Music Industry 2010

"The chart linked to the left gives you a rather dramatic picture of the state of the art in terms of artist's earnings from recorded music. As you can see, the picture is rather dismal. It appears that an artist's best chance of making any kind of living at all from his own recorded songs is to sell the CD directly to the public, at gigs or online.

You can't ignore an omission (forgivable-- that's not what the page is about): the chart doesn't account for the role of publicity and promotion in CD sales. But it does make it clear that the trade-off, for the artist, is absurd. In exchange for access to the "star-making-machinery" of Sony or BMG, you sell a gazillion units, and then get to turn over pretty well all of your earnings to the record company. No-- you don't even "turn over" the profits-- you will never even see them, for the music industry skims off almost everything-- and I mean that literally-- almost everything-- before turning over a pittance to the artist. But then, you get to be on TV. You get promoted. You get fame. You get the girls. You get broke.

I have said this before and I'll say it again: I believe the government should step in and set standards for contracts between musicians and record companies which guarantee that the artist receives a "reasonable" portion of royalties for every unit sold. It also needs to regulate how much the recording industry can deduct from an artists royalties for the cost of "promotion". To me, those charges have always seemed like General Motors deducting money from the wages of assembly line workers to cover "advertising". Why the hell should the assembly line workers pay for the cost of doing business? Especially when you find that a lot of these expenses are fees paid to shadow entities that are actually owned by the record company itself-- like "image consultants", market researchers, arrangers, and so on.

The most compelling paradox of the music industry remains this: would any artist be happy to know that his music is not being pirated? Yes, nobody's stealing your music. You are so lucky.

So what's a young recording artist/singer/songwriter to do? Would they really want to go back to the pre-internet lottery system: if you get chosen (by a record company) and you're lucky and you get a contract, you get rich? And everyone else has absolutely no way to reach a potential audience.

I suspect that the current reality is what is going to work as well as anything can work in this world. New artists practice and play when they can, record their own CD's cheaply with newly accessible technology, and sell them online and at their performances. The music industry has never, probably, been so democratic: anybody can reach a large potential audience via the internet, post a video on Youtube, post their music at iTunes, and keep their fan base informed via Facebook.

Rant of the Week

Paying the Artists