Opinion: Reinventing the Music Business
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unsheffield.net
Ed says that people in the music industry need to realise that online promotion isn’t just about the music, you have to provide a rich experience. Is there an out-of-the-box tool that can create relevent functionality, like podcasts, tourdates and news.
He uses Podomatic. He likes how he can create a podcast and distribute it all in one tool. He tried other less joined up tools, and found it tedious and problematic to create the same functionlity.
Musicians want to spend their time writing music - they don’t want to get home from gruelling studio sessions to have to start working again. There is a need to make money though.
Slice The Pie relies too much on investors, not the musicians.
The needs of the musician must take second place to the need to get the music out there to people. Musicians still think that it’s all about them - they don’t see their music as a product that needs to the bought by people. It’s almost as if there’s a belief that the music buying public will go back the old models of buying music given enough time - they won’t.
Spotify and last.fm create a network of recommendations that people use to decide what to listen to.
Ian Forrester shows graphics demonstrating an ecosystem in dance music of creating, remixing and buying. He thinks this model works well - Ed agrees that it works in the case of successful DJs with high levels of exposure, but it also works against smaller professionals.
Releases on net label, on a donation basis generates a bit of money for musician.
Ed says don’t try and replace the music industry - it’s broken anyway. Create a new, open model. There are online services which are like the Flickr of sound. Promoters could take more responsibility for generating those sales - a good middleman who’s not too greedy, watching the consumers could work really well for both themselves and the musicians.
There are more mixes shared online weekly than could be sold in a month. One problem in trying to understand what’s going on is the lack of good metrics that have adapted to the current environment.
One of the things that works in twitter’s favour is that people can feel that they share a relationship with celebrities. Fans could follow groups on the road. A smart promoter might use a similar idea to let fans feel a relationship with a band - and then monetize that relationship.
People don’t necessarily seem to see the relationship anymore between creation of music and payment for it. That relationship must exist somewhere.
Should musicians sign up with PRS? Doing so jeopardises relationships with other music distribution mechanisms like last.fm.
Why does free software thrive when music is having problems? Both can be transported easily over the internet. The music industry is an older model.
