Lowery: The blue-collar musician at the eye of the copyright storm

Re: TLDR

Adele was with XL Recordings, related to the Beggars Group. Their current roster includes Sigur Ros, Radiohead (and Thom Yorke's solo works) and The White Stripes. In the past, they handled The Prodigy, among many others, so they're not exactly unknown. They're quite big by "indie label" standards. They're also "independent" only in the sense that they're not owned outright by a major recording label, but they do have very close ties with Columbia Records.

I do think the "Mega Corporations" get a lot of stick here and it's not entirely deserved. Yes, many industry CEOs are old, crusty and need a good ousting and replacement by people who actually "get" technology. But that's the norm in any industry that's been around this long. Transitions are painful when the very business model upon which your business is founded is being chipped away beneath you and you don't know how to solve it. All those employees have bills to pay too, you know. These corporations are just a big collection of people, most of whom are not rich and are just as much a part of that 99% as you are, all trying to earn a crust; they're not inherently nasty; their bosses are just fighting increasingly desperately to keep their jobs.

Now...

There are two key challenges facing musicians today:

1. How do I make my music?

2. How do I get my music noticed?

Both steps originally required the assistance of those mega-corp major music labels. They paid a loan up-front to the musicians, taking a gamble that the album would make a profit. (Most did not.) This still happens today, but for a much, much smaller roster of artists who are considered more likely to hit the jackpot. Risk-aversion increases rapidly when your industry is being threatened with major disruption, so this is hardly a shock.

Today, you still need outside funding if you're working with orchestral music, but for most genres, you can create a perfectly commercial track in your bedroom, with the only expense being that of getting it mastered professionally if your home setup isn't up to it. (Mastering is all about getting the most out of a recording and making it sound good on all the various media, in all the various supported combinations of sound reproduction, such as simple stereo, 5.1 surround, Dolby Digital for cinemas, etc. This requires seriously expensive audio kit and an engineer with very good hearing.)

That just leaves the second stage: getting yourself [i]noticed[/i]. When the barriers to entry in any industry are lowered by technology, the industry inevitably goes through a painful phase where pretty much anybody thinks they can make a hit single—and they try and do exactly that.

This was most obvious in the early days of DTP and website design, with any number of horrific, eye-gouging, multi-coloured, multi-font excrescences appearing overnight as people with no training whatsoever decided they could have a go at it too. Mercifully, the days of Geocities websites are (mostly) over.

But it also meant that an aspiring musician with actual talent now had to get himself noticed in a massively expanded ocean of mediocrity and shite. Marketing and self-promotion come into play. Concerts can help, but you can't just go hiring Wembley Stadium or the O2 if nobody's ever heard of you: You need to invest time, effort and, yes, money into making people aware of you and your music first. You need to climb the ladder and keep on climbing, exposing yourself to the media, doing photo-shoots, the odd panel show, umpteen interviews, etc... despite little of this having anything directly to do with the songwriting or performing you so love to do.

THIS is where those mega-corporations do have a lot to offer: they have connections, they know people, they can get you airtime in adverts, or even a movie if you want. They can speed the process up dramatically.

Fundamentally, when you're running any business, your goal is to improve the bottom line. And the music industry really is an business. Artists who are happy to give away all their songs aren't in that industry: they've self-selected themselves out of it and shouldn't get to vote on how it works.

For the remaining 99% of "lower middle class" musicians, engineers, producers, lyricists, etc. making music is how they pay their bills. These people have a right to be paid for their labours as you have a right to get paid for yours.

If anyone disagrees with that on principle, they shouldn't get to vote either.

Re: TLDR Tldr2

"So if a CD by a professional musician costs say 5 pence to produce and another 5 to distribute, why the hell does the artist expect us proles to pay more than a tenner for the privilege of hearing his work?"

He doesn't expect you to do anything. He hopes that sufficient people will like his music and find that it gives them sufficient enjoyment to fork out around a tenner (often less). For those who don't like the music sufficiently to pay a tenner, then there's the option of taking your money and spending it on whatever gives you more pleasure than that CD.

Your production cost estimates are (for smaller CD runs) wrong by an order of magnitude, but even those costs (say 50p for a boxed, sleeved, printed CD) don't cover the musician's instruments, recording equipment/studio hire, paid accomplices (session players, electricians, odd job monkeys), sleeve artwork, digital mastering, distribution, selling and distribution, remittance management, promotion and advertising, etc etc, and that's before the commercial risk in pre-ordering several thousands CDs, or the usually implicit cost of financing of such an investment.

And as an author you're "forced" to pay a whole £4 a book. By whom? Are the Syrian regime's butchers holding author's knackers to ransom: "Pay four GBP per book for a four hundred book edition of Post Modernist Romantic Poetry by Bashar al Assad" or we cut them off!" I don't think so.

Re: Hmm...

I see that as redressing the balance between copyright, which we as a society grant artists, and enforcement of that copyright. Currently no song out today will ever be out of copyright in my time. So speaking purely selfishly why would I support harsher penalties to an industry that isn't willing to play fair? By giving up that massive length of time you are showing that the industry isn't demanding or living in its own wee bubble where they can dictate what they like, as they are portrayed right now let's be honest. The return for this is that we society more rigorously defend that copyright.

I am yet to hear anyone of the people demanding more punishment and more regulation come out with anything they are willing to give in return. Like I said more business models are needed but look at the mess of international copyright and access to music library's for services like spotify and play music.

The same basic theory would apply to movies games and tv.

It's a Deal

Odds are your music isn't any good if it means so little to you you'd stop making it as soon as you stop getting paid. Most artists I listen to these days just stick their work up on SoundCloud and YouTube for free.

then we won't make it

Sounds fair to me. If you don't get paid enough to make you happy go do something else.

I have somewhere between 600-700 CDs but in the last year I've only bought one (and I bought that one directly from the band that was playing at a festival).

Music Schmoosick

I can knock off a relatively good poem in about half an hour. Come back to it a day or two later to give it a once over, maybe change a phrase or a couple of words. Another half an hour.

I dare say a good musician can do something similar. There are thousands of words to make rhymes with, so it is all very easy for me. There are only 7 notes and therefore not many thousands of combinations to couple. It shouldn't be too hard to knock out a newish tune, if your audience is young, silly and inept. Pop misusick isn't even concerned with four part harmonies.

People with pimples singing about broken hearts. FFS!

Not even that these days, just rhyming swear words. How hard can that be?

Writing a book takes a few months. Few authors can knock out 2 an year of any merit. But musicians will all too frequently knock out shit. Even good ones such as Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, god help me what about Stravinsky and Rites of Spring?

Any old tat can be given the Warhol treatment. The target customers are children after all.

> If you don't want to pay for music, then we won't make it.

Give me a break you tit.

In every town in Britain you can find gifted musicians singing their own stuff for free, just happy to be in a groove on open mic. night. Now GTHOOI.

Marcello...

... Then don't make it. :D

I know many artists who do their work as a hobby. Most who get jobs see it as a privilege not a right.

Re: "get a real job" ? Interesting concept ..

Yeah, the thing is the dentist/surgeon/lawyer/mechanic generally gets paid for every time he/she performs the task they're being paid to do, they don't just do something once and then make infinite duplicates of it to sell at an inflated price point. If that were the case then, yes downloading teeth/surgery/legal defence/mechanical repairs would be fine too.

If anything you've just reaffirmed the point I was making; if you're a musician and want to make money then perform gigs and actually work for it, rather than crying that you can no longer rely on an antiquated and artificial 20th century business model that lets you sit back and collect royalties.

Re: "get a real job" ? Interesting concept ..

Actually, the upper-end of the medical profession (surgeons/ dental surgeons/ etc.) are *highly* vulnerable to being replaced by technology within the next 50 years. You will be diagnosed by a computer that scans your body, and you will be operated on by nanobots which don't even need to break the skin. It is going to be an interesting process too - I don't expect the medical profession to go down without a fight; but go down they will.