Intelligent Life On Planet Rock
Why Should Rock Stars Expect To Be Rich?
Tom Whitwell argues that the rock stars of the future will earn about as much as the average bank manager.
I grew up assuming that anyone on tv was mind-bogglingly rich. It's a common enough mistake that I share with the cast of Big Brother. Sometimes, it's true. Some pop stars are very, very rich. Jay-Z's various businesses have earned him $1bn. Former Beatles are on £500 million each. The members of Coldplay are worth £30m each. Even Craig David is sitting on £10m.
I don't think it's going to last. Why should a musician who sells one million albums a year be paid so much more than the editor of a national newspaper that sells one billion copies a year? In ten years' time, maybe five, being a pop star will be a profitable profession. Like being a barrister or a consultant. But not like being a juice carton magnate.
This isn't a moral or cultural opinion. Gary Glitter can earn £50,000 a year on royalties accrued every time Rock & Roll (Part 2) is played at an NFL game. So what? All that tells us is that he was lucky enough to be part of the never-to-be-repeated phenomenon that was The Music Industry of the Latter Years of the 20th Century.
And it was an extraordinary edifice. Instead of paying for advertising, the music biz had an entire industry - radio - paying them to promote their products. Not good enough? Along came MTV, a channel devoted to airing glossy advertisments for their output. Why build expensive shops when HMV and Tower Records will do it for you? Why buy advertising when you've got the front pages of NME, Rolling Stone and all the rest of them?
Not surprisingly, times were good. Vinyl records were cheap to manufacture but hard to copy. Recording studios were vastly expensive to hire, so musicians were dependent on the industry to get records made. Most of all, as internet marketeer Seth Godin reminded executives at Columbia Records last year, people didn't like pop stars, they loved them. It seemed natural that pop stars should be rich. And they were.
Now, all that is gone, washed away by the digital tide. The great, profit-hyping discovery that was the CD - we can get everyone to buy their record collection all over again, for twice the price! - proved in the long run to be the industry's nemesis. Too late, the labels realised that in fact they had been flogging infinitely duplicable digital masters to the public. And nobody ever got rich selling something expensive that you can get for free.
The music business will change. People love music more than ever. Turning that love into money isn't simple but it's possible. Internet clever person Kevin Kelly has written a great essay called 1,000 True Fans. He sets out how a musician (or writer, or artist) should be able to make a comfortable living (say $100,000 a year) if they can offer sufficiently enticing products to a sufficient number of true fans. His maths are fuzzy but his basic argument is sound. It's no longer enough to have two million people like your song, buy the single and earn you a house. They'll just download it, and you won't see a penny. Instead, you need a deeper relationship with fewer people.
The customer service offered by record labels is remedial. I've bought plenty of Grace Jones records with money. I'd happily pay more money to see her play a concert. Did anyone from her label email me to say she was playing in London on a Thursday night when I was at home watching Bonekickers? No. They took my money and didn't even get my name. They expect Amazon or iTunes to manage my likes and dislikes, when they're the people who stand to profit.
Seth Godin sees a future where the record labels become "tribe management". They'll look after the fans, offering them special products, facilitating communities and spotting synergies. Instead of sending me spam about some new band, they'll send me a free track and invite me to an exclusive and very expensive gig.
What will it look like from the rock star's end of the telescope? In fairness, most working musicians in rock and roll's Premiership, if not its Big Four, have accepted that the days of driving Rolls-Royces into private pools are long gone. In the 1970s, Elton, Led Zep and the Stones set the standard of rock star ostentation that is now of use only to filmmakers and potboiler novelists. Today's famous musicians work harder and are paid less, and in the future it'll only get worse. A rock star used to be a demigod who bathed in money each morning. In the future, they'll look with envy on Java programmers or hedge fund managers.
Actually , Some people got
Actually , Some people got rich selling bottled water. Evian spelt backwards tells why.
Pardon?
Hedge fund mangers?
Distortions
Your thinking is all wrong, it completely subscribes to the belief that all music should be cereal box music - quick soulless throwaway tunes used as a loss leader to promote a product. You can give into filesharing and the whole "music should be free" mentality because its comforting to not perceive yourself as a thief but you are bastardizing a form of art and subverting the economic laws (sorry to make you feel bad). No artist wants to break the mold bc there is less and less money; it costs about 10k bare minimum - upwards of 200k to produce a pop hit - you arent going to spend days in the studio for bare minimum 10k per day for a new take on marketable music when you know youll see the same returns on something u can quickly crank out. (all bc ppl will rip you off). Love Lockdown ring a bell? Cheap Production! It clarifies where music is heading - the bottom of a box used to sell some sugary chemicals.
My personal views aside you offered a very distorted analogy which shows the ignorance that is fueling the bastardization of music.
An editor of a newspaper that sells 1 billion does not write all the content, the editor fixes the content. The editor is more like the engineer + mastering agent and gets paid at a similar scale. The musician and the producer are responsible for creating the entire content - they write the newspaper, from all the headlines to arranging the captions - you get the point - They DESERVE millions for their work. How many times do you read a paper? once, then throw it away (who recycles?). Now, how many times do you listen to a good album - for the rest of your life. A $10 investment in something that youll listen to for the rest of your life is cheaper than asinine music articles you can read for free online.
Lets stop deluding ourselves - is our economic system capitalistic? YES? Then its moral, fair, and just to charge for your hard work - you deserve the fruits of your labor. Just like your flashy shoes, the delicious meal you eat, you buy them bc you like them and they bring you some value, ie entertain you. Because you bought the products, the respective industry can flourish and innovate - you can have airforce 9000 with the patent leather diddler and a super mega avocado burrito. By purchasing you are helping the creative evolution of an industry. The new culture of "free" is sickening and concretely schizophrenic - Blogs, newspapers, artists still live well within the capitalistic system, they still need money to live and grow so they have to incorporate an advertisement to cover costs. Now what does that do to the art? The artist/blog/website has to give its power to the advertiser to make sure it is inline with the advertisers goals and wants. In order to grow in a capitalistic system you need money (enables more time spent, attracting better more creative talent etc) - so the artist/blog/website will be forced to solicit more money from the advertiser. So ultimately, who is in control of YOUR content? The Advertiser! What is the advertiser's main goal? Sell THEIR product. in short: YOUR ARTIST is BITCHED - His source of growth is linked to selling shoes or pharmaceuticals or bentleys or w/e, so you get benign ball-less media whose evolution is implicitly linked to the image, content, and emotion advertisers want you to subscribe to. All artists eventually realize this so they can either keep going as lewd halfhearted supporters of the machine or fade out.
This is "cereal box" music - soulless, corporate, and its whole purpose is to entrain. If you keep starving your content creators they will move to another master like any creature on this earth.
In this system, Your "Free" is Your "Cage".
Watch for The Grungler
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ps its funy how the big dicks maintained their ideology that its wrong to steal - ie if u go to a supermarket and take a box of fruity pebbles everyone will look at you like your a devil - yet if u dl music online or buy a pirated cd on the street ppl think you are bad ass. Stamp out the little guy! Make him hug the big dicks then complain about it!
Why Do you think songs about alcoholism "sell" so well HAHAH
Totally misses the point...
It's not about whether the artist should get an income from their work (I don't dispute that), it's about whether the parasitic music industry can continue to control the channels, content and distribution, behave as an effective cartel, and screw the public out of extortionate quantities of money.
Disintemediation is the industry problem - we don't need them between us and the artist, assuming there are other ways to find, deliver and pay (the artist or trusted intermediary) for the product.
Maybe they could have justified the price of CDs when they first came out, but they've been screwing us ever since by leaving the price more or less static even as production costs plumeted.
does anyone read a 9 paragraph comment?
douchius bradley: wft?
I did.
Always interested in hearing the other side of an argument.
So did I
A darn sight more interesting than your contribution, Curtis.
I think 'Music' is the best it's ever been
If it's harder to make a living then good...maybe then we'll get rid of all the chancers out there.
As for it costing 20,000 to record a 'pop' hit ... utter drivel. It may cost that to churn out homogenous over-polished industry standard pap, but who sets the standards? Is it the 'industry' or is it the punters?
Except that
it's the likes of Cowell and Walsh who are making a good living, selling bland white-bread gloop to the mass market people who, in all honesty, don't actually like music very much. How else would you explain the cancer that is Westlife or Boyzone? And I know that sounds like snobbery, but it's not. I like my fair share of 'junk' music but honestly, the likes of Ronan bloody Keating could be singing his tax return every time he inflicts his dull, listless 'singing' upon us, or the latest 'fantastic' artist, who is just some other airbrushed, battery-farmed girl who soulessly trills eight notes when one will do à la Whitney or Mariah, are my idea of being trapped in the eighth circle of hell.
Much as we may not like it, mass market music has become increasingly commoditised to most people, especially the young. Buying music is just like buying a tin of beans; and about as long-lasting. The best pop music always did have that built-in feeling of obsolescence at its heart: it knew it was transient and that was its beauty. Except now, the turnaround of the latest X Factor/BGT nobody, designed to release maybe only even one single before vanishing has taken the concept to its nadir. Music is one of the ultimate dispoable consumer products.
But that's only one part of the market. In there too are the likes of Marillion and others, who have bypassed the labels and gone straight to the fanbase. This does have the risk of producing material that will keep a fanbase happy (and we know how conservative the über fans of some artists can be), but happily in many cases seems to give bands the freedom not to concentrate on mass market, label-led unit-shifting and more on being true to their own visions.
The music industry is getting jumpy. It can't really see a revenue model that will sustain it, and at the same time doesn't quite understand what's going on. Perhaps if there were more music lovers at the helms of the major companies then we might see some more radical thinking. You just have to look at EMI's recent travails to see that problem writ large.
I see it similar to Henry VIII time
and the Dissolution of the Monasteries and The Reformation.. the Major labels being the Catholic church [Simon Cowell as Pontif?] and the digital age and Internet being Protestantism.
Is that too heavy?
I wonder
who the equivalent of Martin Luther is. And I'll be betting there'll not many other threads where the Anti-Christ Cowell is being compared to the head of the Holy Roman See.
Worse still, if we're not careful, this could go all ISIHAC - one argument to the tune of another.
Are Radiohead the Hugenots?
.
I like that article
Well argued and true. Mark King (Level 42)said as much at least 5 years ago in an interview that he has a core set of fans who buy his stuff via his website and that keeps the wolf from the door. These fans know that they are getting the real thing and they also know that the artist benefits directly, so they are happy to pay. This lucky few also get personal messages from their bass-slappin' hero, so everyone's happy.
3-bed semi in Didsbury or Kingston
If someone said to a 24 year old musician that he could play in his band successfully for the next 30 years and earn enough to live in a 3-bed semi in Didsbury or Kingston, he'd take it.
If doing a job you love is enough to earn an above-average salary out of which you can raise a family and go on nice European holidays once a year and send the kids to a decent state school....then you are in a better situation than most people.
But...I do think that the genuinely talented and big-hitters should be able to over-achieve, so that those at an earlier stage in the life cycle have something to aspire to/dream of.
In the words of Zaphod Beeblebrox
"Why am I doing it? Well, partly it's curiosity, partly it's the sense of adventure.
"But mostly I think it's the fame and the money."