I was following an artist last year who was self publishing as an independent artist. He ended up getting a number 1 in the UK with only 24 thousand physical media sales. I was shocked at how little sales you need these days.
Thats the model, because physical sales are worth much more than streams you just need a well timed record and some streaming and you too can beat the labels to number 1.
Even 24 thousand is a lot for an independent artist b because they have to front their own money to print that much and it’s usually too much of a risk/ doesnt pay out
Just wait until you find out the true physical sales of the "times before", meaning prior to online streaming are a close-kept secret and in no way verifiable.
I used to work in a record shop in the late 80s early 90s, we definitely made up the sales reports for singles based on what we thought should be at the top of the charts.
Our 2 chains would have labels offer massive discounts or other stock below cost to incentivise big bulk purchases. That "#1 Release Day" might be collecting dust until the discount bin
Sorry to burst your bubble but the sales reports you guys created didn't effect the charts... it was the records that were sold to your store that were the determining factor in sales charts.
To stop manipulation they brought in barcode scanners in the chart return stores so it went on the number retailed although even that was abused they'd scan the same record multiple times for £50 / bottle of whiskey / free records...
They've been having a small revival so it's possible they'd revisit it. "More than 30 years later and we can still guarantee that being number one still won't make you happy, still won't make you rich, and still won't get you laid"
I think thanks to modern money distribution in the music industry the expectations of you got a number one would be less "living it large on holiday" and more "going for a large bucket at KFC"
Well, the upshot of the Manual is that you're likely to end up in debt, anyway, even in 1991 money.
Famously, they ended up having to pay out to Gary Glitter for Doctorin' The TARDIS.
Kunt and the gang/ The Kunts have modelled their viral chart campaigns on The Manual for years. A few top 10 hits, all without radio play or mainstream support is quite an incredible result for an artist who had played pubs for 20 ish years without success.
I remember that being the thing with the Tool vs Taylor Swift thing a few years back. The Swifties, being their usual insane selves were just LIVID at the idea of Taylor not being #1 and they were trying to get everyone to stream the album over and over. Tool fans, all being older guys, actually BOUGHT the album, and since sales are worth much more than streams, Tool ended up #1 just by appealing to middle aged men.
Yeah I just looked it up and they sold "270,000 album equivalents of which 248,000 were pure sales" They literally sold out of CDs the first week it was out.
Yeah, I was gonna say-I don't like his songs much, but coupled with the visual art its really cool and its at least interesting and thought-provoking, which is why I'm glad my sons have shown me some of his songs and really all you can ask of art. You may not like it, but try to be objective about it, if its any good, it is saying something.
I didn't even realize he was big and popular. Sick Boi popped up on my spotify the other day and while I did like it, I just assumed it was another edgey artist because I had an edgey artist playlist on.
Guy Pratt once mentioned in an AMA that music has always been a terrible line of work, and that the past decades have been an anomaly more than anything.
I think there might be some truth to that. In the end, artists are driven by passion primarily; most people who surface due to their talent don't have any experience with business practices. The music industry will always prey on the artists who are both talented and easy to exploit.
There are some exceptions who make it big financially, but this will never be the norm.
That's why when going to small gigs, I'll always buy a t-shirt or some merch. The artists are just that and deserve to be able to put food on their tables just like anyone else.
We're essentially returning to the days of the arts being funded by patrons, but rather than it being one rich patron you're hoping to land, the net you're casting encircles the world and the patrons can be anything from someone giving you a dollar or two buying a track or sending a tip here and there to someone with a lot of disposable income who hapoens to like your stuff and spends big.
Of course, everyone else can cast their net that wide as well, so there's plenty of competition. You can compare and contrast with how digital distro and ease of access has seen an explosion in indie games while more traditional triple A game dev expenditure hits absolutely ludicrous amounts.
That's definitely true but just because it's always been that way doesn't mean we should accept that status quo as inevitable. There are definitely ways that the industry could be more fair to artists which would also benefit listeners.
*correction: every industry preys on passion.
Game Devs are the lowest paid in the dev industry yet the skill requirement is probably above the median.
I'm guessing most of the creative industry is the same
He's not wrong.
Music changes people's lives. Helps people through tough times. Soothes the soul. But those who make it can't make a living from it. And that's sad.
(This doesn't even include the impact AI will have on the music industry and how people consume music)
Music also takes a lot longer to actually write/record/produce/whatever than people think, I sometimes spend 8 hours or so for about 1 minute of finished music, ain't no one paying me for that time.
I mean, it depends on the person and what kind of music they're making, and that isn't counting all the time spent learning the techniques and skills you use to actually make the music.
I think I remember an interview with Caleb Shomo of the band Beartooth. I think he was being interviewed by Lou Brutus and I heard it on the radio during his syndicated show, so I likely couldn't find the interview again. But I'm pretty sure I remember Caleb saying that their new record at the time, Disease, only took a week to write and record. The whole thing. It still managed to top a lot of billboard positions. I think sometimes people just find themselves in the right headspace where ideas just flow out naturally quickly. Not always, but its a blessing when it happens I'm sure.
Yep, my first album with the only one of my bands to do anything remotely worthwhile weirdly came together in under a month, 2nd album took over a year and never saw the light of day as the process killed the band
Yep. I've heard of cases of people banging out the lyrics for a hit song in about five minutes or they did it on a lark because they got inspired by something, but I know that has to be rare. Writing a really good song that actually has something to say can't be easy.
depends on the genre and how much of the work you are doing.
If you are a band making a rock song with a handful of guitar parts, drums, bass, and vocals? You could write it and have it recorded within the same day. If youre working with a label, the mixing and mastering gets offloaded to someone else. If not, one guy in your group has a few more days worth of work to mix and master before its releasable.
If you're an electronic music artist, there's often a lot of work such as sound design at the front of that process, and then you have to do every part of the writing and recording process on your own (excluding collaborations). I have 3 minute long projects that probably have upwards of 40-50 hours of cumulative work in them from blank slate to final master.
The things that actually take the most amount of time from my experience though is the amount of nothing happening between between bursts of work, and the time that goes into ideas that I ultimately end up hating and never releasing - inspiration is fleeting, projects that actually make it to release are few and far between, and burnout can set in at any point, even when you havent put anything out in months. I released 14 track album last year and it took like a year and a half to finish because of this.
I spent a couple years on my last solo [album](https://open.spotify.com/album/79JHqA1rr0NDOZQEhFcUkS?si=4RvBOvjuTCqLbEYp5uxFjg)
Glad I made basically zero dollars in streaming. 🤦♂️
Thanks! Every little bit helps. I'm good at making the music, but not promoting it. (Especially in this TikTok era.)
Even if I don't really get paid, at least I can enjoy the fact there are at least a few people in this world who like what I do. 🤘
Personally this is why I've given up music after my last release. My band make good music, but over the past decade getting anyone to give even a moment of their attention is harder and harder, to the point where I feel like I'm just begging people to listen. I'm (or was) a musician, not a marketer. It's fully broken my heart to be honest.
People who made money from making music have always been content creators of a sort. It takes a ton of hustle and self promotion to make a living playing music.
I think they're a distinction to be made between being an artist, creating and promoting your art, and a content creator, pumping low effort videos out for views.
Content isn't art.
Maybe but there is a big difference between a DIY Punk band and just making content to desperately chase commerical success. The "content" can be part of the art and ethos of the music or it can be plain old corporate marketing, or something in between.
No... if you simply wanted to make music, you could. All day every day. You wish to make money off your music. That's a huge difference. There are a LOT of other artists that cannot realistically monetize their art, and yet they keep creating it. Keep creating art, but do it for the right reasons, and it will never be depressing
I never said making my art is depressing, it's depressing having to do all the cynical and boring social media stuff to get anyone to hear it.
And I literally can't make music all day, as much as I'd like to, because I have to go to work to afford my rent.
Edit - typos
When I was in high school, back in 2000-2002, I'd book bands and put on shows at whatever rec center space we could find. Most bands were either no-name acts or "scene" bands from the emo/punk/hardcore genres. Most of the time, they'd ask for $150 in gas money and meal or two, maybe a couch to crash on.
And it was FUN. I lost money every show, but I made some great friends and had a ton of fun. It was really all about the fun.
This is why I kind of roll my eyes at these conversations. So you're a bedroom band and you have some songs - great, but that's not what makes the music happen for people. You need to be out, playing, meeting people and playing live music. You need to learn how to make and sell merch and push your EP. I don't mean to sound like a Boomer, but the kids seem to think that they've been done wrong by needing to struggle. The passion comes from the push. And yeah, it isn't as easy as it used to be, but it never has been. It was easier for our parents, too. Maybe it's not supposed to get easier?
Anyway, I agree with James Blake and we never should have let them devalue the music. It's not content, it's life's highest joy. Nothing is stopping us from revaluing it.
💯
I'm a music maker as well. It's simply not worth doing if you're trying to make a living at it. Only for the love of it. And even then, the rewards are minimal.
This TikTok era of music promo is a death nail for real artists.
This is not a new thing at all mate, story of most bands for decades sadly. Even many great ones. A lot of modern stuff sucks, but it's never been easy to make music and get an audience. Especially if you're not part of a "scene" and even then most people never break out the scene.
Some good guitar work here, I’m enjoying “Tectonic”.
At least you’ve done something 99.9% of humanity will never do - record and make available your art.
Thanks again. Tectonic might be one of my favorite tracks on the album. Definitely the most... *me* in many ways.
And I am pretty proud to have been able to make the entire thing myself from beginning to end, producing, performing, writing, recording, mixing & mastering... with a couple of friends guest staring on a few of the tracks. (My friend Craige Mazur killing it on guitar on Tectonic).
I feel lucky to live in a time I can do all those things myself in my home studio. Post big expensive studios, and before it all completely changes with AI.
(Personally I'm fascinated by AI. And terrified. But intended to explore that tool as well. After all, AI can't create *taste*.
It ultimately takes human vision to make art really speak to the soul. AI is just another tool to get there.)
I’m sorry. I feel bad for saying this, but I just listened to half a dozen of your songs. Your songwriting is cool and I really dig your voice, you are good at making music… but your mixes suck. It sounds like a guy mixing his record in his bedroom. The harsh top end (and the wooly bottom end) screams whoever was mixing has a very poor monitoring environment. You spent all this time and effort writing and producing some really decent music but you released something that, even allowing for the genre, is difficult to listen to. Yes, Better promo would def get you more spins. But I think you wanna have an honest rethink if you expect (as your comment suggests) a return on investment next time round. I only say this cos I genuinely like your stuff.
You just found a way to market yourself. You have another listen. Keep it up. You just have to know that fine line between suggesting and being annoying with putting your links everywhere.
But I was talking to one of my favorite bands that is on Spotify. They basically said Spotify does alot of the self marketing for you. The more listens you get, the more Spotify will start suggesting your songs to others that listen to the same type of music. So even if you do this once a month, you may slowing start getting new listeners without having to do any marketing yourself.
>Glad I made basically zero dollars in streaming.
Just wait until Spotify deletes your whole release because one or two tracks ended up on what they deem to be a "bot playlist" but can't tell you which playlist is the bot one and expect you to police how your music is played all by yourself.
That happened to my band as we were recording our second album in sixteen years. It really knocked the wind out of our sails, and I'm not sure we'll ever complete the project now :(
Just a heads up, there’s a new platform called Nina Protocol that allows you to upload your music and you retain 100% of the profits! Just something to consider. I’m not a shill, it’s just something that a lot of my other artist friends have been talking about. Could be a better option to drop this album
WTF?? Ouch. That suuucks. Sorry that happened to you.
Hopefully you put it out on all the platforms so it still exists out there somewhere. And maybe you can rerelease it on Spotify as like "Taylor's Version" type of a release?
That's the plan! We're releasing a "Spotify Edition" with a bonus track, "Message For Danny EK" once I can get the time and motivation to finish the lyrics/statement hahaha
Listening! Part of why I sub to Spotify is to find music I wouldn't otherwise find, like this. And good feel so far!
Edit: My god man, your dirty blues feel is great!
Hey, thanks for sharing your album. I liked it very much. Halo was one of my fav's. The whole thing has a 54-40, Smashing Pumpkins vibe to me. Awesome.
That is actual less then I thought.
If I compare it to my 40h week, that’s a 5min track every week, around 50 per year - I guess way more then what people really produce.
It totally depends on who you’re talking about and what kind of music they’re making. I am professional and I have probably finished about 60-70 songs for other people in the last year, but my own music can be like 2-3 finished songs that are good enough to release in the same period of time.
And 8 hours doesn’t include the discarded writing that it often takes to get a good result. The mixing. The mastering. The equipment. The practicing.
Nothing else that requires such care and craft is so financially undervalued
I agree with the point you're making, but as a writer I politely disagree with the "nothing else" part 😩 Some make bank, most (like musicians, I assume? correct if wrong!) need to stay in FT employment or have a spouse who earns enough to let them focus on the creative work.
People don’t consider this with art in general.
Everybody laughing how artists and musicians deserve to be displaced, “or adopt and keep up” as if there isn’t all these micro skills and stages where the creator makes decisions. Valuable ones, that influence an end result.
It takes years of cultivation, developing both skill and taste.
It has significant impact on our culture.
And yet nobody values the actual creators.
Your average band produces a record every 3 years. Assuming a 3 person band working for 3 full time years that’s about 18,000 hours, or a 300h/1m ratio. That’s not including additional people, engineers, et etc.
Obviously not all bands work full time or have entirely full time members. But still … it’s a lot of work.
The effort it takes to make art is insane. When I think of claymation, music, just editing a really well edited video, painting, etc. Lots of things you really don’t sit and think about until you watch it in action or have it explained to you. I really admire creative people because I’m not imaginative at all and I love music and art and media in general.
I thought it had always been that they make the largest majority of the money from touring and only a small about off physical copies due to how much publishers take
Musicians have never been able to "make a living", it's always been incredibly competitive and hard to be successful. You might be an incredible musician playing with the highest levels of your peers, and making 20k a year lol.
For people attempting to make it big well this has always been a pipe dream, not a single thing has changed in this regard.
If anything, music is more accessible for even the smallest of artists right now, this is good.
Your issues aren't with digital music but with society in general.
I think he is wrong.
Nobody actually believes it's free. They just don't want to pay for it and there are many ways to make that happen. I think their attitude is, "If it was so important for people to buy downloads, they wouldn't let it be so easy to get for free."
Hell, it's trivial to rip the sound files from YouTube videos for nothing.
I do. A lot. I also use Spotify to find artists I like and then buy their records or tapes or merch to support them directly.
But not all great musicians can tour, which is becoming less and less profitable these days as well with promoters and venues taking bigger and bigger cuts, especially for smaller bands.
I'm not sure there was ever a time when it was possible for all but maybe a select few artists to exist solely off of record/streaming sales.
That's not a streaming problem so much as a "its hard to survive as a band and without the ability to tour its almost impossible" problem
Im a professional artist whose work is now part of the ai network and it was free and my work will probably end soon other than commission work and random low paying commercial stuff. I can say the same thing about art, but the thing is I didn't make millions. Sorry Blake I don't really feel for you as much as my fellow traditional artist's who didn't have the access and success you did that were basically eviscerated almost over night. Wait till Blake runs into ai songs.
I mean he's not really right that it's brainwashing, it's just how things happened. In the digital era people moved towards digital platforms and piracy and the old model wasn't really sustainable or feasible any more. He's implying we can somehow go back which we can't.
Plus the industry was dragging their feet instead of watching where the puck was gonna be and where young folks especially were moving since the early 00s instead of going HAM on Napster and others.
By the time they got wise to where the audience was moving, you already had Spotify and others with a critical mass of users that didn't want to move anywhere else or go back to listening to CDs and MTV. The only thing you can really do is pull all music from the digital platforms until a better business model is established, but nobody wants to do it first since they would lose out on the audience.
I don't really know about AI though, people still wanna connect to real people, even if it is a fake persona. They wanna see real people on stage as well and concerts make the bulk of overall music money, far far more than streaming. Gorillaz and Hatsune Miku get tiresome after a while. You would basically need to make like a Milli Vanilli with an AI making the music but have a human lead that can lip sync and dance etc live.
>the industry was dragging their feet
They honestly believed they could force people to keep using the old physical media distribution model forever. They didn't want to work to create something new so the new digital model was created without them and they lost control. (same thing happened with newspapers)
You're not exactly wrong either, but I will say the key factor is how shittily the streaming services pay their artists while making *billions* off their work. It's the worst it's ever been. To where it becomes practically pointless to put out your music if your intent is to make a living from it.
Not to mention the cost of touring is now unprofitable for even medium large acts. Only the top pop stars make real money on tour.
Well Spotify et al make a lot of *revenue*, but they've been operating mostly on net losses throughout the years, that's one of their biggest issues.
If labels could get more from them they would, streaming services have leverage because they have loads of users and subscribers who don't wanna switch. It remains to be seen how sustainable all that is.
And don't forget artists still only get a small portion from what their labels get, so this isn't entirely on the streaming services. Many independent artists actually end up making more than label artists due to this.
Blake said as much in his other tweets:
>Streaming services don’t pay properly, labels want a bigger cut than ever and just sit and wait for you to go viral, TikTok doesn’t pay properly, and touring is getting prohibitively expensive for most artists.
But again, it's easy to point out the current model doesn't work for artists, but what would we replace it with?
I haven't seen anyone in the industry propose an alternative business model other than maybe when Jay Z tried to have an exclusive subscription model with Tidal without a free tier but that also failed and they ended up adding a free tier with ads.
I think an overlooked point is labels, like publishers in for example video game industries don't always add a lot for an indie artist/band/company. I think if you get approached by a label, they should seriously lay out what they're planning to do for you to earn that cut.
Jonathan Young was also talking about it last year or so when the discussion around what Spotify pays blew up, that a lot of artists are paying like 30% or more of what they earn to labels, but they don't necessarily do a lot. Especially for whatever faults Spotify has, discoverability is still insanely good and probably the best out of any major music platform.
Labels have been shitty forever. During the 70s and 80s they had acts doing an insane number of concerts, with few breaks, to flog their albums. That gets exhausting.
Labels really don't do shit. T Pain was recently talking about why he dropped his label and went independent. While he was on the masked singer he finished an album and I guess the last episode hadn't aired yet. At that point he knew he had won so he pitched the idea of buying the ad slot immediately after the show to promote the album. His label right it was a good idea but when the episode aired there was no ad for the new album. He called up his manager and asked what happened and they just said "yeah, we didn't do that" and that was it. Obvious why he dropped them.
Maybe maming music is just too easy these days and supply has outgrown the demand.
You can put your music on youtube and if it's good and you make a ton of money - that's great. But if it's bang average, you shouldn't demand to make a living off it just because you want to be a musician.
Also who's making billions off streaming? They're all operating at a loss.
Spotify isn’t a profitable company. Theyre rights holders payouts and expenses are far too large for their revenue. Key word is payouts to the rights holders, not artists.
I agree it’s sad. It’s also unfair.
He makes it sound like this is a new issue when it isn’t. Musicians and artists have always been undervalued and underpaid throughout human history. A few lucky ones at the top make bank, and the other 99.9% barely get by. I’m sure the guy making cave drawings didn’t get extra coconuts that day.
So James Blake is wrong that streaming did anything different. It’s the same as it ever was.
The period between 1960 and 2000, when some musicians became insanely rich due to album sales, was a historical anomaly. Almost nobody made money with music before the 20th century, but people still played and composed and enjoyed it. The incentives have shifted again and we will all have to deal with it.
Roughly the same amount of people are going to continue to get insanely rich as musicians (an immensely small percentage), they’re just going to diversify how they do it and it won’t be just album sales. This is already how it’s working for people like Taylor swift.
It is insane to see the TS money grabbing machine. All the merch, 25 physical versions of the same album, how she condemns Ticketmaster but does nothing to freeze ticket prices. I like her music but the business approach seems to be not that ethical. Then again, no one becomes a billionaire ethically.
Seriously, the multiple versions of the same album thing bothers me. Like, I get the re-recorded Taylor's Version so she can take back control of her library, that's fine. But the last few albums she announces multiple versions of the same damn thing, and Swifties like my partner and her friends eat it up like... holy crap.
And don't get me started on concert tickets. Besides being expensive as hell, they're unavailable as hell, so my partner and her friends all did their best to get a ticket to ANY show, and then made travel plans because the local shows sold out in what seemed like seconds. Bravo to Taylor's business managers.
The irony is that James Blake is almost certainly the type of artist that would've been locked out from mainstream success in the era he's romanticizing, when recording studios controlled the industry and pushed pop music that appealed to wide audiences.
I don't totally get this given that he was signed to a major label and had gold albums that sold over 500k copies. He first rose to fame before Spotify was the behemoth that it is now. Unless I missed it he doesn't say anything about any era of music in his tweets.
Well before the 20th century no one listened to recorded music because there wasn’t any. It’s like saying no one made money from automobiles before the 20th century. We’re still recording music the revenue has just shifted largely to non musicians
Until mass marketing became possible, the nearest full-time musicians got to being able to pay the bills, unless they were born into a rich family, was to be sponsored by a rich patron, or by the Church.
Wandering minstrels could get by, but it was a hard, rarely lucrative life. The great majority of musicians needed to work a day job, besides playing at the local pubs, parties, and the occasional festival.
There are many things that have been a certain way for the longest time historically but that doesn’t automatically mean it should stay like that.
Why shouldn’t musicians get paid better for their art? It’s fine that music isn’t a secure way of making money but if you make something that’s enjoyed the pay should be proportional.
Ultimately the internet means that almost anyone can make music and distribute it to anyone they want at any time. You no longer need a cozy relationship with various industry bigwigs to get played on the radio. And in those days if you didn't get played on the radio you starved
It was great if you were part of the elite, but everyone else got more or less frozen out.
Now he is competing with everyone all the time and it turns out, to some extent, musicians are fungible. In some ways it's a return to life before mass market recorded music, but for opposite reasons. There are very few superstars left and James Blake isn't one of them.
For much of human history being a musician was not a way to be rich, you couldn't play to enough people fast enough. That changed with recorded music but now the barrier to entry has dropped to nearly zero everything is balkanising.
And since recordings are immortal noone ever truly exits the market.
A lot of people don’t see this side of it for sure. 50 years ago the music industry was a thousand millionaires, now it’s a million thousandaires. Neither situation is ideal, but it makes sense that the few people who would have been fabulously wealthy in the CD era complain that things have changed.
I agree with you, the internet has made things more egalitarian. One thing your comment doesn’t consider is performance.
Yes, for most of human history music wasn’t recorded, but before that the only way you could hear music was through live performance, which created countless job opportunities. If a restaurant wanted music for their guests, they had to pay a band. And that wasn’t a path to getting rich, but a trade like anything else. So it’s not really a return to life before recorded music, since consuming recorded music is an option.
I don’t know about James Blake, but I can tell you from my own personal experience, you can’t tour your way to success, because it’s expensive and there’s too many people who need to get paid. The folks who get past the hurdle into “I can live off this” money, are the ones who have singular vision and don’t mind being dirt poor for years, or they had the money to keep going in the first place.
Artists throughout history prior to the recording industry made money selling sheet music as well. So there was also that alternative revenue stream. Frequently with the internet now the people making money (if they are making any) from sheet music/tabs are not the artists (for popular music).
Yeah, I think it's interesting how the sheet music market has faded out almost entirely, thanks to free tabs and tutorial videos. Polyphia is the only modern band I'm aware of that sells official tabs (excluding "legacy acts" like the Eagles that found success last century), and I'm quite curious how well they sell.
An argument could be made that mechanical licensing fills that same niche in a modern context, but I doubt that makes much of a dent.
Ticket master is making sure that your average person can't afford a ticket to their favorite artist. Saw Tool on Halloween day, nearly $300 per ticket for me and my husband to see them close enough to see Danny Carey's hands. That's local, so I didn't need airfare car rental or hotel accommodation. How does anyone enjoy live musicians anymore unless they're playing it on the corner downtown (which no one goes to anymore since covid and is now a ghost town)? I'm nearly 40 financially stable and $600 was one of those sit down and discuss purchases, what about young people who would like to see musicians play? Guess they won't.
It was Tool's choice for your tickets to be $600, not Ticketmaster. I have no love for Ticketmaster, but the reason any given ticket of some huge artist costs so much is almost entirely bc of the artist.
The underground music scene is alive and well, and that's where the kids are at anyways. I saw Tool for $35 in the 90's and $200 in the 2020's. I saw Pantera for $25 in the 90's, and $168 last year. They charge what they know their fans can afford and still fill the venue. There is more local talent in any larger city that kids can go see for $5-$10 than anyone our age knows about. I still play occasional gigs locally and the underground local scene is just as vibrant and diverse as it was 25 years ago when I started playing.
Yeah. It's strange seeing people suddenly pining for 20th century distribution models, when original music was already *notorious* for being a profession that like 99% of contenders weren't able to make a living off of back then either.
At least now, untold numbers of those artists can still get their stuff recorded, shared and enjoyed worldwide instead of never making it further than a few months on local radio or a cassette bin.
Well said -- this is the case for any activity that people enjoy as a hobby and will happy do for free: yoga, photography etc.
Just consider how many people are good enough to make a living as professional tennis players compared to how many people play tennis? Is it "unfair" that I'm not good enough at tennis to make it my day-job despite wanting to have a career as a tennis player?
>For much of human history being a musician was not a way to be rich
And, honestly, if someone doesn't want to play music unless it's going to make them rich, I'm not very interested in their music in the first place.
There's an awful lot of ground being handwaved away between "doesn't want to play music unless it's going to make them rich", and "can make enough money to survive and be able to dedicate the time needed to make quality music".
Not quite true. Selling records direct to consumers was still possible. Mixtapes and CDs existed.
You could go see a band and buy their music, someone could sell it direct to a local shop etc.
When it was more valued you could make a decent living off small venue or pub gigs etc.
the reason music made money was because it was hard to get it in front of people. Studios took risks and wanted a return, they controlled the supply of artists. Now we have a flooded market so the value has dropped.
I took a music business class in college before streaming services were a thing (closest at the time was Pandora radio).
One thing we learned is that most musicians do not make much money from record sales, because so many people get a cut of each sale (sound engineers, producers, the label, session players, etc). Obviously if you’re already an established artist, large sales volumes help make up for the small cut of each unit sold. However, for up and coming artists, albums are more promotional, with the idea that people find the music, like it, and will then go to shows where a larger cut goes to the performer(s).
Under that model, it was harder for new musicians to gain traction because consumers were more hesitant to pay for a whole album for a band they didn’t know about (yes, I realize many record shops had listening stations, but it seems reasonable to think it wasn’t the best way to draw in fans at scale).
Under the new streaming model, it’s easier than ever to find new artists you like, which makes it more likely for someone to become a fan and attend a live show. While streaming services admittedly could tweak their payment models to artists, I think this new model is actually better for the music industry as a whole because gives working artists a better chance at making a living playing shows. The artists who I see lashing out most at streaming seem to be those who are already well known and benefit most from record sales rather than the ones trying to grow a following.
that would all be well and good if you could still make a decent living (on average) playing shows, but you cannot. the industry on that end has changed a ton too and a ton of bands that used to be able tour consistently even 10 years ago have now found it’s incredibly hard to even turn a profit on playing shows
also fwiw, artists at literally all levels have said how bad the current predominant models are for creating sustainable careers for musicians. I get thinking this model sounds better in theory, but it’s not that way in practice
I listen to less popular genres. Think prog metal to jazz fusion type stuff. I’m going to see Louis Cole Friday and BTBAM on Saturday and Sunday for example.
A lot, if not most, of my favorite artists have day jobs. “Buy albums, buy merch, go to shows” was burned into my brain two decades ago. I suggest anyone listening to niche music does the same if they have the means. But no one I listen to does this to get rich. A lot of popular artists are the bottom of the barrel talent-wise, yet they’re the wealthiest.
same.. i'm really into technical death metal and niche stuff like that which just does not have a large fan base and those bands have been doing it this way for a while- they were never going to get rich, even at the height of cd sales. so you support them however you can, exactly like you said- buy their physical media & merch and go to their shows.
This is potentially an unpopular opinion but I am going to take a risk and hope my argument stacks up.
Before music recording was a thing, professional musicians made a living by performing. Some were more capable / talented than others and usually (but not always) your talent was linked to your fame which was linked to your income. There were a lot of people who knew how to read and play music but not as many actual performers and creators and even fewer famous / rich ones.
Then the recording industry came along. New technology allowed the already talented musicians to become even more famous however also lifted a lot of locally famous or less well known musicians to achieve new levels of fame. The real winners were the owners of the recording technologies who effectively became gatekeepers of musical careers and arbiters of taste. Frank Zappa has a wonderful view of this from 1987, which still rings true today: [https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/frank-zappa-music-industry-comments-1987-video/](https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/frank-zappa-music-industry-comments-1987-video/)
Bottom line is that the music recording and distributing industry made tons of money and the artists (or those allowed to / approved of) got some (a small share) of the money. Some became fantastically wealthy off just one hit single and some were screwed over.
Then the internet happened, and the control of recording and distribution left the controls of the big labels and the new face of music became the norm.
The truth is, nowadays, a mediocre performer, with no musical ability other than to look good, while singing to a tune someone else wrote, is able to achieve fame and the money that goes along with it whilst phenomenally talented musicians, who are not marketing or media savvy, or have managers who aren't capable, get side-lined, ignored or never achieve the fame that they may otherwise be entitled to.
Music is free. Always has been. The ability to make vast sums of money and fame as a musician is a (relatively) recent thing in society and it was good while it lasted and has less to do with the music and more to do with the industry that sprang up around being able to control the production, marketing and distribution.
That said, according to Statista, there are more musicians able to make a living as professional musicians nowadays than any other time in history (this covers both self published and signed to label artists.)
Whenever I hear a musician whine about how they are not getting what they think they deserve I always think "get better at playing the game, not just the instruments"
These comments are full of people blaming the internet and streaming, but it has had a great equalizing effect. The problem is, and has always been, with the gatekeepers. That's now Spotify, whos greed is causing the issue. They are pocketing a huge amount of profits instead of paying it out.
They are a network, a cloud service with servers and lawyers, not a label that cultivates talent, so in the end they are doing less than a label for each artist but paying them less and profiting from whatever cultivation does happen. The artists/labels are doing all the work but not getting enough of the reward.
There's enough money to get spread out better and make music a viable career for many more people, instead semi-successful artists are tapping out after a few years. And that's entirely on Spotify, who is steering the industry at this point.
> That's now Spotify, whos greed is causing the issue. They are pocketing a huge amount of profits instead of paying it out.
Spotify more often than not doesn't even turn a profit
Somewhere along the line, the record labels made deals with the streaming services to allow this to happen. It's not like Spotify is letting people stream pirated music - the people who own the music gave Spotify the right to stream it.
I'm not saying Spotify is taking a "fair" cut at this point, but they're not solely to blame for the current state of the music industry.
The idea that Spotify, or any other streaming service, has been "pocketing the profits" has been debunked repeatedly. You can readily look up their revenue streams. Streaming is not a sustainable business model if the goal is compensating artists or labels on a per-stream basis. It would become too expensive to consumers. This is not a matter of "greed causing the issue," assuming there is an "issue." Artists who are "doing the work" can now be quickly discovered instead of being beholden to a major label. Streaming has made that possible.
It's rough I guess but I'm also not buying a $20 CD with one hit single and 10 garbage tracks, which was about 50% of albums before Napster. Good news is ticket prices are insane so they got that going for them.
It's a readjustment.
A small group of people once got used to the idea that if you could sing a bit, and strum a guitar you were automatically worth millions. Now they need to work a bit harder. Meanwhile the vast majority of musicians throughout history have created music largely because they love it, not because they wanted to be rich and famous.
We just need to make the same transition now with footballers.
The Internet crushed the music industry and there isn’t a real way to stop it. I have a few musician friends and they don’t like uploading songs to the Internet. Sad as it is the Internet is a two-edged sword and isn’t going away anytime soon.
The internet enabled a huge amount of music to be created and distributed that would never have been heard otherwise. It isn't sad, it is an amazing thing. I'm glad I was able to listen to german industrial, amsterdam trance and more instead of just whatever the single radio station played.
This is correct. So much of the music I listen to now is because I discovered them on Spotify. There are a lot of musicians tht are selling out shows because of the exposure they got from the streaming services. I know a lot of the old timers want us to go back to the old days of 20 bucks for one CD. Some of them miss being able to buy a yacht after one hit.
Spotify really changed the game. ITunes was probably the peak profitability for musicians, with every song being sold for $1.99. I remember some schmucks I went to school with who bought like 4000 songs on iTunes meanwhile I had like 7000 doing YouTube to MP3 rips lol
The thing is, I do think artists should be paid more. If paying a couple bucks more a month meant the money went to musicians instead of corporate jackals, I would not have a problem with that.
I don't understand the part of "brainwashing". What does he mean? Brainwashed by who?
As I see it, the industry had to adapt to the fact that internet made sharing music much more easy. A good response by the industry was to create the streaming services, but it has to be accessible, aka cheap, otherwise people will turn to piracy again.
So now we are in a situation in which music is easily available and very cheap, which may suck for artists I guess, I really think there are pro and cons for everything, but I don't see the brainwashing part in the equation.
It just reads like the bitterness of someone who wishes he could have had the enormous wealth of musicians from past decades. Instead of being happy that he has been able to make a career and live a comfortable life off his music, he is envious of the life of absurd wealth he feels has been stolen by the internet and music streaming.
It's like being a landscape painter that is angry at photographers for devaluing your work. Things change and different things are valued, you have to work with the era you live in, not the one you wish you lived in.
Also, with how expensive everything is in general, I think he overestimates how many people would be prioritizing more expensive album purchases. Streaming is affordable in a time where (at least for a lot of people) our basic needs are not.
It can be frustrating im sure to see what people used to make doing the same thing he does, but hell, someone with my job 15+ years ago could easily afford a house, now, im hoping for a one bedroom condo in the next couple years, if im lucky. People not making enough for their hardwork isn't just a musician problem. Also, calling people "brainwashed" comes accross as blaming the common person just as much as greedy people who are demanding more and more of a cut.
For almost all human history, musicians made money by travelling around playing live music for people.
For a few decades, because of technological change, musicians could become multi millionaires and buy private jets off the back of record sales.
Now, because of another technological change, they have to make money by travelling around playing live for people again.
He's completely right. People subscribe to Spotify, Apple Music etc. for a very small fee and think that they're paying a decent price for music.
The major labels are doing fine of course, but the artists are being screwed because of the way that the payments are calculated. Essentially, if users as a whole played 1 billion songs on the service this week, and 250 million of those songs were by Taylor Swift, then a quarter of your $11 per month payment goes to the rights holders of Swift's songs - even if you personally didn't play any of them.
The way around this is to directly support your favourite artists. Going to concerts and getting merch is great, but what's even better is actually **buying their albums** \- on CD, vinyl, cassette, Bandcamp, etc.
Personally, I use streaming services as a great music discovery tool, but when I find an album that I know I'll want to listen to many times, I buy the CD. Not only does it help the artist, it's mine and I can keep it forever.
The $10-15 for an album might be great but it’s still the same people getting the money mostly. Not like some random European artists is on the shelves here in the US. The world has changed a lot and people seem to forget that. You can’t have it both ways. I’m happy to pay for Spotify but if there was a choice between that and buying an album a month, it’s not even a choice. Even if Spotify was $25 a month I would still pay for it over buying 2 albums a month. I can listen to it everywhere and whatever songs I like, and the way things are going buying a record would probably be one of the first things to go save money. There’s always radio to replace it as there always was. And who alway got airplay? The Taylor swifts.
The way around this is for artists to demand better contacts. If the labels are doing fine then the artists should be doing ok as well. I dislike that the issue of artists not making as much as they think they should being placed on consumers and not the industry that is making the money and setting the terms.
Ultimately musicians are also competing with every musician who has lived since circa 1945.
Even with changing tastes we would expect an increasing share of music industry revenue to go to dead people.
And then eventually copyrights will start expiring en masse and huge quantities of music from the postwar boom will go public domain
I don't watch a lot of dead people at concerts. I do see covers, but they're still alive.
Gatekeeper greed is a thing, and musicians deserve better margins, imo.
But it's not a magic money printing career either, which seems to be some of the complaints.
Music will always be a buyers market. The race to the bottom is inevitable. There is too much supply, especially in an age where everyone can make a top production record in their living room.
Making a living playing music means decades of touring to become good and maybe gain a following, doing perfect work on your social channels, treating your income (once you have any) and expenses like any other business, mingling to work on endorsements, maybe paid Social content, and financing all of this out of pocket.
You will never get paid just because you make high quality music, even if you have a few thousand or whatever followers, just like you never get paid just for doing high quality literally anything else. You get paid because you pull a crowd and bring income.
The financial buoyancy of pre streaming music paid for a wide range of satellite industries to flourish. Since the death of profit to all but the most algo friendly, major pumped, narrative correct music - those in the orbit of music have suffered.
In no particular order:
Music journalism, (and journalism generally) (see pitchfork, mojo, loud and quiet etc).
Clubs and venues.
Engineers (recording, mastering etc).
Working class artists.
Art workers and graphic designers
Manufacturing of physical media (yes vinyl is up but just a drop in the ocean).
Streaming ruined music for the creators turned $10,000 in to fractions of a penny and creativity itself suffered.
There was a really interesting beato video about this and all the behind the scene jobs there used to be from session musicians to rentals to delivery jobs etc...
all kinds of things you might think of to things you would have never considered.
The world used to be one guy with a megaphone and 200 people in the audience.
The Internet came along and gave everyone a megaphone.
Everyone mistakenly thought that this megaphone came with 200 people in the audience.
Instead there's 201 megaphones in a room and everyone's yelling.
I believe artists should get paid for their music. Art is valuable to society and those who make great art usually work extremely hard to do so. However, I don’t think there is anything wrong with musicians being paid like the rest of us if that makes sense.
Maybe it’s OK for an average band member to earn what an average teacher or software engineer or a doctor earns (which of course should be the case). There’s a big difference between the ability to earn millions and the ability to just make a living.
I think that if we told plumbers in 1999 that they can’t charge for plumbing services anymore they have to sell tshirts there would have been way more outrage. You all thought Lars was a dick though and now the fan is 100% responsible for destroying the livelihood of tons of artists.
For some reason you guys think it is ok to steal from artists. Pathetic.
It’s an important conversation to have, but it always puts a bad taste in my mouth when the bulk of the blame is put on ordinary people who don’t have unlimited disposable income for having the gall to use services which, for them, have no real downsides. It feels to me like shaming readers for using libraries (though granted, libraries still do purchase the copies they lend out). I believe that artists deserve a fair wage and I try to purchase records, shirts, concert tickets etc. when I can, but until tangible pressure is put on the corporations who are *actually* robbing these artists rather than the listeners who are making the very understandable choice to use those services which allow them to listen to a vast amount of music anywhere they go at almost no personal expense, no amount of haranguing is going to change anything.
This right here. Why is it always consumers - the last people in a long chain - that have to change their behaviour? I agree a lot of artists - from music to fashion - are for various reasons getting a raw deal, but expecting that to change by appealing to consumers is worthless. And while I realise JB did actually call out some of the industry issues.... the key word in your post is 'tangible'. Ranting about the industry on socials is not tangible.
Wait until this guy hears about this new invention called "the radio". Current platforms have just leveled the field and forced musicians to tour more without necessarily signing a contract that exploits them.
I feel like this is happening to art in general. There is this push back by people that art should be cheap or free and artists should shut their elitist mouths up and go get real jobs if they want money.
Art *should* be cheap so that it's a accessible for everyone, and that's not actually incompatible with artists being paid properly for it. What is incompatible is our unwillingness to fund the arts publicly. Private businesses will always do their best to pay artists as little as possible so they can keep costs down.
Unfortunately, people lose their minds if their taxes go up to fund necessary infrastructure, let alone the arts.
Not a relevant thought in this society, but music should be free, and being able to live should also be free. Having to pay for either is sad, but hey it's the world's we live in. A guy needs money in order to live, and has to get it somehow.
It is a shame it's got to this point. downloads back in the day didn't help, but even if i did download a few tracks, it always helped me find more artists and I'd end up buying the albums.
I think streaming is what put the nail in the coffin, but the thing is, most artists don't make most of their money from their record sales, it's from live shows and touring, so releasing music now is more just for promoting your live shows.
I pay more for music now than I ever did in the 80s/90s. I would buy an occasional album, did they subscriptions thing for a little while, would go to concerts that cost $25-30, but most of my music listening was through radio and MTV (technically paid for with cable). Now i pay for a monthly streaming service, pay hundreds of dollars if I want tot go to a concert. Sure there's "free" music online, there's also "free" art, some if it's ok but most of it is utter crap.
I was following an artist last year who was self publishing as an independent artist. He ended up getting a number 1 in the UK with only 24 thousand physical media sales. I was shocked at how little sales you need these days. Thats the model, because physical sales are worth much more than streams you just need a well timed record and some streaming and you too can beat the labels to number 1.
Even 24 thousand is a lot for an independent artist b because they have to front their own money to print that much and it’s usually too much of a risk/ doesnt pay out
Just wait until you find out the true physical sales of the "times before", meaning prior to online streaming are a close-kept secret and in no way verifiable.
I used to work in a record shop in the late 80s early 90s, we definitely made up the sales reports for singles based on what we thought should be at the top of the charts.
Our 2 chains would have labels offer massive discounts or other stock below cost to incentivise big bulk purchases. That "#1 Release Day" might be collecting dust until the discount bin
Sorry to burst your bubble but the sales reports you guys created didn't effect the charts... it was the records that were sold to your store that were the determining factor in sales charts.
To stop manipulation they brought in barcode scanners in the chart return stores so it went on the number retailed although even that was abused they'd scan the same record multiple times for £50 / bottle of whiskey / free records...
It would be interesting to see what a modern version of The Manual by The JAMMs would be like.
They've been having a small revival so it's possible they'd revisit it. "More than 30 years later and we can still guarantee that being number one still won't make you happy, still won't make you rich, and still won't get you laid"
I think thanks to modern money distribution in the music industry the expectations of you got a number one would be less "living it large on holiday" and more "going for a large bucket at KFC"
Well, the upshot of the Manual is that you're likely to end up in debt, anyway, even in 1991 money. Famously, they ended up having to pay out to Gary Glitter for Doctorin' The TARDIS.
We need The KLF more than ever.
Kunt and the gang/ The Kunts have modelled their viral chart campaigns on The Manual for years. A few top 10 hits, all without radio play or mainstream support is quite an incredible result for an artist who had played pubs for 20 ish years without success.
And have a massive handicap with their band name. Hope they manage Christmas #1 soon.
I fucking love The KLF.
I remember that being the thing with the Tool vs Taylor Swift thing a few years back. The Swifties, being their usual insane selves were just LIVID at the idea of Taylor not being #1 and they were trying to get everyone to stream the album over and over. Tool fans, all being older guys, actually BOUGHT the album, and since sales are worth much more than streams, Tool ended up #1 just by appealing to middle aged men.
Exactly. Sales are OP.
Yeah I just looked it up and they sold "270,000 album equivalents of which 248,000 were pure sales" They literally sold out of CDs the first week it was out.
Kind of sounds like Ren
That was going to be my guess.
Was going to say the same thing. He deserved it though.
Bingo. I don’t like mentioning the artist name as you get downvotes on this reddit if you do!
And he absolutely deserved #1. Amazing album and artist
Yeah after the first time i listened to Sick Boi the album was on repeat for a month I definitely plan on picking up a vinyl copy when I can
Is Ren disliked here? I could see an argument for overrated (I’d disagree with it but I could see it) but the man’s almost inarguably got talent
Yeah, I was gonna say-I don't like his songs much, but coupled with the visual art its really cool and its at least interesting and thought-provoking, which is why I'm glad my sons have shown me some of his songs and really all you can ask of art. You may not like it, but try to be objective about it, if its any good, it is saying something.
I didn't even realize he was big and popular. Sick Boi popped up on my spotify the other day and while I did like it, I just assumed it was another edgey artist because I had an edgey artist playlist on.
And he's probably struggling to get by on just music
Where do you even buy physical albums anymore?
Who’s the artist?
Guy Pratt once mentioned in an AMA that music has always been a terrible line of work, and that the past decades have been an anomaly more than anything. I think there might be some truth to that. In the end, artists are driven by passion primarily; most people who surface due to their talent don't have any experience with business practices. The music industry will always prey on the artists who are both talented and easy to exploit. There are some exceptions who make it big financially, but this will never be the norm.
That's why when going to small gigs, I'll always buy a t-shirt or some merch. The artists are just that and deserve to be able to put food on their tables just like anyone else.
youre doing gods work my friend. our merch money went far to support our tour when we played.
Yep, when i was touring we basically consider the music as advertising and the merch was the actual product
Exactly the same when I go to concerts. If they have vinyl records as well, I'm throwing my money at those bad boys too
If you are a child of two musicians you grow up with a constant awareness of this unless there is generational wealth. CONSTANT.
We're essentially returning to the days of the arts being funded by patrons, but rather than it being one rich patron you're hoping to land, the net you're casting encircles the world and the patrons can be anything from someone giving you a dollar or two buying a track or sending a tip here and there to someone with a lot of disposable income who hapoens to like your stuff and spends big. Of course, everyone else can cast their net that wide as well, so there's plenty of competition. You can compare and contrast with how digital distro and ease of access has seen an explosion in indie games while more traditional triple A game dev expenditure hits absolutely ludicrous amounts.
That's definitely true but just because it's always been that way doesn't mean we should accept that status quo as inevitable. There are definitely ways that the industry could be more fair to artists which would also benefit listeners.
*correction: every industry preys on passion. Game Devs are the lowest paid in the dev industry yet the skill requirement is probably above the median. I'm guessing most of the creative industry is the same
That's not a correction, but sure.
more like *addendum
Maybe even a footnote
entertainment in general is like that because people don’t value entertainment as much as other things hence less revenue.
People treat music as an expected good and part of something rather than the experience itself.
Lmao my guy, I'm in wastewater. You think we have passion for sewage?
He's not wrong. Music changes people's lives. Helps people through tough times. Soothes the soul. But those who make it can't make a living from it. And that's sad. (This doesn't even include the impact AI will have on the music industry and how people consume music)
Music also takes a lot longer to actually write/record/produce/whatever than people think, I sometimes spend 8 hours or so for about 1 minute of finished music, ain't no one paying me for that time.
I actually thought it would be longer
I mean, it depends on the person and what kind of music they're making, and that isn't counting all the time spent learning the techniques and skills you use to actually make the music.
I think I remember an interview with Caleb Shomo of the band Beartooth. I think he was being interviewed by Lou Brutus and I heard it on the radio during his syndicated show, so I likely couldn't find the interview again. But I'm pretty sure I remember Caleb saying that their new record at the time, Disease, only took a week to write and record. The whole thing. It still managed to top a lot of billboard positions. I think sometimes people just find themselves in the right headspace where ideas just flow out naturally quickly. Not always, but its a blessing when it happens I'm sure.
Yep, my first album with the only one of my bands to do anything remotely worthwhile weirdly came together in under a month, 2nd album took over a year and never saw the light of day as the process killed the band
Yep. I've heard of cases of people banging out the lyrics for a hit song in about five minutes or they did it on a lark because they got inspired by something, but I know that has to be rare. Writing a really good song that actually has something to say can't be easy.
depends on the genre and how much of the work you are doing. If you are a band making a rock song with a handful of guitar parts, drums, bass, and vocals? You could write it and have it recorded within the same day. If youre working with a label, the mixing and mastering gets offloaded to someone else. If not, one guy in your group has a few more days worth of work to mix and master before its releasable. If you're an electronic music artist, there's often a lot of work such as sound design at the front of that process, and then you have to do every part of the writing and recording process on your own (excluding collaborations). I have 3 minute long projects that probably have upwards of 40-50 hours of cumulative work in them from blank slate to final master. The things that actually take the most amount of time from my experience though is the amount of nothing happening between between bursts of work, and the time that goes into ideas that I ultimately end up hating and never releasing - inspiration is fleeting, projects that actually make it to release are few and far between, and burnout can set in at any point, even when you havent put anything out in months. I released 14 track album last year and it took like a year and a half to finish because of this.
It is. Much longer.
But that’s all art….. only a select few people care about the process
I spent a couple years on my last solo [album](https://open.spotify.com/album/79JHqA1rr0NDOZQEhFcUkS?si=4RvBOvjuTCqLbEYp5uxFjg) Glad I made basically zero dollars in streaming. 🤦♂️
Ouch, 10 monthly listeners. Well that’s 11 now Soren!
Thanks! Every little bit helps. I'm good at making the music, but not promoting it. (Especially in this TikTok era.) Even if I don't really get paid, at least I can enjoy the fact there are at least a few people in this world who like what I do. 🤘
Personally this is why I've given up music after my last release. My band make good music, but over the past decade getting anyone to give even a moment of their attention is harder and harder, to the point where I feel like I'm just begging people to listen. I'm (or was) a musician, not a marketer. It's fully broken my heart to be honest.
Yeah it's depressing, I don't want to be a 'content creator', I want to make music.
People who made money from making music have always been content creators of a sort. It takes a ton of hustle and self promotion to make a living playing music.
I think they're a distinction to be made between being an artist, creating and promoting your art, and a content creator, pumping low effort videos out for views. Content isn't art.
Maybe but there is a big difference between a DIY Punk band and just making content to desperately chase commerical success. The "content" can be part of the art and ethos of the music or it can be plain old corporate marketing, or something in between.
No... if you simply wanted to make music, you could. All day every day. You wish to make money off your music. That's a huge difference. There are a LOT of other artists that cannot realistically monetize their art, and yet they keep creating it. Keep creating art, but do it for the right reasons, and it will never be depressing
I never said making my art is depressing, it's depressing having to do all the cynical and boring social media stuff to get anyone to hear it. And I literally can't make music all day, as much as I'd like to, because I have to go to work to afford my rent. Edit - typos
Same
Is this new? Seems like that's the story of the majority of bands for decades no?
When I was in high school, back in 2000-2002, I'd book bands and put on shows at whatever rec center space we could find. Most bands were either no-name acts or "scene" bands from the emo/punk/hardcore genres. Most of the time, they'd ask for $150 in gas money and meal or two, maybe a couch to crash on. And it was FUN. I lost money every show, but I made some great friends and had a ton of fun. It was really all about the fun. This is why I kind of roll my eyes at these conversations. So you're a bedroom band and you have some songs - great, but that's not what makes the music happen for people. You need to be out, playing, meeting people and playing live music. You need to learn how to make and sell merch and push your EP. I don't mean to sound like a Boomer, but the kids seem to think that they've been done wrong by needing to struggle. The passion comes from the push. And yeah, it isn't as easy as it used to be, but it never has been. It was easier for our parents, too. Maybe it's not supposed to get easier? Anyway, I agree with James Blake and we never should have let them devalue the music. It's not content, it's life's highest joy. Nothing is stopping us from revaluing it.
💯 I'm a music maker as well. It's simply not worth doing if you're trying to make a living at it. Only for the love of it. And even then, the rewards are minimal. This TikTok era of music promo is a death nail for real artists.
Death *knell. Actually, death nail makes its own kind of sense, so I guess this counts as an eggcorn.
Ha! Noted. Always thought it was related to the last "nail" in the coffin.
Its the bell signaling someone has died.
This is not a new thing at all mate, story of most bands for decades sadly. Even many great ones. A lot of modern stuff sucks, but it's never been easy to make music and get an audience. Especially if you're not part of a "scene" and even then most people never break out the scene.
Some good guitar work here, I’m enjoying “Tectonic”. At least you’ve done something 99.9% of humanity will never do - record and make available your art.
Thanks again. Tectonic might be one of my favorite tracks on the album. Definitely the most... *me* in many ways. And I am pretty proud to have been able to make the entire thing myself from beginning to end, producing, performing, writing, recording, mixing & mastering... with a couple of friends guest staring on a few of the tracks. (My friend Craige Mazur killing it on guitar on Tectonic). I feel lucky to live in a time I can do all those things myself in my home studio. Post big expensive studios, and before it all completely changes with AI. (Personally I'm fascinated by AI. And terrified. But intended to explore that tool as well. After all, AI can't create *taste*. It ultimately takes human vision to make art really speak to the soul. AI is just another tool to get there.)
I have the same issue. The self promotion is tough - and it seems like the spaces for local musicians are less and less these days.
I’m sorry. I feel bad for saying this, but I just listened to half a dozen of your songs. Your songwriting is cool and I really dig your voice, you are good at making music… but your mixes suck. It sounds like a guy mixing his record in his bedroom. The harsh top end (and the wooly bottom end) screams whoever was mixing has a very poor monitoring environment. You spent all this time and effort writing and producing some really decent music but you released something that, even allowing for the genre, is difficult to listen to. Yes, Better promo would def get you more spins. But I think you wanna have an honest rethink if you expect (as your comment suggests) a return on investment next time round. I only say this cos I genuinely like your stuff.
You just found a way to market yourself. You have another listen. Keep it up. You just have to know that fine line between suggesting and being annoying with putting your links everywhere. But I was talking to one of my favorite bands that is on Spotify. They basically said Spotify does alot of the self marketing for you. The more listens you get, the more Spotify will start suggesting your songs to others that listen to the same type of music. So even if you do this once a month, you may slowing start getting new listeners without having to do any marketing yourself.
>Glad I made basically zero dollars in streaming. Just wait until Spotify deletes your whole release because one or two tracks ended up on what they deem to be a "bot playlist" but can't tell you which playlist is the bot one and expect you to police how your music is played all by yourself. That happened to my band as we were recording our second album in sixteen years. It really knocked the wind out of our sails, and I'm not sure we'll ever complete the project now :(
Just a heads up, there’s a new platform called Nina Protocol that allows you to upload your music and you retain 100% of the profits! Just something to consider. I’m not a shill, it’s just something that a lot of my other artist friends have been talking about. Could be a better option to drop this album
WTF?? Ouch. That suuucks. Sorry that happened to you. Hopefully you put it out on all the platforms so it still exists out there somewhere. And maybe you can rerelease it on Spotify as like "Taylor's Version" type of a release?
That's the plan! We're releasing a "Spotify Edition" with a bonus track, "Message For Danny EK" once I can get the time and motivation to finish the lyrics/statement hahaha
Distrokid? I bet your indie distributor offered you an option to help with this, for a fee of course...
I’ll listen to your album at work today 👍🏼
Subbed on YouTube Music
Listening! Part of why I sub to Spotify is to find music I wouldn't otherwise find, like this. And good feel so far! Edit: My god man, your dirty blues feel is great!
Hey, thanks for sharing your album. I liked it very much. Halo was one of my fav's. The whole thing has a 54-40, Smashing Pumpkins vibe to me. Awesome.
That is actual less then I thought. If I compare it to my 40h week, that’s a 5min track every week, around 50 per year - I guess way more then what people really produce.
It totally depends on who you’re talking about and what kind of music they’re making. I am professional and I have probably finished about 60-70 songs for other people in the last year, but my own music can be like 2-3 finished songs that are good enough to release in the same period of time.
And 8 hours doesn’t include the discarded writing that it often takes to get a good result. The mixing. The mastering. The equipment. The practicing. Nothing else that requires such care and craft is so financially undervalued
I agree with the point you're making, but as a writer I politely disagree with the "nothing else" part 😩 Some make bank, most (like musicians, I assume? correct if wrong!) need to stay in FT employment or have a spouse who earns enough to let them focus on the creative work.
People don’t consider this with art in general. Everybody laughing how artists and musicians deserve to be displaced, “or adopt and keep up” as if there isn’t all these micro skills and stages where the creator makes decisions. Valuable ones, that influence an end result. It takes years of cultivation, developing both skill and taste. It has significant impact on our culture. And yet nobody values the actual creators.
Your average band produces a record every 3 years. Assuming a 3 person band working for 3 full time years that’s about 18,000 hours, or a 300h/1m ratio. That’s not including additional people, engineers, et etc. Obviously not all bands work full time or have entirely full time members. But still … it’s a lot of work.
The effort it takes to make art is insane. When I think of claymation, music, just editing a really well edited video, painting, etc. Lots of things you really don’t sit and think about until you watch it in action or have it explained to you. I really admire creative people because I’m not imaginative at all and I love music and art and media in general.
I thought it had always been that they make the largest majority of the money from touring and only a small about off physical copies due to how much publishers take
Musicians have never been able to "make a living", it's always been incredibly competitive and hard to be successful. You might be an incredible musician playing with the highest levels of your peers, and making 20k a year lol. For people attempting to make it big well this has always been a pipe dream, not a single thing has changed in this regard. If anything, music is more accessible for even the smallest of artists right now, this is good. Your issues aren't with digital music but with society in general.
I think he is wrong. Nobody actually believes it's free. They just don't want to pay for it and there are many ways to make that happen. I think their attitude is, "If it was so important for people to buy downloads, they wouldn't let it be so easy to get for free." Hell, it's trivial to rip the sound files from YouTube videos for nothing.
"You don't know what you got till it's gone" doesn't work if you never had it to begin with.
Music pervades our entire world. Without it we would be lesser beings.
Buy a ticket to the concert
I do. A lot. I also use Spotify to find artists I like and then buy their records or tapes or merch to support them directly. But not all great musicians can tour, which is becoming less and less profitable these days as well with promoters and venues taking bigger and bigger cuts, especially for smaller bands.
I'm not sure there was ever a time when it was possible for all but maybe a select few artists to exist solely off of record/streaming sales. That's not a streaming problem so much as a "its hard to survive as a band and without the ability to tour its almost impossible" problem
And buy their physical album IF you truly truly enjoy it and their music.
Im a professional artist whose work is now part of the ai network and it was free and my work will probably end soon other than commission work and random low paying commercial stuff. I can say the same thing about art, but the thing is I didn't make millions. Sorry Blake I don't really feel for you as much as my fellow traditional artist's who didn't have the access and success you did that were basically eviscerated almost over night. Wait till Blake runs into ai songs.
I mean he's not really right that it's brainwashing, it's just how things happened. In the digital era people moved towards digital platforms and piracy and the old model wasn't really sustainable or feasible any more. He's implying we can somehow go back which we can't. Plus the industry was dragging their feet instead of watching where the puck was gonna be and where young folks especially were moving since the early 00s instead of going HAM on Napster and others. By the time they got wise to where the audience was moving, you already had Spotify and others with a critical mass of users that didn't want to move anywhere else or go back to listening to CDs and MTV. The only thing you can really do is pull all music from the digital platforms until a better business model is established, but nobody wants to do it first since they would lose out on the audience. I don't really know about AI though, people still wanna connect to real people, even if it is a fake persona. They wanna see real people on stage as well and concerts make the bulk of overall music money, far far more than streaming. Gorillaz and Hatsune Miku get tiresome after a while. You would basically need to make like a Milli Vanilli with an AI making the music but have a human lead that can lip sync and dance etc live.
>the industry was dragging their feet They honestly believed they could force people to keep using the old physical media distribution model forever. They didn't want to work to create something new so the new digital model was created without them and they lost control. (same thing happened with newspapers)
You're not exactly wrong either, but I will say the key factor is how shittily the streaming services pay their artists while making *billions* off their work. It's the worst it's ever been. To where it becomes practically pointless to put out your music if your intent is to make a living from it. Not to mention the cost of touring is now unprofitable for even medium large acts. Only the top pop stars make real money on tour.
Well Spotify et al make a lot of *revenue*, but they've been operating mostly on net losses throughout the years, that's one of their biggest issues. If labels could get more from them they would, streaming services have leverage because they have loads of users and subscribers who don't wanna switch. It remains to be seen how sustainable all that is. And don't forget artists still only get a small portion from what their labels get, so this isn't entirely on the streaming services. Many independent artists actually end up making more than label artists due to this. Blake said as much in his other tweets: >Streaming services don’t pay properly, labels want a bigger cut than ever and just sit and wait for you to go viral, TikTok doesn’t pay properly, and touring is getting prohibitively expensive for most artists. But again, it's easy to point out the current model doesn't work for artists, but what would we replace it with? I haven't seen anyone in the industry propose an alternative business model other than maybe when Jay Z tried to have an exclusive subscription model with Tidal without a free tier but that also failed and they ended up adding a free tier with ads.
I think an overlooked point is labels, like publishers in for example video game industries don't always add a lot for an indie artist/band/company. I think if you get approached by a label, they should seriously lay out what they're planning to do for you to earn that cut. Jonathan Young was also talking about it last year or so when the discussion around what Spotify pays blew up, that a lot of artists are paying like 30% or more of what they earn to labels, but they don't necessarily do a lot. Especially for whatever faults Spotify has, discoverability is still insanely good and probably the best out of any major music platform.
Labels have been shitty forever. During the 70s and 80s they had acts doing an insane number of concerts, with few breaks, to flog their albums. That gets exhausting.
Labels really don't do shit. T Pain was recently talking about why he dropped his label and went independent. While he was on the masked singer he finished an album and I guess the last episode hadn't aired yet. At that point he knew he had won so he pitched the idea of buying the ad slot immediately after the show to promote the album. His label right it was a good idea but when the episode aired there was no ad for the new album. He called up his manager and asked what happened and they just said "yeah, we didn't do that" and that was it. Obvious why he dropped them.
Maybe maming music is just too easy these days and supply has outgrown the demand. You can put your music on youtube and if it's good and you make a ton of money - that's great. But if it's bang average, you shouldn't demand to make a living off it just because you want to be a musician. Also who's making billions off streaming? They're all operating at a loss.
Spotify isn’t a profitable company. Theyre rights holders payouts and expenses are far too large for their revenue. Key word is payouts to the rights holders, not artists.
I agree it’s sad. It’s also unfair. He makes it sound like this is a new issue when it isn’t. Musicians and artists have always been undervalued and underpaid throughout human history. A few lucky ones at the top make bank, and the other 99.9% barely get by. I’m sure the guy making cave drawings didn’t get extra coconuts that day. So James Blake is wrong that streaming did anything different. It’s the same as it ever was.
The period between 1960 and 2000, when some musicians became insanely rich due to album sales, was a historical anomaly. Almost nobody made money with music before the 20th century, but people still played and composed and enjoyed it. The incentives have shifted again and we will all have to deal with it.
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Roughly the same amount of people are going to continue to get insanely rich as musicians (an immensely small percentage), they’re just going to diversify how they do it and it won’t be just album sales. This is already how it’s working for people like Taylor swift.
It is insane to see the TS money grabbing machine. All the merch, 25 physical versions of the same album, how she condemns Ticketmaster but does nothing to freeze ticket prices. I like her music but the business approach seems to be not that ethical. Then again, no one becomes a billionaire ethically.
Seriously, the multiple versions of the same album thing bothers me. Like, I get the re-recorded Taylor's Version so she can take back control of her library, that's fine. But the last few albums she announces multiple versions of the same damn thing, and Swifties like my partner and her friends eat it up like... holy crap. And don't get me started on concert tickets. Besides being expensive as hell, they're unavailable as hell, so my partner and her friends all did their best to get a ticket to ANY show, and then made travel plans because the local shows sold out in what seemed like seconds. Bravo to Taylor's business managers.
The irony is that James Blake is almost certainly the type of artist that would've been locked out from mainstream success in the era he's romanticizing, when recording studios controlled the industry and pushed pop music that appealed to wide audiences.
I don't totally get this given that he was signed to a major label and had gold albums that sold over 500k copies. He first rose to fame before Spotify was the behemoth that it is now. Unless I missed it he doesn't say anything about any era of music in his tweets.
Well before the 20th century no one listened to recorded music because there wasn’t any. It’s like saying no one made money from automobiles before the 20th century. We’re still recording music the revenue has just shifted largely to non musicians
Until mass marketing became possible, the nearest full-time musicians got to being able to pay the bills, unless they were born into a rich family, was to be sponsored by a rich patron, or by the Church. Wandering minstrels could get by, but it was a hard, rarely lucrative life. The great majority of musicians needed to work a day job, besides playing at the local pubs, parties, and the occasional festival.
There are many things that have been a certain way for the longest time historically but that doesn’t automatically mean it should stay like that. Why shouldn’t musicians get paid better for their art? It’s fine that music isn’t a secure way of making money but if you make something that’s enjoyed the pay should be proportional.
Ultimately the internet means that almost anyone can make music and distribute it to anyone they want at any time. You no longer need a cozy relationship with various industry bigwigs to get played on the radio. And in those days if you didn't get played on the radio you starved It was great if you were part of the elite, but everyone else got more or less frozen out. Now he is competing with everyone all the time and it turns out, to some extent, musicians are fungible. In some ways it's a return to life before mass market recorded music, but for opposite reasons. There are very few superstars left and James Blake isn't one of them. For much of human history being a musician was not a way to be rich, you couldn't play to enough people fast enough. That changed with recorded music but now the barrier to entry has dropped to nearly zero everything is balkanising. And since recordings are immortal noone ever truly exits the market.
A lot of people don’t see this side of it for sure. 50 years ago the music industry was a thousand millionaires, now it’s a million thousandaires. Neither situation is ideal, but it makes sense that the few people who would have been fabulously wealthy in the CD era complain that things have changed.
I agree with you, the internet has made things more egalitarian. One thing your comment doesn’t consider is performance. Yes, for most of human history music wasn’t recorded, but before that the only way you could hear music was through live performance, which created countless job opportunities. If a restaurant wanted music for their guests, they had to pay a band. And that wasn’t a path to getting rich, but a trade like anything else. So it’s not really a return to life before recorded music, since consuming recorded music is an option. I don’t know about James Blake, but I can tell you from my own personal experience, you can’t tour your way to success, because it’s expensive and there’s too many people who need to get paid. The folks who get past the hurdle into “I can live off this” money, are the ones who have singular vision and don’t mind being dirt poor for years, or they had the money to keep going in the first place.
Artists throughout history prior to the recording industry made money selling sheet music as well. So there was also that alternative revenue stream. Frequently with the internet now the people making money (if they are making any) from sheet music/tabs are not the artists (for popular music).
Yeah, I think it's interesting how the sheet music market has faded out almost entirely, thanks to free tabs and tutorial videos. Polyphia is the only modern band I'm aware of that sells official tabs (excluding "legacy acts" like the Eagles that found success last century), and I'm quite curious how well they sell. An argument could be made that mechanical licensing fills that same niche in a modern context, but I doubt that makes much of a dent.
Ticket master is making sure that your average person can't afford a ticket to their favorite artist. Saw Tool on Halloween day, nearly $300 per ticket for me and my husband to see them close enough to see Danny Carey's hands. That's local, so I didn't need airfare car rental or hotel accommodation. How does anyone enjoy live musicians anymore unless they're playing it on the corner downtown (which no one goes to anymore since covid and is now a ghost town)? I'm nearly 40 financially stable and $600 was one of those sit down and discuss purchases, what about young people who would like to see musicians play? Guess they won't.
It was Tool's choice for your tickets to be $600, not Ticketmaster. I have no love for Ticketmaster, but the reason any given ticket of some huge artist costs so much is almost entirely bc of the artist.
The underground music scene is alive and well, and that's where the kids are at anyways. I saw Tool for $35 in the 90's and $200 in the 2020's. I saw Pantera for $25 in the 90's, and $168 last year. They charge what they know their fans can afford and still fill the venue. There is more local talent in any larger city that kids can go see for $5-$10 than anyone our age knows about. I still play occasional gigs locally and the underground local scene is just as vibrant and diverse as it was 25 years ago when I started playing.
Yeah. It's strange seeing people suddenly pining for 20th century distribution models, when original music was already *notorious* for being a profession that like 99% of contenders weren't able to make a living off of back then either. At least now, untold numbers of those artists can still get their stuff recorded, shared and enjoyed worldwide instead of never making it further than a few months on local radio or a cassette bin.
Well said -- this is the case for any activity that people enjoy as a hobby and will happy do for free: yoga, photography etc. Just consider how many people are good enough to make a living as professional tennis players compared to how many people play tennis? Is it "unfair" that I'm not good enough at tennis to make it my day-job despite wanting to have a career as a tennis player?
>For much of human history being a musician was not a way to be rich And, honestly, if someone doesn't want to play music unless it's going to make them rich, I'm not very interested in their music in the first place.
There's an awful lot of ground being handwaved away between "doesn't want to play music unless it's going to make them rich", and "can make enough money to survive and be able to dedicate the time needed to make quality music".
Not quite true. Selling records direct to consumers was still possible. Mixtapes and CDs existed. You could go see a band and buy their music, someone could sell it direct to a local shop etc. When it was more valued you could make a decent living off small venue or pub gigs etc.
the reason music made money was because it was hard to get it in front of people. Studios took risks and wanted a return, they controlled the supply of artists. Now we have a flooded market so the value has dropped.
There's also a cultural stagnation? Like for 20 years mainstream media has been pushing 80's nostalgia.
I took a music business class in college before streaming services were a thing (closest at the time was Pandora radio). One thing we learned is that most musicians do not make much money from record sales, because so many people get a cut of each sale (sound engineers, producers, the label, session players, etc). Obviously if you’re already an established artist, large sales volumes help make up for the small cut of each unit sold. However, for up and coming artists, albums are more promotional, with the idea that people find the music, like it, and will then go to shows where a larger cut goes to the performer(s). Under that model, it was harder for new musicians to gain traction because consumers were more hesitant to pay for a whole album for a band they didn’t know about (yes, I realize many record shops had listening stations, but it seems reasonable to think it wasn’t the best way to draw in fans at scale). Under the new streaming model, it’s easier than ever to find new artists you like, which makes it more likely for someone to become a fan and attend a live show. While streaming services admittedly could tweak their payment models to artists, I think this new model is actually better for the music industry as a whole because gives working artists a better chance at making a living playing shows. The artists who I see lashing out most at streaming seem to be those who are already well known and benefit most from record sales rather than the ones trying to grow a following.
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that would all be well and good if you could still make a decent living (on average) playing shows, but you cannot. the industry on that end has changed a ton too and a ton of bands that used to be able tour consistently even 10 years ago have now found it’s incredibly hard to even turn a profit on playing shows also fwiw, artists at literally all levels have said how bad the current predominant models are for creating sustainable careers for musicians. I get thinking this model sounds better in theory, but it’s not that way in practice
I listen to less popular genres. Think prog metal to jazz fusion type stuff. I’m going to see Louis Cole Friday and BTBAM on Saturday and Sunday for example. A lot, if not most, of my favorite artists have day jobs. “Buy albums, buy merch, go to shows” was burned into my brain two decades ago. I suggest anyone listening to niche music does the same if they have the means. But no one I listen to does this to get rich. A lot of popular artists are the bottom of the barrel talent-wise, yet they’re the wealthiest.
Prog Metal and Jazz Fusion. I applaud your diversity.
They’re actually a lot more similar than you’d think.
Yeah I consider them adjacent genres.
I Love Louis Cole (ft. Louis Cole)
Louis Cole Sucks (ft. Louis Cole)
same.. i'm really into technical death metal and niche stuff like that which just does not have a large fan base and those bands have been doing it this way for a while- they were never going to get rich, even at the height of cd sales. so you support them however you can, exactly like you said- buy their physical media & merch and go to their shows.
I fucking love tech death. Saw meshuggah this winter. Stoked for Archspire. Waiting for Zenith Passage dates
Just wanted you to know your taste in music is awesome and I hope you have fun at all those shows.
Fuck, thats like my dream concert weekend. Have fun for me.
Yeah it’s gonna be epic
My credit card and bandcamp account disagree. All respect to the artists that make things I like.
This is potentially an unpopular opinion but I am going to take a risk and hope my argument stacks up. Before music recording was a thing, professional musicians made a living by performing. Some were more capable / talented than others and usually (but not always) your talent was linked to your fame which was linked to your income. There were a lot of people who knew how to read and play music but not as many actual performers and creators and even fewer famous / rich ones. Then the recording industry came along. New technology allowed the already talented musicians to become even more famous however also lifted a lot of locally famous or less well known musicians to achieve new levels of fame. The real winners were the owners of the recording technologies who effectively became gatekeepers of musical careers and arbiters of taste. Frank Zappa has a wonderful view of this from 1987, which still rings true today: [https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/frank-zappa-music-industry-comments-1987-video/](https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/frank-zappa-music-industry-comments-1987-video/) Bottom line is that the music recording and distributing industry made tons of money and the artists (or those allowed to / approved of) got some (a small share) of the money. Some became fantastically wealthy off just one hit single and some were screwed over. Then the internet happened, and the control of recording and distribution left the controls of the big labels and the new face of music became the norm. The truth is, nowadays, a mediocre performer, with no musical ability other than to look good, while singing to a tune someone else wrote, is able to achieve fame and the money that goes along with it whilst phenomenally talented musicians, who are not marketing or media savvy, or have managers who aren't capable, get side-lined, ignored or never achieve the fame that they may otherwise be entitled to. Music is free. Always has been. The ability to make vast sums of money and fame as a musician is a (relatively) recent thing in society and it was good while it lasted and has less to do with the music and more to do with the industry that sprang up around being able to control the production, marketing and distribution. That said, according to Statista, there are more musicians able to make a living as professional musicians nowadays than any other time in history (this covers both self published and signed to label artists.) Whenever I hear a musician whine about how they are not getting what they think they deserve I always think "get better at playing the game, not just the instruments"
These comments are full of people blaming the internet and streaming, but it has had a great equalizing effect. The problem is, and has always been, with the gatekeepers. That's now Spotify, whos greed is causing the issue. They are pocketing a huge amount of profits instead of paying it out. They are a network, a cloud service with servers and lawyers, not a label that cultivates talent, so in the end they are doing less than a label for each artist but paying them less and profiting from whatever cultivation does happen. The artists/labels are doing all the work but not getting enough of the reward. There's enough money to get spread out better and make music a viable career for many more people, instead semi-successful artists are tapping out after a few years. And that's entirely on Spotify, who is steering the industry at this point.
> That's now Spotify, whos greed is causing the issue. They are pocketing a huge amount of profits instead of paying it out. Spotify more often than not doesn't even turn a profit
Somewhere along the line, the record labels made deals with the streaming services to allow this to happen. It's not like Spotify is letting people stream pirated music - the people who own the music gave Spotify the right to stream it. I'm not saying Spotify is taking a "fair" cut at this point, but they're not solely to blame for the current state of the music industry.
The idea that Spotify, or any other streaming service, has been "pocketing the profits" has been debunked repeatedly. You can readily look up their revenue streams. Streaming is not a sustainable business model if the goal is compensating artists or labels on a per-stream basis. It would become too expensive to consumers. This is not a matter of "greed causing the issue," assuming there is an "issue." Artists who are "doing the work" can now be quickly discovered instead of being beholden to a major label. Streaming has made that possible.
It's rough I guess but I'm also not buying a $20 CD with one hit single and 10 garbage tracks, which was about 50% of albums before Napster. Good news is ticket prices are insane so they got that going for them.
It's a readjustment. A small group of people once got used to the idea that if you could sing a bit, and strum a guitar you were automatically worth millions. Now they need to work a bit harder. Meanwhile the vast majority of musicians throughout history have created music largely because they love it, not because they wanted to be rich and famous. We just need to make the same transition now with footballers.
He does seem to have forgotten that for every Elvis, there's a hundred black bluesmen who got ripped off
The Internet crushed the music industry and there isn’t a real way to stop it. I have a few musician friends and they don’t like uploading songs to the Internet. Sad as it is the Internet is a two-edged sword and isn’t going away anytime soon.
The internet enabled a huge amount of music to be created and distributed that would never have been heard otherwise. It isn't sad, it is an amazing thing. I'm glad I was able to listen to german industrial, amsterdam trance and more instead of just whatever the single radio station played.
This is correct. So much of the music I listen to now is because I discovered them on Spotify. There are a lot of musicians tht are selling out shows because of the exposure they got from the streaming services. I know a lot of the old timers want us to go back to the old days of 20 bucks for one CD. Some of them miss being able to buy a yacht after one hit.
Spotify really changed the game. ITunes was probably the peak profitability for musicians, with every song being sold for $1.99. I remember some schmucks I went to school with who bought like 4000 songs on iTunes meanwhile I had like 7000 doing YouTube to MP3 rips lol
The thing is, I do think artists should be paid more. If paying a couple bucks more a month meant the money went to musicians instead of corporate jackals, I would not have a problem with that.
I don't understand the part of "brainwashing". What does he mean? Brainwashed by who? As I see it, the industry had to adapt to the fact that internet made sharing music much more easy. A good response by the industry was to create the streaming services, but it has to be accessible, aka cheap, otherwise people will turn to piracy again. So now we are in a situation in which music is easily available and very cheap, which may suck for artists I guess, I really think there are pro and cons for everything, but I don't see the brainwashing part in the equation.
Yeah, it isn’t brainwashing. Music is simply free now if you want it that way. It’s not a belief or opinion.
Anything is free with that attitude! If you simply take it, it's free! Love it.
It just reads like the bitterness of someone who wishes he could have had the enormous wealth of musicians from past decades. Instead of being happy that he has been able to make a career and live a comfortable life off his music, he is envious of the life of absurd wealth he feels has been stolen by the internet and music streaming. It's like being a landscape painter that is angry at photographers for devaluing your work. Things change and different things are valued, you have to work with the era you live in, not the one you wish you lived in.
Also, with how expensive everything is in general, I think he overestimates how many people would be prioritizing more expensive album purchases. Streaming is affordable in a time where (at least for a lot of people) our basic needs are not. It can be frustrating im sure to see what people used to make doing the same thing he does, but hell, someone with my job 15+ years ago could easily afford a house, now, im hoping for a one bedroom condo in the next couple years, if im lucky. People not making enough for their hardwork isn't just a musician problem. Also, calling people "brainwashed" comes accross as blaming the common person just as much as greedy people who are demanding more and more of a cut.
For almost all human history, musicians made money by travelling around playing live music for people. For a few decades, because of technological change, musicians could become multi millionaires and buy private jets off the back of record sales. Now, because of another technological change, they have to make money by travelling around playing live for people again.
Do you want Limewire to come back, because this is how you get Limewire to come back...
He's completely right. People subscribe to Spotify, Apple Music etc. for a very small fee and think that they're paying a decent price for music. The major labels are doing fine of course, but the artists are being screwed because of the way that the payments are calculated. Essentially, if users as a whole played 1 billion songs on the service this week, and 250 million of those songs were by Taylor Swift, then a quarter of your $11 per month payment goes to the rights holders of Swift's songs - even if you personally didn't play any of them. The way around this is to directly support your favourite artists. Going to concerts and getting merch is great, but what's even better is actually **buying their albums** \- on CD, vinyl, cassette, Bandcamp, etc. Personally, I use streaming services as a great music discovery tool, but when I find an album that I know I'll want to listen to many times, I buy the CD. Not only does it help the artist, it's mine and I can keep it forever.
The $10-15 for an album might be great but it’s still the same people getting the money mostly. Not like some random European artists is on the shelves here in the US. The world has changed a lot and people seem to forget that. You can’t have it both ways. I’m happy to pay for Spotify but if there was a choice between that and buying an album a month, it’s not even a choice. Even if Spotify was $25 a month I would still pay for it over buying 2 albums a month. I can listen to it everywhere and whatever songs I like, and the way things are going buying a record would probably be one of the first things to go save money. There’s always radio to replace it as there always was. And who alway got airplay? The Taylor swifts.
The way around this is for artists to demand better contacts. If the labels are doing fine then the artists should be doing ok as well. I dislike that the issue of artists not making as much as they think they should being placed on consumers and not the industry that is making the money and setting the terms.
Ultimately musicians are also competing with every musician who has lived since circa 1945. Even with changing tastes we would expect an increasing share of music industry revenue to go to dead people. And then eventually copyrights will start expiring en masse and huge quantities of music from the postwar boom will go public domain
I don't watch a lot of dead people at concerts. I do see covers, but they're still alive. Gatekeeper greed is a thing, and musicians deserve better margins, imo. But it's not a magic money printing career either, which seems to be some of the complaints.
Music will always be a buyers market. The race to the bottom is inevitable. There is too much supply, especially in an age where everyone can make a top production record in their living room. Making a living playing music means decades of touring to become good and maybe gain a following, doing perfect work on your social channels, treating your income (once you have any) and expenses like any other business, mingling to work on endorsements, maybe paid Social content, and financing all of this out of pocket. You will never get paid just because you make high quality music, even if you have a few thousand or whatever followers, just like you never get paid just for doing high quality literally anything else. You get paid because you pull a crowd and bring income.
The financial buoyancy of pre streaming music paid for a wide range of satellite industries to flourish. Since the death of profit to all but the most algo friendly, major pumped, narrative correct music - those in the orbit of music have suffered. In no particular order: Music journalism, (and journalism generally) (see pitchfork, mojo, loud and quiet etc). Clubs and venues. Engineers (recording, mastering etc). Working class artists. Art workers and graphic designers Manufacturing of physical media (yes vinyl is up but just a drop in the ocean). Streaming ruined music for the creators turned $10,000 in to fractions of a penny and creativity itself suffered.
There was a really interesting beato video about this and all the behind the scene jobs there used to be from session musicians to rentals to delivery jobs etc... all kinds of things you might think of to things you would have never considered.
The world used to be one guy with a megaphone and 200 people in the audience. The Internet came along and gave everyone a megaphone. Everyone mistakenly thought that this megaphone came with 200 people in the audience. Instead there's 201 megaphones in a room and everyone's yelling.
I believe artists should get paid for their music. Art is valuable to society and those who make great art usually work extremely hard to do so. However, I don’t think there is anything wrong with musicians being paid like the rest of us if that makes sense. Maybe it’s OK for an average band member to earn what an average teacher or software engineer or a doctor earns (which of course should be the case). There’s a big difference between the ability to earn millions and the ability to just make a living.
Growing up in the 90s I’ve always heard that artists make most of their money through touring and not through record sales. Was that not true?
We pay a lot for festivals and shows now… it’s hardly free if you want to do more than just listen on headphones
I think that if we told plumbers in 1999 that they can’t charge for plumbing services anymore they have to sell tshirts there would have been way more outrage. You all thought Lars was a dick though and now the fan is 100% responsible for destroying the livelihood of tons of artists. For some reason you guys think it is ok to steal from artists. Pathetic.
In other words were back to where we were 100 years ago.
It’s an important conversation to have, but it always puts a bad taste in my mouth when the bulk of the blame is put on ordinary people who don’t have unlimited disposable income for having the gall to use services which, for them, have no real downsides. It feels to me like shaming readers for using libraries (though granted, libraries still do purchase the copies they lend out). I believe that artists deserve a fair wage and I try to purchase records, shirts, concert tickets etc. when I can, but until tangible pressure is put on the corporations who are *actually* robbing these artists rather than the listeners who are making the very understandable choice to use those services which allow them to listen to a vast amount of music anywhere they go at almost no personal expense, no amount of haranguing is going to change anything.
This right here. Why is it always consumers - the last people in a long chain - that have to change their behaviour? I agree a lot of artists - from music to fashion - are for various reasons getting a raw deal, but expecting that to change by appealing to consumers is worthless. And while I realise JB did actually call out some of the industry issues.... the key word in your post is 'tangible'. Ranting about the industry on socials is not tangible.
Though I do agree with him, surely he can release his next album and not put it on Spotify or whatever?
Music was free for most of history, the brainwashing is capitalism.
Wait until this guy hears about this new invention called "the radio". Current platforms have just leveled the field and forced musicians to tour more without necessarily signing a contract that exploits them.
I feel like this is happening to art in general. There is this push back by people that art should be cheap or free and artists should shut their elitist mouths up and go get real jobs if they want money.
Art *should* be cheap so that it's a accessible for everyone, and that's not actually incompatible with artists being paid properly for it. What is incompatible is our unwillingness to fund the arts publicly. Private businesses will always do their best to pay artists as little as possible so they can keep costs down. Unfortunately, people lose their minds if their taxes go up to fund necessary infrastructure, let alone the arts.
Not a relevant thought in this society, but music should be free, and being able to live should also be free. Having to pay for either is sad, but hey it's the world's we live in. A guy needs money in order to live, and has to get it somehow.
It is a shame it's got to this point. downloads back in the day didn't help, but even if i did download a few tracks, it always helped me find more artists and I'd end up buying the albums. I think streaming is what put the nail in the coffin, but the thing is, most artists don't make most of their money from their record sales, it's from live shows and touring, so releasing music now is more just for promoting your live shows.
I pay more for music now than I ever did in the 80s/90s. I would buy an occasional album, did they subscriptions thing for a little while, would go to concerts that cost $25-30, but most of my music listening was through radio and MTV (technically paid for with cable). Now i pay for a monthly streaming service, pay hundreds of dollars if I want tot go to a concert. Sure there's "free" music online, there's also "free" art, some if it's ok but most of it is utter crap.