less stops growing at any of those dates, and you give up every piece of music that's moved you, made in the last 20 years, in order to have insanely cheap on-demand listening of everything before. Are you really OK with that? If not, why is now a better time?
I recognize that I'm talking about a magic button and in reality you can't turn off the tap, just change funding/incentives. Some people with some combination of means and passion will find a way to make it because the activity can be its own reward. But we will absolutely lose stuff at the margins -- and it's a good guess that more of that will be from the best side of the margins.
posted by weston at 3:14 PM on November 18, 2014
Listeners want to take music for free, but if you actually to give them your music for free, they'll freak out about freedom and security and disrespect. Its a conundrum.
As others noted, U2 was a forced download. Conversely, Run The Jewels gave their second (and first) album away. In the latter case, the result was a string of sold out concerts (many that had to increase the venue size), and $60k in funding for a charity remix of the album using nothing but cat sounds.
I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say the presentation and approach matter.
posted by Dark Messiah at 3:45 PM on November 18, 2014
As others noted, U2 was a forced download. Conversely, Run The Jewels gave their second (and first) album away. In the latter case, the result was a string of sold out concerts (many that had to increase the venue size), and $60k in funding for a charity remix of the album using nothing but cat sounds.
I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say the presentation and approach matter.
posted by Dark Messiah at 3:45 PM on November 18, 2014
Are you really OK with that? If not, why is now a better time?
Now is a better time because now is when the button exists. I can't think of any time in my life I wouldn't have been eager to press a button labeled, "Everyone gets free, instant access to a large percentage (the most popular percentage) of all music ever recorded, but the rate of new music produced will slow down significantly."
posted by straight at 4:15 PM on November 18, 2014
Now is a better time because now is when the button exists. I can't think of any time in my life I wouldn't have been eager to press a button labeled, "Everyone gets free, instant access to a large percentage (the most popular percentage) of all music ever recorded, but the rate of new music produced will slow down significantly."
posted by straight at 4:15 PM on November 18, 2014
Well, that's at least a more aware sentiment than "bands will make it up in t-shirt sales and new business models!", but it's definitely a different conclusion from mine.
posted by weston at 4:53 PM on November 18, 2014
posted by weston at 4:53 PM on November 18, 2014
"f you're Joe Unknown band, you're not going to get by just by uploading something to Soundcloud and waiting for people to discover your unheralded brilliance. Word of mouth is not going to magically happen. The old, traditional ways of doing things are more important than ever before, dishearteningly."
In the last month or so, I've bought the following records on Bandcamp because I was randomly clicking around on one tag or another:
Big Mouth — Sound Female-fronted post-Pylon
Wolf Blood — s/t Stoner metal
People's Temple — More for the Masses (Brian) Jonestown meets VU
Francis Bebey — Psychedelic Sanza 1982-1984 Warm, trippy thumb piano
It's weird here how many musicians see the surfeit of music as a bad thing because it makes it harder for them to get paid. Like, yeah, of course bands and musicians have publicists now. They used to be part of the label apparatus, but they still serve a valuable role since most musicians aren't good at being publicists (or managers or agents, etc.). But to argue that means that the same level of gatekeepers still exists is nonsense, and that seems pretty implied. The power of gatekeepers has been wildly diminished, and that many listeners don't embrace that freedom by exploring enough to find music to pay for isn't an argument against the diminished power of gatekeepers, nor really an argument for the power of gatekeepers in general.
Most music spending has always come from a fairly narrow segment of superfans, the folks who will shell out for rare autographed alternate covers and box sets that have three new songs. But the majority of music purchasers (and the second biggest share of the market after superfans) are casual listeners. Everyone now has more entertainment choices than ever, and because the music sales market peaked with the '90s bubble, the idea that the music scene is declining now compared to a historical average just doesn't hold up.
I don't think the switch from corporate patronage to the ad-supported model is an unalloyed good for artists, but overall it's far more democratic and artists are not in aggregate doing any worse than they had been if you ignore the '90s bubble.
Plenty of people are still making livings as musicians too, and really athletes seem like the best comparison class: It's vanishingly unlikely that your band will become U2 level successful, just like it's vanishingly unlikely to land a starter position on any pro team. But there are still pro mountain bikers and pro skateboarders just like there are pro punk bands. The biggest difference might be that advancement in sports is more objectively merit based, but all the sturm und drang is really silly.
posted by klangklangston at 8:02 PM on November 18, 2014 [2 favorites]
In the last month or so, I've bought the following records on Bandcamp because I was randomly clicking around on one tag or another:
Big Mouth — Sound Female-fronted post-Pylon
Wolf Blood — s/t Stoner metal
People's Temple — More for the Masses (Brian) Jonestown meets VU
Francis Bebey — Psychedelic Sanza 1982-1984 Warm, trippy thumb piano
It's weird here how many musicians see the surfeit of music as a bad thing because it makes it harder for them to get paid. Like, yeah, of course bands and musicians have publicists now. They used to be part of the label apparatus, but they still serve a valuable role since most musicians aren't good at being publicists (or managers or agents, etc.). But to argue that means that the same level of gatekeepers still exists is nonsense, and that seems pretty implied. The power of gatekeepers has been wildly diminished, and that many listeners don't embrace that freedom by exploring enough to find music to pay for isn't an argument against the diminished power of gatekeepers, nor really an argument for the power of gatekeepers in general.
Most music spending has always come from a fairly narrow segment of superfans, the folks who will shell out for rare autographed alternate covers and box sets that have three new songs. But the majority of music purchasers (and the second biggest share of the market after superfans) are casual listeners. Everyone now has more entertainment choices than ever, and because the music sales market peaked with the '90s bubble, the idea that the music scene is declining now compared to a historical average just doesn't hold up.
I don't think the switch from corporate patronage to the ad-supported model is an unalloyed good for artists, but overall it's far more democratic and artists are not in aggregate doing any worse than they had been if you ignore the '90s bubble.
Plenty of people are still making livings as musicians too, and really athletes seem like the best comparison class: It's vanishingly unlikely that your band will become U2 level successful, just like it's vanishingly unlikely to land a starter position on any pro team. But there are still pro mountain bikers and pro skateboarders just like there are pro punk bands. The biggest difference might be that advancement in sports is more objectively merit based, but all the sturm und drang is really silly.
posted by klangklangston at 8:02 PM on November 18, 2014 [2 favorites]
Like, yeah, of course bands and musicians have publicists now.
Bands and musicians that are starting from a position of already having decent money have publicists now. The rest of us can't afford that shit. Your background (in terms of money and privilege) is the new gatekeeper.
posted by Dysk at 12:19 AM on November 19, 2014 [1 favorite]
Bands and musicians that are starting from a position of already having decent money have publicists now. The rest of us can't afford that shit. Your background (in terms of money and privilege) is the new gatekeeper.
posted by Dysk at 12:19 AM on November 19, 2014 [1 favorite]
yea, i only ever 'discover' stuff thru curation anymore (oh and i guess podcasts are back? ;)
fwiw, here's marc andreessen being interviewed on this:
posted by kliuless at 11:34 AM on November 19, 2014 [1 favorite]
fwiw, here's marc andreessen being interviewed on this:
I think you’re right in the sense that the acceleration of applied technology has made consumers better off. But for producers, things have gotten tough. I think about this all the time with a company like Amazon. I love Amazon as a customer. I get all kinds of things very cheaply delivered to my door. But as a producer of books that are sold on Amazon, the power that it has scares me. With Spotify, too, we as consumers have more choice than we’ve ever had, but the producers are feeling a squeeze. Part of what worries me about your vision of the future is that it’s treating people as if they’re only consumers and not producers.or you could have basic income and have more independent artists!
No, no, no, no, no. It’s treating people as consumers and producers. The same technology makes people better producers. Are you a better producer today than you would have been without all these new technologies?
Yes, but am I compensated properly if I’m a musician whose song gets a million hits and he gets a check for $6?
That’s when we get down into the sticky situation, which is, is our work actually worth what we think it is?
And what’s the answer?
The answer is, it depends. You look at most of the successful authors now, and they’re doing paid speaking. For musicians, the live-touring business grew four times in the last 15 years. So as digital music has taken reproduction down, as the reproduced version has become abundant, the live experience has become scarce. So touring revenues are way up.
But that’s just the superstar model.
No, even for touring bands, even for regular bands. Look at half the heavy-metal bands21 from, like, the 1980s that in the old days could sell 300,000 albums, they’re touring all over the world and the money’s pouring in. And even the bands that fall completely on hard times, they now go and play at people’s birthday parties, or they play launch events for tech companies. People don’t want to listen to Hootie and the Blowfish anymore, but it turns out it’s pretty cool to have them at a birthday party. And they get paid $25,000.
So the future is superstars doing bar mitzvahs.
That’s a fricking big part. But here’s the thing. You get your speaking engagement to show up and tell everybody how horrible this stuff all is.
Yes, at the National Association of Blacksmiths.
The other thing you could say is that recorded music was an oligopolistic cartel. The only reason why musicians were getting paid what they were getting paid in the 1990s off CDs was because the record labels were price-fixing. CDs didn’t cost $16 because that was the floating market price. They cost $16 because the five record labels got together and fixed prices. And who ate it on that? Consumers. And why did consumers react so positively to digital music when it first came along? Because it broke the cartel. Book publishers are the same thing. Amazon broke that wide open. So would you rather live in that world or would you rather live in this world?
As a consumer, I’d rather live in this world. As a producer, I’m not so sure.
I think you’re going to do just fine. You might have to go on the road a little bit.
posted by kliuless at 11:34 AM on November 19, 2014 [1 favorite]
"Bands and musicians that are starting from a position of already having decent money have publicists now. The rest of us can't afford that shit. Your background (in terms of money and privilege) is the new gatekeeper."
By the time you need a publicist, you should already have a booking agent and manager. You should be playing out regularly enough that a significant portion of your income comes from making music, otherwise you won't see much return from having a publicist to begin with. Since we're talking about the shift from the major label system, where publicists were baked in, the extent that this is a new gatekeeper or barrier is dubious — getting signed was never easy, and avoiding getting dropped was even harder. Only about 2 percent of albums sell more than 5,000 copies. Even assuming an indie-level split (e.g. Touch and Go), at the $14 average price, that's $35,000 to pay for all of the recording, promotion, support and band wages. For anyone who's not a solo basement artist, that's less than a middle-class wage. Most bands make far less than that.
If you cut out the label, you can make much closer to 80/90 percent of the sales. But then your costs increase, like having to pay for a publicist out of pocket.
Making money from music means getting other people excited enough about your music to pay you for it. Bands have much more control over that than they ever have before. Complaining that you need a publicist now when you didn't before is ignoring that publicists have always been part of the economy of professional music, just that those costs are borne upfront by the band, and complaining that it's hard to find stuff you like because of how much music is out there ignores that it's a good thing to have that much music out there and that there's always been more music than there is time or access.
posted by klangklangston at 1:34 PM on November 19, 2014
By the time you need a publicist, you should already have a booking agent and manager. You should be playing out regularly enough that a significant portion of your income comes from making music, otherwise you won't see much return from having a publicist to begin with. Since we're talking about the shift from the major label system, where publicists were baked in, the extent that this is a new gatekeeper or barrier is dubious — getting signed was never easy, and avoiding getting dropped was even harder. Only about 2 percent of albums sell more than 5,000 copies. Even assuming an indie-level split (e.g. Touch and Go), at the $14 average price, that's $35,000 to pay for all of the recording, promotion, support and band wages. For anyone who's not a solo basement artist, that's less than a middle-class wage. Most bands make far less than that.
If you cut out the label, you can make much closer to 80/90 percent of the sales. But then your costs increase, like having to pay for a publicist out of pocket.
Making money from music means getting other people excited enough about your music to pay you for it. Bands have much more control over that than they ever have before. Complaining that you need a publicist now when you didn't before is ignoring that publicists have always been part of the economy of professional music, just that those costs are borne upfront by the band, and complaining that it's hard to find stuff you like because of how much music is out there ignores that it's a good thing to have that much music out there and that there's always been more music than there is time or access.
posted by klangklangston at 1:34 PM on November 19, 2014
By the time you need a publicist, you should already have a booking agent and manager. You should be playing out regularly enough that a significant portion of your income comes from making music, otherwise you won't see much return from having a publicist to begin with.
Thing is, while you could make a decent enough living to survive (which is not setting the standards high - think roughly equivalent to what you'd get on benefits) by playing gigs consistently some twenty or thirty years ago to work up to the point where you would then need or benefit from the publicists, that just doesn't happen anymore. Which means you're going to pay a manager or agent how? They can have a cut of the twenty quid you got at the end of the night? They might have done it for a cut of the two hundred quid you would've been paid years ago, of course.
Again, what you're saying makes sense and would apply to the rest of Europe in my experience. But not the UK. The situation here is pretty uniquely fucked up due to the devastation of the infrastructure supporting live music. There are fewer small clubs than ever, and they're closing all the time, councils are increasingly taking noise complaints from people who move in next to long-standing venues seriously and shutting down the venues (I know of a dozen clubs and pubs I've played in that have been around for well over a decade at least that have closed for this reason in the last year), and the insane inflation in property prices has pushed rents to an infeasible level. There are very few rock or jazz clubs around any more - they've been replaced by discos, gastropubs and condos.
posted by Dysk at 1:08 AM on November 20, 2014 [1 favorite]
Thing is, while you could make a decent enough living to survive (which is not setting the standards high - think roughly equivalent to what you'd get on benefits) by playing gigs consistently some twenty or thirty years ago to work up to the point where you would then need or benefit from the publicists, that just doesn't happen anymore. Which means you're going to pay a manager or agent how? They can have a cut of the twenty quid you got at the end of the night? They might have done it for a cut of the two hundred quid you would've been paid years ago, of course.
Again, what you're saying makes sense and would apply to the rest of Europe in my experience. But not the UK. The situation here is pretty uniquely fucked up due to the devastation of the infrastructure supporting live music. There are fewer small clubs than ever, and they're closing all the time, councils are increasingly taking noise complaints from people who move in next to long-standing venues seriously and shutting down the venues (I know of a dozen clubs and pubs I've played in that have been around for well over a decade at least that have closed for this reason in the last year), and the insane inflation in property prices has pushed rents to an infeasible level. There are very few rock or jazz clubs around any more - they've been replaced by discos, gastropubs and condos.
posted by Dysk at 1:08 AM on November 20, 2014 [1 favorite]
"You can’t recall the fart, however much you would like to."
Truer words...
posted by mecran01 at 6:40 PM on November 29, 2014
Truer words...
posted by mecran01 at 6:40 PM on November 29, 2014
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