I like Spotify :(

I decided to Google "Spotify" since I had never heard of it and, whatever-the-opposite-of-ironically-is, Google was apparently going to buy it but then didn't. I read why, and it turns out that their concern was that Spotify pays artists ##CONTENT##.005, which is _way too high_.

The music industry is hilariously doomed. No entertainment medium has done a worse job of adapting to the Information age, and the music industry is one of the first ones to feel the pressure. Can a good band honestly not make it by giving away their albums and living off concert gates? There's no way the Internet is going to replace live events any time soon, and that's always been music's calling card. How are they doing such an astoundingly bad job profiting when live sports are having money thrown at them from every direction?

Sports make a shitload of money off regular TV broadcasts?

TV networks have been signing increasingly outrageous contracts with sports leagues for their programming because normal (i.e., Netflixable and Torrentable) content has been steadily decreasing in viewership for years now.

However, what I was talking about is ticket sales. My understanding is that, with the exception of the NFL, the majority of sports make their money through ticket sales.

A good band can make money touring, but touring takes capital and its not as much money as you think and eventually you will get sick or old enough to where you can't do it anymore.

The bag most famous musicians are in these days, even many of the artists you've heard of, is that they're having to sing for their supper nightly.

Record sales, even the terrible percentage that artists get from them, really do help pad a bottom line and give you a little money to invest for retirement.

So do t-shirt sales.

That said, a lot of people I know who were in some more under the radar bands with a big enough following feel like they smell a rat here. They're fairly skeptical.

No, come on. The New York Yankees play 84 home games a year. Their player payroll is 8 million. According to the first link I found, gate alone (not counting merchandise, concession, etc) accounts for a third of league revenue. Assuming the same overhead (which I have to imagine is extremely generous to touring bands) and cutting attendance down by half since it's usually smaller (but still super-massive) arenas, that's million for 84 dates a year for the performers. Now, this is extremely fast and loose math, of course, but come the fuck on.

Not sure any major sport makes a significant amount of its money directly from ticket sales.

Even during the golden age of booming record sales, most artists made next to jack from albums, even many successful ones. Record company execs made it a point to take huge cuts of the profits and leave the artists with the scraps. Part of the reason the music industry has been such shit at adapting is because the old guard executives had a really cushy little scam going for a while, and it's hard to give that up. If you were a famous artist whose singles consistently topped the charts, you could negotiate contractual terms that would make you insanely rich, but anyone below that - 99.995% of artists - would be lucky to make six months rent off a global hit single. Why do you think most old musicians are bitter, jaded assholes?

Live shows do require an investment but the potential return is exponentially greater.

Musical acts don't get paid like sports teams. I don't know where you get the idea they do.

They're paid a set fee for performing. The ticket sales are how the house makes their money. So, no matter the show on the tour, the artist makes basically the same, minus their overhead.

So, a band playing a 125K person town to their small-sih ampitheatere as a headliner with chart success and a hit single can maybe make K a night before overhead, taxes (which have to be filed separately for each state you play in, not to mention country if you're that lucky). And that's the top .001% of bands.

It's a business guys. Don't be idiots.

No, I understand that, but I'm trying to see how the business adapts. Venues need performers to adapt and if they price themselves out of a market by taking too much, they're going to change the way they compensate acts. I'm just trying to get a handle on how, when the bottom falls out of record sales _completely_, and it's going to, how the industry is going to adapt going forward.

Venues need performers to operate, rather.

Quite hilariously, there is a pretty simple explaination for why musicians get squat and pro ballers make big bucks. It's called a union. That's right, boys and girls, at the beating heart of the American Sportsball Experience is a big, fat, stinking union. College ball players do not have a union and are just as abused and milked as musicians. There are also some technical issues but really they're second order effects compared to that big old elephant in the room.

If you listen to certain Pandora stations you can sometimes hear a band that I'm sometimes in. The checks, when I get them, are for pennies, and when I play out with them locally I usually turn out spending more than I would on a normal night (you get 2 PBRs for free and a hummus plate so I usually use the half-a-tank-of-gas $ on more drinks.) So that's why it's a hobby for me, and I have a full time job on top of it. But the band itself tours (they were at Austin Psych Fest this year and toured with a pretty well-known band whose song is used in the opening for Boardwalk Empire.) And one of the songs was featured in a popular summer movie, which probably explains the penny paychecks. Since I didn't write the songs or perform on said movie song, I don't see anything from that, but it's pretty good scratch. Unlike me, they run record distribution and record labels and recording studios, things within music where "hey I need to take 3 weeks off" is totally normal. So it is possible, for them anyway.. if I took 3 weeks off they'd say have fun on tour and I wouldn't have my job anymore.

I'm not sure how Spotify works, but Pandora just shuffles to songs that fit certain genres. So type in my band, and the next band is something else, probably something I've never heard of, but almost always something I like. Even for really specific small stations. It can get annoying when you just want to be sad and listen to my band's radio and Fleet Foxes pops up, but that's the way it goes I guess (truth be told, there's not a ton to distinguish the two.) If someone puts in Fleet Foxes, that means that there's a good chance someone might hear some new band they'd never heard of. Exposure's exposure is exposure. And sometimes that doesn't even work. A friend's band played SXSW this year to a sold out crowd and was seemingly forgotten about almost immediately, even though everyone loved them.

Anyway, that's music at its core. Like I said below, I can't facially recognize any of these people except for Kanye and Jay-Z (and yeah, holy shit is that actually Madonna?) These are people who have billboards on time square and shit. Is the service going to work like Pandora so if your 16 year old daughter likes Usher she might discover someone like Usher but better, or is it just so you can listen to these douchebags' whole albums and get them even more money?

I don't know, Homework is a good album.

Yeah, that is actually why I added the "most" in the last sentence.

I'm proud to say that I don't know who most of these people are. Kanye and Jay-Z are honestly the only people I recognized at first glance (besides Daft Punk but they don't count. I mean they do count.. you know..) I do think I'm in the minority when I say I didn't like Homework but Discovery's one of my favorite albums ever..

I'm pretty sure that was like the 500th angle shot of Chris Martin in this.

So many one-liner cliches and over-inflated "changing the world" trash from people so disconnected with reality that they don't realize this is just another idea that will be gobbled up by profiting corporations like any other "art" they think they produce for all of history. Barf.

Oh yeah. That is Chris Martin. I should've known from that episode of Extras. God that guy looks like a clone of like every "indie" guy. So much that it looks like he's hugging himself at 0:07 (which I'm sure he does.) But the rest? Johnny Knoxville? Some trucker who got lost and needed directions? Chris Martin Clone? And c'mon Daft Punk, I know it's your thing, but drop the helmets already. It's not 1997 anymore. How do you sip champagne through those things anyway?

I'm embarrassed to say how many of these people I actually do recognize. Haha I'm pretty sure "Johnny Knoxville" is Jack White (what the hell with the 'do, dude?).

I'm sure the only reason these folks got "in one room" wasn't because they were actually creating something, which this stunt tries to imply, but only because it was a publicity event and if they have a face in a camera and some pointless speech about art for "the people" they get a bump in famous coins.

The death knell of music produced as "albums".

That sounds like thinly-veiled socialism to me.

oh god, it's not veiled at all! RUN!

Isn't that kind of how they do it in Canada?

How does "pay a tax" become "get something for free"? And isn't "paying an artist based on how many people download their stuff" the way royalties have *always* worked?

The way I see it, the only difference between your proposal and the way things work now, is that under your system, we'd be forced to pay for music whether we wanted to or not, and the rich asshole Republicans in the US government would get all the money currently earmarked for the rich asshole RIAA executives; great if we want more cops, prisons, bombs, and crony capitalist kickbacks, but not much different otherwise.

The *best* thing to do would just be to step back and let nature take it's course. The music industry, as we know it, was a technologically-dependent product of industrial society; technology made it possible, and now, technology has made it obsolete. The business model is no longer feasible, given the post-scarcity nature of digital information, and the ease with which individuals can both aquire the means of production and bypass the gatekeepers through self-distribution models. And when business models become obsolete, they die. We don't prop them up through corporate welfare, and we certainly don't enshrine them in the same corporate portfolio as the military and the ATF! What you're proposing, Mr Ashtar, is nothing short of mercantilism; a last ditch attempt to centralize power and preserve bourgeois market privilege through the pseudo-populist rhetoric of "socialist/corporatist" anti-liberalism. When, in fact, what "we" (that is, the abstract, homogeneous social unit that does not truly exist in nature) should be doing is precisely nothing; letting it all burn down and embracing the future. Because the future can be *awesome*.

What we should be doing, I'd call it "anarchizing the music industry", but you could call it "communising the music industry", if that makes you feel better.

I love you EH.

Thanks! That means a lot to me.

I think the reason for that is that quite recently, Bono crashed his bicycle into some hapless pedestrian in Central Park and broke quite a number of things inside his body. Something about being housebound for a while? Otherwise, I'm sure he would be there. This thing is like the Knights of the Round Asshole.

I love Flac files too, and always go for them when available. The average Flac might be 800kbps, but I'd think that most decent videos are higher than that, especially in HD.

If an album in Flac is in the 300 meg range, and an mkv of a TV show is 350 megs for for an hour show on a torrent, that would be pretty similar, and what many people are downloading already.

Might as well push all the way to Flac. I never liked the turnover where you have to keep replacing your collection. When I got into music I thought 128k mp3 was great, but not any more, then it was upgrades to 192, now 320, but skip it all and go to a well mastered Flac to begin with.

One thing I didn't dig about this was the throbbing bass line all through it, making the dialog hard to hear. That's not the way I learned to do voice-over.

Boomer

You would've done a much better job, Boomer! And about the Bono thing, maybe, in addition to the bike thing, U2 had to sign some agreement with Apple and iTunes to not pimp any other products. I mean, they did get a HUGE chunk of money for that.

I'm guessing they named it Tidal because it's a homonym of "Title". If that's what they wanted to go for then why not be honest and call it "Prophet".

sorry, *for being entitled to free art.

Thanks John. You and I don't always agree, but when we do, it's a beautiful thing.

Also, it's important to point out that people can't make money distributing or managing or otherwise overseeing music anymore; or rather, they can, it's just getting harder, and they need to rely on increasingly drastic, artificial legalistic constructs in order to maintain their class privilege (like ashtar's "corporatize the record industy into the federal government" plan above). The same goes for the over-class of well-connected, "establishment" artists, like Lars Ulrich or Madonna. However, your average, rank-and-file musician is actually better off today than ever before. You might not become a multimillionaire at the age of 19, but the odds of that happening in the past were slim to none, and the trade-off - a pretty decent shot at making second-job money off of your hobby - is well worth the alleged cost.

Besides, if you're going to get involved in music, you should do it because you want to. You should do it for the love of art, or at least for the love of teenage groupies; if money is what you're after, be a banker.