PHD CONFIRMATION REPORT: HUGH BROWN
… the business had always been stupid and greedy - but new factors causing the illusion were
ever- increasing amounts of money and runaway technology.
- Donald Clarke
The Rise and Fall of Popular Music
Table of Contents
1.
Title & Type.................................................................................................2
2.
Introduction ...............................................................................................2
Overview .......................................................................................................................................................................... 2
Outcomes ......................................................................................................................................................................... 4
Performative component............................................................................................................................................. 4
Exegetical component ................................................................................................................................................ 4
Theoretical/Philosophical underpinning ................................................................................................................... 5
Assumptions/limitations............................................................................................................................................... 6
3.
Research Plan.............................................................................................6
Methodology.................................................................................................................................................................... 7
Approach .......................................................................................................................................................................... 9
Cycles and phases...................................................................................................................................................... 9
Results .............................................................................................................................................................................10
4.
Timeline ....................................................................................................11
5.
Progress to date .........................................................................................11
6.
Literature review...................................................................................... 13
Musicians and their practices .....................................................................................................................................15
Music industry ...............................................................................................................................................................17
History ...................................................................................................................................................................17
Current issues .........................................................................................................................................................21
Business ..........................................................................................................................................................................25
Underpinning theory ...............................................................................................................................................25
Recording business traditions...................................................................................................................................25
The online environment ...........................................................................................................................................26
Intellectual Property .....................................................................................................................................................28
Existing Framework ..............................................................................................................................................29
Ownership structures ...............................................................................................................................................30
Distribution options ................................................................................................................................................31
New Media .....................................................................................................................................................................33
7.
Context review..........................................................................................36
Musicians and their practices .....................................................................................................................................36
Songwriting .............................................................................................................................................................36
Production and recording .........................................................................................................................................37
Live performance .....................................................................................................................................................37
4
Business services ...........................................................................................................................................................38
Management ...........................................................................................................................................................38
Distribution and marketing ....................................................................................................................................38
Social Networking ..................................................................................................................................................38
Sales .......................................................................................................................................................................38
Merchandising ........................................................................................................................................................39
Online and offline radio ..........................................................................................................................................39
Licencing .................................................................................................................................................................39
Capital Raising ......................................................................................................................................................39
Appendix 2 – Prospects for the purposive sample of interviewees....................... 47
Appendix 3 – Invitation to participate ................................................................. 48
Appendix 4 – Media Release Text .........................................................................49
Appendix 5 – MySpace pitch text ..........................................................................50
Appendix 6 – In-principle members of The Genre Benders .................................50
References ............................................................................................................ 52
1. Title & Type
Title: Third Legs, Tentacles and Trust: anatomy of a 21st Century music business.
Thesis type: 50% performative, 50% exegesis.
2. Introduction
Overview
The rise of the public Internet has been credited with providing unprecedented opportunities for
‘independent’ creators of intellectual property (Anderson, 2004; 2005:48; Garrity & Teitelman,
2005). These opportunities would encourage artists to adopt a do-it-yourself approach and
compete directly with established record companies and producers (Bockstedt et al., 2005), though
enthusiasm for them is not universally shared (Bernstein, 2004) and some of the early proponents
of these opportunities now fear for their future (Lessig, 2005).
However, as at the time of writing, no ‘independent’ artist has appeared atop the global sales
charts. In the UK, unsigned band Koopa’s single “Blag, Steal & Borrow” entered the top 30
singles chart after the rules changed on January 1 2007 to includes sales of digital-only releases
(Youngs, 2007), and the song “Crazy”, by virtual artist Gnarls Barkley was rated number 1 with
31,000+ downloads the week before hard copies went on sale (Anonymous, 2006a). Several
artists who have topped the charts are claimed (with many doubters) to have used Internet devices
such as MySpace (Eyre, 2006; Miller, 2006) and webcasting performances (Kelbie, 2006) to
grow their fan base. Indeed, the peak body for the global recording industry, the International
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Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI, 2005; 2006b), has trumpeted the success of the
major labels’ digital initiatives – even claiming that “The emergence of a successful digital
business has been the single most important development in the music industry in 2004” (IFPI,
2005:4).
As a life-long frustrated musician and songwriter, my own efforts to secure a sustainable income
from the production and performance of music have so far failed. Although I have made money
from music composition, performance and teaching, this has never amounted to more than a
complement to the income from my “day jobs”, which have been many. My personal failure to
make a living from my musical activities and the tantalising prospect of harnessing the abovementioned New Media1 properties using a “Long Tail” business model (Anderson, 2004), in
which goods that have negligible reproduction and distribution costs (like digital music on the
Internet) are consumed more widely and in greater variety than other goods, have inspired this
study.2
This study proposes to take an Action Research (Hughes, 1995) approach to the subject by
ascertaining the views and current practice of a number of artists of various levels of
‘independence’ and ‘success’.3 Guided by their input and a review of the literature, academic and
industry, it will explore business plans to create, produce and market an independent musical act
using tools that are available to independent artists. The musical act will comprise a core of local
performers who agree to provide their input for a share of the proceeds rather than an up-front fee.
The aim of this project is to generate sufficient income to be able to fund its continuance after the
end of the study. It is hoped that the other participants in the study will also directly benefit from
their involvement – whatever their business goals may be.
Should this be successful, the model would be of great interest to large sections of the music
industry, who may wish to adopt or further refine its methods. Industry training and development
policy-makers would also find it informative.
Its participants will gain advice, a collegial
networking relationship and possibly short- and long-term financial gain. More generally, it
should provide a valuable assessment of some of the factors affecting the sustainability of
independent musical activities.
1
This term is defined in the literature review.
2
The Long Tail economy is discussed more fulsomely in the business section of the literature review below.
3
Defining the terms ‘independence” and ‘success” is highly problematic and is discussed further in the literature review.
4
Outcomes
This thesis will be presented as an exhibited dynamic work. This work will have two major, interlinked, components.
Performative component
i.
Two CDs of recorded music. These are original productions written and performed by
members of The Genre Benders. Their production and marketing is an action-oriented
auto-ethnographic research strategy designed as a control test of the model devised in the
project, which will also be variously tested by other participants.
ii.
A website built at http://www.genrebenders.com to be the centrepiece of the model’s
marketing aspects for the two CDs. It will be designed to fit the theory embodied in the
model and modified in response to the results of each Action Research cycle.
iii.
A network of related online promotion resources including web pages, e-mail lists, and
bulletin boards designed to help market the CDs mentioned above. These will also be
selected and developed according to the model and the data gathered from the surveys and
interviews. It will also be added to, reduced and modified in accordance with each cycle’s
data.
iv.
A web-based venue for the activities of a community of independent musicians. This
provides an incentive for the Action Research participants to remain involved and for new
members to join. It is intended to form a knowledge base and social reference point for
participants. In doing so it will form a core aspect of the network-marketing strategy to be
developed.
v.
A database of available resources to help independent musicians to further their careers,
which will be posted to the venue mentioned above and maintained for the community’s
benefit – perhaps as a Wiki.
Exegetical component
vi.
A suite of documents representing an original legal framework for creation and sharing of
intellectual property using distributed networks. These documents are a key development
that enables the project to proceed on a distributed risk/distributed return basis, which is
essential to the viability of the model. They are intended to be published under Creative
Commons licensing for the benefit of other independent musicians.
vii.
Two reports on surveys of and interviews with independent musicians. Each of these will
be given back to the participants to enable them to change their practices as they choose.
Data concerning their response to these reports and results from changes to their practice
as a result of them will inform modifications to the model under development.
viii.
A paper outlining the model for the shape of Western cultural industries (Figure 2, below).
Written in collaboration with (co-supervisor) Professor Phil Graham. To be submitted to
New Media and Society.
These will be presented at a public launch, tentatively entitled “Music production in the 21st
Century: a user’s guide”. The online components will available (in "live" or archived forms) from
the time of their creation and integrated into the public exhibition. This exhibition is intended to
be scrutinised by the public and industry, and this can also be the examination method for the
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thesis. It is hoped that the exegetical aspects will be published in peer-reviewed journals and
linked into a single exegesis.
Theoretical/Philosophical underpinning
Like much Action Research, this study is underpinned by Critical Theory. That is, it
1. is motivated by the researcher’s desire to change the social order of the study’s participants;
2. is based on the beliefs that
a. the participants’ realities are shaped by the social conditions in which they find
themselves, and
b. they have the potential to change their situation if presented with a better
understanding of it;
3. assumes that some of those perceived realities are based on myths and misinformation –
especially about the industry and media environment in which they choose to operate; and
4. uses praxis to test and revise its findings. (Neuman, 1997)
Specifically, this study seeks to “uncover the winners and losers” (Kinchloe & McLaren,
2000:281) among participants in the current music industry regime and to emancipate its
participants from the as many of the regime’s dominant forces as possible. It does so by
examining relationships of cultural domination and cultural pedagogy (Kinchloe & McLaren,
2000:284-5) and providing participants with access to alternative and/or supplementary
relationships.
This project begins from the premise of a group of unknown 16-year-old musicians who want a
career in music. It asks: if they asked for help, what do they need to know to maximise the
longevity of their careers and help them achieve whatever goals they have? What does the
‘wisdom of the tribe’ tell them in this rapidly-changing media ecology? It also seeks to find an
alternative to the traditional high-risk music industry approach, in which inexperienced young
artists are given large budgets to produce music recordings and must earn enough from sales to
recoup the company’s expenses before they gain from their efforts (Brain, 2006). Given the
experience of many musicians under the dominant industry regime (Dannen, 1991) and the
persistent reputation of the industry for dishonest conduct (Wilhelms, 2006), this concerns issues
of social justice and equal opportunity. It is clear that viable alternatives to the dominant regime
have occasionally arisen (Clarke, 1995) through movements like 1970s punk and 1980s Hip-Hop,
and that the music industry, after being forced to recognise their value, has worked hard to
subsume them, arguably to the point of their cultural irrelevance (Frith, 1992). This study aims to
provide strategies for alternatives that do not conform to the dominant regime’s notions of
“valuable”.
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It is, however, not the purpose of this project to engage with the kind of arguments outlined by
Frith as to whether “my pleasure in a song by the group ABBA carries the same aesthetic weight
as someone else’s pleasure in Mozart” (2004:33). From the perspective of the anonymous young
artist it is enough to take the view that the music produced has a value, if only to its creators and
their families, and to seek to derive from that value a sustainable career. Where it becomes
apparent that such a career may not eventuate, this project will seek clues as to the extent to which
this value may have been shared with the audience via the qualitative third-party “filters”
described by Anderson (2006). The theory of “long tail” economics (Anderson, 2006) says it is
quite probable that at least some of the value of most music will be shared with some portion of
the music-buying public. The question most pertinent to this study is not whether that segment of
the audience has good taste but how the artist can maximise the benefit of that audience.
Assumptions/limitations
This study is necessarily limited to examination of the music business in Western liberal
democracies. It will focus on the parts of the music industry that are analogous with the Australian
legal and business environment. Further, it is primarily focussed on the English-speaking
segments of the music market, though there is probably no reason why the theories involving
niche production and marketing could not apply to other cultures. I hesitate to make that claim
without further investigation.
3. Research Plan
The research problem concerns the barriers to musicians’ participation in the music industry; what
are they and how do they affect musicians and their livelihoods? Specifically, it considers the
plight of ‘independent’ musicians – those who do not benefit from a relationship with major music
companies. This study seeks to better understand these barriers and to develop methods by which
such artists can use New Media to improve their music businesses.
The questions that underpin this study are:
1. What are the factors affecting the sustainability4 of independent digital music production
and distribution?
2. How many of these factors can be directly influenced by an independent artist in the dayto-day operations of their musical enterprise?
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3. How can these factors be best manipulated to maximise the benefit generated from digital
music assets?
Methodology
There is little literature involving the use of Action Research on the music industry. However, the
more general literature on the methodology provides some advice and this approach has some
clear advantages.
The Action Research approach “embodies a multiplicity of views,
commentaries and critiques, leading to multiple possible actions and interpretations” (O’Brien,
2001) and Johnsen (2005:546) argues that “co-generation” of knowledge by the study’s
participants “guarantees for its usefulness, applicability, accountability, and relevance”. In
addition, this design is built on the “knowledge the researcher brings concerning history and
cultures, and an awareness of body language, semiotics and slogan systems operating within the
cultural norms of the organisation” (Edwards, 2002:72). These “strongly-grounded hermeneutics”
(Edwards, 2002:73) can help to detect misinformation and conflicting agendas, manage the
process and people and better understand the data.
However, the desire to change the reality of participants and create something enduring can be
criticised as arrogant for attempting emancipation (Kinchloe & McLaren, 2000:282). No one is
ever completely emancipated from their socio-political context, and to suggest that they might
attracts accusations of advocacy disguised as research.
The potential clearly exists for the
participants’ frustrations, which led to their initial enthusiasm, to grow and fester. Should such
issues arise, they will test my inter-personal skills as much as my skills as a researcher. As
Johnsen (2005:547) puts it: “as an action researcher I can be involved in action, but I also have to
be a researcher.” However, O’Brien (2001) argues that “action researchers also reject the notion
of researcher neutrality, understanding that the most active researcher is often one who has most at
stake in resolving a problematic situation”.
This tension between my desires as a practitioner and as a researcher is manifest most clearly in
my status as a “deep-insider” (Edwards, 2002), defined as a researcher who has been a member of
the organisation or group under research for more than 5 years. This, of course, will not strictly
apply to The Genre Benders, which will be created for the purposes of this study. However, since
I will be the instigator and driving force behind the group’s activities, at least initially, I will
qualify. Deep insiders face a range of issues, mostly stemming from what Edwards (2002:79) calls
the “Ethics of Intrusion”, none of which is necessarily fatal to the project:
4
Defining the term “sustainability” is highly problematic and is dealt with further in the literature review.
4
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The researcher runs the risk of overlooking the familiar and dismissing the obvious;
The researcher may become indecisive in the face of unpleasant situations involving people
close to him;
Participants may fear the risk to ego stemming from open discussion of one’s interpretations,
ideas, and judgments;
Participants may be intimidated into providing the answers they think the researcher wants to
hear, rather than the most honest ones;
There will occur in the write-up some points at which disclosure will cause discomfort, either
for the researcher or for the persons being discussed. This may even have legal ramifications.
There is no escape from the possibility of these issues, and no simple recipe for dealing with them
should they arise other than complete openness, honesty and accountability. However, O’Brien
(2001) cites some helpful principles for reducing their likelihood and/or impact:

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

Make sure that the relevant persons, committees and authorities have been
consulted, and that the principles guiding the work are accepted in advance by all.
All participants must be allowed to influence the work, and the wishes of those
who do not wish to participate must be respected.
The development of the work must remain visible and open to suggestions from
others.
Permission must be obtained before making observations or examining documents
produced for other purposes.
Descriptions of others’ work and points of view must be negotiated with those
concerned before being published.
The researcher must accept responsibility for maintaining confidentiality.
The final issue pertinent to this, and any qualitative, study is that of the “trustworthiness” or
“rigour” of the data (Morse et al., 2002). Assessing qualitative data is, by nature, a process open
to personal bias and external influence but good research accounts for this. Since my research will
involve autoethnographic devices as well as participant observation, it is important that my biases
are taken into account.
Fortunately, much effort has been put into devising means to do so. Lincoln & Guba (1985), for
example, compiled a list of measures that can help. In addition to prolonged engagement and
persistent observation, which will occur naturally in this case because I will be creating the
settings for activities and also be involved in nearly every activity, to “identify those
characteristics and elements in the setting that are most relevant to the question being pursued and
focus on them in detail” (Lincoln & Guba, 1985:305), I propose to use member checks, which are
a natural addition to an Action Research approach and peer debriefing. In this project the multiple
perspectives, as noted above, and inclusion of quantitative measures should help to “crystallise” or
“triangulate” the data. I am also concerned, as Morse et al. (2002) note, to include these measures
4
as much as possible during the research, rather than as post hoc assessments. This is particularly
important for action research, where the outcome of subsequent cycles can be affected by the
quality of data in each cycle.
Approach
Cycles and phases
This project will have two cycles, each of which has three phases. The first phase is a web-based
global survey of self-defined independent musicians. In the first cycle, this will seek to establish a
yardstick for the status of these artists and their practices (see Appendix 1) and in the second cycle
it will seek to assess any improvements that their involvement has been able to engender.
The second phase will be interviews with a purposive sample (see Appendix 2) of independent
artists at different stages of their musical careers. This sample seeks to include artists that are just
beginning as well as those in the later stages of their musical lives. It also seeks to include a
variety of musical styles and genres, from classical, folk and blues to ambient and meditational
music to pop, rock and electronic dance music. The purpose of these interviews is to gain a more
in-depth examination of the attitudes and practices of musicians at various stages of development.
The results of the surveys and interviews will be preliminarily written up and this write-up sent
back to the survey respondents. It is anticipated that those respondents will, to varying extents,
adopt some of the practices and/or services discussed in the findings. It is this adoption and the
results of it that will form a crucial point of practice variance that will be examined in the survey
and interviews of cycle 2.
As noted in the literature review below, a considerable range of non-academic literature and
services has been produced to fill the vacuum left by the pace of technological development. A
considerable portion of this project will involve collecting and assessing these resources and their
strengths and weaknesses for independent musicians. Based on the findings of the surveys,
interviews and literature, in phase three a business plan will be devised for The Genre Benders and
CDs of music written and produced by the group, will be published along with related
merchandise, live performances, etc. This endeavour will provide the project with some
quantitative data as to the effectiveness of the strategies and services employed. These data will
include sales figures, website server logs, hit rates on social-networking sites, live performances
and their income, and hopefully indicators of other-media presence, including radio and/or TV
broadcast numbers. It is hoped, but not expected, that the interviewees will provide similar data
about their own businesses.
4
Results
Out of this project will be developed an approach to constructing a musical business that, while it
cannot be overly prescriptive, should provide artists with some key indicators of the relative
importance of the possible strategies, service providers and considerations they face. This model
will, by design, have to assume that each artist has their own goals and criteria to assess the
“quality” of their product. While it is acknowledged that product quality is a key indicator of
likely business success, it is also recognised that the criteria for “quality” and “success” are likely
to vary enormously between artists, within each artist’s audience, and over their careers. For
example, early data from the survey (see Appendix 1) have identified a clear division between
artists whose criteria for success concern artistic goals (“Make a lasting contribution to the world’s
cultural heritage”), for whom the best advice may come from Jimmy Web’s book on songwriting
(1998), and those whose goals are mainly financial (“Make enough to be able to retire young and
comfortably”), for whom Dec Cluskey’s 57 secrets (2006a) might be more relevant.
The model aims only to help artists find resources that can help them create, and to find sources of
feedback that can help them improve. One of the great virtues of the Web is that it is a space in
which people can, and often are encouraged to, fearlessly express their opinions. The result of this
is that the power of mass-media gatekeepers and tastemakers is reduced, and an artist can get
assessment of the quality of their efforts more readily and more meaningfully via the myriad of
amateur, peer and professional critics. All this project can offer artists is devices for putting their
creations in front of these critics, making sense of the response and acting upon it.
Finally, this advice will not be equal. Even in the world of abundance, a hierarchy exists among
publishers in terms of their influence and audience size. Artists seeking exposure will be best
suited by appealing to the most influential publications, online as offline. Contrary to the thinking
of some commentators (Adler, 2007; Hindsman, 2007), I do not foresee the demise of mass media,
but a devolution and disaggregation of the mass. In industrial terms that may amount to the same
thing but in cultural terms it is not. There will remain institutions of vast reach and influence, and
accessing these will remain a challenge for independent artist, as they will be patronised by the
dominant players of the industry. This project falls short of aiming to help find pathways for
independents to access these institutions, preferring to concentrate on viability and sustainability
in smaller enterprises.
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4. Timeline
This study should be finished, written up and submitted within the standard three-year period. It is
a many-faceted project and some of the proposed activities will overlap, as indicated in Figure 1
below.
Figure 1: Timeline for thesis completion
Confirmation
Annual Progress
Final Seminar
Lodgement
Thesis writing
Introduction
Literature Review
Methodology
Initial Survey and Interviews
Release 1
Followup survey and Interviews
Release 2
Discussion
Conclusion
Research Process
Context review
Cycle 1
Develop survey 1
Process survey 1
Recruit Purposive sample
Conduct interviews
Reflect/write up and distribute findings
Produce first recording
Distribute first recording
Market first recording
Cycle 2
Develop survey 2
Process survey 2
Re-interview purposive sample
Reflect/write up and distribute findings
Produce second recording
Distribute second recording
Market second recording
Re-interview purposive sample
Approvals/Agreements/Applications
Intellectual property
Recruit participants
Publishing agreements
Outputs
Conference Papers
Journal papers
5. Progress to date
As can be seen from Figure 1 above, several of the key phases of stage 1 have been entered.
Specifically, the first global survey questionnaire (see Appendix 1) has been posted to
http://polling.nationalforum.com.au/index.php?sid=4 and on November 15 2006, after extensive
testing, the invitation in Appendix 3 was circulated to potential participants by e-mail.
4
Propagating this invitation encountered many problems at first and several strategies have been
employed to increase the response rate. The strategy for promoting the survey’s existence was
copied from that used by The Pew Internet and American Life Project in it’s 2004 survey of online
musicians (Madden, 2004), in which an invitation to complete an online questionnaire was
circulated to members of nine organisations based in the USA. Since this project is intended to
have a global focus, only the three of these with an international focus, CDBaby.com, the Future
of Music Coalition and Just Plain Folks, were approached. However, the Future of Music
Coalition and Just Plain Folks declined to include my invitation in their e-newsletter and Derek
Sivers of CDBaby advised that, due to the workload associated with anti-spam and rejection
notices, he no longer e-mails his members unless absolutely necessary. Instead, he invited me to
post the invitation to the CDBaby bulletin boards, which I have done.
To overcome this difference, I recruited several other sources, who have agreed to include it in
their e-newsletters: Muses News; In Music & Media; Q-Music; a notice about it has also been
posted to a large number of other sources, including blogs, e-zines. I also circulated the invitation
via MySpace, friends list and bulletins, and 6 MySpace groups devoted to independent musicians
and their discussions (whose memberships totalled more then 146,000), as well as equivalent
services at iSound. As at 15 April, 2007 there have been 75 survey responses.
An essential core of members for The Genre Benders has agreed to take part on the basis offered
(see Appendix 6) and some preliminary rehearsals were held in October and November 2006.
Now that a formally-drafted publishing agreement has now been drafted, work on recording the
11-song setlist will resume in February. Preliminary demonstration recordings can be downloaded
on a Creative Commons basis from http://www.huge.id.au. Further recruitment of contributors is
an on-going process.
A website has been registered at http://www.genrebenders.com via Yahoo! and visits to it are
redirected to a place-holder page hosted off my blog at http://www.huge.id.au/genrebenders. This
site will be developed further as the main online vehicle to promote The Genre Benders and their
music when the CD is ready for promotion and the business plan drafted. This site will exemplify
the design principles and link to the other marketing measures chosen in the business plan. It will
also be a major source of quantitative data, for example visitation and download statistics, and
qualitative feedback in the form of visitor comments, ratings and feedback. Additional web
presence has been developed at other music-related sites including MySpace, ISBSL, iSound, and
Garageband, though this, too, is nascent until the first CD has been produced.
4
The database of services is currently 157 strong and will grow as the results of the survey are
collated.
A
slightly
dated
version
http://www.huge.id.au/genrebenders/Webservicesdata.xls.
has
been
uploaded
to
New services are being launched
almost daily and as they are discovered they are being added. Although the context review below
provides a short review of these, a more comprehensive analysis will be needed before the first
business plan can be devised.
6. Literature review
Most research into the music industry seems to be compilations of statistical industry data (for
example, see IFPI, 2006a; IFPI, 2007a; Nielsen, 2007a;2007b), case studies of specific countries
or companies (for example, see Berry, 2005; Mabry, 1990; Mukherjee & Dass, 2004; Pedersen &
Andersen, 2006), or activities (for example, see Hochhauser, 1999; Kauppila, 2005; Wee, 2002);
ethnographic investigations of artists or music subcultures (for example, see Brown, 2001; Ebare,
2003); or (most plentiful) action research involving music education rather than music industry
practice (for example, see Begay, 2002; Brown, 2004; Conway & Borst, 2001; Loren, 2003).
A small group of researchers have examined music industry music business models (see the work
of Buhse, 2001; Buhse & Wetzel, 2003; Fox, 2004; Krueger et al., 2004; Swatman et al., 2006) in
the New Media environment.
In addition, Brad Stamm (2000) has undertaken a detailed
econometric analysis of the music industry and proposed a hedonic demand model for it, while
quoting Harold Vogel’s (2001:32) observation that “Conventional economics has accorded little
attention to the arts and has included some rather curious notions about the association between
the arts and the economy …”, referring to the difficulty of modelling demand for “cultural goods”,
whose value appears unpredictable (Denzin, 2004; Frith, 1996).
However, a considerable body of work in the “cultural studies” tradition has addressed the
sociology of music (see, for example, Adorno, 1991; Denzin, 2004; Frith, 1996; Hesmondhalgh &
Negus, 2002; McDonald-Russell, 2002; McKee, 2006), including its value. Hesmondhalgh &
Negus (2002) categorise these in four ways: 1) questions concerning musical meaning; 2)
questions of music audiences; 3) questions concerning the music industry, especially production;
and 4) questions concerning the role of place in music – the extent to which music can be national,
or international, or has “world” influences.
A range of other studies has examined the impact, legal, ethical and cultural, of peer-to-peer (P2P)
technologies on CD sales (for example, see Blackburn, 2005; d'Astous et al., 2005; Hong, 2004;
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Michel, 2006; Oberholzer & Strumpf, 2004; Zentner, 2003); the actions of the record industry in
response to the decline in CD sales since 2000 (for example, see Channel, 2004; Galway, 2005;
Gordon, 2005; Grodzinsky & Tavani, 2005); and of consumption patterns and other changes
associated with P2P and the response to it (for example, see Asvanund et al., 2004; Bhattacharjee
et al., 2003; Rainie & Madden, 2004; Rainie et al., 2004; Shayo & Guthrie, 2006).
Finally, much effort has been directed to understanding the nature of the Creative Industries,
particularly on a national basis in Australia. These studies are mainly directed by the various
levels of government, often working together, towards assisting in policy formation to facilitate
these aspects of the economy (for example, see CIE, 2005; CIRAC, 2004; DCITA, 2002;
Donovan et al., 2006; Flew et al., 2001).
However, none of these addresses the perspective or needs of the independent artist. That is left to
the industry itself, and a large body of non-academic literature, in the forms of books, e-books,
websites, CD-ROMs, radio broadcasts, podcasts and more, has sought to provide assessment,
advice and strategy to participants in the industry (for example, see Baker, 2004; Brain, 2006;
Cluskey, 2006a; Goldstein, 2002; Gordon, 2005; Hooper, 2005a). Much of this is based entirely
on the authors’ personal experience as a practitioner in the traditional music industry, with
observations on how this applies to the new environment and advice offered to those who wish to
further their career. This, sometimes contradictory, usually US-centric, literature will be assessed
in light of academic studies and this analysis will be used as the basis for The Genre Benders’
business plan.
In addition to these resources, the industry has created many new services, including iTunes,
MySpace, MusicSubmit and their competitors, that can help the independent artist achieve their
goals. Many of these services have already proved unviable and disappeared, some make claims
that are infeasible, though the business remains viable, and some provide steady and profitable
services to mutual satisfaction and some, such as Spiralfrog, have yet officially launch but promise
further innovations in the music business. Collecting and collating as many of these as possible
will be a substantial part of this project and using some of them will be a key part of The Genre
Benders’ plans.
Collectively, this precedent presents a patchwork of helpful input to the proposed study but does
not address its issues in their entirety. For this reason, the following literature review has been
approached on a topic-by-topic basis. Further, the pace of change is such that the academic
literature is significantly out of date compared to the industry’s advances. For this reason, a
4
“Context Review” of industry literature and online services will follow the formal review of
academic literature.
Musicians and their practices
In her Doctoral research into the professional practice of classical instrumental musicians, Dawn
Bennett (2005) found that insufficient research has been conducted into the professional practice
of musicians, with understanding being based mostly on economic studies of the creative
industries. What is known, however, shows that “far from making a living by making music, the
majority of musicians finance music making by making a living” (2005:205). Bennett cites a UK
study (Metier, 2001) that found that 90% of classical musicians held a secondary occupation –
94% in a Danish study (Transdaahl, 1996). For most of these, the secondary occupation was …
teaching music! Bennett paints a complex picture of musicians’ self-assessments of ‘success’, in
which a clear hierarchy emerges. Most would prefer to be full-time performers but teach “as a
fall-back career” (2005:206) in what is described as “a very unstable industry” (2005:208).
Tellingly, Bennett found a self-assessment that “the musician is a person whose ‘product’ results
in music” (2005:209), with her participants lamenting that their education had underplayed the
“business, social and cultural” (2005:210) aspects of a musical career.
Australia’s pessimistically titled Don’t Give Up Your Day Job report (Throsby & Hollister, 2003)
found that of all Australian artists, musicians had the highest median earned income (pre-tax from
all sources) at $35,800 in the 2000-01 year and that they comprised the highest, though a
declining, proportion of the sector at 30%.
This study found that artists’ incomes were
“substantially less than managerial, administrative, professional and para-professional earnings”
but “little different from those of all occupational groups, including non-professional and bluecollar occupations” (2003:46). The low return from their artistic endeavours is best illustrated by
the finding that although they spent 81% of their time on artistic work, they earned only 66% of
their income from it. Finally, although the study found that “about half of Australia’s practising
professional artists earned less than $10,000 from their creative work” (2003), this figure
comprised only earned income, which did not include royalties, unemployment benefits and other
sources of income. It is noteworthy that these figures conform roughly to supply side of the model
in Figure 2.
A US study (Madden, 2004:iii) found that about “32 millions Americans consider themselves
artists” and there were “more than three times as many who pursue some sort of artistic endeavors
in their lives”. Of these, about 10 million “earn at least some money from their performances,
4
songs, paintings, videos, sculptures, photos or creative writing”. This study put the proportion of
musicians who rely on a non-performing job to supplement their income at 92% (2004:24). The
major focus of Madden’s study, however, was the relationship between musicians and the
Internet, with two-thirds of respondents saying it was “very important” in helping them to create
and/or distribute their music; another quarter said it was “somewhat important” and just 11% said
it was “not too important” or “not important at all” (2004:26). Given that the sample was largely
recruited online, and that the survey was conducted using a web-based form, these figures are, as
the author freely admits, not necessarily representative of the wider population. However, the
myriad ways in which respondents have “integrated the Internet deeply into their musical lives”
(2004:26) – they report using it to help inspire them, promote their releases, stay in touch with
colleagues, and even collaborate (see also Anderson & Ellis, 2005; Dillon, 2006; Ebare, 2003 and
www.sticky.net.au) – shows that it is significant.
In a different approach, Andrew Brown’s study of the “Modes of Compositional Engagement”
(2001) examined the way in which five composers, “highly regarded in their area”, used
computers in their practice of composition. Brown found that “each composer demonstrated a
wide range of approaches to the computer, even in the composition of one piece. Its function
changed as circumstances demanded – it’s not unlike a piano shifting function from a tool to test
harmonic progressions to a performance instrument.” (2001:3) He developed five “modes”, or
ways in which the composer related to the musical material, and noted that they “are states with
blurred boundaries, a particular type of compositional activity might show characteristics of two
or more of the modes. Compositional activity usually oscillates between modes, at times
frequently.” (Brown, 2001:8). Also, Mark Fenster examined the way in which “alternative”
musicians, who “construct themselves as distinct from and at times oppositional to mainstream
musical practices” (1992:iv) operate, articulate and communicate.
Others have studied musicians’ non-musical practice. Merkl (1997) examined the projection of
persona by Eddie Vedder and Madonna as marketing devices, noting the complexity and
ambiguity of the relationship between their public image and their commercial success. By taking
public stances on non-musical issues, like religion and abortion, they have (not necessarily
deliberately) found extra ways to raise public awareness of their music. Andrews (2004) reports
on musicians organising “Guerilla gigs”, in which musicians use SMS, web forums e-mail
communication to stage “secret, spontaneous concerts at unconventional venues” in London
within hours.
4
Kauppila (2005) notes the importance of fan culture to the legacy of three 1960s San Francisco
Bay bands: the one with no national hits has the highest post-career profile – due mainly to a
“cult” status obtained through an outstanding live performance and a more experimental sound
that inspired others to try new things, rather than recording sales volumes.
This same
phenomenon is credited as the reason for the nomination of punk poet Patti Smith to the Rock ‘n
Roll Hall of Fame (Wikipedia, 2007c). Finally, Hochauser (1999) argues that the career of The
Moody Blues has been extended and shaped by the musicians’ interaction with fans’ activities.
These activities, musical, artistic and extra-musical; sanctioned and unsanctioned, are part of a
“symbiotic
relationship”
that
differs
significantly
from
the
normal
music/fan
and
producer/consumer relationships. It is hoped that similar such relationships will be a significant
part of the models developed in this research.
Music industry
History
Donald Clarke (1995) argues that many of the earliest patterns that can be observed in the modern
music industry emerged in the era of minstrelsy in the first half of the 19th century. At this time,
troupes of performers toured across what is now the USA, performing songs and shows that
reflected their lives and satirised contemporary events – especially concerning the status of
negroes. Many of the best of these songs, such as “Oh! Susanna” (1848), “Gwine to run all night”
(a.k.a. “Camptown Racetrack”, 1850) and “Jeannie with the light brown hair” (1854), were
published as sheet music (Clarke, 1995:28), which sold many copies across the USA. Even at this
time, however, the publishing and performing aspects were often separate and “mainstream music
publishers failed to take advantage of songs that struck a common chord in millions of people,
leaving them to new independent firms” (Clarke, 1995:37).
Initially, music was published exclusively as sheet music; transcripts of popular songs that could
be played on the home piano or player piano in pubic venues (Clarke, 1995). It was the advent of
the latter in the USA that gave rise to the notion of a “mechanical” royalty: an amount to be paid
to the copyright holder when a song was performed by a machine (Kusek & Leonhard, 2005:133)
or, later, when a recording was “performed” on radio, TV or in licensed venues like restaurants,
shopping malls or stores. As with the arrival of digital technologies, early radio broadcasts were
initially opposed by the then-dominant music publishers. Association of Sheet Music Dealers
representative William Arms Fisher is quoted in Music Trades magazine as saying:
4
Radio at one blow undermines the concert tours of artists who perform to potential
buyers of sheet music and diverts music into the ear of those who follow the line of
least resistance – by that I mean those who might desire to sing or play or perform
– but with radio, content themselves by bathing in music as a pleasant sensation,
with half-hearted attention. (as in Kusek & Leonhard, 2005:127)
However, Anand and Peterson argue that in the 1940s and 1950s, the music industry
“reconstituted itself round recorded music” (2000:272), largely as a result of the unique symbiosis
of radio stations and record companies. In this arrangement, record companies sell their products
off the back of radio promotions and the radio stations play the “hit” songs in order to create an
audience, which is sold to advertisers (Graham, 2006). From the outset the US government
regulated this arrangement but in practice the participants hid behind a claim to objective
assessments of song popularity from independent chart makers (Anand & Peterson, 2000) while
“payola” meant that, even from the earliest “Billboard 100” chart in 1958, the songs played on the
radio were the ones the record companies wanted to be hits (Dannen, 1991). The practice of
payola is specifically intended to encourage “tastemakers” (Anderson, 2006) in mass media to
promote the payer’s music at the expense of other material, which acts as a barrier to promotion of
independent artists’ music.
Despite being illegal, payola continues. On 19 April 2006 the US Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) began formal investigations into four of the largest broadcasters in the USA
after allegations that they had spent millions on illegal promotions (Freepress.net, 2006). Record
Companies Sony BMG and Warner Music Group agreed to pay the City of New York more than
$15 million in an out-of-court settlement before the FCC began its investigation. The last of the
companies under investigation, Entercom, agreed on 27 December 2006 to pay US$4.5 million
and “institute internal reforms” (Cuomo, 2006) to resolve the action. There is nothing to prevent
larger companies from pursuing a similar result in New Media, for example by purchasing all of
the available advertising space on the iTunes home page. In every country, the iTunes home page
advertising is dominated by acts supported by the major labels but at least in “long tail”
(Anderson, 2006) services such as iTunes, in which the marginal cost of storage and distribution is
trivial and hence huge catalogues can be offered for sale, unpromoted music is present and can be
discovered by listeners via title or artist searching, genre classifications, micro-charts, new-release
lists and other “filters” (Anderson, 2006:110).
There is no way for the larger suppliers to
obliterate the public presence of every rival song in the iTunes catalogue, as there is on radio
where broadcast time is strictly limited.
4
The result of the major companies’ efforts has been that, despite the arrival of some new
companies and the demise of some others (see Clarke, 1995), the concentration of ownership of
the music publishing business has reached the point where four international companies: Sony
BMG, Time Warner, Vivendi Universal, and EMI together control about 85% of the music market
(Dubosson-Torbay et al., 2004). A pattern has emerged whereby the major players in the industry,
unchallenged in their access to the market, seek to maintain a low-cost approach to their
repertoire, which results in stagnation and customer dissatisfaction, which provides opportunities
for new players to enter the market, which, after demonstrating some success, are bought by the
major players, entrenching the hegemony (Clarke, 1995). This pattern is hardly unique to the
music industry, and has persisted for a long time within it, becoming particularly prominent in the
period following World War II (Hsieh, 2002).
This mass-media oligopoly (Frith, 1992;
McChesney, 1998) has been the subject of a number of governmental reviews and much public
debate in the Western world over the past decade (for example, see DCITA, 2006; European
Union, 2005; FCC, 2003). The global consensus seems to be that too much concentration of
media ownership is not good but no-one knows how much is “too much”.
However, Graham (2006) argues that this “consumption-sided” focus on media ignores half the
issue, and that in addition to having an oligopoly, the major media companies are also in a
monopsony – or, more correctly, oligopsony (Hannaford, 2003). This is a condition in which
many producers try to sell to very few buyers and Figure 2 is an attempt to illustrate graphically
the effect of this combination of many producers, many consumers, and comparatively few
“middlemen”, who both buy from producers and sell to consumers.
At point A are a large number of people who produce a little culture. They may sing at
community Carols nights at Christmas, or write letters to loved ones, but don’t participate in what
might be called the culture industries. That’s not to say that they don’t produce cultural artefacts,
but simply to note that their production is comparatively small and of the kind that Graham (2006)
observes is “junk” as far as the industry is concerned. At point B there are very few people for
whom participation in the culture industries is entirely central to their lives – some as both
producers and consumers of culture. These are typically professional entertainers, record and film
producers, critics, and associated culture-industry professionals, like lawyers, accountants, and so
on. Between points B and C are the masses that make up the “mass media” audience. Some will
consume a lot of culture, reading widely, attending concerts and/or cinema regularly, buying CDs
and DVDs, etc; while others will consume relatively little, perhaps listening to the radio while
having a barbeque.
The most important point is that almost everything the people on the
4
consumption side (C) have access to must have been validated by the hegemony’s gatekeepers
(B). In addition, the validation process excludes the great bulk of what is produced by the people
at point A and “privileges the ability of the industries to construct meanings, while limiting the
meaning-making opportunities of the audience” (Glass, 2006).
Figure 2: Shape of the cultural industries in Western societies.
This model is, of course, not meant to be statistically accurate. The proportions of the curve and
the relative widths at points A, B and C are not based on quantitative data – the model is only
indicative. Perhaps with further study an accurately proportional model or series of models could
be devised, based perhaps on figures from “cluster studies” within the creative industries (see, for
example, Clarke & Higgs, 2003; DCITA, 2002; Higgs & Kennedy, 2003; SGS Economics &
CIRAC, 2005) and the myriad of unaccounted possibilities for the “mass” audience to be dissected
into niches (see, for example, Christman, 2006; Ebare, 2004; Hall, 1998; McKee, 2006). It should
also be noted that some researchers argue that media ownership is not an important predictor of
media content diversity, and that the Internet makes available a plethora of alternative sources of
nearly all media content (Compaine, 2005).
4
Current issues
To the hegemony’s chagrin, for some years at the start of the 21st century there has been a decline
in the total number of CDs sold, which the major industry players have blamed on (largely
Internet-based) piracy (Channel, 2004), and a shift toward digitally-distributed music (Curran,
2006), which rose from about 6% of the recording industry’s global worldwide revenues in 2005
(IFPI, 2006b) to about 10% in 2006 (IFPI, 2007a). However, there is significant debate as to
whether the decline in CD sales is due to the effects of illegal file-swapping, made feasible by the
advent of the MP3 standard (Hsieh, 2002) and software such as Napster (Boorstin, 2004; Hong,
2004), due to consumer dissatisfaction with heavily promoted but bland artists and/or a reduction
in the number of CD releases (Malik, 2005), or perhaps simply to global economic forces reducing
demand for entertainment in times of recession (Shayo & Guthrie, 2006). Lesk (2003) argues that
the sales figures are not as authoritative as is often claimed, and shows that US per-person sales of
recorded music peaked in 1978 and US recorded music sales as a fraction of US GDP peaked in
1921. I have yet to encounter any literature addressing the possibility that the decline is, at least in
part, caused by inadequate sampling methods in the reporting process. Soundscan, the company
responsible for compiling these figures, bases them on the “point-of-sale” reports of retail outlets
(Nielsen, 2007b). However, since about 2000, the cost of small-scale replication technologies has
declind, making small-scale distribution viable for many new bands. My band, Bun’ Ber E Celtic
Bands, for example, sold 500 copies of our debut CD at performances and markets in 2001 and
these sales would not have been reported to Soundscan. It is quite possible that the decline is due
to market dilution brought about by the myriad of small, unaccountable entrants to a market to
which they were previously denied access. Smaller music businesses, frustrated by the major
companies’ dominance, saw in the new technologies an opportunity to transform the music
business in their favour. Such an effort is the point of this study.
This transformation would happen via a number of gradual shifts: reduced production costs due to
cheaper digital recording devices (Businessweek, 2006b); cheaper replication resulting from
digital storage and transmission (Anderson, 2006; Anonymous, 2000); cheaper distribution
resulting from the Internet’s almost instantaneous global reach and structure (Premkumar, 2003);
and reduced marketing costs resulting from the creators’ ability to communicate directly with
potential consumers via web and e-mail (Bockstedt et al., 2005; Businessweek, 2006a). There
would also emerge new income streams from musical products such as ringtones (Bessman,
2004). These shifts provide the opportunity for a change in the value chain of music production.
Bockstedt et al. (2006:16) describe the traditional recording industry value chain as shown in
Figure 3.
4
Figure 3 – Traditional recording industry value chain
Composition
by the Artist
Production
and recording
Copyright,
Licensing
Marketing and
Promotion
Manufacturing
and
distribution
Inventory
and sales
Consumer
Figure 4 shows Bockstedt et al’s (2006:19) revised value chain for digital music production. The
key change is the division of the final two stages into two options: manufacture and distribution of
a physical product or IP rights enforcement and digital distribution. However, this is only one
suggestion for ways in which the value chain can be reconstituted (for an alternative, see Shayo &
Guthrie, 2006) and, depending on the response to the policy issues discussed by Slater et al.
(2005) below, IP enforcement, the fourth link, becomes redundant for digital distribution. Also,
depending on the artist’s business structure and approach to revenue, the third stage becomes
redundant for recorded music (Fox, 2004), leaving only three stages in the chain. This can be a
highly efficient operational structure and Benjamin & Wigand (1995) argue that has the potential
to be further refined.
Figure 4: Digital Music Production Value Chain.
Manufacturing
and
distribution
Composition
by the Artist
Production
and recording
Inventory
and sales
Copyright,
Licensing
Marketing and
Promotion
Consumer
IP rights
Enforcement
and Piracy
protection
Digital
Distribution
and Sales
The sum of these changes would allow artists who have no major publishing-company affiliations
to produce material cheaply and sell it at larger margins than the traditional model could provide
(Anderson, 2006), as illustrated in Figure 2 by the red “alternative structures”. However, just as
they have always done, the major labels have begun to take advantage of these same opportunities
(IFPI, 2006b) and use their marketing power to diminish smaller players in marketplaces such as
iTunes, MSN Music and Amazon.com. It remains to be seen whether a viable, sustainable “Long
Tail” (Anderson, 2006) business can be built using some of the newer alternatives to these, such as
The Orchard (www.theorchard.com) and CDBaby (www.cdbaby.com) and “Web 2.0” (O'Reilly,
2005)
promotions
devices
such
as
MySpace
4
(www.myspace.com)
and
YouTube
(www.youtube.com). Some experiences of artists who have tried to develop such businesses are
examined in the Context Review below.
The policy response to this new environment has been slow and politically charged. US and
Australian lawmakers have addressed it only by strengthening copyright protections to specifically
address digital copying of recorded works (Gordon, 2005; Simpson, 2006). However, The
Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard law School proposed five possible scenarios
for future music industry (Holden & McGuire, 2003): 1) No change; 2) Taking Property Rights
Seriously; 3) Effective Technology Defence; 4) Utility Model; and 5) Compulsory License. They
revised this analysis two years later (Slater et al., 2005) and proposed four business models for the
film and music industries, which contained variations on three policy choices: 1) adoption or
rejection of P2P technologies, which facilitate rapid distribution of digital files but are prone
illegal activities; 2) reaction to infringing distribution behaviours (to sue or not to sue); and 3)
adoption or rejection of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies, which prevent copying
and therefore sharing or digital files by technological means. The four models proposed are: 1)
The digital media store (for example, iTunes, MP3Tunes.com); 2) P2P stores (for example, the relaunched Napster or Weedshare); 3) Collective blanket licensing, in which the providers pay a
licence fee to a collecting agency (with or without government administration of, for example, a
tax on blank media), consumers can choose whatever music files they wish, and artists are
compensated proportional to their share of consumption, as currently occurs with broadcasting;
and 4) Ancillary products & services, in which any notion of per-use compensation is abandoned
in favour of the music being used to promote other goods and services (namely concerts,
merchandise sales, advertising, fan club memberships and voluntary contributions), from which
income is derived. (For variations on these, see Buhse, 2001; Fox, 2004)
Of these, the first two are already being pursued by various companies (IFPI, 2007b), of which
iTunes is the clear market leader (IFPI, 2007a), and eMusic a rapidly-growing challenger (Osorio,
2007). The third has been implemented as a levy on blank media in Canada, Spain and Finland,
and Internet Radio stations require a licence in many countries and the International Federation of
the Phonographic Industry has proposed a global licensing agreement, which is in development
(Wu, S., 2006). The last one has long been part of major artists’ revenue strategies (Ian, 2002),
with hits songs adopted for advertisements, and concert and tour merchandise revenue comprising
the major income source for many artists. However, even its proponents doubt whether this model
could be a financially viable strategy for unknown artists (Slater et al., 2005:AV-8), though some
4
hit songs have become so after being licensed on high-profile TV shows (Huhn, 2007) and
thereafter selling in large quantities.
A similar system of three models was devised by Vaccaro & Cohn (2004), consisting of
“Traditional”, “Renegade” and “New” approaches to the music business, which were compared in
terms of their probable “Services Marketing Mix” of 8 components. There is also a system of 6
“traditional” and 7 “emerging” models devised by Dubosson-Torbay et al (2004). Most ambitious
is the “music like water” concept (Kusek & Leonhard, 2005), in which music is ubiquitous and
accessed on demand, and artists are compensated via a public-utility model based on European
broadcast system. Its proponents regard this outcome as inevitable, since it is based on the view
that the perfection of digital technologies’ replication has forced the music industry to return to its
pre-publication state of music as an entertainment service, not music as a product (Kusek &
Leonhard, 2005:12). However, such a model has, at this time, no basis in public policy or
commercial experience.
Kusek & Leonhard (2005) take pains to point out the important difference between the music
business and the recording industry and to emphasise that, although sales of recorded music may
have declined since about 2000, the rest of the music industry is growing. They cite figures from
Pollstar magazine showing that the concert business rose from US$1.3billion in 1998 to
US$2.1billion in 2003 (2005:7), and the LA Times reported that the instrument sales industry has
grown strongly over the past decade – doubling in size in the USA (Martelle, 2007). Further,
Kusek & Leonhard recommend that the future for the recording industry giants is to get more
involved in the overall business of their artists – including generating revenue from concerts and
merchandising as well as sales and licensing, citing the Sanctuary Group as an example of a new
company with “360-degree participation of all the related revenue streams meaningful to artists”
(Kusek & Leonhard, 2005:113). In 2002, EMI signed just such a contract with Robbie Williams
(Sullivan, 2002), which included a proportion of his earnings from concerts and merchandise as
well as recording sales in exchange for £80million up front. A do-it-yourself version of this
approach is at the heart of this study. As Bob Lefzetz puts it:
“The key is to realize this, and change your business model to fit the paradigm.
Majors have infrastructure. Distribution, accounting … Systems that cannot be
replicated for a cheap price by indies. They should sell these services. … It’s the
music business. Until you realize this, you’re screwed. You’ve got to establish a
relationship with the fan. You’ve got to sell credible music. You’ve got to be in it
for the long haul. These are basic tenets. Ignore them and you go out of business,
or become marginalized.” (Lefsetz, 2007)
4
Business
Underpinning theory
Afuah and Tucci (2003) state that a business model is concerned with three things: 1) what does
the customer value; 2) how does the business generate revenue; and 3) who is the customer?
These questions can be theoretically addressed when the business is retailing music from many
sources to consumers (for example, see Bockstedt et al., 2006; Swatman et al., 2006; Vaccaro &
Cohn, 2004), but less easily answered with regard to the work of a single artist (Frith, 1996).
Recording business traditions
The traditional recording industry approach to music sales is a high-risk one (Tripp, 2006), in
which large amounts of money are advanced to a band in the calculated bet that they will sell
enough of the recorded songs to recover costs and generate a profit. However, Phil Tripp (2006)
cites Billboard figures showing that in 2005, 0.7% of album releases generated 70% of sales. The
major labels’ releases (11,700) averaged only 18,454 sales each and the independent releases
(49,261) averaged 787 copies per album. In other words, most commercially produced music
recordings never recover the cost of their production and therefore most recording artists receive
no money from sales of their recordings. From as artist’s perspective, as Janis Ian puts it:
“ … in 37 years as a recording artist, I've created 20+ albums for major labels,
and I've never once received a royalty check that didn't show I owed them money.
So I make the bulk of my living from live touring, playing for 80-1500 people a
night, 200-300 nights a year, doing my own show.” (Ian, 2002)
Much of the money advanced to artists is spent on promotion of the recorded music rather than the
production process (averaging about 20% according to Premkumar, 2003). Artificial scarcity is
created by the major labels in two ways: by flooding the attention market of potential customers
with marketing material that small independents cannot afford to create – especially since the
music companies are part of conglomerates that also contain media companies (DiCola &
Thomson, 2002) – and by ensuring that the limited shelf space available in retail stores is filled
with product that has either a track record of selling well or the prospect of selling well because of
the marketing initiatives (Anderson, 2006). This is a much more attractive prospect to a retailer
than any quantity of CDs from an unknown act with unknown prospects. The effect of this is to
deny other music producers their place in the market and thus deny consumers real choice.
However, online digital music is non-rivalrous (Quah, 2003), meaning its ownership by one
person does not prevent another person from also owning it, so in the digital environment, there is
no need to keep inventory or pay staff to stock shelves. Similarly, although the majors can buy the
4
advertising space on the iTunes home page, they cannot, in theory at least5, prevent consumers’
access to the full catalogue, making that catalogue abundant. This creates a situation described as a
“Long Tail” economy (Anderson, 2006), whose full ramifications are only now being explored.
The online environment
A great deal of popular attention has been paid to artists’ efforts to circumvent the music industry
hegemony and market directly to a potential audience using New Media techniques (for example,
see Garrity & Teitelman, 2005; Gibson, 2007; Gundersen, 2005; Hall, 1998; Hurley, 1998; Kelbie,
2006; LeBlanc, 2006; Miller, 2006). These techniques conform closely to the growing body of
literature about “Long Tail” businesses (Anderson, 2006; Brynjolfsson et al., 2006; Caron, 2006;
Huberman & Wu, 2006). This notion is based on the shape of a power-law distribution (also
known as a Pareto Curve or Zipf’s Law), as shown in Figure 3, whereby a few items achieve
enormous popularity (and therefore sales) while an enormous majority of items remain virtually
unknown. Anderson’s argument is that if a business’s income is proportional to the area beneath
this curve, the area shown in red, usually the preserve of the industrial hegemony, is no greater
than the area shown in yellow. If the inventory in the yellow area can be provided at a marginal
cost equal to or lower than that in red, profit margins can be sustained and business will be viable.
Prominent examples of this approach include Amazon.com (the long tail of books), Google.com
(the long tail of searching) and EBay.com (the long tail of selling anything).
Figure 3: Chris Anderson’s Long Tail graph.
Source: http://www.thelongtail.com/
The focus of discussion for these businesses is to figure out how to shift the dividing line to both
the left and the right (in other words, to maximise the area captured), while avoiding the expense
of competing directly with traditional, and richer, marketers; the effect noted by Blackburn (2005).
The iTunes store, for example, contains all of the music provided by the major labels as well as
5
Recent data have brought to light the possibility that, in fact, online database may have this capacity, whether they intend to or not.
However, this data is, at this stage, imperfectly understood and hence will not be discussed further here.
4
that of all the independents and a lot of unsigned acts – more than 3.5 millions songs plus an
expanding repertoire of other products including TV, video and audiobooks (Apple Corporation,
2007) – allowing it to capture a huge proportion of the area under the curve, whereas not even the
largest department store in the world can carry more than a few thousand titles. eMusic, on the
other hand, cannot persuade the major labels to provide their catalogue because of a lack of
copyright protection and significantly lower returns per file (Wikipedia, 2007a), which means that
their revenue stream lacks income derived from the most lucrative area under the curve.
This creates a long tail of digital distributors, with iTunes at the highest point of the head and the
many startups with untested approaches towards the tail. Also, there emerges a long tail of
promotional services, with MySpace at the head and the multitude of social network niches
towards the tail. Unfortunately, particularly with regard to promotional services, this is not a
perfect long-tail scenario, as the marginal cost of adding one more service to an artist’s efforts is
not insignificant. Some incur setup and ongoing fees, and the more outlets and promotional
websites an acts uses, the greater the cost and time commitment involved in maintaining and
updating them, collecting revenue generated and so on. The question for an artist distributing their
music digitally is how to place music in as many of these as possible within budget. Answering
that question is an important point of this study.
Much of the commercial literature is concerned with ways to do this, while the academic literature
provides mainly case studies of how this has been done. For example, Hochhauser (1999)
examines the roles of the Moody Blues’ fan club, its (sanctioned an unsanctioned) subculture, and
non-musical merchandise in the band’s success. This study suggests some strategies and products
that may be helpful to the development and sustainability of The Genre Benders and provides
useful indicators as to how these might most effectively be harnessed. Ebare’s (2004) study uses
“cyberethnography”, the adoption of New Media devices (chat, P2P clients, an so on) to perform
ethnographic research on primarily online communities, to examine the functioning of subcultures
in an online environment. It provides some interesting observations about the behaviour and
power relations within these communities, eschewing the mass-audience view in favour of a more
complex diversity of audiences. In doing so, it enables an understanding of the relationship
between artists and music consumers (reflecting Hochhauser’s (1999) findings).
These and other fan studies, mostly based around the distributive effects of social-networking
websites (Ebare, 2004; Kim, 2004; Lizie, 2000; Lovink & Rossiter, 2005) and viral marketing
(McDonald-Russell, 2002; Stanbouli, 2003) point to a variant on Smythe’s theory of audience
4
labour (as discussed in Glass, 2006), which argues that much of the value of media arises because
of the labour provided by their audiences in consuming the media content. It follows that if this
relationship can be made overt, a musical act’s fans may provide their labour to help add value to
the band’s productions, for example, by remixing their recording (Burke, 2006), making videos
for them (Leckart, 2007), or simply spreading the word about their upcoming releases or tours to
potential fans (Andrews, 2004). This is sometimes referred to as “fansourcing’ the production
(Leckart, 2007). Examining ways to develop this capacity is another of the key aspects of this
research.
Intellectual Property
Intellectual property law was set up to provide creative people with a “temporary monopoly” (Wu,
T., 2006), which allows them to derive an income from their creations. The first copyright Act was
the British Statute of Anne, passed in 1710 (Lessig, 2004). This gave the authors of published
works (all books at that time) a “copyright” for a term of 14 years, renewable once if the author
was still alive – but did not explicitly define “copyright” and strictly limited the term of the
protection, in keeping with contemporary concern over monopoly power. In 1774, the British
Parliament enshrined the concept of “public domain” – the idea that a copyright could exist only
for a limited time and that once it expired, the work became public property and was thus
available for anyone to copy. This, and the notion of “fair use” (used in the USA, see Gordon,
2005:19) or “fair dealing” (used in Australia, see Simpson, 2006:168) reflect the need for
intellectual property regimes to “balance” the rights of creators and the public in the interests of
capitalist economic growth (Hrynyshyn, 2002).
However, the various nations’ lawmakers were attempting to regulate publishers, and by 1909, the
US Copyright Act allowed for a 28-year renewable entitlement period (Shayo & Guthrie, 2006).
Today US Intellectual Property law, which is the de facto standard for Intellectual Property Law in
much of the Western world since 1994’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual
Property Rights (TRIPS) (Samuelson, 2004), also protects patents and software. However, these
are beyond the scope of this review, which will be limited to copyright law, which today provides
protection (depending on date of creation) for up to 70 years after the death of the creator
(Gordon, 2005) and covers:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Literary works;
Musical works, including any accompanying words;
Dramatic works, including any accompanying music;
Pantomimes and choreographic works;
Pictorial, graphic and sculptural works;
Motion pictures and other audiovisual works;
4
7. Sound recordings; and
8. Architectural works.
Despite TRIPS, each sovereign country legislates its own variant of copyright, which creates
significant issues for people trying to operate in a global environment (see, for example,
Samuelson, 2004), especially in relation to “newly industrialising countries” (Richardson, 2004:9),
whose growing domestic markets are attractive but who do not have the same level of copyright
protection as Western countries. Administering the international environment and resolving
conflicts that arise among its 184 member states (WIPO, 2007a) is the responsibility of the World
Intellectual Property Organisation (http://www.wipo.int) (WIPO, 2007b).
This research is concerned with intellectual property in two main aspects: the costs and benefits of
re-structuring the dominant allocations of proportional ownership in a recording as a device to
reduce risk and overcome up-front barriers to music creation; and the costs and benefits of
distributing music for promotional purposes using some variant of Creative Commons licensing
and/or peer-to-peer distribution (Li, 2005; Pavlov, 2005).
Existing Framework
Australian copyright law (Copyright Act (Australia), 1968), under which this project will mainly
operate, provides for copyright protection of four main kinds of interest to the project: literary
works, musical works, artistic works, and sound recordings. It also provides protection for film,
though this project is not expected to involve the use of film or video during the course of this
study, and these provisions will apply to any video materials that are eventually made. For the
purposes of this literature review, however, film will be regarded as beyond the scope of the
project.
The most important aspects are those that affect the creation of songs (“literary works” and
“musical works”), recordings (“sound recordings”) and packaging materials (“artistic works”).
Specifically, the Act provides (s31) the exclusive rights:
(a) in the case of a literary, dramatic or musical work, to do all or any of the
following acts:
(i) to reproduce the work in a material form;
(ii) to publish the work;
(iii) to perform the work in public;
(iv) to communicate the work to the public;
(iv) to make an adaptation of the work;
4
(v) to do, in relation to a work that is an adaptation of the first-mentioned work,
any of the acts specified in relation to the first-mentioned work in
subparagraphs (i) to (iv), inclusive; and
(b) in the case of an artistic work, to do all or any of the following acts:
(i) to reproduce the work in a material form;
(ii) to publish the work;
(iii) to communicate the work to the public; and
(c) in the case of a literary work (other than a computer program) or a musical or
dramatic work, to enter into a commercial rental arrangement in respect of
the work reproduced in a sound recording.
Any of these rights can be sold, licensed or assigned to a third party but assignment or sale of
them must be done in writing.
The Copyright Act, as amended in 2005, also provides for the ‘Moral Rights” of copyright holders
(Copyright Act (Australia), 1968 part IX). This grants the creators of Intellectual property the
right to recognition for their creations (right of Authorship), to be recognised as the author only of
works of which they are the author (right not to have a work falsely attributed), and the right to
have their work kept in the forms they recognise (the right to integrity of authorship). These rights
can be held only by individuals and cannot be traded.
Ownership structures
In a typical traditional recording industry approach, the record company advances the artist a sum
of money for the purposes of making the recording. In return, the band agrees to make and
promote the recording with the assurance of a royalty payable per copy sold – once the cost of
production have been recouped and on condition that the record company owns the recording
(Brain, 2006). Since, as discussed above, most recordings never sell enough copies to recover the
costs of their production, recording artists rarely receive income from sales of their recordings.
This experience is not uncommon and Brain (2006) lists several high-profile examples of artists
who have declared bankruptcy despite selling millions of copies of their recordings (for other
examples, see Albini, 2006; Ian, 2002). Further, record companies have a reputation for ensuring
that their accounting practices capture every possible cent (Wilhelms, 2006) – to the extent that in
2006 Bands Cheap Trick and The Allman Brothers Band sued Sony for a higher royalty rate
because Sony regarded digital sales (which were not specifically addressed in the original deal
because they did not exist) as traditional sales, paying the bands a royalty rate of 6.5%, whereas
the bands argued digital sales should be regarded as a licensing deal, paying 50% (Caruso, 2006).
The argument rests largely on whether or not Sony should be allowed to deduct costs for “sales”
including packaging and postage costs, which do not exist for a digital sale.
4
The advance-and-recoup approach gives the impression that the record company is taking all of
the risk in the recording venture but the reality is that the conditions of the deal usually place all of
the risk onto the artist. Steve Albini (2006) details the arrangements and accounting by which a
band can be advanced $250,000 and, after releasing a record that sells 250,000 copies and touring,
make $710,000 for the record company and still owe $14,000. Worse, Albini notes, this failure to
recoup costs on the initial release obliges the band to let the company have more control over their
second release.
However, there is no legal reason why music recording has to be this way. Strictly according to
the Copyright Act, the only people who have a right to be paid from sales of music recordings are
the songwriters (music with or without words) and the owner of the recording, which may or may
not include the performers (Simpson, 2006). The rest is a matter of business arrangements, and a
growing number of acts are using different arrangements, such as Ice Cube (Leonard, 2006), who
produced the record at his own expense and sought a record company’s help in distributing and
promoting it. After Universal declined, EMI made an offer and the record sold about 500,000
copies worldwide – well short of its predecessors’ multi-platinum status, but Ice Cube gets to keep
all of the profits, including from ringtones and synchronisation royalties. David Leonard (2006)
details other variations involving Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, Garth Books, Korn and others. Since
The Genre Benders has neither capital nor links to a record company, it is intended that this
project’s initial recordings will be made on a non-traditional basis.
Distribution options
The second of these is highly contentious, with little reliable data and great financial consequences
for both sides of the debate. Research is divided when it comes to the effect of file swapping on
music sales, with some studies finding that distributing songs for free using peer-to-peer software
can lead to increased sales (Boorstin, 2004), while others find it has no effect (Oberholzer &
Strumpf, 2004), and some agreeing with major record companies that file-swapping has a very
negative effect (Zentner, 2003). Some studies have even found different effects depending on the
method of analysis applied to the data (Hong, 2004), while others sit on the fence and highlight
factors that might be significant (Bhattacharjee et al., 2003). Liebowitz, (2005) examines some of
the more prominent attempts and sensibly notes pitfalls in the various methods of assessment,
given the complexity of the issue and the anarchic nature of the available data. Shy (2005) argues
that, although Liebowitz may be quite technically correct, he ignores the possibility of a
substitution effect: file swapping may be causing declining CD sales not because of piracy but by
constituting a complementary medium.
Perhaps the most sensible perspective comes from
4
Blackburn (2005), who found that file-sharing probably has both effects: it reduces sales for
established artists, but has a promotional effect that increases sales for unknown artists. See the
section on marketing, below, for a fuller explanation of this effect.
In any case the debate may be largely redundant as far as the major companies are concerned,
since the combination of legal music-downloading services (Amoroso & Guo, 2006) and industry
action against illegal downloaders (Rainie et al., 2004) seems to have significantly reduced the
willingness of music consumers to swap files illegally. However, a growing body of research has
begun to explore the benefits of “Copyleft” (Fitzgerald, 2005), or artists surrendering part of their
copyrights in exchange for some indirect benefit, such as exposure for their act. Examples of
copyleft include the Creative Commons licensing system (see www.creativecommons.org) and the
GNU General Public Licence for software (see www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html). Although
plenty of anecdotal claims have been made of the benefits of free distribution of music
(Musicweek, 2005) and businesses such as www.mp3.com.au set up to facilitate it, insufficient
empirical analysis has been applied to this approach to understand its costs and benefits. In fact,
Creative Commons co-founder Lawrence Lessig is now concerned that the long-term effect of
copyleft arrangements may be the opposite of that intended (Fitzgerald, 2005).
Essentially, the idea behind Copyleft is to reserve all intellectual property rights that are granted
by
law,
but
choose
selectively
not
to
exercise
some
of
them
(http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ). For example, a singer-songwriter may record one of his
compositions, make that recording into and MP3 file, upload the file to his website and let visitors
know that he grants them a non-exclusive right to copy the file as many times as they like, for any
non-commercial purpose.
The Creative Commons movement has devised a range of such
licences, based on choices about attribution, commercial use, derivation and on-sharing (Creative
Commons, 2007b). They can be applied to an entire work or a “snippet” of a work, and a Creative
Commons Music Sharing Licence has been especially devised to encourage music sharing
(Creative Commons, 2007a) that has Attribution, Non-Commercial, and No Derivatives
properties. In addition, Creative Commons has set up a register of music licensed in this way, to
enable promotion and provide free hosting for music files.
The artist’s trade-off in granting a Creative Commons licence (or in releasing their recordings into
Peer-to-peer networks) is in sacrificing direct income from sales in exchange for indirect income
via the benefits of promotion (Magee, 2003).
This is referred to as the “sampling effect”
(Boorstin, 2004:37), in which potential fans can sample the music produced by a group and may
4
go on to buy the sampled track or the album from which it came, or attend the act’s concerts or
buy their merchandise (effectively, this is what major labels have done for years in seeking
relationships with broadcasters, as noted above). Countering this is the “replacement effect” (not
to be confused with the “substitution effect” discussed by Shy (2005) above), in which potential
fans are satisfied with the free downloaded track and do not spend any more money on the artist.
Boorstin (2004) and Blackburn (2005) both note that for an unknown artist, the sampling effect
generally outweighs the replacement effect but for more established artists, who receive exposure
via radio and TV, the effects are reversed. However, giving music away can also generate
revenues from other sources, such as advertising (Anonymous, 2006b) and several companies,
such as Spiralfrog (Buskirk & Michaels, 2006), Revver.com (Anonymous, 2006b) and, most
recently Youtube.com (Anonymous, 2007b), are attempting to finance businesses and support
artists by this means. This approach is one that will be tested in The Genre Benders’ business
model
New Media
This project intends to use primarily New Media to promote The Genre Benders and ecommerce
as their business driver. “New Media” is a problematic term that requires careful definition.
When the printing press was invented, it represented new media and face-to-face communication
was “old media”. However, at this point in history, “New Media” refers to (taken from Bodle,
2004; Wikipedia, 2007b):














Video games,
Virtual Worlds,
Multimedia CDROMs,
Software,
Web Sites, including RSS feeds from them,
E-mail and attachments,
Electronic Kiosks,
Interactive TV,
Internet Radio and other forms of streaming video and audio,
Satellite radio,
Mobile devices, including ringtones and SMS
Podcasting,
Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VOIP) telephony, including chat functions,
Hypertext fiction.
Not all of these are equally significant in the context of this project, or of digital music business
more generally. “Software”, for example, (as opposed to “video games”) is of little use to an artist
seeking to promote their music. Generally, in this context New Media are regarded as separate
4
from “old media”: television, radio, film and print; that were the drivers of the symbiotic
relationship between record companies, media companies and audiences mentioned above. For the
purposes of this project, New Media have several defining characteristics:
1. They are digital technologies;
2. They have risen to significance since the mid-1990s;
3. They have relatively low access costs for producers;
4. They are interactive;
5. They are mostly asynchronous; and
6. They are essentially non-rivalrous in both production and consumption;
The Wikipedia (2007b) entry reveals a little confusion between the New Media technologies and
the New Media industry, as in companies that own New Media publications or provide New
Media services, stating that “[f]rom 1995 to 2004, the old media started to expand into producing
new media, thus blurring the boundaries between the two”. However, this project uses New Media
in its technological sense; the only industrial issue is the business decision of whether it’s more
cost-effective to undertake the activity in-house or to outsource it to another company. The
technological discontinuity (Shayo & Guthrie, 2006) that the advent of New Media represent has
many dimensions: political, social, industrial, legal, cultural and historical (Anonymous, 2007a)
which are explored in other places.
Fortunately, there is a great deal of literature dealing with the considerations involved in designing
effective New Media devices. Unfortunately, none of it points to simple, formulaic solutions,
instead highlighting the trade-offs and compromises that must be resolved in the design process.
In reviewing this literature, I am also drawing on my own experience as a New Media
communication designer.
The basis of any Internet-based business is a web site (Plowright, 2006). Ethier (2005) points to a
large body of literature examining the question of usable web interface design. This literature has
emerged from four main sources; 1) practical professional expertise; 2) specific interface design
research; 3) user-perception studies and 4) research based on other research traditions, such as
marketing, psychology and architecture. From these studies emerge a range of considerations:



Context (aesthetics vs functionality)
Content (subject matter)
Community (interaction between site and user)
4







Customisation (site’s ability to be tailored to a user)
Communication (dialogue between the site and users)
Connection (links to other sites)
Commerce (business functionality including legal constraints)
Architecture (the structure of the site)
Technical standards (which technologies to use and which to ignore) and
Performance (download speed, transactional efficiency)
These overlapping, sometimes incompatible, criteria must be reconciled with the site’s purpose,
which is governed by its owner’s goals (Pearrow, 2000). In this case, the goal is to promote and
sell music, and from this premise, a few key compromises emerge:
1. Aesthetic appeal comes at the cost of performance. HTML, the code used for to create
web pages and e-mails, provides only for square corners and flat colours but allows for the
inclusion of other graphical and multimedia elements, which enhance visual appeal.
However, transmitting these elements along with a web page requires significantly more
bandwidth than plain HTML, which slows page delivery times significantly. Jupiter
Research (2006) found that a third of online shoppers abandoned their activity on websites
that took longer than 4 seconds to download. This figure is reducing over time (Nielsen,
1997), perhaps as bandwidth increases and user expectations increase.
2. Adherence to technical standards comes at the cost of enhanced functionality.
All
browsers are capable of rendering pages based on the technical standards approved by the
World Wide web Consortium (W3C – see www.w3.org). However, these, including the
XHTML standard allow only for basic functionality and deny an enhanced user experience
through inclusions like Flash and the myriad of Microsoft HTML enhancements. The
advantage of technical adherence is that you guarantee nearly everyone will be able to
access and use the site – the disadvantage is that a lot of techniques cannot be used to build
rapport with the site’s visitors.
3. A well-designed site is not enough. The best-designed and most appealing site will not
achieve its owner’s goals if users don’t go there. Sites with no links from other sites, or
“orphans” (TRH Communications, 2006), can only be found if fans know where it is. An
investment in promotion, either by search engine marketing (Sen, 2005) or by investing
time developing an ecology of related and linked sites can raise the profile of the main site
but diverts resources from other activities.
These compromises can only be resolved on a case-by-case basis and further refinement of the
design criteria is contained in the context review below.
4
7. Context review
Like many of the information and cultural industries, the music industry has been thrown into
great turmoil by the “technological discontinuity” (Shayo & Guthrie, 2006) that is the Internet.
Much of that turmoil has been caused by the prospect that digital musical works can be perfectly
copied and cheaply distributed using internet technologies (see the earlier discussion) but, more
recently, public and industry interest has centred on the prospects for harnessing the unique
communicative properties of the Internet to promote unknown artists and sell their products.
Iconic examples of this “Web 2.0” phenomenon (O'Reilly, 2005) include MC Lars (Miller, 2006),
Sandi Thom (Steroboard.com, 2006), Lilly Allen (Eyre, 2006) and Barenaked Ladies (Burke,
2006). However, many of these are more controversial when examined closely.
This context review is preliminary, comprising mostly a collection of resources to be analysed in
light of the earlier literature in the process of drafting the business plan for each CD. These
include “old” media – books – as well as New Media publications. Some are the work of a single
author and some are the product of collectives – even amounting to “organised networks” (Lovink
& Rossiter, 2005) facilitated by New Media. This list is, of course, far from comprehensive and
will need continual updates as new resources arise and unviable ones cease operation.
Musicians and their practices
It is beyond the scope of this project to consider issues pertaining to the education and training of
musicians, though these considerations would have great impact on a person’s self-definition as an
“independent artist” and their views on “sustainability” and “success”. For an entry point to the
extensive academic discussion about musical education and training see Bennett (2005), Brown
(2004), Hagans (2005) and Transdahl (1996). For the purposes of this project and dissertation, it
will be assumed that the participants have what they consider is “adequate” training in music to
enter the industry, and this research may be of benefit to educators in improving music curricula.
Songwriting
Many of the world’s best-known and most successful songwriters has written texts sharing their
advice for songwriting success (see, for example, Blume, 1999; Cahn, 1989; Webb, 1998; Zollo,
2003). Most of these point out that there is no simple formula for writing a hit song, but suggest
processes and strategies that may help a songwriter improve their output. In a twist on this
approach, Dec Cluskey (2006a) nominates “57 Secrets of a Hit Record” – many of which are
concerned with production and marketing rather than writing – and supplies a CD-ROM (Cluskey,
4
2006b) with a calculator to predict a song’s likely success based on the number of the 57 secrets
used and the relative importance of the “secrets”.
There are also many websites devoted to songwriting tips, tricks and courses (see, for example,
www.musesmuse.com, www.songu.com and www.easy-song-writing.com).
These sites are
supported by selling related services promoted via the freely distributed content, such as enewsletters, or by affiliate fees from selling other songwriting, performance or production goods
and services. They generally have some kind of syndication (e-newsletters or RSS) and some
kind of community-building device (discussion boards or chat) to encourage return visits.
For songwriters who want feedback on their lyrics and/or development, there are lyrics analysis
sites.
For songwriters who think their songs are good enough to be hits, songwriting contests can be
great promotion. The most prominent of these is the International Songwriting Contest, and many
others are run by smaller organisations on either a geographic (Q-Song) or niche (Blues Heritage
Contest) basis.
Production and recording
(Huber & Runstein, 2001)
Mastering Central.com www.music-production-school.com – Berklee Music School website
giving away video tips in the hope of increased enrolments
ProTools users group discussion
E-mail lists like Musicthoughts
Live performance
(Goldstein, 2006)
(Oxford, 1999)
(Zografos, 2004)
4
Business services
Whenever there are opportunities to make money there are plenty of people willing to offer their
assistance – for a price – and digital music is no exception. Online marketers offer advice and
assistance from such sites as www.awp.com.au (Hooper, 2005c; Plowright, 2006; Wilson, 2005)
and are not afraid to break anti-spam laws to get attention. Most of this advice is based on
personal experience and/or anecdotal evidence and the publications are used as a device to solicit
customers for the authors’ consultancy or web hosting services. It would be easy to dismiss this
material as unreliable and unacademic, but it the material most likely to be used for guidance by
independent musicians seeking to improve their practice, and hence must be sifted through. The
results of this sifting will be posted to the organised network resource on my blog at
http://www.huge.id.au.
Management
(Hooper, 2005b) (Butler, 2004) first published in 1989 (MMF, 2005) (Wimble, 2005) Music
Business Radio (http://www.musicbusinessradio.com/)
Distribution and marketing
(Goldstein, 2002) http://www.bob-baker.com (Author Guerrilla Music Marketing Handbook,
MySpace Music Marketing) http://www.indiemusician.com/ (Hooper’s blog)
How-to websites eg “Web sites that sell”
Taxi, MusicSubmit, Beatwire, www.leisurebrokers.com (Australian) eListeningPost
E-newsletters and RSS
Blogging
Social Networking
MySpace.com, iSound.com, isbsl.co.uk
Lastfm.com, Bebo.com
Sales
Hard copy - CDBaby, the Orchard, Amazon.com, Distributor vis CDBaby
Digital – CDBaby list plus others
4
Different approaches – sales, Subscription, advertising supported.
Amie street
Merchandising
Cafepress.com (no overheads)
www.pfgroupinc.com (better quality)
www.synergyprintdesign.com (better quality)
www.spreadshirt.com
www.zazzle.com Advice re local screenprinters from Scott Andrew on MusicThoughts
Online and offline radio
ILR, Accuradio,
Nova FM’s undiscovered plans, JJJ unearthed
Licencing
A& R international and AMMA
Tunetrader
Capital Raising
Sellaband
4
Appendix 1 – Survey 1 Questionnaire
(Page 1) PIS statement
PARTICIPANT INFORMATION for QUT RESEARCH PROJECT
“A Digital Business Model for Independent Musicians”
Research Team Contacts
Hugh Brown
Chief Investigator
Phone: +61 7 3202 7523
Email: h8.brown@student.qut.edu.au
Thank you for your time and interest.
Description
This project is part of Hugh Brown’s PhD study at the Queensland University of Technology
[http://www.qut.edu.au]. Plenty is known about the relative status of acts owned by the major labels
but little is known about the rest of the industry. The project’s purpose is to investigate the factors
affecting independent musicians’ access to music markets and, focusing particularly on New Media
aspects, to figure out how to make it easier for independent musicians to build a music business.
The project will take three years (it began in February 2006) and involve three main stages. This first
stage is an online survey of musicians all over the world to find out how they are faring in the
industry, how they operate and how they use media to help them. Following that, a sample of the
respondents will be interviewed in more depth, and a strategy devised for the independent release of
an album using the best practices learned from the survey and interviews. The third stage will be the
launch of an act called "The Genre Benders" [http://www.genrebenders.com] and a study of the
business it is able to generate. A year later this process will be repeated to see what has changed for
the original participants and to release a second CD by The Genre Benders.
Participation
I need your help to provide an initial picture of what the standard is for independent musicians. This
survey is in four sections and should take about 10-15 minutes to complete, though some questions
may require you to consult your records. This research will make a yardstick to indicate what an
independent musician can expect when they embark on their career and the extent to which the New
Media channels that are opening up for sales, distribution and promotion can help them achieve their
goals.
Your participation in this project is voluntary. If you agree to participate, you can withdraw from
further participation at any time during the project without comment or penalty. Your decision to
participate will in no way impact upon your current or future relationship with QUT. However, if the
information you provide via the online survey does not answer the questions in part 4 it will not be
possible to identify and withdraw what you have submitted.
Expected benefits
4
This is an Action Research [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_research] project, which means the
research findings will be given to you, the participants, in a deliberate attempt to help you. Should you
agree to complete the questionnaire and provide your details in the final section, you will be sent the
results and invited to comment on them and/or use them as you see fit.
You will also be given access to resources compiled as a result of this research. This includes a
directory of services that may be of assistance to you and a network of like-minded people with whom
you might collaborate. These resources will be assessed and annotated to help you prioritise them. It
is hoped that this will directly lead to better fortunes for your musical activities.
Risks
There are no risks beyond normal day-to-day living associated with your participation in this project.
However, QUT provides limited free counselling for research participants of QUT projects, who
experience distress as a result of their participation in the research. Should you wish to access this
service please contact the Clinic Receptionist of the QUT Psychology Clinic on +61 7 3864 4578.
Please indicate to the receptionist that you are a research participant.
Confidentiality
All comments and responses can be anonymous and will be treated confidentially. The names of
individual persons are not required in any of the responses. However, as noted above, if you do not
supply the information requested in the final section we cannot send you the results of the research
and cannot remove information you supplied. All information you supply will remain confidential and
used only for the purposes of this research. Any data that may lead to your identification will be
withheld from publication unless you specifically authorise its release.
Consent to Participate
Clicking "Continue" below is accepted as an indication of your consent to participate in this project.
Questions / further information about the project
Please contact the researcher named above at h8.brown@student.qut.edu.au to have any questions
answered or if you require further information about the project.
Concerns / complaints regarding the conduct of the project
QUT is committed to researcher integrity and the ethical conduct of research projects. However, if
you do have any concerns or complaints about the ethical conduct of the project you may contact the
QUT Research Ethics Officer on 3864 2340 or ethicscontact@qut.edu.au. The Researcher Ethics
Officer is not connected with the research project and can facilitate a resolution to your concern in an
impartial manner.
I understand and agree, continue button
(Page 2)
4
Survey Questions
Note: If you are involved in several musical activities, please answer these questions in relation to
your most important activity.
Part 1 - background
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
For how long have you been an artist (in years)? (text box)
For how long have you regarded yourself as a professional artist? (text box)
Where do you live (state/region, country)? (text box)
Do you regularly perform live outside your home country (not including recording sales)?
(yes/no radio button)
What genre(s) would you use to classify your music? (text box)
Whose compositions are involved? (Ignore sampled loops but a remix is a cover of someone
else’s song)
1. I write my own (including co-writing)
2. Other people write it (excluding co-writing).
3. I write some and other people write the rest (in whatever proportion).
What percentage of your total income do you make from musical activities? (text box)
What percentage of your musical income comes from (must add up to 100%)
1. Performances (text box)
2. Commissions (text box)
3. Royalties (text box)
4. Sales (text box)
5. Merchandise (text box)
6. Other activities (please specify) (text box)
Do you also gain income from (check boxes)
1. Teaching music
2. Working in music industry sales
3. Another music industry job
4. A non-musical day job.
5. Another source of income (investments/welfare/parents, etc).
6. None of the above.
Save & Continue/Back Buttons
(Page 3)
Part 2 –business practices
Note: If you are involved in several musical activities, please answer these questions in relation to
your most important activity.
10. Have you released any recordings? (Yes/no)
11. Is your music available as (checkboxes)
1. CDs sold from my website(s).
2. CDs sold via online stores such as CDBaby.com [http://www.cdbaby.com] or
Amazon.com [http://www.amazon.com]. Please list as many as you can separated by
a comma. (text box)
3. CDs sold in offline stores?
4. CDs sold at your gigs?
5. Digital downloads in stores like iTunes [http://www.apple.com/itunes/],
mp3tunes.com [http://www.mp3tunes.com] or Destra
4
12.
13.
14.
15.
[http://www.destramusic.com/]? Please list as many places as you can separated by a
comma. (text box)
6. Subscription-based services such as eMusic [http://www.emusic.com], Rhapsody
[http://www.real.com/rhapsody/] or Musicnet [http://www.musicnet.com/]? Please
list as many places as you can separated by a comma. (text box)
7. Creative Commons licenced distribution via Soundclick
[http://www.soundclick.com], or ccMixter? [http://ccmixter.org]? Please list as many
as you can separated by a comma. (text box)
8. Commercial licencing websites such as Tunetrader [http://www.tunetrader.com/]?
Please list as many as you can separated by a comma. (text box)
9. Free MP3 (or similar formats) downloadable from your site(s)?
10. Swappable MP3s (or similar) that I put in P2P networks?
11. Swappable MP3s (or similar) that someone else put in P2P networks?
12. Ringtones?
13. Podcasts?
14. Other (text)
15. None of the above.
Which media have broadcast or reviewed your music – recordings and/or live performances?
(checkboxes)
1. Terrestrial Radio
2. Internet Radio
3. Satellite Radio
4. Newspapers
5. Street press
6. Magazines
7. TV
8. Music-related Websites
9. E-newsletters
10. Other (please specify)
Have you produced band/act merchandise (T-shirts/hats/stickers, etc). Tick all that apply?
(checkboxes)
1. No.
2. Yes, available at gigs
3. Yes, available online
4. Yes, available in offline stores
Do you have a web presence at (checkboxes)
1. your own URL?
2. music-specialty sites like webcds.com [http://www.webcds.com/], iSound.com
[http://www.isound.com/]? Please list as many as you can separated by a comma.
(text box)
3. social-networking site such as myspace.com [http://www.myspace.com], bebo.com
[http://www.bebo.com], Youtube.com [http://www.youtube.com], Flikr.com
[http://www.flickr.com], or last.fm [http://www.lastfm.com]? Please list as many as
you can separated by a comma. (text box)
4. A blogging site such as blogger.com [http://www.blogger.com]? Please list as many as
you can separated by a comma. (text box)
From which of these online sources have you tried generating revenue (tick all that apply?
(checkboxes)
 Advertising on my website (including Google Adsense or syndication programs)
 Affiliate marketing of music products (other people’s music, instruments, sheet music,
etc)
 Affiliate marketing of non-musical products (books, electronics, etc)
4
16. Have you used press release services such as Musicsubmit [http://www.musicsubmit.com] or
Beatwire [http://www.beatwire.com/]? (yes/no) Please list as many as you can separated by a
comma. (text box)
17. Have you used music-related email lists or discussion boards to promote your music?
(yes/no) Please list as many as you can separated by a comma) (text box)
18. Have you used advice offered by sites such as performingbiz.com
[http://www.performingbiz.com/], indiebible.com [http://www.indiebible.com/],
makehits.com [http://www.makehits.com/] or indiemuscian.com
[http://www.indiemusician.com/]? (yes/no) Please list as many as you can separated by a
comma. (text box)
19. On average over the past year (or less if you have started recently), how many hours a week
would you devote to:
1. Writing music (text box)
2. Practice/Rehearsal (text box)
3. Performing (text box)
4. Your “day job” (text box)
5. Business administration, including accounting, booking, chasing payment and so on.
(text box)
6. Promoting your music online (text box)
7. Promoting your music offline (text box)
8. Networking/seeing other bands/hanging out with other musos (text box)
20. What support does your business/band have? (checkboxes)
1. A manager
2. A booking agent
3. Administrative help
4. Legal representation
5. Professional image advice
6. Professional marketing advice
7. Other consultant (please specify) (text box)
21. Which business functions do you outsource to other people/companies?
1. Online hard copy CD sales
2. Offline hard copy CD
3. Online digital sales
4. Bookings
5. Administration
6. Promotion/marketing
7. Other (please specify) (text box)
Save & Continue/Back Buttons
(Page 4)
Part 3 – Motivations and attitudes
22. How would you define your personal artistic or cultural “success” as an artist? (Radio button)
1. I want to change the world with my creations
2. Make a lasting contribution to the world’s cultural heritage
3. Compose the perfect song/tune
4. Have someone else record my song/tune
5. Be invited or commissioned to write or produce songs/tunes for other people.
6. Hear my song/tune played on the radio or TV
7. Make an album or two.
8. Have some crowds enjoy my music at occasional gigs
4
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
9. I just want to play or jam on weekends with the guys
10. Other (text field)
How would you define your personal financial “success” as an artist? (Radio button)
1. Make a mega-$million
2. Make enough to be able to retire young and comfortably.
3. Be able to make music for a living for the rest of my life
4. Make enough to be able to continue for as long as I enjoy it
5. Have some crowds enjoy my music at occasional gigs
6. Jam on weekends with the guys
7. Other (text field)
Which is more important to you? (radio button)
 Artistic/cultural success
 Financial success
How badly do you want to “succeed” as an artist, as described above? (Radio button)
1. I have already “succeeded” and am happy to quit when I feel like it.
2. I have already “succeeded” but I still want more.
3. It’s the only thing I want
4. I feel empty and lost without it and will keep trying.
5. I’d like to “succeed”, but “failure” is not the end of the world
6. It really doesn’t matter. I have other goals too.
What would you NOT be prepared to do to “succeed” as an artist? (checkboxes)
1. Surrender copyright control of my music
2. Give away some of my recordings in exchange for publicity
3. Spam potential fans
4. Perform a non-musical stunt to get attention
5. Perform other people’s music
6. Undertake a strict image-management program involving your diet/wardrobe being
dictated by someone else
7. Perform for free at exhibition shows
8. Leave my family/friends for a 6-month tour overseas
9. Give up my secure day job and take a chance
10. Other. Please specify. (text field)
In 100 words or less, please describe what you see as the biggest barrier to growing your
career as an artist. (text field)
Save & Continue/Back Buttons
(Page 5)
Part 4 – personal details
Note: The following questions are not compulsory but will help me make sense of the results. You
need only answer them if you would like to receive a copy of this survey’s findings and/or would like
to participate further in this project. Any personal details you provide will remain confidential.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
What is your name? (text field)
What is your age? (text field)
What is your gender? (text field)
What is your e-mail address? (text field)
What is your band’s or act’s name? (text field)
Would you like a copy of the results of this survey? (yes/no)
Are you prepared to be involved in future research in this project? (yes/no)
4
Survey consent script.
I understand that the information supplied in this form is to be used for research at the Queensland
University of Technology [http://www.qut.edu.au]. I understand that any personal details supplied
will be kept confidential and used only for the purposes of my involvement in the study. I realize that
I can have my personal information removed at any time by contacting the researcher
(h8.brown@student.qut.edu.au) and expressing that desire to him.
I agree to participate in this study by supplying this information.
Submit/Cancel/back buttons
(Page 6)
Thank You statement
Your responses have been recorded - thank you for completing my survey. I hope it has already
suggested things that might help you reach your goals and that you completed section 4 so I can send
you the results and related resources, which should be even more helpful.
I’d like to thank the following artists, who were particularly helpful in drafting and refining this survey:
Jackie Marshall [http://www.jackiemarshall.com/]
Tracey Saxby [http://www.traceysaxby.com]
John Harley Weston [http://www.johnharleyweston.com/]
Kathy Hirsche [http://www.amusica.com.au]
Peter Townson [http://www.elevenpm.com]
Adrian Herd [http://www.myspace.com/adrianherd]
Craig Spann [http://www.brindle.com.au]
This survey should remain online until the end of December 2006. I will then collect the responses
and it will take a month or so before I can make any reasonable claims based up on them. As soon as
I can make sense of the results I will write up a report and send it to the email address you nominated
in section 4. If you’d like to keep up to date with the project in the meantime, I will be blogging the
project at http://www.huge.id.au/phd. I value your feedback via that site but I must ask you not to
post any links to it as it is very vulnerable to blogspam.
If you have any questions or queries about this project, want to add to or remove any of your
responses, or want to get in touch with me or any other reason, I can be contacted at
h8.brown@student.qut.edu.au.
Once again, thanks for helping make the world a better place for independent artists.
Hughie
http://www.huge.id.au
4
Appendix 2 – Prospects for the purposive sample of interviewees
Adrian Herd (Sunshine Coast) is a 21-year-old singer-songwriter who has released an EP with
government funding support and is just beginning to venture into online promotion and
distribution.
Dave Johnston is a 30-something ambient didjeridu, bass and drums player. He has recently
returned to Australia after many years away and wants to "get back into the music scene".
John Harley Weston (Gold Coast) is a late-30s singer-songwriter. Originally from Scotland, he
won the Australian Songwriting Contest in 2005 but says this has not translated into radio airplay
for his award-winning single or increased sales. His second album is in production.
Edward Guglielmino (Brisbane) is a 20-something alt singer-songwriter whose experience
online was featured at Big Sound 2006. He has established a growing nline presence and is
deriving significant (but not yet adequate) income from his ventures.
Charlie Chan (Sydney) is a composer of stage, film and TV music, as well as her own CDs
spanning jazz, classical, ambient and contemporary forms. She has had music in some of
Australia's highest-profile TV shows, including McLeod's Daughters and, having sold thousands
of CDs online, has built her own distribution channel, Martian Music, to sell digital music
files.
Kirk Lorange (Gold Coast) is a 50-something Canadian born Australian guitar legend. He has a
huge catalogue of back recordings for various artists and of his own, and has established a very
successful online business based around his guitar technique textbook, Plane Talk and his
properties at Guitar for Beginners and the Bottle Neck Guitar webring.
The wish list includes:
Janis Ian -- huge star of the 70s who has gone it alone and has been outspoken about the benefits
of doing so.
Barenaked Ladies -- Canadian alt rockers who are leading the anti-DRM charge and being truly
innovative in developing alternative methods of distribution and fan relations - with great success.
Frederick and Fartein - London-based QUT MA students from Norway who, as “The
Headliners”, play techno/dance music with a fashion industry third leg.
4
Erinn Swann –
Tara Simmons –
Transit Lounge -
Appendix 3 – Invitation to participate
Dear fellow CDBaby members,
The Queensland University of Technology has been working in partnership with CDBaby, Just Plain Folks,
The Future of Music Coalition, the Worldwide Independent Network and an array of other musician-based
organizations to design a survey that will give independent musicians, performers and songwriters a chance to
learn how to improve their chances of a fulfilling career in music. New technologies have created complex
challenges as well as many new opportunities for musicians, yet concrete examples of how these can help
independent artists are few and far between.
Now's the time to make your voice heard and gain help with your music as a result. We invite you to take about
15 minutes of your time to share your opinions and experiences through this important survey.
Visit http://polling.nationalforum.com.au/index.php?sid=4 before December 31, 2006 to participate.
Further, you are encouraged to forward this invitation to every independent musician, performer and
songwriter you know and encourage them to participate. Your contribution will have a valuable impact, as the
findings from this survey will be given back to those who supply the information along with a network of
resources aimed at helping independent musicians.
Don't miss this great opportunity to speak up on behalf of artists!
Sincerely,
Hugh Brown
Chief Investigator
h8.brown@student.qut.edu.au
Revised and amended to
Dear fellow CDBaby members,
The Queensland University of Technology has been working with CDBaby, Just Plain Folks, The Future of
Music Coalition, the Worldwide Independent Network and an array of other musician-based organizations to
bring you a survey that will give independent musicians, performers and songwriters a chance to learn how to
improve their chances of a fulfilling career in music. New technologies have created complex challenges as well
as many new opportunities for musicians, yet concrete examples of how these can help independent artists are
few and far between.
Now's the time to make your voice heard and gain help with your music as a result. We invite you to take about
15 minutes of your time to share your opinions and experiences through this important survey.
Visit http://polling.nationalforum.com.au/index.php?sid=4 before December 31, 2006 to participate.
4
Further, you are encouraged to forward this invitation to every independent musician, performer and
songwriter you know and encourage them to participate. Your contribution will have a valuable impact, as the
findings from this survey will be given back to those who supply the information along with a network of
resources aimed at helping independent musicians.
Don't miss this great opportunity to speak up and learn from the best practices of your fellow artists!
Sincerely,
Hugh Brown
Chief Investigator
h8.brown@student.qut.edu.au
Appendix 4 – Media Release Text
Media statement
27 November 2006
For immediate release
Seeking the keys to independent music success.
EVER wondered how you can give away your music as MP3s and still make a living as a muso?
QUT PhD candidate Hugh Brown is conducting an online survey of independent musicians aimed at figuring
out exactly that - and more - at http://polling.nationalforum.com.au/index.ph p?sid=4.
"The project's purpose is to investigate the factors affecting independent musicians' access to music markets
and, focusing particularly on New Media aspects, to figure out how to make it easier for independent musicians
to build a music business," Mr Brown says.
"It will ask what's the optimal amount of music to give away, how to best use MySpace and other sites to build
a following, and what's the best way to bring your music to the attention of the people who can help you," he
says.
"It's Action Research, which means the results are given straight back to the people who can best use them the artists who completed the survey - in a deliberate attempt to help them do better."
"Then after a year we'll go back to those same artists and find out what worked for them and how, and give
them all those results as well. We're aiming to change the world for independent artists."
"Just completing the questionnaire should give artists some ideas for things they can try."
Mr Brown says the project is global in scope and open to anyone who considers themselves and independent
musican, songwriter or artist.
"We want people from all parts of the world, all genres, full-time, part-time, former major-labelers gone indie or
a bunch of kids just starting out - it's all good," he grins. "The underpinning question is: how can you go from
being a frustrated part-timer to a full-timer and, who knows, the Next Big Thing."
4
For more information, visit polling.nationalforum.com.au/index.ph p?sid=4, phone +61 7 3202 7523 or +61
409 622 395 or e-mail h8.brown@student.qut.edu.au.
Appendix 5 – MySpace pitch text
Subject:
Want to know how to take your music career to the next level using MySpace and iTunes?
Hi,
I notice that, like me, you're an independent musician. I'm conducting a PhD study of how
independent artists can use online services like MySpace, MP3.com and iTunes to grow their careers.
It's an Action Research study, which means that in return for your help I give you the results so you
can use them straight away.
The
first
stage
is
global
survey,
which
has
been
posted
to
http://polling.nationalforum.com.au/index.php?sid=4. It's open to anyone who regards themself as
an independent artist - any stripe, any type. It requires no registration, takes about 15 minutes to
complete and can be completely confidential if you want it to be. Just completing the survey should
suggest some things you could try that have helped other artists.
If I could ask you to do one more thing, whether you complete my survey or not, it is to forward this
invitation to every other independent artist you know. The more people get involved in this project
the more we will learn and the better we'll be able to improve life for all independent artists.
If you need to know more, my Faculty's website is http://www.creativeindustries.qut.edu.au and I can
be contacted at h8.brown@student.qut.edu.au or on +61 409 622 395 (I'm in Australia).
Thanks for your attention and your help.
Regards,
Hugh Brown AKA Huge.
Chief Investigator
h8.brown@qut.edu.au
http://www.huge.id.au
Appendix 6 – In-principle members of The Genre Benders
1. Peter Baker .......................................................... Keyboards and Saxophone
2. Peter Retchford .........................................................................................Bass
3. Matt Mikkelsen......................................................................... Lead Guitarist
4. Peter Willersdorf ......................................................................................Bass
5. Ian Focks ..................................................................... Bass, Cello and Violin
6. Lucille ....................................................................................... Female vocals
4
7. Mark Gillett ........................................................................ Banjo, songwriter
8. David Johnson .................................................................................... Dijeridu
4
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