Singing a Digital Tune: Part 1

The culture and business of music online, for fun and profit

Original post: Singing A Digital Tune: Part 1

Even after having the Internet for 20+ years the music industry still operates in a primarily analog mindset, but it’s not as warm an experience as listening to a vinyl record. It’s taken years of new school digital disruptors with a pro-consumer focus to shake the old school’s previous iron grip and bring music’s sound and vision into the mostly-democratic 21st century, while the old sleeping giants still continue to try to hold everyone back.

I have a large passion for music and I admit that this article is primarily anecdotal and based on my own arbitrary research, opinions and assumptions of the industry, taken from my own experiences as a purchaser, producer, promoter and performer. My primary goal is to state how I feel about the industry’s current status (in context of its history) and to conjure up and connect old and new ideas for potential ways that it could further develop to incite growth in both cultural and capital gains.

To preface my opinion piece, I offer this disclosure too: I fully support artist and labels’ legal rights when it comes to ownership and licensing. I also equally feel that a lot of the old school legal opinions and views aren’t an adequate fit for the current age’s consuming behaviours and will look into and consider potential ways that it could be improved for the good of culture and business equally.

Everyday creates your history: The digital music revolution

I’d mark the birth of the MP3 as the turning point of the new musical age, heralded as the digital music revolution. Compressing audio tracks down to approximately 1MB per minute of music (depending on the bit rate quality, often 128kbps was the most popular at the time) meant that one could easy store digital versions of one’s own music collection — previously available only on bulky physical vinyl, cassettes and CDs — and still retain some semblance of quality in the playback, and the added convenience of having a digital library ripe for OCD categorisation and fingertip search-and-recall. What happened after is that after people took their digitised collections, and with the advent of the social nature of the Internet, shared their love — and files — of music online, ‘coz that’s what humans like to do: share.

Of course there were significant legal issues at play. The old school industry was founded upon a one-directional flow of music to consumer: they’d choose who would be recorded, what songs would be released, where it’d be played and sold, and who got paid how much for fulfilling the various facets of the chain. The money flowed back from consumers to the businesses and all was supposedly fine. Most of this directional flow was dictated by legal agreements that stipulated licensing, playback and selling conditions. It was a regimented system held together with money, market share and legal power, and it worked for a while.

Once the digital MP3 music revolution occurred, no longer were people confined to only “sneaker-net” sharing — copying and swapping CDs, cassettes and the like — people could now connect together online, via email or websites, and share with more than just their inner circle of friends and families; the whole world was connected and free digital music was flitting from east coast to west coast and beyond.

As the momentum of this digital ecology was growing, bigger and better players were getting involved. Software graduated from MP3 and music collection players like Windows Media Player, Winamp and Sonique, to sharing applications like Limewire, Kazaa, Napster and SoulSeek which helped make sharing music collections easy, and the proliferation of expanding music collections exploded. One would say that it was a boon time for the music industry — I’d hope especially for live music performers and events — however the old school music industry couldn’t have predicted this particular development and were both flummoxed and enraged that people were now copying and sharing music that they legally owned the rights to sell and determine who could play and where they could listen. Which is fair enough too, since the artists who were writing and performing the songs were relying on the old school’s system to pay for their meal ticket too.

So the inevitable legal crushing came. Companies like Napster were ground down and minced, the old school ploughed millions into legal action to deter young and old, little and big, from even thinking about listening or playing their music in ways that they didn’t approve of. Technology continued to update and innovate and old school’s grip on the digital world became more old and withered as more people circumvented and subverted their attempts to restrict the music from playing.

Through this continued innovation the digital music industry wasn’t crushed by the massive legal weight launched by the old school. By this time big players like Creative, Sony and Apple were marketing digital music players that would take most digital formats and place your whole collection (or at least some of it) within your hands and pockets. After the iPod exploded (the convenience of a portable music player containing your whole collection as opposed to playing per album in older portable cassette and CD players was an attractive draw for most — if not all — young music listening consumers), there was some minor altercations with DRM, but a large consumer backlash (on part because the horrible implementation of restrictive DRM would more often impede a consumer’s listening experience) expunged DRM from digital music, for the most part. This was encouraged by Apple’s innovative iTunes market — which was both a player, library and store — showed that there were a lot of happy enthusiastic people who wanted to give artists and labels real money in exchange for legal digital music playing rights.

The irony looking back now with hindsight, is that all people ever wanted was music and a way to listen to it. Had these larger old school music companies invested more into the new digital platforms and the convenience and immediacy of digital distribution, instead of restricting them, who knows how the music business industry may have looked now (during the 1970s and 80s there had been a large amount of consolidation between the bigger record labels; in 1995 there were six majors: Warner Music, EMI, Sony, Universal and PolyGram; now in 2014 there are three: Universal, Sony and Warner). Instead of marketplace innovation the majors went the way of lock-and-key: technology was developed to manage and restrict digital rights, encouraging previously loyal paying customers to circumvent digital oppression in the form of DRM (digital rights management) in order to listen to their music (and watch movies too — the same issues affected movie and TV companies too).

Another revolution started to take seed around the birth of the MP3. With consumer computing getting cheaper, it became easier for musicians at home to write and record music with their computers. No longer did they need expensive software, equipment, recording studios and label contracts to gain access to them — essentially one could write, record, produce and release one’s own music in one’s own home. While this isn’t a huge deal for the majors (they operate more on a national/global level sinking thousands to millions on marketing to reap the consumer purchasing rewards) it did however start to encourage bedroom musicians and independent label makers to create their own smaller industry, one that has now significantly chipped at the old school’s dominance in money and cultural value, thanks to other digital marketplace innovators as well as being good (if not debatably better) quality product.

Arguably, one could say that the current digital music mindset of sharing, remixing and bedroom composition was spurred when rap and hip hop came into life. DJs taking boomboxes and vinyl players to houses and the streets to share the music, then taking snippets of parts of songs and stitching them together and rapping over the top to create new sounds and songs was as refreshing as it was revolutionary and threatening, until the majors managed to contain it for their gains. In essence, the remix/sampling age was taking the cultural emanations of people and refactoring them into a new voice, giving rise to a whole new side of the industry, one which also now rakes in millions of dollars selling samples, music licensing and equipment that allows one to resample, cut and remix with just a few button taps.

And so for the most part we reach nowadays: iTunes, Amazon, and Google operate huge digital music marketplaces selling individual songs and whole albums; streaming music services like Spotify, Rdio, Deezer and Pandora are now replacing both radio and traditional music collections; plus online media repositories like YouTube, SoundCloud, and BandCamp (which arguably is a marketplace, streaming service and music repository) where one can go and listen to any and all kinds of mainstream and independent tracks. Being a music producer, promoter and consumer is a pretty sweet and stimulating time.

Of course, it could be much much better.

Check yo’self before you wreck yo’self: The current state of the industry

I’ll now detail (in my opinion) the various key aspects of the industry that have formed and continue to be shaped today, conveniently broken down into the following categories:

• Product
• Labels and Management
• Artists, Producers and Engineers
• Events
• Consumers
• Marketing

Product

I’m talking about music in general, but I’d like to also include information and context about physical music sales in-store and online, as it all relates to the online music business ecology as well.

For the most part, the product is the music itself: audio that has been designed, produced and recorded by artists, producers and engineers. These audio songs are either presented individually as singles, or packaged in short/long albums collections or compilations called:

• EPs (extended play) often contains 2-5 songs, approx. 20 minutes total play time); or
• LPs (long play) roughly 30+ minutes, can contain any number of songs so long as the length is longer than an EP

Singles are released as a hot, popular, and fast-moving commodity. A single may represent a very popular song released by the artist, and are often released before EPs and LPs. They are readily available for those who just want the single song and not the whole album. In the case of physical media, a single would have been paired with a not-so-popular-but-still-interesting song to use up the other side (i.e. a vinyl record or cassette). The less emphasised song on the physical media is often referred to as the B-side, as it would be situated on Side B of the media. CDs don’t have two sides, but it was common for CD singles to come bundled with another single, or a couple of alternative remixes of the primary track. Some singles would come with instrumental or a’capella versions. Nowadays with online music market places, a song doesn’t have to be an officially labelled single to be sold separate from the album.

EPs are often employed as short releases, either as a collection of singles or a shorter stand-alone album release. They often have a promotional emphasis, in that they often appear before or in-between LP albums, to showcase songs that artists/labels want people to hear in order to drum up interest for the more longer LP album. They also work as smaller albums to produce, allowing an artist to create fewer tracks and also allowing a label to gauge an artist’s popularity by how well the EP does before they invest in full album contracts.

LPs are regularly the main bread-and-butter and what most artists aim for, but really all three types of releases work in tandem in terms of promotions and overall sales. I’ll explain this a little later in Part 2.

I won’t really get into music videos, but they are an interesting medium and one which does logically extend the musical experience. Also of worthy mention are interactive experiences, like websites, games, physical activations (live shows, signings, art happenings), etc. which can also contribute to a sonic experience which may heighten an audience’s appreciation and retention of the product and artist.

Another notable product category to mention is merchandise. This includes things like posters and apparel (t-shirts, hats, badges, etc.) to full on action figures/dolls and the like, plus a billion other cheaply produced items that probably shouldn’t exist in the world but unfortunately do. Most likely the merch pertains to the artist, often it can also pertain to an album release or a tour. Merch is most likely purchased by fans who have some interest and/or emotional investment in the artist and their oeuvre.

Labels and Management

As mentioned earlier the major three labels currently dominate mainstream music. Often these labels even hold the rights to popular music stretching back to the 40s and 50s, and their role involves commercial investment in financing via licensing (permissions to play and sell music), developing musical talent, marketing talent and product, and observing market trends to then fuel into the same chain.

I know this is a simplified account of the role of a label, but if you look at the basics of what they do, you can see how this particular ecology has sustained itself for a while and how it is also becoming redundant in a more democratic technology climate. Currently labels fill a big role with financing, but I’m seeing trends where labels are more valuable as cultural icons themselves than they are financial powerhouses. To a certain degree a label can still make money, so long as their A&R (artist and repertoire) representatives can find new and relevant artists that capture some element of the cultural time, place and imagination.

The major labels are often more financially driven, so their output (generally speaking) can become more homogenous as they look to engineer continued financial earnings based on what they understand of the marketplace via consumer listening and purchasing trends (mostly through music charts, but now digital music services proliferate, it’s easier to track and see who’s listening, to what and where). New innovative artists can still breakthrough and it’s often inevitable (or even intentional?) that they end up on a bigger label and their new sound can also influence the mainstream sound.

One of the biggest, and dare I say more important, roles of a label is in finding new popular artists and sound, and sometimes finding those things is more a matter of making it, or just trying to do as much as you can and see what comes out. Labels (often more larger, more financially solvent ones) will invest in up-and-coming artists’ musical development in the hopes that they create some kind of single — or better, a whole career — that will enable a sizable return on investment (ROI) (take two young New Zealand success stories Kimbra and Lorde as perfect examples of this). Labels are kind of like the venture capitalists of musicians — they’re there to give a buck, but betting on that they can get a bigger buck back.

Management can mean those chief organisers who book venues, who wrangle artists, who coordinate musical and sound equipment to be set up and generally all the important things to make a live artist function outside of playing the music itself. A pivotal role, indeed.

Artists, Producers and Engineers

I’ve made some mentions to artists above. They come from all walks of life, and the digital age has both opened up the world to the independent innovators, but also encouraged many copy-cats and such to creep forth from the digital craggs. Artists are the face of the music. Not only are they represented by the sound, but often by their stage and life presence. I’d argue that the best artists are those who are performers too — not necessarily if they are good, but to have some kind of je ne sais quoi to go out on stage and not just play a show, but create an experience.

In the digital age the proliferation of connecting to new upcoming artists has expanded and deepened music’s cultural capital. Of course, whenever you get someone truly ground-breaking, it does inspire many others to derive from that individuality and some unique trends and sounds can quickly saturate the market (Dubstep, anyone?).

Producers fill the role of not entirely being musicians, but being able to guide musicians to make particular choices for songs and sounds. They can often be a sage-like figure, waxing lyrical on the lyrics, or waxing sonically on the construction and collection of sounds. They can take a shaggy dog of a song and make him trim and neat — or just expel him from the kennel. Producers primarily are involved with label backing, but a producer can also mean a friend who said “I like that bit, but maybe you should change that bit”. Producers can, and often are, songwriters themselves, the artist can also function as their mouthpiece or reside under the tutelage of. In most cases they are behind the sound, not in front of it.

Engineers comprise of the recording, mixing and mastering kind. They record the sounds, evaluate and balance the sound and aural composition, and finally they prepare the composited tracks for distribution to market, be it physical or digital. Often they, like producers, can also be marketed as influential factors on the sound of an artist’s release — just look at how Steve Albini is touted on anything that he is involved with nowadays.

Events

This constitutes live shows, signings, anything that involves an artist in a physical space with an audience. Often artists when putting out any kind of product release will back up that release with live shows, be it a few dates in a small geographical area to a multidate multi-country tour. These can be gruelling affairs and take a fair amount of logistical wrangling to pull off, not to mention can be completely disheartening if the artist isn’t big enough to handle venues, the supporting artists aren’t a right fit, if the area the artist is playing isn’t interested in their music, or even if bad luck is in the house. But when it goes good, it’s great.

It’s not often an artist will do any form of event unless they have some release to back it up, but often independent, unknown artists will play small shows around to get their sound out there and to expand their audiences. This may consist of a number of years independently producing their own material and organising their own shows in order to generate interest from larger labels, to get to the point of being sponsored to do professional songwriting, production and touring. Of course, it depends on the kind of sound, the marketability of the artist and even the location and tenacity of the artist, which will often correlate to the tastemakers at a label.

Nowadays festivals seem to reign supreme as marketable events in which hundreds of artists and thousands of attendees conglomerate for 1-5 day events in which non-stop music entertains. This glut of festivals often correlates to the Summer season and acts as a one-stop-shop for people to see a few artists they already know and experience a large number of artists they have probably, or vaguely, known of. Although, it takes a certain kind of person to attend large festivals and I would even say that the demand for festivals is slowly dipping.

Another thing about festivals is that the larger ones attract bigger artists that work as major attendee draw-cards, and often these artists will perform side shows in which they feature as the main attraction for a smaller, often a one-off, event (compared to the festivals). They’re great to allow those people who don’t like festivals to still have a chance to see their favourite artists, plus an extra chance for those artists to sell more tickets, sell more merch and to play good shows. In some cases these side shows are organised by the festival organisers as well and can factor into their revenue model.

Consumers

Probably the most important factor in the equation of the music industry, aside from the music itself. To sell something you need someone to buy it, and that’s who these people are. In the digital age, a majority of consumers are media and technology savvy: they know where to find information about what music to listen to, and they often know how to buy it and from where.

The trickiest thing in any commercial relationship with a supplier and a consumer is how to get the product from the factory to the audience. In previous years products were physical and relied on physical distribution networks involving factories to produce the physical media, transportation networks to distribute the product, and shops to sell the product. Nowadays the digital age allows us to have the physical product for sale on website shops and the transportation networks deliver straight to the consumer’s home. With digital products though, the factory is non-existent; the files are stored on a server, the transportation network is now a series of tubes called the Internet and they’re zipped directly to the consumer’s device.

I had heard of a theory that one only needs 1,000 true fans to sustain one’s own professional career in the arts. Who knows what the figures are, but later on I’ll use this assumed variable for some wildly fun data calculations.

Marketing

Marketing is as much about visibility as it is about availability and suitability. Marketing is where you can tell someone about something readily or soon-to-be available, but to be successful the message needs a directed angle — perhaps based on a particular market segmentation like interest or location — in order to devise and display the relevant messages that will be noticed and hopefully remembered. The following is an account of some previous and existing methods of marketing music — it’s not entirely exhaustive, but it should be a good generalised account of what channels are currently being utilised.

Radio used to occupy a large proportion of how the general public would hear new and old music. It was a huge business platform in which record labels could transmit their latest tracks and promote their hottest artists. It was even the prime touch-point to see what artists and songs were the most popular: top 10-100 hottest music track lists would feature (Rick Dees and the weekly top 40, being a big example). Interviews, documentary features, gossip and the like prevail to communicate what’s cool and what’s has-been. With the rise of MP3, digital radio and streaming services now occupy a big space of that, however there’s still a large audience listening to radio via the traditional methods. There’s some comfort in having someone else pick the music you listen to daily and being tapped into the news and happenings of the times.

In tandem with radio, music shops themselves display the most popular albums and artists based on newness and/or popularity. They sell all kinds of music media with methods to listen to old and new music for the discerning public to help their buying choices. Posters and merchandise are on show; even in-store live performances showcase local and national artists. The record shop was an important social area for music performers and lovers to interact and form a community, swap stories and names of intriguing and interesting music. Unfortunately the brick-and-mortar style of shop is declining, as the convenience and cheaper operating costs of online shops operating, distribution and payment systems can provide greater service and more convenience for the operator and the consumer. The music community now continues to communicate and share online via forums, blogs, and other social media.

Music magazines like Rolling Stone, NME, and Vice feature gossip, music and event reviews, photos, and more, collecting the culture together and holding it high giving it a kind of validation and/or prominence to the public. Often they would provide the human story-telling element behind the music’s story-telling, allowing first-hand accounts of artists’ motivations and experiences, that which fueled the impetus to create sound and vision, and often the saucy antics behind such lives. Advertising space is dominated by latest releases, upcoming tours and more. Reviews allow a personalised voice recommend or dismay audiences to listen/purchase music releases and artists.

While a number of music magazines operate online, a large number of aspiring and successful journalists took to creating their own websites showcasing their writings and discoveries of new and old artists and music, using a variety of online blog systems. Blogger, Tumblr and WordPress host a wide variety of music writing and recommendations from any particular kind of genre that you could name. In fact, the “music blog” became quite a popular platform for new music and artists to be seen and heard on and large blogs like Pitchfork, Stereogum, Resident Advisor and Drowned in Sound often have formal partnerships with labels to gain new music to preview and review, artists to interview, and so on and so forth for promotional duties.

In terms of TV, MTV defined a generation when it first came out, playing and showcasing mostly music videos and music related content. Music video culture still persists and is still highly regarded, however the medium has changed emphasis to online delivery (MTV now regulated to an almost 100% saturation of inane reality TV shows). Sites like YouTube, Vimeo and DailyMotion showcase the latest and greatest music videos and stream live music events. People in their millions visit to watch and listen to old and new music all the same. A music video going viral online can become a huge boon for independent artists and with the global reach of these websites, help even make a young artist’s career. Just look at the behemoth that is Justin Bieber for proof of that (if you can stomach his face and his music).

Speaking of online sites/services, tools like Facebook, Twitter, SoundCloud, Bandcamp and more (TopSpin, SongKick, Bandsintown, HypeMachine, MySpace, ReverbNation, etc.) offer a great resource for artists and promoters to release music and get an audience’s reaction. Features like comments encourage feedback, analytics allow one to get an idea of how much the audience is interacting and what particular kind of traits they may consist of (age, gender, location, etc.). Even just the ability to upload and host the assets for free (or paid subscription for extra features) offers any and all musicians and promoters extra tools and methods to get their digital and physical material out and into consumers’ hands, ears and hearts.

It’s this aspect of marketing and promotion within the ecology of the music industry that I will concentrate on next. Part 2 will take a look at current marketing trends with artists, labels, consumers and products and how they relate within the existing music industry ecology in terms of promotion and distribution. I’ll also offer my own ideas and theories regarding how the industry could potentially design and deliver its existing methods to encourage growth and relevancy in today’s digital age.