Jul 28

Hyping Rented Music: Time For A REALLY Dumb Idea?

New Music Media No Comments »
Image Courtesy of Ryan Van Etten @ VirtualMusic.tv

Image Courtesy of VirtualMusic.tv

Brendan Mulligan, the founder of ArtistData now flush with SonicBids cash from their recent sale, opines that rented music is the way to go over at Hypebot.  While it sounds hip and enlightened, this is one of the scariest (and dumbest) memes I’ve seen in awhile.

First of all, if you actually care what music sounds like the whole idea’s crazy. Pandora and Rdio soundalikeass!  I’m not a snob, I’m just not deaf (yet!). 128K artifacts are ugly and easily audible, and that’s the best-case scenario streamed.  This is fine for background listening, and for many people that means it’s good enough. But if you listen on a decent system, not computer speakers, the current streams are not ready for primetime.  If recent bandwidth trends continue, this won’t be getting better any time soon; the unlimited bandwidth needed to get your music streamed in is no longer the norm for iPhones, and most carriers are finding ways to limit demand.  Most users are moving to smaller, data-driven smartphones with similar issues, and away from desktop broadband.  Strike one.

If one accepts this meme, wither Sgt. Peppers, Dark Side of the Moon or Exile on Main Street? Concept albums and bodies of work are less accessible as sound, but we also give up the liner notes and packaging with the services you’re pimping. When you move to this new paradigm, the act of listening to music purely for its own sake becomes more difficult. You can’t invite a bunch of friends over to hear the new Flaming Lips record, unless listening is really just an excuse for drinking and yakking – drop outs and re-syncs are part of the experience, along with the $hitty $hitty sound, eliminating the possibility of pure musical entertainment.  Even the bad-old CD can be fun to listen to as an album, when the music is good.  Streaming makes pure listening rare or impossible.  Strike two.

Keep in mind, once you board this train there’s no going back. It will disrupt and destroy the old paradigm entirely. As the physical purchase market shrinks, economies of scale go away (vinyl sells for a permanent premium, because manufacturing capacity is capped and shrinking – no mfg has sold a new press or lathe in 20 years!). While it’s fine to discuss new models, cheering radically different and clearly weaker ones is dangerous, if not dumb. Be careful what you cheer for – if you get it, you’ll have creative blood on your hands, and be working a new, lamer music market. The rented-music paradigm is great for stars and bottom feeders, but puts sustainable middle class “jobdom” (new since the 90s in music biz) on the ropes.  Strike three.

Ultimately this article feels like a surrender to garbage and noise, trading a rich heritage for ephemera. It’s weak on facts and analysis, pitching a scheme to move music permanently into the background of our lives. I don’t see it as visionary, merely dystopic punditry. The fact that so many responders are willing to give up on concept albums, sound quality, liner notes, tangibility, and a broad license to flexibly enjoy their music is alarming to say the least.  Bah humbug, I say “Nay!” to Brendan Mulligan’s carelessly tossed grenade.

After cashing a fat SonicBids check, why not throw the rest of us under the bus?  His ideas are great for ArtistData (who will track all these unpaid spins, and rent you access to metrics), and his new masters at SonicBids (the gatekeepers for festivals, and live booking, and more recently licensing, all unaffected by his bomb-throwing).  Given the timing of Mr. Mulligan’s brainstorm, the attitude reminds me of Henry Hill’s famous line from Good Fellas: “F*ck you, pay me.”  Ummmmm… no thank you?

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Jul 19

Consigned to Oblivion?

Music Products 2 Comments »

When I was a performer, managing the consignment of records/CDs was a thankless chore.  The longer the band stayed together, the less motivated I was to keep stores stocked and collect income.  Best-case scenario: I’d burn an hour (plus gas) to collect $10.  As titles aged, even those meager returns were rare.  On the plus side, our local record stores offer great terms for hard working artists – their doors are open to all kinds of music, they let you set your own price, and take a miniscule cut in exchange.  While these stores are doing you a solid by carrying your product and handing over most of the profits, they’re unlikely to stay on top of inventory for you.  And if your title isn’t carried by a physical distributor they have no easy way to reorder, if they wanted to.  So as The All Night Party enters it’s second year, we’re wondering if there’s a better solution to stocking local retailer’s with consignment products.

We’ve been stressing over national physical distribution since day one – there are plenty of distros out there who would love to carry our catalog, but frankly the traditional retail terms demanded are a poison pill (ask Touch and Go).  Only in the music business do retailers operate with “borrowed” stock.  Only music distros get away with returning previously sold inventory for full credit, months after the original sales  are booked and closed.  It’s an inventory nightmare that’s saddled the industry with unsustainable costs.  While avoiding this money pit, we’ve worked the problem for on-label artists.  Talking to our bands and local retailers has given us a some fresh ideas we’d like to discuss here with the scene…

I’ve noticed it’s far more productive to stock retailers when you’re carrying many releases, than it is for individual bands.  When I show up to service at least 3 recent titles, I generally leave the store with a few bucks from completed sales, which in turn need to be restocked to keep it going.  Retail, like licensing and booking, is about persistence and effort.  Your music’s got to be wherever and whenever the fan’s in the store or you lose the sale (often for good).  There’s a need for regional distro, and a means to pay for it if you can carry some critical mass of titles.

I discovered how important a band’s activity and visibility are.  A popular local band that plays regularly can often sell titles to local retailers for cash, while a part time band of weekend warriors must consign inventory on spec.  As noted, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, at least in Cincinnati.  A CD that wholesales for $6 retails for $10.  If you only pay $1 to the store for consigning your title, you stand to make $9 for waiting to collect.  Obviously $6 in hand beats $9 in your imagination.  But if you’re working hard and visible, there’s some reward for waiting.

This brings up what might be the key to a good solution.  Wholesale prices drive the system we call capitalism.  Manufacturers leave roughly half of their potential profits on the table to incentivize consumer-facing partners to pimp their wares.  By selling to all qualified buyers, competition controls prices for consumers.  The music business, like all capitalist enterprises, has wholesale price structures.  Unfortunately these structures are opaque and bespoke.  Shake It might pay a different price than Best Buy for the same title.  South American distros sell the same titles at different prices than Euro or US distros.  What you pay has less to do with market forces than who you know and how you know them.  The good news: Participation in this funky kind of distribution isn’t compulsory.  Like ANP, you can do something different.  Set a single fixed wholesale price, between 50-60% of the retail price you expect your fans will pay for the set, and use it as an incentive.  Kick it old school, Capitalism 1.0.

From a set wholesale price, many doors open, starting with ANP’s.  We’re here to help you sell music in all it’s forms.  So let’s talk… Would you be interested in a regional consignment program with a single contact for pickups, drop-offs and collection?  Would you be willing to redefine pricing to incentivize more sales, and open the door to more conventional retail terms?  Could we buy CDs from you outright at these new wholesale prices, and act as a regional distro to make sure your work is always available at local stores?  If these steps seem reasonable, ANP can provide solutions.

These are a few of our ideas for fixing some problems we’ve seen.  We’d love to hear yours, and get some feedback in comments!

-d-

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Jun 05

EPKs, RPKs, WTFKs?!

BRAD LOANS OPINION No Comments »

You’re in a band.  You need to book shows.  You’ve been convinced you need an EPK; an Electronic Press Kit.  So what do you do?  Maybe you went and signed up at SonicBids.  If you did, you effectively took $5.95 out of your pocket and flushed it.  Or burned it.

Paying for an Electronic Press Kit SUBSCRIPTION is a freakin’ joke, in my opinion.  Just don’t do it.  Some nerd at SonicBids will probably rattle off some stats about how bands using an EPK get more shows because of their EPK, but they forget to tell youabout all the bands that DON’T get shows.  Or bands getting FEWER shows than those using EPKs whether they just suck, or don’t have someone booking their band full-time.

I’ve used them and they don’t work.  Correction: EPKs don’t do the work FOR you and the money you’d shell out every month is worth way more to you, a working musician, in the form of a sandwich or a couple gallons of gasoline.  Do you know what another name for an electronic press kit is?  They call it electronic mail and having a web presence you can point booking agents to.  A band website, a MySpace Page, a Reverb Nation page, a Facebook Page, a Twitter account, a blog, etc.  You know; the endless list of Web 2.0 mazes we musicians have blindly walked ourselves into.

Ask anyone that books a venue worth playing and they’ll give you a pretty short list of things they want to know about your band.  Usually it’s something like:  What’s your draw?  Have you played here before?  Who have you played with?  What dates are you looking for?  where can I hear your music?  where can I QUICKLY find out more?  That sort of thing.  If they want you to impress them with a pie chart and something that more closely resembles the Business section in USA Today, you’re probably booking yourself at the wrong venue.  Either that, or your in that band, Jet.  In which case I am looking for you so I can kick your ass.  I’m talking about 50-200 capacity places for the most part here because that’s probably where you’re playing, and because that’s where MOST of us are playing.  If you aren’t, then stop reading this now and enjoy your wine!

I’ll be having a conversation with my partners about this issue soon and intend to come up with a solution that doesn’t take $5-10 out of your wallet every month, so this is a bit of an open rant/post/question to anyone reading this.  Comments and suggestions welcome.

Over the years I’ve tried pretty much every method I could think of to book my band (The Sundresses).  Everything from being a complete dick, to hiring someone else to do it, to EPKs, to bein’ cute, being funny, being clever and being really dumb.  And you know what works best?  Building a good relationship with venues and local bands and return often enough to build a following so you aren’t forgotten about.  Simple as that.  It doesn’t hurt to be a really good band either, but there’s nothing I can help you with there.  Find those places and go back as frequently as you can.

One more thing:  Reverb Nation has EPKs they call an RPK because they are pretty clever marketers.  But here’s the thing about that; you can try it for free for one month and then after that they’ll charge you $5.95/mo.  Laughable.  Admittedly, I haven’t tried the free month… and I almost just wrote that I’m not going to, but I will and I’ll update you on the results.  My guess, though, is that in the end you’d pay $72/year for a service that will land you probably, maybe, one show every month that you could just as easily have booked yourself by using something called Google, an electronic mail message, a map, and a little thing called the Internet.

Happy booking!

love,

~brad loans

Mar 01

License Revenues Plummet in 2009. Some Fixes for 2010

Party Line No Comments »

The day after The All Night Party’s first licensing workshop, Digital Music News published this piece on how Synch Revenues Remain Under Serious Rate Pressure.  To summarize, buyers are paying less for rights to using existing recordings in commercial and creative contexts.  Much less.

The reasons cited by DMN for the decline are many.  First, the number of paying projects being produced has declined across the board, increasing the competition for what remains.  Alongside that decline, there’s been an increase in the supply of music due to lower barriers – today it’s cheaper and easier to make music.  Creatives and music buyers are leveraging new market mechanisms, like One Stops (PumpAudio, Rumblefish), to justify resetting budgets at ever-lower rates.  None of this is good news, and we’ve seen the same signs.  But as ANP’s entered the licensing arena, we’ve discovered that artists and bands collectively have the means to bend the curve in the other direction.

The One-Stops have opened the licensing market to pretty much everyone with a tune and copyrights.  Unfortunately they’re (rightfully) designed to appeal to creatives working existing markets – all the shadiness and opacity of those niches are baked in.  So pricing is always a mystery… the average artist has no way of knowing what to charge for a needledrop use versus a full-buy out, because customers are used to buying blind, and haggling over prices.  The flood of new artists and titles make the situation worse, thanks to the “man behind the curtain” mystery of rates.  As a result, newbies sell $20,000 licenses for $5000 or less every day, often bragging about their deals.

What is the value of a song?  In some sense, it’s whatever someone is willing to pay.  To a band who might earn less than $5000 profit selling 1000 CDs, a $5000 buy-out of a single track seems like a no-brainer windfall.  And if the band is quirky, unstable, or generally non-commercial in orientation taking the money may not be a bad thing, since these opportunities are increasingly rare (see above).  But charging too-little in an established market is short-sighted.  Each sub-par deal struck validates the new, lower rates.  Once market rates ratchet down, it’s nearly impossible to raise them again.  Further, if an advertiser truly wants to buy your quirky, non-commercial piece, it’s very likely to be perfect match for their picture, ad copy or script; unlike pure pop, whatever you’ve bottled is unique and clearly works for this client.  So your money is left on the table when you accept the low-ball offer; you would likely get more for the asking because, unlike bands, most buyers have some idea of fair market rates and are quite happy to offer less on the chance you’ll accept!

We see the challenge a little differently.  As usual, we’re focused on making the most of these new opportunities and see a relatively simple solution for the entire licensing market: Radical transparency.  The problems in licensing aren’t related to too many one-stops or too much information.  The problem is the mushroom-farming habits of the current players.  Licensing Agents, music directors and even the emerging one-stops believe they make more when no one knows what things cost.  In the 20th century, every deal was a customized one-time special, crafted to extract the most dollars possible from each unique client.  It was a benefit to be able to sell a track to Target for $100,000 then sell the same rights package again year to a cheeky startup for a bargain $10,000; as long as neither party knew what the other was paying, prices were whatever came out of the sellers pen or mouth on any given day.  In the 21st century, One-Stops turned this upside down.  By making it easier for big advertisers and creatives to reach artists directly, music buyers have effectively taken control.  Today, big advertisers pit bands against one another, making the apples fight the oranges in a steel-cage death match.  Most jobs start with a low-ball offer for a premium rights package; when the artist squeals, the advertiser rattles off an impressive list of bands willing to accept the offer, usually including some familiar, famous names.  The artist usually buckles at this point, swallowing their pride to avoid risking a deal that could pay for their next record.  When the smoke clears, market rates are a little lower.  But what would happen if the artists, like the buyers today, actually knew the score?

Where market rates were known and familiar low-ball offers fail.  Sure, you can walk into a gas station with a fat $20 bill and declare “I’ll give you $20 for 20 gallons of gas”, but you won’t find many takers because the station owners know their competitors won’t accept your ‘generous’ offer, so there’s no risk if they decline.  The current low rates only work because sellers are deliberately kept in the dark.  One-Stop prices are completely open to buyers with valid credit cards, while artists are kept apart from one another, always guessing.  A simple solution is apparent: open the drapes and let the sun shine in on rates!  Licensors must top pretending it’s so complicated, and begin defining the market before licensees define it for us.  Making prices transparent and clear will eventually stop the bleeding.

Obviously this isn’t good for everyone, and the biggest winners relying on 20th century tactics stand to lose the most.  Agents and managers of big stars who’ve flocked to licensing to replace lost retail music sales will not be happy with fair and open market rates, because they’ll be forced to explain why their product is worth more (yes, really) than songs from lesser-known artists.  That’s more work for the same, or slightly fewer dollars.  But over the long haul even those artists win, if transparency prevents a total collapse of the market.  What happened in 2009 can get much worse, very fast.

So what are fair market rates?  There are many variables, and it’s a bit more complicated than it sounds, so we can’t answer it either.  We think we have a clue, but the backwards offers we get these days have left us a little gun shy.  But it’s not difficult to define them as ranges, using an open, web-based reporting tool could objectively collect and report that data.  The trick would be populating it with realistic, verifiable data, from enough sources to accurately depict the market, and at the same time account for geographic differences… for instance music costs more in NYC than Nashville, while some remote markets are still able to command relatively high rates for composition work thanks to less competition.  It takes a village of agencies and sellers, willing to be open about former secrets, to bend this curve.

If you sell music and are ready to think outside the box, we should talk – together a few of us could change the future of our industry for the better.  Transparency is scary and radically different, but clearly a path forward.

Feb 12

February Free Stuff in Mastering!

Party Line No Comments »

If you’re releasing a record soon, you can’t beat our current mastering specials: Free Tunecore Digital Distribution or Download Cards (pick one, your choice!).

We don’t believe in “one-size-fits-all”, even for promotions, and our specials leave it up to the artist.  As it should be!

Of course it only matters if you want to master your record with us.  We realize you have choices there too, so again, we make it easy: We’ll master a track free, and send you a download link to check it out when we’re done.

Check in with ANP Mastering Engineer Dave Davis and make your choice.  In February, there are no bad options for mastering at The All Night Party!

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