Jun 21 2008

The Music Business in Flux: as usual

Category: Uncategorizedharmonicminer @ 2:38 pm

The music business is having interesting times.  After reviewing the wrenching changes imposed on business models by recent technological innovation, Mike Ragogna concludes:

Regardless of the problems, there are growing opportunities to solidly integrate music into the culture. There is a lot of incredible music being created, and more of it now than ever before, so the state of the art remains in good shape (though I guess this is where “taste” come in). But the reality is Tower’s gone, Virgin’s shrinking and yet another distributor is going the way of the “78” (you know, great-grandpa’s records?) and we’ve got to deal with it. Maybe it’ll take a little more than an hour, but this battleship can be turned around. With a little luck, the music business will get past this current set of challenges and put the focus back on the business of music.

May it be so.  I think we aren’t putting the genie back in the bottle, though.  The stranglehold by a few large suppliers is broken, and that is going to have more and more effect on the actual music itself.  I think we already see plenty of micro-markets that were unthinkable 10 years ago, and I think things are going to move farther in that direction.

Which, basically, I like.  On the one hand, it means there may be fewer “superstars”, carefully groomed by essentially non-musical people, just because they can be sold to a certain demographic.   On the other, I think it opens up more opportunities for basic, solid musicians to make a living without having the choice between lightning striking or abject poverty.

 

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2 Responses to “The Music Business in Flux: as usual”

  1. michael lee says:

    I’ve said this before, but I think it’s astounding that the “Music Industry” (and by that I mean the massive corporate commercial version of it) doesn’t know how to make money by selling 100,000 of something. They only know how to make money selling 6 million of something.

    With the rise of the internet, indie artists are now realizing that they can sell 100,000 of their record, and those 100k people don’t have to be geographically grouped. Indie no longer means exclusively regional.

    The next big shift is going to be figuring out how to handle the economics of making indie records when there isn’t one company paying the bill. Without the big money advance, more projects are being made with people taking a stake in the back-end sales. I think you might start to see a new developing cottage industry for handling back-end percentages on these projects, so that an engineer can agree to track 10 days for 5 points on the album, and can be confident that an independent accountant (or someone like that, an escrow company for royalties, basically) is going to ensure that their interests are protected.

    Right now, I have about two dozen indie projects that I have a back-end stake in, built up over the past ten years. There’s no possible way I can keep on top of those accounts. I have to just trust that the artist will stay current. I’d be more inclined to take on further projects on that basis if I knew who was watching the money.

  2. harmonicminer says:

    Yep, we need some kind of royalties system, based on trust and reputation, something like eBay.

    I’m still waiting for a few checks, myself.

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