New Music Strategies (Amazon Is Still Falling Short)
DRM-free is great and all, as is any healthy competition for iTunes. But you know how else you can get DRM-free music, plus not give iTunes or Amazon or any big record company any money at all, and just support artists on your own terms, as one human being to another according to how much you actually value their work? I do. Most people do, whether they choose to engage in it or not.
It’s actually two things in combination. The first is file-sharing, the second is donating. And plenty of people are choosing to engage in both — if more often the first of the two. But that’s the messy, realistic reality of things, like it or not, Elton. Why the hell fight it? I ask that not just in the sense of “why bother fighting the inevitable”, but in the sense that it’s not something that should be fought. It’s a positive r/evolutionary trend, both a cause and effect of old metaphors being outgrown and new, better, more expansive metaphors taking their place.
Radiohead is with it enough to see this and to actually live in the present (which in some sense requires also living in the future). Radiohead are clearly forward-thinking people who understand media and marketing (see TIME’s article “Radiohead Says: Pay What You Want” if you haven’t already). And they aren’t the only progressive thinkers willing — in fact, happy — to face and embrace the evolving reality of the music business (and all business, and life itself), to see the good in what’s going on and to find constructive ways to begin facilitating it, actively, now. Radiohead are just the most famous.
If you are a musician, artist, entrepreneur, whatever — person — you can’t afford to wait idly by for the ‘new music industry’ (or whatever industry) train to slow down and stop before you hop on board. It’s not gonna slow down or stop, so you better start moving, if you’re not already. Andrew Dubber is a smart person and here’s a smart thing he has to say about this (From his New Music Strategies Manifesto):
“…changes are still underway, and it is a process of navigation, not a process of conversion from an old model to a new one. By the time you have adapted you will be obsolete again. Develop a strategy for keeping up.”
Every second and every dollar you invest in the old business model is essentially a step backwards. Not a good move in a situation where you need to be not only keeping up, but preferably staying ahead of the curve, and better yet, actively participating in the direction of the ‘curve’ itself. As such, I have compiled for you a starter-kit of essential study materials to help you in this endeavor:
The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online (by Andrew Dubber)
New Music Strategies Manifesto (also by Andrew Dubber)
The Wu Tang Manual
And the following awesome conversations going on over at Tim’s place:
Pay What You Want
Rock Stars Need Not Apply
(no doubt these awesome conversations will be continuing in future posts and threads here, at Tim’s and at Andrew’s, so I would subscribe to / bookmark us all if I were me, and I am, and I have. You should too, mkay).
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17 Responses to “New Music Strategies (Amazon Is Still Falling Short)”
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Regarding manifesto #6: it’s seems like a long time since I was on my DMCA kick (and I should ressurect an unfinished song called “Steamboat Willie”), but it’s good to hear people still hate it. Nowadays I just think of it as yet another typical law that can only be put into practical use by corps against individuals, not the other way around.
Though I’m sure it would be fun to enlist an army of half-crazy vigilantes to try using it the other way around, using witch lawyers and bogus C&D letters — as if they aren’t all bogus anyway.
Heheh, “witch lawyer”… only 558 hits on Google, and they’re not even using it right! Run with the idea while it’s hot!
Curses, my dastardly scheme of using br tags to separate the paragraphs was foiled by the css in your theme!
I must devise a new plan…
No, I must devise a new theme!!!
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“Witch lawyers” — holy jesus, I love that. I almost do want to run with it while it’s hot, just because it’s so hott. but what would I use it for, is the thing. Somebody should, though! like somebody who specializes in witch doctor malpractice suits.
As for going back to little localized audiences, that’s great, but to some degree the listeners need to be reasonably matched to the music. One function the record companies served half-decently once upon a time was to provide some sort of quality control. I’m not 100% willing to say that quality is entirely subjective; just as there are faces only a mother could love, and just as there are jokes for which “you had to be there”, there are plenty of tin-eared dabblers who, because they have plenty of time left over, will gladly toss their arbitrarily slopped-together soundfarts into the indie self-promotion pool, making it that much harder to find the needles in the haystack. Even if you agree with the general consensus that mainstream music has deteriorated over the last few decades, at least it’s all “competent”. When you venture into checking out indie stuff without any kind of roadmap or guide, you have to wade through stuff that’s completely lacking in aesthetic vision.
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There are multiple forces at play as far as why somebody likes what they do, but I think it can be whittled down to two ends of a magnet: the need for familiarity, and the need for freshness. What kind of familiarity we need and what kind of freshness we need gets pretty complicated, but it’s clear that the major labels have leveraged the familiarity end to an unhealthy degree by conditioning middle of the road consumers to actually want homogenity, and creating this sort of “blandness feedback loop”.
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I really have no idea where I was going with all this.
I’ve been using correct capitalization all along, just to prepare for the event of such a theme update! Sock it to me, baby!
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I was hoping those br tags would work, though, just to freak everyone out and look like I had superpowers.
Um, I guess my point is, no, we can’t exactly be “going back to the parlor rooms” (even virtual parlor rooms), but rather we’d be (ideally) going on to some kind of “phase #3″, because the parlor won’t exactly work now that all of our musical tastes have already been fucked up. I think as a species we’ll still want to have some centralized points of interest in the world. It would be nice if a few of those points were deserving of that interest…
Quality control– (alright, this may come out all weird because I’ve only downed half of my first cup of coffee)…
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I get what you’re saying, but I don’t agree with all of it. Hmm, how can I verbalize this weird visual gestalt of pre-verbal thought pulsating at the tip of my brain? (drink more coffee). (That’s not helpful). (Fuck you). (Fuck you). ANyway…
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It’s like the old media vs. new media thing. Back in the olden days when we trusted the news to give us true facts, and facts worth telling, our lives were much much simpler. We didn’t spend nearly the time we now do searching and reading and wading through piles of bullshit, trying to discern what’s legit and what isn’t. It’s a pain in the ass but there are many advantages to it. The old situation wasn’t a pain in the ass, but there were disadvantages to it.
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But the way it is is the way it is, and things are evolving the way they’re evolving. I don’t assume that major labels will die off as many want to think they will. Just as the old crap-tastic news networks still continue to share their symbiotic relationship with the average and below-average-intelligence members of society (yes I know I’m generalizing), it will probably be the same thing with music. Not everyone cares about the ‘long tail’ of music, they just like their booty songs or their generic power-pop or whatever. And that’s fine. People have different interests and priorities in life.
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Like how I don’t give a crap what brand name the shirt I’m wearing is or whether it’s pre-owned, and thus thrift stores will continue to thrive, doesn’t mean the people with a huge passion for fashion, obsessed with designer clothes, shouldn’t be creatively evolving their industry and understanding how new technologies and social trends are changing it and how they should be changing with it.
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The way things are now isn’t ideal by any means, but it’s also not finished. We’ve lost certain good things along with the bad, from the way things used to be, and now there are new problems inherent in the new metaphors / new technologies / etc. What really needs to happen is integration of the best of the past with the best possibilities of the future (which need to be focused on and developed). I like the thing ANdrew Dubber says about the music industry — that there isn’t one; there are many — and each plays by different rules, appeals to different people and requires different ‘metaphors’ and strategies.
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A more simplified version of this idea is the Challenger Brand philosophy:
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“…you are a Challenger Brand. You are unlike the category leader in position, perception and resources. And you cannot succeed simply by trying to re-create the relationship the category leader enjoys with the consumer … To compete and win, a Challenger Brand must change the criteria by which it is evaluated by the consumer.”
Oh yeah, quality control…
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Well, now we need to wade through more, but I think that problem, being an annoyance to so many people… some of those people will be smart and creative enough to come up with solutions to it.
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Meanwhile, there’s word of mouth — the internet + friends and ’shared value communties’ with similar tastes. If your music sucks, word will get around. If your music is amazing, word will get around.
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That’s what I like about not being dependent on traditional avenues like mainstream radio-play or record labels — if my music is good, I actually have a chance to get it out there and even make some money doing it and without giving up my sovereignty or integrity. Maybe I sound naive, and maybe I am, but I think ‘long tail’ musicians (if they’re good!) have reason to be very optimistic right now, more so than ever. Unless they’re clinging to the hope of becoming a huge rock star, which is silly.
The thing about parlor rooms / little localized audiences is just something I see as part of a bigger picture — something I want to see come back into more prominence in people’s lives, particularly my own. But obviously music / live performance can’t be limited to that. That’s utterly impossible and not desirable.
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I’m not a “down with the old regime! up with its polar opposite and fuck common sense!” kind of gal. I hope I haven’t been coming off that way. These are just points of focus and ideas I’m exploring, but there’s always another side and there’s always a bigger picture.
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I’m just trying to push myself to write things out as I’m discovering/thinking about them; to think out loud more. I learn better that way, by having smart-asses like you pointing out the holes in my thinking. :)
Short reply before the long reply: it was in the wee hours when I posted my previous comments, so I need to re-read them, and I don’t know if they made any sense. If this dialogue is in the spirit of “fart out the words first, figure out what you said that you didn’t exactly mean later”, then I’m okay with that, because I think that’s what I was doing.
I think the very term “rock star” needs re-examination. When I was in Episodes, Scott and I used to constantly use the phrase “when we’re rock stars”, because any time you say something like that, you get kind of a mental boost. Sort of like “toppermost of the poppermost”, which, seeing as how that phrase worked so well, we should all start using it. Or something like it. To this day, I don’t identify myself as a “singer/songwriter”, because there are hundreds of thousands of singer/songwriters, and if I’m singer/songwriter #532116, why should anyone give a crap? So I think of myself as separate from the culture (possibly to my detriment in a lot of ways) and try to be more of an Alfred Hitchcock than a Robyn Hitchcock. In other words, not a guy sitting on a stool, strumming, and being basically “normal”, but rather a guy creating a unique and engaging musical realm that isn’t going to get confused with anything anyone else is doing.
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I actually kind of like the term “rock star”, and throw it around to see what kinds of alternate meanings it can pick up, but what does it mean today? It’s kind of self-contradictory, since rock is now considered old-timey and quaint. “Stars” are people like Paris Hilton. To this day I have no f***ing clue why she is famous.
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But, you know, if you’re a star to one person, you’re a star. Because the point is, you’re putting on some kind of show, and you’re creating some kind of effect, and making some kind of impact on someone. But this is in my idealized reality where you’re a star for creating something, not just posing, waving, and wearing defective dresses. But that’s okay, because it only takes one audience member who shares that idealized reality, so that someday down the road, a musician might say to another musican, “I was thinking of doing it more, you know, Brooke-ish — but you know, not totally copying Brooke, still making it our own, but having a bit of that Brooke vibe to it, you know?”.
That last paragraph I just wrote reminded me of how, when I was a kid, if we saw a play being put on by some local theater group, we would all swarm around the actors afterwards and ask them for their autographs. So they succeeded in creating that “larger than life” mystique. We were no more or less delusional than Moody Blues fans, just fewer in number. “We decide which is right — and which is an illusion.”
…yes, that was incredibly corny. Sorry. :)
You will be sorry.
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No, I know. And yes, this dialogue is totally about not thinking things through before you post, and then figuring out what you were talking about later. It’s all good.
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I think we’re on the same page about basically allowing yourself to feel like a star in your own realm –(that’s what the “starlet” thing was all about, and making your own rock star posters of you and your friends and all that). And also recognize that everyone else is a starlet too, though some will shine more brightly than others. I don’t know what I’m getting at anymore. But you know?
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Bla. gotta go.
Brooke,
I just remebered somthing. I thought of a similar idea 5 years ago. I should say this idea “came to me.” I had this idea of doing Pet portraits, then I thought of doing human portraits, but like “fantasy portraits” helping people be in the portrait who ever they want to be in their fantasy.
I didn’t follow through with it.
So this is an idea that is floating around in the ether waiting for someone to bring it into being. All you have to do is download it.
Ted
Wrong post, sorry!
I forgive you, my son.