Modern Musicians and Internet Buzzwords

Thom Yorke of Radiohead recently gave an interview to BBC Radio 4 talking about their now released CD version of their In Rainbows album. This album is rather infamous because Radiohead initially released it initially only on the interwebs. They asked that you pay as much for it as you think it was worth. While nobody has released specific numbers they apparently made a nice little bit of money. This is the crux of the BBC interview and a recent story in Wired. To sum it all up, Radiohead made more money allowing people to pay whatever they want to download their album than they would have releasing it on a venue like iTunes or Amazon through their record label.

Musicians have long been screwed over by record labels. David Byrne wrote a nice companion piece to the Wired interview which gives some gory details on the depth of artist screwing. If you buy a $15.99 CD from Best Buy the artist only receives a 10% royalty (on paper*). They make a larger percentage on the sale of the same album on iTunes for $9.99 but a larger percent of a smaller number is still a smaller number. To understand how royalties work for recorded music HowStuffWorks has a very good explanation. It’s worth taking a few minutes to break your brain trying to figure it out. I put an asterisk next to “royalty” because artists don’t really make that full 10% that Byrne’s breakdown suggests. As outlined on this page onerous record contracts often leave artists owing the record labels money. Reading all of this it seems unthinkable that a musician would ever want to sign a contract with a big label.

This brings me to the aforementioned buzzwords. Some, obviously not all but some artists are learning the true meaning of The Long Tail and Social Networking. I don’t however use those term specifically in their technological contexts. Over the summer I followed The Format up and down the state while they were here on tour. They were touring with one of their own social networks. They didn’t pack the population of MySpace on a tour bus, only a few bands they were friends with that they wanted to tour with. They were touring with Reuben’s Accomplice, Steel Train, The Honorary Title, and Limbeck. Any fan of The Format that came to one of the shows was exposed to the other four (awesome) bands on the tour. Even if they didn’t fall in love with Robb and Patrick they at least got to see them play and might have bought a CD or poster. The Format like many other bands used their personal network of friends to help them put together a successful tour. If The Format had toured by themselves or with only unknown local acts opening they probably would not have had the turnout they did. From the size of the crowds at each show I think they pulled off a pretty impressive feat. The power of their social network amplified the attraction of the shows and drew in bigger crowds than any of those bands alone might have.

There’s also the effect of the Long Tail as described by Chris Anderson. Amazon allows for a market effect not seen in more traditional brick and mortar stores. Because they have a virtually unlimited stock of items and some context about their customers they can sell hojillions of low volume items and make a lot of money doing so. If you buy a popular book about a subject Amazon can recommend a less popular or more obscure book on the same topic. To apply this to touring bands; a few months ago I saw Beirut in concert. Opening for them was a “band” called Alaska in Winter. It turns out I really dug them and bought their record in the lobby. Simply having them open for Beirut was like Amazon suggesting I buy “The Elegant Universe” because I bought “A Brief History of Time”. This also holds for my example of The Format. If I had never heard of Limbeck but I saw them play with The Format I’d likely buy their CD and see them in a headlining show. I think more smaller groups not tied to bigger labels are going to try to market themselves collectively like this in the coming years. Instead of trying to make it on their own they might band (ha!) together with similar acts they found on Last.FM, Facebook, or even P2P networks and try to fill up venues. They’ll also place more importance of linking to each other in more meaningful ways that record store taxonomies. These sort of links are what allow a long tail economy to build up.

Any sort of music industry that survives this decade will likely be built more out of networks of artists and promoters than loan sharks. I think the music industry is going to move back to a model where artists directly interact with their fans through performances and simple networking. Before gramophone recording allowed a single performance to be reproduced thousands of times musicians had to perform to be heard and to make a living. Now that recording technology is ubiquitous and inexpensive I think the pendulum is going to swing back that direction. Recordings have lost monetary value because their distribution cost is next to nothing and their production costs get lower every time some kid buys a copy of Logic and builds a studio in her garage. People might pay a few bucks to listen to a good recording on their iPod but that’s not going to be a way for musicians to make real money, even if they keep 90% of the revenue.