The WHO lead vocalist says no money in music

[Anderton]

There was something in Daltrey's piece that really gave me pause...

 

 

"Why would I make a record?"

 

I dunno...because you're a musician?

 

"I would have to pay to make a record. There's no royalties so I can't see that ever happening. There's no record business. How do you get the money to make the records? I don't know."

 

C'mon, Pete Townshend has a home studio, and he's into Ableton Live. Maybe it's time to do an album YOU want to do for the hell of it, just fun stuff, no pressure, no money...putting out any album is a crap shoot, so why not do what you want to do and see what happens?

 

I understand that if you make your living by being a musician, you want to be compensated for making music. And as Ernest points out, you're fighting against an intractable ethics issue. But maybe at some point, the Who should just live off licensing their music to get an income stream, and treat making music as a hobby. There's no shame in having fun making music.

 

Paradoxically, I did my "Neo-" CD (which I'll get around to releasing someday, really I will, it's finally mastered) for the fun of it and never expected to see a penny from it. But now I've been taking bits and pieces of various songs and remixing them as soundtracks, which DO provide compensation. Usually the vocals are stripped out and the arrangement simplified, but so what? Best of both worlds: Make music for the fun of it, and then get paid for it by accident

 

 

[Ernest Buckley]

 

Well it wasn't 20 years ago, but does 17 years ago count? I met Shawn Fanning right after Napster had started, and it was clear to me the genie was out of the bottle. I talked to some people at record companies and said what they needed to do was put their entire catalog online at 8-bit/22 kHz - good enough to know if you'd like something enough to buy it, but not good enough to steal. I saw that as the way to cut off file-sharing at the knees by deluging the market with so files that peer-to-peer networks, with their more limited selections, could not compete.

 

Then if you liked what you heard, you could click on a "buy" button and have a CD sent to you (this was before downloading entire albums became feasible on a widespread basis). But I also proposed that labels take advantage of "360 deals" so if you bought a CD, some copies might have a code that would entitle you to attending a chat room with a limited number of people and the artist, as well as discounts on live performance tickets, a free cut from the artist's next CD, etc. In other words, I was asking record companies to take ownership of the internet by leveraging it in ways that P-to-P networks never could. I felt by offering a better product, they would cause the competition to dissipate.

 

The premise was also to continue promoting the idea that music had value. Sure, you could get an MP3 from a peer-to-peer network for free, but if buying a CD from a record company gave you goodies like those mentioned above as well as codes to download candid photos of the band, additional artwork, maybe some interviews, etc, then what the record companies were offering would (hopefully) be perceived as having greater value, and thus justify a purchase.

 

Obviously I wasn't persuasive enough Granted, I have no idea whether what I was proposing would have worked, and I'll never know. What I do know is the strategy of the record companies didn't work, so I doubt they would have been any worse off...

 

 

 

Craig,

 

The model you proposed may have worked in the early days of the Internet but it would not work today because someone would buy the HD copy and put it online to share. This is an ethical issue as I have said time and time again and its not going to change unless people change their ethics.

 

I`m not holding my breath.

 

I don`t pretend to know anything about writing code but I imagine one day that when you purchase a song, you should be able to share that song on 5 other devices you own with each device getting its own code which is somehow encrypted on the song file. If Consumer A (owner of the song file) tries to share the song file with someone else ("Consumer B"), the song file will download but not play because Consumer B does not have the code necessary to play the file. The code acts like a key of sorts...

 

Maybe this is an old idea but I cannot imagine no one else has thought of it. We use it for software and plug ins, right?

[Ernest Buckley]

There was something in Daltrey's piece that really gave me pause...

 

 

"Why would I make a record?"

 

I dunno...because you're a musician?

 

"I would have to pay to make a record. There's no royalties so I can't see that ever happening. There's no record business. How do you get the money to make the records? I don't know."

 

C'mon, Pete Townshend has a home studio, and he's into Ableton Live. Maybe it's time to do an album YOU want to do for the hell of it, just fun stuff, no pressure, no money...putting out any album is a crap shoot, so why not do what you want to do and see what happens?

 

I understand that if you make your living by being a musician, you want to be compensated for making music. And as Ernest points out, you're fighting against an intractable ethics issue. But maybe at some point, the Who should just live off licensing their music to get an income stream, and treat making music as a hobby. There's no shame in having fun making music.

 

Paradoxically, I did my "Neo-" CD (which I'll get around to releasing someday, really I will, it's finally mastered) for the fun of it and never expected to see a penny from it. But now I've been taking bits and pieces of various songs and remixing them as soundtracks, which DO provide compensation. Usually the vocals are stripped out and the arrangement simplified, but so what? Best of both worlds: Make music for the fun of it, and then get paid for it by accident

 

 

 

Several days my son (who is 13 and composes his own music using Reason) and I were discussing how artists make money today. He wants to be a musician, making his living selling records... I spoke to him about piracy and how artists have to tour to make $$$ these days. I guess he was thinking about this for a few days and he says to me yesterday, "Dad, I think I know how artists can make money selling their records. I think all the artists should make an agreement to not put out any more music until record labels figure out a way to make money selling albums. The artists should just go on strike."

 

Remember, he`s 13.

 

I explained to him that artists create music because thats what they do. Its not really a choice for us. Also, there are label agreements that say the artist must put out music every few years, etc...

 

I admire his fascination with the subject and I said to him, "Maybe you`ll figure out a system that works."

 

In the meantime, I`m hoping he pursues another career...

 

As for Pete Townsend and any other artist of his stature, I think its lame of them to not put out music because of piracy. I really think the older consumer would be a bit more supportive and actually BUY the albums.

 

I`m putting out a record later this year and I have pondered whether I should deliver the album on CD, on vinyl, or digital. After a lot of conversations with others and thinking on my own, I have decided to put it out on CD and make it available as a digital download. However, I am going to ask everyone to actually pay $10 for it whether its a CD or digital. I plan to be open and honest about the costs, the time, the ethical issues, and I hope people will re-consider and actually buy the record.

 

I`m not pretending that this album is going to sell more than a few dozen copies. I`m being realistic but I really do believe artists, especially those of us who are not on major labels should have heart to heart conversations with our audiences and explain to them that we are not making a killing and we do not have major labels invested in us. Maybe if we actually talk DIRECTLY to our fan base about piracy, the message will start to sink in?

 

At least I can hope...

 

[Anderton]

The model you proposed may have worked in the early days of the Internet but it would not work today because someone would buy the HD copy and put it online to share. This is an ethical issue as I have said time and time again and its not going to change unless people change their ethics.

 

Well, this was in the early days of the internet. The point was for the industry to take ownership of the online music experience instead of ceding it to the P2P networks, and get their foot in the door. Whether they'd be able to hold on to that lead over time would of course not be guaranteed, but taking ownership early on would have given them an advantage.

 

[Anderton]

But to be clear, I don't disagree with you that the root is an ethical issue to a large degree. People WILL take free if they can get it, but there's a difference between getting something for free because it's offered as part of a business deal (e.g., you can listen to TuneIn.com for free, but then you have to put up with commercials or you can pay to make the commercials go away) or because it's stolen.

 

Another overlay of complexity is that when Steve Jobs and Woz got their start making Blue Boxes so they could steal free long-distance phone calls, they knew they were doing something wrong. I believe there are people who get stuff from torrents who genuinely feel they're not doing anything wrong...everything should be free, right? It's the internet, and "everybody does it." They perceive something that's not a physical object as not "real."

[Ernest Buckley]

But on another note' date=' if the music industry no longer exists, how do you explain Taylor Swift? Or Adele?[/quote']

 

Thats an interesting question. To me, we are talking about two outliers in the industry...

 

I`m not trying to be a smart ass but Adele is a big girl. She can sing her ass off though whereas TS sucks. As politically incorrect as this may sound, I think part of Adele`s charm is that she is a big girl who has been done wrong and many people live vicariously through her. There are a lot of big girls out there who can relate to her story... Adele will enjoy a long singing career as long as she can stay healthy which is an issue.... especially her vocal cords.

 

Taylor Swift can`t sing for her life but she definitely knows what girls ages 6 - 14 like to listen to. I think TS will enjoy a career as a songwriter long after her fanbase realizes she really cannot hold a note. I do admire her stance against iTunes last year though and I actually think her songwriting is really legit from the perspective of post 2010 era pop music.

 

They both have that intangible something... we can`t really pinpoint what it is but we know when Adele opens her mouth, its an event. And even though TS does nothing for me from a performance perspective, her songs speak for an entire generation of girls. And if boy groups have taught us anything, we know thats probably the biggest market there is in the industry.

 

 

[Phil O'Keefe]

The problem is and I`ll say this again.... Music is free. Most people do not want to pay for something if they can get it for free.

 

 

 

You've long been able to "get music for free" or listen to it for free.

 

Radio has been providing "free" music (from the end-listener's perspective) for decades. Ad-supported streaming (and YouTube) are different insofar as the ability to call up something on demand instead of being at the mercy of Program Directors and having to wait for your favorite song to be played, but other than that, the paradigm is quite similar. The "broadcaster" has to pay a fee to the copyright owner(s) for the use of the song, which in the case of radio is handled by the PRS organizations (ASCAP/BMI/SESAC) and is paid for as bulk licenses that allows the station to play anything in their catalogs during the term of the license agreement period. BMI and ASCAP have their own ways of trying to determine who gets played the most and dividing the collective pie (the total income after operating expenses) while streaming tracks individual songs more directly.

[Notes_Norton]

Thinking out loud here.

 

It seems easy to blame the Internet, P2P, and all that, but I can't see it as all the blame.

 

Sure Adele can sing and Taylor Swift cannot. Elvis Presley could sing and Bob Dylan could not. Examples like this are everywhere.

 

Me? I think the record companies dug their own grave. A couple of things off the top of my head.

 

They hired "The Network" to plug their songs on the radio so the indies didn't have a chance. The Network found they could make or break any record they wanted, and started demanding gazillions of bucks to promote a record. So while putting the indies out of business they cut their own profits by millions of dollars per hit record.

 

Without the indies, the innovation and creativity was diminished. That killed some people's interest in new music because the safe thinking record companies just put out more of whatever is selling.

 

They quit promoting singles because albums are more profitable. But spending a buck for a 45 or cassingle was lunch money, and it was a disposable item like Chiclets. By downplaying singles they abandoned their Chiclets item.

 

When they went CD, which are much less expensive to manufacture, they raised the price. They should have lowered it. People spend lunch money without thinking about it.

 

The record companies also divided their markets.Until the market was divided again and again, everyone listened to the same station. Sinatra, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, were all icons of their entire generations. Whether you liked them or not, you knew them, and you identified your generation through them. I think The Beatles were the end of that. Everybody knew the Beatles had a new album out, and it was as big a generational event as Apple introducing a new iPhone (up to 6 anyway). After the first division, the disco people could care less about the new rock album and vice versa. A new Michael Jackson album was never as big as "The White Album" or "Revolver" or "Elvis Is Back".

 

And we divided even more.

 

Now we have rock, dance, alternative, R&B, metal, and how many other sub-genres of pop music that used to play for everyone?. So the generation no longer identifies themselves through their music, because it isn't their music anymore. When it's less important, it's less important to buy and keep.

 

The dinosaurs were long on their way to extinction before the asteroid put the final nail in their coffins.

 

The record companies were digging their own graves before the Internet came along. The Internet just sped it along IMHO.

 

I don't know if it's possible to put the genie back in the bottle. It's a new era. Evolution belongs to the most adaptable. The most adaptable are the fittest and those businesses will survive.

 

It's still possible to make a living playing music. And as I pointed out before, for every band like The Who making mega-bucks selling records there always have been hundreds of bands just making a living playing music. 99% or more of us never made it, never will, and still have the opportunity to make our living doing music and nothing but music.

 

The Internet hasn't hurt my living at all. Television has. But that's another thread.

 

Insights and incites by Notes

[Ernest Buckley]

 

 

You've long been able to "get music for free" or listen to it for free.

 

Radio has been providing "free" music (from the end-listener's perspective) for decades. Ad-supported streaming (and YouTube) are different insofar as the ability to call up something on demand instead of being at the mercy of Program Directors and having to wait for your favorite song to be played, but other than that, the paradigm is quite similar. The "broadcaster" has to pay a fee to the copyright owner(s) for the use of the song, which in the case of radio is handled by the PRS organizations (ASCAP/BMI/SESAC) and is paid for as bulk licenses that allows the station to play anything in their catalogs during the term of the license agreement period. BMI and ASCAP have their own ways of trying to determine who gets played the most and dividing the collective pie (the total income after operating expenses) while streaming tracks individual songs more directly.

 

The issue with the Internet is the amount of file sharing that goes on. Thats obvious but if we could find a way to make file sharing extremely difficult or completely banish it via code, that would be ideal. The consumer would then feel paying $.99 per tune is easier than spending an hour trying to share a digital copy. Time is money...

[nat whilk II]

The carrot to lead people away from piratical downloading is to simply make streaming significantly more convenient. People will pay for convenience.

 

As others earlier in this thread have mentioned, the means to copy music has been around a lot longer than digital media has been around. It's just that the digital format made it relatively easy and convenient to copy music, compared to the old cassettes and such. That's what made illegal downloading catch on - it was so easy to do.

 

People will move to the next level of convenience, and they will pay something for it - they are paying for it.

 

Streaming is the most convenient way to access music by far. Next up would be uploading files to the cloud and streaming your own files - but even that is less convenient than just pulling up Spotify. Uploading is slow, and cloud storage alone can cost some. Why bother when most of the music people want to hear is already available from the streaming services own servers?

 

Kids are particularly crazy for convenience and instant access - and particularly uninterested in dealing with computer and file maintenance. Sure there are exceptions, but my impression from experience is that kids know less now about computers than they did, say, 15 years ago. They know a lot about how to use devices to access stuff quick and easy.

 

And most kids at least in my demographic will spend to the extent of whatever their income is - anyone with kids in college learns this about the younger set. Kids with prepaid meal programs still drop as much or more money redundantly on eating out or carting in junk food. What's a few bucks a month for streaming? They spend five times as much at Starbucks each month.

 

All you have to do to change consumer behavior is make things marginally cheaper or better or convenient. You don't have to totally ban this or that, or charge half of what the competition does, or make things miles better than the other person - you just have to get the edge and keep it for a bit until word gets around.

 

Sure, there will be people with deep music interests that will still want to own CDs or high-quality files in the cloud. Or even vinyl or tape. But we're a small minority and don't drive the industry, we just live in niches.

 

A population that spends billions on bottled water that is no better for the most part than tap water can be induced to pay for music. If the industry smartens up. And if the gradual move away from personal hardware and personally owned software continues as it's already going - which all the talking heads seem to think it will.

 

nat whilk ii

 

 

 

 

[Idunno]

If you can listen to something on your computer you can steal it' date=' period.[/i'] Even if some terrible operating system patch was created to stop you from routing the stereo output of your computer to recording software, you'd still have music coming through wires going to your speakers to record the old fashioned way. The same is true of video, it's just a bit more complicated.

 

What killed musicians' livelihood was the invention of recording. Before recording, if you wanted music at your wedding or barn dance or party or funeral or whatever, you had to hire musicians to perform. The musicians can only be one place at a time (except for Giant Smiling Dog, ask if you're curious) so a lot of musicians worked various functions all over the planet on any given night and made their meager living that way. The good musicians made more money and the hack musicians made less or none, just as with any other job, but nearly no one got rich playing music. Now, thanks to recording, Beyonce can be singing at thousands of weddings at the same time and there's no need for live musicians at all, they're a luxury.

 

There's no putting the recording genii back in the bottle.

 

For a short time (as Notes describes), a few musicians made millions (mostly for the record companies) and most musicians played for a few bucks, a few beers and the love of it just as they do now. Those were further decimated (along with the bars) by tightening of alcohol limits, severe drunk driving penalties, high quality audio with digital TV, Internet availability instantly for any music ever recorded (free or for pennies), karaoke, etc. etc. The "stars," the "one percenters" of music got the big bucks and everyone else was impoverished; now they're complaining too.

 

It's not about today's music being "bad" (every generation thinks their kids / parents' music is awful), it's not about education (you don't have to teach kids to love music, it's innate), it's not about DJ's, it's about the widespread societal belief that music is free, because the reality is that IT IS FREE. Nearly everyone wants the instant gratification of hearing the exact song they they want precisely when they want to hear it for FREE or very close to FREE (Spotify, etc).

 

What digital did was add to the devastating stratification of recording, reducing the cost of reproduction to zero and putting that ability in the hands of the masses. There's no putting that genii back in the bottle either for ANY sort of intellectual property that can be reproduced for $0. It's simply not possible to prosecute or stop the illegal reproduction of music when such a large percentage of the public is doing it.

 

All the above is describing the water we're drowning in. So what do we DO about it?

 

The first response by many artists was to remember that music is entertainment. How can rendition of music be made more entertaining so that people will leave their comfortable houses, drive downtown, brave the cops and their 0.08 blood alcohol level, and pay through the nose for imperfect music and overpriced drinks they could stay home and get for free or nearly free? The answer was to borrow from theater and make the performance a show. Choreographed dancing, elaborate lighting, pyrotechnics, stagecraft, costumes, being part of a screaming crowd, dialog with the audience, all those loud, brash, unpredictable and excitement factors that carefully recorded music, even big screen TV doesn't provide - immersion in a visceral spectacle.

 

That works! And best of all (depending on your viewpoint) it requires a record label, sponsors, endorsements, large elaborate venues so that the man once again gets the biggest cut. We're back in business!

 

Or are we? Tours and concerts cost a lot of money to put on, often more money (even with sponsorship) than they make. Oh well, we'll make the real money selling albums, videos, downloads, recordings, etc. Oh wait - recorded music is FREE. You can't sell it, at least not for much or to many before anyone who wants it has stolen a copy of it. Still this this works for famous artists fairly well and that's why you see them still touring.

 

But what about the little guy who's playing for beer and girls at the local bars and music venues? They don't have a record label but then again, the cost of recording music and video and reproducing it is FREE to them too. YouTube picked up on this as a way to monetize their video storage by sticking adverts into them and paying the little guys a few cents or medium $$$ if their video goes viral.

 

The most successful bands I've worked for have put all this together and make a middle to upper middle class living from it. They maintain a standard of excellence, they play events that would not be appropriate for a DJ, they play for clients who can afford to pay them well, they dress and act and move and work the crowds in a way that create excitement, they monetize their music in all the various ways I've described above including selling downloads at shows and putting video up on YouTube. They're entertainers, artists, songwriters, recordists AND they're businessmen always looking for the next step up. They're selling a personal experience, not an impersonal one like listening to a recording.

 

There's no other way to succeed at music right now, there never has been. The only difference is the musicians do everything themselves now. Maybe someday neural science will reach the point where one person or group can simply THINK improvisational music and have it transfer directly into the audience's brains, sounds and colors and melodies and rhythms and harmonies and emotions. Even then, it will still be about creativity, emotion, excitement, and entertainment.

 

Terry D.

 

 

The recording removed the live music from the home and lofted it to the stage. I don't go to concerts. Nasty gatherings of weird people attending for ulterior purposes.

 

The acoustic (parlor) guitar became popular because the poor folks could afford them where they could not afford the traditional parlor piano. So, the missus would learn to play and entertain the men-folk in the parlors across the western world after the evening meal. That was the way of it for a long time.

 

Then, the affordable Gramophone was introduced (His Master's Voice) by Emile Berliner heralding the death of live entertainment. It's been heading south ever since.

 

Now we've arrived at a juncture where most of the people who actually play real musical instruments are soon to be upstaged by button-pushing musical digitizers in the same fashion that CGI is on the short path to replacing real movie actors. People are replacing themselves with their inventions, for the sake of the inventions alone, on a grand scale. Cost savings? For what purpose other than to remove it from the little people to better line the pockets of the beautiful people? Is that the progress inventions are supposed to bring?

 

Live music has become the fashionable back ground noise for night denizen haunts. That's where it will remain and live out a usefulness as musician showcases. Plenty of people (audiences) like live entertainment but they do not particularly care to routinely come out of pocket for it. So, musicians, like their fine arts brethren preceding them, have now joined them as starving artists plying a has-been art form. You better have another idea for personal income.

 

Then there are the rare individuals who are musical happenstances and become successful. Are they any better musicians than the next guy of similar skills? No, they're just different in a way that becomes popular. They have something novel, unique, distinctive that gains an attraction. Did I think that the 70's acoustic sound would one day be upstaged by Devo's Whip It, played by 4 guys wearing dog food dishes on their heads? I thought they were a joke, like Tiny Tim, and I'd have lost that wager. But, the point is the changes in the audience popularized artists, no differently than the dart finds a target, and they had to pay to listen to it recorded and live. Now, however, the audience does not have to spend money to have their recorded music because our inventions have made it available gratis. Isn't progress wonderful? Mere mention of its imagined virtues cripples all thought of proper control to ensure no one suffers its introduction into the diaspora of good and not-so-good intent.

[1001gear]

Stardom - and the issue is stardom and not so much music, seems to be a matter of hitting the big schools. Although in that regard, the big economies have diversified and the consumers have (maybe unwittingly) divided and resigned to their captivity. What that means is there ain't no big easy schools left. Sex withstanding and even that's all divvied.

[Phil O'Keefe]

 

The issue with the Internet is the amount of file sharing that goes on. Thats obvious but if we could find a way to make file sharing extremely difficult or completely banish it via code, that would be ideal. The consumer would then feel paying $.99 per tune is easier than spending an hour trying to share a digital copy. Time is money...

 

I really don't think that's possible. As Terry mentioned, the signal has to "go analog" sooner or later, and once it does, grabbing it is a piece of cake, and it won't take an hour to do that - just however long the song is (IOW, real-time recording). After that, the song's digitized and we're right back where we are now.

[MrKnobs]

Back when Julie and I were gigging I had many "epiphany" sorts of moments, this one being germane to the topic of the thread.

 

A guy sometimes opened for us, a singer songwriter, he was actually pretty good. I noticed that he always had a big stack of CD's by the venue door marked FREE. I also noticed that the stack was always much smaller by the end of the night. This set the wheels in my mind to turning, I wondered if what he was doing was a good idea, if it was advancing him toward his goals in any way. I wondered how much it was costing him, as he was doing the musician thing full time and didn't look like he was wealthy.

 

So, that night, for the first time, I actually talked to him. Not just the usual mandatory boiler plate, "Hey Man! Great Set! Always love playing with you!" but real conversation. I was curious about his CD "sales." Here's what he told me, as close to verbatim as I can remember:

HIM: "Yeah I wasn't selling sh*t, and I had a ton of these made, so I figured why not give 'em away, at least people would hear my music and maybe come to gigs."

 

ME: "How's that working for you bro? Seems like you must be spending a lot of your gig money making CDs."

 

HIM: "No dude, it's actually not costing me much at all. A lot of people pick one up cuz it's free, but about half to three quarters of them that make it out the door I find laying on the grass or parking lot unopened. I just pick them up, wipe them off, and give them away again the next night. The only problem I sometimes have is with the club owners,

one of whom yelled at me to 'clean that sh*t up" and compared them to 'dog turds lying in his yard.'"

 

I guess free is only good if it's something you actually want. I surmise that picking up a free item gives momentary pleasure that expires surprisingly quickly. That conversation and that imagery made me depressed for about a month.

 

Terry D.

[Phil O'Keefe]

That is a depressing story Terry, but OTOH, the optimist in me holds out hope that not all of them get tossed right outside the venue, and of the ones that make it home, not all of them get tossed either. Maybe a few actually get played. And maybe, just maybe, every once in a while the music actually connects with the listener.

 

Yeah, I know... not likely, but hey - hope springs eternal.

[elsongs]

I thought the reason why The Who wouldn't make another album again is because half the members are dead now...