Forget money. As a musician I struggle to even get people to listen to my music for free.<p>There's an absolute glut of content out there, due to two things:<p>1 - The increasing ease of making music. It used to be that you had to invest time in acquiring some skill, some relatively expensive instruments, and some in-person relationships with other musicians to make music that was palatable to a significant number of listeners. Today all you need is some free software on a phone or computer you probably already have, and it all but makes the music for you.<p>2 - The ease of distributing music. You used to have to get contracts with record labels, make other connections with the music industry, or spend a lot of money to get much of an audience. Now we've mostly cut out the middle men, and distribution is virtually free.<p>As a result there's vastly more content and much more competition between artists for an audience. No longer are consumers limited to a dozen radio stations or having to read music reviews, physically go down to the record store, listen to and buy records. The consumer has virtually the world's entire musical output at their fingertips and far more free content than they even have time to listen to.
I have a few friends that are aspiring musicians with what I consider to be a high quality product, and they both struggle to make a living out of it, bankrolling their music endeavors with side gigs or similar avenues.<p>In the age of the Internet, it seems clear to me that from a macro economic perspective, the only scarce things a musician can provide are (a) experiences and (b) physical goods. It seems like no small/medium artist can expect to make a living out of YouTube views or Spotify plays.<p>Is anyone here that is more knowledgeable about the industry able to comment on what tech-enabled avenues exist (or may come into existence in the short term future) for younger musicians to make a living? Crazy ideas are OK (for example, I think VR live concerts might be a thing at some point, but I don't have enough understanding of the industry to tell whether something like Ujomusic makes sense).
Music throughout the centuries has always been subsidized by benefactors.<p>It wasn't until 19th century that the breadth of career options opened up for Musicians.<p>The struggle for "Pop" artists is that the definition of Pop changes every 5 years... and even then, Artists underestimate just how much promotion goes into driving streaming traffic.<p>But career options for scoring video games, multimedia, EDM, DJ, live bands, and teaching have never been better.
I'm a semi pro musician. The market makes plenty of sense if you adopt the idea that:<p>a) any commodity will eventually be priced at its cost of producution<p>b) recorded art is a commodity, at least at the level of record labels and national acts<p>I make more playing piano by myself for 30 people at a winery in the Texas hill country than I could playing in a really hopping stage band in Austin... one experience is costing the folks engaged in it a lot more, and there is a lot less competition.<p>The only reason I sell merch is because rich people would rather buy something than tip a service worker.
I built JQBX (<a href="https://www.jqbx.fm" rel="nofollow">https://www.jqbx.fm</a>) so I think about streaming, money, and the law a lot. The industry is very focused on siphoning off as much cash from the musician as possible. That being said, in the age of streaming that seems like a common model (Psy got $2 mil for 2 billion views!?). I think direct sales is the most promising future for artists compensation given that there are so many new sales and social channels. Bandcamp is does good work and if you're going to buy music (and the artist is on there) you should probably do it there. I know I'm a small fish but I'm integrating on some direct to artist sales features currently to at least help the cause.
An example of live performance making money - my friend and I busked the summer after high school and made $15 an hour or so, 6 hours a day before our voices gave out. So we were each able to make around $4k for college over two months. Annualized, $24k a year is not great, but it was a lot to us, and we also got about a gig offer per week which we declined. If we had wanted to be full time musicians we probably could have had a decent career in short order.
The era of a musician making a $100m is over.<p>The same thing has happened to books and software.<p>I'm a little surprised that movies can still make so much money. There's an explosion of video being made.
I thought the article would focus a bit more on the "or don't" part. I think Courtney Love's article on the economics of being a new musician would have added an interesting perspective to the (already complex) issue: <a href="https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/" rel="nofollow">https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/</a><p>Edit: note that the article is from 2000, and the landscape has changed a bit since then.
I think we need a platform that is a cross between Spotify and Patreon.<p>Then, artists can aim to bring in subscribers who pay them something like $2-5/month to support them as a patron.<p>You can already do this on patreon but I think a specialized platform would have more sway.<p>The platform could also sell bands enhanced band pages for a small subscription fee too.<p>Basically, a platform to fully connect artists with fans where the fans WANT to buy the music in order to support the band.
I wrote a somewhat related article a few years back that I think is very relevant to this: <a href="https://kolemcrae.com/the-internet-killed-the-rock-star-and-why-thats-okay/" rel="nofollow">https://kolemcrae.com/the-internet-killed-the-rock-star-and-...</a><p>The days a massive rock stars is over - it's not too bad though...
Old man Zappa comes to mind...<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZazEM8cgt0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZazEM8cgt0</a>
> “When you end up tracing all the dollars, around 10 percent of it gets captured by the artist. “That’s amazingly low,”<p>Actually, that's pretty good. Compare it to the profit margin of most any business.