The True Reason For The Current Breakdown Of The Music Industry: Don't Mess With Art!

May 26, 2009

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Somebody just asked me whether i’m intersted in helping him in marketing his music in the web, pointed to his myspace profile and asked me about my quality valuation. Here’s what i answered him:

I’m not skilled to judge the quality of music. What does quality in art mean anyway? The sex pistols, did they make “good” music in the sense of a musician? Surely not. Have the been “good” musicians? *cough*. Was punk rock innovative? nope, it was just rock’n'roll, not even a fast one. So why have the sex pistols – at least – been so successful and why did millions identify with their music and why can be said: this is true art? Of course is the answer: because punk rock was an authentic, urgent and strong expression of an attitude towards society and life.

Authenticity is something that everybody carries inside, it derives from life itself, it is not manageable and cannot be created artificially. Authenticity is the key to art. I am convinced that the greatest and most common mistake in the music business is to influence and polish artists in order to reach marketing goals and therefore undermine and bury their authenticity. This is the true reason for the current disaster of the music industry.

Regina Spektor says: Don’t mess with art!

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My Guess: We Will Pay $3 For An Album – For Service Fee And Fairness

March 1, 2009

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As the Digital Audio Insider suspects, Amazon is conducting a large scale experiment with prices for digital music downloads. For a single day, Opeth’s Still Life was only $1.99 and immediately boosted to position #3 on amazon’s best seller list. Today it’s the Greatest Hits album from Creed (also $1.99, also #3). Last.fm numbers indicate that both bands are fairy popular (345,852 listeners for Opeth, 523,844 listeners for Creed), but both albums are from the back catalog, what makes this even more astounding.

There is the suggestion that an album should cost $5, my guess is that in mid term the prices will even drop to around $3. This seems to be the amount a consumer is willing to pay on a voluntary basis. (Remember the Radiohead In Rainbows numbers. Divide $2,736,000 by 1,200,000 downloads, then you get $2.28 in average.)

Why so low? It’s not only random customer behaviour. The value of an mp3 file itself, as is with any digital information, tends to zero. It’s an economic fact, because the marginal costs for the production of a digital copy are nearly zero.

Despite this a digital download has a value for the customer, because of two reasons:

First, the service that provides the download is a value. If you pay, you save yourself hunting in file sharing networks and ending up with mistagged mp3s in bad quality. The better the service, the higher the value. iTunes is more convenient than amazon’s mp3 store, so they might be able to realize a higher price.

Second, people will pay because it’s fair. But you are not paying for the file, your want to support the artist. People (mostly) want to be fair. In this view, you are paying for the consumer-artist relationship. This means that probably a direct sale from the band’s website has a higher value for the customer – if they know that the money goes directly to the artist – that could equal much more than $3.

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Long Tail Info Porn: Lil' Wayne vs. Regina Spektor

February 13, 2009

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Did you know…

…that the best selling album of 2008 - Tha Carter III from Lil’ Wayne -  sold 2.88 million copies and

for the very first time since tracking album sales started under the current model in 1991, the number-one album didn’t clear 3 million copies (mediapost.com)

… but still, Lil’ Wayne alone…

sold more CDs than did CD Baby in 2008 (coolfer)

…which is interesting if you know that CD Baby has 277,000 Albums in stock. Does that mean that the Long Tail is a dead end? I doubt. Look at this:

Songs from Regina Spektor, an album that is available only from CD Baby has 2,257,765 plays from 161,533 listeners on last.fm, which is roughly the same as the 2,466,466 plays from 116,056 listeners for Lil’ Waynes’ Tha Carter III.

How come? Do Lil’ Wayne listeners use less computers? Are Regina Spektors’ fans a bunch of file sharing criminals? Or maybe – are the “official” sales numbers just a massive fake?

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Trying Out Spotify: I Like It, But I Wouldn’t Bet On Its Success

February 11, 2009

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There is an ongoing buzz around Spotify – a new streaming music service from London – the latest news is that they closed a deal with CDBaby and thus grew their library by 1M tracks. That sounds great, so i decided to pay the 10 euro and try it out.

I won’t say that i regret having paid, i like it, but i really wonder how much time people spend on developing stuff that – on a mid term perspective – will surely be eaten up by the big fish in the pond?

Spotify isn’t difficult to understand. Basically, it’s  a streaming iTunes with a 9,99 € flatrate. The application is well made, slim (just 2.4MB) and in terms of interface design an iTunes copycat, even shortcuts like spacebar for play/pause work the same. Spotify is fast and search works fine.  Sound quality is good, a lot better than streaming from last.fm, but not as good as an 192kB mp3 downloaded from iTunes. One downturn for me: spotify cannot stream to my apple airport speakers. Feature request! Anything else is fine, but what’s new?

Surely, Spotify is doing what Napster should have been done in the past. But that does not justify its right to live. At the certain moment when it will be possible to clear royalties for an on-demand streaming for the US market (Spotify only works in Europe), it is very easy for Apple to enter the business, and that will be the sudden end for Spotify.

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What This Blog Is About: Read This NY Times Article

February 6, 2009

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If anybody wonders what’s the real problem with the music industry, read this note from NYTimes’ Winter Miller. It’s a review of the new album of Rachael Yamagata, a New York singer-songwriter who recently published a wonderful double CD and is currently on tour in Japan and Europe:

What I love about “Elephants … Teeth Sinking Into Heart” is you know for a fact that there was not a single A&R or P.R. or marketing person that was in the process remotely, because there’s not a single up-tempo song on the whole album. They’re all completely self-indulgent, in the best possible sense of the word, indulging in the beauty of the sadness.

I’m so thrilled when I hear that. There might be slight danger that a label would be trying to say “Let’s make sure there’s a radio song.” It’s a really healthy thing in this younger generation of artists…

No A&R, no PR and marketing remotely makes good music. Just think about it.

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