thought I'd post the lies without the original commentary to contextualise this discussion
The 13 Most Insidious, Pervasive Lies of the Modern Music Industry... | Digital Music NewsDigital Music News
Lie #1: Great music will naturally find its audience.
Lie #2: Artists will thrive off of ‘Long Tail,’ niche content.
Lie #3: The death of the major label will make it easier for artists to succeed.
Lie #4: There will be a death of the major label.
Lie #5: Digital formats will produce far greater revenues than physical.
Lie #6: “The real money’s in touring”
Lie #7: There’s an emerging middle class artist.
Lie #8: Kickstarter can and will build careers.
Lie #9: Spotify is your friend.
Lie #10: Google and YouTube are your friends.
Lie #11: If Pandora could just lower royalties, they could then survive, and really help all the artists out there.
Lie #12: T-Shirts!
Lie #13: ‘Streaming is the future…’
my own gut suggest that each of these lies is spot on - i.e. these things are not true
1 asserts that music will be found - this was true of JS Bach who fell out of favour shortly after his death in 1750, but saw a resurgence in his popularity when Mendelssohn found a large store of his manuscripts and set about mounting performances to bring the music back to the public but it just does not track that you will be found in your lifetime.....
2 asserts that people will buy what they want and that there is a large enough number of people willing to buy even relatively obscure music - 99% of sales are in the mainstream (10% of all acts/artists) and 1% in the small tail feeders which means very little money to share amongst more than 90% of acts
3 is predicated on 4 which is not going to happen as there is too much money tied up in maintaining the
status quo; major labels will swallow independents by buying them out wholesale or starving them of talent; most of the old school independents are now major labels themselves and engage in the same behaviours as their founding principles have been seen to be anathema to making money
5 is based on the idea that people will buy a digital product as often as they would a physical product - something physical wears out or is damaged or is lost/stolen and needs to be replaced, the same is not true of digital formats even with DRCM limiting the number of actual copies a single purchaser can have.....put everything onto a single hard drive and clone that hard drive to guard against loss and you have a perpetual single copy system
6 except that it costs money to tour and recent tours have taken to getting major sponsorship to mount them. 365 days on the road and you lose sight of creativity, relationships, a lot of stuff. the money to be made is small in comparison to the gross sales as everyone has to be paid, fed, watered, clothed, housed for the duration of the tour
7 this is not class warfare or economics of supply and demand - the middle class emerged because they were able to obtain jobs that paid well with benefits without the hazards of some of the more menial positions; today music is just like everything else economically we have the super rich and the working poor
8 if you can convince people to put money up - this venture capitalism on a small scale - you would have better chances of convincing a real venture capitalist that you had the makings of something big and then not much. Without careful planning, marketing and execution, such an approach is only going to raise cents on the dollars needed to pursue the project and even then how do you move it so that everyone wants a piece of the result (i.e. how do you get the public to buy the result???) - study project management first and then come back to trying to raise the capital to pursue your dreams - you will be at least going in eyes wide open and understand the issues and the problems that can beset any production effort
9 Spotify is a leech and stops sales because you share your music with others rather than buying it for yourself or themselves
10 google is about placing advertising high in the search results and alongside your search results. Youtube has devolved from the "anyone can post anything" channel that it was to a slick marketing machine for established artists and labels - there are tracks that I cannot access because they are not available in Australia due to market or label restrictions
11 rob the artist to improve their profit margin??? you've got to be joking - lower royalties means exactly that
12 merchandising is only successful if you are already big - who wants to buy a piece of memorabilia for an unknown
13 streaming is already here and is not producing the profits for individuals that you might expect - unless you are already registered with a PRO and you keep accurate records of what is played by who, you will not see the pitiful revenue stream that such plays generate
