By the end of the summer, over 450 large-scale music festivals will have been held in Britain (I’m off to the Big Chill next weekend). And while the somewhat apocalyptic weather will have led to weekend washouts for some, the British festival scene is undeniably in rude health—tickets for Glastonbury sold out within two hours of going on sale, despite a cumbersome new pre-registration system, and at the other end of the festival spectrum, smaller “boutique” events are sprouting up across the country.
This boom time for festivals is part of a general flourishing of live music in Britain. Demand for pop performances has rocketed in recent years, and so have prices—for £25, the cost of a programme at Barbra Streisand’s recent Manchester concert (top ticket price: £550), you could have seen the Rolling Stones play Wembley in 1990. Last August, as Robert Sandall points out in this month’s Prospect cover story, a decent seat at the Stones’s Twickenham gig would have set you back at least £150.
Yet while concert promoters and venues rake in the cash, record companies the world over are slashing both prices and staff, because the recording industry is in major decline. In Britain, HMV recently announced that its yearly profits had halved, while the discount chain Fopp recently shut its doors for good. Not even the explosive growth in sales of downloaded music can offset the damage—the total value of music sales across all formats in the US fell by 6 per cent last year.
What this all means, Sandall argues, is that the economics of pop music have been totally upended in recent years. Artists now make their money from live work and the accompanying merchandising opportunities rather than from recordings. Record companies now ensure that the deals they make with artists include shares in the profits generated by tours. And while bands used to tour to promote their latest album, often at a loss, it’s now the other way around. The CD is dead; long live the gig.
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Stadium and arena stalwarts such as Metallica and U2 are just as much nostalgia acts as Streisand and the Stones nowadays, perhaps this look at the sales figures for reissues might be more revealing… http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/16/AR2007071601061.html?nav=rss_artsandliving/entertainmentnews
Why buy new releases when you can get the classics at bargain-bin prices? I saw Thin Lizzy’s brilliant ‘Live And Dangerous’ album on sale for three quid yesterday, essential ‘Blue Note’ albums can be had for a fiver a pop, and you can always stick all your old man’s cds onto i-Tunes for free if you’re less-than-troubled by the idea of McCartney missing out on a few bob of royalties. Instant record collection, to coin a Monty Python phrase.
Maybe if bands started releasing new albums worth buying? Look at sales of Bob Dylan’s last album for instance.
And yet nothing can hide the fact that even if you do buy a cd you need only physically play it once before having to find somewhere to store it. A depressing prospect if your band doesn’t sell out arenas and doesn’t have an impressive back-catalogue still selling like hotcakes….
This may well be a complaint of every generation when it becomes middle-aged, but to me, I hear very, very few new tracks today that excite me enough to want to buy them. I’m a 48-year-old with well over 1,500 CDs, but they’re highly focussed on the 1970-1977 era of rock. This week I have listened to Atomic Rooster’s ‘Death Walks Behind You’ and Golden Earring’s ‘Moontan’, for example. Both are excellent albums and, to my ears, contain rather higher standards of musicianship than anything on XFM that my teenage children require me to hear when they are in my car.
Except for some dabbling with Jeff Buckley and Radiohead, I’d rather spend my money on yet another remastering or SACD version of a 70s LP than on the vast majority of new music by today’s bands.
Though I could add many more, I’ve only got about 2,000 tracks on my MP3 player — I just don’t need more. I get my pleasure today from listening to old familiars, rather than risking the declining returns of experimentation with unheard, new music. If I was a more frequent concert-goer, I’d much rather see Genesis or Peter Gabriel than the Arctic Monkeys. I suspect this attitude has been a big factor in the growth of live concerts — hence the continuing demand for the Stones, King Crimson and yes, even Roxy Music.
All this talk of £ 200 or more to watch old rockers in a crowded arena makes £4 for a Proms ticket in the wonderful setting of the Albert Hall seem quite a bargain !
One of the side effects of the new economy is though digital work stations have made making music easy and economically feasible for anyone with a computer, and the internet has made the distribution of music a more egalitarian undertaking, no one will make money on the music unless they perform it live.
We then get to the quality of this live performance; do you want to hear a digitally reproduced “perfect” version of what you have on your McIpod, which a lot of the big names do through the use of hard drives on stage, or would you rather hear a great artist’s interpretation and improvisation on her own music? IOW, Madonna or BB King…
I also find it odd that a world class jazz musician, who spends as much time on his craft as a classical musician (and usually more) finds it hard to make 1/2 of the same nightly fee that a club DJ makes playing mp3’s in a nightclub 3 blocks away from said jazzman.
Interesting times to be a music fan.
I’d like to reply to Gavin Wilson. Totally agree with him about old music but I do feel that there is loads of great music around today. However his point about “I hear very very few tracks I want to buy” says it all. Radio in the UK is so narrow. Radio 2 during daytime hours is very predicatable and 6 Music still habours old prejudices.
But there are ways to hear new music – as always personal recommendation is crucial, social newtorking sights and just follow links, internet radio (often from other countries). Even fast disappearing record stores with good staff – if you can find one.
Top tips for this year? The wonderful Enter Shikari (and yes I am 53 but I love their energy and tunes) and Little Big Town from the USA.
Go find great new music – it is there.
Webbo
Here’s what’s going on musically in California that you don’t read about in the mags or papers. Lots of towns have free summer concert series and special music events. Where that once meant oompah bands, dixieland, or John Philip Sousa, now it can be anything from a day of punk to a day’s worth of blues, rock, surf, indie, or folk. My own community hosts a blues harmonica festival in the park every year and I’ve watched it grow from a few bands and harp players to a dozen or more bands who bring up brave amateurs and let them play their licks to professional accompaniment. Thousands of people show up just to listen and watch.
Ten years ago I started going to a drum circle that grew from five to a hundred within a few months and is still an ongoing venture, though its character has changed and anyone with any type of instrument is welcome. This weekly gathering can grow to several hundred musicians, dancers, and listeners.
Music camps for adults are thriving, most of them in rural settings and resembling hippie gatherings in spirit. A middle eastern music camp I know of in northern California sells out each year. For the monetary equivalent of a good seat at a Rolling Stones concert, one gets a week of camping, cook-outs and almost non-stop music. People come to learn, to play, and to listen and watch. Belly dancers from all over the country attend and perform for free.
And I haven’t even mentioned the small clubs and venues that bring in indie music groups for reasonably priced tickets.
All in all, music is thriving everywhere except in the soul dead corporate offices of the music industry.
It’s been said before by others, but it is worth repeating:
The music industry had a hundred year window in which it could be profitable to record and sell music to consumers. That period is coming to a close.
Music isn’t a natural commodity, experiences are. Record companies artificially created a product, the record/CD, and charged a consumers a premium to own it. But all people want is the experience of enjoying music.
And so, once technology made it easy for consumers to do so without buying an actual disc, music was effectively un-bundled from the whole idea of it being a product.
And that’s why only the experience of music as embodied in concerts will continue to make money. The concert is an experience which can’t easily be copied.
In the late 80’s and early 90’s, I quit buying CD’s because there was no new music which was interesting. Then I discovered Tricky, Massive Attack and that trip-hop genre, which made me go back and buy again. The point is, if there is no music worth to listen, I rather stick to my classics. Now I mostly buy Jazz and albums from 80’s. Still, once a week I go to Virgin records and listen to what is out there. 95% is crap… and I truly mean it. Amy Winehouse was the last meaningful thing I heard at a listening station. I also refuse to buy anything I have not heard before.
I take issue with the half accurate statement that Creation was wholly owned by Sony. Creation was around for nine years with various licensing arrangements before Sony acquired 49% of the label and the option to purchase the remaining 51% at the end of four years. The total acquisition of Creation by Sony did not occur until 2000 when Alan McGee decided on a new direction. Perhaps you were confused by the fact that Oasis were signed to Sony directly and then licensed to Creation as a way to get around an unfavorable licensing deal the latter label had in place in the U.S.
As Mr. Sandall is supposed to be a journalist I find his laziness with facts irresponsible.
Regarding the state of music today, it is far from dead but one would never know it from what MTV and radio constantly play. It now just takes more of an effort to find something new and worthy. Thankfully, the internet has provided many opportunities to judge for one’s self.
In the United States, you also can place the recording industry’s woes on the buying tactics of the “big box” stores like Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Circuit City, Borders and Barnes & Noble. In the case of one chain I choose not to mention by name, the retailer will only buy a new “untested” release for its outlets if the label or its distributor pays $2,000 upfront for the privilege of placing selected album tracks on its “listening posts” for a set period. If the label or distributor agrees to this, the retailer buys multiple copies for each store. Its inventory now depleted, the label then reprints and represses that piece to fulfill other orders. About the time the invoice is due for payment, the chain’s buyer notifies store managers to return most — if not all — unsold copies to its central warehouse. These in turn are returned to the label or its distributor. Besides getting only a fraction of its anticipated payment, the label or distributor now sits on an excessive inventory of product that is no longer new or hot.
As a US resident, I can only comment on the situation over here, but I’d like to take issue with the notion that it was CDs themselves which account for the decline of the record industry. I would hazard a guess that their overall promotional models, especially having to do with radio and video in the US, have a lot to do with it.
Turn on the radio in the States, and you find a few channels of narrowly tailored playlists (200 songs a day, perhaps…) determined by marketing executives at the record companies. Seeing as radio was once the primary way to disseminate new music, this can only be seen as self-mutilation, promoting blockbusters at the expense of smaller albums. MTV, once daring and eclectic, is just Clear Channel radio with pictures, and suffers the same problem.
Payola isn’t a new issue, and one could argue that the radio was never all that daring, but as soon as the internet became a medium capable of disseminating music, they should have seen the writing on the wall. Kids have no fear of technology, and they have no money, but even the poor inner-city kids I teach have myspace pages, even if they don’t have their own computers. So once radio made itself boring, moving to the internet to look for new sounds was natural. And since listening and copying are one and the same on a computer, the need to go out and buy a new CD just wasn’t there.
(And that’s ignoring the mix=tape scene in hip=hop, where the hot new acts break in on home-produced tracks…)
With all due respect to the old codgers (I’m pushing 30 myself), the kids today certainly have a lot of good new music to choose from. Just because we don’t like it doesn’t mean that it’s not good. And just because the record companies slit their own throats doesn’t mean we should shed a tear for them. These are the people who would have us forget Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and remember The Eagles. Puh-lease.
I have been a lifelomg music collector. I taught all three of my boys to love all kinds of music. But, to repeat, there is virtually no new music I care to own. I live in the Dallas Ft. Worth metroplex. We have two classic rock stations, no jazz, one classical, and dozens of Hip-Hop/Rap stations. Country is, of course, prolific but uninteresting. I too, recycle 60’s,70’s, and 80’s R&R along with a few Jazz albums I try out first at listening stations in Borders or Barnes and Noble. I might even go back to buying records if they were available. I have been writing to any music company I could find an address for to complain about the fact that they were focusing their investment into a small demographic when the boomers with most of the money were being neglected. Kind of like network news in the US.
After reading the prior posts, I wanted to toss out a thought that I didn’t see posted, yet needs to be: While it is true the “real” collectors posting here may look for qualifying attributes when deciding which music to collect, the fact is that the day-in, day-out person buys music for its memories.
Most of us made those memories in our “youth” – an age that begins in the early to pre-teens, and ends somewhere in the mid to late twenties. Certain songs provoke certain pleasurable memories – getting high on whatever, getting sex with whoever. As our lifestyle changes for the placid, the music transports us back to those “irresponsible” days when we didn’t have much money, but we certainly had much fun.
That aspect of buying music is where the so-called pros in the business disconnect from the real reasons people buy music: it preserves a photo in our mind of the hormonal stimulators in our lives, the drug-soaked environment where we popped our cherries and kept popping whenever, wherever, with whoever we could get to pop off with us.
Contemporary so-called pop music doesn’t sell to us because it doesn’t remind us of any highlights in our night-lives. Sorry, but I just don’t have memories that are rekindled by ghetto criminals rapping in lock-step rhythm with their big booty babes and white bling.
But it will sell, and keep selling, to those whose life is at a place where their own memories of cold drinks, hot nights, and even hotter lovers, are incubating. The problem is that ghetto dwellers don’t have any money – if they did have some money, the first thing they will do is get as far away from the ghetto as they can possibly move. There is no social redeeming value to ghetto life – just depression, degradation, and death.
So, as record company execs and promoters wonder why their wares don’t sell, the question they should contemplate is, “Who relates to this stuff anyway? People with money, or people without?”
The sales charts tell the story. Spin it any way you want, with condemnation for making role models out of ghetto murderers, or disdain for a decadent culture. Either way, it adds up to the same thing: People keep playing the music of their memories.
If there is no mental image when the music plays, people pass it by. You can’t make money being a “mass” marketer of niche nostalgia.
-30-
The argument for the future of music is probably best made by one of its own dinosaurs: David Fetch, a UK record label A&R who attended David Byrne’s presentation on the Future of Music at last year’s POP Montreal festival. He notes in his blog that current tastemaking is happening at lightning speed and on a much more intuitive levek than the past. The consumer is casting a wider net; it is not the digital download that is shaking the paper and plastic industry to pieces, but the changing culture of the music listener. Plus, he’s a riot:
http://www.maisonneuve.org/index.php?&page_id=12&article_id=2472
I am very impressed with the clear condensation of Sandall’s wordy article. For us in India, it is an eye-opener. Live music, in the wake of newly discovered electronic instruments, is taking a beating here to the detriment of creativity.
It is good to know gigs are coming back. Long live gigs!!
This article states, though, that “everybody agreed” that cd’s sounded better then vinyl. Really? I and many others hated the sound of cd’s when they came out, and time has only proved us right. You’re lucky to find a cd from the 80s that can stll play, whereas an lp will still sound great.
The death of the cd has lead to a resurgence in the boutique market for LPs, and I couldn’t be happier with it.
I’m very gratified that Robert Sandall’s story validates what I wrote four years ago in my essay “Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads” at:
http://www.goingware.com/tips/legal-downloads.html
Not all free music downloading is copyright infringement! Many musicians – including myself – offer free downloads of their music from their websites, or music hosting services such as MySpace, as a way to promote themselves. My article links to many such legal music sources.
It has always been the case that artists, especially less well-known ones, made more money from live performances than from CD sales. And why?
Because the record labels take the cost of recording, distributing and promoting the CD out of sales revenue. It is quite often the case that a CD will sell well, yet the artist gets no money at all!
Sandall story is evidence that the major labels are no friends to the professional musician. This isn’t just because of Internet distribution, but also because the cost of recording and pressing a CD is dramatically cheaper than it used to be:
One can buy good-quality USB or FireWire audio interfaces, studio mikes, software and a computer for two or three thousand dollars, and make recording that are as good as those from any studio. A thousand CDs can be pressed and labeled for one or two thousand dollars.
Thus we have the phenomena that the indie musicians, or those whose music is of a more eclectic nature, are taking their careers into their own hands and earning good money while leaving the major labels completely out of the picture.
And, I assert, this is a good thing!
The demise of the CD has a lot to do with the costs of the CD’s. Why would anyone pay $18.99 plus tax for anything unless it’s worth it? Minimum wage was under $5/hr in the U.S. until very recently. Asking a teenager to pay half a day’s wages on a CD when most of them are not worth it is ridiculous. DVD’s often cost less. A $5 CD with cool cover art and graphics may be worth it even if the music is not top-notch. Otherwise it’s very easy and very cheap to borrow and copy someone’s CD or download and burn one. It would be hard to convince me that it costs more than a dollar or two for the recording industry to produce what they are deluding themselves is worth more than $5.
I won’t pay hundreds to see a concert; I’ll buy the DVE instead (and it’s usually cheaper than the CD!!!
—Single Mom
Actually I think you missed several main subjects, some of them already mentioned:
1) The focus of the industry narrowed down in the 90s. Most countries I traveled suffered from a more than predictable radio and if you watched MTV you got the same stuff all the time. Who needed the 1000s boy band (one of the booms in the 90s)? Right, nobody did.
2) Prices spiked, in continental Europe especially with the introduction of the Euro. Sales decrease, so how do you react? Increase the price to milk the cashcow one last time? How stupid is that?
3) The internet age and globalization have (in nearly any kind of market) the effect that interests diversify. “Sell less of more” is the slogan of this decade. The major labels completely missed that and are now stuck.
4) DRM. How should I explain a user that suddenly he/she is not allowed to do what she could do before. It is even not DRM itself but the way it was introduced and how the music industry reacted. It made them look evil. You don’t cause bad conscience by that. It makes people feel good cheating you.
5) Online distribution. Why is the illegal market so big, but legal market so small ? A reason the industry likes to ignore is that they (surprise, surprise) ignored the legal possibilities for too long. How many years did it take after the introduction of Napster until the iTunes music store was available in all of the main (major medium) markets? Not too mention that until this day, there is NOT a ny store by the music industry themselves. Direct marketing would have been a chance to at least get a bigger gain on selling less tracks (simple math: if I can gain 50% gain instead of 20% per track, I only need to sell less than half of the songs) – which might have eased the pain of selling only “a few tracks” of each album.
In the end, I see the dawn of the Majors coming unless the react aggressively NOW.
Digitisation has proved to be a ship taking on water for content industries & software industries. The more leaks are plugged, the more new holes are found. People are downloading in greater & greater numbers & have developed a “take it for free†mindset, not acknowledging that they are stealing. This is unlikely to change as sitting in front of a computer is like sitting in front of a TV or radio as opposed to going to a shop. There is not even a feeling of ownership as people acquire & dispose of digital files constantly. The free mindset has set in & punitive law enforcement models are not working.
The first industry to be affected has been the music industry where content in the form of 3-minute songs encoded as MP3 files are easily obtained off the Internet. Apple’s iTunes has been a small plug to the Music Industry’s ship & has been successful for Apple as it is tied to their piece of hardware, the iPod, most other online music stores are not faring well, & for the Music Industry players themselves, for every song sold legally through the iTunes Store or others, there are another 50 (20? 100? 1000?) songs downloaded illegally through peer-to-peer networks. Millions of potential revenue dollars are lost to the Industry every year.
As bandwidth improves & more end users join high-speed broadband networks the same consequences will apply to creators of film, television, written works & software, the “take it for free†ethic will apply & the law will be unable to stop it.
What is needed is a new model. Everything else is delaying the inevitable. Digital commerce has worked for some but for many industries it has not & will not work.
The new model proposes a cyber hub or portal where high quality digital content is stored, much as the iTunes Store, but can be accessed by the end user for free while the creators & owners of the copyright are paid for the use of their work.
How is this possible?
All digital traffic passes through your Internet Service Provider. By levying them a small fee (say $10.00 or perhaps a fixed percentage of the services purchased from an ISP) per customer, per year, their customers will have access to this hub. Their customers will have “free†access to all information contained – music, film, software; a powerful incentive to pick one ISP over another.
As all files leave the Hub, owners of the information are paid accordingly. While not guaranteed a specific fee as in the iTunes model, the incentive to provide content is compelling, as the potential is there to earn far more – end users would rather, as is demonstrated in the real world, go to a Hub for free. They will throng. Peer-to-peer will not necessarily stop, but why use a slow unreliable service when a high speed, guaranteed, problem free & at no cost service is available.
The kind of fee we are talking about if the ISP is unwilling or unable to absorb the cost would raise a monthly bill to the customer by less than a dollar & wouldn’t appear as a separate fee. An ISP that charges you a dollar more per month is an attractive proposition if you have access through them to free downloads.
Radical times require radical solutions. This business model provides a win win solution for ALL players. This solution, as the business grows, has the potential to restore missing millions to creators of content.
Reading the moans about contemporary pop music above, I was reminded of something Richard Russell of XL Recordings said recently: ‘You often get people saying that music was better in X year, but it tends to turn out that that was when they were first getting laid.’ (Kenneth Lamb makes this point too.)
The current boom in live concerts may also turn out to be a temporary cultural phenomenon rather than the rediscovery of an eternal verity. During the heyday of dance music, many music fans never went to concerts at all. I suspect the wheel may yet turn again.
In the meantime, I’m sure artists will do their best to exploit their potential. At the Cinematic Orchestra’s recent concert at the Barbican, punters could pre-purchase a live recording of the evening’s event for £10 (and walk home with it thanks to superfast copying). For an extra £5 people doing so were given a voucher enabling them to download the new album. They did good business that night.
This leads me to one final thought. Possibly one way to make more of the download market would be to price it more competitively? £5 for an album is hard to argue with, given that you get high quality files that you can download more than once. But Mr Zee’s model is more attractive still…
This is a good read. I have covered the potential ‘way out’ for the music industry in a related blog post at http://www.muserati.com – thought I’d share that.
This is only half the truth. It is great to see the resurgence of real live music, especially when not so long ago a lot of people believed that its days were numbered.
However there’s something else, and it’s down to the nature of the Web. I actually buy more music now than I ever have in the past and it is NEARLY ALL “new music,” by which I mean music that was made recently rather than some weird stylistic handle. Just the other day I got a kickin’ album by Kris Wiley–WHO??? I hear you ask– Or what about Nina Storey? Her latest album is brilliant. And I just got a couple of new Daniela Mercury albums. PARTY! Or remember Southside Johnny?– he’s still on the go and has a fantastic new album out. (you do the research– it’s fun and worthwhile.)
My point? The record industry model was designed as a distribution system that supplied selected “product” to the customers who could in most cases not get anything else because the record industry controlled the means of distribution. Indeed for it to work it had to control everything, from signing artists to making the music to distributing and selling it. The Web just makes all of that irrelevant. You don’t have to buy the pre-packaged pap from the A&R men any more. Why would I buy utter drivel from the Arctic Turkeys when with a few clicks of a mouse I can find a practically limitless variety of great music and the only constraint is how much time I am prepared to give it and how much I want to buy?
The point is that the monopoly is gone, so now I can choose what’s good from the mainstream–and there’s always some– and discard the rubbish in favour of great music that the majors either won’t touch or (increasingly today) music made by artists who refuse to allow themselves to be shafted by the slimy individuals who are the backbone(sic) of the record industry, and it is NO MORE EFFORT and indeed often cheaper than choking on the record-industry’s prescription.
The record industry no longer controls what we hear, through its promotional air-time pay-offs, read about, through bean-feasts for journalists, or can buy in the high street. And the funny thing is, now that the monopoly is gone, we find we don’t really need the record industry at all.
So, curiously, even though I have a huge collection of vinyl albums and the means to play them, I don’t find myself waxing nostalgic over Genesis or Pink Floyd, or for that matter the Supremes or the Pistols. In fact I don’t have time to listen to them at all because I’m far too busy discovering new music– but it’s new music the record industry REALLY wishes I didn’t know about at all. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a great new band on the local scene or an artist from half a world away– the Web puts them all right under my fingers, and not a money-grubbing slime-ball industry “executive” in sight.
Lovely.
I just wanted to respond to Mr Zee. I presume this person works in the record industry. A portal? A PORTAL? Now there’s some real 90’s thinking for you.
I note your reference to the software industry– had you not noticed the growth of Open Source? I am viewing this page on a FREE open-source piece of software. Free software is likely to become the NORM. You’re right about one thing; the free mentality is here–and it is a Very Good Thing Indeed.
The future for artists and musicians will also involve a good deal of FREE distribution. Prince showed one way forward last year when his new album was GIVEN away with the Daily Mail (a UK Sunday paper,) a lead that has already been followed by others. There are other models and other methods too– the point is that the record industry is NO LONGER in control.
Mr Zee, you’re too late, thankfully. The record industry is dying the death of a thousand cuts and what is funny is NO-ONE outside it gives a hoot. Not the artists and not the public. I would need a book to write all the reasons why, but I can think of no industry that has worked harder at alienating and offending its customers, from the simple fraud involved in hiking the prices of CDs when they were introduced to bullying artists and members of the public.
Of course your idea of a “portal” is to get back to the situation where the record industry controls the business, just as it used to. It’s a scary thought, but the trouble is, Mr Zee, the genie of freedom of choice is out of the bag now and it is not going back in.
There will be no portals. In fact, there will be no record industry, at least in the terms we have known it till now. There will be artists with a range of means of distribution that they control.
You need to do your research, Mr Zee. The record industry was a publishing business which was born in the early 20th century with the invention of one technology and fizzled out in the early 21st with the invention of another. There were artists before the record industry and there will be artists afterwards. Move on. No more to see here.