The Music Industry
Posted by reallyrelyay | | Posted On Thursday, February 7, 2008 at 10:22 AM
Some of the other books that I found were about the politics of the music industry, making it, etc.
A professor in class said something that piqued my interest. "Record company execs are looking towards the new generation to figure out where the music industry is going, because they are clueless right now. If any of you guys have ideas you should get your voices out there."
That seems to be the voyage that I am embarking on in my writing. It's tough because it is such a multifaceted issue. There is a lot of resistance in the larger musical community (i.e. major record labels, successful rock stars, etc.) against change. Those of us who are on the bottom of the musical totem pole find ourselves standing and gawking up at them... there's no good way to get up there. Obviously there are those salmon swimming against the current, as there are still successful musicians out there, but there are quite a few more pitfalls than there were before.
There has been a shift in the exchange of information, starting with platforms such as Napster, which have mutated and evolved into things like Limewire or even Itunes.
I started this portion of my literary journalism stuff by just writing out a bit of my own experiences in the music scene, so I could get a grasp of my own opinions from inside experience. This brought me to things like burning cds:
After shows on tour I was our "merch bitch," as I was the cutest and most approachable of the six of us. Gavin would announce from the stage before the last song of the set, "if you like what you hear, talk to this little lady in the back after the show. We have cd's and tshirts and stuff. We would really appreciate your support." We would unload our gear from the stage and I would hustle to the back of the venue and set up camp. One night in Springfield Missouri an enthusiastic group of girls bought a cd from me.
"You have a great voice, the show was really awesome. Really good." The girl who was in the middle of the few of them held our cd close to her chest and smiled. The other girls nodded in agreement.
"Yeah! We're gonna make copies when we get back to my house."
What a verbal slap in the face. I felt like robbing their designer-brand purses, but suppressed my instinct into a wince/smile. I had assumed that the other girls would burn the cd at home, but to tell me that felt like robbery, and essentially it was.
Scene folk may not understand this but venues don't pay bands much at all. Next time you're at a show, take a tally of the heads in the audience. Multiply that number by the amount of money you payed at the door, usually about $5. Subtract about 15-20% of that for the venue (usually about a dollar) then divide the remainder by the number of performers that night. Sometimes the local act will be charitable and ask the doorman to give the traveling act a bigger cut, but most of the time that doesn't happen. The night of my birthday in Minneapolis there were six acts, and a five dollar charge at the door. The place may have looked packed, but there were five people per act...at least thirty of the people there were performing that night. All and all we made about sixteen dollars that night, to get our bus to Iowa on over $3 a gallon. It was impossible.
Merchandise really is what gets us show to show. With people burning and illegally exchanging, cd sales are down, making it very hard for musicians to thrive.
I’m also exploring the economic realities of the music business. My main source on this is the novel Noise: The Political Economy of Music by Jacques Attali, who believes that “if it is true that the political organization of the twentieth century is rooted in the political thought of the nineteenth then the latter is almost entirely present in embryonic form of the music of the eighteenth century.” He also believes that the way that music is exchanged is ominous of a change in social relations, which leads one to think of online social networking such as myspace and facebook, and the way those avenues have effected the music scene. Attali is very dense reading for me, as my economic education is very limited, and I find myself having to do a lot of back up reading to completely understand what he is talking about, but so far what I have read I agree with. He goes as far back to Bach to explain his point of view, but his theory still applies to our current situation.
He actually has changed some hypotheses of what the economy of music will evolve into. Part of me felt as if the industry was devolving, a slow adjustment back to bardism. The earliest musicians were simply entertainers who played for both the peasants and the courts, playing and performing wherever and whenever possible. That isn’t too different from the way that we lived this summer, especially when we had a few shows cancel on us out west this past summer. The night of my birthday we ended up doing an acoustic set at a coffee shop in Des Moines, and not making any money, just so that we could play a show. Justin, Gavin, and I sat on stools with Sierra Nevada’s in hand, staring out at an audience of five, along with Jordan, Joey, and Ian. We were stripped down to a banjo, an acoustic guitar, and two voices…as sparse as we could get, but it was better.than not playing a show at all. Surely that situation wasn’t too different from our bearded bard brethren from centuries ago. No, we didn’t walk there on foot, we weren’t carrying our instruments on our backs, and we didn’t have to juggle while we performed, but we were playing for whoever we could whenever we could.
What stands between us and the past is the technology. If it weren’t for social networks such as myspace, the tour never would have happened. These days the music business is completely networking, its who your booking agent is, or which out of town bands you have hosted when they came to your town, which venues you can get into. In “How To Become A Rock Musician” H. Stith Bennett distinguishes the difference between a local band and a touring band, “In economic terms, the traveling group’s bookings constitute a salary whereas the local group’s piecemeal bookings constitute wages.” This very well may have been valid when the book was first published in 1980, but now a days local groups have taken their ‘piecemeal bookings’ to the road.
....to be continued
A professor in class said something that piqued my interest. "Record company execs are looking towards the new generation to figure out where the music industry is going, because they are clueless right now. If any of you guys have ideas you should get your voices out there."
That seems to be the voyage that I am embarking on in my writing. It's tough because it is such a multifaceted issue. There is a lot of resistance in the larger musical community (i.e. major record labels, successful rock stars, etc.) against change. Those of us who are on the bottom of the musical totem pole find ourselves standing and gawking up at them... there's no good way to get up there. Obviously there are those salmon swimming against the current, as there are still successful musicians out there, but there are quite a few more pitfalls than there were before.
There has been a shift in the exchange of information, starting with platforms such as Napster, which have mutated and evolved into things like Limewire or even Itunes.
I started this portion of my literary journalism stuff by just writing out a bit of my own experiences in the music scene, so I could get a grasp of my own opinions from inside experience. This brought me to things like burning cds:
After shows on tour I was our "merch bitch," as I was the cutest and most approachable of the six of us. Gavin would announce from the stage before the last song of the set, "if you like what you hear, talk to this little lady in the back after the show. We have cd's and tshirts and stuff. We would really appreciate your support." We would unload our gear from the stage and I would hustle to the back of the venue and set up camp. One night in Springfield Missouri an enthusiastic group of girls bought a cd from me.
"You have a great voice, the show was really awesome. Really good." The girl who was in the middle of the few of them held our cd close to her chest and smiled. The other girls nodded in agreement.
"Yeah! We're gonna make copies when we get back to my house."
What a verbal slap in the face. I felt like robbing their designer-brand purses, but suppressed my instinct into a wince/smile. I had assumed that the other girls would burn the cd at home, but to tell me that felt like robbery, and essentially it was.
Scene folk may not understand this but venues don't pay bands much at all. Next time you're at a show, take a tally of the heads in the audience. Multiply that number by the amount of money you payed at the door, usually about $5. Subtract about 15-20% of that for the venue (usually about a dollar) then divide the remainder by the number of performers that night. Sometimes the local act will be charitable and ask the doorman to give the traveling act a bigger cut, but most of the time that doesn't happen. The night of my birthday in Minneapolis there were six acts, and a five dollar charge at the door. The place may have looked packed, but there were five people per act...at least thirty of the people there were performing that night. All and all we made about sixteen dollars that night, to get our bus to Iowa on over $3 a gallon. It was impossible.
Merchandise really is what gets us show to show. With people burning and illegally exchanging, cd sales are down, making it very hard for musicians to thrive.
I’m also exploring the economic realities of the music business. My main source on this is the novel Noise: The Political Economy of Music by Jacques Attali, who believes that “if it is true that the political organization of the twentieth century is rooted in the political thought of the nineteenth then the latter is almost entirely present in embryonic form of the music of the eighteenth century.” He also believes that the way that music is exchanged is ominous of a change in social relations, which leads one to think of online social networking such as myspace and facebook, and the way those avenues have effected the music scene. Attali is very dense reading for me, as my economic education is very limited, and I find myself having to do a lot of back up reading to completely understand what he is talking about, but so far what I have read I agree with. He goes as far back to Bach to explain his point of view, but his theory still applies to our current situation.
He actually has changed some hypotheses of what the economy of music will evolve into. Part of me felt as if the industry was devolving, a slow adjustment back to bardism. The earliest musicians were simply entertainers who played for both the peasants and the courts, playing and performing wherever and whenever possible. That isn’t too different from the way that we lived this summer, especially when we had a few shows cancel on us out west this past summer. The night of my birthday we ended up doing an acoustic set at a coffee shop in Des Moines, and not making any money, just so that we could play a show. Justin, Gavin, and I sat on stools with Sierra Nevada’s in hand, staring out at an audience of five, along with Jordan, Joey, and Ian. We were stripped down to a banjo, an acoustic guitar, and two voices…as sparse as we could get, but it was better.than not playing a show at all. Surely that situation wasn’t too different from our bearded bard brethren from centuries ago. No, we didn’t walk there on foot, we weren’t carrying our instruments on our backs, and we didn’t have to juggle while we performed, but we were playing for whoever we could whenever we could.
What stands between us and the past is the technology. If it weren’t for social networks such as myspace, the tour never would have happened. These days the music business is completely networking, its who your booking agent is, or which out of town bands you have hosted when they came to your town, which venues you can get into. In “How To Become A Rock Musician” H. Stith Bennett distinguishes the difference between a local band and a touring band, “In economic terms, the traveling group’s bookings constitute a salary whereas the local group’s piecemeal bookings constitute wages.” This very well may have been valid when the book was first published in 1980, but now a days local groups have taken their ‘piecemeal bookings’ to the road.
....to be continued
