davidtaylforth – Member
What do you mean by full potential?

Music would still exist without the music industry. I guess most of the shite (Taylor Swift?) would disappear, along with the record industry and all the other unnecessary rubbish.

Full potential, maximum exposure world over maybe? sell as many units as possible so a career can be had & a living be made? Etc

Of purse music would exist without an ‘industry’ but I think you would find the quality would drop, not improve.

Taylor Swift is one of the biggest names in Pop at the moment,

prior to this thread i had no idea that she existed. after having googled her and fliced through three of her songs i have to agree with chekw and DT….

if it wasn’t for the music industry and the likes of MTV there would be an awful lot less shite music on the airwaves. i’m surprised people buy this “pop” stuff.

i occasionally use spotify… usually when in the workshop and tend not to notice the adverts so much what with machinery running. (prefer to stream radio 4/6 whilst driving.) my problem with spotify is that if i pay 10€ a month my collection is no longer mine as soon as i decide not to pay 10€ a month.

was never a big buyer or downloader of music. what does a single song cost to download? have heard a few artists that i would like to her more of/own but have never looked into downloads.

can anyone recommend a decent download site other than itunes as i don’t want to give Apple any money.

timc – Member
Full potential, maximum exposure world over maybe? sell as many units as possible so a career can be had & a living be made? Etc

Of purse music would exist without an ‘industry’ but I think you would find the quality would drop, not improve.

Pfffft

Making a living?

Who’s making a living?

And apparently Jared Leto just doesn’t understand the music industry

With streaming music services like Pandora, Spotify, iTunes Radio and Beats Music still on the rise, Leto is cautiously optimistic a new business model is in the works for the industry, even as those services continue to sort out their economics and royalty rates for artists.

“We’re all trying to figure out ways to share our music with the world, in new and exciting ways that don’t force us to have to sign some convoluted record contract that’s designed to keep us terminally in debt for centuries,”

I haven’t watched the video but your linking to two extreme examples, not a standard. also very US based & the UK for example differs greatly from the US industry.

Im not denying unfavourable deals exist, but to suggest they are commonplace is simply not true, there are so many variables that can make a deal good or bad dependant on what level the artist & label achieve.

When I was younger this was cutting edge

Sharing music was when you let your mate listen to one of the headphones
We made tape copies of CD’s when they came out and people still recorded from the radio.

less than 10 years after that Napster was changing the world

Now we are in a situation where the genie is out of the bottle, I can access any song in the world in a matter of seconds, listen to it discard it and move on. Same with TV & Film.

The current models are based around an outdated business model crashing head on with new ideas, streaming services are a great idea and the variety of music available is huge. It’s also a very cheap consumption method costing about the price of 1 album a month.

The next part of the solution is to make sure the money flows in the right direction.

what money? thats the point? the money from streaming currently isn’t enough even without a label taking a slice…

lifer i forgot to ask, you seem to advocate streaming / free music (which i don’t object too), but then highlight vast costs in your example of label costs, without labels & sales revenue, how do you expect an artist to pay such costs?

what money? thats the point?

and thats the bit that is missing in the car crash that is the current model.

Somethings that may also need to be taken into consideration, the product isn’t worth what people thought it was.
There is too much “fat” in the system
Streaming services need to cost more.

The itunes/mp3 shops have already dismantled the album as a sales model by letting you buy the tracks you want.

I’m not claiming to have answers just that the entertainment industry needs to come up with some ways to fund itself and keep consumers happy.

timc

Are you implying record labels are a/the problem? I think you would be surprised how much good they do for their artists.

I’m not implying anything. I’m straight up accusing them of being a cancer on the music scene! 😆 on many levels.

BTW timc, what label do your work for? 😆
:

seosamh77 – Member
I’m not implying anything. I’m straight up accusing them of being a cancer on the music scene! on many levels.

Well you may as well elaborate?

Part of the issue is that the old model of making popular music = making stacks of money has been blown apart.

There is no divine right for a recording artists to be massively rewarded for what they do – most people who write and record songs never were.

The recording industry will contract, there will be fewer ‘stars’ and perhaps we will get to hear more of the brilliant music that never got airtime in the past.

I think it is wrong to compare spotify with owning music, it is more like a personalised radio station. That is what the revenue streams should be compared to, how much money does an artist get from a radio play with a million people listening?

As has been shown many times, the people who listen to most music and watch most movies from different sources, are also the ones who buy the most media. The majority of users who solely rely on streaming services, would never have been big purchasers anyway.

I’m not implying anything. I’m straight up accusing them of being a cancer on the music scene! on many levels.

as an artist, i find this argument to be reductive (and wrong). when i sign record contracts – got one to sign this week in fact – it’s because the record label are offering something i haven’t got.

Capital, business acumen, the organisation and manpower to get a record pressed, promoted and distributed. I’ve tried self-releasing before and i’m shit at it. I’m just not business-minded enough. So i have no problem giving half the profits to a label who are going to do that for me. And most of the really good artists I know would be much worse –
they can barely remember to tie their shoelaces, let alone negotiate a promo spot on iTunes.

of course there are examples of record deals gone sour, but take a poll of a random selection of artists and you’ll find that most are happy enough with their label.

as for spotify (back on topic) i’m pretty ambivalent. The most popular tracks of mine on there have plays in the low tens of thousands, and that works out to basically £0, same as Youtube, same as most streaming services. I don’t budget for it, get a few pennies each quarter. But from a user perspective it’s fantastic! I have a premium account and I love it.

if we could get enough people on board, paying (say) 5 quid a month for a spotify-like service, i think there’d be a lot of money coming in to the industry, possibly even comparable to when people were buying records. what’s not in doubt is that streaming is the future – it’s basically here in fact, my back of an envelope maths suggests that more listens of my tunes come from streaming than purchased – so we’d better get used to it.

But i totally support artists having the right to choose what happens to their music and i back Taylor Swift in all this. If she doesn’t want her music on Spotify she should have the right not to – and i think her album sales the next week vindicated her from a business perspective too.

I’ve had to pirate all her albums now her back catalogue has gone from Spotify. Not pirated any music for years since Spotify came along…

shame that someone was holding a gun to your head and forcing you not to use all those other services where her music was available to stream for free, eh? must have been pretty scary.

Edit – Is it OK to perve on Taylor and Ariana Grande…?

😳

doris5000 – Member

“I’m not implying anything. I’m straight up accusing them of being a cancer on the music scene! on many levels.”

as an artist, i find this argument to be reductive (and wrong). when i sign record contracts – got one to sign this week in fact – it’s because the record label are offering something i haven’t got.

Capital, business acumen, the organisation and manpower to get a record pressed, promoted and distributed. I’ve tried self-releasing before and i’m shit at it. I’m just not business-minded enough. So i have no problem giving half the profits to a label who are going to do that for me. And most of the really good artists I know would be much worse –
they can barely remember to tie their shoelaces, let alone negotiate a promo spot on iTunes.

Sure.

But there are better ways of doing it that will make the whole thing better for fans and artists.

I wrote a big post this morning at home about things that artists I know have done to take more control but forgot to post it, will do tonight.

The genie is out of the bottle on free content now, but hopefully people are slwoly realising that everyone can’t get something for nothing.

Seems like artists are making most of their money touring now, as a revenue stream which they can fully control.

Ironically the charts are much more interesting than they were a few years ago, maybe because everyone can hear records before they buy them?

Seems like artists are making most of their money touring now, as a revenue stream which they can fully control.

i tend to take issue with this one too! But yes, by definition, if someone’s main revenue streams are touring and sales, and you remove one of them, they’ll now ‘make most of their money’ from the other one.

But touring really isn’t any more controllable than sales. In my experience, as an ‘underground’ artist, you go on tour for 3 or 4 weeks and hope to come home with a grand maybe. But one cancelled gig can throw the whole thing into the red! There’s so much that can go wrong, it’s amazing. It’s fun but you’re definitely not in full control….

Doris5000 – any chance of a link to your music on Spotify/ soundcloud whatever

No worries if you would rather stay annonymous – if I like your music I promise to buy some 🙂

i tend to take issue with this one too! But yes, by definition, if someone’s main revenue streams are touring and sales, and you remove one of them, they’ll now ‘make most of their money’ from the other one.

That’s what I meant, necessity being the mother of invention and all that. But I was thinking more of mainstream artists TBH.

Look at One Direction, one of the biggest acts in the world but they don’t even do that well in the singles chart. They are permanently on world tour though.

Madonna barely sells any new records, but people happily stump up £100+ per ticket to see her at the O2.

I’m aware that smaller acts are on very tight margins playing gigs and that despite (and a bit because of?) the vast array of interesting new music – it must be harder than ever to make a living from music.

if we could get enough people on board, paying (say) 5 quid a month for a spotify-like service, i think there’d be a lot of money coming in to the industry, possibly even comparable to when people were buying records. what’s not in doubt is that streaming is the future – it’s basically here in fact, my back of an envelope maths suggests that more listens of my tunes come from streaming than purchased – so we’d better get used to it.

Herein lies the problem, no money for the artist so it’s either live on the benefits or get a real job & stop recording & touring…. ultimately less choice for the consumer & eventually Simon Cowell controls all music. Apart from odd old punk record that music fans get to number one at Christmas to protest.

So Spotify claim (and probably have the numbers to back this somewhere) that $1.4Bn has been paid to music labels/artists as their share since they started. Of this Taylor Swift was on course to get $6m. Source
Where has all this money gone?
Miss Swift comes across as just a little entitled.

surely there’s a case to be made either way. Ms Swift may come across as entitled, but then again so do all the people demanding that she should make her music available for free/do what everyone else wants.

Doris5000 – any chance of a link to your music on Spotify/ soundcloud whatever

i’d rather not, if you don’t mind! 😆

let’s just say i’m currently trading as a moderately credible, low to mid-ranking deep house producer from bristol. 😉

it’s been fun, but i got a day job this year. my goodness this ‘getting paid each month’ malarkey is cushty!