I was having this conversation on Saturday...

I'm hanging with my new musical buddy George Kilby. He's decided to upgrade his website so we're doing a consult to get a feel for what direction we're going to move him in (pardon my grammar). He said something at one point about a friend of his who'd decided to totally forgo having their own website in favor of just managing their presence through Facebook and a couple of other social sites.

I'm kicking myself for not having a canned response as to why I think that's a bad idea, but I guess i hadn't really thought about it too much in a while.

In my humble opinion...

I can totally understand why an artist would do that. It's a hassle to manage your own website. There's tons of traffic already happening for free over on Facebook, they already have most of the goodies that a band website needs to have built for you, and you've got to spend half your life posting all this crap there again anyway. Why not just skip the middle man?

To me it's two things – branding and informational liberty.

Branding

If you fold up your own website and just manage your presence through mySpace or Facebook or Reverb Nation, you're effectively subordinating your brand to theirs. I don't mean to suggest that you are bigger than Facebook, but to me it almost implies that Facebook or MySpace owns you if you send your potential fans there instead of a property of your own. Would a “normal” business send people to MySpace instead of having their own site? No! They want to make money...

Informational liberty

I have some friends in a band. They've moved their main website onto a platform called Ning. Ning is a well funded company that aims to make the process of building a “social network” something that anyone can do. It's sort of like the old days of having your own message board on your site, except with the features one would expect of a modern social network. They have a pretty decent system for listing their tour dates, and maintaining the info is pretty easy. It doesn't cost that much and it works well, so what's the problem?

What if they every want to do something different? What happens when the day comes that they want to do something that Ning won't let them do (or won't let them do at a price they can afford), like maybe host and sell their own digital downloads or build a design template that's outside the parameters of what Ning allows?

They're faced with a tough decision. On the one hand they don't have access to tools that they'd like to use to promote their band. On the other hand they shutter a social network that they've asked their fans to join and be a part of, one that has been a definite success so far. Maybe it's not an issue right now and maybe it won't be that big of one ever, but by inviting their fans to create a community around them using proprietary software that they'll never fully control they're rolling the dice that Ning (or whoever ultimately buys Ning) will continue to do them and their fans right.

In summary

Better to build your own site and use that as the hub around which you organize the rest of your social accessories.

#theidea #music #business

So Eminem's old producers sued Universal over royalties. For those of you who have never been signed to a record contract, they are shadier (pardon the pun) than you probably imagine. The whole point of getting a record deal is to try and make some money off of selling your recording, right? Well, over the last decades, the industry (and by industry, I mean the lawyers and label heads in charge of finding ever more inventive ways of scamming inattentive rock stars (which is generally easier than shooting fish in a barrel)) has come up with some novel ideas about how your royalty rate should be calculated. They subtract the cost of all manner of promotional charges for the posters you see in the window of the record store, and then things like “breakage” (which hasn't been a real issue since records were made of shellac), and then just arbitrarily lop off another 10% for this, and 10% for that, until by the end you're not getting paid for the 1 million records you sold, you're getting paid for maybe 500k of them, if you're very lucky. Then they charge you back for some more (usually bogus) stuff. The whole game is to keep you, the artist, in the hole. It's easy. Oh, the label is sending a limo to pick you up at the airport and take you to the Grammy's! Great! Do I need to tip the driver?

Add into this that their lawyers have seen fit to jump on digital distribution by making your royalty rate 75% (again, if you're lucky) of what it would be if there were a physical medium being sold through a store (and this is in addition to subtracting for “Breakage”, etc.), and the margins for the artist get even lower. It's pathetic, honestly. Even more pathetic is that artists are usually in a big hurry to sign these pieces of shit.

So, when I read things like this, it really makes me wonder. To sum up, Em's old producers sued over the fact that there were so many absurdly non-justifiable, pre-royalty charges added up before they got their cut. They argue, and rightly so in my mind, that since you can't “break” a digital download, and the distribution costs are virtually nil, and that the labels aren't paying for in-store promotional material to market the download, that those charges shouldn't apply to their royalties. They argued that the deals should work more like commercial and movie licensing agreements work. That'd bring their cut up, as producers. It'd also bring down the labels' cut, obviously. The jury found for Universal, unfortunately...

So when I read articles like the one that I posted earlier today, I wonder why music label execs think we're all so stupid. By “we”, I don't just mean artists because there's plenty of empirical evidence that we are in fact, but the entire music listening populace. Why do we want to consume the crap that they sell, ripping off artists in the process, ignoring or suppressing good music along the way?

Time to get back on my musicTech thread...

#music #business

Now, this part won't be any news to anyone, but will mainly serve to help organize the thoughts in my brain. First, the old way:

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The old way involved the “record industry”. The record industry used to exist because recording was very expensive. It was expensive to record a song, it was expensive to reproduce the recording of the song, and it was really expensive to warehouse, distribute, and sell the recording of that song. Thus a whole industry cropped up to take advantage of the fact that the barrier to entry for your average recording artist, say Ma Carter out of the hills around Bristol VA, was so astronomically high that nobody really thought about releasing their own music. Show up, play my tunes, get paid for them? Okay! This worked great for long enough for the basic oligarchic framework of the major label system to rise to power.

A moment now to reflect. It's extremely popular to bash record labels, and with good reason. Let us now take a moment, however, to reflect on the cultural purpose that they've served...

I take it for granted that America is, on balance, the coolest nation on the face of the earth, in the history of humanity. Citizens from other countries would doubtless dispute this claim, but I would submit to you that even those societies that profess to hate everything America stands for only hate so strongly because they don't enjoy the liberties and luxuries that Americans have long grown accustomed to. Now, imagine if the record business never existed, that there was no such thing as an LP or a CD, and the only way to enjoy music was to go listen to it live. There were no Beatles, except for those of you lucky enough to be in the Cavern Club, no Elvis, unless you went down to the BBQ shack to see him in Memphis, no Chuck Berry, no Led Zeppelin, no Pink Floyd, no Eagles, no Neil Young, no Bob Dylan, no Coldplay, no U2. I know, a lot of these bands are from the UK, but I consider the give and take of the UK and the USA to be part of the competitive exchange that has pushed the limits of musical creativity for the better. And we can safely lump all these bands into the category of Western Music. Now, imagine if Western Music never existed. How would we export our culture abroad? At gunpoint, probably. How would generations of kids be incited to stand up and make change happen? At gunpoint, probably. My point is that exactly at the moment in human events that the USA and the UK became 2 of the dominant political powers in the world (1946 or so), rock and roll made an appearance. It moved legions of Japanese kids just like it did American kids. The cultural service that the major label system provided these kids and us to come later is therefore immeasurable. And the world danced together...

Now, back to the point, to be covered in another blog, because really long blogs are fucking boring...

#music #business #the-idea

When in the course of your bands business, it becomes necessary to cast off your old, crappy website and the confusing, unnavigable interface which you present to the world as your first impression, and to assume the powers of PHP, CSS, XML, RoR, and other technologies not yet invented in the pursuit of a highly compelling online experience, a more meaningful dialogue with your fanbase, and the glorious rewards of possibly higher merch sales, a decent respect to the opinions of webmasters everywhere requires that I should declare the causes which impel me to dream of a better way....

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#theidea #music #business

When in the course of your bands business, it becomes necessary to cast off your old, crappy website and the confusing, unnavigable interface which you present to the world as your first impression, and to assume the powers of PHP, CSS, XML, RoR, and other technologies not yet invented in the pursuit of a highly compelling online experience, a more meaningful dialogue with your fanbase, and the glorious rewards of possibly higher merch sales, a decent respect to the opinions of webmasters everywhere requires that I should declare the causes which impel me to dream of a better way....

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all websites are not created equal, yet they are endowed by their creators with the potential to be entertaining, informative, and even useful in a utilitarian sense. That to secure these ideals, most bands stumble blindly about with no technical idea of what's involved in actually building a modern website, that the layout and information contained in your average band website has been virtually untouched for several years in a field where technology is changing every day. That the potential for truly democratizing the music industry has never been more at hand than it is today. That nobody in the business of selling records is interested in seeing a better system devised. That the only way forward for the record industry is via the ubiquitous distribution system present in every one of your homes. That the only way to achieve such independence is to fight for change, to take up development tools, and to learn what bands and the music business are doing wrong, and to right these wrongs.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that those of us yearning for change learn as much as we can about the technologies available, so that we may make best use of them and not stumble where so many of our brethren have before. This blog shall henceforth detail my quest to overhaul the sorry state of affairs that is the music recording industry, so that it may brighten all of our lives forevermore...

#theidea #music #business