The New Yorker has a piece on the live music ticketing industry, in their August 10 issue. Here's an abstract at their website (registration required for the full article), and here's an audio discussion with the author, John Seabrook.
This is really a piece about the big side of town: massive U.S. artists like Bruce Springsteen and The Eagles. It's an interesting piece from that perspective, but it's a whole different world from the average band experience.
Sasha Frere-Jones says it well. For a better article about Radiohead's opinion than the one he links to, see here and, as it's Stereogum, you have to read the comments for the full hilarity.
Plastic Palace Alice has thought about the possibility of releasing singles or EPs instead of another full-length album, but it's a difficult choice to make at the moment. For now, it looks like an LP is in the works instead, and not for any immediately obvious reasons (and I'm not sure that many bands really think in terms of "single" versus "filler", so much as "possible single" versus "songs we actually like").
Andrew Murphett had an interview with Jet in the EG on Friday, which you can read online here.
The story of Jet has been somewhat of a cautionary tale the past couple of years, with their lack of recent success attributed to all manner of things. Being dropped by a major label is a pretty common way for a band to fall apart, so full credit to them for managing to avoid destruction. Aside from that though, there were a couple of things in the article that caught my attention.
The first is the nature of the article itself. In its own way, it's a relatively informative piece, and perfectly well written. But I do get a little bit tired of what seems to pass for music journalism here - if not everywhere else. Again, no problem with the article itself, or with Andrew Murphett, but the fact that there are essentially only three ways in which the music press writes about popular music: reviews, interviews and announcements that are basically just reprinted press releases issued by the bands themselves. In this instance, like many others, it's a combination of all three.
Aside from it being an interview, Murphett briefly mentions the music on Jet's new album, suggesting that it's pretty good, without really offering any analysis beyond saying that there are "two excellent ballads, (and) a couple of rock-radio-friendly mid-tempo tracks". And it's also propaganda. At the top of the article we are told that "Jet are ready to soar", and the tone continues from there. Too often it simply feels like it's an article tailored to suit the needs of Jet much more than the reader.
The other thing I noticed was right at the end. Mark Wilson, the bass player, when talking about the fact that they weren't signed to a label until recently, says that "as arrogant as it sounds, we knew that somebody would pick us up." It's funny to think that it would be considered arrogant for a band to be confident that they would be signed to a record label. It suggests that the label is making a big investment by signing them, thereby making it arrogant to assume that one would so readily agree to distribute their record. This needs to change, if it hasn't already. Labels need to charge for their services, which can be anything from simply distributing an album to hiring producers to record it. The don't need to pay big advances, they don't need to act like banks. They need to operate in a way that their successes aren't nearly as profitable as they were 10 years ago, but their failures aren't nearly as costly. If a band approaches a label with an album already in the can, and the money to pay for their services, why reject them? If a band has no money and hasn't got any to record an album, send them to a bank to get a loan.
06 August 2009 —
Touring
Sasha Frere Jones, in a short column about Steely Dan in The New Yorker, asks "Would anybody this smart and cynical go into music now, especially given that the money is in touring rather than studio work?"
You mean this sort of touring?
David Byrne posted this on his journal a while ago, before this site was active, but I thought I'd bring it up here. Byrne speaks from the perspective of an artist, of course, as opposed to that of an audience, and I like his relatively ambivalent take on how art affected his life.
So, was art good for me? It got me out of gym class, that’s for sure...
..But what about looking at pictures, as opposed to making them? I love doing it — my house and office are plastered with stuff — but I don’t see how it can be uplifting, though I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.
One's life can be enriched by all manner of things, of course, and I think I'm too young to be able to judge what impact music has had and will have on my own. I can certainly think of ways in which my life is likely to be made a lot harder as a result of focussing on music so much, but that's kind of a given.
According to this piece in The New York Times (via Daringfireball), "since music sales peaked in 1999, the value of those sales, after adjusting for inflation, has dropped by more than half". Which I guess is interesting, but is anyone that surprised? Two things in this article surprised me more:
The peak of music sales in terms of value was in 1999. That seems so late to me, now that it feels like we've been in the current climate forever. I guess it was around that time when I first started to download music myself, using up inordinate amounts of space on my computer's hard drive.
If you examine the accompanying infographic, you'll see what peak value was for vinyl, in adjusted dollars: $8.1 billion, in 1978. Which is less that half the $16.4 billion that CDs reached at their peak. No wonder everyone in the music industry was doing so much cocaine in the 80s.
I'm not really sure what this whole "death of the music industry" line is supposed to be about. There will always be a music industry, because people are always going to play music, and some of them are going to find ways of making money from it. It's like talking about the death of the food industry. Of course things are changing, and a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money before things settle to a new equilibrium, but that's going to happen in a lot of areas over the next few decades.
According to this article by the BBC, scientists have discovered that chimpanzees "are biologically programmed to appreciate pleasant music". The young chimp, Sakura, "pulled on the cord to voluntarily listen to the pleasurable music significantly more often than to the dissonant passages."
More important than any of this, though, is how incredibly adorable Sakura is. Watch her look of complete annoyance when the dissonant music comes on. Kids(Chimps) sure do say(do) the darnedest(cutest) things!
Of course, there are all manner of arguments here that other people could make about the nature of consonant and dissonant music in our society. But, as a comment on human relationships with music, it's no revelation. Pitches tuned along the harmonic series aren't just consonant because we think they are; they're consonant at a base physical level. Is it surprising to learn that we have some unconscious appreciation for that fact?
One wonders how Sakura would react to this (via Kottke). It's cats! Playing Schoenberg! As long as nobody pretends that Sakura offers and sort of "proof" that consonance is somehow better than dissonance, I'm happy. Very happy, because I get to watch animals both perform and respond to music.
NPR has an article here about The Posies, and how they earn money (via @sashafrerejones).
It's a story that gets told more often these days, which I think is a good thing. There's no point in just saying "it's impossible to earn money from album sales" and leave it at that. There are ways.
The killer bit is here:
"I actually saw a check for that record that went in my pocket," Auer says. "I never saw a check from the sales of any of the records I've made on the major labels."
That certainly mirrors the experiences of many bands I've known who were signed to majors at some point. Of course, it's still worth it because you get to hang out with coke dealers!
After writing the post below, I started thinking a bit more about what it is to be a fan these days. If a true fan is someone who is prepared to spend $100 a year on an artist, I'm not sure that the label would ever apply to me. If I had the opportunity to see Wayne Shorter perform every year, I might well pay $100 for that. Possibly. The fact that I have to create hypotheticals, however, suggests that it's unlikely.
So who does spend that much on any one artist, for more than two years in a row – if we exclude one-off spending that would average out to be much more, such as an individual painting worth thousands of dollars? Hard data would be nice to find, but I have yet to see anything that shows whether such a sum is something that music listeners ever spend on a single artist.
Lacking actual evidence though, let's take an example of an Australian teenager who listens to pop music – most of which is American. The cheapest ticket to see Beyoncé in Melbourne is about $100, ranging up to $170. She toured in 2007 also, and we can assume that the tickets were a similar price. So that's $50-$85 a year averaged out, if she were to tour every two years. This fan also decides to buy every studio album of hers and of Destiny's Child, including the "8 Days of Christmas"(!) album, and the compilation "#1s". Beyoncé has released three solo studio albums (plus a live album which, hell, I'll include too), and Destiny's Child released 7, making it 11 albums over an 11-year span from 1998 to 2009. Assuming the charitable rate of $30 an album, that's up to $80-$115 a year. If you include $50 worth of merchandise spent at each concert, that makes $130 a year. Yay! A true fan!
This model also assumes that an artist can gain new fans at the rate that she loses them: we know that it's not the same fan that goes to a concert once every two years for 10 years, but rather that for every fan that stops attending concerts she attains a new one with the same habits.
But we know that this is stretching it to the extremes. I can't find how many times Beyoncé actually toured Australia since Destiny's Child's first album, but I can't imagine it was once every two years. And it's hard to imagine that the average price of those albums was anywhere near $30. So it's highly unlikely that it's really even practically possible to spend that amount of money on a single artist over an extended period of time.
Plus, this is fucking Beyoncé! If she can't get someone to spend $100 a year on her, who can?
This suggests to me that there is a pretty good reason for attempting to reach a broader audience: true fans are a myth.
Is it already happening? Is it about to hit? What favourite band of yours is going to suddenly seem embarrassingly decadent and excessive? Are thermals going to become fashionable again?