13 ms·

Open the Music Industry’s Black Box

50 points by stuartmemo 11y ago

ruffrey 11y ago
Some fellow entrepreneurs had an awesome idea recently to create a jukebox-like service for businesses, where they could get payed per request and pay a monthly fee for the streaming service. I coded up an MVP and we got a few customers that agreed it was something they would pay for, as long as they had a decent chance to make even a small profit on song requests. Once it looked like a viable product idea, the financial numbers guy did his magic and researched more details about how royalties worked. We got conflicting information from different lawyers and royalty aggregators. After a couple months of research we determined it was completely impossible to make a profit, until we hit maybe 5 million in revenue and could start to negotiate better rates with copyright holders. This assumed extremely cheap tech and bandwidth, and almost no salaries for us three founders. We killed the project because it became clear how sadly broken the music industry has become. They wanted about 50% of our revenue, no matter how we sliced the business model. We are totally miffed at how pandora or spotify survive.
- k-mcgrady 11y ago
  >> "We killed the project because it became clear how sadly broken the music industry has become. They wanted about 50% of our revenue, no matter how we sliced the business model. We are totally miffed at how pandora or spotify survive." Aren't Spotify running at a huge loss? I don't see how this means the music industry is broken. They are trying to get as much money for the content they own as possible. If they don't think your service is worth much to them they probably don't want to bother licensing you the content. Seems like simple business strategy. The problem is with your business - you need to find a way to make money. If a business can't make enough money to afford the thing it can't survive without then you have a problem, you can't just blame the problem on someone else. I get where you're coming from (they make it too expensive) but they have no need to license you content. In fact it just fragments the market more making marketing more difficult for them. I think ideally they would want one store where everyone goes for everything.
  - disantlor 11y ago
    Startups and labels constantly jockeying for better position to maximize profits, etc etc and so on; the plight of the artist at the bottom of the food chain is generally brushed over, often with the supposed consolation that "it's never been easier to get your music into people's ears". That may be true in a technical sense but it's completely meaningless in reality. I've worked as a full time programmer to subsidize basically every detail of actually getting the music heard (recording, merch, subscriptions to soundcloud and bandcamp and tunecore, gas money for shows). Granted we're exactly striving for mainstream popularity but it's hard to even conceive of how we could possibly make enough money, split three ways, to sustain it without sacrificing most of the remaining hours to working to pay for food and rent; and none of us have children to worry about. Yet we press on, for nearly a decade, primarily because we love it of course but also people seem to think we're not half bad. I suppose all these discussions matter but I guess all I'm saying is if you really care and truly like a band (even a little) go to their website or bandcamp and buy a tshirt and a record. PLEASE. And just cut all this bullshit in the middle right out.
    - morgante 11y ago
      Maybe artists should accept the fact that the supply of music vastly outstrips the demand. 99% of consumers would be happy if there were only 10,000 employed musicians in the entire market.
      - williamcotton 11y ago
        You're looking at this completely wrong. Imagine you write a song. I take that song and I turn it in to a bunch of holes punched in a big long reel of paper. Now I put that reel in to a specially designed piano that will read the sequence of holes and use it to trigger notes. Now I sell that roll of punched holes. Do I need to give you any money? Imagine you write a song. I take that song and I record it on to thin plastic disc. I sell these plastic discs. Do I need to give you any money? Imagine you write a song. Someone else records it and I play that recording over a radio broadcast. I sell spots in the broadcast to advertisers and make a profit. Do I need to give you any money? Imagine you write a song. Someone else records it and puts that song on a website I run. I sell spots on the website to advertisers and make a profit. Do I need to give you any money? Imagine you write a song. Someone else records it and uploads it to their own website. They don't have ads. However, I have a website that indexes every other website on the Internet. I sell ads around the content that is returned in these search results, including your song. Do I need to give you any money? This has nothing to do with supply and demand. It has everything to do with people like me making money off of things that people like you made and if that is or isn't how we expect a lawful and just society to work.
- frankdenbow 11y ago
  Pandora has a statutory radio license that requires no negotiation, which is why you have restrictions on what you can play. The cost is less to them which is why they have survived.
- cwyers 11y ago
  The music industry is broken because they wouldn't give you a license to use their product at a price you wanted? And you shut the whole product down because you couldn't get the licensing, so clearly you have no product without those music rights. How is your idea adding so much value to these music catalogs that 50% of revenue isn't a good deal for you?
sparkzilla 11y ago
Hmm. I can see the problem right there. Google takes 50% for distribution. If that figure was less then artists would get more.
- nugga 11y ago
  The labels take most of the money because artists have agreed to very one-sided contracts. Then the artists proceed to complain how spotify is screwing them when in fact they screwed themselves signing on major labels. MAFIAA et al do suck but you should read what you sign.
  - bnj 11y ago
    Is it preferable to accept a tiny slice of a large pie, or decide pre-emptively not to put the pie in the oven? I've been baffled by the contracts that artists sign with major labels, but you have to remember that artists are confronted with a difficult choice. If they don't accept these ridiculous deals, how do they achieve the mainstream recognition required to be able to live off their craft? Society should provide basic resources to people so that they can work less and pursue music as a serious hobby without cutting into their food supply.
amelius 11y ago
> Perhaps the biggest problem artists face today is that lack of transparency. I’ve asked basic questions of both the digital services and the music labels and been stonewalled. For example, I asked YouTube how ad revenue from videos that contain music is shared (which should be an incredibly basic question). They responded that they didn’t share exact numbers, but said that YouTube’s cut was “less than half.” Transparency is the problem not only with music labels. It is also a problem with services like Uber, and with the App Store. The sad thing is: people think they can make a decent amount of money on these services, but that might just turn out to be an expensive mistake on average (there will always be outliers, and those cases will hit the news, but they are not the norm). I think the government should step in and demand complete disclosure on these services.
Qantourisc 11y ago
In the old days you REALLY needed the record companies. But with digital distribution for sales. And the possibility to accurately log each play of a song on streaming services, and compensate the artists for that. Why are they still used ? The biggest problems will occur from artists want a$ per play, but the streaming services only has b$/(month*plays).
- davidgerard 11y ago
  1. Streaming is comparable to radio plays, not record sales. Radio plays got royalties, but they were tiny as well. 2. Spotify has more tracks than subscribers. Essentially, it's the vast oversupply of artists in the modern age.
  - Jgrubb 11y ago
    Re: #1 - Radio play generates mechanical royalties for the publisher (usually the songwriter). They vary I think based on when the song was published, but they're currently at $.091 per play - https://www.harryfox.com/license_music/what_mechanical_royalty_rates.html https://www.harryfox.com/license_music/what_mechanical_royal.... This is probably 3, maybe 4 orders of magnitude more than what online streaming rates are currently.
    - bjterry 11y ago
      That makes sense, as a radio play is probably heard by 3 or 4 orders of magnitude more people.
    - davidgerard 11y ago
      That's not per-listener, though, which would be the relevant number for comparison.
davidgerard 11y ago
Contrariwise, Steve Albini - who's been at the sharp end of this stuff as well, but without the "I used to be a rock star" bit - considers this the golden age, and that the Internet has solved The Problem With Music: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-k...
- williamcotton 11y ago
  From my part, I believe the very concept of exclusive intellectual property with respect to recorded music has come to a natural end, or something like an end. Technology has brought to a head a need to embrace the meaning of the word “release”, as in bird or fart. It is no longer possible to maintain control over digitised material and I don’t believe the public good is served by trying to. It is with this paragraph the Steve's ignorance to the societal and legal foundations around intellectual property and exclusive copyright are brought to full attention. It technically became "no longer possible to maintain control" over intellectual property hundreds of years ago with the invention of the printing press. The idea that the decreasing marginal cost of making copies is somehow a new concept and unique to the digital world is completely absurd. The fact that the copyright system has been abused by corporate interests doesn't mean we should blindly throw out one of the cornerstones of the Western world.
  - alexvoda 11y ago
    Actually you are incorrect in multiple ways. First of all, Steve's article refers strictly to music. I would argue maintaining control was no longer possible since the invention of magnetic tape. If you really want to stretch things, you can go as far back as grooved disks (LPs, Vinyls, gramophone records) and claim it was possible to copy them like so: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/29/bone-music-soviet-bootleg-records-pressed-on-xrays http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/29/bone-music-sovi... This is at least some hundred of years after the invention of the printing press. As for music scores, see the next paragraph. Secondly, it was never possible to control information represented as glyphs (text, music scores, etc.). People could easily copy such information as long as they knew how to write and had some sort of writing utensil. In fact a person doesn't even need to know how to read in order to copy written or printed information. The more control is exerted the more determined people will be to copy. Thirdly, it was very much possible to control what was printed with a printing press by using the might of an authoritarian regime. Printing presses were not things you could easily hide. Sooner or later the source of unwanted printed content could be tracked down. Besides, the very first copyright like laws were made exactly to avoid such an adversarial situation. The British government offered the publishers the power to control distribution (protected by the government) as long as the government gained control over what was being printed. Also, I don't quite get what you mean by your last sentence.
CamperBob2 11y ago
Question for David Byrne (rhetorical, of course, since he's unlikely to read HN): I asked Apple Music to explain the calculation of royalties for the trial period. They said they disclosed that only to copyright owners (that is, the labels). I have my own label and own the copyright on some of my albums, but when I turned to my distributor, the response was, “You can’t see the deal, but you could have your lawyer call our lawyer and we might answer some questions.” At some point, you signed a contract with that distributor. (Why you need a "distributor" at all is an obvious question, but never mind that for now.) Why did you accept terms like these?
- williamcotton 11y ago
  From what I can gather a lot of deals are being done without the consent of the artists. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a series of class-action lawsuits in the near future, probably starting with songwriters.
- rectang 11y ago
  David Byrne is associated with Tunecore, so I'm guessing that's the distributor in question. The alternatives to Tunecore (CDBaby, Reverb Nation, Distrokid) all have their own problems. Most indie musicians, perhaps including even David Byrne, are not in a position to negotiate terms.
rectang 11y ago
What I would really like to see is a non-profit alternative to Tunecore/CDBaby/DistroKid, submitting music for digital distribution and disbursing streaming royalties. Tunecore has a nice model and they were great for a while, then they jacked prices and forced out their founder. Distrokid seems good right now, but what's stopping them from pulling a Tunecore in the future? The only way to guarantee transparency and stability permanently is for the musicians themselves to control the distributor -- similar to how individual Members of the Apache Software Foundation control it. Speaking as a former mastering engineer and graphic designer, whatever QC DistroKid and Tunecore are doing can't be too hard to reproduce. I've often thought of writing some open source software for this purpose.
- Zigurd 11y ago
  Those services as investor owned enterprises are not the problem, and and a coop is not the solution. Don't assume there is any way to make selling, or streaming, recorded music pay for more than a few highly promoted musicians, and don't assume that the business of promoting those musicians can stay clean. Compared to performing and teaching music, selling a recorded performance is a relative novelty, and the business of it was always an irrational hits business and always more or less dirty. Recorded music disrupted performance, and vastly reduced the demand for music performers. Figure out how to reverse-disrupt that and you will do more to put more money in the pockets of more musicians than a novel way of selling recorded performances.
  - aikah 11y ago
    > Recorded music disrupted performance, and vastly reduced the demand for music performers. This is totally untrue, on the contrary, recorded music has always been a way to promote music performances. It never disrupted performance. How can anyone say that? Before pop music and the record industry, there were no big concerts with thousands of people attending them. Recorded music boosted the demand for music performances.
  - rectang 11y ago
    Investor-owned distribution would be a substantial incremental improvement over today, and it answers David Byrne's challenge to improve transparency. So what if it can't compete with vaporware?
weems 11y ago
great article. we need some disruption
S_A_P 11y ago
So the problem as I see it is the layers of complexity of record deals. In my limited experience with the music biz(released a record on itunes, a few side soundtrack projects, and 3 friends with major label deals) there isnt much chance of making money from the record deal itself until you have accomplished the following: 1) > 2 profitable and high selling records 2) a solid fan base 3) luck One of my friends was signed to Barsuk records, and released 2 albums with them. He made about 25k per year including touring. He released 2 more albums independently and licensed a song for a microsoft zune commercial. He was telling me about some of the details of his record deal, and it obviously wasn't a super good deal for him, but he was just taking whatever he could to get on. He maintained a near constant touring schedule which broke up his marriage, and it generally just made his life really hard. This guy still struggles, I havent spoken to him in about a year or so but he may have given up. Another was signed to hollywood records, got major label promotion as a VH1 artist to watch with heavy rotation. His first album didnt sell very well and he got dropped. He is still a semi full time musician in Austin right now. I recently stayed at an up and coming country musicians apartment(she is a friend of a friend), she sold 1 million copies of her self penned single. While she is doing way better than I was at that age, she lives very modestly.( I dont know all the specifics of her deal, and she is young and wants to live simply so she could have a million bucks in the bank but I doubt it) Anyway, I mention this because from what I know of their deals, the record companies still treat them largely like they still spend big bucks at a big studio, and manufacture vinyl, CDs and cassettes for the bulk of the revenue. The music biz is making a killing on streaming because manufacturing is so low these days, and anyone can have a laptop studio capable of professional recording for 5-10k. The situation for artists wont change until record companies are not their main outlet.
l33tbro 11y ago
I was signed to a major label at one point and would do so again in a heartbeat. What you're getting in exchange for surrendering publishing and the masters is the huge network majors are tapped into. Syncs, marketing spend, publicity, festival circuits, key relationships with tastemakers, etc - I found the music industry incredibly nepotistic and benefitted over equally or more talented unsigned artists. There's a Hollywood Accouting hustle to what the majors say they are spending on you, but I believe you're building a better fanbase with a major, which generally means a greater touring revenue. Another point missed: it's hard to speak globally about "musicians". Artists have very different outcomes and objectives, so it's very easy to project a mainstream mentality on to the indie, as so with the converse.
hackuser 11y ago
> Musicians are entrepreneurs. We are essentially partners with the labels, and should be treated that way. There's no reason that Byrne and other musicians shouldn't earn as much as they can, but let's try to remember that musicians are artists. I seem to remember many of those disliking record labels for imposing onto their art the desires of commerce.
- aikah 11y ago
  > but let's try to remember that musicians are artists. Well according to HN musicians should be artist, developer,sys-admin, graphic designer,sells-man, accountant,lawyer all at the same time because "evil labels". And if they can't do all these things well they shouldn't be paid fairly for their art because they didn't try hard enough ...

50 points by stuartmemo 11y ago

Some fellow entrepreneurs had an awesome idea recently to create a jukebox-like service for businesses, where they could get payed per request and pay a monthly fee for the streaming service. I coded up an MVP and we got a few customers that agreed it was something they would pay for, as long as they had a decent chance to make even a small profit on song requests. Once it looked like a viable product idea, the financial numbers guy did his magic and researched more details about how royalties worked. We got conflicting information from different lawyers and royalty aggregators. After a couple months of research we determined it was completely impossible to make a profit, until we hit maybe 5 million in revenue and could start to negotiate better rates with copyright holders. This assumed extremely cheap tech and bandwidth, and almost no salaries for us three founders. We killed the project because it became clear how sadly broken the music industry has become. They wanted about 50% of our revenue, no matter how we sliced the business model. We are totally miffed at how pandora or spotify survive.

k-mcgrady 11y ago
>> "We killed the project because it became clear how sadly broken the music industry has become. They wanted about 50% of our revenue, no matter how we sliced the business model. We are totally miffed at how pandora or spotify survive." Aren't Spotify running at a huge loss? I don't see how this means the music industry is broken. They are trying to get as much money for the content they own as possible. If they don't think your service is worth much to them they probably don't want to bother licensing you the content. Seems like simple business strategy. The problem is with your business - you need to find a way to make money. If a business can't make enough money to afford the thing it can't survive without then you have a problem, you can't just blame the problem on someone else. I get where you're coming from (they make it too expensive) but they have no need to license you content. In fact it just fragments the market more making marketing more difficult for them. I think ideally they would want one store where everyone goes for everything.
- disantlor 11y ago
  Startups and labels constantly jockeying for better position to maximize profits, etc etc and so on; the plight of the artist at the bottom of the food chain is generally brushed over, often with the supposed consolation that "it's never been easier to get your music into people's ears". That may be true in a technical sense but it's completely meaningless in reality. I've worked as a full time programmer to subsidize basically every detail of actually getting the music heard (recording, merch, subscriptions to soundcloud and bandcamp and tunecore, gas money for shows). Granted we're exactly striving for mainstream popularity but it's hard to even conceive of how we could possibly make enough money, split three ways, to sustain it without sacrificing most of the remaining hours to working to pay for food and rent; and none of us have children to worry about. Yet we press on, for nearly a decade, primarily because we love it of course but also people seem to think we're not half bad. I suppose all these discussions matter but I guess all I'm saying is if you really care and truly like a band (even a little) go to their website or bandcamp and buy a tshirt and a record. PLEASE. And just cut all this bullshit in the middle right out.
  - morgante 11y ago
    Maybe artists should accept the fact that the supply of music vastly outstrips the demand. 99% of consumers would be happy if there were only 10,000 employed musicians in the entire market.
    - williamcotton 11y ago
      You're looking at this completely wrong. Imagine you write a song. I take that song and I turn it in to a bunch of holes punched in a big long reel of paper. Now I put that reel in to a specially designed piano that will read the sequence of holes and use it to trigger notes. Now I sell that roll of punched holes. Do I need to give you any money? Imagine you write a song. I take that song and I record it on to thin plastic disc. I sell these plastic discs. Do I need to give you any money? Imagine you write a song. Someone else records it and I play that recording over a radio broadcast. I sell spots in the broadcast to advertisers and make a profit. Do I need to give you any money? Imagine you write a song. Someone else records it and puts that song on a website I run. I sell spots on the website to advertisers and make a profit. Do I need to give you any money? Imagine you write a song. Someone else records it and uploads it to their own website. They don't have ads. However, I have a website that indexes every other website on the Internet. I sell ads around the content that is returned in these search results, including your song. Do I need to give you any money? This has nothing to do with supply and demand. It has everything to do with people like me making money off of things that people like you made and if that is or isn't how we expect a lawful and just society to work.
frankdenbow 11y ago
Pandora has a statutory radio license that requires no negotiation, which is why you have restrictions on what you can play. The cost is less to them which is why they have survived.
cwyers 11y ago
The music industry is broken because they wouldn't give you a license to use their product at a price you wanted? And you shut the whole product down because you couldn't get the licensing, so clearly you have no product without those music rights. How is your idea adding so much value to these music catalogs that 50% of revenue isn't a good deal for you?

sparkzilla 11y ago

Hmm. I can see the problem right there. Google takes 50% for distribution. If that figure was less then artists would get more.

nugga 11y ago
The labels take most of the money because artists have agreed to very one-sided contracts. Then the artists proceed to complain how spotify is screwing them when in fact they screwed themselves signing on major labels. MAFIAA et al do suck but you should read what you sign.
- bnj 11y ago
  Is it preferable to accept a tiny slice of a large pie, or decide pre-emptively not to put the pie in the oven? I've been baffled by the contracts that artists sign with major labels, but you have to remember that artists are confronted with a difficult choice. If they don't accept these ridiculous deals, how do they achieve the mainstream recognition required to be able to live off their craft? Society should provide basic resources to people so that they can work less and pursue music as a serious hobby without cutting into their food supply.

amelius 11y ago

> Perhaps the biggest problem artists face today is that lack of transparency. I’ve asked basic questions of both the digital services and the music labels and been stonewalled. For example, I asked YouTube how ad revenue from videos that contain music is shared (which should be an incredibly basic question). They responded that they didn’t share exact numbers, but said that YouTube’s cut was “less than half.” Transparency is the problem not only with music labels. It is also a problem with services like Uber, and with the App Store. The sad thing is: people think they can make a decent amount of money on these services, but that might just turn out to be an expensive mistake on average (there will always be outliers, and those cases will hit the news, but they are not the norm). I think the government should step in and demand complete disclosure on these services.

Qantourisc 11y ago

In the old days you REALLY needed the record companies. But with digital distribution for sales. And the possibility to accurately log each play of a song on streaming services, and compensate the artists for that. Why are they still used ? The biggest problems will occur from artists want a$ per play, but the streaming services only has b$/(month*plays).

davidgerard 11y ago
1. Streaming is comparable to radio plays, not record sales. Radio plays got royalties, but they were tiny as well. 2. Spotify has more tracks than subscribers. Essentially, it's the vast oversupply of artists in the modern age.
- Jgrubb 11y ago
  Re: #1 - Radio play generates mechanical royalties for the publisher (usually the songwriter). They vary I think based on when the song was published, but they're currently at $.091 per play - https://www.harryfox.com/license_music/what_mechanical_royalty_rates.html https://www.harryfox.com/license_music/what_mechanical_royal.... This is probably 3, maybe 4 orders of magnitude more than what online streaming rates are currently.
  - bjterry 11y ago
    That makes sense, as a radio play is probably heard by 3 or 4 orders of magnitude more people.
  - davidgerard 11y ago
    That's not per-listener, though, which would be the relevant number for comparison.

davidgerard 11y ago

Contrariwise, Steve Albini - who's been at the sharp end of this stuff as well, but without the "I used to be a rock star" bit - considers this the golden age, and that the Internet has solved The Problem With Music: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-k...

williamcotton 11y ago
From my part, I believe the very concept of exclusive intellectual property with respect to recorded music has come to a natural end, or something like an end. Technology has brought to a head a need to embrace the meaning of the word “release”, as in bird or fart. It is no longer possible to maintain control over digitised material and I don’t believe the public good is served by trying to. It is with this paragraph the Steve's ignorance to the societal and legal foundations around intellectual property and exclusive copyright are brought to full attention. It technically became "no longer possible to maintain control" over intellectual property hundreds of years ago with the invention of the printing press. The idea that the decreasing marginal cost of making copies is somehow a new concept and unique to the digital world is completely absurd. The fact that the copyright system has been abused by corporate interests doesn't mean we should blindly throw out one of the cornerstones of the Western world.
- alexvoda 11y ago
  Actually you are incorrect in multiple ways. First of all, Steve's article refers strictly to music. I would argue maintaining control was no longer possible since the invention of magnetic tape. If you really want to stretch things, you can go as far back as grooved disks (LPs, Vinyls, gramophone records) and claim it was possible to copy them like so: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/29/bone-music-soviet-bootleg-records-pressed-on-xrays http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/29/bone-music-sovi... This is at least some hundred of years after the invention of the printing press. As for music scores, see the next paragraph. Secondly, it was never possible to control information represented as glyphs (text, music scores, etc.). People could easily copy such information as long as they knew how to write and had some sort of writing utensil. In fact a person doesn't even need to know how to read in order to copy written or printed information. The more control is exerted the more determined people will be to copy. Thirdly, it was very much possible to control what was printed with a printing press by using the might of an authoritarian regime. Printing presses were not things you could easily hide. Sooner or later the source of unwanted printed content could be tracked down. Besides, the very first copyright like laws were made exactly to avoid such an adversarial situation. The British government offered the publishers the power to control distribution (protected by the government) as long as the government gained control over what was being printed. Also, I don't quite get what you mean by your last sentence.

CamperBob2 11y ago

Question for David Byrne (rhetorical, of course, since he's unlikely to read HN): I asked Apple Music to explain the calculation of royalties for the trial period. They said they disclosed that only to copyright owners (that is, the labels). I have my own label and own the copyright on some of my albums, but when I turned to my distributor, the response was, “You can’t see the deal, but you could have your lawyer call our lawyer and we might answer some questions.” At some point, you signed a contract with that distributor. (Why you need a "distributor" at all is an obvious question, but never mind that for now.) Why did you accept terms like these?

williamcotton 11y ago
From what I can gather a lot of deals are being done without the consent of the artists. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a series of class-action lawsuits in the near future, probably starting with songwriters.
rectang 11y ago
David Byrne is associated with Tunecore, so I'm guessing that's the distributor in question. The alternatives to Tunecore (CDBaby, Reverb Nation, Distrokid) all have their own problems. Most indie musicians, perhaps including even David Byrne, are not in a position to negotiate terms.

rectang 11y ago

What I would really like to see is a non-profit alternative to Tunecore/CDBaby/DistroKid, submitting music for digital distribution and disbursing streaming royalties. Tunecore has a nice model and they were great for a while, then they jacked prices and forced out their founder. Distrokid seems good right now, but what's stopping them from pulling a Tunecore in the future? The only way to guarantee transparency and stability permanently is for the musicians themselves to control the distributor -- similar to how individual Members of the Apache Software Foundation control it. Speaking as a former mastering engineer and graphic designer, whatever QC DistroKid and Tunecore are doing can't be too hard to reproduce. I've often thought of writing some open source software for this purpose.

Zigurd 11y ago
Those services as investor owned enterprises are not the problem, and and a coop is not the solution. Don't assume there is any way to make selling, or streaming, recorded music pay for more than a few highly promoted musicians, and don't assume that the business of promoting those musicians can stay clean. Compared to performing and teaching music, selling a recorded performance is a relative novelty, and the business of it was always an irrational hits business and always more or less dirty. Recorded music disrupted performance, and vastly reduced the demand for music performers. Figure out how to reverse-disrupt that and you will do more to put more money in the pockets of more musicians than a novel way of selling recorded performances.
- aikah 11y ago
  > Recorded music disrupted performance, and vastly reduced the demand for music performers. This is totally untrue, on the contrary, recorded music has always been a way to promote music performances. It never disrupted performance. How can anyone say that? Before pop music and the record industry, there were no big concerts with thousands of people attending them. Recorded music boosted the demand for music performances.
- rectang 11y ago
  Investor-owned distribution would be a substantial incremental improvement over today, and it answers David Byrne's challenge to improve transparency. So what if it can't compete with vaporware?

weems 11y ago

great article. we need some disruption

S_A_P 11y ago

So the problem as I see it is the layers of complexity of record deals. In my limited experience with the music biz(released a record on itunes, a few side soundtrack projects, and 3 friends with major label deals) there isnt much chance of making money from the record deal itself until you have accomplished the following: 1) > 2 profitable and high selling records 2) a solid fan base 3) luck One of my friends was signed to Barsuk records, and released 2 albums with them. He made about 25k per year including touring. He released 2 more albums independently and licensed a song for a microsoft zune commercial. He was telling me about some of the details of his record deal, and it obviously wasn't a super good deal for him, but he was just taking whatever he could to get on. He maintained a near constant touring schedule which broke up his marriage, and it generally just made his life really hard. This guy still struggles, I havent spoken to him in about a year or so but he may have given up. Another was signed to hollywood records, got major label promotion as a VH1 artist to watch with heavy rotation. His first album didnt sell very well and he got dropped. He is still a semi full time musician in Austin right now. I recently stayed at an up and coming country musicians apartment(she is a friend of a friend), she sold 1 million copies of her self penned single. While she is doing way better than I was at that age, she lives very modestly.( I dont know all the specifics of her deal, and she is young and wants to live simply so she could have a million bucks in the bank but I doubt it) Anyway, I mention this because from what I know of their deals, the record companies still treat them largely like they still spend big bucks at a big studio, and manufacture vinyl, CDs and cassettes for the bulk of the revenue. The music biz is making a killing on streaming because manufacturing is so low these days, and anyone can have a laptop studio capable of professional recording for 5-10k. The situation for artists wont change until record companies are not their main outlet.

l33tbro 11y ago

I was signed to a major label at one point and would do so again in a heartbeat. What you're getting in exchange for surrendering publishing and the masters is the huge network majors are tapped into. Syncs, marketing spend, publicity, festival circuits, key relationships with tastemakers, etc - I found the music industry incredibly nepotistic and benefitted over equally or more talented unsigned artists. There's a Hollywood Accouting hustle to what the majors say they are spending on you, but I believe you're building a better fanbase with a major, which generally means a greater touring revenue. Another point missed: it's hard to speak globally about "musicians". Artists have very different outcomes and objectives, so it's very easy to project a mainstream mentality on to the indie, as so with the converse.

hackuser 11y ago

> Musicians are entrepreneurs. We are essentially partners with the labels, and should be treated that way. There's no reason that Byrne and other musicians shouldn't earn as much as they can, but let's try to remember that musicians are artists. I seem to remember many of those disliking record labels for imposing onto their art the desires of commerce.

aikah 11y ago
> but let's try to remember that musicians are artists. Well according to HN musicians should be artist, developer,sys-admin, graphic designer,sells-man, accountant,lawyer all at the same time because "evil labels". And if they can't do all these things well they shouldn't be paid fairly for their art because they didn't try hard enough ...