David Byrne?s Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists - and Megastars - The Diigo Meta page

• 01 Apr 09
  

  Tuomas Saarela

  music business media culture technology copyright marketing art distribution

• 25 Mar 09
  

  bieshin ainteasy
• 13 Jan 09
  

  Brett M

  The CD? It's dead. Good thing the music industry is about more than selling plastic discs. Today's artists have surprising new ways to reach fans and make a living. David Byrne gives Wired readers a guided tour of what's next.

• 09 Jan 09
  

  Brian Edwards

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• 27 Dec 08
  

  John Lucero

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• 14 Nov 08
  

  jpburstrom
• 24 Aug 08
  

  arnie Grossblatt

  How to survive in the era of free content, pirated content. Written for musicians but contains lessons for publishers as well.

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• 19 Jul 08
  

  Rahul Matthan

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• 04 Apr 08
  

  Marion Walton

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• 24 Feb 08
  

  Jorge Yunes

  Con motivo del lanzamiento online del disco de Radiohead, David Byrne escribió un interesante artículo en la revista Wired en el que analiza el estado de la industria de la música y las estrategias para artistas emergentes (y megaestrellas)

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• 21 Jan 08
  

  Brian Dowling

  creative-destruction fairuse marketing copyright

  • What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. But that's not bad news for music, and it's certainly not bad news for musicians. Indeed, with all the ways to reach an audience, there have never been more opportunities for artists.
  • What is music?
    
    First, a definition of terms. What is it we're talking about here? What exactly is being bought and sold? In the past, music was something you heard and experienced — it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. Epic songs and ballads, troubadours, courtly entertainments, church music, shamanic chants, pub sing-alongs, ceremonial music, military music, dance music — it was pretty much all tied to specific social functions. It was communal and often utilitarian. You couldn't take it home, copy it, sell it as a commodity (except as sheet music, but that's not music), or even hear it again. Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone — a memory.
  • 2 more annotations...
  • • Freedom versus pragmatism
      
      These models are not absolute. They can morph and evolve. Hausman and Mann took the total DIY route at first, getting money orders and sending out CDs in Express Mail envelopes; later on they licensed the records to distributors. And things change over time. In the future, we will see more artists take up these various models or mix and match versions of them. For existing and emerging artists — who read about the music business going down the drain — this is actually a great time, full of options and possibilities. The future of music as a career is wide open.

    • No single model will work for everyone. There's room for all of us. Some artists are the Coke and Pepsi of music, while others are the fine wine — or the funky home-brewed moonshine. And that's fine. I like Rihanna's "Umbrella" and Christina Aguilera's "Ain't No Other Man." Sometimes a corporate soft drink is what you want — just not at the expense of the other thing. In the recent past, it often seemed like all or nothing, but maybe now we won't be forced to choose.

      
      
      

      Ultimately, all these scenarios have to satisfy the same human urges: What do we need music to do? How do we visit the land in our head and the place in our heart that music takes us to? Can I get a round-trip ticket?

• 14 Jan 08
  

  david waxman

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• 13 Jan 08
  

  _ dashun _
• 09 Jan 08
  

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• 07 Jan 08
  

  Owen Mathews

  toconsume article music intellectualproperty business drm

• 03 Jan 08
  

  aysinkara

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• 02 Jan 08
  

  eduardgrebe

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• 31 Dec 07
  

  Adriana Lukas

  required reading :)

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  Mike Cane
• 30 Dec 07
  

  Gonzalo Martin

  byrne contenidos davidbyrne derechos digitales itunes musica recording

  • First, a definition of terms. What is it we're talking about here? What exactly is being bought and sold? In the past, music was something you heard and experienced — it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. Epic songs and ballads, troubadours, courtly entertainments, church music, shamanic chants, pub sing-alongs, ceremonial music, military music, dance music — it was pretty much all tied to specific social functions. It was communal and often utilitarian. You couldn't take it home, copy it, sell it as a commodity (except as sheet music, but that's not music), or even hear it again. Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone — a memory.
  • Technology changed all that in the 20th century. Music — or its recorded artifact, at least — became a product, a thing that could be bought, sold, traded, and replayed endlessly in any context
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  • • Recording costs have declined to almost zero.
    • Manufacturing and distribution costs are approaching zero.
    • Touring is not just promotion. Live performances used to be seen as essentially a way to publicize a new release — a means to an end, not an end in itself. Bands would go into debt in order to tour, anticipating that they'd recover their losses later through increased record sales. This, to be blunt, is all wrong. It's backward. Performing is a thing in itself, a distinct skill, different from making recordings. And for those who can do it, it's a way to make a living.
    • . At one end of the scale is the 360, or equity, deal, where every aspect of the artist's career is handled by producers, promoters, marketing people, and managers
    • As a general rule, as the cash comes in, creative control goes out
    • 2. Next is what I'll call the standard distribution deal. This is more or less what I lived with for many years as a member of the Talking Heads. The record company bankrolls the recording and handles the manufacturing, distribution, press, and promotion. The artist gets a royalty percentage after all those other costs are repaid. The label, in this scenario, owns the copyright to the recording. Forever.
    • So what happens when online sales eliminate many of these expenses? Look at iTunes: $10 for a "CD" download reflects the cost savings of digital distribution, which seems fair — at first. It's certainly better for consumers. But after Apple takes its 30 percent, the royalty percentage is applied and the artist — surprise! — is no better off.
    • 3. The license deal is similar to the standard deal, except in this case the artist retains the copyrights and ownership of the master recording. The right to exploit that property is granted to a label for a limited period of time — usually seven years. After that, the rights to license to TV shows, commercials, and the like revert to the artist. If the members of the Talking Heads held the master rights to our catalog today, we'd earn twice as much in licensing as we do now — and that's where artists like me derive much of our income.
    • Merge cofounder Mac McCaughan says. "The bands we work with, we never recommend that they make videos. I like videos, but they don't sell a lot of records. What really sells records is touring — and artists can actually make money on the tour itself if they keep their budgets down.
    • 4. Then there's the profit-sharing deal. I did something like this with my album Lead Us Not Into Temptation in 2003. I got a minimal advance from the label, Thrill Jockey, since the recording costs were covered by a movie soundtrack budget, and we shared the profits from day one. I retained ownership of the master. Thrill Jockey does some marketing and press. I may or may not have sold as many records as I would have with a larger company, but in the end I took home a greater share of each unit sold.
    • 5. In the manufacturing and distribution deal, the artist does everything except, well, manufacture and distribute the product. Often the companies that do these kinds of deals also offer other services, like marketing. But given the numbers, they don't stand to make as much, so their incentive here is limited. Big record labels traditionally don't make M&D deals.
    • In this scenario, the artist gets absolute creative control, but it's a bigger gamble. Aimee Mann does this, and it works really well for her. "A lot of artists don't realize how much more money they could make by retaining ownership and licensing directly," Mann's manager, Michael Hausman, told me. "If it's done properly, you get paid quickly, and you get paid again and again. That's a great source of income."
    • 6. Finally, at the far end of the scale, is the self-distribution model, where the music is self-produced, self-written, self-played, and self-marketed. CDs are sold at gigs and through a Web site. Promotion is a MySpace page. The band buys or leases a server to handle download sales. Within the limits of what they can afford, the artists have complete creative control
    • At this end of the spectrum, the artist stands to receive the largest percentage of income from sales per unit — sales of anything. A larger percentage of fewer sales, most likely, but not always. Artists doing it for themselves can actually make more money than the massive pop star, even though the sales numbers may seem minuscule by comparison
• 29 Dec 07
  

  Gabriela Sellart

  via E Dans

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  Sean D

  david byrne of the talking heads on the future of the music industry

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• 28 Dec 07
  

  bigbootys

  artists business byrne david itunes music recording

• 27 Dec 07
  

  Alex Whitlock
• 26 Dec 07
  

  Shanta Rohse

  What I like about this piece is how David Byrnes defines music, and that by doing so expands the idea that it is just a piece of plastice meant to be bought, sold, traded and replayed endlessly in any context. "We'll always want to use music as part of ou

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• 25 Dec 07
  

  A D

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• 24 Dec 07
  

  Jason Wehmhoener

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  Ben Godwin

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• 22 Dec 07
  

  tswanick

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• 21 Dec 07
  

  Shawn Miller

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• 20 Dec 07
  

  jiri SPICAK

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  Cláudio F Gil

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• 19 Dec 07
  

  Andreas Bovens
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  David Jennings

  Typically thoughtful analysis from David Byrne, charting six possible business models, and rejoicing that there are now six, not just one. Includes interviews with Brian Eno, Merge, Radiohead managers.

  byrne eno merge radiohead arcade fire business models Digital music

  • The fact that Radiohead debuted its latest album online and Madonna defected from Warner Bros. to Live Nation, a concert promoter, is held to signal the end of the music business as we know it. Actually, these are just two examples of how musicians are increasingly able to work outside of the traditional label relationship. There is no one single way of doing business these days. There are, in fact, six viable models by my count. That variety is good for artists; it gives them more ways to get paid and make a living. And it's good for audiences, too, who will have more — and more interesting — music to listen to. Let's step back and get some perspective.
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  evad23 Burnett

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  ognjen s

  Six possible music distribution models

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Page Comments

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  bigbootys on 2007-12-28
  Interesting article by David Byrne about being a recording artist in today s digital world.

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