What SoundCloud could have become, a supporting brand of indie and music that people appreciate but without as much obligations in revenue etc in exchange for continued electronic streaming through SoundCloud
On a related topic, Bandcamp does something right. Until I first heard of it, I had very rarely bought music (I was born in the early 90s), and very often just downloaded it. Which meant manually (or automating) tagging of tracks.
But Bandcamp feels fair, I pay the artist/band the amount they wish or I wish to, and in return I get flac files I own with correct id3tags.
(Maybe it's just that Bandcamp was made when I started getting revenue, two unrelated events that just happen to coincide.)
I do a massive amount of work with indie bands in Melbourne and Bandcamp/Physical Records/Merch is the only way a lot of them make money (other than the rare big show). Most tours lose money.
This is strange, I remember some (ok, many) years ago a truism was predatory contracts stripped musicans of income from their albums but tours made the money. Maybe even then it was merc? I dunno.
And it's prohibitively expensive if they decide to try playing outside of Australia. Just ask Ne Obliviscaris, who can only do it because they started a Patreon and their fans pitch in extra.
Which is why my closet is absolutely packed full of (metal) band t-shirts.
I want to support the artists, so i usually get one if I liked the show, but sometimes I wish they would get more creative with merch options. I know there's an upfront cost and focusing on t-shirts is a pretty safe option. But I just love it when they get creative with patches, stickers, hip flasks, rings, belt buckles, skulls, necklaces, booty shorts, all kinds of stuff.
It may be a little bit odd, since I usually don't like obvious branding and advertising, but doing something different will absolutely make me consider buying more merch.
Ticket sales are substantially profitable for solo artists and DJs, marginal for small acoustic combos and revenue-neutral for most rock bands.
One man and a guitar have much lower overheads than a four-piece band with a trailerload of equipment - you can't take a drum kit as cabin baggage. The band have to sell four times as many tickets to make the same revenue per person.
Even if a band can draw a bigger crowd and sell more tickets, the economics are still stacked against them. Small venues generally provide a house PA system and lighting rig, but larger venues don't. Equipment hire or a touring road crew take a huge bite out of ticket sales. Bigger venues also offer less favourable terms to artists, because they're far more likely to have a local monopoly.
I think this is a hugely overlooked factor in the decline of rock music. Young musicians are smart enough to realise that drummers and bass players need to be paid, but drum machines and looper pedals don't.
Yup especially with big concerts in Australia like soundwave/big day out. I once booked a show and none of the 4 bands I booked wanted to bring a drum kit. Okay, I'll hire one I thought (mind you I don't have a car...)
I sold $330 worth of tickets (small sunday night show), paid the soundperson $160 ($40 an hour), $50 for poster design and printing and then $100 to hire a set of drums... works out that each band ends up with $5???
With apple mucic 100% of the money goes to the label. The label then has a contract with the artist for how much online sales get sent their way. This contract may be very complicated so it isn’t necessarily “I pay $1, artist gets $.20”. Artists and labels will have different agreements with each streaming service for how many plays equal one “download”, from ~10 to ~1000.
It's the same problem on all the streaming services. The deals are done with the labels, so even if the payment for each playback is reasonable, the label takes a huge cut.
This is already happening. I bought an album(Requiem for my friend by Zbigniew Preisner) from bandcamp couple years ago. Now i wanted to buy a new album but the artist is not publishing lossless music on bandcamp anymore. It's all the big streaming providers.
With my band, we have experienced though that there is (should say was, 2015) not enough visibility, so we opted for big streamers which ripped the money off us, but allowed us to be heard more widely.
Although I like Bandcamp, it's in a sense an even bigger rip-off than traditional labels. They get hefty shares for merely offering you a pre-designed web page and hosting. The vast majority of artists on Bandcamp make no money.
The problem is like with all alternative distribution channels - if you actually want to sell your music, marketing is more important than the music itself and very few people have the ability and time to do the creative work and the marketing at the same time. If nobody knows about your music, nobody will buy it. It's the same with self-publishing platforms for books.
Traditional publishers have all the marketing channels already set up, so marketing is easier and more affordable to them than for startups, let alone individual artists.
15%, or 10% if you're really successful. That means 85% of the money goes to the artist. This is better than e.g. Steam and the app stores, and far better than the old physical-media based sales.
I think most (in the 95% sense) artists don't live of their art. Most of them have "real job".
I think Bandcamp is fair in that it enables all those people to make their production available and get something, however small, for it; and enables other people to find art which would otherwise not be accessible. All in all I think it's a cultural plus for the world.
Excuse me for being direct, but do you work for a record label?
Bandcamp takes 15%/10% (depending on your yearly sales). Combined with the payment processing fees, that gives a return of around 80%, as mentioned in another reply to your post. I think that's perfectly fair, considering the hosting costs for thousands and thousands of hours of music, and their entire platform.
What Bandcamp offers is a sales channel that is already configured, all you have to to is give it a theme, upload your music in a lossless format, name the songs and choose a price. Bandcamp handles the layouts, the tagging, the multiple formats, the embedded album art and the whole shopping experience. You do the art, they do the technical stuff.
You're spinning a yarn that the traditional labels are necessary in order to do marketing, but with the rise of social media and the huge trust people have in word of mouth, the big in-your-face advertising campaigns of yesteryear are simply outdated. The only reason the big labels still have some kind of clout is that they own all the big radio stations. But the rise of streaming and internet radio has eroded that power.
And even if what you say was true, it only holds up for mainstream pop artists, not the much more interesting indie artists out there.
Excuse me for being direct, but do you work for a record label?
Not at all, I'm an independent artist at Bandcamp. What I am saying is that without marketing you have 0 sales.
I'm also not saying that there are no artists who can do the marketing themselves (through social media, etc., as you mention). Most artists, however, neither have the time nor the connections to do that.
It's the same effect as with app stores, where also just a very small number of developers make any money. You're right that Bandcamp offers a sales channel,of course. That's essentially all that these alternative distribution channels offer. We can debate whether that's worth 15% of the sales, though. As I've said, it works for some people who are well-connected and have a natural talent for self-marketing. For most of the artists, it doesn't work.
It has always been just a small segment of artists who could actually make money directly from their art. Most artists in history had a patron of some kind, either a rich person or royalty, or the church (or other religious institution).
The sales pitch from the big labels is that they will use their connections to get you noticed, but the prerequisite is that you should already be reasonably established before they want to pick you up, or ridiculously lucky that you just caught the right person's attention at the right time.
The best way to get your name out there is still to play tons of smaller shows, build a local fanbase, and get on festival lineups, either through competitions or because your fanbase pesters the promoters into booking you.
The rise of TicketMaster's business in the age of touring has been interesting.
One of the very last interviews Charlie Rose broadcast before his disappearance was a fascinating interview with Live Nation's CEO: https://charlierose.com/guests/12447
hmm. his site is down along with his entire show archive. That is a loss for the Internet.
Rapino talked about how Live Nation has gotten into managing artists directly, buying venues, and doing promotion and logistics for a wide array of artists at a range of scales.
It's a big change now that artist's have a direct microphone to their entire fanbase through Twitter, Instagram, etc.
From a different point of view, the most popular band originating from my country[0] became popular because they dismissed the idea of trying to earn money via streaming and album distribution, and focused on live shows to actually make money (with more gigs per year than I thought it was humanly possible). You can still buy their music if you feel like it, and they're available on streaming services as well (although they get added to Spotify about a month after the official release).
Their last two albums (+ an EP and a few singles) got released as a free download on their site, and they've released a pretty cool music video[1] in which they've encouraged people to get their music for free (the video was on the front page of The Pirate Bay for a while), featuring lyrics such as "we don't give a shit about the copyright law" and "we do file share like we don’t care, throw music industry in despair".
Live musical performances are the only thing in music that nobody can fake or pirate. Even the video recordings of a concert is nothing near the actual experience. Maybe the music business will move towards such a setting where internet is the place to show off your work, and the concert venue is where you earn money. More publicity, more fame, more venues, more tickets. Add to that maybe a combined use of say Bandcamp, Patreon et al, Youtube, and streaming services, and about everybody who wants to do music can find a niche there for themselves.
Also, the Dubioza guys are really cool, thanks for the links!
Back in the 90s you didn't have to try that hard. The competition was Blockbuster Video so it wasn't that hard to get booked 5-7 nights a week in 1991. There were lots of places to play live that no longer exist. You played for donations but your share of the rent in 1991 was $175 a month. No cell phone bill, not much to spend money on because you could get your guitar and amp for cheap from a pawn shop. Today we have all this technology but music struggles because its based on live person to person physical community. Today in LA its all pay to play so music has turned into a vanity project for people with the money to buy their way in. The one way in today is to develop over the top, absolutely undeniably exceptional skills and then pair with a luthier to produce signature instruments in a partnership. Tosin Abasi has the right business model. Develop amazing technique then work with instrument makers to rely on boutique instrument sales rather than album sales or even live performance for the main income.
Sure, but playing even 3 times per week is VERY taxing. If you play, let’s say, from 10 to 1, you probably won’t be in bed before 3. And it’s the equivalent to running 10 miles or perhaps even more, if you move a lot and try to engage the audience very much. It’s exhausting, and I don’t envy anybody who has to play every day. I don’t know how people like Justin Timerlake are able to keep this up for decades.
just like working out it gets easier as you train, for quite a few serious runners 10 miles a day is par for the course (100mi training weeks are not that uncommon).
My dad played for a living in the 60s and his band played TWO shows a day (afternoon and evening, so the schedule was get up around noon, breakfast, show, lunch, show, dinner, sleep) 6 days a week during the summer, it's just like any other type of physical labor and listening to him it definitely beat working 12 hour days in the fields which is what he did before...
This is because they've signed to Kobalt, a technology-driven music services company that gives songwriters and bands complete ownership of their work and a greater share of income than has traditionally been the case in the industry.
"We never used to make any money because we were always paying off our advances," recalls Haggis, whose band formed in 2003. "We'd get about a 20% share of revenues and the label would keep the rest.
"Now we get to keep about 90% of what we earn ...it's such a difference, it just made sense."
Because you failed to read the following paragraphs that talked about different companies?
It's the BBC. They aren't allowed to take money for articles. Of course, they aren't particularly fussy about what press releases they run, so you can still sneak in an ad for your company if you make the effort.
The fact that they mention other companies doesn't invalidate my point. Of all companies mentioned, a majority of time is spent speaking about Kobalt, it's founder and praising it. Kobalt gets around 6 paragraphs. Most other companies only get a paragraph each which only briefly describes what they don, and they aren't even all direct competitors.
I have read the article and I'm miffed you'd suggest otherwise. Please read HN guidelines where it explicitly asks you not to suggest other posters haven't read the articles but to stick to the facts.
Fair enough. Sorry. I hate defending the BBC because they're so insidiously biased, but they definitely don't accept money for articles. But my grumpiness is no reason to miff people!
Because the author also mentions other competitors and/or substitute products. The BBC has editorial guidelines for product prominence.[0] You can contact the BBC if you feel it breached their guidelines.[1]
This isn't unusual with the BBC. A lot of the article ends up shaped by who would actually talk to them, or who would go into the details.
If Mr Entrenched gives you the same canned statement they've been giving you for years, and Mr Newcomer is willing to sit down and give you a good chunk of his time because "holy crap, the BBC are talking about us"; then the article can choose between being devoid of content, or looking like it's all about Mr Newcomer.
It's tricky to make money from recorded music. I don't think the "industry" is to blame - it's more about peoples' consumption habits (streaming services, games instead of records etc), and the fact that there are so many artists, so many people releasing music.
Most people listen to music on streaming services. In terms of making money from streaming services, you don't. There are a zillion artists on them, and the vast majority ends up with pennies.
You can sell on bandcamp etc, and that will probably generate more than streaming services, but still very little for the vast majority -people don't really buy downloads/physical music anymore, it's free on streaming services.
You could try Patreon, and that might generate a bit of recurring revenue if you're active on social media.
If you start getting mainstream radio play, you're doing good as the royalties from that are still pretty nice. But very few artists get there. Also, tracking publishing rights and actually paying people for radio play (or publishing in general) is an arcane, paper based mess.
If you're lucky, you'll get your music licensed to TV/film/games, and that can also be a good source of revenue.
But sales of recorded music, as a way of making a reasonable amount of money, is pretty much finished.
The problem is that if you own your distribution channels you need a massive marketing budget to stand out from the other offerings as you are competing with other distributors instead of getting help from them.
My father and his brother's entire business model in the 90s and 2000s was mass producing Karaoke for America while giving labels the finger. He saw digital downloads and streaming coming like a freight train from the future. I worked at my colleges radio station with labels to examine their newest stuff and add/omit it to our rotation for the metal segments. Finally, I have a friend I met in college who is in a talented metal band (Aether Realm) basically forging their own way. In all these interactions, the sense I have gotten from everyone from labels to artists to derivative works is always fundamentally a numbers game "how much and how many people will people really pay" and smoothening out statistical noise in income streams.
The end result is truly if you care for the music and the art, buy the merchandise directly from the artist. Go to the local concerts. Help reduce the variance in the artist's income stream. Show them that despite not having a big label, they can succeed. Once I realized I had this kind of power to my favorite metal artists, it was nice to give back.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 85.3 ms ] threadBut Bandcamp feels fair, I pay the artist/band the amount they wish or I wish to, and in return I get flac files I own with correct id3tags.
(Maybe it's just that Bandcamp was made when I started getting revenue, two unrelated events that just happen to coincide.)
I want to support the artists, so i usually get one if I liked the show, but sometimes I wish they would get more creative with merch options. I know there's an upfront cost and focusing on t-shirts is a pretty safe option. But I just love it when they get creative with patches, stickers, hip flasks, rings, belt buckles, skulls, necklaces, booty shorts, all kinds of stuff.
It may be a little bit odd, since I usually don't like obvious branding and advertising, but doing something different will absolutely make me consider buying more merch.
But it feels sort of condescending to just hand them money at a show.
Though I think a lot of places around here have a beer allowance for performers. I'll give it a go, though :-)
One man and a guitar have much lower overheads than a four-piece band with a trailerload of equipment - you can't take a drum kit as cabin baggage. The band have to sell four times as many tickets to make the same revenue per person.
Even if a band can draw a bigger crowd and sell more tickets, the economics are still stacked against them. Small venues generally provide a house PA system and lighting rig, but larger venues don't. Equipment hire or a touring road crew take a huge bite out of ticket sales. Bigger venues also offer less favourable terms to artists, because they're far more likely to have a local monopoly.
I think this is a hugely overlooked factor in the decline of rock music. Young musicians are smart enough to realise that drummers and bass players need to be paid, but drum machines and looper pedals don't.
I sold $330 worth of tickets (small sunday night show), paid the soundperson $160 ($40 an hour), $50 for poster design and printing and then $100 to hire a set of drums... works out that each band ends up with $5???
And yes, the fact I can support beautiful music makes me happy. I want to support these artists so they make of more of these beautiful tracks.
The problem is like with all alternative distribution channels - if you actually want to sell your music, marketing is more important than the music itself and very few people have the ability and time to do the creative work and the marketing at the same time. If nobody knows about your music, nobody will buy it. It's the same with self-publishing platforms for books.
Traditional publishers have all the marketing channels already set up, so marketing is easier and more affordable to them than for startups, let alone individual artists.
15%, or 10% if you're really successful. That means 85% of the money goes to the artist. This is better than e.g. Steam and the app stores, and far better than the old physical-media based sales.
I think Bandcamp is fair in that it enables all those people to make their production available and get something, however small, for it; and enables other people to find art which would otherwise not be accessible. All in all I think it's a cultural plus for the world.
It's just a really convenient way to make your music purchasable for download.
Bandcamp takes 15%/10% (depending on your yearly sales). Combined with the payment processing fees, that gives a return of around 80%, as mentioned in another reply to your post. I think that's perfectly fair, considering the hosting costs for thousands and thousands of hours of music, and their entire platform.
What Bandcamp offers is a sales channel that is already configured, all you have to to is give it a theme, upload your music in a lossless format, name the songs and choose a price. Bandcamp handles the layouts, the tagging, the multiple formats, the embedded album art and the whole shopping experience. You do the art, they do the technical stuff.
You're spinning a yarn that the traditional labels are necessary in order to do marketing, but with the rise of social media and the huge trust people have in word of mouth, the big in-your-face advertising campaigns of yesteryear are simply outdated. The only reason the big labels still have some kind of clout is that they own all the big radio stations. But the rise of streaming and internet radio has eroded that power.
And even if what you say was true, it only holds up for mainstream pop artists, not the much more interesting indie artists out there.
Not at all, I'm an independent artist at Bandcamp. What I am saying is that without marketing you have 0 sales.
I'm also not saying that there are no artists who can do the marketing themselves (through social media, etc., as you mention). Most artists, however, neither have the time nor the connections to do that.
It's the same effect as with app stores, where also just a very small number of developers make any money. You're right that Bandcamp offers a sales channel,of course. That's essentially all that these alternative distribution channels offer. We can debate whether that's worth 15% of the sales, though. As I've said, it works for some people who are well-connected and have a natural talent for self-marketing. For most of the artists, it doesn't work.
The sales pitch from the big labels is that they will use their connections to get you noticed, but the prerequisite is that you should already be reasonably established before they want to pick you up, or ridiculously lucky that you just caught the right person's attention at the right time.
The best way to get your name out there is still to play tons of smaller shows, build a local fanbase, and get on festival lineups, either through competitions or because your fanbase pesters the promoters into booking you.
If you don't sell anything, you don't pay anything.
That's a true snake pit, and there are very few attempts to untangle what goes on.
Cortney Love does the math
https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
Ms. Love appeared to be inspired by this piece written seven years earlier by the engineer who recorded Nirvana's "In Utero".
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music
One of the very last interviews Charlie Rose broadcast before his disappearance was a fascinating interview with Live Nation's CEO: https://charlierose.com/guests/12447
hmm. his site is down along with his entire show archive. That is a loss for the Internet.
Rapino talked about how Live Nation has gotten into managing artists directly, buying venues, and doing promotion and logistics for a wide array of artists at a range of scales.
It's a big change now that artist's have a direct microphone to their entire fanbase through Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Their last two albums (+ an EP and a few singles) got released as a free download on their site, and they've released a pretty cool music video[1] in which they've encouraged people to get their music for free (the video was on the front page of The Pirate Bay for a while), featuring lyrics such as "we don't give a shit about the copyright law" and "we do file share like we don’t care, throw music industry in despair".
[0] http://dubioza.org/albums/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOqxarVWKRs
Also, the Dubioza guys are really cool, thanks for the links!
My dad played for a living in the 60s and his band played TWO shows a day (afternoon and evening, so the schedule was get up around noon, breakfast, show, lunch, show, dinner, sleep) 6 days a week during the summer, it's just like any other type of physical labor and listening to him it definitely beat working 12 hour days in the fields which is what he did before...
This is because they've signed to Kobalt, a technology-driven music services company that gives songwriters and bands complete ownership of their work and a greater share of income than has traditionally been the case in the industry.
"We never used to make any money because we were always paying off our advances," recalls Haggis, whose band formed in 2003. "We'd get about a 20% share of revenues and the label would keep the rest.
"Now we get to keep about 90% of what we earn ...it's such a difference, it just made sense."
It's the BBC. They aren't allowed to take money for articles. Of course, they aren't particularly fussy about what press releases they run, so you can still sneak in an ad for your company if you make the effort.
I have read the article and I'm miffed you'd suggest otherwise. Please read HN guidelines where it explicitly asks you not to suggest other posters haven't read the articles but to stick to the facts.
[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/guidelines/editoria... [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/contact
If Mr Entrenched gives you the same canned statement they've been giving you for years, and Mr Newcomer is willing to sit down and give you a good chunk of his time because "holy crap, the BBC are talking about us"; then the article can choose between being devoid of content, or looking like it's all about Mr Newcomer.
Most people listen to music on streaming services. In terms of making money from streaming services, you don't. There are a zillion artists on them, and the vast majority ends up with pennies.
You can sell on bandcamp etc, and that will probably generate more than streaming services, but still very little for the vast majority -people don't really buy downloads/physical music anymore, it's free on streaming services.
You could try Patreon, and that might generate a bit of recurring revenue if you're active on social media.
If you start getting mainstream radio play, you're doing good as the royalties from that are still pretty nice. But very few artists get there. Also, tracking publishing rights and actually paying people for radio play (or publishing in general) is an arcane, paper based mess.
If you're lucky, you'll get your music licensed to TV/film/games, and that can also be a good source of revenue.
But sales of recorded music, as a way of making a reasonable amount of money, is pretty much finished.
The end result is truly if you care for the music and the art, buy the merchandise directly from the artist. Go to the local concerts. Help reduce the variance in the artist's income stream. Show them that despite not having a big label, they can succeed. Once I realized I had this kind of power to my favorite metal artists, it was nice to give back.