Thursday in Seattle
Early walk to coffee this morning. We don’t travel with a Lighting Designer, well, we do, but he plays guitar. So, sometimes we get a nice light show at the hands of the local LD (((Ben at Boulder Station in Vegas did a very nice job!))) and sometimes it’s not so good. Sometimes it is difficult to communicate what we are looking for. Everything was rather dark for the first show yesterday, but much better for the second one. I suppose it will be even better tonight.
Digital music suffering from entrepreneur drain | Beyond Binary – CNET News
Pakman agreed that such influencers are a key factor. “Bloggers are the music critics (of today),” Pakman said.
Yeah, yeah, bloggers replace journalism, bloggers replace music critics, Flickr-members replace photographers, Facebook and Twitter networking replaces meeting friends…
From the same article:
By Pakman’s count, there have been 109 venture-backed digital music start-ups. Fewer than five, though, produced a substantial return, he said.
“Investors lost a lot of money in this space,” he said, speaking on a breakfast panel at the Fortune Brainstorm: Tech conference here. The loss for the industry, he said is that entrepreneurs have moved on to areas like Twitter and Facebook.
Good riddance, I say. You know why Record labels attracted giant corporations? Because some of them were so successful. And why were they successful? Because they were run by musicians or people who truly loved music. A&M Records was formed in 1962 by trumpet player Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss. Or check out the history of Atlantic Records. When an artist went over budget with a grand idea, these labels might do things that a corporate beancounter would not allow… if they liked what they heard they went with it. They didn’t do market research. They didn’t hold a stockholder meeting and asked everyone’s opinion.
Music is like water, which always runs down to the sea. It may take a long time and many turns of the river to get there, but it does get there eventually. We are a musical species. We can’t help it. After this low-tide a high-tide will come.
Musicians Find New Backers as Labels Lose Power – NYTimes.com
Under the Polyphonic model, bands that receive investments from the firm will operate like start-up companies, recording their own music and choosing outside contractors to handle their publicity, merchandise and touring.Instead of receiving an advance and then possibly reaping royalties later if they have a hit, musicians will share in all the profits from their music and touring. In another departure from tradition in the music business, they will also maintain ownership of their own copyrights and master recordings — meaning they and their heirs can keep earning money from their music.
So, instead of signing a deal with a record label they sign a deal with a management company. That’s a switch from hyena to shark, or what? Bands as startup companies… nice, so everyone will keep the bottomline in mind. Instead of signing a contract with a large corporation, they become a corporation. Let’s see, we let radio become corporate and boring and horrible, now we’ll make the musicians themselves become corporate. Nice! Hey, and the musicians will share in all the profits from their music and touring. So generous!
