So, Keith (and Sarah) have been sick all weekend; here's hoping they get to feeling better.
I installed an 18" stage in the studio to get Keith's drums off the ground.
My oldest brother turned me on to the Dilbert Blog ( http://dilbert.com/blog ). Scott Adams has a unique way of looking at things (reminds me of Freakonomics). I've been reading it daily and it caused me to have a pretty long daydream about the direction of the entertainment industry, and in particular the way the music industry is changing.
Geoff Emerick (the guy who recorded the Beatles, whose book I recently finished) said a lot of interesting things about how music has changed since the dawn of digital technology. The one thing he said that stood out most was that basically, the music industry has become flooded with mediocre product. Because, for around $2500, anyone can get ahold of the equipment necessary to make a record, tons of people who otherwise would never have recorded music have been able to record and market their songs virtually the same way as anyone with a record deal. (Emerick's main complaint about this was that there will never be another Beatles because the record labels are forced to get immediate returns on their investments, which prevents them from developing promising acts over multiple albums. These days, if a band doesn't blow up on their first major release, they're tossed aside for the next big thing.)
Think about this: after I get off work today, I can go home, go into my studio, and record an acoustic song. Within a couple of hours, I can edit out the silences and mistakes, add various vocal effects and have a finished "product". It would take me about 30 seconds to compress that to an MP3 file and have it posted on the internet, where anyone in the world can access it instantly for free. This is great for mediocre choades like me, but bad for lower tier professionals and REALLY bad for the major labels.
Music is, at it's core, simple math. There are a finite combination of notes and tones that you can put together to make music. When you filter it down to the combination of notes and sounds that the average person would find appealling, you get down to a pretty limited set. When you filter that down to the very few instruments that people are used to hearing, and into the genre that the paying public wants to hear, and you're talking a VERY small package of ways you box up music and sell it.
If you had a giant database of every hit song ever written, and had them broken down into what chord progressions they were made up of, I bet you could take any new song that hits the radio, plug it into the database, and get multiple songs that have the exact same combination of basic melody and rhythm. What I'm getting at is that there are no new songs. Music, and rock music in particular, is a mature industry. You're not going to make improvements on the existing products. All you're going to do is re-package the stuff that's already out there and do a better job of selling it. (This is one reason I've always been so infatuated with vocal quality--the human voice is, imo, the only popular instrument in modern music that is incredibly unique to the person playing it.)
Anyway, these are mainly just a serious of fairly obvious and exhausted observations. But one thing I've taken from them is that I think that in the future, the demand dollars allocated to the music industry will continue to gravitate toward concerts and away from recordings. I think what you'll see because of this is an increase of middle-tier acts and a decrease in the number of bands doing world and national tours. It's just too expensive for the labels to promote these bands nationally to sell out medium sized venues like Stubb's, when a guy like Bob Schneider, with virtually no advertising expenses, can sell out that place once a month for eternity.
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4 comments:
A recent story on This American Life(http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1277) supports your theory. Fast forward to about minute 14 to hear the music they created based on a survey of what people wanted to hear(and not hear)in a song.
That's really interesting. Looks like my voice type (high male) isn't ideal. That opera-rap in the "most hated" song is hilarious.
Yeah, I'm wondering how the music industry makes any money at all these days. Why anyone buys a CD anymore is beyond me. I suppose if encoding or enforcement of copyright laws gets better that might change. But seriously, where does the revenue come from in the music biz? Concerts only? Do radio stations pay to get the tracks now? It just can't be from CD sales.
Mostly concerts. My numbers may be off, but I think overall album sales (when you factor in a dramatic increase in download sales with the dramatic decrease in CD sales) are down by over 70% since 10 years ago. Most of the $ comes from touring. Radio stations still technically pay-for-play, but most of that is squandered in the complex system that essentially buys the radiotime in the 1st place, so touring is the only way for artists to make $. Artists that appeal to teenagers and poor people (rap guys like Lil Wayne and acts like Hannah Montana) can still make good money on album sales. Everybody else has to get what they can off of touring. There's still decent $ there; Hall of Fame acts like The Stones, U2, etc. still make tens of millions each year.
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