Christopher Pouncy's List: MUSIC BUSINESS MANAGEMENT

• The rise of “Harlem Shake” is all the more remarkable because of its speed. With only 18,000 downloads the song did not make the last Hot 100 chart at all. But last week it caught fire online, and across the tens of thousands of its scattered YouTube dance videos the song had 103 million views in the United States, according to YouTube
• Billboard’s charts are based on data collected by Nielsen SoundScan
• Nielsen also tracks radio plays and most major streaming services.

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• “Chicken Noodle Soup,” by the Harlem duo Webstar and Young B, became a do-it-yourself sensation. Fans learned the accompanying dance even before the duo had a major-label record deal. And by the time Universal Republic rushed out an official music video, it almost seemed like an afterthought, because there were already hundreds of homemade “Chicken Noodle Soup” videos online.

  • COWGIRL COMES TO MIND
• extended music videos are finding a home in record stores.
• Once upon a time MTV outgrew the music video. But now it seems that the music video has outgrown MTV.

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• OK Go were YouTube's music-video darlings: their inspired 2006 video for "Here It Goes Again," featuring a choreographed treadmill dance routine, was watched by more than 50 million people. But fans were outraged when videos for the band's latest album, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, were viewable on YouTube
• like many record companies, the band's label, Capitol, feels obliged to keep tight rein on its artists' music videos as one of their few remaining revenue streams.
• there are a lot of people out there who think labels are Satan's spawn. It's not only a really simplistic view of the world, but it's one that misses major chunks of how the music industry works.

  • I'm not mad at that statement.

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• As any pub quiz specialist will know, the first video broadcast by MTV back in 1981 was Buggles's Video Killed the Radio Star.
• chart music would have to be backed by big bucks.
• MTV has often been accused of cowardice, of backing down to calls for censorship, excessive use of the "bleep" button

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• I started uploading music to MySpace and just trying to make it happen, and one day somebody sent me a video of a kid who was sort of  okay at acoustic guitar and singing, not great by any means, but just decent, and he had like 250,000 hits on this video; and I sort of went back over to  my MySpace page. I saw that I had, you know, like 3 plays or 4 plays, that's what I'd usually get for the day, and I kind of realized then that YouTube was  the new place people were looking for content.
• luck favors the prepared
• had we been better entrepreneurs and better business people, we probably would have been way bigger than we are right now.

• Jack Conte: It was the two of us against the world and said "fuck you" to everybody that called us and said, "Hey, we want to work with you." I mean, not  really. We talked to everyone and we were very nice. We got offered record deals from every major label that was around at the time. All four basically  offered us and talked with us about what we wanted to do and we said "no" to everybody because we thought that was a bad approach.

   
• Labels have the same model as a venture capital firm, except it's more dangerous, which is why they take a higher percentage of the loan,  basically, in the backend. But they say, "Okay, here is a thousand different things that we think could possibly be successful. Let's give each of them  $500,000 to make something. Let's give all of them. We know that 98% of them are going to fail. It doesn't matter. We know that 98% of them, nobody's going  to ever hear it, nobody's going to like their music, they're going to hate their music, it doesn't matter." But they know that two of them are going to be  Lady Gaga and Coldplay, and that makes it all worth it, but they don't know which two. They don't know! Nobody knows!
• Surge of new interest of fans comes from covering a song on YouTube and using SEO to find people.
• PR agents, PR campaigns, have not really done  that much. I had a PR campaign done for one of my releases a long time ago and it didn't really do much, and then we tried doing another PR campaign for  Pomplamoose and that really just didn't do much and it was expensive and we decided not to do that. So that kind of stuff, nah, not really happening. 

  • NOT SURPRISED! JUST ANOTHER COMPANY LOOKING FOR A SLICE.
• Stageit which is this incredible video live  streaming site that has a tip jar on the site, and people can tip you as they're watching which is just freakin' mind-blowing,

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• "HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I" is being promoted by Sony at a reported cost of about $30 million.

• There has been a fair amount of commentary lately on Pandora’s approach to royalties – some coming from a deliberate and orchestrated campaign funded by the RIAA, and some coming from well-intentioned artists who, because of this misinformation campaign, have been mislead about Pandora’s intentions.
• we compete directly with AM/FM radio, which pays zero performance royalties, we have always supported fair compensation to artists.

  • Pandora doesn't pay performance artist royalties either.
• The second confusing and contentious issue is the amount of money paid for each song spin on Pandora.
• First we need to clarify what a “spin” on Pandora means.
• Each spin on Pandora reaches a single person, compared to a “play” on FM radio that reaches potentially millions of people. In other words, a million spins on Pandora might be equivalent to a single play on a large FM station.

  • It's still dirty!! Pay the original $.09 cents you're supposed to!
• Regardless of the math, the truth remains that any way you cut it, when it comes to Internet radio “x spins pays y dollars in performance fees” is always going to sound like a small number.
• But in a sad irony, the actions of a few small, but powerful publishers seeking to gain advantage for themselves has caused all songwriters’ royalties to go down.

  • Pandora is full of shit.

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• Spotify is “an equation that just doesn’t work.  The music industry is being taken over by the back door, and if we don’t try and make it fair for new music producers and artist, then the art will suffer.
• “Make no mistake,” he added.  “These are all the same old industry bods trying to get a stranglehold on the delivery system.
• “Make no mistake, new artists you discover on Spotify will not get paid.  Meanwhile shareholders will shortly begin rolling in it.  Simples.”

  • HOT!!!!
• The band Grizzly Bear posted on Twitter last year that they received $10 for 10,000 plays of their tracks.
• They have no power without new music.”

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• In 2011, when the music service made its US debut
• 70 percent of its revenue — which comes from ad sales and paying subscribers — goes toward paying licensing fees.
• 18 million Spotify users who don't pay, opting instead to listen to up to 10 hours of free music filled with radio-style ads each month.
• Pandora and Rdio face similar hurdles as royalties industry-wide have hit the $1 billion mark

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• Performance royalties have become critical for songwriters as sales of compact discs and downloads — which pay a different kind of royalty not administered by Ascap and BMI — have fallen.
• Irving Berlin and Victor Herbert.

  • Founded ASCAP
• After federal antitrust investigations, both groups agreed to government supervision in 1941.
• songwriters protested on Capitol Hill. Five writers of hits by stars like Beyoncé and Christina Aguilera showed that 33 million plays on their songs on Pandora yielded just $587.39

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• Soon you will be hearing from Pandora how they need Congress to change the way royalties are calculated so that they can pay much much less to songwriters and performers.

• He was America’s first professional songwriter.
• he died at the age of 37 with only 38 cents in his pocket.
• One of the most popular of these, the original Christy Minstrels, adopted “Oh! Susanna” as their theme song in 1848, and it soon became a hit song throughout the still-new nation even in those days long before radio.
• the song was essentially bootlegged by many different music publishers, who sold the sheet music to the public and cashed in on its popularity without compensating the songwriter at all.
• Foster tried to persuade Christy that his minstrel show could perform a new kind of song, one that could appeal to all people and not only those who enjoy the use of “trashy and really offensive words.”
• It’s been estimated that during Foster’s lifetime he earned just over fifteen thousand dollars in royalties on sheet music from his entire catalog of songs, and no income at all from performance royalties.
• His wife and daughter earned a total of $4,199 after his death.

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