Oh and as a reply to Anon 32, “Not surprising that the guy who runs a download site claims that downloads are better for the artist.”
Well I’m not surprised that people that run record companies say that only THEY can have control over media distribution.
You’re full of shill anon 32

The margin that’s being squeezed to produce that result is the vast infrastructure of the traditional music industry… those losing their place in the machine include both rapacious weasels and hardworking worthies.

The writers use data from the British music industry to show that overall revenue has grown slightly from 2004 to 2008, with artists taking a much larger proportion of the cake due to a shift towards live performance revenue. Their numbers show that in that period, the income of artists has grown an average of 40%!

Crisis, what crisis? Not for artists.

Oh yay. Every tone deaf idiot who couldn’t find a chord on guitar hero is a “music creator” because he can use technology to cover up a lack of skill.

Look, I don’t know what the death of giant record companies will have on music over the next 30+ years. In lots of ways (shitty American Idol style contracts, going after children for downloads, etc), I’m sure they’ve earned it.

But I am sick of hearing people talk about “community” and “creativity” and “self-expression” like that’s what makes good music. Singing, playing an instrument, or composing takes natural talent and a lot of practice. Technology won’t provide the talent, and you need free time to practice. Doing your own distribution, marketing, and sales, takes away free time. It just does. New tech can make some of this easier, or slightly faster, but the musician is still using up time on tech that he could’ve spent on music.

I’m not saying the big labels were good at supporting artists either, but I do think it’s crazy to pretend the lack of major labels + tech will create some kind of magical musical community. Music requires skill, and technology is a just tool.

I am sure a lot of the big people in the industry will adapt – and sure, quite a few will be put out.

I am not certain if I am allowed to cross post to the TuneCore blog, but if so, I previously recorded a number of
short video responses to many of the questions I see here.

As an example, @tomslee, the first video “General Responses to All Questions” directly responds to your question

http://blog.tunecore.com/2010/10/video-response-to-the-state-of-the-music-industry-and-the-delegitimization-of-artists-pt-1.html

Jeff Price
Tunecore

“[n]or do they include most band selling direct-to-fan sales, bundling of music with merchandise (i.e buy the t-shirt, get a free album, buy Guitar Hero and get the Soundgarden album), on-line drop card redemption, sales of tracks for game play in Rock Band, ad revenue generated via YouTube and other streaming video sites, traditional public performance royalties, gig income, “pay what you want” donations to the band for music, stem sales, synchronization licenses, ringtone sales (these are listed separately by Nielsen), publishing royalties, fan club subscriptions and a lot more. “

All creative fields are being affected. Far more “average” people are participating and the income to many “professionals” is going down. In terms of society, this is probably a good thing. It is eliminating a distinction between creator and consumer. Someday soon we will all be music creators, producers, and consumers. There will be differences in degree, but if enough of us do it, we’ll make music for community, creativity, and self-expression, but have day jobs to actually pay the bills.

It was not just a story of mainstream labels or nothing – there were hundreds or thousands of small, mainly geographically local, labels and scenes. How it balances out against today’s, I don’t know, but I think the “past = mainstream, today = diversity” meme is an oversimplification.

By the way, Jeff did a video response to all the questions those articles generated.

http://www.youtube.com/tunecore#p/u/13/uYeJInsC9OY

Thanks again!

–Peter
peter@tunecore.com

I just think it’s very possible “fake pop” artists are not the only ones who won’t succeed if musicians have to manage everything themselves. I’m not arguing for keeping the huge record companies we have now, I just think all the change isn’t positive. (And I still think some of the ideas people had above about tech replacing talent are totally false. That’s the kind of thinking that propped up manufactured pop in the first place.)

/pedantry

This is bullshit, since when did the record companies actually do any of this? You want marketing? You have Google and many many advertisement agencies. Who said you did it yourself? Distribution is automated. They just click a link and they download. You don’t “do it yourself”. Sales happen when people buy something.
The only artist that won’t succeed are the fake pop one’s. Since they won’t have a mega-corp strong-arming radios and media to play the songs using bribes. That’s ALL they ever did. I hope they die off one by one (unfortunately they won’t, since they lie about losing money. Greedy suits)

won’t that just be a return to the way things were? wasn’t music originally something that was shared with the community, for celebration, for mourning, for worship? and then once that was done, everybody went back to work in the fields or in the workshops or what have you.

I for one welcome our new musical community overlords.

I, and no doubt thousands of others, thought these changes through fifteen years ago and came up with the epiphany that music would evolve from big budget productions and zillion-seller albums to smaller amounts of money being made by many. This is generally good, hell, anything that breaks down the tournament model where 95% of the money is made by 5% of the participants is great.

I don’t deny that copying is going on. But the music industry needs to look its own suckage in the face, and it has consistently refused to do so. O’Reilly Media (which pays my salary) has published many books with creative commons licenses, and publishes electronic books without DRM. And our observation is that the ability to share and copy makes good books more successful, while it makes poor books fail worse. I don’t see any reason to believe that music behaves differently.

You’re absolutely right that there is, but it’s going to be a tremendously reduced power position with a whole lot more work involved. You’re right, artists don’t want to handle printing and promotion and merchandising, but given the nearly free marginal costs of distributing their product, they’ll retain a hell of a lot more control and profit percentage over time.

It’s entirely possible that the labels will devolve into services that compete for the artist’s attention, offering packages at cost plus a reasonable profit margin. This is as it should be.

It’s really not. I did read the first page before I wrote my comment, and now I’ve read the whole thing. The author doesn’t distinguish between purchases, revenue, and profit, nor does he provide any figures for the uses you list in your quote — he says “the numbers go off the chart”, but he doesn’t say which numbers he’s talking about (purchases? profits?), or what “off the chart” means. And he says things like “More musicians are making money off their music now then at any point in history,” which is worthless data — if a billion musicians each earned a dollar last year, that’s not very inspiring. He’s throwing together a lot of different kinds of data and statistics that sound good, but don’t actually fit together.

Klaus’s figure above — independent artists’ income grew 40% between 2004 and 2008 — is much more heartening. I’m willing to believe Jeff Price is hitting some of the reasons why that is, but he’s conflating a lot of things that should be kept separate. He’s saying, “My car has better gas mileage than yours, because I drove 50,000 miles last year and paid an average of $2.50 per gallon!”

please — I know for a fact that many musicians are *not* making a living or any money from their work because people don’t want to pay for it and most musicians are unable to tour due to having to hold down jobs.

on the flipside of this issue: we are seeing the cult of amateurs all wanting celebrity lifestyles — which is due to a commodification of desire mixed with gadget narcosis and ease of making music with software.

e.g. the noise has overtaken the signal.

“Indie” = Short for “independent”

“Indy” = Short for “Indianapolis,” also a famous treasure hunter

First, I can say without a doubt that sales are up from one year ago. This is in large part due to reviews in print media. I attribute this to the fact that we’re talking jazz here and a good percentage of the audience is made up of, shall we say, old farts who still read magazines and newspapers.

Second, the loss of brick and mortar stores hurts us because old habits die hard. Those old farts like to go to the record store and browse. The collapse of the physical infrastructure– the stores and distribution– has been remarkable. I worked for a major label in the early ’90s. There were seven major label/distributors. In less than 20 years, that bloated beast has become a skeleton. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. But the system seems to have forgotten that there are people over the age of 40 who enjoy buying music and feel a bit lost without their trusty, dusty record store and grizzled shop hand.

Third, thank god for Amazon. They have the worst terms as far as what we make per CD, but it would appear that the old farts who lost their stores can at least find Amazon. So while they pay the least, we sell the most through them and they pretty much do all the work.

Fourth, the artists may be making more, but they’re working a lot harder for it. Part of the new paradigm is they have to sell merch at the shows. We have some pretty big name guys in the jazz world who have been in the biz a looooong time. They’re having a real tough time adjusting to this new reality. Try telling a guy who was big time in the ’70s that shit ain’t like that anymore. Thankfully, the audience seems to really like buying merchandise at the gigs because they feel like they’re supporting them. That’s a positive change.

In short, things are not good. They’re not as dismal as a year or two ago, but we’ve yet to break even on a single record. I don’t think I’m saying anything particularly insightful when I say the music business is a long, long way from sorting itself out. I’m happy the artists are making more money. I’m optimistic that there is still a symbiotic relationship to be had between artists and labels. Don’t get me wrong, I adore every artist on our roster like you wouldn’t believe. But without the label losing money on their behalf, they would have to put the product out themselves, promote it, fight for distribution, etc. All of that takes valuable time away which should be used creating. I’m not saying it can’t be done, because I know it can be. But I’d argue that most artists don’t have the inclination to take all of that on.

what i found out was astonishing. most of the artists present made more money than they ever did before by just releasing their music online and receiving donations via their website or physical sales.
(albeit none of them had been signed by a label before, but one of them was a experienced guitar player who has been working with a-list rockbands his whole life – he knows hows the business works)

the fact is.
if u are a new band/artist today – you have got the greatest assets available to you to make and distribute your music at a low price. you can however not prevent digital copies of your work.
so just release all you works online. ask people who like ur work to support u via paypal and similar outlets. then come physical sales from fans who will surely like to have a physical artifact of your work, even if it is a collaboration with an illustrator/designer.
and then there is the money you can make from merch and shows.

i m not saying everyone can be a rockstar now but the fact is everyone can actually make some good money from their creative work. i think ultimately the question whether or not you can live from your creative work is solely based on a) the effort you put into your work and b) the cultural appreciation of your work from the audience – if it doesnt fit the zeitgeist it might just not work and you cant expect people to pay u for it.