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What is really going on in the music industry?

March 27, 2023 //
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So the BBC posted an article last week about music industry profits and greed with the title Music industry makes $26bn but wants streaming prices to rise.

Of course the music industry wants streaming prices to rise. They’re in the business of maximizing shareholder value by hook or by crook. Raising streaming prices, of course, doesn’t mean they’ll pay the artists any more, but the coffers of those at the top will be enriched. More.

The BBC article has an interesting table of the top ten earning artists worldwide last year, with the assumption that these are the artists who make up the bulk of that 26 billion in the headline. Four are from Southeast Asia, four from North America (including Taylor Swift at the top of that list), and two from the UK. The table doesn’t include their earnings.

Who the artists are and where they’re from aren’t very useful metrics for understanding the position or state of the music industry as a whole.

To get closer, sure I want to know what those artists earned, but the music industry is massive. What the artists earned might be peanuts compared to what the labels earned on the backs of their work. Also, the music industry is comprised not just of artists and labels, but of touring and ticketing organizations (dominated by LiveNation and Ticketmaster), distributors, agents, and all the people and infrastructure around secondary markets such as television and film.

Once upon a time, there were about a dozen major labels. When I was in high school, the shop I worked in sold almost entirely 45s. (When, you ask? I worked at American Pie on Venice Blvd from 1983-1985. I don’t know when it eventually closed.) The business model included a storefront, but was mostly dedicated to wholesaling. The records were organized by label and then by record number. It was MCA, Polgygram, WEA (Warner / Elektra / Atlantic), CBS (which was Columbia and Epic, later subsumed by Sony), Capitol/EMI, A&M/RCA and a small scad of independents. We dealt entirely in reissues of the oldies and the current top 40. Even those six conglomerates have shrunk to a smaller number. The thing is, at the time, they were all doing well as separate entities.

Fast forward 20 years for an anecdote about the times they’d fallen on. In 2005, EMI (and whatever agglomeration it then belonged to) pinned all of its financials on one release. One. The release in question was Coldplay’s X&Y. Great pop album. It did really well, but EMI, once home of the Beatles, Duran Duran, Kate Bush, and Pink Floyd, sold its recorded music division to Universal Music Group. UMG, by my own finger in the wind estimate, accounts for about 40% of the recorded music business. A list of UMG’s labels is here.

(A side note regarding EMI’s accounting: In 1985, coming off the massive success of Hounds of Love and The Whole Story, someone at EMI dropped the ball and forgot to renew Kate Bush’s contract. Her next albums came out on Columbia.)

My perspective is (as is usual) different than that of the BBC. The larger metrics I’d like to have at my disposal are those associated with the independent music sector. While I enjoy a lot of pop, I was amused by the fact that I could hum exactly one song by one artist on that list up top. (To get Shape of You by Ed Sheeran out of my head, a friend sent me a link to BTS’s Butter which is a straight-up banger, no doubt about it.) As noted, I don’t listen to a lot of pop, but the artists I do spend a lot of time on have carved out their own interesting niches.

The folks I discuss here are ones I’ve long been fans of – Bandcamp and other such platforms support thousands and thousands of artists, many of whom are more or less successful on their own terms as well.

Michael Gira finances the recording of Swans albums by releasing limited edition CDs of demos and live material. The fan base snaps them up and the band goes into the studio every few years. Gira owns his own label, Young God Records and has been known to manage his own distribution by hand (though they inked a distribution deal with Mute for their last album, 2019’s leaving meaning which I think is still in effect for the upcoming release, The Beggar).

Laura Kidd, whose first several albums came out under the moniker She Makes War, and now records as Penfriend. Her most recent release, One In A Thousand came out under the name Obey Robots with Rat from Ned’s Atomic Dustbin), runs her own label, My Big Sister Recordings. She does all her own marketing and promotion and her last two albums have debuted in high positions on the UK’s independent music charts. She’s been doing things her way for almost 15 years without major label support. Check out the Obey Robots track Elephant.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor is another band who run their own label (Constellation Recordings). I’m well aware that music that falls under the rubric of post-rock aren’t going to be raking in the big bucks. Even as a fan, I was unaware of their last album, G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!, until about a month after its April, 2021 release. They’ve been recording on and off since 1997’s F♯ A♯ ∞ (there was a break between 2002 and 2012 since which time they’ve released four insanely good albums) entirely on their own terms. When they tour, they sell out decent-sized venues without a lot of promotion. Given the chance to get their music to an even wider audience, the band holds to its principles. They allowed Danny Boyle to use a track in his film 28 Days Later but wouldn’t allow its inclusion on the soundtrack. My guess about this is that they stick to a singular artistic vision. Their albums, much like their concerts, are best experienced as full pieces, but there’s probably more to it. GY!BE are also one of those bands that allows taping of their shows and there’s an extensive list of concerts posted at archive.org. Here’s Job’s Lament from a gig last year in Minneapolis.

Unwoman, who creates cello-based music which is ostensibly pop, reaches her fans through Patreon and judicious use of social media. I’m not sure how I would have found her had she not been part of group I belonged to who met regularly at a pub on Haight street back in the 90s. She releases independently, using Bandcamp as a distribution tool (as do most of the artists I mention here). One way she keeps her fans engaged is by polling them to choose which covers she’ll record. The music itself tends to emotionally bare electronic/goth sounds (which is really reductive, I know), but she’s an experienced enough musician to have fun with songs like Everything Is Awesome.

Promotion for a 2017 SUNN O))) gig at the Melkweg in Amsterdam.

SUNN O))) is another one of those acts who make difficult music for the benefit of an ever-expanding audience. Two guys who drive their sound with feedback-heavy riffs, performing in hooded robes behind waves of fog to keep their appearance hidden. Like the other artists I talk about here, they’ve been in this game for a long time. Evolving from acts such as Burning Witch, Goatsnake and Engine Kid (by way of Thorr’s Hammer), they created Southern Lord Records to release their own material and since 1998 of cultivated quite a roster. (Around 70 acts call or have called Southern Lord home.) Interestingly, Southern Lord’s distribution is handled by UMG. SUNN O))) also post audience recordings of their shows to Bandcamp. As was said about the Grateful Dead back in the day, the albums are fine, but the best way to experience them is live. That said, the in-studio set they recorded for the BBC, Metta, Benevolence, isn’t a bad intro.

To bring the thing full circle, the acts I mention here have been actively engaging the music industry for anywhere from 15 to over 40 years. (Swans evolved out of the same early 80s No Wave scene that gave the world Sonic Youth.) Many learned the hard way or took the hard way to satisfy the drive to create unapologetic music. Taylor Swift, according to Wikipedia, wanted to be making pop from a very young age and with the help of parents who were in a position to do so, she worked within the industry to develop her skills and create music that would sell. And sell it she has, by the truckload.

I know I’m not Swift’s target audience, but I recall my boss at American Pie telling me that the ability to write pop music that sells is a skill. I believe we were talking about Van (“The Hustle”) McCoy who had just passed away, but the same holds true of many such artists, Swift among them. She took her early successes and has continued to build on them. While she’s not my cup of tea, I can’t help but appreciate that. There are, however, massive communities of creators of hundreds of different musical styles who I’d like to see accounted for in these discussions.

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Categories Music, Journalism, Writing

More podcasts!

April 23, 2021 //
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Last week I mentioned Maddow and O’Donnell, Penfriend’s Attention Engineer, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, and BBC Radio 4’s Friday Night Comedy. This week I look at more music, some food, and more politics.

Martyn Ware’s Electronically Yours. Ware was a founding member of the Human League and Heaven 17, and his British Electrical Foundation project relaunched Tina Turner’s career in the early 80s. He mostly interviews his own contemporaries (Thomas Dolby, Gary Numan, Vince Jackson), but he’s gone farther afield with Sandie Shaw, and Tony Visconti. Sometimes he’s a little too fond of his own self, or he hasn’t yet decided to edit out his own meanderings, but in general the interviews are fascinating. In his interview with Tony Visconti, Ware admitted early on that Visconti had produced 12 of his 20 all time favourite albums, but he generally did a good job of letting Visconti tell the stories.

Home Cooking with Samin Nosrat (author of Salt Fat Acid Heat) and Hrishikesh Hirway. I learned of this great podcast from Hirway, I’m guessing – I think he must have mentioned at the end of an episode of one of his other podcasts, Song Exploder (which I also love). I didn’t know anything about Nosrat and her amazing cooking journey. The two of them started this podcast at the beginning of the pandemic with the idea that they’d do four episodes talking about their favourite foods and answering listener questions. Four has so far turned into 15. Really delightful and sweet. And mouthwatering.

I said I’d mention a political podcast, but in the last couple of weeks, I’ve not listened to much beyond Rachel and Lawrence. But in the category of longer form political discussion, I really like Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara. Bharara was US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, fired at the beginning of the last administration. He is both articulate (not unexpected in a trial attorney) and an astute interviewer. His discussion with conservative columnist David Frum at the earlier this year was especially interesting.

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Categories food and drink, Music, podcasts, Politics

Podcasts!

April 14, 2021 //
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Many podcasts ask you to rate and review in the various podcast places, but I thought I’d use this post to point to some of the stuff I listen to when I’m out on walks and the like. If I put it here, trust that I recommend it highly.

Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell are my go-to folks for left-wing outrage. Capable journalists and engaging hosts. The podcasts are just the audio versions of their TV shows, but that’s fine. I used to listen to both of these just about every weekday, but I’ve dialed it back to two or three times per week, because times are hard and my outrage needs more effective channels. Back when times weren’t so bloody fraught, Maddow would make cocktails on air every now and then, and punctuate some shows with a segment called ‘Best New Thing In The World’ which was always nice. And then we got DJT and it’s not like that anymore. (about 45 minutes each)

Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 Alternate series of The Now Show, The News Quiz, Dead Ringers and random BBC audio comedy. The Now Show is topical political humor with sketches, music, and pointed commentary. Skewers both left and right. The News Quiz is a scripted panel game show. Kinda like Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, but shorter with a UK focus, natch. Dead Ringers is comedic takes on a number of British radio shows and a lot of the humor assumes you recognize the source material. I’d listened for several years before I actually knew who Diane Abbott was. (30 minutes)

Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me is NPR’s weekly news quiz – I’ve been listening to it for most of the 20+ years it’s been on the air. Obviously a US bent on these things. (45 minutes)

Attention Engineer – Musician Laura Kidd (formerly She Makes War, now Penfriend) interviews mostly other musicians about the creative process and being creative in these times. The first episodes were recorded in late 2019 and didn’t predict how crazy stuff would get. Check out one of her gorgeous new tracks, Black Car (The list of her podcast guests is on the right).
(Usually over an hour)

And if I have my act together, I’ll do another one of these next week.

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Categories podcasts

There are skeptics and there are skeptics

May 13, 2020 //
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I thought I would discuss this Atlantic article in the context of political love languages, but there are so many other problems with Conor Friedersdorf’s Take the Shutdown Skeptics Seriously that I’m just going to get into it as a political discussion.

Friedersdorf argues several points:

  • That the discussion isn’t as clear-cut as pro-human and pro-economy. However, he goes on to argue the pro-economy stance much of the way through.
  • That because we don’t know how long a solution will take, or if we will reach a solution, “Americans should carefully consider the potential costs of prolonged shutdowns lest they cause more deaths or harm to the vulnerable than they spare.”
  • That supply chain interruptions and a prolonged depression are equally great risks to life and not to be discounted.
  • That crashed healthcare and education systems are also hard to recover.

He cites Michael Klare’s warning in The Nation that “Even where supply chains remain intact, many poor countries lack the funds to pay for imported food,” he explained. “This has long been a problem for the least-developed countries, which often depend on international food aid” This is not new. Starvation and poor access  to food has always been a hazard because of (among other things) how international trade and exploitation are arranged now and have been since the admitted colonial times. (These places are still colonies – of multinationals now, not other countries, but still.) When we talk about developing/developed countries, there’s often the assumption of dependence on foreign assistance. The problem here is that there are so many internal and external forces at play that keep such countries in the ’not developed’ column. Using this as an excuse not to work on those issues is just a continuance of the problem.

And note the absence of discussion of the plague of locusts in Africa – no global locust watch dashboards but the problem still exists, and people will starve because of it.

Note, too, that there’s currently enough food gin the US supply chain if we’re processing it carefully and not sending it to China. The web of trade can’t be brought back but government stimulus – paying a fair wage for fair work harvesting the food that’s rotting on the vine right now and planting for the next season will feed more people. But again, it seems to be a matter in American politics and the US media that dividing people works in some folks’ favour, and bringing people together to support the effort and each other runs counter to that. This might be a dream that free people will do manual labor in the absence of other labor to do, or in the interest of the country not going underfed in a land of plenty.

The part of the article that really got my blood boiling is the assertion that this crashing economy won’t leave the healthcare systems standing, sourced to Esther O’Reilly’s Arc Digital article Economic Costs Are Human Costs. In the West, this is mostly a problem in the US where a large portion of the economy rests on a fragile but very lucrative system of people paying large sums of money to insurance companies on the slim chance those companies will take care of them in the event of catastrophe. Those companies have a bottom line dependent on not covering care in the event of catastrophe. This is the big hole in how the US economy works that Obama and many before him were trying to fix and now we’re seeing how that affects the rest of society. In the context of the pandemic, we find that we had an opportunity to meet the disaster head on by working with manufacturers to build up the stockpiles of ventilators and PPE that were going to be necessary. See above about the ease of dividing people rather than bringing together to meet the challenge.

Healthcare systems running out of cash on hand is one of the symptoms of poorly run healthcare (and a poorly run country, in my opinion) – or healthcare run on a for-profit basis. We can fight the virus and put the economy on hold if the money we’re borrowing to shore up the economy goes into fighting the disaster and to the people it needs to help. It’s the same with giving tax breaks at the top rather than minimum wage increases at the bottom. That wage increase gets plugged right back into the economy. But a few more people are fed first.

Stimulus works a lot better when it’s effectively directed as well. Hospitals (nursing homes, prisons, food processing plants), three months into this disaster, should have all the PPE they need. There were hundreds of ways to reconfigure our manufacturing base temporarily to address the situation in testing as well as equipment. We (the executive branch of the US government) simply didn’t and made excuses for not doing so. And continues to. Gracious, DJT. You can’t blame the system for that – you can, but we saw disaster on the horizon and decided not to prepare and identified who we’d sacrifice and which corporations would reap the benefit of stimulus packages that should have supported humans in need.

A final point in the article that made me scratch my head was this: ‘The shuttering of auto manufacturing plants led to an 85 percent increase in opioid overdose deaths in the surrounding counties over seven years, according to a recent study.’ (The referenced article by Heather Mac Donald in The Spectator – https://spectator.us/consider-costs-coronavirus/ doesn’t cite a source for this statistic.) Friedersdorf is trying to argue about the social costs of a depression should this shutdown last too long. There’s a leap of logic here that I can’t fathom. Opioid deaths are also associated with the companies pushing the opioids, other healthcare issues associated with manufacturing and the holes in our healthcare system and the generally accepted disposability of workers in general in the US. Topic for another blog

And finally, I found this related sentiment on Facebook, but am having a time sourcing the original tweet:

medically-informed

We absolutely can do much better.

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Categories Covid-19, Economics, Health, Journalism, politicians

How do we get where we need to be?

May 26, 2019 //
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Rob Cox in Reuters argues that ‘China Does It’ is a bad antitrust argument (6-minute read). But before I get into the arguments the biggest companies in the US and Europe make for maintaining their monopolies, I want to talk about how we are able and not able to occupy space in society.

I’ve had two discussions in the last few days that I want to connect. In one, my friend was complaining about nudity at Dutch spas. Nudity is generally the norm at spas in the Netherlands unless it’s a rare kledingsdag (clothing day). My friend complained that one should be able to wear a swimsuit or not. The issue is not one of prudishness, but that my friend has a surgical scar that a swimsuit hides. It’s not even that the scar is problematic. It’s the threat of unwanted intrusion in what should be a relaxing space that gets tiresome.

Another friend is an expert in her field and occasionally gives free practical courses associated with it to the public. And what is the first question raised in a recent class? Something about how and where she gained her expertise, or her interest in the subject at hand? No. It was ‘Where are you from?’ The adult child of Japanese immigrants born and raised in Los Angeles. Not that that part matters. Again, it’s the impertinence – and the unspoken question of whether my friend had a right to occupy the space at the front of that classroom.

These two experiences play into a larger narrative of how the spaces occupied by people are no longer personal. They probably haven’t ever been, really, but we had a couple of decades where it seemed that they might be. If one wasn’t paying very close attention.

Where to I fit into this narrative? As a cisgender, adult, heterosexual presenting (I’m out as bisexual in most areas of my life, but you can’t necessarily tell that by looking at me) white male, my right to occupy space is rarely questioned. Nor is most expertise I claim. I’m also Jewish which you can probably tell from my physical profile. I’m somewhat removed from the racism I’m about to discuss, but only just. It’s a topic for another entry.

On a good day, however, I might classify as an ally to those who face harassment and verbal and physical violence simply for being.

The right to occupy space. I read a tweet sometime in the last few days that read something like ‘A survey of transgender people asked “What is the one thing you would do if you had a day during which no one would judge or comment on your appearance?” The majority of respondents said “Go swimming.”‘ This Vox article (approx. 5-minute read) on a 2016 survey doesn’t have that nugget, but it tells quite a lot about how difficult it is to be trans and occupy space.

All of this is leading up to a connection I want to make to that Reuters article on big business in the west and China, but I’m going to toss in one more thing about swimming and occupying space. About twenty years ago I dated a black man who grew up in Detroit in the 70s. In response to a suggestion we go to the beach, he laughed me off, saying “Negroes don’t swim.” He didn’t share any of the history of the difficult efforts to integrate swimming facilities that continues. The New York Times ran a long article on the subject just last summer. In short, the right to occupy space unharassed in America is tenuous, and far more extensive than even some close followers of the news guess.

I could stop here and say, ‘look how enlightened I am for acknowledging my privilege’ and all the blah blah blah attendant to such a claim.

The Reuters editorial linked at the top of this entry has nothing to do with occupying space, except insofar as Facebook policies turn a continuing blind eye to the racism on its platform – not within the editorial’s scope. It has nothing to do with how we as a society address or don’t address our responsibilities to each other. It has nothing, really, to do with respecting the privacy and autonomy of people in their private and professional spheres. What struck me reading the arguments of people like Sheryl Sandberg (CEO, Facebook) and European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager is the distance between how we look at business and how we look at humans. Both of these people argue competition policy as it relates to the Chinese.

It might be that financial reporting is always like this. If I read Reuters’ Breakingviews and the Economist as assiduously as I do popular news assessments of social policy, this wouldn’t surprise me. But reading Cox’s look at how large corporations address competition got me thinking about how to decrease concern with monopoly power and increase respect for each other in our common spaces. More to the point, I started thinking, again, how little discussions of monopoly power have to do with how humans interoperate in the world. I’m not arguing anything here that five millennia of (mostly privileged white male) philosophers and teachers (not to mention three seasons of The Good Place) haven’t argued better. But the question remains:

How do we get where we need to be?

There’s a collision of autonomy and respect and privacy and intrusion from so many different areas that any conclusions I draw are either meaningless, or pablum. The social media waters that we swim in constantly invite – and foster – invasion and misunderstanding. And outright hostility. Note again my generally unchallenged white male expertise. I know that I can step up and say that the status quo is untenable and quietly slip back into enjoying my position with respect to it. In my What If Future, the status quo is that no one is challenged in their right to occupy space, but gracious, that future is bloody far away.

And entirely unrelated: The one-two punch of The Talking Drum and Larks’ Tongues In Aspic Part Two on King Crimson’s Meltdown: Live in Mexico (Spotify link) is superb. To be played at maximum volume.

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Categories business, history, Journalism, Social media
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