Category Archives: Piracy

A to Z of Making It, Music, My Stories, Piracy, Stupidity, Treating Fans Like Shit

Music Today: Hundreds Of Different Streams That All Flow Into One

Techies are the new rock groups. A lot of people have been saying it for a long time and recently even Bono got into it.

Instead of people forming bands, they are forming start-ups. The musical star has been replaced by the tech star.

At least in tech there is a pretty clear distinction as to what is paid. The recording industry still make royalty payments creatively. Taylor Swift is on schedule to earn $6 million from Spotify this year however she reckons Spotify doesn’t pay enough and her label head reckons Spotify makes a mockery of the SuperFan because the music is free on the site. In addition, her label reckons that Spotify is full of shit when it comes to the $6 million dollar amount. Those poor confused souls.

When did a payment of $6 million dollars to the rights holders = free/zero income? I must have been asleep at the wheel when that went down. Just because the user streams the music for free, it doesn’t mean that Spotify is not paying the rights holder. Accounting is the bedrock of the techies, however in music it is a different story.

Seriously how much extra did Coldplay make by windowing their “Ghost Stories” release and keeping it from Spotify. All they did was drive people to YouTube that had a mixture of ad-supported streams (which meant income) and no ad-supported streams (which meant NO income). P2P traffic also did wonders.

What the recording industry needs is transparency however what they still deal with is deceit, because in music everybody’s a street hustler who demands to get paid at every stop along the way. It’s short term thinking and it does not help the artist at all because there is still a lot of bastardry going on. The Majors are all concerned about pushing Spotify to an IPO which might be something to do with the fact that they own a piece of Spotify. And how does that relate back to the artist.

It looks like labels screwing artists is still pretty relevant today. Nothing really changes in that regard, however what has changed is that the fans of music are inundated with new album releases.

Here’s the new Slipknot. Here’s Black Veil Brides. Here’s Audrey Horne. Here’s Machine Head. Here’s Disciple. Here’s Evergrey. Here’s Nickelback. Here’s Otherwise. Here’s Sanctuary and Sixx AM. Here’s Wovenwar. Here’s a band that I haven’t heard off that I should hear.

And that has been in the last few months.

Add to that some of my favourites in the last 12 months or more from Avenged Sevenfold, Black Label Society, Five Finger Death Punch, I Am Giant, Trivium, Stryper, The Kindred and Digital Summer and you get the idea of my time being eaten up trying to catch up. And I am not alone.

That is why we want a smaller amount of music more regularly but of high quality. We all want to pay attention longer to our favourite artists and our artists are only as good as their last album. If they don’t continue to deliver then expect their career to fade away.

I remember being bored with the same damn records to play because I couldn’t afford any others. Now with so much choice I don’t know if I should try to hear something new or stick to the same damn records of yesteryear. To say that today’s world is overloaded is an understatement.

Maybe there was some madness method to Thom Yorke’s BitTorrent bundle initiative. 40 million people use BitTorrent each day and overall it has over 170 million users. If 1 percent of that user base pays for it, it is a win. Moby’s BitTorrent bundle from 2013 was downloaded 8.9m times in comparison.

That is a win that Moby would have seen in other forms of income because that is the music industry today. Hundreds of different streams that all add to the larger pool.

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Copyright, Music, My Stories, Piracy, Stupidity, Treating Fans Like Shit

If Money Is Not Filtering Down To The Artist, Whose Fault Is That?

There are still a lot of misguided people/entities in the recording industry that believe that they are immune to the changing times. Our world is constantly evolving. When will the recording industry accept that the landscape has changed.

Napster showed the recording industry what the fans of music want. The recording industry responded by shutting the service down. However, CD sales didn’t pick up as the recording industry would have hoped and what did happen was that the fans of music just went elsewhere. Suddenly there was Audiogalaxy, Limewire and KaZaA. Then came BitTorrent and The Pirate Bay.

In the end the customers just wanted free music. And even though Spotify and YouTube might give the illusion to the fan that music is free on their service, it is not. Spotify and YouTube do pay a large portion of their incomes to the rights holders.

Young people don’t purchase music the same way their parents and grandparents did. Access is more important than ownership. The car makers are being challenged at the moment as purchasing a car is no longer a rite of passage. The new housing market is being propped up by the older people, as young people are happy to rent or stay at home until their late thirties.

Spotify is a business based around access. This gives the fans greater choice whereas a purchase model takes away the choice of the fan and it makes them commit to which artist they would like to support. I remember walking into record stores, looking into my wallet to see how much cash I have and making decisions to maximise my cash with my purchases.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both. More choice means confusion and the fan just doesn’t commit to anything or they revert to trusted filters or playlists.

It is in the best interest of the recording industry and artists that streaming services gain traction. Otherwise the fans will just go elsewhere and if you take away the free tier of Spotify or YouTube, then what.

Once Napster went to a paying service, did fans start paying for music again?

Of course not.

What about Rhapsody? It has been trading for at least ten years and it has failed to get mass appeal.

The struggles that the recording industries are facing today were already quite clear in 1997 to people paying attention. The focus of sales as a success metric had to be tweaked and worked together with a smart business model. What we have here is an inability to adapt to a changing market.

Today’s world is much better for bands starting out today than in the past because they don’t need to win over the gatekeepers. They can find their own audience. They can create their own business models and make a living — unlike under the old system, where you either hit it big or you gave up and went back to your day job.

Can someone please explain how getting people to stop listening to free music magically makes them start buying music again?

What will do that, however, are smarter business models and Spotify is one link in the NEW MUSIC ECONOMY.

Shinedown just received a gold certification for their album “Amaryllis”. That means their album has moved over 500,000 units in the U.S. They moved that many units while their music was available on Spotify, YouTube, P2P and other services that offer free-tier models. They toured for over 12 months on the backs of that album. Their business model isn’t just about sales as a metric of success.

I seriously struggle to understand the long-standing debate between Spotify and artists. The debate should be between artists and the Record Labels. The debate should be between artists and the Publishers. Spotify pays the rights holders (labels and publishers) 70% of their income. From the other 30% they make, a certain percentage goes to the record labels who are shareholders of the company. The record labels had the power to negotiate a shareholding stake because of the amount of copyrights they have amassed from the artists on their rosters.

Quincy Jones posted on Facebook that “Spotify is not the enemy; piracy is the enemy”. Daniel Ek put that into dollar terms. Piracy could lead to higher concert attendances and merchandise sales, however in relation to the recording industry, piracy yields a ZERO return. Spotify at the moment has paid TWO BILLION dollars to labels, publishers and collecting societies for distribution to songwriters and recording artists.

As I have mentioned before, if that money is not flowing to the artists in a clear transparent way, then whose fault is that. The streaming services or the record labels.

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A to Z of Making It, Copyright, Music, My Stories, Piracy, Unsung Heroes

Music Lives Because Of Sharing and Copying

We all want to first and foremost SHARE something. If you go to Facebook, people are sharing their day and their lives. Go to any internet page and you will see people sharing photos, writings, music, opinions, stories, etc. And all the things that we share are all free. We do it for free.

However, the recording industry will say that artists cannot survive without being paid. What the recording industry is saying is that the recording industry cannot survive if they are not getting paid. Artists NEED to create. And there are artists who WANT to make money from those creations. And a few of them actually CAN make money from their creations.

As always, there are lots of bands created every day. Only a few survive. Only a few of them make enough money to live. And only a very little few of them make a lot of money. That has always been the same. We know of Motley Crue, but how many bands were there in L.A at the time? How many of them have we never heard of? We know of Metallica, but how many bands were there in San Francisco at the time? How many of them have we never heard of? We know of Accept and Bonfire from Germany, but how many bands were there in Germany at the time? How many of them have we never heard of? Get my point.

The difference now is that musicians can reach many more people and they don’t need a whole industry for that, and the industry is frightened about it.

Music will always exist along with people’s need to share it. The fact that we have music alive today is because it was shared and copied from day dot.

Music is about beauty and beauty has no real set price. For super fans, that beauty could be worth thousands of dollars in music, merch and concert purchases. For others, the beauty could be worth a few dollars and for others that beauty could be worth just the enjoyment.

If we listen to a song and we like it, we will listen to more songs. We could purchase a CD, we could download an album, we could purchase a ticket to a show or a T-shirt. Hell, we could even fan fund the next recording. That is how the fans build social communities around their favourite acts. They chat about them to another person. Then they share the music that they love. And once upon a time, there was no law forbidding this. Information was exchanged freely. However when the entertainment industry kept on growing, and when they kept on getting the governments to pass laws to give the industry a monopoly, that is when the repression began.

I bet no one has heard about Paulo Coelho. He is one of the best-selling authors and a few years back he decided to create “The Pirate Coelho”, an non-official fan page that allows people to download the full texts of his books in different languages. And guess what happened. He started selling more books now than ever. Guess you need to balls to try something that is unknown.

In bands, this is a difficult card to play because band members very rarely see eye to eye, so as soon as something goes astray there will be one band member that will start throwing the blame at another band member.

 

 

 

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A to Z of Making It, Music, My Stories, Piracy, Stupidity, Treating Fans Like Shit

The Changing Times and The Record Label Business Model of STEALING From The Artist.

I remember waiting in line for an in store appearance of the band Sepultura at Utopia Records back when Utopia Records were situated on Clarence Street, Sydney. It was the early nineties and the in-store had the classic Sepultura line up. My cousin at that time (who was a drummer) had a real bashed in snare skin for Igor to sign, I had a couple of CD’s and a poster and the others all had various forms of music (LP’s or CD’s or drumsticks or guitar cases and so forth).

Sepultura was cult like popular then. They sat in an area that satisfied a few different markets. You had the “betrayed” original Metallica fans. You had fans of the original “thrash” movement. You had fans of the “Death Metal” market. You had fans of the “Extreme Metal Market”. And you had fans of the new “Groove Metal” market. Shredders appreciated them.

I remember asking one of the Utopia guys who was doing line management outside the building, why so many people came to Utopia on a daily basis just for chit-chat. He replied that they come to buy CD’s and I disagreed with him. I told him that nobody wakes up in the morning and says to themselves I need to spend $30 on a CD. We wake up in the morning and we say to ourselves, we want to hear the new Sepultura album, the new Motley Crue album and we want to hear it right now. And in order to hear that song, we HAD to buy a CD or an LP. Because radio sure wouldn’t play it.

So a bit of talking goes back and forth and the Utopia dude goes on to tell me I have no idea what I am talking about as Utopia sell hundreds of thousands CD’s a year.

The recording industry failed to realize that it existed not to sell records or CDs but simply to find the fastest, easiest way to let fans hear the song we wanted to hear. If they realised that, then they would have invented the iPod and iTunes. Instead history shows that a company not even in the music industry, did that instead. And now Apple makes billions of dollars selling music. So going back to my Utopia example, they are nowhere near the force it was back in the early to mid nineties and I wouldn’t be surprised if it shuts its doors eventually (which I hope never happens \:::/).

Apple has been selling tracks at the iTunes store since 2003. Apps, books, movies and TV shows came after. Yet, no one complained about the accounting and to my knowledge no one has sued Apple for unpaid royalties. Artists may complain about Apple taking a 30% cut, however that was the deal.

YouTube and Spotify have been streaming songs from about 2006 and 2008 respectively. Of course there are others on the market as well that offer streaming services like Pandora, Google, Deezer and so on. However, one thing these companies have done is they pay. They honour their deal. Which is the reverse of what the record labels did.

You know, those record labels that got sued by artists for their accounting practices, claiming they’ve been screwed over by the label. You know those record labels famous for paying late or paying at all. You know those record labels for never honouring a deal. You know those record labels that threatened to derail your career and you end up settling for less than you deserve.

What pisses me off is that while people complain about Spotify stream payments and YouTube stream payments and Pandora royalties,  at least these techies are honest in their deals at this point in time. It just seems that the record labels who are the majority rights holders are not passing on the monies.

Because a deal is never a simple deal to the recording business. The labels don’t want simple. The labels don’t want royalties to be computerised because that would mean there is transparency and with transparency, profits would disappear. The major label business model is based on STEALING from the artist. That is why you have artists like Eminem, Dave Coverdale and others suing their labels for unpaid iTunes royalties. That is why you have artists suing their labels for unpaid monies due to creative accounting practices.

Believe me, if an CEO’s pay packet was suddenly short, he’d drop everything and do his best to get it right if the problem wasn’t immediately rectified. But if it’s the artist?

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Alternate Reality, Music, My Stories, Piracy, Unsung Heroes

June, 1993

It’s June 1993 and I am flicking through the new issue of Hot Metal Magazine, which at the time was Australia’s premier metal and rock magazine. For $3.50 it was an excellent alternative to the overpriced American and British magazines.

On the cover there was the John Bush fronted Anthrax. Three members are wearing white t-shirts with blue Jeans, and two members are wearing black t-shirts with blue jeans. It was a sign of the changing times as publicists and record labels pushed their artists to have a more grungy look.

“The Sound Of White Noise” got 5 skulls in the magazine review, which equates to ‘KILLER’. A few months after it’s release the album was certified GOLD. This is probably the album that Scott Ian was referring too when he made his comments that in the past they would sell a shitload of albums.

It was a hungry album. John Bush’s transition from a struggling band to a major label act was the catalyst. It was an album chock full of metal “hits”. “Only” comes to mind straight away. Even James Hetfield called it the perfect song. “Black Lodge” didn’t sit out-of-place with the current crop of chart toppers in Soundgarden and Alice In Chains. Credit producer Dave Jerden who produced both “Dirt” from Alice In Chains and “The Sound Of White Noise”. It was the last good Anthrax album and it is not even up on Spotify. Actually none of the John Bush-era of Anthrax is on Spotify which is a shame.

And the critics that said “Worship Music” is a great album cannot understand why it didn’t resonate with the audience. Look at the top ten songs on Spotify for Anthrax. Not one song from “Worhsip Music” is on the list. Same goes for YouTube.

Then you have the bloodbath from the Eighties scene.

Jani Lane (RIP) and Warrant had split and both acts had their contracts reduced to demo deals. So even though you had three albums that had moved 500,000 plus units each, they still ended up on the scrap-heap. Kik Tracee also split with vocalist Stephen Shareaux (bet he wished he tried harder for that Motley Crue vocalist spot) and both of them had been reduced to a demo deal. Looks like all the promo to sell the act just didn’t connect with the audience because in the end the songs where rubbish.

Meanwhile Rowan Robertson from “The Lock Up The Wolves” Dio era inked a deal with Atlantic Records for his new band that had Oni Logan from Lynch Mob on vocals. We all know that this didn’t end up going anywhere.

While, Roberston’s former employer, Dio (RIP) was working with WWIII guitarist Tracy G after his “Dehumanizer” venture with Black Sabbath went sour. These sessions would go on to create the “Strange Highways” album while Jake E.Lee was working with WWIII singer (and i use that term loosely) Mandy Lion.

Reports coming through at that time spoke about the new Bruce Dickinson solo album being an “updated, toughened up Santana vibe with a heavy leaning towards Peter Gabriel type atmospherics and experimentation.”  That album would become “Balls To Picasso” and apart from the song “Tears Of The Dragon” which sounds like an Iron Maiden song the rest of the album was a listen best avoided.

On the drug front we had David Lee Roth getting busted in New York after purchasing a $10 bag of weed. Seriously, for someone like his stature surely he could have done it more discreetly or gotten that $10 bag delivered to the studio. However, Roth is Roth and he decided that he should go out into the town and look for a dealer. On the other drug front, there was news that started coming out about Tim Kelly (RIP) from Slaughter who was alleged to have been involved in a major drug smuggling ring that was busted after a five-year investigation by the F.B.I.

Then we had the Motley Crue vs Vince Neil shenanigans.

The Vince Neil “Exposed” album got a good review in the magazine. I suppose it was inevitable that the solo album from Vince Neil would sound a lot like Motley Crue, even though NIkki Sixx insisted that Vince Neil had nothing to do with the creation of the songs in Motley Crue or the Motley sound. I think Nikki Sixx missed the memo that the actual voice plays a big part in the sound. Credit music business vet Phil Soussan for delivering a stellar performance in the songwriting department that helped kick-start Vince’s solo career.

Then on the other side you had “The Scream” with new singer Billy Scott battling to get their album done in time so that they can tour with Motley Crue as part of the singer transfer deal. For the uninitiated John Corabi from “The Scream” replaced Vince Neil in Motley Crue. However, the Crue’s album was REJECTED by Elektra Records. It wouldn’t be until the following year that the self-titled Motley Crue album saw the light of day. And within 6 months it disappeared from the public conversation and the tour got reduced from arena’s to theaters to getting cancelled.

Finally Pride and Glory was still on hold while Zakk Wylde worked with Ozzy Osbourne on the follow-up to “No More Tears”. Producers John Purdell and Duane Baron took over from Michael Wagener (who produced the first few songs and was then retained to mix the album until Micheal Beinhorn got involved). James Lomenzo was being used as a bass replacement for the recording sessions. The album that would become Ozzmosis would take another two more years before it saw the light of day and the style of the songs would be re-imagined into the modern sound of the day.

In the end the majority of artists mentioned above are still part of the music business in some way. And for the ones that aren’t, only death could separate them from the music world.

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A to Z of Making It, Music, My Stories, Piracy, Stupidity

The Music Word As I See It

Fiction

Just because one person knows it, it doesn’t mean that everybody also knows it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Is anybody talking about the new In Flames or Flying Colors album this week? Of course not, that is last week’s story. The hard-core fans would now of it but the rest. Not so much.

Hype

Despite all the hype, most people don’t pay attention. We live in a worldwide economy and all that we’re interested in today, is the fantastic. If you’re going to hype it then let me buy it. The true mark of a great record is that we have to hear it again and again. No hype can never make that happen.

Connections

Today we don’t want to be left out. We all have/want a broadband connection and a smart phone.

Niches

This is a huge problem in music especially in metal and rock circles. Suddenly it is uncool to like Meshuggah, Children of Bodom and Black Veil Brides. Suddenly it is uncool to like Five Finger Death Punch, Shinedown and Bon Jovi. Back in the Eighties when metal and rock was a commercial force to be reckoned with, the fans of say Motley Crue, Twisted Sister and Ratt were also fans of Metallica, Megadeth and Slayer.

Tastemakers

Tastemaker publications are irrelevant. They still operate on an old business model. The believe that if they act as gatekeepers, they can control which band breaks through or doesn’t. If an artist wants something to last then they need to infect the fans with quality. The fans are the tastemakers, not the media establishment. The fans make the songs hits and more importantly the fans sustain the songs for years after that.

Culture

We live in a society where we consume different cultures. So there’s no focus. Almost nothing lasts. And those in charge believe if they yell louder, they will get more traction, not realizing most people aren’t paying attention and never will. Fans of metal music in general still don’t know that Machine Head has a new album coming out.

Importance

What is important to you is probably not to someone else. Just because you are on TV it doesn’t mean that people saw you. We grew up with three channels. Now we have five hundred.

Dollars

Dollars are more important than music in today’s society. U2 got a $100 million from Apple, it doesn’t matter whether anybody listened to the music. “Reporters” are paid by the clicks. The iPhone moved 30 million units in its first month.

Tons Of Information

So here we are in with tons of information and so little time. Where do we start? Remember the past where the gatekeepers screamed for a decade only to give birth to a few dominant artists. It used to be that we couldn’t escape what was sitting at number one. Now we’ve got no idea what number one is or what it means.

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A to Z of Making It, Copyright, Music, My Stories, Piracy

Music Overload, Fans And Platinum Albums

Back in the past there used to be about a thousand metal and rock releases a year and from those releases only a few got traction and if an artist didn’t get traction or press they were doomed. Now there are thousands upon thousands of metal and rock releases. And they are all online and unless someone that we trust verifies their quality or a track becomes a viral phenomenon, we don’t care and suddenly most people don’t care, and then that album that the artist worked on for two years is gone.

The days of multi-platinum sales are over. Have you seen the latest report on the state of the recording industry?

The sales model is dead. No artist-album released in 2014 has gone platinum in the major U.S market. Sure, bands like Avenged Sevenfold, Five Finger Death Punch and Volbeat are pushing close to the GOLD mark however their albums came out in 2013. And yes Metallica’s self-titled album is pushing closer to 20 million in sales however that was released back in 1991.

The RIAA began certifying American platinum records in 1976. A long time ago and since then 345 albums have received the award.

Think about that for a second and do the math. Even when the record labels controlled the distribution and set the price, only 345 albums achieved platinum status over the last 38 years. 345 albums out of 40,000 plus albums. It comes to about 1%.

And of course, the record labels and the misguided artists will be quick to blame piracy and simply forget about streaming, the outdated albums format, the quality of the music released or the fact that fans of music prefer access over ownership.

Things change.

And one of the big changes is the shift in consumer behaviour. It seems that a lot of people don’t miss owning music. We have put our trust in the internet and the speeds they offer. Sort of like flicking a light switch. We have faith that the lights will switch on.

And bands that are still writing long players. You end up putting them online to be cherry-picked. It doesn’t make sense.

We live in a world where what was a hot news item in the morning is forgotten by days end.

Hell, with everything at our fingertips, we gravitate to the few that break through. We only want the very best all the time and therefore it takes an incredible effort to penetrate our consciousness and stay there. Furthermore, the more successful something is, the more it continues to grow, reinforcing its success. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Digital downloads were once hailed as the saviour, however they only provided a bridge between the CD and streaming. And the whole issue about money. Just because you released a song or an album it doesn’t entitle you to be paid. As the Metal Sucks piece notes,

“Nowhere is it written that rock stars should be well-off — the only reason it worked for the 50-year period between 1950 and 2000 is because of a market inefficiency whereby distribution was completely monopolized by the rights holders.”

And here is where the misguided and out of touch people talk about the cost of production, the years of blood, sweat and tears and the entitlement that all of that deserves our attention and our money.

Rubbish.

And yes, music is hard. Writing a great song is hard. The new Five Finger Death Punch double albums for me have four definitive tracks. “Lift Me Up”, “The Wrong Side Of Heaven”, “A Day In The Life” and “Watch You Bleed”. On the Avenged Sevenfold album, “Shepherd Of Fire”, “Hail To The King” and “Coming Home” are the definitive tracks.

So as we move forward, more than ever, it depends on the hit. And with so many of us listening to music in different places no one knows how to aggregate all of that data. And because of that the onus is on the fans. That’s right, the fans make and promote the hits. Once the fans find you, you need to feed them and that doesn’t mean one song a month or one song a week, or an album every two years.

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A to Z of Making It, Copyright, Music, My Stories, Piracy, Unsung Heroes

Thinking Out Loud About Music

MUSIC OVER MONEY

Everybody wants to get paid. But if money is your primary desire, you’re not an artist.

First and foremost an artists want to create and have their creations experienced by as large an audience as possible. There is a local Australian artist called Ricki-Lee Coulter who is in the pop market game. She has spent the last two years making her fourth album. This process has involved her funding a three-month stint in New York to work with American songwriters and producers, paying rent there as well as back in Australia. Then there was a self-funded trip to LA to work with more American writers, aware of the need for an ‘international’ sound to compete on radio. Then she flew an LA-based writer called Brian Lee to Australia for a ten-day workshop to co-write three songs. She paid for his flights and accommodation. And this is how she sums it up;

“Over the last ten years if I added it all up I could have totally bought a really nice house with what I’ve spent on my career. But sitting in a big house with empty dreams? I’d always be wanting more. I always pay for my songwriting trips overseas. I don’t want to be reliant on anybody or answer to anyone. I want to have the freedom to do things the way I want, not the way someone else does because they’re paying for it. I don’t want to take away from the support I get from my record label, but if I want something I want it. Sometimes it’s me that has to suck it up and pay for it and that’s fine, because I don’t want to have any regrets. Record labels aren’t an endless source of money. I’m lucky with the opportunities I’ve been given and I’m not left wanting. But if I wanted to be a billionaire I wouldn’t be doing music in Australia. There’s plenty of other jobs where you can work as hard as you do in music and make a whole lot more money. But I don’t do it for dollars and cents, it’s who I am. I’d feel empty if I didn’t do it.”

If you are not investing in yourself how do you expect others to do so.

CREATE

An artist creates constantly. That’s their job. You’ve got to keep doing it because you love it. You need to be trying to create something that connects all by itself and you have the fans spreading its greatness, not some marketing campaign.

TRUTH

How many Googles are there? How many Apples are there? How many Facebooks are there or Amazons?

The answer is ONE Major player. So why do you think that musical fans have time for thousands of bands.

POINT OF VIEW

Robb Flynn puts it out there with his journals and it is a great way to keep in touch with the fan base. It is him also creating art. His recounting of the “Through The Ashes Of Empires” album making off was brilliant.

LIKES vs MUSIC

Keep the likes for social media. They have nothing to do with music. Music has an edge and as an artist if you rub off all of those rough edges that make you unique, then no one will care about you.

CHANGE

People will try to change you. There are a million ways to screw an artist financially and career wise. Don’t change.

ONE TO MANY

The tech game is all about how can I go from one to many. In other words how can I produce something so good that it sells itself.  It used to be the musical game however it hasn’t been that way in a long while. You will never make money from recordings if you don’t have hit songs. I don’t mean a Billboard Number 1 style of hit,I mean a Paranoid, Live Wire, Holy Diver, Lick It Up, Darkness Within style of hit. Apple as we know it today was built upon the iPod. That was their hit.

VINYL/CD’s

It’s a niche market selling these musical artifacts. Now, more than ever before, your success depends upon your music. The traditional recording sales revenue may have tanked, that does not mean new opportunities have not arisen.

STREAMING

Streaming is just too easy, and on streaming services everything is available. You need great music to rise above.

TOURING

Recordings keep your career alive. Spend too much time on the road or leave large gaps in your recorded output then you are moving in the direction or being irrelevant.

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A to Z of Making It, Copyright, Music, My Stories, Piracy, Stupidity, Treating Fans Like Shit, Unsung Heroes

THE CCC!! Capitalist Copyright Crap And How The New Breed Of Artist Will End Up Making More Than The Old Breed Of Artist

We live in a capitalist society. The wealthy dominate us and anyone who gets in the way gets their dues. Don’t believe me, then tell my why copyright laws are at their most protective.

Once upon a time in a galaxy far far away, the copyright length was set at 14 years with an option to renew it for another 14 years after which the work falls into the public domain. This was enough incentive for the people of that era to enjoy the profits from sales of their works and be encouraged to write more. What was made clear back then was that the ultimate beneficiary in all of this was the public. Then copyright was expanded to 42 years, then 56 years, then life plus 50 years and now it is life plus 70 years. Throughout all of the copyright term extensions, each passing was heavily supported by the ones that held the power, like book publishers, film studios and record labels.

“I worked half of my life for free. I didn’t really think about that one way or the other, until the masters of the record industry kept complaining that I wasn’t making them any money…. As I learned when I hit 30 +, and realized I was penniless, and almost unable to get my music released, music had become an industrial art and it was the people who excelled at the industry who got to make the art. I had to sell most of my future rights to keep making records to keep going.”
Iggy Pop – John Peel Lecture 2014

So what went wrong with copyright.

MONEY is what went wrong.

When people in the recording/entertainment business got very rich for doing absolutely nothing, they decided that they needed to pay their local politician a visit, send them some money and get laws enacted that helped to protect their monopolistic business models.

Don’t you just love how the powerful lobby groups like the RIAA and their stooges talk about “piracy” and how “piracy corroded the livelihoods of musicians who put blood, sweat and tears in creating those works”.

Don’t you just love how they seem to forget how the labels employed creative accounting to ensure that almost no album ever recouped.

And isn’t it funny how the RIAA and their stooges don’t want to talk about the antiquated recording contracts that the labels still get artists to sign. Maybe back in the day it was okay for record companies to keep 80% of the revenues as it was a costly exercise to produce, distribute and promote their fledgling talent’s works. But in 2014, especially with all of the different ways that music is monetized, aren’t these old contracts really out of touch with the real world.

So while the old breed of artists like the top 1% who accounted for at least 80% of the recording business revenue bemoan the new recording industry, the new modern breed of artists understand that online music is essentially a promotional vehicle for live performances. I also predict that these modern breed of artists will end up making more money than their heroes.

I seriously believe bands like Avenged Sevenfold, Shinedown, Five Finger Death Punch, Volbeat, In This Moment, Halestorm and so on, will make more money in the long run than Metallica, Motley Crue, Kiss and so on.

Why?

The new breeds have leaner organisations than their counterparts and they are more knowledgeable than their counterparts.

What I mean by this is that the new breed of artists don’t have to deal with expensive recording budgets like the artists of old. They don’t have to deal with distribution and breakage costs like the artists of old. They have a better understanding of economics and accounting principles. The new breed is more diversified. Their business is not all about recording and touring. They are branching out into different industries and they are finding interesting and innovating ways to connect with their audiences.

So watch out for the new breeds.

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Copyright, Music, My Stories, Piracy, Stupidity, Unsung Heroes

The Paul Stanley Article

The Article
Paul Stanley reckons that if KISS started today they wouldn’t stand a chance because the music industry as it exists today isn’t even an industry, it’s just shambles.

KISS didn’t really blow up until “ALIVE” came out. So in today’s standards or even the late eighties standards they wouldn’t stand a chance to reach their fourth or fifth album. The thing with Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons is that they base a lot of their decisions on what piracy and peer-to-peer downloading has done to the industry.

Now if you search the RIAA database for the band KISS, you will see that “Destroyer” is 2x Multi-Platinum and that happened in September 2011. Two other KISS albums have been certified 2x Multi-Platinum and they are “Smashes, Thrashes and Hits” and “Alive II”.

They don’t have an official album that has been certified more than 2x Multi-Platinum and piracy has been around since 1999. So even in the heyday of record label control, KISS were not large sellers of recorded music as they would like you to believe. Especially when you compare them to Pink Floyd, Eagles, Bon Jovi, Metallica and Motley Crue. It wasn’t until the KISS Reunion in the late nineties that KISS finally went from playing to 10,000 people to 40,000 people. Credit Doc McGhee with the vision to make that happen.

As for Stanley’s comments on file sharing, it just shows how out of touch he is.

“File sharing is just a fancy way of saying stealing. You can’t share what you don’t own. It’s like me saying, ‘transportation borrowing,’ and I steal your car.”

If a person illegally shares or downloads the song “Lick It Up” what that person has done is infringe on the copyright of the song. The song is still available on iTunes for downloading. The song is still available on Spotify for streaming. The song is still available on YouTube for listening. The song is still available on the “Lick It Up” album that is gathering dust in the record store waiting to be purchased. No one has stolen anything.

Paul Stanley also reckons like Yngwie Malmsteen, Kirk Hammet and Gene Simmons that younger bands don’t have a chance in hell of ever getting that pot of gold.

What about Five Finger Death Punch, Shinedown, In This Moment, Bullet For My Valentine, Skillet, Red, Trivium, Halestorm, Black Veil Brides and many more others that are releasing albums and going from success to success.

What about musicians/bands who have been doing the rounds since the eighties and nineties who have all seen an upswing in recognition and success like Slash with Myles Kennedy, Godsmack, Stryper, Volbeat, In Flames, Machine Head, 10 Years, Coheed and Cambria, Lamb Of God, Avenged Sevenfold and Killswitch Engage.

Now, Ed Sheeran has nothing to do with heavy metal or hard rock music however the work ethic and ideas that he exhibits should be noted. His current tour of Australia has one ticket price at $99. All of his fans will have the chance to sit in the front row.

This in a way takes out the elitist tickets. It makes it affordable for people with rich parents and not rich parents. This is in contrast to say Kiss who sell front row tickets for a premium of around $2000 for some shows. In Ed Sheeran’s case he keeps the front row tickets and gives them out on the day. He and his team try to find fans outside of the venue of fans in the nosebleed seats and give them front row tickets. And what an artist to fan connection he is establishing.

And for hard work, Ed Sheeran is up there. It took two years to sell two million copies of the first album through constant touring and intimate acoustic gigs and now it’s taken 14 weeks for his new album “X” to do the same.

This more or less proves the piracy argument decimating the music business is invalid. People still purchase albums along with streaming and downloading the songs. The great thing about musicians being worldwide right away is that if a song’s not successful in one country like Australia it usually is in another. Different countries have different tastes. You can always have a hit somewhere. But Paul Stanley doesn’t get that. Which is a shame.

I actually finished reading his book Face The Music last week and the impression I got from it was an out of touch and sheltered rock star. Guess his comments sum it up.

And the thing is Kiss’s best song in the last fifteen years has been “Hell Or Hallelujah”. So how about coming up with more songs like that instead of the other garbage that has done the rounds.

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