Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

Mon 16th Sep, 2013

A Glut of Music?

I finally read David Gerard's original article, and I have to say there were some pretty sweeping assertions in there. Mainly that quantity always trumps quality, every time, no exceptions. That, personally, I think is ... a bit overstated. There are plenty of examples of people still liking the old quality stuff over the new quantity stuff - my nieces love my Eighties music just as much as they like the new popular hits. And plenty of people still listen to classical music and are interested in music that is strictly of fixed quantity - Beethoven sonatas, for example.

The other big generalisation is that this works purely on a cost amortisation calculation. I.e. that musicians are trying to cover costs, and therefore the cost of producing physical units and distributing them is the governing factor. Some musicians also look to make a living from their work, and that means setting a time period over which they hope to gain money from selling the product, an amount which they expect to live on, a number of units to sell, and so forth - all of which can vary widely and are complicated to fix. (Aside: this is why established artists push for extension to copyright - because theoretically they're extending the amount of time they gain from selling that product. This is a myth and a fairy story record labels tell them when they want them to support copyright extension.) It used to be that the cost of producing the units and distributing them were the major costs - see Courtney Love's calculation, for example - and therefore the label proposes to take that risk for the band (another fairy story); nowadays the distribution is free, and producing a new unit is cheap (in the case of digital distribution, it's totally free), so the ongoing costs of keeping the musicians alive and producing new music is the major cost for professionally produced music.

But I still think the big points made in the article is true: that the real cost of producing music - even music of reasonable quality - is coming down, that more music than ever is being produced and hence there's much more competition for listener's money, and that "hobby" artists who do it in their spare time and don't expect to make money out of their music (I'm one) drives the cost of actually getting music down too. So for professional musicians, who have sort of expected to make money out of music because their heroes of the previous generations did (due, as David points out, to a quirk in history that made the twentieth century great for this kind of oligopoly), it's a rude awakening to find out that people don't care about your twenty years in the industry or your great study of the art form, they care about listening to a catchy tune that's easy to get.

I also like the point that musicians are also inveterate software copiers. It's one reason I use LMMS and free plugins - because free, quality software does exist. I find it intensely hypocritical that professional musicians can criticise people for copying their music, when they may well have not paid a cent for all the proprietary software they use to produce it.

But to me this is really just about getting in touch with your audience. Companies like Magnatune exist to help quality artists find an audience by putting them in touch with an existing large subscriber base who wants new music. Deathmøle's insane success on Kickstarter shows that someone with an established audience can make it really big without having to sell their soul to big record labels. And Jeph himself is a great example of the way things work in the modern world, since Deathmøle is his side project - his main one is Questionable Content, which he also went into without having existing funding or requiring a big backer to grant him some money and take his rights in exchange. As Tim O'Reilly says, obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy; it doesn't matter if you're signed to the best record label there is, if they haven't actually publicised your work you might as well have not signed up at all. And, fortunately, these days we have this wonderful thing called the internet which allows artists to be directly in touch with their fans rather than having to hope that the record label will do the right thing by you and not, say, ignore you while promoting another band.

I wish David had made his point without the broad generalisations - I think it stands well without them.

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