The Social Dilemma for musicians - some thoughts

Tonight I just watched a film called ‘The Social Dilemma’ it was as I expected it to be a bit of an eye opener. It mostly focused on Facebook and that being the most dominant social medial platform. In the UK a population of around 66 million, 44 of them use Facebook and around 14 million use twitter. 


There has been a lot of talk about the Arts and Music and the future. Well in my view Tech companies have already done so much un repairable damage to the music industry that it can never recover from. 


Here are a couple of examples. 


In late 90s to early 2000s file sharing was rife on the internet, whole albums being downloaded with the artists receiving nothing. This saw a massive shift in the way the industry worked. It was all about Live acts and it was about live acts that pull big audiences. Major labels lost focus on promotion new acts because they knew that it would earn less money than what could be earned from say a Pink Floyd box set or a Fleetwood Mac tour. 


Apple saw this as a massive money making venture, they saw that people were downloading music but they didn’t have a sleek device to play them on. So along came the Ipod, now this was a very good piece of kit, and the itunes software they gave away free worked well. Crucial, by giving away itunes free it sucked people into the apple way.  Not long after people that were less tech savvy wanted an ipod and they were prepared to pay for content. This was a middle part of the story where major acts were starting to make revenue from digital sales. Now I say Major acts, unsigned and indie acts initially found it very hard to get product on to itunes because you had to be a major label, it was only around 2006 people like Tunecore came along and acted as a broker for anyone to get music on to the platforms. Now Apple were quite happy selling ipods and making a 50% profit on pretty much every song they sold. But they wanted more. They saw how spotfy was doing, and increasingly people were using phones for music.  So how do they do this ? well they decide to ditch the Ipod, and make everything streaming, for a price to apple users. And naturally peoples brand loyalty stuck with apple. Apple now don’t have an income from itunes, but they make far more money by giving a fraction of a % per tune to the artist / label rather than 40p per sold track in the previous model. And the Consumer think they are getting a good deal. 


If we look at live gigs. 


Because the internet you would send your gig listings off to the Music papers we are talking NME and Melody maker. Music fans bought one or the other or both every Wednesday. They would look at the back see what gigs were on and play the week accordingly. This was a perfect way of doing things. You got the name out there, and people could see what was what. 


When the internet came along some sites tried this model, the best is Ents 24, a free listings site that sends out emails to subscribers whom what to know about a specific artists and is funded by commission from ticket sales. Brilliant everyone knows where they stand. 


When facebook started, artists could have a page, they could even have music on at one point. If you set up an event you could invite all your follower and for a time you could boost your post, and know your followers would all see it. 


As time has gone on, the followers saw less and less of your content, facebook stopped page admins from inviting people to events, rather making page owners pay to have events boosted, fair enough except the page followers seldom see still even If the event is boosted at a cost more than the artist is likely to make from playing the gig. 


The bottom like is this, its very hard for any musical artist to make a living from music in any way if you rely on the internet. There is a lot of frankly bullshit about artists building followings via instagram and so on, most of this if financed at huge cost. 


I think its probably time for artists to turn off the social media and spend time making good music that hopefully people will find rather than the other way round. I have been using the internet since 1995 and I can honestly say I have regretted every single second I have wasted trying to build an online audience because it’s a time effort and money pit that you can never dig out of. 


Don’t worry I have a far more upbeat post to follow. 


Comments

Unknown said…
That was an interesting read :)

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