Yeah, Spotify clearly sucks. Luckily, it's not the only streaming venue, and it's the worst of the bunch in terms of artist payout. Why don't more artists just boycott them? Send their music only to those services that payout fairly? ----------
So, the question for me is, is a) there money in streaming music or is the infrastructure to expensive and b) if there is money and the artists aren't getting it (presumably meaning the streaming sites are) is there a way to get that money going to the artists?
Maybe there should be a not-for-profit artist collective streaming site? (At the very least they could plow the tax savings back to the artists). Is the glut of music making the streaming sites position too strong? In that case a union, or at least a 'we won't let you stream until you hit this $. Is it that there is too much competition in streaming so the streaming sites can't demand enough for ads and don't have money to pass along? (That might lean towards an artist backed non-profit as a solution). Is there too much competition for exposure from the up and comings to sustain prices for the established artists, or vice versa, is there too much demand and a glut of us hacks, too wide a gulf for anyone but Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan to make money?
Maybe we just demand that the streaming sites open their books? It seems like all courses of action depend on what the underlying cause is.
I'm not up for a battle this scale, but it seems that if things are going to change we need some brainstorming. What is a fair percentage of the revenue? How do we get there?
I still prefer the Great Library model. All digital information is uploaded and can be downloaded 'free'. Information is free. A large progressive tax pays the content providers- not based on what the government wants to support but what the people want to download. The more popular your widget or song or game is the more money you get, but the person using it never directly pays for it. Capitalistic principles still control the market- it's not the cost, but the quality of the content that draws people in. Everyone has free access to protools, but protools gets a big check from the government for the copies it digitally places in the library.
The tax cost would be heavy, but it would be offset by a lot of savings- companies would't have to pay for software. People wouldn't have to pay for music or video games. People still have to make good stuff to get popular to make money, so capitalism is still alive.
I know it sounds crazy, but the other option is to criminalize and prosecute kids sharing files. I'd rather lose a little freedom to a progressive tax than to the constant creation of new classes of criminals. ---------- Nate Facebook Thread Organizer (A list of all sorts of useful threads)
An article on "Source," an e-publication of Nationwide Disc. It's called "Taking Note: Taylor Swift and Spotify":
We like to stay up-to-date on music industry news. It would be foolish not to. We get daily reports from a number of websites and news conglomerates, and there are certain terms that we track. This can mean that when something big happens, we hear a lot about it in a very short window of time.
Yesterday, we heard a lot. What Happened?
Simply put, an artist chose to remove her back catalog from a streaming service.
It probably happens quite often, although not nearly as often as artists announce that their music is now available on streaming services. But, judging by the flood of news bulletins in our inbox and trending topics on social media and legit news sources, yesterday’s announcement was a little different and a big, BIG deal. So, what is the difference?
Well, the artist in question is Taylor Swift. And the streaming service? Spotify.
That’s right. Spotify has neither Taylor’s newest album, which debuted last week and was never offered on the streaming service, nor any of her previous albums available for its users.
Whether or not you personally are a fan of her music, it’s hard to deny the enormous success and even larger fan base that Taylor has. If those fans can’t get Taylor’s music on Spotify, they might start looking somewhere else for Taylor’s music… which could be cause for alarm for Spotify and could explain their efforts to bring her back.
There’s abundant speculation about why Taylor Swift has removed her back catalog, including an alleged effort to boost her label’s sales figures before the label makes itself available for purchase. We don’t want to speak for the songstress, though, so we’ll allow her words from a recent article in the Wall Street Journal to speak on her behalf:
“Piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically… Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It’s my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album’s price point is. I hope they don’t underestimate themselves or undervalue their art.”
Taylor, we couldn’t agree more. Why You Should Care
We’ve said before how we feel about streaming music, but we’ll say it again. It’s great for fans, since they get often customizable and sometimes unlimited access to music for free or almost free. Based on the fact that Spotify and Pandora have struggled to turn a profit, and that Pandora attempted to have Congress enforce lower payments to artists, we’d be reasonably safe to argue that streaming services are an unprofitable, unsustainable business model. Yet, these services are still around. How are they surviving? Well, someone is picking up the financial shortfall. And that someone is every musician who gives his or her music away on these services.
Yes, those are the same musicians who spend hours writing the music and lyrics, weeks rehearsing and perfecting the songs, time and money recording, mixing, and mastering the album, and then pay more to market and promote their newest releases. Musicians—whose gifts and talent result in the product (music) that streaming services need—are paying to get their music on the service, only to wait on hundreds of thousands of streams (if not more) to recover their investment. While not free, the payments to musicians are so low that the music might as well be free. Additionally, since streaming also impacts their ability to sell music to fans, musicians struggle to recover financially.
Why do musicians give away their product for almost nothing? We hear a lot of reasons: In hopes of exposure. Because everyone else is. Because it’s what is expected by their fans. Because their labels make them. Because they don’t think there’s another way.
But there is. What You Can Do
We think it’s insane that musicians let others profit off of their hard work while they struggle to make ends meet and debate continuing what they were born to do. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Like Taylor Swift said, we think that, “Music is art, and art is important and rare [and] valuable.” With that in mind, here are some changes you can make.
First and foremost: stop sending sales and profits to everyone but yourself! Sell your product on your own website, or on a platform that doesn’t rip you off and does share your own customers’ information with you. Stop giving it away! If you want new listeners to explore your music before they buy (how kind of you!), offer previews of songs (meaning, not the whole song) or music videos on your website. Or, exchange one valuable item for another: one of your songs for your fan’s contact information. If you feel that streaming is a necessary part of your music marketing plan, then try posting just a single song or a small sampling of your work. Hopefully, this limited sampling will whet the appetite of listeners, who will then come to you to purchase your music. Believe that your music, and the time and energy you’ve put into it, is valuable. You can’t ask your fans to pay for something if you don’t see value in it. They aren’t just paying for a file, whether digital or on a piece of plastic. They’re paying for your creativity, your time, and your energy. If that means nothing to you, it will certainly mean nothing to them.
While Taylor’s motives for pulling her music from Spotify have yet to be seen (if they ever come to light), we can only hope that other artists will see some logic in her actions and decide to take their career and their livelihoods back into their own hands.
I was going to comment on the Taylor Swift news. It's a big deal, and hopefully causes some change. The "free" streaming services are really what's wrong here, and they are the ones that really underpay artists for their work. What needs to happen is that a realistic and fair pricing scheme needs to be set for the per-song payout on these services, and this needs to be fed up the chain to the consumer. I'm currently paying $10 a month for Google Play Music All Access. I think that's absurdly low, and I don't get how Google can be paying artists the purported $0.045 per song if I'm only paying them ten dollars. By my math, Google starts to loose money after I play 222 songs, and that's without accounting for any overhead. I easily do that in a couple of days. Honestly, I would be happy paying $40 or $50 a month for this kind of streaming service (i.e., one that lets me listen to anything I wanted to, and save all my playlists and songs and stuff). Google must be making some money off of the service (or at least expects to soon be), otherwise they wouldn't have it, right? So how do they make money? Album sales (probably not)? Ads (they don't put them in the paid service)? Or is it just "worth it" to them to have me buried so deep in their ecosystem that I couldn't crawl my way to another service provider even if I wanted to? I dunno.
I guess the question now is, "What's a fair per-song payout?" What do you all thing? 2 cents? 5 cents? What do artists get when their songs are played on the radio? How much would you be willing to pay for a streaming service that you KNEW was paying artists fairly?
I was going to share the Swift news (there has got to be some sort of metaphor in there about musicians eating their profits/babies). The article I read had Spotify saying that artists got 70% of the revenues.
"A large progressive tax pays the content providers- not based on what the government wants to support but what the people want to download."
I could not disagree more. The government should not have anything to do with this. And I don't want to pay taxes to have someone else subsidized, in effect, to produce and download what I might consider crap music.
*** As an aside, on the issue that kudzurunner raised about not giving it away, that rule of thumb also should go for people, like myself, who shoot and publicly post videos of musical performances on various social media. I almost always ask to post, and many times I post on Facebook where it can't be downloaded. When I have permission to post on YouTube, which is most of the time (for both permission being granted as well as where I post), I don't post all of my footage. Many artists that I know trust me to post not only just what is a good performance, but also not to post a whole lot of it. Leave some room for the artist to draw people to a show, don't just throw it all out there. If you don't have their permission, just don't post it publicly.
Last Edited by atty1chgo on Nov 04, 2014 11:07 AM
Atty1chgo, just throwing ideas out there. There seem to be 6 models for making money in music.
1) Streaming revenue- the downfall seems to be even with Spotify paying 70% back to the artists artists aren't seeing much.
2) Record sales- piracy. Even in a world without streaming, piracy. And fighting that's not free. It means all sorts of court costs and there are a lot of problems with how you fight it without giving up people's right to privacy (although that ship may have already sailed)
3) The library model, which is essentially streaming but with a tax. It's kind of like the health insurance mandate. It only works if everyone pays in. Alternately you could use the NEA model, but that ends up with the government deciding what is art and what isn't.
4) The hobbyist model, aka the horse poop sweeper. There used to be a huge industry sweeping poop off the street. Then cars came along. We do music because we love it. Maybe a few lucky people make millions but most talented musicians, probably fewer and fewer, will make money at it. Or maybe we are fooling ourselves. I haven't seen any real numbers on how many people are making a living in the music industry compared to times past. Maybe some of us wouldn't be making any money at all. (I'm still not!) I'd like to see some hard numbers on that. I know there are guys making a living by making a YouTube series. You can make money playing video games if you have enough subscribers.
5) Merchandising and touring. You can make 70 cents on a song download. How much can you make on a tee shirt? How many shows can you play? How many studio gigs can you get? Open a forum. Sell lessons and books.
6) The patron (Patreon)/Kickstarter model. People pledge money to you for doing what you do. It might also cover pay what you want album releases like Radiohead did.
(7)- you can wait until someone famous steals your work and sue- http://www.musictimes.com/articles/7020/20140624/pitbull-being-sued-timber-featuring-kesha-similarities-lee-oskars-san.htm
Some of these models can coexist side by side. Some of them would cannibalize others. I'm spitballing here. The guys making money doing YouTube gaming shows often put out multiple episodes a week. They don't make their money on any one episode, but they serialize their series and get a couple hundred thousand views for each new installment. They find a hyper-focused market and exploit the hell out of it. I used to watch a series called, 'Songs from a Hat'. Abbey Simons collected made up song titles from her comments section and posted a new song every week on Sunday based on one of those songs. She probably never got more than 5 digits worth of hits on any one song but people tuned in week after week (like Adam's tutorials).
The regularity of it and the willingness to just keep plugging along led to more hits. I've got a friend who tried to make a go of game videos. He made fairly high quality stuff. Starting from zero he got up to 17 subscribers after a few weeks and then decided he'd had enough. If you are going to commit to making money on music you kind of have to be all in.
Amanda Palmer has just written an article titled "Why fans choose to pay artists they love." It is partly based on her experience as a street performer.
She makes some interesting points.
The key one seems to be "People actually like supporting the artists whose work they like. It makes them feel happy. You don't have to force them. And if you force them, they don't feel as good."
and This is the lesson I learned, as a rock star and as a street performer in my wedding dress:
· Keep the content authentic,
· Keep the exchange honest,
· Keep the message spreading by any means necessary,
· And people will come.
· Once they come, if you make it easy for them, many will pay.
Palmer had a good TED talk on that too. Imagine a Kickstarter for an album that pulls in nearly $1.2 million.
A couple years ago there was a book by former Wired editor Chris Anderson arguing that digital technology would drive all content prices to zero. (I read reviews and in depth summaries but I haven't gotten around to reading it.) Basically the premise was that digital distribution is virtually free so the cost of selling 3 copies of your album is basically the cost of selling 3 million copies and that most content will be supported by advertising.
Yes, but the cost of creating "content" is not free. Musicians need to be paid. Good mastering engineers need to be paid. Grant Kessler's matchless services in the art department don't come free. Dematerialization of the content--digital rather than CD delivery--is a reality, but the content still needs to be created. That takes time and money. That's even true if you're a one-man band.
Anderson believed it could all be supported by advertising. Spotify argues that they aren't competing with record sales- they are competing with piracy. They are trying to reestablish the idea that music has value. Or at least that's their pitch.
I guess the pre-release version of that would be having advertising companies act like the record companies, and front musicians the production and publicity costs in exchange for future revenue. It's more likely, I think, that most of us will have to gamble our own money (or go to Kickstarter).
Ultimately, I think lowered recording prices make competition a lot fiercer since the entry cost is lower, which is good for consumers, but lousy for content providers. Just look at this forum. If money wasn't an issue, I could go crazy just buying all the forum members albums. The record company gatekeeper model meant you had a lot fewer people putting out albums.
The problem (and strength) of pure capitalism pushes all costs down, including the wages of the people producing things. Profits go up when production costs go down or when production goes up and you sell more product. If the musician is making less money per album, then the producers make less per album, and the art guys.
It's a tough puzzle to solve. I can digitally distribute a track, and there are websites that will teach me how to mix it (I've got files all over my computer of songs where I just can't get the mix right), but unless I can get the track in front of lots of listeners record sales will still be zero. You can post videos and stream, but you get a small cut. You can try to get on the radio, but then you've run into one of those gatekeepers again, and one you aren't allowed to pay at that! As long as there are more of us than the radio stations (or YouTube) need to keep their users happy it's an uphill battle.
So, another question for the people seriously trying to make money on this- how much do you spend on advertising? I remember hearing some advice on advertising in general that you should spend until the amount extra you are spending is less than the amount extra than you will get from it. If you can spend $1 and get $5 extra in business, good. If you can spend another $1 and get another $4, do it. Keep doing it right up until the point when that $1 is getting at least $1 back. It's not the point of diminishing returns, it's right up until it starts losing money. (But then you have very reasonable articles going around saying that it's the venues responsibility to promote, and for some solid reasons, especially for touring musicians who aren't going to be in the city, it's easier for the venue).
For what it's worth, most of the last few albums I've bought were Kickstarter rewards. Basically I just paid what I'd pay for the album and waited. It counts on a warm fuzzy feeling that you are helping get something done. I've also downloaded a couple of those 'pay what you want to pay' albums. I personally haven't paid much, but some artists have made good money on it. There is also the model Prince used where he included a copy of his album in a newspaper (I think I'm remembering that right). In that case he was clearly using it purely for advertising. He probably took it as a write off.) One way to advertise would be to flood an area with free CDs hoping to drive attendance at shows, but it probably has to be done very locally.
I don't know. I find it a fascinating but frustrating topic.
The only thing Anderson was right about was the head vs long tail model.
If the "new" economic model for livelihood is "advertising" we are well and truly fracked as a species. The whole advertising meme (grasped by every wannabee startup bizmode as in "we just need 100 million eyeballs then we can monetize by ads") is flawed because of one basic fact...humans have a threshold for everything.
As the noise floor of content has risen due to democratization of content devtools and distribution, so has the noise floor of adverspam trying to push signal through it. It's not a solution, it's just adding to the problem of signal vs noise.
Komuso, just because it means we are fracked doesn't mean it isn't true! There is a saturation level, I agree, but that saturation level may also be the level that people are willing to spend at. There are, of course, premium services that provide exactly the same service just minus the ads (as opposed to the HBO model that offered premium content but no legal option to skip the ads for a premium). I bet Serg and Brin run adblock on their computers. The targeting of the ads is getting more refined. I don't get ads for feminine hygiene products in my searches anymore. The more targeted the ad is the more likely it is to get a sale while being less intrusive (or at least in theory. It can short circuit our desires. It's one thing to run an ad for a diet product when I say I'm on a diet, but ethically a little different if you send me coupons for Whoppers!)
Advertising is the lazy default business model. For all the talk of innovation what we see is ad supported business models. Yes, advertising is needed and it is getting better but the current paradigm of using it as the final solution basis for an economic engine is unsustainable. Saturation levels and annoyance thresholds being continually hit are indicators of a broken system. Not to mention ability to tune out, which makes them equally ineffective.
While ad targeting is getting more refined, it also has a long long way to go and there are still huge issues with data privacy and use. That said, I do like how google's algorithm improvements have eviscerated the internet marketer SEO game. I wish the same could be said for email spam, which seems to be growing.
The core issues in a noisy content spectrum for both producers and consumers is discovery and needs matching, and that does not necessarily mean advertising, which all to often is a hammer where a nail is needed. Advertising is also essentially a "user pays" medium, which favors deep pockets not always the best product/service.
I knew we were fracked when I read French social theorist Guy Debord's SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE back in grad school. "From being to having to appearing." Society is on an inevitable declension from being to having to appearing. Which is to say: from the world of AVATAR (utopian oneness with each other and the trees) to the Gilded Age to.....now.
Here's what he actually said: once civilization figures out that time--understood as your potentially commodifiable attention--is money, it will proceed to subdivide and commodify time, forcing advertising into every place where it can conceivably be forced. There will increasingly come to be no part of the world, or your mind, where advertising cannot be squeezed.
I watched this happening with movies. As late as my 30s, when you went into a theatre to see a movie, you had 10 minutes of coming attractions, and then the film. I still remember how shocked I was when a movie theater first dared to show an ad--i.e., an ad for something other than a movie. Now that has become standard, and unremarkable. But that's where I saw SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE at work. Once there were no ads; now there are ads. Pop-ups are the same thing.
When you take a cab these days, there are ads blasting at you from a small TV set on the back of the front seat. When you pump gas these days, there's another small TV set blasting ads at you.
The internet has been transformed into one incredibly sophisticated tool for demanding that we pay attention to ads, and for mining our "attention," such as it is--our surfing and response patterns--to figure out which ads we can be shown.
From being to having to appearing. That is the EXACT definition of Facebook and Instagram. "If you don't have a selfie of it that you share with the world, it didn't happen." Some people actually behave like that. Correction: the preponderance of young people these days think that's the only way to behave. Debord would say: it used to be enough just to eat a nice meal. Then it became important, in the Gilded Age, to invite your friends over for big meals: conspicuous consumption, which was a way of broadcasting your "having," your wealth and possessions. Now it's important to take a picture of your dinner and share it with all your "friends," worldwide. You do that, and you've lost touch, arguably, with the soul-pleasure that the meal alone, and its many tastes, might have graced you (and you alone) with. That sort of private pleasure is no longer....fun. Because your time and your attention have been commodified. Remember: when you "share" your dinner-photo with the Facebook world, it's being mined for data. The folks in charge of the matrix--ah, I mean the spectacle--are using your "appearing," your shared photo, to sell stuff in an increasingly sophisticated way. Share a photo of you hoisting a tankard of craft beer and you'll start getting ads for beer.
Me, I don't actually share everything--or very much at all--with Facebook. I just do stuff. I don't have a smart phone. I enjoy the workings of my own mind outside the matrix--I mean the spectacle.
Here's how you'll know I'm right: think about modern life, and think of one or two places where ads don't currently show, indeed where it would seem almost like sacrilege if they showed. A men's bathroom in an airport? Hmm. Probably too late for that. How about a huge lit-up ad display on a college campus? Too late for that; at Ole Miss, we've got such an ad on the side of the stadium, within plain view of many classrooms. How about...the inside of your own head? That's coming, once Google Glass reaches the third or fourth generation.
How about in a church? How about an unending stream of ads in the hall of an elementary school? How about at the Lincoln Memorial--a lit-up ad-panel display on the wall next to Lincoln?
All those things, I'm quite sure, are on the way.
How about taking advantage of the few seconds, or minutes, that you're waiting on line at a drugstore. Surely nobody will commodify and sell THAT small bit of time? Too late. I've seen little TV sets at Walgreens and the like, blasting ads at me while I wait.
Society of the spectacle.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Nov 06, 2014 3:48 AM
The advertisement as a method of making money is an interesting thing, not so much the product placers but the economy it creates to find places to put ads. The spammers who flood forums with links aren't even trying to get clicks directly from those links- instead, they are trying to up their Google ranking since Google relies on link counts from reputable sites to figure out how popular something is.
I was singing along with a song the other day in my car (finally driving something from this century!) and suddenly, in the middle of a chorus of Dream On the radio turned itself down and the OnStar played an ad. I won't be renewing when the free trial runs out!
I don't get upset about unobtrusive ads. I love seeing some of Tom's new harps in my Facebook feed, for instance. As someone with more time than money, I'm even willing to trade some time for free content. If you are broke that's a good deal.
I'm certainly not suggesting pushy advertising, but if I've signed up for a local musicians FB page I really do want to know when they are playing a show, (as long as it's not spamming my entire feed- there is one local band that somehow has 3 shows a week they want to to attend). (Meanwhile, FB has decided to charge musicians to rank higher in people's feeds, which has meant I've missed shows from some poorer friends who couldn't afford to do that).
Komuso, advertising certainly does favor those with deep pockets! I can't think of a way to fix that. There are certainly free ways to advertise. Lots of local bulletin boards let you advertise shows. Some radio shows are looking for guests. Flyers aren't terribly expensive and if you build an email listing it's not a bad way to advertise (as long as you find a way to not over saturate.) The problem is, it's a crowded marketplace and as long as there are lots of places to advertise there will be floods of people advertising, all competing for your eyes. Ironically, each one is acting in their own best self interest, but collectively they over saturate the market (although studies show there is a cumulative wearing down of a consumers resolve the more choices they are presented with). Short of legislation limiting where people advertise it's not going away. (Limited advertising might actually make any specific advertisement more effective? Who knows.)
So, if the advertisement is already going to be there, and it's going to advertise for someone, I know, I know, it's a morally slippery slope, but if the harm is already done, why shouldn't any specific advertiser be the beneficiary?
Talking about the specific, 'I want to make money at this' aspect, how much money and time do people in the music business spend on advertising themselves? How does that compare to how much record companies used to spend? (They used to pay radio stations to play their songs. Payola was basically a form of advertising- and it probably would still make sense in the streaming world if it was leading to album sales. That's what people are selling when they say 'do it for the exposure'. If that leads to big arena shows for Taylor Swift or Miley Cyrus, well, they've got accountants to figure out whether they should be focusing on record sales or concert venues and what the mix is. It's harder once you get out of the very top echelons.
Adam, don't look at your pharmacy receipt! (Mine is usually a foot long and covered with ads and coupons!)
-A note on email lists. I think I'd trade a free song for an email any day, especially as someone only likely to be playing local shows. One of my friends uses a service that lets you give away songs in exchange for contact information. Every person you add to the list is one more person who might show up for a show (and at the local level, well, it will be easier for them to get to the show, so you'll give away fewer songs per butt you put in the seat.) I'm also more likely to go back and buy more songs from someone I forgot about if I'm listening to my playlists and one of their songs pops up.
Advertising favors the deep pockets. That's going to be the rule. Short of a radical restructuring of society I can't think of a way around that (and I don't really want to live with Soviet Era bread lines). But just because it favors the deep pockets, and just because we may not personally like advertising everywhere doesn't mean it doesn't work.
(I'd propose ideas for radical restructuring of society, but I'd probably go off on a REAL tangent then.) :)
Great points. Other than sitting naked in an empty room there is almost no place where we are not blasted by advertising. Just sitting at my desk I'm blasted by advertising. My monitors are HP, my keyboard and mouse are Logiteck, the little harp case below my monitor is emblazoned Crossover, Hohner, Made in Germany, and the list goes on.
We're conditioned to look for it now. Think about watching a youtube video of a street musician...we get annoyed by the pop up add while at the same time we’re consciously or unconsciously looking to see what guitar the musician is playing (we’re looking for the brand or, the AD.)
Our current society has become very accomplished at inventing problems and creating desire.
I would imagine that the majority of music is now listened to via some type of wifi connected device. Most often this allows the music to be instantly purchased. For most folks music is now an impulse purchase, much like gum at the checkout stand. It’s purchased for .99 cents repeated at infinitum and then discarded.
No longer are hours spent trying to identify the song title, searching the stores for the record, and then reading the liner notes while resetting the needle or rewinding the tape to hear the same song again and again.
---------- Purveyor of Optimized New and Refurbished Harmonicas.
"The spammers who flood forums with links aren't even trying to get clicks directly from those links- instead, they are trying to up their Google ranking since Google relies on link counts from reputable sites to figure out how popular something is."
This used to be the case with back linking as a key part of the Internet Marketer SEO toolkit but not so much anymore. As mentioned previously Google continually evolves the algorithms based on how relevant the original site is. It's not in Google's interest to serve obvious spam sites via search, but real products and services that people are after. They are getting better at this.
One of the few ad free spaces left at the moment is early childhood apps and websites. "Ad free" is actually a quality product issue now. That's ad free from inception, not an ad supported free version and a premium ad free version btw.
The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act goes someone to enforcing standards in this area, but even that is under constant attack of being watered down.
Komuso, all my cartoons I watched as a kid were product placements! I had the Smurfs clay kick for making and painting smurfs, my brother had the G.I. Joes, and we both had all sorts of Star Wars stuff. (Not really a cartoon, but definitely aimed at selling toys!)
And that was all before the internet. I can't imagine what it's like to be a parent these days.
Nate, I'm not against advertising per se I'm against the pervasive saturation bombing of it into every aspect of life (as Kudzu points out).
The aspect of child apps promoting themselves as "ad Free" (among other things) is an interesting line in the sand. As parent of a 5 yr old myself there is nothing more annoying or off putting from a brand than to get an ad shoved in your face when you're playing with your kid. Developers listened and responded.
All it takes is for enough people to vote with their wallets and behaviors can be changed in other intrusive areas too. It's the only message advertisers will listen to anyway.
If I could wave a magic wand, I'd switch us over to a system where rich people sponsored artists and get rid of ads. That's not going to happen though, so I'm trying to come up with other possibilities.
What are the other options? I suppose we could do the artist colony model, all move in and share living expenses. That would be pretty cool actually. All the economic levers you pull or flip advertising seems like the long hanging fruit if people aren't maximizing it.
I read an article on just what FB knows about you and the weird ways it guesses to fill in the gaps. Kind of creepy. I don't think it's going to change by people's wallets, unfortunately. It seems people are willing to trade a lot of privacy for a little convenience. (You might be able to tackle it with privacy legislation, but that horse is probably out of the barn with so much money involved.
I remember a coworker that I had in the very early 90's pointing out all of the missed opportunities for advertising. e.g. when a PC was booting and showing all of the BIOs messages he would point at it and say that it was a missed opportunity to sell some advertising. I thought he was nuts at the time, but little did I know that he was a visionary. He's probably living the good life now and trying to turn off all of the advertising that's coming his way.
"If I could wave a magic wand, I'd switch us over to a system where rich people sponsored artists and get rid of ads."
People are experimenting with that already, with varied results: eg http://www.patreon.com/ ++ kickstarter etc etc. And it's not "rich people" sponsoring creators...it's normal people spreading their limited budgets.
" I suppose we could do the artist colony model, all move in and share living expenses. "
I'm not sure what you mean by that. I'm not being all unicorns and angels, Advertising is useful when it's opt in and expected as part of the package - such as TV and Facebork etc. Free services where YOU are the product.
However, when it's intrusive and disrupts the experience, especially if it's a paid experience, you need to tell them to frack off. Vote with your wallet, and tell them to shove it when you don't want it..as in early childhood apps.
But..and here's the big but...Content creators need some serious expectation management training as well.
Just because you can easily create something to self express doesn't mean you are entitled to monetary return for it. Some don't and freely release their projects to the world, but a large amount (including a huge section of the so called "pro" creator market making clone content or just average dreck) need a wake up call.
It ties into the crowd funding comment above as well. People, real people not the 1%, have limited budgets with both money and time. Yelling louder and ambushing them has as much potential to be a brand turnoff than a turn on.
There's quite a few companies that most people are not aware of that are huge in the web analytics and profiling space. Facebook isn't the only game in town, and is a walled garden compared to what these companies are collecting and aggregating for brands as you web browse.
Yes, people are willing to trade a measure of privacy if the recommendation service actually provides value and is non-intrusive, and they have control over the collection and use of said data at all time. People are learning this the hard way though...you really need to read the fine print. *cough*
btw, if advertising is so inevitable why is there such a huge demand for ad blockers? Voting with your wallet is the ultimate ad blocker.
Ads are inevitable in that they are an easy way for companies to squeeze money out of us. I didn't mean to imply that harmonica communes were the option, I was just adding it to my list of ways to fight declining revenues in the face of new technology. That's all I'm trying to elicit- ways for musicians to get money for what they do, a spitballing session as it were.
I run adblockers myself. I wish they were a little more fine tuneable. I only really get annoyed with autoplaying and popups.
The market may have shifted and it may not be realistic for anybody but the very top artists to make a living at this, but maybe we need a technological or social hack to make it work and brainstorming seems like the best way to go about figuring that out. I hate intrusive ads, but I voluntarily give up some of my privacy for convenience. When I can afford it, I vote with my wallet. I try to support other artists (adblocker aside).
Like I said a few posts back, it may be that we are the horse manure sweepers looking for a way to make a living. I'd rather hope that we were the horse and buggy drivers who were able to adapt to driving cars, because if this is what we love doing, then it would be great to be able to make a living at it.
Of all the choices on the table, I think the library model I proposed, public supported arts where you are paid by how many people listen but the money comes from a central fund would be my choice, precisely because it would allow people with no money to enjoy things too. I grew up fairly poor with a very hard working mother. It strikes me as socially just. It could be an ad supported model like streaming services, or it could be a government supported model, or some hybrid. The ad supported model, from what I'm hearing, doesn't seem to be working for everyone, but the tax supported model isn't going to pass.
I'm treading in dangerous waters here. I don't want to turn it into a politics thread. I'm pretty far to the left myself. Okay, really far to the left. But I'm also pragmatic. I'm looking for ideas that might be implementable. A stronger, more unified negotiating position from artists? Swallowing more ads? Piracy for the poor? I don't know. I'm spitballing. Voting with your wallet, unless you are Taylor Swift, only works if you can get a bunch of other people on board. That is really hard to do because people all have different self-interests. Consumers want free music with no ads. Musicians want to be paid. Streaming services want a cut. Venues want to pack the house as cheap as they can. Advertisers want you to advertise. Middlemen want a cut (and are willing to provide services- cost vs. convenience).
There used to be a great SNL dating skit- Lowered Expectations. They'd trot out worse and worse dating options. Give me the ideas to change the things I can change, and the ability to let go of the things I can't and maybe the ability to know the difference. In the meantime, mental puzzles are fun for me, so even if I don't get emotionally involved in the expectations, I'm going to keep thinking away at this.
One final thought- advertising can cannibalize itself. If we all had to watch a one minute commercial at the start of each day but then could go through the rest of our day without any marketing the value of that one commercial would be way more than any of the flurry of ads we see all day irl. I love that we have a law that protects kids from aggressive advertisements. If I said I'd love to have a law like that for the rest of us, and saying that, I'd probably lose 2/3s of the crowd because of free speech issues, and maybe rightly so.
Personally I think the all you can eat Library model has legs. It's been proposed a few times, esp by ISP's, but always gets shot down by vested interests and rent seekers.
re: Taylor Swift - there's more to that story "Well, that’s the part of the story that isn’t actually fully understood. SHE didn’t pull it. Her label, Big Machine Records, pulled it. And more specifically, it was Scott Borchetta, the CEO. He’s looking to sell the label and thinks that the only metric buyers care about is sales. He (along with these alleged buyers) are clearly out of touch." Why Other Musicians Shouldn’t Copy Taylor Swift
As part of expectation management creators need to understand that they are competing for an ever expanding entertainment pie but people only have a fixed time budget to apply to it, as well as only a slightly more flexible money budget.
Entertainment markets used to be fairly simple, but it's not just music, movies, and TV anymore. It's not just democratization of content creation creating more content, it's a flowering of new content categories as well as expansions of old and hybrid mashups creating a smoregesboard for consumers to explore.
Music is not alone in coming to grips with how content creators survive.
Regarding ads: When I lived in DC, I rented a country house in Sperryville, VA, with some other musician/artistic types. Sperryville is in Rappahannock County, which (a few years before) had adopted an ordinance against billboards and other posted advertisements. There were a few older billboards that had a grandfathered exemption, but they were for things like "See Luray Caverns" rather than McDonald's.
It was utterly amazing what a difference this made to the consciousness.
Regarding streaming: Although I use Rhapsody myself, I am rapidly coming around to Adam's point of view on this. It is wrong to expect artists to keep producing recorded music -- which, despite advances in technology, still takes a great deal of resources and time to create -- for next to nothing. I don't buy the "you can tour and sell merchandise" argument. The live music industry is collapsing; here in Jackson, Mississippi -- which had a thriving scene just a few years ago -- the venue situation is at an all-time low. This is not an anomaly. Hitting the road is cost-prohibitive in most situations unless you just don't care how much money you make... and anyway, I refuse to accept that one should HAVE to tour in order to sell your music.
Of course, I can refuse to accept it all I like, and that won't change reality. But I don't have to aid and abet it by giving my music away. I have a new record coming out soon, hopefully in February, and I honestly have not decided whether to make it available on streaming services.
I'm not convinced of the viability (or ethics) of streaming model while the labels take the bulk of proceeds. Technology wise it's the way to go, but business wise it's new boss meet the old boss = fail.
fwiw I still live stream (as in perform live in virtual worlds). I just finished a regular weekly gig I've been doing for years, and had some old fans who have been with me for years. Earnings have dropped off the last few years, as have the gigs but it can still work out to US$30-50 / hour. Virtual busking from my home studio. This should pick up again with the next generation of VR tech now in development (and overhype mode atm)
As an aside, gigs in SL dropped off a lot due to an influx of karaoke bathroom singers who undercut and oversaturated the virtual live music market and undercut the real live musicians.
Fortunately there are still some venue owners and music fans who appreciate real (even eclectic jam band style stuff like mine) music.
My small contribution to the solution of the moment is to go out and see live performances and buy CD's at the show. Exactly how the artists will find a way to adapt to this, most latest version of no-talent people in suits profiting from their creations remains to be seen, but more power to Taylor Swift.
On the other hand, one person purchased the same track through eMusic, and I made 46 cents. About a hundred times as much.
Which is a better deal for the musician? I'll be talking to you about swamp land in Florida later.
But hey: when I look back to my first post, it appears that I'm making TEN TIMES AS MUCH per stream now as I was then. So things are looking up. One of these days I'll accumulate enough royalty money to buy a beer.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Mar 20, 2015 2:38 PM
In a way, it is about the music. As a society, the way we choose to support musicians will greatly impact the kind of music we get. This goes for any trade or skill, but especially ones that some people feel we could do without like art, music, sport, theater etc.
31 streams of "Big Boss Man" by Satan & Adam in my Spotify royalty report, conveyed by CD Baby. $0.06020000 as payment.
That's a lot of zeroes. I'm not sure why we need to know our payments to the one-millionth of a cent, but that's what Spotify provides. (Maybe it's because when you add all those zeroes and squint, little money seems like big money? Or because all those millionths of a cent add up? Not.)
31 streams. Six cents in royalties.
Six cents? What is six cents worth these days?
I've heard people say "Streaming is basically the new radio." It's basically the new radio--except you don't get the royalties that radio airplay used to pay. I get real money every time Bluesville plays/streams my music on Sirius/XM.
So the streaming-as-the-new-radio analogy is a bad one.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Jun 18, 2015 4:33 AM
The Spotify payout model is heavily weighted in favour of the massive recording artists at the expense of the smaller guys – and not necessarily the little independent artists/labels, many "mid level" artists are struggling. – Here's a good video that explains the model.
The new streaming service Tidal – launched by Jay Z and a bunch of other "celebrity" claims that they are a music service for musicians by musicians, however there seems to little or no information about their model and/if it will be more beneficial for small to mid weight musicians.
Thanks, Baker. That first video completely accords with my subjective sense that the current system epitomized by Spotify is broken and unfair. I learned some new things from that video.
I don't use Spotify to listen to music. Partly because of the reasons outlined above, partly because it also encourages lots of "single song listening". If I'm interested in someone I want to hear a full album or at least an EP to get a good sense of who they are and what they do. I know you can do this on Spotify, but there is always the temptation to just listen to the song or two you like and ignore the rest. I've fond often that there'll be a song on a album that I dismiss at first and then over time realise it's the best track on there.
If I see someone live I like I'll normally see if I can buy a CD from them so they the cash straight in their hands. If not then I'll try and buy it on iTunes.
That said, we do have our CD on there – you kind of have to be out there for people to find you. Our band is very small and low profile so I always look at it as an opportunity for people to find you, or at least find out about you and maybe they'll come to a gig or recommend you to a friend. We kind of let the money thing go with Spotify and try and see it as a promotional tool.
Any money we do make mostly comes from paying gigs or selling CDs at gigs. My royalty cheque for last year came in at £35 :)
Last Edited by Baker on Jun 19, 2015 6:23 AM
I once read about some thought going into projecting ads onto the moon at night. At first I thought this was a made up story, but as time goes on, it doesn't seem so unreasonable in our crazy world.
When big companies enter the art world, profits are king (for those companies). ---------- The Iceman
YouTube is many things, but one thing it is is a streaming platform--especially when a performer, as some do, uploads each of his/her tracks in the form of a video. I can't personally see why anybody would do that after spending thousands of dollars to make an album. I can, though, see why somebody would upload one track from an album--give it away--and do so in the hope of enticing folks to purchase the entire album. I've done that. And of course for the very biggest stars who can get tens and hundreds of millions of streams, it may make financial sense to upload singles. That keeps your franchise alive and fresh, and it drives ticket sales when you tour.
I believe that Americans , for the most part, do not value art. They believe its either a hobby for the artist or "someone" else will pay for it. It seems to be especially true of young people
How many times as a musician have you been asked to play for free? My ex-wife was a very successful painter and that world is even a bigger rip off than music. She was always being asked to " donate " her work.
I remember once we whent to a party where a very wealthy dentist asked if she could display some paintings in his office- I asked if he could provide some dental work in exchange-- you know that didnt end well-he of course was a professional with overhead-- artists just live on air in his world, I guess
The art model in this country is very broken and I think its beyond fixing The Arts now are for a few successful mega artists and the rest are amateurs in the true sense of the word- you do it ,cause you love it
To be honest I see both sides of the story- nowadays a kid with garage band on a mac and the right type of equipment could put out a good sounding mp3 album- Back in the day it was impossible to do a professional record on your own without shelling out big bucks to studios. Even big name acts have used garage band to record and release new albums. Streaming is a lot like listening to the music on a radio station. its a form of advertising. If I happen to catch a tune on the radio I really like I'll normally go to you tube to listen to the song again and if I really like it that much I'll buy the song off of iTunes or amazon. I discovered a lot of my favorite harp players through advertising and you tube before putting money down on their CDs. I discovered a lot of players through the documentary Pocket full of soul- and I discovered satan and adam from Kudzu's on you tube channel. after listening to a couple of his songs on a particular album I bought the album on iTunes and now have the complete collection that has been put on there. Now you don't get any royalties when you listen to music on you tube or the radio but you do when the song or album is bought outright. we have to take the good with the bad. at least you are getting something for streaming. and not anything at all. doing music on your own with no help- a few of your own instruments -a little equipment and software like garage band will help you keep down the cost when you first start out- but if you start hitting the big time with some of your songs you will need a live band when going on tour and that is what will put a dent in your profits and that's the downside too. If you get to the big time you have to stay big time in order to pay for the world tours and everything else. when you first start out the only thing you have to worry about is making sure you get paid for your performances from one bar to another.
@popculture: I think you're missing two important points made by the article. One is the fallaciousness of the streaming/radio analogy. Radio, in the old days, helped drive sales, and radio stations paid performance rights royalties to the artist--collected by ASCAP and BMI--every time they spun a side. Streaming doesn't pay those royalties, and Pirate Bay and similar operations obviously don't, either. Corporations, however, are making money from that model; it's the artists who aren't. Also, it's great that YOU are purchasing mp3s, but the kids aren't, and they're barely touching CDs, either.
Secondly, I think the record-it-in-your-own-garage model guarantees an overall lowering of the quality of music.
I think the basic point of the article was a gentle but devastating skewering of hypocrisy--hypocrisy on the part of the "music loving" young woman who just hadn't thought through the ethical implications of her actions, hypocrisy on the part of the "free culture" advocates who are profiting handily from the new model and from the activities of lawbreakers like Pirate Bay.
I keep thinking about the fact that young people are willing to pay $3-4 for a cup of coffee but unwilling to pay $1 for a song. If they're just not interested in music, that's fine. But if they call themselves music lovers AND they behave like that--well, I'm glad somebody is calling them out.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Dec 27, 2015 4:19 AM
