The Problem Isn't Streaming, It's Too Much Music

[nursers]

[Editor's note: this was moved from the Spotify/Joe Rogan/Neil Young thread because I thought it was sufficiently different that it deserved discussion on its own merits. The piece was written by Rachel Hurley, which Nursers saw on Facebook and posted here.]

 

An interesting perspective ( via Facebook )

 

This is probably a bad idea.

Okay. I’m going to say my piece about Spotify. I realize that some people won’t like what I have to say, so here goes nothing.

Spotify and streaming are not the problem. Too much music is.

 

With the Neil Young vs. Joe Rogan battle coming to a head this week and Neil Young losing (what a poorly thought out maneuver that was ), I've seen a renewed battle cry about Spotify being some demon corporation that devalues music and keeps musicians from making a living.

It’s hard to take seriously anyone who thinks that quitting Spotify will have any impact on anything. It feels performative and hollow. It doesn’t present any viable solution. And it tells me that they obviously have not looked at the numbers.

 

Streaming has been around for over a decade, plenty of time for musicians to unite and form a union or an advocacy group that could study Spotify’s extremely transparent numbers and come up with a more fair payment plan. But no one has and that’s because the math doesn’t work.

Even if Spotify doubled what they paid out, which they can’t afford to do, it would make no significant difference.

 

Streaming isn’t keeping musicians from making a living. The real issue is that music is an over saturated market. There are too many musicians and too much music. Spotify estimates that there are 60k songs uploaded to their platform DAILY. Now think about how much music is uploaded to Soundcloud, Youtube, Tidal, Apple, Amazon, and on and on and on.

 

You know the whole economic theory about the more there is of something, the less it's worth?

 

The barrier to becoming a musician has been lowered to the ground. And that's great in terms of giving everyone equal access, but due to the influx of people participating, well, that's what has devalued the product.

 

If diamonds grew on trees we could get a basket of them at the corner market for $3.99.

 

Plus, the lower bar hasn't created an influx of more musical geniuses, but it has given us an abundance of very good musicians. The downside to so much great music is it’s harder for individual musicians to rise to the top. I listen to and read about music for a living, and I still can’t keep up with all of the good music just in my niche. Every single day I come across new music from new artists.

 

The simple truth is that the market can not supply every good musician with a full time living making music. If NO ONE created another song from this moment on, you would still never get through all of the music that has already been made. As a matter of fact, the popularity of catalogue music, songs more than 18 months old, rose from 60.8% in 2018 to 66.4% in 2021. In sharp contrast, new music listenership is falling. That’s why all of these legacy artists are selling their catalogs right now. Investors are forecasting that older music can be repackaged for commercials, tv, movies, etc and bring in major dollars. Yes, this is something that has been done in the past by individual artists, but now there are going to be one-stop-shops where you can choose from a David Bowie, Prince, Fleetwood Mac, NEIL YOUNG, or John Lennon song. Publishing rights usually stay with publishers and songwriters and recorded rights belong to labels and performers, but with companies like Hipignosis spending 100s of millions to purchase back catalogues, it will be easier than ever to purchase rights to use this older music.

But I digress. Back to musicians making a living from music.

 

There was ONE golden period in the mid to late 20th century when a significant number of musicians and the music business were able to harness the market well enough that it really seemed like being a successful professional musician meant being well paid (even though they were all ripping each other off back then too.) The truth is, there was still always a very limited number, as compared to other professions, of musicians who were able to make a good living from music for an extended period of time. For the majority of musicians, just having a 2 to 3 successful album cycle was an epic win. And most professional musicians still made a low to middle class salary, it was only after the idea of the musical star was born that a limited number started raking in the big bucks.

 

For the majority of human civilization, making a living from being a musician was obtainable by a very small number of people. Music used to be just passed on through friends, families, communities, churches, etc. Music as a commodity is fairly new. Before the idea to sell music on a large scale came about, once you heard a song, it was yours forever, because the only way to hear it again would be to sing it yourself. We as humans have over-glamorized and overvalued music. It’s a natural, abundant resource that the majority of humans can create. Just about anyone can learn to play an instrument. It’s no harder than any other skilled profession, the only thing you really need is time. Human brains love patterns and patterns create dopamine, we are biologically wired to love and make music.

Obviously, the invention of the phonograph, record players, radio, television, etc had a huge impact on people’s relationships with music, but none more so than the internet. The World Wide Web has made it very easy for people to be extremely well versed in music: to know its history, to learn to play it, to learn theory, recording techniques, network with other musicians, book shows, market their music, etc etc etc. I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who would argue that this low bar of entry has been detrimental to the evolution of music. But what it HAS been detrimental too is the selling of music.

 

Fans have a finite amount of time and money to expend on musicians and listeners are spending more today than they ever have in history. Music listening is up 10% since 2020. 10% is HUGE.

 

But for every 10 musicians the average person might be a fan of, they only have the time and money to support 2 or 3. I realize that most of the people reading this are probably hard core music fans, but I’m talking about the average person, whose attention is being pulled by an inordinate amount of entertainment options like tv, movies, social media, books, video games, and other hobbies. Add this to the before mentioned love of older music, or music by musicians that listeners no longer feel the need to support financially, and herein lies our conundrum.

 

It’s simple supply versus demand.

 

Not to mention, that streaming services and social media have over inflated most musicians’ sense of their fanbase. Are people who have never purchased anything from a musician really fans? Or should we change the valuation system from people who clicked a button to follow them with people who are actual customers, because measuring a fanbase based on streaming and social numbers is a complete fallacy.

 

It’s not that difficult for a song to reach 100,000 streams if added to the right playlist, but that doesn’t mean 100,000 people liked the song. You can gauge true interest in the artist by looking at the streams of all of their songs. You can have 100k streams on one song and an average of 2k on your other songs. This tells me that your song with the high streams is not converting people to listen to your other music. But the artists often look at it like they have a ton of streams which means they have a large fan base and their not making the amount of money that they think is equivalent to the amount of people listening, when in fact, all that’s really happened is 100,000 people got to sample a song and it didn’t convert. But without streaming services, they would never have had that opportunity in the first place.

 

I often feel like I am in a giant feedback loop of people saying that Spotify is stealing money from artists without anyone ever acknowledging the massive benefits of streaming. And I don’t just mean the convenience of it. Most people would never have access to such a huge variety of music and on the flip side of that, so many musicians would not have access to such a variety of fans. Streaming has allowed so many different styles, genres, and people to enter the conversation. It has also knocked down the income barrier, giving those with less money access to the same variety of music as those with plenty of disposable income.

 

Do you remember the time between ages, say 12 and 18, when music was SO important to your life? Well, not every teenager has access to the money to purchase music from all of the artists they love. Only 17% of teenagers work. And we all have way more bills than we did 20 years ago. At the height of my music purchasing time period, I wasn’t also paying for a cell phone, internet, all the streaming accounts, etc etc. Streaming makes music accessible to everyone and has expanded our horizons exponentially, affecting every aspect of our culture.

 

So, should musicians just give away their music for free?

Well, they do and they always have, and they always will.

 

But no one is making anyone give their music away. No one is making anyone put their music on streaming services. They can just sell their music the old-fashioned way. But most musicians won’t go this route, because they know the enormous opportunities, NOT GUARANTEES, that streaming services give them.

The fact is most bands that have listeners on streaming services, would not sell an equivalent amount of records. I listen to hundreds of records every year, but I would not purchase 100 records a year, due to the laws of time, space, and money. With streaming I can read about an artist and immediately go check them out. If I had to go purchase an album every time I wanted to listen to someone’s music, well, I just wouldn’t do it.

 

I also never see anyone talk about all the negatives of purchasing music before streaming. Like, it was sort of a scam, and definitely a seller’s market. If you’re over 40, how many times did you buy an album because you heard a song on the radio, and the rest of the album was terrible. Or you bought an album and listened to it 3 times and then just forgot about it. Or you bought an album because of the cover, and again, it was not good. How many times did one of your LPs break or melt, or your CDs get stepped on and shattered, or even stolen. How many CDs are sitting in landfills? How many of your cassette tapes got jammed in your car stereo or just stopped playing? I do not want to go back to any of that. The pendulum has swung and now listeners have more power. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t swing again and become more even. More on that later.

 

Let’s talk about the math of paying musicians more for their music streams, even if some of those streams are just people sampling their music who would never actually purchase anything from them.

 

It's with an uncritical eye that anyone could look at Spotify's revenue and think that they should just pay more and that would solve everything.

 

First of all, only 15% of Spotify's artist base made over $1000 in streams in 2020 - (and streams count whether people listened and hated it or played via algorithmic playlist that the listener had no control over. ) So let’s say that 15% is the number of musicians on their platform with actual fan bases. It’s not an exact analogy, but it works for this discussion.

 

That dollar amount seems paltry until you add in the context that that 15% was over 187,000 artists. Now, $1000 is just the minimum amount paid out to be a part of this top 15%. But to keep it simple, let’s say they gave 187000 artists $1000. That’s 187 million dollars. Some of these artists have streams in the billions. 13000 of those made over 50k. They are paying out a LOT of money spread out among a lot of artists.

 

In 2020, Spotify brought in 8 billion dollars in revenue - NOT profit. As a matter of fact, Spotify has never published an operating profit. In 2020, it posted a 581 million euro loss. But just for fun, let’s say you you took every dime of their revenue - and they didn't pay their CEO, or a single employee, electricity bill, server cost, marketing - (and on and on) and split that money between the artists with enough streams to make 1000 bucks - that would only be $4200 bucks per artist. Now split that between the publisher and the songwriter and the band members and the manager, etc, and that is hardly enough for anyone to live off of.

According to Business Insider, Spotify pays rights-holders between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream on average. Approximately 70 percent of the total revenue earned per stream goes to the artist, while the rest is absorbed by the platform itself. So in order to double what Spotify pays artists, they would have to raise their revenue to at least 13 billion dollars.

 

I also see people say that if they took away the crazy salaries of their top executives, you could use that money to pay musicians. The salaries of many higher ups at Spotify may seem outrageous, I get it - but if you paid Spotify’s top 11 executives nothing at all, it would literally have no effect on the amounts paid to musicians. It would be like taking away someone’s extravagant dinner to solve the hunger problem of a major city.

 

The ONLY way to raise the monetary amount that musicians make from streaming is to raise streaming prices SIGNIFICANTLY for consumers.

 

But it’s hard for any streaming company to do that since they all offer basically the same product. If Spotify raised their subscriber fee to 19.99 a month, people would just switch to Apple or Tidal, if those 2 services also raised their rates, people would switch to Youtube. If they ALL raised their rates, a new service would just come in and undercut them all. You should never underestimate the average person’s total disregard for if someone is getting paid enough for the product they are purchasing. They just want the product at the cheapest price available.

 

And let’s say that you could get an across the board payment hike on streaming services, well now you’ve started to price some people out. And you’re probably definitely going to damage the discovery aspect of streaming services. If Spotify had to pay a significant amount to artists whose songs their algorithms and editorial playlists served to their customers, that would be like them paying to promote the music themselves.

 

But the HUGE problem, that I’ve never seen anyone address, is that as time goes on, the economics of streaming only get worse. There are still 60k songs being uploaded daily - which means there is even more music to listen to and more musicians who want a cut of the pie. The song pool is further diluted. Which means the amount of money that can be garnered from streaming can only diminish no matter how much you charge customers to access it. The only way to make the math work is to limit the amount of music on Spotify while still significantly increasing their user base.

 

So why do I continue to work with musicians when I think that the market is oversaturated and selling music can’t lead to a full-time living for the majority of musicians?

 

Because I don’t think the modern day music business is solely about music. I think it’s about the people behind the music. It’s a total package game. You’ve got to be a good musician, a good performer, a good storyteller, a good marketer, and basically be good at having people buy into YOU. Sometimes it’s hard to gauge exactly what the thing is that makes a person drawn to someone, but if you do it right, they’ll be your lifelong fan and they’ll buy whatever you're selling. Just go take a look at Taylor Swift’s merch store.

 

The musician is the brand and the music is just one of the products. People will buy stuff from musicians that have value - whether it's tickets to a show or live stream, t-shirts, specialty products, one on ones, VIP packages, music lessons, deluxe editions, demos, books, etc etc. Musicians are only limited by their own creativity when it comes to selling products.

 

Personally, I think making money is easy. Just like learning an instrument, it may take time and effort to become adept at it, but the steps are pretty simple. Build your audience through building connections with them, get to know your audience, provide products for your audience that have value.

All you have to do to be successful as a musician is know who you are, what you stand for, have a story to tell and SERVE your audience rather than have them serve you. Hell, you don’t even have to be a good musician. There are plenty of bad ones out there making money.

 

Musicians get upset because they JUST want to play music and not have to do the business part. But business owners are the ones who make the money. Making music and making money are two very distinct talents. You can be a musician and not sell your music. There’s no shame in that. But if you want to make money from your music, you’re going to have to have an entrepreneurial outlook. This means you’re going to have to learn and perform tasks that make your business profitable. Sure, I’d love to just do the fun parts of my job, but I own a business, so I have to do tons of stuff above and beyond just publicity.

 

The reason why you’ll never hear me complain about these conditions is because I know that working in the music business is a privilege. I work in an industry that’s only goal is pleasure. New music is not needed. “Paid Musician” is not a job that society needs. As mentioned before, we have plenty of music to last any individual a lifetime. Plus, people will alway make and play music, even if they outlawed anyone ever making a dime from it again.

 

In conclusion, I believe streaming has been vastly beneficial. I don’t believe that it is keeping anyone from making a fair living, there are other far more likely factors that have affected the economics of musicians, the most important one being the over abundance of them. I think that it is naive for musicians to hold Spotify accountable for not paying them money that doesn’t exist for streams from listeners that they probably would not have without streaming. I think that all of this energy bashing Spotify was wasted when it could have been used to find a solution. Maybe there’s a tiered subscription plan option, or after you stream a song so many times you own it, or after your song hits a certain amount of streams, you no longer get paid for it and the money goes to less popular artists who need the money more, or maybe, and I can hear some of you groaning, NFTs and Web3 streaming will solve a lot of these problems.

 

I saw quite a few people on Twitter cheering that Spotify lost2 billion dollars this week due to the Neil Young controversy. I don’t understand that. Spotify is not a person. It’s a publicly traded company, so it was really just people with individual investments and people with retirement funds that lost money. And with NO solution being offered by the naysayers, it was all for nothing.

 

I’m not some corporate apologist, free market worshipping, Ayn Rand fan. I just like to look at the full picture of situations and acknowledge that there are hardly ever any easy answers. Nothing I saw this week came close to actually solving any problems, because that takes time and effort, something that few people want to actually do.

 

If you want to disagree with me on my position, that’s fine, I’d love to hear your fact-based plan on how to keep all of the benefits that Spotify provides and make it a viable income stream. But be ready to show your work.

P.S. well this blew up! Sign up for my weekly newsletter on Sweetheart Pub .com.

P.S.S. For all the people telling me I dont know what I'm talking about, I've been working in the music biz for 25 years - as a music supervisor, writer, talent buyer, publicist, and in social media. I've written for major newspapers, worked at cable music channels, live concert events, at a record label, at a legendary recording studio, and have helped DOZENS of artists self-release albums.

[Dave Bryce]

This is an excellent read.  Thanks so much for sharing it.  There's a lot to think about here...

 

dB

 

[Anderton]

I can't wait to share an idea of a possible solution, once it's published in my monthly Mix column...but at least I do think there's a solution. However, it's not the kind of answer that will lift unknowns into the stratosphere and have overnight successes on social media. It's more for people for whom music is a serious career choice.

[jerrythek]

A really interesting read... my main first reaction is that the many unknown and un-listened to artists shouldn't expect to make much money. You have to have streams, and fans, and traction to expect to be making much of anything. The issue is for the people that get moderate and above action, what is the compensation? I found it interesting that she states that Spotify pays 70% of the money to the artist... I have never heard that, and every article I have read states that Spotify pays much lower than the other major streaming services. So what is the truth? If they were on parity with Apple, Amazon, Youtube, Google etc. they wouldn't be singled out, methinks.

 

For example:

 

typical article

 

But when you read more, the picture is less clear-cut:

 

Forbes article

 

So I remain confused...

 

Jerry

[Notes_Norton]

I would guess that even during the height of the recording boom, 99% of the musicians on the planet didn't make a living as a recording act. The 1% like Elvis, Beatles, Jackson, hit the jackpot, but for every one of those, hundreds never made it.

 

There has always been too much music, but now the gatekeepers are less selective.

 

I recall reading about A&R departments getting mail bags full of cassette tapes, with some minimum wage kids assigned to decide which ones go to up the ladder to someone who could actually make a "Yes" decision. I read about people including money, and fetish objects in with the tape to 'bribe' some kid to send them up the chain. And I recall A&R people saying the popped the cassette tape in, and if they heard hiss or static, they would pop it out and trash it before the first note.

 

It helped if you were related to or if you knew someone in the big-time biz.

 

Bands were also paying to gig in LA and other recording cities in the hopes of some promotor or record exec 'discovering' them. If the door didn't make so much money (and it didn't) the band would have to pay the club to make up the difference. I haven't experienced this myself, but read about it in trade magazines.

 

Then once the label decided to back you, in the early "Elvis" days you had to shop it around to radio stations, then when the indies were bought up by the major labels, and the radio stations started to fall under corporate umbrellas, it could cost a million dollars or more of promotion to get it played on the radio. The Program Director had the power to say yes or no to hundreds of stations.

 

I played 'sax for hire' at a nice Independent recording studio around here for dozens of people wanting to be stars. I was usually called in after the basic rhythm track was done, sometimes with final vocals, sometimes with just reference vocals. Some of the recordings were so-so, others were excellent. As far as I know, none of them ever got any airplay. That studio folded in the mid 1990s when the owner/engineer had a stroke.

 

Now we have almost anybody able to post their music online in one platform or another. So the problem is still the same, how is a recording going to get noticed?

 

The entry fee is now lower, but the market is saturated. And as always, the gatekeepers take the bulk of the money and give the newbies nothing more than a few crumbs off the table.

 

No thanks, I'm doing fine playing in front of an audience. I'm not rich, but the mortgage is paid off, and I'm not carrying any debt.

 

Notes ♫

[Anderton]

1 hour ago, jerrythek said:

I found it interesting that she states that Spotify pays 70% of the money to the artist... I have never heard that, and every article I have read states that Spotify pays much lower than the other major streaming services.

 

Here's a really interesting article that doesn't answer your specific question, but has fascinating stats about Spotify. For example, users are 56% women, 44% men, and the biggest demographic slice (29%) is in the 25-34 age group. Note that Spotify has never turned an operating profit (!).

 

It may be true that Spotify pays 70% of the money to the artist and has really low per-stream rates, if you add in payments to labels and licensing entities as going to the artist. Apparently major labels own most of the content on Spotify and have the most streams (e.g., Drake). So if they're racking up billions and billions (and billions) of streams, getting licensing fees, and paying the artist, then it could add up to a lot of money while the huge number of streams dilutes the payment per stream.

 

I like to remind people that "back in the day" it was never easy to make money from recordings. The top 10% of a label supported the other 90% who lost money. I made a much-better-than-average living as a musician back in the 60s, but the money was from live performance, not recordings. I did make some decent money from the "new age" productions I did in the 80s, but that dried up a long time ago.

[KuruPrionz]

There was "Too Much Music" before there was the internet, streaming is just a delivery system that allows a glutted system to become more glutted. 

I hear people exalting "the good old days when music was great" but we are seeing the "oldies" through a filter now. 

I remember buying albums decades ago and often enough there would be 2 to 4 good songs on an album and 8 to 10 not so good ones. These were major artists, releasing albums with a low percentage of good to great material. 

At the same time, we can look at artists like Joni Mitchell, who wrote a ton of great songs and just about the only thing that gets played is Help Me. 

 

Honestly, I hardly listen to other people's songs at all. Once in a while I'll start one up on YouTube and listen to it on the laptop speakers. If it's pretty OK I might only make it through a minute or two. If it's fantastic I'll put the headphones on and listen to the entire thing, once. 

 

I can go for weeks without doing either. No subscriptions to any streaming services, I've listened at friend's places and the current situation is similar to how it's always been. You can listen to a lot of songs and hear a good one here and there. We haven't had time to filter out the good stuff, maybe that will happen and maybe it won't.

Not all hit songs are inherently "great", I can think of quite a few from the past that I don't feel have anything going for them at all. 

 

Could be I'm just too picky, so it goes. 

[Joe Muscara]

I call B.S. 

 

There are WAY too many TV shows, specials, made for streaming productions, etc., now, more than there ever was*. But is anyone complaining that their portion isn't getting paid because Netflix or Paramount+ or Showtime or Apple TV+ or whatever streaming service isn't paying them enough? (Yes, IATSE is talking about too many hours and not enough pay or something like that, but that would be like if the record producers or engineers were complaining about their workload and share as opposed to the records themselves not getting enough). And those streaming services generally cost what - $5, $10, $20/month? How is that different than paying $5, $10, $20/month for Apple Music or Spotify?

 

So what's the difference? In general, it seems like the film industry has had it figured out for years but the music industry hasn't.

 

8 hours ago, jerrythek said:

I found it interesting that she states that Spotify pays 70% of the money to the artist... I have never heard that, and every article I have read states that Spotify pays much lower than the other major streaming services.

 

My understanding is that Sputify takes the money they have collected that month and after "expenses", divides that up among the spins for that month. So if they take out 30% for their overhead (making this up, I have no idea), then that 70% remaining is divided by however millions of spins/plays that occurred. So if your song got played 10,000 times that month, you'd make ((0.7 * amount collected)/total plays for everyone)) * 10000.

 

On its face, that might seem like a fair way to do it, but imagine that you made any other physical product. You don't get to decide how much you get paid for the product, the vendor tells you how much they will pay you per unit. If they sold 70 of your widgets, but their costs were higher that month because their heating bill was higher or more employees showed up for work, tough luck widget maker, you get less money.

 

But hey, build a relationship with your widget buyers and sell t-shirts and get a following for your future widgets and you can make more money that way.

 

Can you tell this kind of article ticks me off? Look, I think it's cool that artists can build a following, and that they can develop a market for their creations and merchandise. I love the convenience of streaming. I love that small artists are theoretically on a level playing field with bigger ones. There are lots of advantages that streaming brings, but the fact that the formula for payments sucks isn't one of them. I wish I could figure out what makes sense, but I don't have enough info. For a minute there, smaller artists were using Discmakers, selling their own CDs, and making a living. How many streaming spins would that be equivalent to? I don't know. I know that the numbers these same artists get now aren't even close to the money they used to make. Or, were the CDs over valued?  

 

Note that my perspective here is largely thinking about smaller artists. The Beatles, Neil Young, MJ, Shakira, Elvis, Frank Sinatra, etc., have always been on a different level than the "middle-class" artists who I see getting really screwed by this. I know lots of them who made a living from music and now they've gotten one-twoed by streaming and the pandemic.

 

* Remember when there were three networks plus PBS, and a couple of channels that had reruns? Look at the viewership numbers for shows back then vs. how they are divided now. The most watched stuff now isn't even close because viewership is so divided.

[ToddP]

8 hours ago, jerrythek said:

A really interesting read... my main first reaction is that the many unknown and un-listened to artists shouldn't expect to make much money. You have to have streams, and fans, and traction to expect to be making much of anything. The issue is for the people that get moderate and above action, what is the compensation? I found it interesting that she states that Spotify pays 70% of the money to the artist... I have never heard that, and every article I have read states that Spotify pays much lower than the other major streaming services. So what is the truth? If they were on parity with Apple, Amazon, Youtube, Google etc. they wouldn't be singled out, methinks.

 

For example:

 

typical article

 

But when you read more, the picture is less clear-cut:

 

Forbes article

 

So I remain confused...

 

Jerry

 

Here is an in-depth about how the 70% us distributed. I think the main complaints about payouts are from songwriters, who are no longer getting much of the pie due to how the different royalties (performance, mechanical) are paid vs recording owners (labels mostly). 

 

https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts

 

[jerrythek]

15 hours ago, ToddP said:

 

Here is an in-depth about how the 70% us distributed. I think the main complaints about payouts are from songwriters, who are no longer getting much of the pie due to how the different royalties (performance, mechanical) are paid vs recording owners (labels mostly). 

 

https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts

 

 

Thanks Todd... a really deep read, and I think I'm going to have to go through it a couple of times to fully digest it all. It does confirm what I thought I had surmised when I was looking for a streaming service, and that is that since already being an Amazon Prime member, going with Amazon Unlimited was a decent choice. High resolution audio specs supported, and more than enough music to keep me occupied.

 

But there's plenty more to understand about the current landscape. However you cut it, journeymen musicians and non-upper-tier musicians have it worse than before. Selling your music on places like Bandcamp and at your gigs helps, but there's simply less outlets to move product since physical media is all but dead.

 

Thanks again.

 

Jerry

[jerrythek]

On 2/2/2022 at 7:04 PM, Anderton said:

I can't wait to share an idea of a possible solution, once it's published in my monthly Mix column...but at least I do think there's a solution. However, it's not the kind of answer that will lift unknowns into the stratosphere and have overnight successes on social media. It's more for people for whom music is a serious career choice.

I'm (we're) all ears!

 

Jerry

[Anderton]

1 hour ago, jerrythek said:

However you cut it, journeymen musicians and non-upper-tier musicians have it worse than before. Selling your music on places like Bandcamp and at your gigs helps, but there's simply less outlets to move product since physical media is all but dead.

 

I've often toyed with the idea of selling my music more like a product, e.g., a sample library based on cutting various tracks into loops, or a preset collection that contains all the presets used in the course of making a collection of songs. I proposed the "music-meets-sample-library" idea to Sonic Foundry years ago, and they ended up applying it to one of their libraries...don't know whether it sold or not.

 

I've also thought about putting everything I've ever recorded from the 60s to today on a USB stick, with artwork, stories, memorabilia, essays, presets, etc. It would sort of be like a "USB stick coffee table book." The main advantage I would have is a disadvantage in all other respects - my "audience" is scattered all over the map. But, they might add up. There are still a lot of Mandrake Memorial fans, and although they might not care what I'm doing now, they might want to buy the USB stick just to have cleaned-up versions of what's on their beat-up records. There are rare live performances with the band Anomali, which had Charles Cohen in it. The people who liked the classical guitar recordings I did with Linda Cohen, or the other classical projects, might want it for that. Others might want it because it would have lots of presets and samples. I also have an album that was never released, but had several remixes done in Europe. It would be fun to include the album and the remixes.

 

I probably won't do it - seems like a lot of effort, and I doubt the returns would justify the time required to put it together. But someone with a huge following might be able to pull it off and make it work.

[RABid]

I'm going to take an opposing view for one reason. ...

 

I watch a LOT of YouTube. A lot of what I watch is music creation based. People who teach and demonstrate electronic instruments and beatboxes, review synths and Eurorack, and show their process of making beats. Some of these are quite talented at making electronic music but record companies are not going to pay any attention to them. Some of them put out their own music and I am interested in checking it out. In the past they would be limited to selling CD's or using a minor streaming/downloading service. That does not work for me. For the past two years I only use Apple Music. In the past I was buying from other sources but it became too much to keep up with. I'm happy that services like Distrokid now make it easy for them to enter my market and appear on my chosen service. Yes, the abundance of new music makes it hard to get discovered the traditional way, but now it is easier than ever to build your own audience.

[Anderton]

Then there's podcasts. Apparently in 2021 there were 2,000,000 podcasts online with around half of those active, and 48,000,000 episodes. Almost seems like it's not even worth trying to start a podcast, how are you possibly going to get noticed when there are already people who are firmly entrenched?

[Notes_Norton]

It's always best to be first at the new party. The problem is, which new thing is going to be the one that lasts?

 

Notes ♫

[David Emm]

5 hours ago, Anderton said:

Then there's podcasts. Apparently in 2021 there were 2,000,000 podcasts online with around half of those active, and 48,000,000 episodes. Almost seems like it's not even worth trying to start a podcast, how are you possibly going to get noticed when there are already people who are firmly entrenched?

I don't even want to do the math on the full number of Spectrasonics or Serum patches, never mind Spotify, bursting with amateur works no one much will ever hear. Some of it is pretty good, but like unexpected money from Hebbin, my attention span is here today, gone by 4 pm.

 

I think Bill Maher put it well: "Andy Warhol said that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. The problem is that now, they all want to be famous for 15 minutes every day." You've probably heard a variation on the old joke 'Even if you're a one-in-a-million guy, in a city of eight million, there are seven more just like you?' There are just too many of us. Thanos WAS right. Makes you itch for a med check, eh?

 

I take small exception with Notes, in that NO new thing lasts unless it contains enough fundamentals, rather than being mere novelty. No one buys pet rocks anymore, but Frisbee golf is doing okay.  

[nursers]

10 hours ago, Anderton said:

Then there's podcasts. Apparently in 2021 there were 2,000,000 podcasts online with around half of those active, and 48,000,000 episodes. Almost seems like it's not even worth trying to start a podcast, how are you possibly going to get noticed when there are already people who are firmly entrenched?

 

You have to find a niche not saturated. That's what I did and even though I started the podcast only 2 years ago it has a very solid audience.

[Anderton]

1 hour ago, Dr Nursers said:

 

You have to find a niche not saturated. That's what I did and even though I started the podcast only 2 years ago it has a very solid audience.

 

That's kind of my point...I think by podcast standards, "2 years" is probably firmly entrenched!