First off – I’m not really going to answer that question, and here’s why:

When you buy an album, or a t-shirt, or a concert ticket, you are making a purchase from a business. A musician has structured his or her business in a way they feel is appropriate, and has entered into binding contracts with people they hopefully trust. Those people are providing services which help the artist to further their career in ways that (again, hopefully) are worthwhile to the artist and worth whichever pieces of the pie they’ve made a decision to surrender in exchange for said services. Why should it be up to YOU to decide which employees of the business get paid? You don’t get to walk into McDonalds’, order a Big Mac and then say “..but I want THIS GIRL to get all the money from my purchase, because this sandwich is the work of HER hands and is going to be delicious.”

Besides, if you DID believe that, you’d be delusional to begin with and therefore incapable of making sound fiscal decisions. Big Macs are gross.

BUT.

But, but, BUT.

I know WHY people always ask me “where should I buy your album so that YOU get more money?” I absolutely understand the good intention and reasoning behind the query. You’re asking because you want to support ME, the artist writing and performing the music you enjoy, and not a faceless corporate entity who scrapes every penny they can from my art and giggles over champagne glasses full of truffles and caviar all the way to the bank in their super-stretch Lamborghini limo.

This is exactly the problem. This is why good people, who would never steal a fifteen dollar t-shirt from a store, don’t blink at stealing an album. They think they AREN’T really stealing from the artists they care so much about – or at least they think they aren’t stealing MUCH. And you know what? In a lot of cases, that’s totally accurate.

We’ve all heard enough stories about artists getting screwed by record companies. We all know that major label artists can sell millions of albums and walk away empty handed. We also know that the majority of music put out by majors is terrible, so if “stealing” an album means depriving an artist we like of the $0.12 they would have eventually had to sue the label to get, with the ADDED benefit of not supporting a label who puts out more bad music than good, who’s the victim? Especially if you make a pledge to see your chosen artist whenever they come to town, buy the t-shirts, etc. (Incidentally, don’t fool yourself. Tons of artists today sign what are known as “360 deals” – which means the label gets their cut of EVERYTHING, including shirts and ticket sales. What you’re actually doing is justifying your theft of an artist’s music by loftily “deciding” not to risk arrest by ripping off a t-shirt you want from a merch table, where there’s a lot more danger of being apprehended. You’re making the decision in your own head, independently of the artist, to get a t-shirt and cd, or concert ticket and cd, without paying for the cd).

Or, in some cases, you decide not to pay for an album because the artist has a private jet and “has enough money”. Problem is, ETHICALLY, this isn’t your call to make. If they’ve created a product that you want, and they’ve put the price where the market will bear it, your only ethical decision is whether to pay the set price for the service they’re providing for you. Why should someone be penalized because they’ve been successful? Why is it less wrong to steal $15 from a millionaire than it is to steal it from the jar of a homeless man? $15 is $15. Money isn’t worth more or less based on whose account it’s in, it holds an intrinsic value independent of its location or owner. That’s what money IS. If you start making these calls based on your assessment of how much one person “needs” the money vs. another, you’re essentially saying that the productivity and efforts of a successful person are INHERENTLY worth less than those of a less successful person. If you’re a collectivist, if you truly believe in the ideal of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”, then you’re acting in line with your beliefs and we can’t really have this conversation. Or at least, it’s a very different conversation we can have elsewhere.

Back to the matter at hand.

Buying records at stores has a lot of benefits to artists. EVEN IF they never see a penny from your sale, other things happen: the record store makes a small profit, and can keep their doors open a little longer. They report the sale to the artist’s distributor, who decides that the artist is a worthwhile risk and agrees to put more money and effort into getting better placement and visibility for future albums. Numbers get reported to label execs who (as businesspeople) decide to bankroll another album for their artist, enabling that artist to keep doing what they love for a living. This USED to be the way the music industry worked, before people found out they didn’t have to pay anymore.

DON’T GET ME WRONG. The system is and was irrefutably broken. Many, if not most artists were getting screwed. Don’t believe me? Read this article, which has been around forever but eloquently illustrates the problem:

http://www.negativland.com/albini.html

When it comes right down to it, the REASON people are happy to rip off music is that our society has decided that all record labels are corrupt and unforgivably greedy, and that they are unfairly leeching off the artists they claim to champion. In a lot of cases, this isn’t inaccurate. As soon as an indie band gets signed, the fans instantly react as though there’s a vulture circling overhead and that their money will never get to the artist they want to support. Again, an accurate assessment in far too many cases. Some people actually feel like they’re HELPING the music industry by downloading instead of buying music; that they’ll help to reel in the labels and force them to only sign “good” artists who we’ll all want to pay for the privilege of hearing. (That’s not the way it works though – the majors, needing to meet their bottom line, just aim for LOWER common denominators to get bigger sample sizes.)

THE LABELS HAVE LOST WHATEVER CREDIBILITY THEY EVER HAD WITH CONSUMERS. Even the good ones – as soon as you brand yourself a “record label”, you’re the bad guys, and being a “bad guy” is a really hard stigma to shake once it’s on you. Just ask the lawyers.

The thing is: sure, lots of artists are intelligent, business-minded people who with the assistance of amazing free services online (like the ones I’ve written about on this site) can build themselves a viable career and keep it running. Artists are volatile by nature, however. Not every messed-up, self-absorbed prima donna of a trainwreck whose music you enjoy has the means or ability to build a successful business and get their music to you. Does that mean Lou Reed’s music, or Amy Winehouse’s music, or KURT COBAIN’s music is less valuable to you?

A better example: classical music. Without someone using their capital to hire an orchestra, pay for rehearsals, rent a concert hall and produce a recording, you would NEVER hear a new recording of Vaughn Williams’ “Lark Ascending”. The start-up costs for an orchestral recording are staggering, and very few soloists have the money kicking around to bankroll such a recording on their own.

OK. Rambling. No one ever said my writing was structured.

Here’s the thing: record labels need to understand that they’ve lost the mandate of heaven here. A major label is evil come to earth, and people don’t care to hear otherwise. They haven’t reached this conclusion by themselves; they’ve seen evidence to support their grudge time and time again. Thinking about this while making coffee, I had a bit of a cathartic moment (I’m serious, clouds opened, choirs choired, harps harped, the whole shebang).

People really DO want to pay artists for their music! They just don’t want to pay the evil labels!

Here’s my challenge: I want to see a major take the first step, and issue a press release saying “We understand that we’ve become the bad guys, and we’re sick of seeing our artists suffer and have their music stolen by their fans because of OUR sins. We hereby pledge to give our artists 100% of the money made from the sale of their music, after pressing and shipping charges. We’ll make our money from the tours we support, the t-shirts we design and print, the posters we sell and the cameo appearances in Judd Apatow films we negotiate on the artist’s behalf. Thank you, music fans, for keeping music alive.”

What have they got to lose? If everyone’s stealing the albums to begin with (which they keep claiming is the case) they aren’t really losing much money by doing something like this, right? It allows them to put their support firmly behind the artists they represent, wash their hands of the years of dirt accumulated by (as far as fans are concerned) “leeching” off of the creative efforts of their artists, and allows fans to make a decision to directly support artists they love. Considering the frequency with which I’m asked who exactly is getting the money from a cd sold, I have to conclude that a lot of people WANT to pay artists for their music, but are ok with downloading if they think the artist isn’t getting the money. So… GIVE THE ARTISTS THE MONEY. Put the ball back in the listener’s court and ask them: Is that REALLY why you’re ok with downloading? Or do you just not like paying for your music no matter who gets your money? HMMMM?

I’m not suggesting I see this happening, but I’m really curious what would happen to download numbers if, all of a sudden, people had to come to terms with the fact that they were now “stealing” directly from the artists. I think there are a lot of artists out there who DO have a close connection to their fans who would see an immediate increase in their sales numbers across the board. Fans would be motivated to go to a record store and buy an artist’s album if they knew that most of that money was going directly to the artist they’re supporting, with the added benefit of helping the industry know it’s worth continuing to develop that artist’s career. People keep saying that the internet can help artists succeed because it removes all the middle-men: so stop being middle-men! Stop getting between the music and the music fan, stop suing college kids for downloading singles, stop screwing artists, stop being the BAD GUY. There are still indie labels out there who can sell albums to fans of the LABEL, like Sub-Pop used to and Victory and yes, UFO. If fans see the label as a partner of the artist and not an oppressor, I really believe they’ll make the decision to vote with their wallets.

End of rant. For now.

coveritlive rules

(As usual, these opinions are my own and don’t reflect the opinions of… well…. anyone else).

The music business is, as everyone knows, in a state of clumsy transition between the analog past and the digital future. Although it’s well documented that the labels had lots of time to prepare for what’s happened, most of them did little or nothing – beyond suing a few potential customers and clamping down on internet service providers, that is. In a stunning example of “cover-your-eyes-and-ears-and-ignore-the-world-ism”, many of the people with the power to control the inevitable slide instead ran around applying band-aids to axe-wounds, with predictable results.

Clubhouse Studios in Rhinebeck, NY

What caused this nosedive? Well, to hear the industry execs tell it, you’d think there were cartels of suave techno-pirates working diligently to bring the labels to their knees. Music “thieves” were painted to look like hardened criminals one illegal MP3 download from abandoning the rule of law altogether, running naked through the streets, robbing banks and firing their tommy-guns joyfully into the air. These reprobates had to be stopped in the name of a free-market economy, for the good of the free world, in the name of good, hard working people everywhere.

The problem was, these “criminals” weren’t out to break any laws. They saw an industry grown fat on its own excesses; an industry happy to flaunt its wealth; an industry arrogant enough to charge $20 for an album of filler songs and soulless cookie-cutter drivel. And they started to wonder why they were paying so much for so little.

When you control the means of production – when your product is delivered to the waiting public through a narrow, tightly-controlled and highly regulated pipeline – you get to charge whatever the market will bear. This is the basic founding principle of capitalism, right? For decades, we had no choice but to pay whatever the stores chose to charge for music. Fine. Problem was, we had to pay BEFORE we had any guarantee of the quality of the product we were buying. Can you imagine if every transaction was like that?

Suppose you walked into a grocery store and had to order (and pay for) your produce before getting a look at it. Maybe the bunch of carrots they gave you would be great – crunchy, juicy, plump and delicious. Or maybe the grocer would realize that since you couldn’t get carrots anywhere else, he didn’t have to worry so much about the quality of the produce he was providing. You’d start noticing that instead of 12 quality carrots, you were getting just enough good ones to keep you from returning the bunch in disgust. Chances are, the only carrot you’d really enjoy would be the one you’d heard on the radio nonstop for the last month.

Wait.

Right. My point is, what if you suddenly found out that you could try each and every carrot before deciding whether you wanted to buy them? Best yet, you could sample them FOR FREE, FROM YOUR HOME!! Goodbye lecherous grocer, hello satisfying salads. Never again would you have to suffer the indignity of biting into a rotten carrot you’d been promised was great – nor would you have to sit through the REST of Fergie’s album. Heh.

At first, the music industry turned a blind eye to the growing trend of “try-before-you-possibly-buy”, with the excuse that “people won’t be satisfied with inferior quality MP3 files for long – they’ll realize that their CDs sound much better”. Sounds reasonable… but it was actually, really, REALLY stupid.

Thing is, the only reason MP3 files sounded bad was that they were compressed digitally, to make the files smaller, to facilitate faster download speeds. This was back in the days when cable or broadband internet was the exception rather than the rule, and a 3 mb MP3 file would take you from a few minutes to a few hours to download. It was nothing short of criminal negligence on the part of the labels not to acknowledge the inevitable: when bandwidth and storage space got cheaper, the size of the files being downloaded would cease to matter – and the quality would start going up.

Art from "Soapbox Heroes"

The funny part is that CDs aren’t really all that great when it comes to audio quality. (nerd alert..)

CD quality audio is 16-bit, with a 44,100 KHz sample rate. This isn’t really very high at all. As an example, our last two studio albums were recorded and mixed at TWICE that quality, and had to be “dithered” down for the transfer to CD format. I mention this only to illustrate the obvious next step in the downward spiral: when it no longer matters how big your song file is, suddenly you’ll see bands releasing super high quality (read, better than CD) versions of their songs digitally – and the CD as a “high-quality” music format will be instantly obsolete. I give it 6-8 months, a year at most, before you start hearing of bands selling ultra-high quality digital albums through their websites… if you haven’t already. Labels have been HEMORRHAGING money in their attempt to keep consumers tied to a format that is, for all intents and purposes, already in a terminal decline.

The really sad thing is that the EXACT SAME THING is happening to all forms of video entertainment, be it TV, movies, or music videos. The ONLY reason it’s taken a little longer is that video files are harder to compress and are therefore much bigger. When our computers get to the point where downloading a hi-definition episode of CSI Miami takes as long as it used to take us to download the theme song, the TV and movie industries will suffer the EXACT SAME FATE. Thus far they haven’t shown many signs that they’re ready for the coming crisis.

While this was all going on, another interesting trend was developing: bands were starting to realize they didn’t really need the big labels anymore, at least not in the traditional sense.

Historically, the only way an artist could reach the masses in any significant way was to sign on the dotted line, put their career in a major label’s hands and toe the line, hoping they wouldn’t get TOO screwed in the process. Artists were built and destroyed by commercial radio, MTV, music magazines and industry award shows. There was ONLY ONE SYSTEM, and if you wanted mass exposure you had to conform yourself to that system, to one extent or another.

Then came the internet.

Suddenly, an artist didn’t need a team of people licking envelopes and posting newsletters to their fanbase – a couple of minutes writing an email to the email list would take care of that nicely, and much more personally to boot. Artists could target potential fans directly through talkboards and forums, and eventually through social networking giants like MySpace, Friendster and Facebook – sites with demographic-based search engines BUILT IN!

All of a sudden, you didn’t need to be played on the radio for thousands of people to hear you – you just had to drive traffic to your website or MySpace profile. With virtually no effort, you could send a message to 10,000 of your fans instantly, telling them about tour dates, new releases, special offers, or just spouting your thoughts and rants on any subject. Kinda like I’m doing right now.

The real catalyst in this whole farce however, comes from a glaring disconnect between the labels and the artists they’re supposedly representing. The industry was – and is – OBSESSED with the idea of controlling access to their artists’ music, for purely economic reasons. The artists, on the other hand, DON’T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT THE MONEY. (Most of them don’t, anyway.) For the artist, the whole point – the passion driving them to live below the poverty line and get kicked around by club owners night after night – is writing, performing and living their art. Ask any musician if they’d rather keep their music in an iron fist, control the public’s access totally and sell 5000 albums the conventional way, or have their songs spread around the world online, listened to and loved by millions of people, with no personal financial gain. Now take into account the fact that the average major-label act would never see a penny from the 5000 albums sold anyways. What do you think they’d say? I know what I’d say.

An aside: don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely no problem with an artist making money from their art. If they produce something that the public places value on, and the public is willing to pay for that product, the artist has every right to expect compensation for their work – however, the very fact that so many artists starve themselves and scrape by doing what they love is evidence of the fact that the art, not the compensation, is the motivation behind the artist. End aside.

What happened next is pretty predictable: the labels attacked the consumers who were stealing their products, expecting the artists to jump on board and join the good fight. What actually happened was the opposite, for the most part. Artists realized that rather than being the million-mouthed monster destroying their careers, the internet was an incredible tool for self-promotion and would enable them to be much more self-reliant, with less and less need for the publicity machine provided by the majors. Plus, by cutting out middle-men, musicians could actually start SEEING some of the money their music was earning. The average independent musician sees more real cash from 10,000 independent sales than many major artists see from a million sales. That’s not an exaggeration, it’s a fact, and a telling one. And even though most of those musicians aren’t in it “for the money”, the money is very nice as well, thank you.

What happens next?

Well, the first thing everyone needs to get their heads around (if the music industry is going to survive) is that radio and television, in their current form, are dead. D-E-A-D. Broadcast media will collapse when they can no longer sustain themselves by selling ads; they will stop selling ads when the companies buying ads realize that people aren’t watching or listening anymore. Personal Digital Video Recorders like TiVo are speeding this process up; what’s the point of spending tens of thousands of dollars on a TV commercial when all your target consumers are recording their favorite shows and skipping all the ads? The most important concept in media in the next few decades will be the concept of Media On Demand. And there’s NOBODY out there who, given the option, would demand to sit through commercials. Where will people go to find the entertainment, news and information they crave, On Demand, without commercial harassment? YouTube. Blogger.com. Any number of no-fee-ad-free avenues to digital media. Broadcast TV and radio do not fit into this picture.

When TV and radio disappear, so does the pipeline the music industry has been leaning on all these years. You can’t sell 10 million albums if you don’t have a way to reach 10 million people at once (bye bye, MTV), and although the internet is a great way to reach a lot of people, it’s much less controllable. If you think of websites as “channels”, it seems pretty obvious: paying for an ad on NBC makes sense when there are only a hundred channels to choose from, but if there were a hundred million…

The days of a few hand-picked artists dominating the music industry are rapidly coming to an end. True, there are still millions of people out there who will buy whatever they’re told is cool – but in order to sell to those people you have to be able to reach them, and to be their ONLY source of information. That used to be easy, but it isn’t anymore. Look at what’s happened on MySpace: instead of a few bands having a few million fans each, you’ve got literally hundreds of thousands of bands with tens of thousands of fans each. These bands are out there, touring, selling their music digitally, selling tons of t-shirts and stickers and doing quite well for themselves because they’ve realized that SUCCESS DOESN’T MEAN SELLING TEN MILLION ALBUMS FOR A FACELESS CORPORATE ENTITY. Success is playing a song you wrote in a city you’ve never visited, and hearing a thousand people sing it back to you. Success is cultivating a die-hard fanbase who will support you and allow you to do what you love for ten years, twenty years – not two singles in the top ten, a whirlwind of publicity and a lifetime of obscurity. Success is making any kind of a living doing the thing you love. It sure as hell isn’t making a fortune for a hundred leeches who can’t whistle one of your songs or recognize you at an industry party.

The labels who will survive are the ones who are smart enough to redefine their position in the industry. Labels who understand that success in the new music industry means carving out a niche – finding and reaching out to the people with whom your music will resonate for years to come – these are the labels who will serve a purpose, and who will shape the music industry of the next few decades. We’re really lucky to be working with a great bunch of smart people at UFO/Invasion – (www.ufomusic.com). Labels like UFO and other “new-model-indies” are quickly redefining the concept of the record label, and are thriving in the process.

What this all means is that artists are in control of their own destinies in a way they have never been before, and as a result the bands who survive will be the ones who can get back to the basic purpose of being in a band in the first place: producing music that we, as consumers, actually want to listen to. I, for one, am glad to see the state of the industry today – maybe in an age of real freedom of choice the cream will start rising to the top.

Or maybe, in an age of infinite Entertainment On Demand, with no dominant cultural voices shaping public opinion, the mediaverse will fragment into millions of super-specialized slivers and we’ll all get lost in the noise. Whatever happens, I think it will happen soon – and those of us who aren’t willing to evolve will find ourselves becoming dinosaurs much faster than we’d expect.

Thanks for reading – till next time!