Entertainment For Lively Minds
Fame and fortune in the internet music age
I know the parts of the Word readership are interested in the business side of the music biz. Kristin Hersh is an artist I admire massively, well-established with a decent fanbase she invests a lot of time in and a decentish press profile as well I'd say. And a tendency to make her music available for free. She's been sharing on Facebook the extent of the rewards that this brings.
"...a few people have asked privately how sales of records and books have been. they're wondering because i have lots of twitter and FB followers (75,000 or so) i appreciate the curiosity - and in the spirit of full disclosure, i'll say that the best selling thing i've done in the past 10 years has been Rat Girl [US title of her book] and I've sold 15,000 or so of that. Crooked has sold just under 10,000 books, about 1000 CDs and a few hundred apps [she released her last album in book form, with download codes for final mixes - having made rough versions freely avaiable - as well as CD an IPhone app format]. And I have 250 or so Strange Angels [her scheme whereby you can contribute a fixed amount per quarter] at any given time. Not an economic disaster, but not enough to pay studio bills *and* earn a living, which creates a natural tension between living and creating. that's where you come in..."
Intersting I thought - certainly reinforces my increasingly quaint determination to pay for stuff...
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But is it
really the "internet music age" that is doing for Hersh? It would be interesting to know how many albums she was selling ten years ago.
No doubt she is losing a certain amount of sales but she is the kind of artist who is never going to sell a million albums. The people who like her, really like her, there's just not that many of them. But they are probably mostly the kind of people that pay for their music.
She's probably the kind of artist that would have some success financing her albums via Kickstarter.
Sorry if being misunderstood - I don't think she's moaning
...just explaining why she puts the effort into the financing stuff. I think she's a bit ahead of the curve in terms of financing via subscription/upfront payment. It could well be that what she's doing on the internet is actually prolonging her career beyond what it might have been in a label structure, which is all to the good as far as I'm concerned.
But I do think it's interesting how borderline even a pretty decent level of success for a proven artist is, and how much grind goes into sustaining it. I don't know whether to be dead chuffed or a little sad that the magic marker message on the jiffy bag containing my Swans special edition was clearly written by Michael Gira himself. But I do know that the music on the CD is infinitely precious...
Free...
is overrated.
People don't value free. Free isn't bringing people into the fold, it's begging to be liked.
There appears to be one of two things that's going to happen, and pretty soon at at that.
1. Artists can no longer afford to be full-time, or pack it in.
2. Some kind of hybrid business model – that actually brings in revenue commensurate to the output – is forged. However, it won't be musos who manage it – a new breed of music biz specialists will arise.
The 'free business model' touted by internet phisionaries is uberly nonsense.
I'm interested in your first point...
.....about artists no longer being able to afford to be full-time.
I think that's always been the case. The overwhelming majority of performers never made what you might call a profit. The up and comers have always been like that. They justified it as being in the "investment phase" of their career. The past their prime acts keep going because, frankly, they have no choice. What else would they do? They move back in with their parents. They lower their expectations. They get by somehow.
The thing that makes it even harder nowadays, and I've said it before, is NOBODY GIVES UP. That means that the available cake, which is getting smaller all the time, is also being shared between more and more people. I keep coming back to what Sir John Harvey-Jones said when he had to advise an independent TV producer on how to make money. "This is not a job. It's a lifestyle."
Lifestyle..
er.. schliffestyle.
"They move back in with their parents."
At what age is a musician considered "Past their prime"? Are you assuming aspiring musicians are twentysomethings* with parents affluent enough to bankroll their kids?
And, yes, producing and performing music isn't an option – it's a compulsion. Especially for singer-songwriters. Cake isn't even on the menu when musicians follow this absurd e-visionary trend of chucking their music at people and hoping for the best.
A theme of Word is our nostalgia for those rectangular objects of desire, and we wouldn't have a relationship with them if we hadn't had to go down the shop of a Saturday morning to hand over some of our hard-earned. In giving away (digital) music, the artist is basically canvassing for friends – rather than inviting fans to join them on a magical mystery tour.
A click and a download might as well be a click to empty the desktop trashcan.
My fear is – we may soon see culture stagnate into some pre-Elvis 50s nightmare, given that musos and writers seemingly have no future as full-time professionals – which affects the quality of their work and output. As ever, artists are lousy business people – I'm with JHJ on that one, if not his 'lifestyle' nonsense* – and they're adding more to the landfill in not kicking and screaming their way to the bank.
Expect more xfactors, as the public get used to 'free music'. Rinse and repeat.
* After all, being a high-profile business-tzar is a lifestyle.
The day everything is free
is the day I will start to lose interest in music. Free music at all costs is recklessly irresponsible and will kill the industry and those who aspire to entertain us. I am sure very few of us if any would agree to work for nothing except maybe for a charity. Why then should we expect musicians to give away their efforts for nothing. If I am honest I really don't think that people who get all their music for free are real fans of music - certainly the ones I know aren't.
Todd Rundgren has posited that...
... it's making money from recorded music that might be the anomaly here, and not the norm. For hundreds of years, musicians made their livings from playing live and from patronage, we just happened to have lived in an age where a combination of circumstances meant that they could also sell disks and tapes, and maybe that time is ending...
Artists, especially cult-ier ones, need to find ways to get more money out their biggest fans - I don't know how Hersh's scheme works, but what would make you give your favourite artist (say) £100 a year? 20-30 songs, a couple of gig tickets, a hand-written birthday card, a 5-minute Skype call at Christmas, live online Q&A session...?
We've talked here before about artists offering themselves out for living room gigs and the like, and how "sad" or "forward-thinking" it is - this is the modern world, though, and we all need to make a living.
The trouble with living room gigs or
selling some sort of personalised VIP experience is it robs the artist of something very important, a sense of mystique and mystery!
Imagine David Bowie circa Ziggy Stardust having to come round and play some acoustic numbers in peoples living rooms, or Ian Curtis offering to take you out for dinner? It's a sort of Wizard of Oz moment if everyone has to peak from behind the curtain to make a living.
Not knocking it at all, works well if you're Ian McNabb or Boo Hewerdine but it's not really an option for a lot of the awkward, weird, antisocial buggers who make a lot of the great records!
Much as I love The Horrors for example, I really don't want them to come round to my house..I want to go an watch them and enjoy the show and imagine they live in a Scooby Doo style haunted castle and sleep in coffins.
Don't know about Bowie
but, if you've got the cash you can get a private gig with some big names :
http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2011/07/11/today-from-i-private-gigs/
including one that the papers aren't slagging off too much at the moment (that story ran only 2 weeks ago though).
There are some weird posts here
" I don't want free music". So who the hell is stopping you from paying for it? Christmas, if it makes you feel better why not send a musician of your choice a personal cheque? Or give the cashier at HMV a 100 pound note for the next CD you buy and tell him to keep the change - I'm sure this will make you a 'better' music fan than the next guy.
Sending a personal cheque
is pretty much what schemes like Strange Angels amount to (like Neil I signed up - after reading her book earlier this year and realising just how many of my favourite records she'd made, and recently to boot). Or like subscribing to the Word, only without quite the regularity of return. It doesn't make you better, but there's a reason everyone fights hard to get subscribers...
I pay for music
the trouble is, the majority of people have no qualms about taking it for free and have given no thought to the consequences. If you expect the commercial sector to bankroll artists by licensing music for adverts or montage sequences for TV shows, you get music that sounds like it made for adverts or montages.
I'm a Strange Angel
I love Kristin's work, have done since the late 80's, I pay whatever the equivalent of $10 is each month and for that I get lot's of downloads, each new album on release and free entry for two to any show she does (festivals obviously excepted).
The GLW and I went to her Bloomsbury Theatre "Paradoxical Undressing" show and just sent her a thank you email for the fantastic seats we were given as I thought it was the polite thing to do, I was surprised and delighted to get a personal note back from her.
Her output is prolific and whether she is shaking your fillings out with 50 Foot Wave or Throwing Muses, or breaking your heart with an acoustic guitar she is always fascinating. She appears to have won the battle against her devils and seems happy with her lot. Long may it continue.
Free isn't the only issue
I think that without her go it alone approach, and using the internet and self promoting, Kristin would have been out of the industry years ago. Record labels would not hAve accepted her level of sales.
I wish her luck in surviving.