'Pro-Artist' Gatekeepers Continue To Separate Artists From Their Fans

from the the-internet-is-the-keymaster dept

Despite the internet's promise of connectivity, gatekeepers are still working as hard as ever to keep artists' work out of the hands of their fans. It seems counterproductive (to say the least) to withhold finished work until some magical date in the future when platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc. allow artists to connect directly with fans instantaneously. I'm sure the legacy industries have their reasons, but as much as a frustration as it is for the fans, it's even more so for the artists.

Grantland's review of Fiona Apple's appearance at the Largo in Los Angeles contains this quote from Apple herself:

At one point, a fan requested new material. "I can't remember [how to play] any of my new songs because they've been done for a fucking year," Apple replied. "Not her fault!" said Brion.

Explain that. Is Apple's label waiting for the perfect moment, some arbitrary date which has been deemed as perfect for dropping her new album? Is there any reason, in this day and age, with all the distribution options and instant connections, for any label to sit on a finished album for an entire year?

It boggles the mind. Here's an industry that exists to sell content and yet shows a bizarre reluctance to do exactly that. No wonder artists (like Drake) get excited about leaks. Who knows how long the album has been sitting on the virtual shelves, collecting dust while the label decides whether or not today might be perfect album-selling weather.

As an artist, this has to be torturous. You're understandably proud of your work and can't wait to put it in the hands of your fans, but someone else completely unrelated to the creative process is gazing at the calendar in consternation and penciling in your album for release at some random point in the future. And since you don't have control over your own work, there's nothing you can do but hold on to your waning enthusiasm and hope that no one at a concert asks you to play something from your still-unreleased album.

It's even worse in the publishing world, where it can take 2-3 years to see your work in print (or an ebook), not to mention the fact that your back catalog is still controlled by someone else, meaning you can't reissue older books in order to keep money flowing in or maintain public interest while waiting for your finished book to hit the shelves.

As a fan, it's frustrating enough that publishers of all types still insist on ridiculous staggered releases and "windows." For an artist, it has to be absolutely maddening. All you want to do is get it to the people who want it most, but the gate is locked down tight by the same companies who still insist they're the last, best hope for the creative community. Conjuring up false scarcity through calendar mismanagement is no way to treat your artists. Or their fans.

Filed Under: albums, fiona apple, gatekeepers, music

Elvis Costello Tells His Fans 'Steal This Record'

from the this-price-is-crazy dept

The price at which labels want to sell music and the price customers are willing to pay are often two totally different things. Yet, as we talk about this price disparity, we very rarely consider the price at which the artist wants to sell the music. This point of contention has come to a head with the release of Elvis Costello's latest music collection. In a post titled "Steal This Record", Costello states his album, "The Return Of The Spectacular Spinning Songbook", just plain costs too much.

Unfortunately, we at www.elviscostello.com find ourselves unable to recommend this lovely item to you as the price appears to be either a misprint or a satire.

Yeah, I would say that $202.66 is a joke. For that price you get 1 CD, 1 DVD and 1 Vinyl EP. That's it. You would think that for that price you would get a lot more, but no. along with other memorabilia including a coffe table book and autographed commemoration card. But still, if the artist thinks even with those extras the price is just way too high, then perhaps he is right. I can imagine how frustrating it must be for Costello to try and get the price changed with no luck. This is one of the downsides of working with a label.

After hitting a brick wall with his label, Costello has decided to take drastic measures to get his point heard. He is suggesting that his fans avoid buying the album and instead buy something he feels is far superior and cheaper to boot:

All our attempts to have this number revised have been fruitless but rather than detain you with tedious arguments about morality, panache and book-keeping - when there are really bigger fish to filet these days - we are taking the following unusual step.

If you should really want to buy something special for your loved one at this time of seasonal giving, we can whole-heartedly recommend, "Ambassador Of Jazz" - a cute little imitation suitcase, covered in travel stickers and embossed with the name "Satchmo" but more importantly containing TEN re-mastered albums by one of the most beautiful and loving revolutionaries who ever lived - Louis Armstrong.

The box should be available for under one hundred and fifty American dollars and includes a number of other tricks and treats. Frankly, the music is vastly superior.

That is quite a show of humility. Not only does he suggest Armstrong's album as a better buy for the money, he also gives Armstrong props for making better music. This is a pretty good endorsement and according to Amazon, "Ambassador of Jazz" is already sold out. So people are listening. Perhaps the end goal here is to get the label to admit that it screwed up the pricing and to soon change it. However, if even the artist cannot get the price changed, what hope is there for a consumer boycott?

We talk a lot about the need for artists to connect with fans as a way to give them a reason to buy. Here, we have an artist connecting with fans and asking them to avoid buying. You would think that this would be counter productive for the artist but this move shows that Costello has the best interests of his fans in mind and will do anything to protect them from unscrupulous business moves. That is certainly a reason to support an artist.

If you really want to support him, Costello gives his fans other options if they really want this album but don't want to pay the current asking price:

If on the other hand you should still want to hear and view the component parts of the above mentioned elaborate hoax, then those items will be available separately at a more affordable price in the New Year, assuming that you have not already obtained them by more unconventional means.

Filed Under: albums, elvis costello, music, pricing

Former Music Industry Exec Says Album Prices Should Be Drastically Lower

from the he's-onto-something... dept

Robert Katz was the first of a whole lot of you (really, this may be the story with the most submissions ever) to pass along the news that former Warner Music UK boss Rob Dickins is suggesting that the record labels lower the price of albums all the way down to £1 -- about $1.60. He points out that, at a price like that, it becomes much easier for people to buy. With the prices today, he says there's simply too much of a mental transaction cost to determine if people are willing to pay the much higher amounts. Not surprisingly, others in the industry complained about his suggestion, first mocking him for presiding over Warner when the prices were so high (true, but that has nothing to do with what he thinks now) and then someone else tossing out the obligatory misunderstanding of the difference between price and value:

"A piece of music is a valuable form of art. If you want the person to respect it and value it, it's got to cost them not a huge sum of money but a significant sum of money."

Yeah, so that's not how value works, actually. And the problem, which Dickins appears to have figured out, but Jonathan Shalit who made the quote above has not, is that whether you like it or not (and whether it is legal or not), music today is already competing with free music online. So, it's not a question of "value," but of market prices.

Dickins seems to recognize the actual economics at play here, noting that by making albums so cheap, the number of sales would shoot way up, offsetting some of the price decline when it came to revenue and getting more people more interested in more acts, leading to greater revenue from alternative sources like concerts and merchandise. Of course, plenty of folks have been suggesting this same thing for years, but it's nice to see an "insider" get it, even if he's mocked by those who are still confused about these things.

Filed Under: albums, music industry, pricing, rob dickins

It Isn't Easy To Break Out Of Obscurity In The Music Business

from the so-what-should-you-do dept

It's no secret at all that it's tough to become famous in the music industry. In the past, you had to hope for one of the golden lottery tickets from a major record label. Otherwise, after a few years of trying, you went back to something else instead. But is it becoming any easier these days? It seems there's some debate about that. Music Think Tank highlights some stats on artists who broke out in 2008:

In 2008, 1,500 releases broke the "obscurity line" (sold over 10,000 albums).

Out of [those], 227 artists broke the "obscurity line" for the first time ever.

Out of the 227 first-timers, 14 artists did it own their own; approximately 106 were signed to a major; the rest were signed to indies.

Interesting stuff, right? Now, the quick conclusion here is that you still need that magical golden lottery ticket to make things work. But I'd argue that's not necessarily the case. First of all, a decade ago, how many artists could have done it "on their own"? Yes, it's a small number now, but it's a trendline that didn't even exist just a few years ago, and the opportunities to do it on your own have only increased. In fact, I'm surprised that 14 artists were able to sell 10,000 albums without a label already. That's really impressive.

And, of course, "doing it on your own" isn't necessarily the point. We're all for artists using record labels or managers or whoever makes the most sense to help them handle the business stuff -- but just the fact that they don't necessarily have to is quite impressive.

The second problem with the stat above? It assumes that album sales are the judge of the "obscurity line." That certainly may have been true in the past, but it is really becoming less and less of an issue. You don't have to sell albums to become well known, and just because you're well known, it doesn't mean you sell albums. It's not the best proxy for figuring this stuff out.

In fact, that data above came from a great (and absolutely worth reading) interview with Tom Silvermn of Tommy Boy Entertainment, and in the interview he more or less makes that very point:

Tommy Boy is more than a record company; we don't consider ourselves a record company anymore, we're much more than that. Now we're sort of a strategic artists positioning company, and our job is to take an artist from where they are in revenues to a much higher number. If we work with Artist A that's making half a million dollars a year, our goal is we take them to a million in year one, two million in year two, and three or four in year three. That's our goal. And then we take a percentage of that revenue. And we're talking about dollars, not record sales, because we may decide to give the records away, and we may only make about 10% of our money from the music and master use or 20% and the rest of it will come from touring and merch, publishing and possibly sync and other things. We'e not concerned with where the money comes from as long as it comes.

Tommy Boy is known for building brands, from Queen Latifah and Ru Paul, to De La Soul and Afrika Bambaataa, Naughty by Nature, House of Pain, so many household names now that you know. When you mention the name, you can see them; like Digital Underground, when you close your eyes, an image of who they are comes up. Coolio ... they all became significant brands, and that's what we did. Tommy Boy is itself as a significant brand. We're not just a record company. Our business always was building brands. How we used to make money was selling records; but we don't see it as the way we can make money now. It's one of the streams of revenue that we can make money from, but it's no longer the most significant or even the second most significant way we'll be making money. We can no longer be limited in how we see artists to the music domain. It's more than the music. We have to work with the artist's positioning.

Exactly. It seems like he understands completely how the industry has changed and what's happening today. Selling music, alone, is no longer the business model. It may not even be a major part of the music business model. It's much more about understanding what that artist allows you to sell. It could be music. It could be seats in a venue. It could be t-shirts. It could be instruments or music boxes or something wacky. Or maybe it's a combination of them all. And, in that world, "album sales" might not be a very good proxy for who is and who isn't obscure. If you're goal is to make a ton of money selling some of those other things, it might make the most sense to give that music away as freely as possible to get over the obscurity hurdle in order to get more people interested in buying those other things.

Filed Under: albums, business models, culture, music, obscurity, tom silverman

Another Company Helping Musicians Finance Their Albums

from the enabling-the-business-model dept

Whenever we talk about business models involving scarce and infinite goods, a few folks show up repeatedly in the comments claiming that the only scarce goods musicians can sell are t-shirts or concert tickets -- and then go on to complain that this will never work for musicians who don't want to tour. Of course, that's incorrect. Even before we had explained the whole economics behind scarce and infinite goods, we had pointed out another important scarce good from musicians: the ability to create new music. There's no reason why musicians can't focus on getting people to fund the creation of a new album.

In fact, we've pointed to plenty of musicians doing exactly that, from Marrillion to Jill Sobule to Maria Schneider (who won a Grammy with her album produced this way) -- these musicians have all had fans pay for the creation of a new album, often giving them certain extras for helping to fund the album. This way, the musicians make the money they need (they set the "goal" and once it's raised, they go and record the album). Unlike sitting around and hoping for royalties that never seem to show up, they get plenty of money, and the fans get the music. While not all the artists then adopt this second part of the model, if they then give away that music for free, it helps attract more new fans to create the next album -- which, if there are enough new fans, can be done at a higher cumulative price.

This is a perfect example of business model that involves paying for scarcity, with the scarcity being the musician's time and creative efforts. And the good news is that more companies are showing up to help musicians use such a business model. We'd already covered ArtistShare, which has been around for a while, and which helped Maria Schneider producer her album via this method, and now there's apparently a new entrant called BandStocks that seems to offer a similar model.

Of course, BandStocks doesn't seem to really embrace the second part of the model. The benefits to those who prepay are that they get a share of the profits from the later sale of the album -- meaning that there's still a focus on trying to sell the album. It will be interesting to watch, but models that still ultimately rely on selling the music by itself are going to come under increasing business model pressure, especially as others embrace models that don't focus so much on selling the music, but on using it to sell other scarce goods.

Filed Under: albums, business models, economics, music industry, pre-finance
Companies: artistshare, bandstock

Bands Avoiding iTunes For The Wrong Reasons

from the it's-not-going-to-make-people-buy-the-album dept

This is hardly a new phenomenon, but the Wall Street Journal is noting that some bands and some record labels are avoiding putting music on iTunes (or in some cases, pulling music off iTunes) in an effort to force people to buy the full album, rather than just a few tracks. There are plenty of reasons to dislike iTunes, but it seems hard to believe that this does anything positive for the bands in question. The article quotes Kid Rock's manager, who compares apples to oranges, by pointing out that people who are on iTunes sell more single songs than albums, but that's rather meaningless in comparing to an artist (like Kid Rock) who's not on iTunes at all. Not putting your music where people want it is only going to piss them off.

Hell, even record industry execs are getting frustrated by bands not having their singles anywhere that can be downloaded legally. And, yet, the sister record label to the one that employs the annoyed exec above is experimenting with an even more annoying proposition: pulling popular songs from iTunes after they've become popular, to see if it gets more people to buy the CD.

Honestly, is it really that hard to understand the concept of providing the customer what they want in a convenient manner?

Filed Under: albums, itunes, kid rock, music, record labels, singles