Current music vs 'old'?

[john]

8 hours ago, Greg M said:

I appreciate that the debate about "being discovered" and "making yourself hard to be avoided" has merit but, fundamentally, what the music business was like when I was first getting into music in the later 60s and through the 70s and 80s was PROFIT.

Record companies employed people to go out and find bands that might be good enough to be exploited, to create more riches for the record companies themselves.

The "Indie" movement challenged this and took a large chunk of the music market away from the established recording companies, and maybe the level of exploitation of artists changed a little bit but it was still there.

What I have noticed and really enjoyed is the number of unsigned bands and artists that we have been seeing at the bigger multi-stage music festivals for the last ten years at least. The big concert venues are now really big, with major artists and bands playing multiple shows at a few venues around the country. This has been a way for artists to make more money themselves, as opposed to just making records where the vast majority of the money made goes to the recording companies.

But what has happened as this centralisation of big concerts has proliferated, is that the number of smaller venues around the country that show live music has grown to an enormous extent. Bands without recording contracts get to play at big festivals and arrange tours around the country playing at small venues. It is possible to make a living out of playing live music without having to have a recording contract.

There is still the issue of getting noticed in the first place, but there are lot more ways that this can occur now.

 

I went to see Sting and his band play in Sherwood Forest in Nottingham (UK) a few days ago. Sting was brilliant but he brought with him two guest artists who were relatively unknown

 

"Storry" is what I would describe as an Rand B artist  (or Soul artist) who sings her life through her songs. Brilliant if not a little heavy.

 

But the second band who played,  "Germein" , were a three piece band from Australia made up of the three Germein sisters. A brilliant display of melodic rock music that I could not fault. They weren't doing the sexy young thing approach, they were serious musicians. They had been playing around Australia for over ten years and their only album was made in 2013, since then only a long list of singles had been recorded, which I happily added to my playlist. They have been making a living and building a reputation for 12 years and this is the first time they had been outside Australia. That morning was the first time that any of them had seen a squirrel.

They finally got noticed, but they didn't sit around waiting for it. The played their music and honed their skills and are now really worth listening to

 

Just my two penn'eth

 

The music business is still about profit. Absolutely. It’s just streamlined it’s business model.

 

The biggest change for mainstream music (other than piracy and streaming killing music sales) is risk management.

 

Labels are “closed house” lenders. They largely lent you money to spend with or through them, often keeping artists in debt for years. Nonetheless, they took on mostly young, naive artists, and in lending them money they took a large risk. Getting their money back was a significant roll of the dice. So, they reduced and reduced what was offered to artists until it became single song contracts. Usually non-recouped income was written off.

 

Now they expect artists to take all the risk. instead of taking on an artist and them have 3-5 albums to get their crap together and turn profit, they only sign artists with a proven track record, selling to an established listener base. Most of the risk is removed yet the preferential terms (preferring the label of course) remain the same.

 

Artists that were once retired are back out touring because recording money has dried up. Simple.

 

Venues, I don’t see a huge change, and many still pay a pittance. Festival with many stages…. They’ve just found a way to charge huge festival ticket prices, largely populated by indie bands commanding low fees. Sure, it’s great exposure, and even opens some financial doors for indie acts, however the industry itself hardly paid a cent to develop those bands and build their following… a following that the festival owners and sponsors now get to reap the benefits of.

 

Don’t get me wrong… I am all for indie bands carving out a living from their music. Platforms like Spotify make billions from unsigned artists. The advertisers that use their platform make bank on selling products only made possible by music.

 

Back in the day, independent bands made money playing gigs and selling tapes, then vinyl, then CDs. The opportunities were always there. The methods were different. The entire punk scene was borne from a label backlash (not the first), with hundreds of independent labels being launched (now mainly bought up by mainstream labels). Someone has always made money from mainstream music.

 

The biggest difference is accessibility and knowledge. Back in the day, knowledge was largely protected and hard won. Songstuff, and sites like it, provide knowledge to bridge the gap. This is our 24th year of doing that. We’ve done it for free. There’s still a ton of paid for info out there.

 

Thing is, people don’t value free. They frequently don’t act on it. They act on what they pay for. Funny that.

 

The indie movement took almost nothing. They were given risk taking. It was billed the indie movement taking. Piracy killing off labels Truth is Piracy and eagerly streaming services killed off a whole bunch of independent labels, largely based on info in skewed articles that sold the masses on a bunch of bull. The bull was loosely based on a single truth… it cost roughly 57 cents to press a CD that then sold for $15 - $20. Of course that was the cost of a raw CD pressing. It didn’t include the shared cost of creating glass masters. It didn’t include the cost of printing on the CD. Or the cost of the box it came in, most commonly a jewel box. It didn’t include the printing of a CD tray insert or the CD booklet/cover. It didn’t include the cost of the bar code. Or the cost of the shrink wrap. It didn’t include the cost of distributing that product to record shops world wide.

 

It also didn’t include the cost of designing the CD artwork for the CD, Tray insert of booklet. It didn’t include the cost of poster designs, printing or distribution. It didn’t include the cost of rehearsal, recording, mixing or mastering. It didn’t include the cost of photoshoots. Nor the cost of marketing the music.

 

There’s a reason that the general public was misinformed. YouTube was potentially in massive debt (not just them obviously) for streaming unlicensed music. There were articles supporting “attacking labels actually supports artists” and articles explaining the above info. Weirdly articles supporting killing labels by going easy on music piracy were all over the first 10 pages of search results, before you find the first article against that viewpoint.

 

If actual info had won out, YouTube would have owed millions if not billions.

 

Google owned (owns) YouTube.

 

The reality is that largely most of the independent scene was never monetised. Monetising it took nothing from labels. It monetised what was previously the unsigned market.

 

The difference is that the unsigned market learned to go it alone. Sort of. They also take advantage of some of the now separately floated label services which the indie artists pay for. They are either backed by old labels or they ar businesses set up to provide such label services. I mean sites like DistroKid. There are loads of other label sub services available via websites