Music Is Becoming A Service AgainOne story that got a lot of online buzz this week was the one about a 22 year old Boston rapper named Sam Adams who was accused of buying up his own album to top the iTunes charts. His freshman album Boston’s Boy debuted at number one on iTunes, ahead of DJ Khaled.
The fishy thing about all of this is that no one’s ever heard of the guy. No publication online or off had written much about him. And he only has 911 friends on MySpace the last time I checked. And his page makes no mention of his album. His page also got only 3526 plays on the day I checked.
Even if MySpace is no longer the gold standard for indie music artists, I’d still think that someone who debuts at number one on iTunes would have generated a bit more online buzz than he did. Human beings are a chatty lot. It isn’t possible for someone to become popular without leaving a digital trail, especially if that person produces music that appeals to younger people.
So the numbers are probably fake. But then again, it can’t be that easy to manipulate iTunes. Apple isn’t MySpace. They know technology. On the other hand, kids have managed to hack the iPhone. Nobody really seems to have the back story on this guy.
Either way, who really cares, right? Well, the labels apparently do. Warner, Atlantic and Universal are knocking at his door now. But that still doesn’t matter. Even if Sam Adams does get a record deal, there just isn’t much money in selling records anymore. Buzz rarely translates into real dollars. A friend of mine told me several days ago that he thinks American Idol is deceptive because of the way it decides who’s the best talent. If fans of American Idol actually had to vote with their wallets by buying up contestants’ music, none of the contestants would be popular. And when the winners do go out to establish real-world careers, they run into the harsh realities of the modern music market.
American Idol provides an interesting window into the modern music industry; but only to people with an analytical eye. Most people who watch American Idol get the impression that there’s still a thriving process in place for developing artists, marketing and distributing music.
What American Idol really shows is that there’s a ton of money in the music business, but it’s made indirectly. The American Idol brand itself got rich off of advertising and licensing products, not music. Technology and software companies are today’s biggest beneficiaries of the music space.
This all presents an interesting philosophical issue because it goes to the nature of what music really is and whether it can ever be lucrative again because of that. At its core, music is a profoundly social experience. What follows from that is that anybody who composes music and shares it with the public is providing a service.
Anyone who knows business knows that the reason service-oriented businesses tend not to grow as rich as product-oriented businesses is that they don’t scale well. In a service business, your growth is intricately tied to the number of bodies you employ. With a product business, you just have to devise a process to create copies of something and then sell them in large quantities.
LPs and CDs turned music into a product. But that was an anomaly that lasted the better part of four decades. The cat’s out of the hat. The Internet isn’t going to disappear. As a result, music will never be a mass product again. That means it’s becoming a service again. Not a free one, but a service. That means scaling problems and less money.
The record business is stuck. It’s problem doesn’t lie in the world of business. It lies in the much more abstract world of economics where individual intentions don’t change the course of events. Collective intentions do.
The 40 year period between about 1960 to 2000 was a unipolar moment for music where the machine age made possible the hardware to make copies of music, but not the technology to make copies of those copies. And now that’s all gone.
I think that the best way to view all of this is to fully accept that music is once again becoming a service. That doesn’t mean it’ll be free in every form. Nor should it be. Musicians still have to make money. But music as a business just runs into scaling issues. That’s perfectly fine if you don’t care about getting super rich. But if you do want to get rich, get into technology that services the music industry.
March 16th, 2010 at 1:47 am
Bravo, well said, although I’d say the hay-day of the recording was a bit longer than 40 years; there was a grand peak of musicians paying mortgages from their recordings from the late-swing era onward. That doesn’t change your point, but it does complicate the issue because we have today a generation of musicians where none alive can remember a time when recordings was not the primary money channel — in the days of Coltrane and before our artists depended on the record deals, often conniving among themselves to find session-lead contracts for their friends as a way to keep the music moving forward. This is why the loss of the recording-channel is so frightening to musicians, even the younger players, even those who do came into their own in the iTunes/MySpace era.
We need to look back, and as musicans that should be easy for us, we’re a traditional-knowledge sort of people! Think back, look back, and what do we find? How did the first great international superstar make his money? (that would be Franz Liszt) How did Gershwin get by? Shows, yes, certainly, although one might argue that touring is lucky if it meets tour and production expenses. No, the way money was made historically was, in a nutshell, by aiding others to make music! By spreading the joy around, by teaching, and not just technique but also in providing people with new material and showing them how to appreciate and interpret that material.
And sure enough, what do we find in the business pages but a nearly mirror image increase in the music-enabling industry to match dollar for dollar the losses in the music-canning industry. Guitar makers are cranking out low-cost instruments, shops are flooded with $100 violins, $200 saxophones, parents are clamouring eager to get their kids into the burgeoning world of neuro-cognitive enhancement that accrues to musicians, the classical print industry isn’t even lowering their prices! That has to tell us something.
Here’s another old-school rule worth remembering: even among the record-biz at its height, the real money-maker has never been hit records as little bits of plastic shipped to eager kids: the money-maker has been in the royalties due from a song re-sung by others – maybe you can’t due fifty shows a night 365 days a year, but a tune like ‘Yesterday’ can and the rights owner, even in the days of copying-frenzy, will still get the rights from airplay, concert venue fees, heck in Vancouver SOCAN even charges royalties from buskers!
March 16th, 2010 at 11:58 am
mrG, your observation about the burgeoning “music-enabling” industry as you call it, is spot on. Someone pointed the same thing out to me several days ago. People just have to do it themselves now.
March 16th, 2010 at 12:57 pm
Excellent points in the main article, and in mrG’s comment.
March 16th, 2010 at 12:58 pm
PS. You need to change your videos to the right on this page. The Don Henly video has been broken for a couple of months at least, I think.
March 16th, 2010 at 1:25 pm
Thanks so much about mentioning scale and service. That gets passed over when people talk about new music business models. If you’ve become popular because you’ve answered every fan email personally, and then you become even more popular, there comes a time when you can’t do that any more.
People are suggesting that popular celebrities/artists charge fans for access, with the ones who pay the most getting more chances to hang out with the celebrities/artists. That may work, but it does change the dynamics of everything. You become a friend for hire, more or less.
March 20th, 2010 at 5:57 am
Mika,
I think you make some good points here, and hopefully you might be able to do an additional column piece one day on maybe ‘How American Idol is Both Affecting & Destroying Today’s Music At The Same Time’.
It’s absolutely amazing (& very disheartening) just how much this TV show alone, has played such a huge role in not only ‘how’ a lot of artists both write & record their music now, but also ‘how’ a lot of consumers, audiences, & listeners in general have severely lowered their standards & expectations of ‘what’ even makes a great artist to begin with and even ‘what’ type of music is to be mostly accepted & played today.
As a recording engineer/producer, I continue to see more & more artists come in the studios now & rely heavily on what ‘American Idol’ is currently promoting & the audiences that support it. It seems that things such as ‘originality’, ’soul’, ‘heart’, ‘creativity’, etc – is being pushed to the far background now (if not ‘forgotten’ even) – to make more room for things like ‘popularity’, ‘perfection’, and ‘best chances’.
Don’t get me wrong, ‘talent’ is an ingredient that is almost always needed – but I also see so much ‘character’ and/or ‘imagination’ being lost due to this new TV trend. For example, what could have been a ’simple’, good recording take, is now replaced with a polished & perfected ’stale track’ instead. What could have been a really ‘innovative’ and expressive song, is exchanged for something far more conservative, ’safe’, and flat-out boring.
It seems that ‘American Idol’ is almost rewriting the ‘rules’ and playbook for so many up & coming artists now (and in some cases, even ‘older’ artists.) For instance, a lot of the ‘imperfections’ that used to stand-out in someone’s vocals and really move the listener, is completely ‘glossed-over’ with excessive amounts of pitch-correction in order to create an absolute, unblemished vocal track, or to perhaps just keep up with the current trend-movement of the ‘American Idol’ vocal standards. Either way, wether it’s the singer, a song-writer, or even the entire band itself that subscribes to these ridiculous ‘requirements’ – not only do they lose originality & fervor, but continue to flood the market with more & more cliche’ and banal music. Not only is this starting to become the accepted ‘norm’ of the music business, but it’s also critically wounding a lot of the more ‘indie’ artists out there who are FAR more pioneering, willing to take chances, and worthy of success.
It’s really funny how if you were to picture maybe Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Beck, Radiohead, or even John Lennon on ‘American Idol’ – they wouldn’t have even made it past the first round. They would have been dismissed as ‘horrible’, ‘ugly’, ‘out-of-tune’, or a ‘major-disappointment’. And so many artists, bands, and/or song-writers now, are coming into the studios trying to ‘clean their acts up’, strive for ‘perfection’, and will focus on these new ‘American Idolized’ standards, that I think they’ve almost forgotten ‘why’ they even became a musician in the first place. It’s incredibly sad.
It’s truly amazing that with all the technological advances that have been made within the music industry, the availability of the music, the ability to create music, and in a world that desperately ‘needs’ music – it’s seems to be getting harder and harder each day to discover or to even be able to turn on your radio and hear something completely ‘fresh’ and new. It’s often brought up in these discussions of what bands & artists can ‘do’ to help their chances of being successful or discovered – or how to promote, distribute, or better sale their songs. But at the end of the day, music content should still come before ‘anything’ else, and perhaps things like ‘originality’, ‘ingenuity’, and ‘freshness’ should be focused on ‘way’ before things like fast-marketing, internet-tools, and web hits.
I know that may sound like common sense to most of us, but again, since things such as ‘American Idol’ have come about and forced SO many artists and listeners to subscribe to the same carbon-copy music, techniques, and ‘formulas’ over and over again – a lot of the really ‘good’ ingredients for music has simply been lost and forgotten. I used to think (and pray) ‘American Idol’ was just a quick ‘fad’ and would be cancelled after a 2-3 seasons, but unfortunately, it seems like it’s here to stay for awhile and only gets ‘bigger’ with each year. It may be a ‘fun’ show to watch for some, and great for TV ratings – but again, it really seems to be affecting a lot of what’s going on in music now and the musicians that make it in a negative way. With all of these re-occuring ‘copy-cat’ artists being plastered all over the TV’s, mirrored on iTunes, and saturating every radio station nation-wide – we need ‘originality’ now, more than ever, in order to stand-out from the masses and hopefully bring in some great music at the same time.
Again, you made some good points here, and hopefully you’ll touch on this subject matter again in another column some day. I’d like to hear some more of your input on this and what you think about it.
March 21st, 2010 at 7:29 pm
He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery. EVOLVE!!!!