The Future of Music: Go Corporate or Go Busking
February 24th, 2008 by Patrick
A couple of articles about music downloading caught my eye last week. The first was the news that the Songwriters Association of Canada wants somebody - the government, I guess - to tack an additional five bucks a month onto our Internet fees to help pay songwriters and artists for illegally downloaded music. I can understand why the composers are miffed at not being properly remunerated for all that humming and scribbling, but why the entire web-using community should ante up is less clear. If widespread on-line theft is the criteria for societal subsidies, then porn producers deserve a few bucks from my ISP too.
The second article that I read without paying for concerned a report by Forrester Research predicting that music downloads will overtake CD sales by 2012 and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about it. And it gets worse - nobody wants to pay for music, advertising-funded downloads won’t work, subscription services are a joke, and social networks like Facebook are destined to become hotbeds of file-sharing.
Paradoxically, all of this may take us back to the days before one-to-many technologies made it possible to sell the same thing millions of times and get paid for it each time. Before that, such money as there was in popular music came principally from performing in front of live audiences night after night, kind of like a real job. Musicians who don’t have recording contracts, or who have crappy ones, still do it.
What the gods of tech give, they also take away, and while getting your song out is easier than ever, control over where it goes and how you get paid for it is pretty much impossible.
So how will the elite of musical artists, songwriters and their posses and hangers-on continue to pull down preposterously big bucks in a world where songs are freely and easily shared?
James McQuivey from Forrester has the obvious solution, which is corporate sponsorship. While music and big business have been sodomizing each other from the beginning of the rock era, it was Michael Jackson who made it quasi-acceptable to be an unabashed corporate shill when he set his hair on fire for Pepsi back in the ’80s. The trail he blazed was followed swiftly by Madonna and others for whom the concept of too much money or too little artistic integrity was meaningless.
The day when selling out is the exception rather than the rule may soon be over, according to McQuivey, who predicts (perhaps a little too gleefully) that “”Artists who used to pretend that their platinum album success was really about their “art” will no longer have that luxurious pretense because labels won’t sign them unless they agree to a barrage of sponsorship opportunities.”
The alternative may be that even genuinely popular musicians will have to ratchet down their financial expectations, and about time. It’s not as though 50 years ago society suddenly realized that recording artists were so fabulously talented, so superior to the rest of us, that they deserved solid gold toilets in their private jets. No, the musical gravy train started chugging along because of the invention of recording media and of radio, accidents of technology that allowed popular culture to be commoditized and sold on an industrial scale.
Two choices, then. On the one hand, the lucky few can toe the commercial line of whatever corporation picks them out of the line-up at the pop music whorehouse, and hope that their sugar daddy is somebody palatable like Apple and not a company that sells flamethrowers to the Taliban.
Anyone who’s not quite sponsor-worthy can cling to whatever sense of counterculture purity they’ve still got, but resign themselves to the fact that even if millions of fans are listening, the filthy lucre may never follow.
For me, I’m pretty sure I’d go for the money. But one thing to which I will never agree is paying five bucks a month so that the guys from Hedley can buy matching Ferraris.
Trent Reznor made over a million dollars in a couple of weeks without corporate sponsorship.
There’s an obvious and economically viable option you missed: making money off the scarce goods associated with music.
Digital music is an infinite good. It’s abundant, so the price naturally approaches zero (the marginal cost of production).
When copies are free, you need to sell things that can’t be copied.
Physical goods surrounding music may be the most obvious scarce goods (t-shirts, limited edition autographed vinyls, posters, album art, etc) but the most important scarce good is an artist’s time, whether for performance or more content creation. If there’s demand for an artist’s musician, there is an opportunity to monetize the creation of content (rather than only trying to make money after content has been created).
I could go on forever. Point is, there are more ways to make money than just through selling CDs or through copyright. The record business may be in decline, but the music business is thriving.