Top Dawg Entertainment/Virgin Records
Media Magazines
- · In the last decade the music industry faced the most complex set of changes in its history. The conventional industry models have been challenged, largely due to the emergence of new technologies and new ways for music lovers to listen to, and own, the music they love.
- · In the old days, working musicians would hope (ultimately) to be signed to a record label.
- · Record company would pay the artist a sum of money as an ‘advance’, to record some material, and specify how much the artist would have to sell before that advance would be paid off – then the artist would start to get a cut of the profits (usually about 15%).
- · In the meantime, the label would arrange tours, with all the accompanying merchandising, as another revenue stream, and the publishing arm of the label (or an independent publisher) would collect royalties from all the airplay and other usage of the artist’s materials, taking a cut themselves.
- · In them modern digital world, much of this can actually be done on a smaller scale and we may even be able to circumvent the record companies entirely.
- · Emergence of Napster and other file-sharing sites more than ten years ago, it became obvious that the internet offers a perfect way for artists to distribute music.
- · Music rights organisation PRS for Music reported this year that CD and DVD revenues fell by £8.7 million in 2009, but digital revenues grew by £12.8 million
- · The ubiquitous MySpace emerged as a platform for artists to host, promote and distribute music.
- · Lilly Allen was actually signed to a record label at the time her massive popularity on MySpace broke - first high-profile artist successfully to promote themselves via the site, highlighting the importance of the medium. Allen’s story is a good example of how early- adopters can use the free technology available at their fingertips.
- · By combining elements of social networking with music downloads, the site is maximising the impact of a variety of Web 2.0 technologies, and this combined model of ad-funded distribution and networking might be one to watch as it develops.
- · How did the record companies lose control – was it solely a case of new technology revolutionising music output? Charlie Barrett argues: Initially, I think yes. The first technological change came in the methods of recording in 1986/7 ... Getting techie about it, drum machines came to dominate, along with the Fairlight and Synklavier. Next followed digital processing with AMS delay, which enabled people to use pre samplers. And this all added up to cheaper studios being needed which was bad news for us [Terminal also owned a recording studio at the time].
- · Harvey Birrel, Alien Sex Fiends, says “basically, it facilitated what I call the rise of the faceless technoproducts.
- · All parties agree that downloads have had a game-changing effect on the industry.
- · the fallout from technological change has left the music business here akin to a vaguely connected patchwork of cottage industries.
- · The music industry has turned 180 degrees, and gone back to how it was in the 70’s. Live music is key to a band’s success,
- · Apple has devoured the open space with its digital offering, iTunes. Most majors have rushed to own shares in the digital provisions, such as Spotify. There is no development of artists from record companies, and independents are quite as guilty as the majors in this regard.
Spotify
- · Spotify satiates music lovers who want to listen to, then purchase, music – their 4 million song database is available to any listener who doesn’t mind putting up with occasional adverts, and it’s this advertising revenue that funds the venture.
- · Spotify explains, the free tier that 75% of users are experiencing contains adverts, all of which advertisers have paid to place there. This revenue all goes into Spotify’s coffers, as do the subscription fees for the paid tier, and it pays 70% of the overall revenue they collect to rights holders – in other words, to the artists.
- · According to its figures, the amount of royalties that Spotify pays to artists doubled from 2013 to 2014, from half a billion to a billion US dollars.
Sellaband/Slicethepie
- · SellaBand is an online platform where music fans can financially support the recording, touring or promotional activities of their favourite artists - Public Enemy are using Sellaband to finance their next album
- · Slicethepie offers a slightly more complex model, where the fans are paid a modest fee to listen to and review uploaded music
- · Marillion used a similar model in 2001 when they asked fans to pre-order their new album directly from them. The 12,000 orders were enough to fund entirely the recording process.
- · The system is a meritocracy: artists with talent, a big enough fan base and a good demo can get funding without contracting to record companies.
- · Unsigned artists aided. No longer do you need labels to provide recording, promotion, production or distribution, new ways to raise money towards your recordings and other activities. All of this has been made possible by technical innovations in the last decade, so artists have no excuse not to embrace the change and take ownership of their own careers.
Virgin Records
- · Virgin Records was emblematic of a new breed of record company.
- · Originally a mail order company, and then a stall in Portobello Market, Richard Branson’s entrepreneurial spirit enabled it to make the transition from retailer to record label in the early 1970s (funded in part by the extraordinary success of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells).
- · By 1985 it was at the very top of the tree.
- · The prevailing culture in the company then was somewhat unorthodox by current standards. Stories of excess at the company away days and weekends were legion.
- · Branson moved onto Virgin Airlines – record company sold
- · As the company became ever more absorbed into EMI, so the spirit started to die
- · Scale of the final downward plunge was not guessed at until one fateful evening. Scarr recalls: One of the IT guys came into our office flourishing an MP3 player and announced with nervous pride: ‘The nerds are taking over the asylum.’ We didn’t know it then but he was dead right.
Independent Music
- · Independent music is flourishing in the digital age, with the democratisation of production and distribution brought about by the internet.
- · Most of this infrastructure for circulating information and opinion on non- mainstream music has now disappeared; HMV is no more and NME is a shadow of its former self and bear little relationship to the way it looked back then. All have been replaced, to some extent or another, by the internet.
- · Since the end of the 1990s, the mainstream music industry has struggled to cope with the huge changes to its business model bought by the rise of peer-to-peer sharing, downloading and internet piracy.
- · Theodor Adorno was a Marxist Media theorist, part of the ‘Frankfurt School’ of intellectuals
- · Was a stern critic of capitalism, and the role played by the ‘culture industries’ in helping maintain the capitalist system.
- He believed that media texts were used to keep us distracted and uninterested in political thought
- · The Culture Industries – music, TV, film, magazine publishing, etc – produce ‘formulaic, simplistic, emotional products’ which avoid any complexity and possibility of questioning the powers that control or oppress us in daily life.
- · Their products are also filled with images of goods produced by the capitalist system, represented in a glamorous, aspirational way; this creates false needs in the audience.
- · Adorno describes this sense of willingly enslaving ourselves to the demands of the system as living in a ‘euphoria of unhappiness’.
- · Standardisation/Homogenisation- He believed that this uniformity of culture brought about a uniformity of needs, thought and behaviour, and ‘the end of the individual’.
- · Cultural production was taken away from artistic individuals, and placed in the control of big corporations, with the products therefore serving the needs of those corporations.
- · This pseudo-individuation in music can be seen in the repetitive structures, instrumentation and technology used to produce popular music. – take that and one direction
- Adorno built his theory of the culture industries on Marxist principles. He was a critic of the capitalist system and argued that popular culture or the culture industries maintained capitalism. They achieve this by offering audiences generic products and consumer goods that act as diversions, making them disinterested in politics and change. Adorno argued that the products produced by the culture industries are: Formulaic, Simplistic, Emotive
- · Neilsen SoundScan’s global figures reveal that 70% of the music consumed in the first half of 2014 was streamed or downloaded– with streaming up a staggering 52% from the previous year. Other players in the streaming field include Pandora, who came early to the internet radio game and has an enormous user base, and Apple’s Beats Music with its unique human-curation element. Even Amazon is trying to carve out a bit of this new territory with Amazon Prime Music.
- · 50 million songs were streamed in January 2015 (double the previous January’s)
Examples
- · Views, was released as an Apple exclusive in April - Music, a two-week period of exclusivity before they are made available to rival services.
- · Chance the Rapper isn’t signed to a record label and has never released music that can be purchased. His is a new model of being an artist, where sponsorships, merchandise, collaborations with other artists, and live performance take the place of album sales.
- · Immortal Technique has aims to retain control over his production, and has stated in his music that record companies, not artists themselves, profit the most from mass production and marketing of music
Top Dawg Entertainment
- an American independent record label
Media Factsheets
- The five major record labels; Sony, Universal, BMG, EMI and Time Warner monopolize the market
- Although independent record companies make up a small percentage of the music market, the British Music Rights Education Factsheet calculated that as many as 3,000 record companies in the UK were responsible for 14,000 record labels.
- Peterson and Berger believe that because the music industries are primarily concerned with generating a profit, they choose to invest in musical forms that offer the least resistance to the culture and they take resistant musical forms and sanitize them (removing ideological challenges) to make them attractive to a mainstream audience
- According to www.songrights.com music companies give between 9% and 12% to the artist and the rest is profit for their company.
- Adele's demo on MySpace 2006
- In recent years consumers are less willing to pay for their music and as a consequence piracy and file-sharing have seen the industry lose billions over the last decade. According to the Institute for Policy Innovation global music piracy causes $12.5 billion of economic losses every year. In order to combat this music streaming services such as Spotify have worked in conjunction with the industry to try offer audiences the opportunity to listen to music but not actually download it, which means it is not being shared YouTube has also placed ID content censorship on videos to stop music being downloaded. However, these are only temporary measures and the industry has had to find more ways to prevent this
- The Internet was meant to weaken the dominance of superstar artists in the music industry and enrich the smaller, niche music creators. But new research suggests that this “long tail” theory is wrong: superstars are capturing the vast majority of music revenues and their share is increasing – not decreasing – because of the rise of digital services like iTunes and Spotify top 1 per cent of artists the likes of
- Rihanna and Adele accounted for 77 per cent of recorded music income in 2013.
- Artists like Amanda Palmer are trying to circumvent the big labels and do things differently by using the idea of crowdsourcing.
- This is where an artist asks their fans or anyone who may be interested to fund their project and be given something special in return.
- Palmer already had an establish fan base which she appealed to fund the production and distribution of her album through the crowdsourcing site Kickstarter.
- In return she also pledged to break down the barriers between artist and audience
- "‘And then Twitter came along, and made things even more magic, because I could ask instantly for anything anywhere."
- Para-social relationships – Psychologists use the term “parasocial relationship” to describe the connection people get from celebrities and other famous people but which an illusion is
- in a trans-media age where changes are brought about by the developments in technology at a rapid pace the interrelationship between the artist and consumer is evolving beyond the traditional models, but whether they will ever challenge the monopolies is yet to be seen
The Independent Newspaper
- http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/vinyl-streaming-music-industry-spotify-ed-sheeran-2017-deezer-mr-bongo-formats-digital-downloads-a7635131.html
- Vinyl vs streaming: What music industry experts predict for the two platforms in 2017
- Jorge Rincon, VP of Deezer North America, explained to Billboard: “Our music democratises the way music is available. It’s also very important to us that new artists are visible and accessible to the audience.
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