6 ms·

The gist of this article is that concerts bring in much, much more revenue for the band than in-store cd sales via (a percentage of) ticket sales and merchandis

The gist of this article is that concerts bring in much, much more revenue for the band than in-store cd sales via (a percentage of) ticket sales and merchandising. Most of all, concerts expand the fan base leading to even more revenue. Most of us have been saying this for years (and some in defense of the Napster model, for better or for worse), and it still seems like a no-brainer to me. As one poster here pointed out, if artists treat the music experience as a service instead of product (and, to expand on that, give the music away for free), I would be interested to see the impact. Also note that Iron Maiden has never had a song on the radio and they pride themselves for it, so I don't necessarily buy the argument that artists need the conventional music business model to succeed.

chc 13y ago
And if you work at McDonalds 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you'll get more revenue than you probably would as an entry-level developer in many cities. The problem is that it is radically more work and doesn't scale well at all. (You might think this is an unfair comparison, but touring does pretty much demand your whole life. Your effective wage from touring is typically not very high when you consider how many hours it consumes.)
- alttab 13y ago
  OK, so the entertainers of the future will work differently and make less due to the digitization of music. So instead of being famous and having millions of dollars and a huge tour train, you'll produce music on the cheap or electronically and sell it via you-tube, streaming deals, shows, and direct album sales for the super fans. Innovation always has its side effects good and bad, but those who want to entertain and be famous will still have all the motivation and incentive to be creative and strive for the spotlight. They won't be making off too bad for themselves, either.
  - csallen 13y ago
    Agreed. Just because an industry hit a certain level of profitability doesn't mean it should be guaranteed to do the same indefinitely. If change comes to entertainment than change comes to entertainment.
  - paulhauggis 13y ago
    You are right about innovation... It's side effects will also be increased automation, which means unions shouldn't use the government to inflate wages of jobs that could otherwise be automated with a machine.
  - wwweston 13y ago
    > So instead of being famous and having millions of dollars and a huge tour train, you'll produce music on the cheap or electronically and sell it via you-tube, streaming deals, shows, and direct album sales for the super fans. This isn't a new model. Most artists already rely on both performance and recording revenues (some add licensing and/or merchandising). So we're essentially talking about the old model, except with the apparent proposal that we remove revenue from recordings. That's removing a leg from a stool that's already frequently shaky to begin with, except for mass-market pop acts that have already made it (Iron Maiden is, more or less, one such act). > Innovation always has its side effects good and bad Can't make an omelete without breaking a few eggs, eh? You can, of course, break eggs without making an omelete, and so far, it looks to me like the instructions for the recipe under discussion stops at cracking them open.
    - V-2 13y ago
      http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/103759/not-a-big-deal http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/103759/not-a-big-deal
    - mcguire 13y ago
      "Can't make an omelete without breaking a few eggs, eh? "You can, of course, break eggs without making an omelete, and so far, it looks to me like the instructions for the recipe under discussion stops at cracking them open." Wrong question. The correct question is, "How much are you willing do distort the rest of your society in order to support one relatively minor, if wealthy, group of people?" Or possibly, "How much damage do you want to do to other, more important industries in order to protect a small one?"
      - wwweston 13y ago
        I've written elsewhere in this thread about how it seems some of the tech community has been reacting so strongly for so long to the content cartels insistence on copyright over everything that they often assume any defense of copyright/music sales is in service of a draconian tech-crippling regime. Sometimes they even arrive at the complete opposite (and equally incorrect) position that copyright and revenue from it is completely unimportant. I can only assume that's what's going on here, given that nothing I've proposed would reasonably prompt your questions. I suppose I'll respond anyway, though: > How much are you willing do distort the rest of your society in order to support one relatively minor, if wealthy, group of people? Wealthy? I suppose there are some pop acts that make it so big that they become pretty wealthy. These are indeed folks (like Iron Maiden) that could continue to enjoy good business even without much recording revenue at all, but they're no more a representative sample for the sake of discussion here than most hackers are (or ever will be) Mark Zuckerberg wealthy. As it happens, I am willing to distort society a little, in much the same way that the original copyright bargain does, for the same reasons. I think that the norm should remain that recordings are something people should pay for. That's it. No need for SOPA or DRM required everywhere by law or million dollar fines for vigorously prosecuted individual violations. Piracy still exists, and may even be often treated as discussed in the article, but people who do it know it for what it is and that the approved (and supportive) way to participate in getting recordings is to either purchase or download from where they're explicitly free. Probably wouldn't do terrible damage to other "more important" industries.
- Oculus 13y ago
  I imagine that entertainers enjoy touring/performing vs. viewing it as a chore/work.
  - dhimes 13y ago
    That's true in every profession- but the entertainers I know consider/considered touring to be pretty grueling.
  - chc 13y ago
    I enjoy programming, but I wouldn't want to spend 18 hours a day doing it for weeks on end for effectively $6 an hour.
  - PeterisP 13y ago
    Not really. Performing occasionally is fun, but many months of doing pretty much the same perfomance every night in different place - that's definitely a chore.
    - collyw 13y ago
      I am guessing you are not as popular with fans as Iron Maiden. I saw them numerous times as a teenager, and they certainly seemed to enjoy the response they got from the crowds. (Go on surprise me and prove me wrong - let me know you are in a band that is well known).
- Dewie 13y ago
  Touring scales by playing bigger venues. Do you know the mean wage per hour for an average artist for their album sale if you divide their profits from the studio time? In theory recording an album can be a fixed amount of up-front labor that then pays out like a passive income, but is that really what happens for all practical purposes?
  - chii 13y ago
    touring doesn't scale not because you can't get a bigger venue, but because it's not a passive income stream. A scaling income stream is a passive income stream - e.g., selling a book, a CD/digital file, video etc.
    - Dewie 13y ago
      And I'm not so sure that recording albums really are a passive income stream in any meaningful sense. One would have to know how the album sales look for the average artist. If an artist uses 5 months to record an album, then it sells for 1 year until most of the fan base has bought it, than a little for the next year and then only pennies for the rest of the decade, then that album will not constitute any more passive income than me depositing some thousand dollars in the bank. Then that artist has to go back to recording a new album in a year or two to keep afloat.
      - Dewie 13y ago
        ...And that is assuming that the artist is so popular that he can sell enough albums to just live off of that for two or so years without any touring or such, which I think is unlikely.
- ndesaulniers 13y ago
  Maybe artists should be paid like teachers and teachers should be paid like rock stars.
k-mcgrady 13y ago
The record labels have also noticed this and now nearly every new deal includes cuts of touring and merchandising as well as the usual cut of records sold. They're known as '360 deals'.
PavlovsCat 13y ago
Not all great songwriters are great performers, or even enjoy performing at all. I'd rather have those spent their time in the studio coming up with new songs, rather than touring with the old ones, crappily, because they have to.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  I've definitely experienced acts which are amazing in the studio, terrible on-stage. I do not speak of autotune-artists. Sometimes it is the fault of the audio engineers at the venue, and sometimes it is synthetic music that was born on a mixing board, rather than on a stool in front of a microphone.
Recoil42 13y ago
>Most of us have been saying this for years (and some in defense of the Napster model, for better or for worse), and it still seems like a no-brainer to me. As one poster here pointed out, if artists treat the music experience as a service instead of product (and, to expand on that, give the music away for free), I would be interested to see the impact. Drake/OVO did this with Abel Tesfaye (The Weeknd). His first three albums -- House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence -- were all released for free, over the internet. To say that he's been a success in the R&B world would be an understatement.
dice 13y ago
>Also note that Iron Maiden has never had a song on the radio What do you mean by "never had a song on the radio"? They get played all the time on Local Radio Station's metal section. Here's an example from two days ago: http://bonemetalzone.tumblr.com/post/70661430266/now-playing-2-minutes-to-midnight-iron-maiden http://bonemetalzone.tumblr.com/post/70661430266/now-playing...
- robryan 13y ago
  I think they just mean that Iron Maiden have never got that saturation level of mainstream radio play that some top pop hits get. At least in Australia they are massively popular among metal fans but in the mainstream they don't have anywhere near the brand awareness as say someone like one direction.
eertami 13y ago
>Also note that Iron Maiden has never had a song on the radio That is definitely not true, I have heard with my own ears Iron Maiden playing on UK radio and by looking at logs I can see that at least 8 stations have recently played them. I think it would be foolish to take pride in not having radio airtime - you get revenue and you get heard.
- tokenrove 13y ago
  They prided themselves on getting big without radio airplay, which is where I think the OP got confused. I think Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter got radio airplay, for example. They're certainly big enough now, and metal is big enough, that there is actual radio play, but things were different in the early 80s.
  - teh_klev 13y ago
    >They prided themselves on getting big without radio airplay I can't tell what country you're from but in the UK we've always had a diverse selection of music broadcast on the BBC. Back when Iron Maiden were in their late-formative years (after Paul Di'Anno joined in '78 and when "Iron Maiden" was released in 1980) you heard them played on Radio One by presenters such as Tommy Vance [1] on The Friday Rock show [2] all the time. They also got plenty airtime on MTV and Top of the Pops back in the 80's when their first album was released, for example: "Running Free" was released as a single on 23 February 1980, reaching No. 34 in the UK Singles Chart. The band also performed the song on the UK TV show Top of the Pops, refusing the usual tradition for artists to mime and thus becoming the first group to perform live on the show since The Who in 1972 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Vance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Vance [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_Rock_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_Rock_Show [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Maiden_(album)#Songs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Maiden_(album)#Songs
- collyw 13y ago
  They reached number one in the UK a number of times from what I remember in the early 90's. As such they would have been played on the charts radios shows.
chrislgrigg 13y ago
I disagree with your idea of the gist of this article. What I took from it was that illegal music downloaders should not be disregarded and we can glean important metrics that artists should consider. This is completely at odds with the opinion commonly held by the music industry. Despite the fact that the article was essentially an advertorial for that product, it's an important example of how we can approach piracy and use it to our advantage. On the other hand, this attitude is a privilege afforded exclusively to bands with the resources to travel the world, capitalizing on international interest. For an indie band on a small label, record sales are all that matter if they hope to not get dropped. A band like Iron Maiden has the luxury of not caring as much about recording because they have visibility, they have leverage, they have an existing market, and they already profited directly from "music as a product." Smaller bands, however, only matter when they are doing new things -- releasing albums, specifically -- and the budget for that is the direct result of sales if it is coming from a label. Music as a Service only works when demand is massive. Since most bands are working primarily DIY and taking whatever little budgets they can get, it is not a reasonable model for anyone other than those with existing resources.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jimmaswell 13y ago
Iron Maiden's really never on the radio? I thought I'd heard it on the radio before.

chc 13y ago

And if you work at McDonalds 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you'll get more revenue than you probably would as an entry-level developer in many cities. The problem is that it is radically more work and doesn't scale well at all. (You might think this is an unfair comparison, but touring does pretty much demand your whole life. Your effective wage from touring is typically not very high when you consider how many hours it consumes.)

alttab 13y ago
OK, so the entertainers of the future will work differently and make less due to the digitization of music. So instead of being famous and having millions of dollars and a huge tour train, you'll produce music on the cheap or electronically and sell it via you-tube, streaming deals, shows, and direct album sales for the super fans. Innovation always has its side effects good and bad, but those who want to entertain and be famous will still have all the motivation and incentive to be creative and strive for the spotlight. They won't be making off too bad for themselves, either.
- csallen 13y ago
  Agreed. Just because an industry hit a certain level of profitability doesn't mean it should be guaranteed to do the same indefinitely. If change comes to entertainment than change comes to entertainment.
- paulhauggis 13y ago
  You are right about innovation... It's side effects will also be increased automation, which means unions shouldn't use the government to inflate wages of jobs that could otherwise be automated with a machine.
- wwweston 13y ago
  > So instead of being famous and having millions of dollars and a huge tour train, you'll produce music on the cheap or electronically and sell it via you-tube, streaming deals, shows, and direct album sales for the super fans. This isn't a new model. Most artists already rely on both performance and recording revenues (some add licensing and/or merchandising). So we're essentially talking about the old model, except with the apparent proposal that we remove revenue from recordings. That's removing a leg from a stool that's already frequently shaky to begin with, except for mass-market pop acts that have already made it (Iron Maiden is, more or less, one such act). > Innovation always has its side effects good and bad Can't make an omelete without breaking a few eggs, eh? You can, of course, break eggs without making an omelete, and so far, it looks to me like the instructions for the recipe under discussion stops at cracking them open.
  - V-2 13y ago
    http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/103759/not-a-big-deal http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/103759/not-a-big-deal
  - mcguire 13y ago
    "Can't make an omelete without breaking a few eggs, eh? "You can, of course, break eggs without making an omelete, and so far, it looks to me like the instructions for the recipe under discussion stops at cracking them open." Wrong question. The correct question is, "How much are you willing do distort the rest of your society in order to support one relatively minor, if wealthy, group of people?" Or possibly, "How much damage do you want to do to other, more important industries in order to protect a small one?"
    - wwweston 13y ago
      I've written elsewhere in this thread about how it seems some of the tech community has been reacting so strongly for so long to the content cartels insistence on copyright over everything that they often assume any defense of copyright/music sales is in service of a draconian tech-crippling regime. Sometimes they even arrive at the complete opposite (and equally incorrect) position that copyright and revenue from it is completely unimportant. I can only assume that's what's going on here, given that nothing I've proposed would reasonably prompt your questions. I suppose I'll respond anyway, though: > How much are you willing do distort the rest of your society in order to support one relatively minor, if wealthy, group of people? Wealthy? I suppose there are some pop acts that make it so big that they become pretty wealthy. These are indeed folks (like Iron Maiden) that could continue to enjoy good business even without much recording revenue at all, but they're no more a representative sample for the sake of discussion here than most hackers are (or ever will be) Mark Zuckerberg wealthy. As it happens, I am willing to distort society a little, in much the same way that the original copyright bargain does, for the same reasons. I think that the norm should remain that recordings are something people should pay for. That's it. No need for SOPA or DRM required everywhere by law or million dollar fines for vigorously prosecuted individual violations. Piracy still exists, and may even be often treated as discussed in the article, but people who do it know it for what it is and that the approved (and supportive) way to participate in getting recordings is to either purchase or download from where they're explicitly free. Probably wouldn't do terrible damage to other "more important" industries.
Oculus 13y ago
I imagine that entertainers enjoy touring/performing vs. viewing it as a chore/work.
- dhimes 13y ago
  That's true in every profession- but the entertainers I know consider/considered touring to be pretty grueling.
- chc 13y ago
  I enjoy programming, but I wouldn't want to spend 18 hours a day doing it for weeks on end for effectively $6 an hour.
- PeterisP 13y ago
  Not really. Performing occasionally is fun, but many months of doing pretty much the same perfomance every night in different place - that's definitely a chore.
  - collyw 13y ago
    I am guessing you are not as popular with fans as Iron Maiden. I saw them numerous times as a teenager, and they certainly seemed to enjoy the response they got from the crowds. (Go on surprise me and prove me wrong - let me know you are in a band that is well known).
Dewie 13y ago
Touring scales by playing bigger venues. Do you know the mean wage per hour for an average artist for their album sale if you divide their profits from the studio time? In theory recording an album can be a fixed amount of up-front labor that then pays out like a passive income, but is that really what happens for all practical purposes?
- chii 13y ago
  touring doesn't scale not because you can't get a bigger venue, but because it's not a passive income stream. A scaling income stream is a passive income stream - e.g., selling a book, a CD/digital file, video etc.
  - Dewie 13y ago
    And I'm not so sure that recording albums really are a passive income stream in any meaningful sense. One would have to know how the album sales look for the average artist. If an artist uses 5 months to record an album, then it sells for 1 year until most of the fan base has bought it, than a little for the next year and then only pennies for the rest of the decade, then that album will not constitute any more passive income than me depositing some thousand dollars in the bank. Then that artist has to go back to recording a new album in a year or two to keep afloat.
    - Dewie 13y ago
      ...And that is assuming that the artist is so popular that he can sell enough albums to just live off of that for two or so years without any touring or such, which I think is unlikely.
ndesaulniers 13y ago
Maybe artists should be paid like teachers and teachers should be paid like rock stars.

k-mcgrady 13y ago

The record labels have also noticed this and now nearly every new deal includes cuts of touring and merchandising as well as the usual cut of records sold. They're known as '360 deals'.

PavlovsCat 13y ago

Not all great songwriters are great performers, or even enjoy performing at all. I'd rather have those spent their time in the studio coming up with new songs, rather than touring with the old ones, crappily, because they have to.

sliverstorm 13y ago
I've definitely experienced acts which are amazing in the studio, terrible on-stage. I do not speak of autotune-artists. Sometimes it is the fault of the audio engineers at the venue, and sometimes it is synthetic music that was born on a mixing board, rather than on a stool in front of a microphone.

Recoil42 13y ago

>Most of us have been saying this for years (and some in defense of the Napster model, for better or for worse), and it still seems like a no-brainer to me. As one poster here pointed out, if artists treat the music experience as a service instead of product (and, to expand on that, give the music away for free), I would be interested to see the impact. Drake/OVO did this with Abel Tesfaye (The Weeknd). His first three albums -- House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence -- were all released for free, over the internet. To say that he's been a success in the R&B world would be an understatement.

dice 13y ago

>Also note that Iron Maiden has never had a song on the radio What do you mean by "never had a song on the radio"? They get played all the time on Local Radio Station's metal section. Here's an example from two days ago: http://bonemetalzone.tumblr.com/post/70661430266/now-playing-2-minutes-to-midnight-iron-maiden http://bonemetalzone.tumblr.com/post/70661430266/now-playing...

robryan 13y ago
I think they just mean that Iron Maiden have never got that saturation level of mainstream radio play that some top pop hits get. At least in Australia they are massively popular among metal fans but in the mainstream they don't have anywhere near the brand awareness as say someone like one direction.

eertami 13y ago

>Also note that Iron Maiden has never had a song on the radio That is definitely not true, I have heard with my own ears Iron Maiden playing on UK radio and by looking at logs I can see that at least 8 stations have recently played them. I think it would be foolish to take pride in not having radio airtime - you get revenue and you get heard.

tokenrove 13y ago
They prided themselves on getting big without radio airplay, which is where I think the OP got confused. I think Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter got radio airplay, for example. They're certainly big enough now, and metal is big enough, that there is actual radio play, but things were different in the early 80s.
- teh_klev 13y ago
  >They prided themselves on getting big without radio airplay I can't tell what country you're from but in the UK we've always had a diverse selection of music broadcast on the BBC. Back when Iron Maiden were in their late-formative years (after Paul Di'Anno joined in '78 and when "Iron Maiden" was released in 1980) you heard them played on Radio One by presenters such as Tommy Vance [1] on The Friday Rock show [2] all the time. They also got plenty airtime on MTV and Top of the Pops back in the 80's when their first album was released, for example: "Running Free" was released as a single on 23 February 1980, reaching No. 34 in the UK Singles Chart. The band also performed the song on the UK TV show Top of the Pops, refusing the usual tradition for artists to mime and thus becoming the first group to perform live on the show since The Who in 1972 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Vance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Vance [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_Rock_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_Rock_Show [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Maiden_(album)#Songs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Maiden_(album)#Songs
collyw 13y ago
They reached number one in the UK a number of times from what I remember in the early 90's. As such they would have been played on the charts radios shows.

chrislgrigg 13y ago

I disagree with your idea of the gist of this article. What I took from it was that illegal music downloaders should not be disregarded and we can glean important metrics that artists should consider. This is completely at odds with the opinion commonly held by the music industry. Despite the fact that the article was essentially an advertorial for that product, it's an important example of how we can approach piracy and use it to our advantage. On the other hand, this attitude is a privilege afforded exclusively to bands with the resources to travel the world, capitalizing on international interest. For an indie band on a small label, record sales are all that matter if they hope to not get dropped. A band like Iron Maiden has the luxury of not caring as much about recording because they have visibility, they have leverage, they have an existing market, and they already profited directly from "music as a product." Smaller bands, however, only matter when they are doing new things -- releasing albums, specifically -- and the budget for that is the direct result of sales if it is coming from a label. Music as a Service only works when demand is massive. Since most bands are working primarily DIY and taking whatever little budgets they can get, it is not a reasonable model for anyone other than those with existing resources.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

jimmaswell 13y ago

Iron Maiden's really never on the radio? I thought I'd heard it on the radio before.