4 ms·

Growing live performance isn't great news; it's likely driven by the fact that buffet streaming is murder for artist capture of revenue from recordings. Live pe

Growing live performance isn't great news; it's likely driven by the fact that buffet streaming is murder for artist capture of revenue from recordings. Live performing is one of the remaining options. And it doesn't scale.

msla 7y ago
Anything which does scale is going to go the same way as recorded music. We can take bets on how long, either directly using betting markets or indirectly by founding or investing in companies which depend on the profitability of certain kinds of scalable thing, but there's nothing scalable which can magically only be scaled the right way by the right people.
- wwweston 7y ago
  We had a better model for artists for recorded music before buffet streaming: pay for recordings. The trajectory we're now on was less an inevitability driven by new tech + market forces and more a result of specific policy choices and business plays. If your generalization applies (and it may well apply), then that's something to consider for anyone who could find themselves as easily exploited by scale as its beneficiary.
mxfh 7y ago
That SFX Entertainment only is a footnote, underplays how controversial this corperate overexpansion was. If you prep up a whole style of music as a corperate owned bran,d with big advertising budgets, no wonder it can collapse. 2012 to 2016 was an engineered hype. https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/10/06/445039871/edm-after-the-drop-what-a-wounded-corporate-giant-means-for-dance-music-culture https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/10/06/445039871/... Live is scaleable when it comes to the industry, festivals are international brands now, idol bands exist. Artists and performers find themselves again mostly at the short end of the stick.
bsder 7y ago
> Live performing is one of the remaining options. And it doesn't scale. I would be FINE with that, if it were sustainable. If you could play one concert a week and somehow pay your 4 band members $50K per year each--that would be okay. The problem is that it seems to be more typical that you play 3 concerts a week and lose money. You practically need to play every single day to even make ANY amount of money. And that's just not sustainable.

msla 7y ago

Anything which does scale is going to go the same way as recorded music. We can take bets on how long, either directly using betting markets or indirectly by founding or investing in companies which depend on the profitability of certain kinds of scalable thing, but there's nothing scalable which can magically only be scaled the right way by the right people.

wwweston 7y ago
We had a better model for artists for recorded music before buffet streaming: pay for recordings. The trajectory we're now on was less an inevitability driven by new tech + market forces and more a result of specific policy choices and business plays. If your generalization applies (and it may well apply), then that's something to consider for anyone who could find themselves as easily exploited by scale as its beneficiary.

mxfh 7y ago

That SFX Entertainment only is a footnote, underplays how controversial this corperate overexpansion was. If you prep up a whole style of music as a corperate owned bran,d with big advertising budgets, no wonder it can collapse. 2012 to 2016 was an engineered hype. https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/10/06/445039871/edm-after-the-drop-what-a-wounded-corporate-giant-means-for-dance-music-culture https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/10/06/445039871/... Live is scaleable when it comes to the industry, festivals are international brands now, idol bands exist. Artists and performers find themselves again mostly at the short end of the stick.

bsder 7y ago

> Live performing is one of the remaining options. And it doesn't scale. I would be FINE with that, if it were sustainable. If you could play one concert a week and somehow pay your 4 band members $50K per year each--that would be okay. The problem is that it seems to be more typical that you play 3 concerts a week and lose money. You practically need to play every single day to even make ANY amount of money. And that's just not sustainable.