Stephen Budd, a council member of the Music Manager’s Forum and founder of Stephen Budd Management, the producer management agency which looks after one of We Are Listening’s esteemed panelists, producer KK (Bjork, Dido, Nelly Furtado), commented on the devaluation of professional music producers at a summit of music producer managers in London this week.
Budd, and his peers, are calling for change in producer agreements due to unreasonable expectations and progressive devaluation of producers’ work, often subject to “on spec” agreements where the financial risk rests on the producers’ shoulders and their agents, no less.
The summit represented a concerted industry effort to brainstorm new business models to ensure the futures of professional producers through a restructuring of royalty shares in a number of areas where producers are professionally and creatively involved.
Motley Crue’s guitarist, Mick Mars, has struck a deal with the celebrity services division of Paid Inc., a new media company with a strong focus on online relationship and ecommerce solutions for celebrities, to build a brand new website at www.MickMars.tv and host a range artist-to-fan relationship features to maximize Mars’ online presence. In addition to offering Mar’s musical portfolio, the site will introduce new and exclusive guitar clinics, educational resources, and personal performance tips and video demonstrations. There will also be a strong focus on authentic Motley memorabilia and a new line of merchandise, all under the Paid Inc. celebrity brand management umbrella.
Although a turbulent time to be in business, let alone the music business, I’m delighted to learn that National Geographic has taken the initiative to launch a music label, Nat Geo Music, to produce and distribute music from around the globe. As part of National Geographic’s mutli-media expansion, the label will be based in New York City and aims to release six to eight albums by year’s end.
Starting at approximately $1000, emusu provides a turn-key solution for managing and selling your digital assets from your own domain, as opposed to distributing to third-party ecommerce websites or via social network applications. The system is entirely web-based and the company is sinking its teeth into the music industry. Ouch.
The service allows its customers to create custom web pages from a series of handy templates and enable fans to buy directly from the source or incorporate its technology into an existing site geared for music retail.
The fact is that most artists simply don’t sell. In fact, most labels don’t sell a volume of any note. As such, even if the service was free, managing your own music sales is not too far up your priority list unless you’re shifting so many units that iTunes’ commission significantly diminishes your bottom line. Furthermore, if MySpace, boasting approximately three million *active* musician users can’t make Snocap work on exclusive terms, how is emusu going to convince prospective clients that they can sell – and sell more – on their own?
At a time where the industry is shifting away from record sales and toward ticketing, merchandising, bundling, licensing, sponsorship, and advertising, emusu is a surprising entry into the space. Selling recorded music is no longer the end game but rather the marketing collateral to sell something else. The infamous 360 deal is a tribute to this strategy and Live Nation is a testament to its success. Starbucks too.
However, if emusu can leverage its platform to forward thinking megastars such as Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails, both of which ’sold’ direct-to-the-fan, they may have a lucrative client. Or two.
Ethan Diamond, the brain behind OddPost, the web mail service acquired by Yahoo! and, more recently, founder of Bandcamp, dispatched a newsletter today announcing the band portal’s new feature-set and recent upgrades. The free publishing platform boasts nifty and relevant tools for artists and band promoters to optimize their online presence and provide an uber-cool experience for fans and new comers. Armed with features such as domain redirection to a unique domain name within the site, fan email capturing on transactions, and IP licensing control (courtesy of Creative Commons) associated with the variety of ways to transmit music files, Bandcamp is set to become a popular choice for the brand conscious and online promotion savvy music community. In addition to Bandcamp’s visual bells and whistles and you-control-your-music ethos, the company focuses on pertinent music file meta-tagging and artist profile-specific search engine optimization for its individual members. Did I mention that it’s free? Bandcamp is really quite simple, down to earth, and rather wonderful.
Google’s VP of Content Partnership, David Eun, said that YouTube “is not screwing the labels, and, if anything, needs to partner more closely with them”, in response to Warner Music Group’s demand that YouTube remove every video from WMG’s catalogue.
Google acquired YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion in an all-stock transaction. It has since been working closely with record labels and independent rights owners on a number of mechanical royalty models for balanced and mutual content monetization, at which point, it struck a ‘blanket license’ deal with Warner. However, Warner has not been able to re-negoatiate terms with Google who, resultantly, had to remove videos under WMG’s authorship or which contain copyright associated with WMG’s publishing. As this amounts to a great many clips which are now ‘unplayable’, YouTube, the world’s largest video portal, can no longer claim to provide “infinite choice”, at least under the music category which will no longer include Madonna, REM and Eric Clapton, to name a few. Quite a blow.
The feud has snowballed and YouTube users are documenting their frustration on the video portal. Here’s one version I enjoyed watching:
Hello Operator, recent winners of Breaking the Band, were called a “newsmaker” in Macleans magazine, and listed as “one of 12 bands to watch out for” by Canoe.ca. Their video for Chasing Satellites has been in regular rotation on Much Music and Much Loud since November 2007 and the band has been on “Much On Demand”, “Going Coastal” and “Much News”. Hello Operator have appeared and performed on MTV Live, were showcased on E-Talk Daily and have toured with Faber Drive, Hilary Duff, Ill Scarlet, Switchfoot, Simple Plan, Hedley, Thornley, Loverboy, and many more. The London Free Press called Hello Operator a “guaranteed breakthrough rock act” and now, after headlining club dates across Canada, more stadium shows with Duff, and several U.S. tours behind them, the band has just released a new 6-song EP, called The Breaks. The new material offers escapist pop jangle tempered by a moody new-wave pulse. Not only is it a progression from the quirky Cars/ Costello vibe of the first Hello Operator EP (produced by Arnold Lanni), but is also the result of many hours spent in the studio, where Mike Condo and Evan Huson experimented with taking a new approach to their songs. The Breaks (co-produced by Mike Condo and
Dom Condo) shows the evolution of Hello Operator from Mike’s original work to collaboration between Mike, Evan and a full live band. VIEW Magazine calls it “a mature, expansive set of fun, playful songs.”
The record industry, worth approximately $31 billion globally in 2006, is a large slice of the much broader and more than three times larger ‘music industry‘, worth more than $130 billion. With record sales dipping and alternative revenue streams coming into significant play, a broader view of the music business, namely the live, gaming and film/television licensing, and publishing sectors, is warranted for budding professionals. In spite of the bad rep, the record industry remains to be one of the most creatively oriented sectors in media with 20% of its revenues invested in the acquisition and development of new talent. This is a staggering figure for R&D investment in intellectual property. Although this investment is still being recouped from record sales, revenue goldmines are being discovered in other media sectors which are increasingly more prominent than the traditional retail sources. Recorded music has become a key influencer in the mobile industry and a pivotal consumer offering in $100 billion worth of broadband subscriptions in 2006. The live performance sector is growing rapidly and its promising, future effect on music merchandising and sponsorship remains to be seen.
While the record industry appears to be an exclusive club, every artist recording and, in one form or another, publishing music is, in fact, a part of it. As music converges with other media, so does the record industry with other industries. As such, as more and more artists produce and publish great new music, more opportunities arise for monetizing their copyright without the dependency on actual record sales.
Trent Reznor has done it again. Few musicians have Trent’s gift for realizing trends in the music industry and preemptively meeting their fans needs, rather than simply reacting to changes in the market.
With a note attached that says, “Thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years — this one’s on me”, Reznor’s latest album, The Slip, is now available for free download everywhere.
In addition to being offered for free, the album has been released under the Creative Commons “attribution noncommercial share-alike” license, and a post on the NIN site says, “We encourage you to remix it, share it with your friends, post it on your blog, play it on your podcast, give it to strangers, etc.”
The album is available in better-than-CD sounding 24-bit, 96-kHz WAV files, MP3, or lossless (FLAC or Apple), and comes with a printable PDF with album artwork, track listing, etc.
Get your free copy of The Slip now at http://theslip.nin.com
All you need is an email address.
It seems like eons ago that Madonna seeded file-sharing sites with MP3s of her voice scolding fans about the evils of music downloading. Well if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. In Early October, 2007, Madonna walked away from her 25 year relationship with Warner Music and signed a new 10-year contract worth $120 million with Live Nation, an LA-based concert promotion firm. In a released statement Madonna explained, “the paradigm in the music business has shifted and as an artist and a business woman, I have to move with that shift.”
So what does a concert promotion firm have that Warner Music doesn’t? Live Nation offers a complete marketing package for the Madonna label and recognizes, like Madonna now does, that music is the least of what she sells. The deal covers every aspect of the Madonna music brand including touring, merchandising, fan club, DVDs, website, music related TV and film, licensing and sponsorship agreements, and of course, record albums.
This mega-deal with the US’s largest concert promoter is the first step in which Live Nation aims to set itself up as a new breed of record company by appealing to mega-stars and offering them one-stop shopping benefits to market and sell their image, which, for an established artist, constitutes so much more than just their music. It combines two industry powerhouses into one efficient revenue stream that can more effectively promote the Madonna label and dramatically increase revenue for both parties.
Although a turbulent time to be in business, let alone the music business, I’m delighted to learn that National Geographic has taken the initiative to launch a music label, Nat Geo Music, to produce and distribute music from around the globe. As part of National Geographic’s mutli-media expansion, the label will be based in New York City and aims to release six to eight albums by year’s end.
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