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These articles are pointless. This guy knows nothing about being a professional musician. The investment money is gone. Record labels functioned as venture cap

These articles are pointless. This guy knows nothing about being a professional musician. The investment money is gone. Record labels functioned as venture capital firms. Their bread and butter, the physical audio disc, is no longer. No other entity has yet stepped in to provide mentorship and investment capital for young, bootstrapped musicians. The schedules of musicians do not align with the modern working world. Employers do not look highly on people who take 8 weeks off to tour. In order to make money touring, you have to be pretty well established. Also, unlike software development, there is no 'day job' that musicians can work while saving to bootstrap their own venture. Their only option is are low-paying temp jobs, mainly in the service industry, that they must frequently quit in order to work on their craft. And if concerts and not recorded albums are their craft, they will need to spend lots of time on the road perfecting it. But how? Practice does not make you a good stage performer. And you can't play 10 times a month in your home city and expect fans, promoters, or clubs to think nicely af you. Sure, there are still new music artists that emerge, but nowhere in the numbers that they have in the past. It is ultimately a dying art form and those that don't see that and in fact argue the opposite, don't have any inkling of what is actually going on.

apalmer 13y ago
Are you claiming that music is a dying art form? Really? The music industry is at best a 100 year old historical anomaly compared to the at least 4000 year history of music. The life of musician has pretty much always been extremely unlikely to be financially rewarding. Even at the height of the modern music industry maybe 1 in 1000 aspiring musicians ended up being signed to a major label. Musicians by and large have always made the bulk of their income based on in person performances. The only difference now is music companies now are losing out on record sales and starting to design contracts where artists have to split show and endorsement money with the label as well as record sales. Honestly its a moot point, the technology has changed, and the music industry has to change with it or die. The whole music industry was created by the technology of the record, and will change or die with the advent of easily copyable media.
- hipsters_unite 13y ago
  I don't think music is a dying art form, but the age of larger 'alternative' music having a look-in versus the lowest-common-denominator dross on the radio is definitely on its way out.
- williamcotton 13y ago
  Of course music will still be around. I'm saying that music as we know it, music that has been made as a result of the industry and technologies of the 20th century, is dying. Claims that it isn't are false and misinformed. What is ALWAYS missing from the "new solutions" is the investment in emerging artists. Sure, you see companies like Live Nation/Roc Nation setting up these 360 deals. There is definitely some promise to these new approaches, but the investment money is WAY lower than what it was. I don't know the figures, I can't find the numbers online, but I will talk to people I know in music to see if I can track down some facts and write an article on the subject. My point stands, however. The author of this article doesn't know what he's talking about and the data he presented is useless and doesn't contain enough information to come close to accurately representing the music industry. BTW, there is a great opportunity for "music venture capitalists".
  - apalmer 13y ago
    Music as we know it? What does that even mean? Really I dont understand what you are getting at? This isnt snark I really want you to explain. Perhaps you mean the phenomenon of popular artists that are so big that they are household names across all demographics across the globe/nation. If so then your probably right. Probably we will see less new justin timberlakes/drakes/britney spears level superstars, and more local/regional/niche stars. as far as the investment, really labels/mangement companies will continue to invest in whatever makes them money... the size of the investments will probably diminish, but realistically the breakdown of record label investment is 90% marketing/promotion. And realistically if your projected to sell 50% less you should cut your marketing budget appropriately, that has very little to do with the music as an art form at all.
    - 13y ago
glenntzke 13y ago
This is the direction in which I was immediately thinking. As a software dev by day and musician by night/weekend/days off with experience living, working, and playing in several major east coast US cities I can say that the musician's job has gotten significantly more difficult as the physical medium dies. Record companies used to provide a lot of money up front for prospective bands - this created much of the rock star persona the world came to love. Now, unless you simply luck out on connection or blatantly craft your music as a sale, it's prohibitively expensive to practice, play, and tour without living in squalor. Without the capital from record companies willing to take a risk, the returns on personal (band) investment in their own recordings are dim.
- vizeroth 13y ago
  A prospective band that caught their attention and was willing to sign the contract received: - an advance - studio time, advertising, packaging, etc. at whatever rate the label charged them - maybe help with touring, while paying whatever rates the label charged them If they were really lucky/good/smart, they weren't in debt to the label when it came time to negotiate a new contract. Then they could hire a decent contract lawyer and get something more than 2 cents an album (before paying back that advance), build their own studio, etc. Most of those "rock star persona"s have stories of what their lives were like before they signed those contracts. Some of them have some pretty interesting stories of what their lives were like after they signed them, too. Very few of them would believe that major record labels were taking a lot of risks with their money. If the money has dried up at all, it's simply because the industry has become less predictable/more fragmented. Minor labels have become bigger than ever, and the majors are letting them take the risks (or leverage market expertise to gain a profit where the majors could not). On the up-side, the costs of making a decent demo (or even album) and distributing it to an international audience are lower than ever, making it much easier for bands to do all of the things rock bands always had to do if they wanted a label rep to show up with a contract and an advance.
beat 13y ago
Hence the popularity of coffeeshops and other low-paying, transient jobs with musicians. I have a number of friends who work crap jobs so they can get away with touring. When I look at my financially stable but locked-in life, it's not a bad trade they're making. I remember reading an interview with Nels Cline, the lead guitarist for Wilco, where the interviewer was surprised to find out that he had coffeeshop jobs until he joined Wilco. After all, Cline was a fairly well-known and respected musician even before Wilco. But frankly, being a well-known experimental jazz-rock guitarist means working in coffeeshops to pay the rent.
ScottWhigham 13y ago
The schedules of musicians do not align with the modern working world. Employers do not look highly on people who take 8 weeks off to tour. In order to make money touring, you have to be pretty well established. I don't think it has anything to do with "schedules" - if that were the case, there would be no book industry, no training industry, or any industry in which it takes 6-18 months to churn out a product. Besides, with the rise of 360 deals in the past decade [0], the labels can get a chunk of touring/merch/etc. Also, unlike software development, there is no 'day job' that musicians can work while saving to bootstrap their own venture. Musicians for hundreds of years have used teaching, selling musical services/instruments, and wedding/event gigs as a day job. Practice does not make you a good stage performer. Practice does exactly that. Bands practice having "stage presence". They rent out massive venues, build their stages, and they practice the #($% out of their shows. It is ultimately a dying art form and those that don't see that and in fact argue the opposite, don't have any inkling of what is actually going on. Where's that "scratches head" forum icon I see so often elsewhere when I need it... [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360_deal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360_deal
josefresco 13y ago
Are we better off with one entity that offers horrible funding terms and exploits/chooses artists for maximum profit? Or are we better off with an industry of smaller players that compete to offer the best terms to the most talented musicians? Decentralizing the funding while messy, scary and potentially hazardous is a better path for all. I also think there's room for both the traditionally funded musician model and the self-service or smaller label models. The problem is when there is no choice which leads to abuse.
- williamcotton 13y ago
  I'm guessing that you have never and will never have to deal with the consequences of your suggestions and your statements are nothing more than empty posturing, am I correct?
vectorpush 13y ago
The investment money is gone. Record labels functioned as venture capital firms. Who cares? Venture capital won't make you practice every damn day. Venture capital won't make you suddenly sing in key. Venture capital won't inspire you to write compelling lyrics. Venture capital doesn't have anything at all to do with musical talent and I think most people would agree that the overwhelming majority of "VC" supported artists are chosen by record companies based on ROI, not based on their musical merit. Today more than ever, the cost of producing and distributing quality music is easily within the range of most serious musicians; the software available to musicians today is staggering and quality recording equipment becomes cheaper all the time. The schedules of musicians do not align with the modern working world. Employers do not look highly on people who take 8 weeks off to tour. In order to make money touring, you have to be pretty well established.. Give me a break. If you're not big enough to make money touring then sorry, you have to get a job like the rest of us; this is not something unique to musicians, how do you think employers feel about a 6 month sabbatical dedicated to working on your ultimate app idea? It's not gonna happen. The majority of startups don't have access to VC money, and the capital going to many successful early stage startups are (relatively) paltry sums that a determined individual could absolutely accumulate. Also, unlike software development, there is no 'day job' that musicians can work while saving to bootstrap their own venture There is no law that says musicians have to work low-paying temp jobs. There is no reason why musicians are any more economically disadvantaged than any other individual who has to work full time while building towards their personal goals on the side. The implication seems to be that musicians generally have no other useful skills besides waiting tables, but that is obviously false. Practice does not make you a good stage performer. What? Every good performer practices within an inch of their life, even Beethoven had to put in the hours, the debatable exceptions are too rare to be worth consideration. It is ultimately a dying art form and those that don't see that and in fact argue the opposite, don't have any inkling of what is actually going on. That's a pretty presumptuous and condescending assertion. I'd argue that you don't actually know what's going on since music is more alive than ever; in fact, music is so alive that the flood of new music that has exploded onto the internet has driven the cost of music way down. It turns out, music is really cheap to produce when you're rolling studio quality equipment out of your laptop (with mastering/mixing/sequencing software that is rampantly pirated by musicians, I might add)
thirstywhimbrel 13y ago
> there is no 'day job' that musicians can work "Fronting a band that gets airplay" is a narrow version of working musicians do. Those just happen to be the most prominent and famous musicians in the US right now, but they're a tiny, tiny slice of working musicians. Some people show up at advertising firms and write jingles. Some compose arrangements for films. Some studio musicians show up every day, provide background drums or bass for a hundred different singers, without really getting any credit. The most reliable "gig" players I know play weddings, and they make a decent amount of cash. Others play jazz four or five nights a week, often with different fellow players every session. Almost every major city has a symphony. Many working musicians I know also teach. We need to stop analyzing the music industry by pretending it consists entirely of Trent Reznor and Carly Rae Jepsen.
davidgerard 13y ago
The trouble is that literally everyone is a musician. The pie is not only smaller, it's sliced more thinly. This is great for culture, so-so at best for aesthetics and shit for working musicians. http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthetics-punk-rock-is-now-enforced-by-law/ http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthe...
r0s 13y ago
> Sure, there are still new music artists that emerge, but nowhere in the numbers that they have in the past. Let's see some numbers then, I don't believe this at all.
beloch 13y ago
Grad students looking to do research for a living face a bleak existence. There are very few decent paying jobs with security available if they can't land one of the very few tenured professor positions. Fail to do that, and it's a nomadic life, moving from post-doc to post-doc until they give up and get out of academia for the sake of their family. Acting is almost a pyramid scheme. A small number of actors at the apex make millions in Hollywood, but it's hand-to-mouth for the majority. Most actors can't even rely on their profession for a living! You can pen a best-selling novel and still need a day-job. Few authors make a living by writing. Only a steady stream of best-seller after best-seller will let you start to rely on your writing. Forget about making a living off of magazine short-stories and articles! You should get my point by now. There are many noble professions that add to the knowledge and culture of humanity that must be done out of love, because the money is piss poor. Most of these professions require tremendous investments in terms of time and money to get good at. The music industry was an odd beast. It never really invested money freely in artists, preferring to put them into debt so that they would have to be wildly successful before ever seeing a cent of return. It was sort of like supplying student-loans to grad students with the caveat that wages would be garnished until they leave academia. Without the record labels, musicians are largely in the same boat as actors, authors, etc.. Namely, they have to invest in themselves out of love for their art, or forget about it. The notion that one has to suffer for art or science is not new. What bothers me is that we so blindly accept egregious rewards being handed out for the dubious virtue of "being close to the money". Bankers, traders, managers, etc.. People who are close to the money still make out like bandits despite the fact that their jobs are really about supporting the people who make and do. You can't fault them for being greedy and taking what they're able to. That's what anyone would do in their position. We should, however, be angry with ourselves for granting them that power.
nikatwork 13y ago
> Record labels functioned as venture capital firms. Record labels acted as industry gatekeepers who hoovered up talented young performers, paid them gas-station wages then spat them out once they'd finished exploiting them. Now, a youngster can learn their craft from youtube videos, record in a home studio using affordable equipment, and distribute their music worldwide using BandCamp. I personally know two people who have quit their dayjobs (in music equipment stores) to create music fulltime using this model. And this is in a sparsely-populated backwater city. It's a frigging beautiful time for the artform yo'. I'm jealous of the youngsters!
dobbsbob 13y ago
The local indie acts do fine where I live. They all rent a place together and work at coffee shops or, longshoremen some of them because they can take off whenever they want to. I know plenty of bands like Hooded Fang, Gold & Youth, and Lightning Dust that do fine for themselves without major labels and are able to tour worldwide and still come back with money. The big acts now are really, really big. Jay-Z, Timberlake, U2 they're all approaching billionaire status. Just there are less middle men siphoning it off to feed the 'industry'. The old music industry was a closed club you couldn't get into but now anybody can be in a band and get exposure or record cheaply. If the music biz is so dire, why is there an explosion in small recording studios. They are all booked solid too one of my friends had to go out of the city to record because the 23 studios (there used to be only 4) were booked including the night shift well into next year. The punk bands def make more money now. They can actually afford to tour instead of stealing all their equipment like in the old days and pushing a broken down VW across the country and nearly starving to death in the middle of nowhere Arizona. Now they can fly to Brazil, or do shows in Iceland. That never happened a decade ago. These are local tiny acts without labels too. There is also ~40 live venues where I live now. 15yrs ago there were only 2 legal venues for smaller acts, and everybody else had to illegally play in warehouses and hope the police didn't show up. Even worse, some music industry A&R parasite was in charge of one of the clubs and refused plenty of acts that went on to be successful here because he didn't like them, or thought they wouldn't be good for business. I'm glad the industry is dead. Let it die. We've never had so much music
coldtea 13y ago
>And if concerts and not recorded albums are their craft, they will need to spend lots of time on the road perfecting it. But how? Practice does not make you a good stage performer. And you can't play 10 times a month in your home city and expect fans, promoters, or clubs to think nicely af you. Not to mention that this "just make money through concerts" thing is a US-centric, narrow view, of the musical landscape. Not all artists are rockers/jazzers, enjoying touring and playing to crowds with their guitars and stuff. And even fewer are like Phish or some heavy metal touring band. Some don't even have the kind of material that would draw a crowd at a concert (e.g ambient music writers), but they still managed to make money in the record era. E.g you could sell 40,000 records worldwide and make a decent living (know several artists who did), but still not have enough fans in more than 1-2 cities to make a concert possible. So this whole concert thing mostly works for either huge familiar brands (like the Stones) or pretty, trendy musicians that can manage a wider following of younger people, like Amanda Palmer and such. For most bands, historically, concerts were a loss leader for album sales. And, no, selling t-shirts is not a musician's job. That's like "pivoting" your web 2.0 startup into a fast food franchice. It might make you money, but it's not what you wanted to do.

apalmer 13y ago

Are you claiming that music is a dying art form? Really? The music industry is at best a 100 year old historical anomaly compared to the at least 4000 year history of music. The life of musician has pretty much always been extremely unlikely to be financially rewarding. Even at the height of the modern music industry maybe 1 in 1000 aspiring musicians ended up being signed to a major label. Musicians by and large have always made the bulk of their income based on in person performances. The only difference now is music companies now are losing out on record sales and starting to design contracts where artists have to split show and endorsement money with the label as well as record sales. Honestly its a moot point, the technology has changed, and the music industry has to change with it or die. The whole music industry was created by the technology of the record, and will change or die with the advent of easily copyable media.

hipsters_unite 13y ago
I don't think music is a dying art form, but the age of larger 'alternative' music having a look-in versus the lowest-common-denominator dross on the radio is definitely on its way out.
williamcotton 13y ago
Of course music will still be around. I'm saying that music as we know it, music that has been made as a result of the industry and technologies of the 20th century, is dying. Claims that it isn't are false and misinformed. What is ALWAYS missing from the "new solutions" is the investment in emerging artists. Sure, you see companies like Live Nation/Roc Nation setting up these 360 deals. There is definitely some promise to these new approaches, but the investment money is WAY lower than what it was. I don't know the figures, I can't find the numbers online, but I will talk to people I know in music to see if I can track down some facts and write an article on the subject. My point stands, however. The author of this article doesn't know what he's talking about and the data he presented is useless and doesn't contain enough information to come close to accurately representing the music industry. BTW, there is a great opportunity for "music venture capitalists".
- apalmer 13y ago
  Music as we know it? What does that even mean? Really I dont understand what you are getting at? This isnt snark I really want you to explain. Perhaps you mean the phenomenon of popular artists that are so big that they are household names across all demographics across the globe/nation. If so then your probably right. Probably we will see less new justin timberlakes/drakes/britney spears level superstars, and more local/regional/niche stars. as far as the investment, really labels/mangement companies will continue to invest in whatever makes them money... the size of the investments will probably diminish, but realistically the breakdown of record label investment is 90% marketing/promotion. And realistically if your projected to sell 50% less you should cut your marketing budget appropriately, that has very little to do with the music as an art form at all.
  - 13y ago

glenntzke 13y ago

This is the direction in which I was immediately thinking. As a software dev by day and musician by night/weekend/days off with experience living, working, and playing in several major east coast US cities I can say that the musician's job has gotten significantly more difficult as the physical medium dies. Record companies used to provide a lot of money up front for prospective bands - this created much of the rock star persona the world came to love. Now, unless you simply luck out on connection or blatantly craft your music as a sale, it's prohibitively expensive to practice, play, and tour without living in squalor. Without the capital from record companies willing to take a risk, the returns on personal (band) investment in their own recordings are dim.

vizeroth 13y ago
A prospective band that caught their attention and was willing to sign the contract received: - an advance - studio time, advertising, packaging, etc. at whatever rate the label charged them - maybe help with touring, while paying whatever rates the label charged them If they were really lucky/good/smart, they weren't in debt to the label when it came time to negotiate a new contract. Then they could hire a decent contract lawyer and get something more than 2 cents an album (before paying back that advance), build their own studio, etc. Most of those "rock star persona"s have stories of what their lives were like before they signed those contracts. Some of them have some pretty interesting stories of what their lives were like after they signed them, too. Very few of them would believe that major record labels were taking a lot of risks with their money. If the money has dried up at all, it's simply because the industry has become less predictable/more fragmented. Minor labels have become bigger than ever, and the majors are letting them take the risks (or leverage market expertise to gain a profit where the majors could not). On the up-side, the costs of making a decent demo (or even album) and distributing it to an international audience are lower than ever, making it much easier for bands to do all of the things rock bands always had to do if they wanted a label rep to show up with a contract and an advance.

beat 13y ago

Hence the popularity of coffeeshops and other low-paying, transient jobs with musicians. I have a number of friends who work crap jobs so they can get away with touring. When I look at my financially stable but locked-in life, it's not a bad trade they're making. I remember reading an interview with Nels Cline, the lead guitarist for Wilco, where the interviewer was surprised to find out that he had coffeeshop jobs until he joined Wilco. After all, Cline was a fairly well-known and respected musician even before Wilco. But frankly, being a well-known experimental jazz-rock guitarist means working in coffeeshops to pay the rent.

ScottWhigham 13y ago

The schedules of musicians do not align with the modern working world. Employers do not look highly on people who take 8 weeks off to tour. In order to make money touring, you have to be pretty well established. I don't think it has anything to do with "schedules" - if that were the case, there would be no book industry, no training industry, or any industry in which it takes 6-18 months to churn out a product. Besides, with the rise of 360 deals in the past decade [0], the labels can get a chunk of touring/merch/etc. Also, unlike software development, there is no 'day job' that musicians can work while saving to bootstrap their own venture. Musicians for hundreds of years have used teaching, selling musical services/instruments, and wedding/event gigs as a day job. Practice does not make you a good stage performer. Practice does exactly that. Bands practice having "stage presence". They rent out massive venues, build their stages, and they practice the #($% out of their shows. It is ultimately a dying art form and those that don't see that and in fact argue the opposite, don't have any inkling of what is actually going on. Where's that "scratches head" forum icon I see so often elsewhere when I need it... [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360_deal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360_deal

josefresco 13y ago

Are we better off with one entity that offers horrible funding terms and exploits/chooses artists for maximum profit? Or are we better off with an industry of smaller players that compete to offer the best terms to the most talented musicians? Decentralizing the funding while messy, scary and potentially hazardous is a better path for all. I also think there's room for both the traditionally funded musician model and the self-service or smaller label models. The problem is when there is no choice which leads to abuse.

williamcotton 13y ago
I'm guessing that you have never and will never have to deal with the consequences of your suggestions and your statements are nothing more than empty posturing, am I correct?

vectorpush 13y ago

The investment money is gone. Record labels functioned as venture capital firms. Who cares? Venture capital won't make you practice every damn day. Venture capital won't make you suddenly sing in key. Venture capital won't inspire you to write compelling lyrics. Venture capital doesn't have anything at all to do with musical talent and I think most people would agree that the overwhelming majority of "VC" supported artists are chosen by record companies based on ROI, not based on their musical merit. Today more than ever, the cost of producing and distributing quality music is easily within the range of most serious musicians; the software available to musicians today is staggering and quality recording equipment becomes cheaper all the time. The schedules of musicians do not align with the modern working world. Employers do not look highly on people who take 8 weeks off to tour. In order to make money touring, you have to be pretty well established.. Give me a break. If you're not big enough to make money touring then sorry, you have to get a job like the rest of us; this is not something unique to musicians, how do you think employers feel about a 6 month sabbatical dedicated to working on your ultimate app idea? It's not gonna happen. The majority of startups don't have access to VC money, and the capital going to many successful early stage startups are (relatively) paltry sums that a determined individual could absolutely accumulate. Also, unlike software development, there is no 'day job' that musicians can work while saving to bootstrap their own venture There is no law that says musicians have to work low-paying temp jobs. There is no reason why musicians are any more economically disadvantaged than any other individual who has to work full time while building towards their personal goals on the side. The implication seems to be that musicians generally have no other useful skills besides waiting tables, but that is obviously false. Practice does not make you a good stage performer. What? Every good performer practices within an inch of their life, even Beethoven had to put in the hours, the debatable exceptions are too rare to be worth consideration. It is ultimately a dying art form and those that don't see that and in fact argue the opposite, don't have any inkling of what is actually going on. That's a pretty presumptuous and condescending assertion. I'd argue that you don't actually know what's going on since music is more alive than ever; in fact, music is so alive that the flood of new music that has exploded onto the internet has driven the cost of music way down. It turns out, music is really cheap to produce when you're rolling studio quality equipment out of your laptop (with mastering/mixing/sequencing software that is rampantly pirated by musicians, I might add)

thirstywhimbrel 13y ago

> there is no 'day job' that musicians can work "Fronting a band that gets airplay" is a narrow version of working musicians do. Those just happen to be the most prominent and famous musicians in the US right now, but they're a tiny, tiny slice of working musicians. Some people show up at advertising firms and write jingles. Some compose arrangements for films. Some studio musicians show up every day, provide background drums or bass for a hundred different singers, without really getting any credit. The most reliable "gig" players I know play weddings, and they make a decent amount of cash. Others play jazz four or five nights a week, often with different fellow players every session. Almost every major city has a symphony. Many working musicians I know also teach. We need to stop analyzing the music industry by pretending it consists entirely of Trent Reznor and Carly Rae Jepsen.

davidgerard 13y ago

The trouble is that literally everyone is a musician. The pie is not only smaller, it's sliced more thinly. This is great for culture, so-so at best for aesthetics and shit for working musicians. http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthetics-punk-rock-is-now-enforced-by-law/ http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthe...

r0s 13y ago

> Sure, there are still new music artists that emerge, but nowhere in the numbers that they have in the past. Let's see some numbers then, I don't believe this at all.

beloch 13y ago

Grad students looking to do research for a living face a bleak existence. There are very few decent paying jobs with security available if they can't land one of the very few tenured professor positions. Fail to do that, and it's a nomadic life, moving from post-doc to post-doc until they give up and get out of academia for the sake of their family. Acting is almost a pyramid scheme. A small number of actors at the apex make millions in Hollywood, but it's hand-to-mouth for the majority. Most actors can't even rely on their profession for a living! You can pen a best-selling novel and still need a day-job. Few authors make a living by writing. Only a steady stream of best-seller after best-seller will let you start to rely on your writing. Forget about making a living off of magazine short-stories and articles! You should get my point by now. There are many noble professions that add to the knowledge and culture of humanity that must be done out of love, because the money is piss poor. Most of these professions require tremendous investments in terms of time and money to get good at. The music industry was an odd beast. It never really invested money freely in artists, preferring to put them into debt so that they would have to be wildly successful before ever seeing a cent of return. It was sort of like supplying student-loans to grad students with the caveat that wages would be garnished until they leave academia. Without the record labels, musicians are largely in the same boat as actors, authors, etc.. Namely, they have to invest in themselves out of love for their art, or forget about it. The notion that one has to suffer for art or science is not new. What bothers me is that we so blindly accept egregious rewards being handed out for the dubious virtue of "being close to the money". Bankers, traders, managers, etc.. People who are close to the money still make out like bandits despite the fact that their jobs are really about supporting the people who make and do. You can't fault them for being greedy and taking what they're able to. That's what anyone would do in their position. We should, however, be angry with ourselves for granting them that power.

nikatwork 13y ago

> Record labels functioned as venture capital firms. Record labels acted as industry gatekeepers who hoovered up talented young performers, paid them gas-station wages then spat them out once they'd finished exploiting them. Now, a youngster can learn their craft from youtube videos, record in a home studio using affordable equipment, and distribute their music worldwide using BandCamp. I personally know two people who have quit their dayjobs (in music equipment stores) to create music fulltime using this model. And this is in a sparsely-populated backwater city. It's a frigging beautiful time for the artform yo'. I'm jealous of the youngsters!

dobbsbob 13y ago

The local indie acts do fine where I live. They all rent a place together and work at coffee shops or, longshoremen some of them because they can take off whenever they want to. I know plenty of bands like Hooded Fang, Gold & Youth, and Lightning Dust that do fine for themselves without major labels and are able to tour worldwide and still come back with money. The big acts now are really, really big. Jay-Z, Timberlake, U2 they're all approaching billionaire status. Just there are less middle men siphoning it off to feed the 'industry'. The old music industry was a closed club you couldn't get into but now anybody can be in a band and get exposure or record cheaply. If the music biz is so dire, why is there an explosion in small recording studios. They are all booked solid too one of my friends had to go out of the city to record because the 23 studios (there used to be only 4) were booked including the night shift well into next year. The punk bands def make more money now. They can actually afford to tour instead of stealing all their equipment like in the old days and pushing a broken down VW across the country and nearly starving to death in the middle of nowhere Arizona. Now they can fly to Brazil, or do shows in Iceland. That never happened a decade ago. These are local tiny acts without labels too. There is also ~40 live venues where I live now. 15yrs ago there were only 2 legal venues for smaller acts, and everybody else had to illegally play in warehouses and hope the police didn't show up. Even worse, some music industry A&R parasite was in charge of one of the clubs and refused plenty of acts that went on to be successful here because he didn't like them, or thought they wouldn't be good for business. I'm glad the industry is dead. Let it die. We've never had so much music

coldtea 13y ago

>And if concerts and not recorded albums are their craft, they will need to spend lots of time on the road perfecting it. But how? Practice does not make you a good stage performer. And you can't play 10 times a month in your home city and expect fans, promoters, or clubs to think nicely af you. Not to mention that this "just make money through concerts" thing is a US-centric, narrow view, of the musical landscape. Not all artists are rockers/jazzers, enjoying touring and playing to crowds with their guitars and stuff. And even fewer are like Phish or some heavy metal touring band. Some don't even have the kind of material that would draw a crowd at a concert (e.g ambient music writers), but they still managed to make money in the record era. E.g you could sell 40,000 records worldwide and make a decent living (know several artists who did), but still not have enough fans in more than 1-2 cities to make a concert possible. So this whole concert thing mostly works for either huge familiar brands (like the Stones) or pretty, trendy musicians that can manage a wider following of younger people, like Amanda Palmer and such. For most bands, historically, concerts were a loss leader for album sales. And, no, selling t-shirts is not a musician's job. That's like "pivoting" your web 2.0 startup into a fast food franchice. It might make you money, but it's not what you wanted to do.