What's Going on?
I’ve covered the basics in this site before - but I still get this question a lot. So here’s an attempt to answer it. It seemed sensible to start here.
Not every musician is immediately at home online
Welcome to the Internet. It’s a network of computers, allowing people all over the world to communicate, share text, audio and images as digital files — and connect in ways that had previously been impossible.
You’ll no doubt be familiar with web pages and email, which form the majority of internet use, and you may have heard of peer-to-peer filesharing technologies like BitTorrent and Limewire, which account for the bulk of the data traffic on the internet. Then there are other applications like instant messaging software such as Live Messenger, voice-over-internet programmes like Skype, and internet-capable media players like iTunes, that allow you to not just play music, but also purchase it over the internet.
The internet changes things, because of its massive connectivity and the fact that everything on it is digital. Digital is different. Digital media have different characteristics to analogue media.
First of all, you have to forget the idea that it’s a new format like records, cassettes and CDs were. This is a transition to entirely new system that is as different from the world of CDs and records as that world was from the one in which sheet music was the main thing.
Digital media is made out of ones and zeros. It’s all data. Whether it’s a recipe for soup, an email to your mother, a home movie, a Hollywood blockbuster, a new hit record or your band’s demo - to the internet and to the computers that deal with it, it looks something like this:
1101100011010011011100011010010111001101001000010110
1111011011001011110110110110110011001100110011001111
0000101100011101100100111011001100110011110011011011
0100110010101101100011010011011100011010010111001101
0010000101101111011011001011110110110110110011001100
1100110011110000101100011101100100111011001100110011
1100110110110100110010101011000110100110111000110100
1011100110100100001011011110110110010111101101101101
1001100110011001100111100001011000111011001001110110
0110011001111001101101101001100101011011000110100110
1110001101001011100110100100001011011110110110010111
1011011011011001100110011001100111100001011000111011
00100111011001100110011110011011011010011001010…
…and so on.
This is important for a number of reasons.
First, it means that your music is just mathematics, and so by doing clever mathematical stuff, you can change, edit, remix and process it. Or any other kind of media, for that matter. This is all that programmes like Logic, ProTools, Photoshop, Final Cut, and Word are doing when they manipulate media files — it’s all just (just?) mathematics with a user-friendly front end. So anyone can change any piece of media. Including your recording of your music.
Second, it means that your music - and any other media - is endlessly replicable. If I was making an analogue recording of your music, it would be a degraded copy of the original. If I’m copying the ones and zeroes, then the recording is not a copy - it’s another original. They are identical in every respect.
Third, it means that copying is the easiest thing in the world to do. In fact, you can’t avoid it. Just by reading my website, you make a copy on several computers in different places all over the world. There’s a copy on your own hard drive - and all you were doing was looking.
So - it’s a world of communication, connectedness and copying. That’s just the way that it is.
The other thing to know about the internet is that it’s a medium. But it’s a medium that includes and swallows other media. Radio, television, print and all other media - including music media - become nothing more than ‘content’ on the new online medium. They cease to be things in themselves and become just part of the whole online experience.
The analogy I often find myself using is that it’s like what happens to theatre directors when you point television cameras at their work and put it on TV. They either continue to make theatre productions and plays and hope that it comes across okay on the new platform - or they can adapt to the new medium and start making television programmes.
One is not better nor worse than the other. But the hypothetical theatre director who adapts to the new medium and starts working on its own terms is far more likely to have ongoing success, while the one who resolutely refuses to change is more likely to experience difficulties and will complain bitterly that television is stealing the audience and making it very difficult to survive in the world of drama these days.
Does that mean I think that you should stop making music and start ‘making internet’? Actually, yes it does. That’s exactly what it means.
That’s not to say I think you should stop being a musician or a music industry entrepreneur. Just that the medium of music, as it has existed for around sixty years, is not the ‘natural condition’ of music business. These things are artificial constructs that can and do change over time. This one just happens to be a biggie.
So… the skills you have in making the art that you make will still come into play, just as the adapted theatre director who understands television still makes dramatic productions using those deep understandings of narrative, character, pace and dramatic tension — but equally, there’s a distinctive break in the way in which they operate.
To thrive in the online environment, you need to make a decisive break with the old way of doing things and instead attempt to ‘go native’ in the new online environment. I don’t care whether you’re a solo singer-songwriter or a major record label. This applies.
But just as our theatre director doesn’t need to know how television transmission works — nor even how to operate a camera — you don’t have to worry about ‘not being technical’. You just have to worry about what the parameters and conditions of the new medium are, and what expectations your audience has in this new world.
It’s not about learning new skills. It’s about understanding a different world. Some of us are off to a flying start and others are standing at the brink of it looking at a confusing and slightly scary landscape. Don’t be put off — it’s not the wild west and it’s not riddled with pirates and gangsters, no matter what you might read in the press.
It’s fine, it’s exciting, it’s completely within your grasp and it’s where your best chance of making a living from music lies. And best of all, you can put it together in any way that suits you, your audience and your music.
Can I avoid the internet and stick to what i know?
Of course you can. You might even make a very good living at it. The chances are increasingly slim, of course. I mentioned earlier that this was a shift in the way the world of music works of the same magnitude as the shift that happened when we went from sheet music to recorded music.And yet, of course, people still make money by making and selling printed sheet music. In fact, some people do very well out of it. It’s just not the main way that things are done anymore, despite the wringing of hands and the repeated insistence that everyone behave as they always did that accompanied that particular ‘death of the music industry’.
You can even just decide to pick and choose the bits that you’re comfortable with. You are perfectly within your rights to have no website, and yet use email and Facebook for your online communication. These things are not mandatory - and nor is it an all-or-nothing scenario.
However, it’s fair to say that I think your best chances are to endeavour to understand the technology and run with it. Use the ones that make sense to you, avoid the ones that don’t. But whatever you do, don’t make the mistake of thinking that some technologies are good and others are bad.
There were people who were determined not to use the telephone to take gig bookings long after its creation. Others who refuse to use a calculator to work out royalty statements.
The most laughable thing here, of course, is the underlying idea that technologies are responsible for some sort of malaise in the music industries. That the internet causes the decline of CD sales or that MySpace created a world where there was suddenly too much to compete with as an independent artist.
Technologies are not causes. Technologies are tools. They are solutions that people have come up with to address problems that they perceive. The result of those technologies stem from the way in which people use them. Of course, different technologies allow for different types of results - but they don’t make them happen. People do.
So - as someone trying to achieve a task — let’s say the task of cutting a steak — and you are offered a fork, a knife, a spoon and a serviette… would you refuse the knife on the grounds of all the stabbings you heard about up North?
Use the tools or don’t use the tools. It’s entirely up to you. But don’t be surprised if the people who figure out which tools to use in which combination and in which way are the ones who start to streak ahead of the pack.
Personally, I’d try and give myself every advantage.
How do I get on the radio?
Actually, this wasn’t going to be one of the hundred questions I keep getting asked about music online… but it’s a good question, and I’ve come up with a fun theory about it.
I’ve been doing some consultancy for an artist known as Krause. You might place her sonically between recent Madonna material and Peaches.
We’ve talked about all sorts of things along the way, from online marketing priorities to er… ponies — but that’s a long story — and I’m delighted to say she was the winner of the Lopend Vuur Sony BMG pitch in Holland last month.
One of the things that Krause’s keen to focus on, as well all the online stuff, is traditional media. In short, she wants a radio hit. And she’s perfectly capable of achieving that. But I made a suggestion I think might help.
Radio likes to play songs with the word ‘radio’ in them.
That’s it. Simple as that. Put the word “radio” in the title or the chorus, and your chances of airplay go up by a factor of ten. I spent close to 20 years in the radio industry - and trust me: it’s more true than anyone would like to admit.
In fact, it’s fair to say that a bad song with the word ‘radio’ in it stands a better chances of being selected for airplay than a good song without. I’m sure you can think of a few examples.
Now, I meant it as a throwaway observation - but Krause is keen as mustard. So she wrote a song.
Check this out: a great radio song that manages to fit the word ‘radio’ in 24 times (as well as once in the title). Not only that - but the entire lyric is specifically directed at radio programmers:
"Tell me - how does it sound? The radio edit…"
That has to work…
Of course - when you want a bit of mainstream airplay, having a major record label on side and a decent plugger working for you - as well as a decent promotional strategy and a bit of budget wouldn’t hurt. But a bit of psychology goes a long way.
Should I worry about piracy?
I would discourage worrying of any kind as a general principle. Worrying is a fear that something bad might happen — a negative emotional state with no external cause in reality. So on that basis, no — I wouldn’t worry about piracy.
I’d also suggest that piracy is not something that tends to happen on the scale that the mainstream media seems to suggest. Unauthorised duplication goes on, but not piracy. The idea that these two things are the same is one that major record labels tend to be quite fond of, but it bears no resemblance to either external reality, or what words actually mean.
Let me outline what I see as the differences between those two things.
Unauthorised copying is the practice of making duplicates of recorded music, usually for personal and social advantage — and most typically for reasons of convenience.
If my friend has a CD copy of a U2 record that I don’t own (for instance) and I put it in my computer and instruct my iTunes software to import that music, then that’s an unauthorised copy.
If I email a track from that album to a friend of mine, that’s another unauthorised copy. If I burn a CD from my iTunes playlist so I can listen to that album in my car, there’s another unauthorised copy.
If I then put that U2 record into my shared folder in Limewire so that my fellow peers online can download it, that’s unauthorised copying (but only if they actually download it — at present, ‘making available’ is not considered ‘distribution’).
If I scan the artwork, set up a mass CD replication production process, manufacture cheap copies of the CD and then distribute and sell the album for financial gain, then that’s piracy. Which is bad and wrong.
Now, simple economics would suggest that if I was going to invest capital in a mass replication process, then it would be U2 and their like that I would want to be mass replicating. The value of the hit, to the actual pirate, is much greater than the value of the non-hit.
So the short answer to the question about whether you should even give piracy a second thought is: Are you U2?
But that’s a flippant response and the question deserves more serious consideration. When asking ‘Should I be worried about piracy?’ the real underlying question is about whether there is a significant potential loss of income as a result of unauthorised copying. And here we’re talking about what’s generally referred to as the ‘Lost Sale’.
The Lost Sale is the idea that because someone came into possession of a track of yours as an mp3, then that is one less copy that will now be sold, thereby depriving you of your rightful income. From the artist and label perspective, it’s the sense of indignation that “all of these people now have my music - and they didn’t give me any money for it. I worked hard and invested all this money, and they’re just stealing it from me…”
It’s an understandable emotion. But it’s not a helpful approach - for three reasons:
1) Copying, as I’ve mentioned before, just happens online. You can’t legislate against it, prevent it by technical means nor force people to behave in ways that you would like them to. If you’re going to make recorded music, you have to be aware that you live in a world where this is what goes on. Refusing to accept that on principled grounds will only lead to stress and illness, and the unhelpful belief that every music consumer is a criminal.
2) The fluidity with which your music can pass from hand to hand is not an impediment to your success, but a technological advantage that you can leverage to your own ends. The overwhelming cry from the independent musician twenty years ago was ‘How can I just get my music out there?’ Problem solved. Now what are you going to do?
3) There are several phases to music that I characterise as Composition, Production, Distribution, Promotion and Consumption. All of those links in the chain are very important. I would suggest that if a technology is not cutting it for you in one part of the chain, it’s sensible to move it to another part of that same chain. That is to say, if you want mp3s to be the way that you profitably distribute music but the results are unsatisfying because of unauthorised copying, then redeploy mp3s to be the way that you profitably promote your music instead.
Now, of course, this raises more questions than it answers — and of course, things are far more complicated than I’ve laid out here — but as a general principle, it’s worth considering that rather than fret about unauthorised copying and expend time and energy in the fruitless task of preventing people from engaging in it, that time and energy can be better spent elsewhere.
And here are three more things to consider:
1) People who share your music are recommending you to people who respect their taste and opinion;
2) The vast majority of people who have unauthorised copies of your music would not have ordinarily paid for it anyway;
3) Do you really want for people who cannot afford your music to be prevented from ever hearing it?
The single most effective way to stop people from copying your music is to stop making music. If that’s not an option (and why would it be?) then accepting that this is the world in which we live is a good start towards successfully negotiating the new media environment.
How can I sell my music online?
When I go and give lectures and seminars, this is by far the most frequently asked question by the musicians in the audience. There are variations on this theme, but essentially it boils down to this very simple question: now that there’s this internet thing, where’s the money and how do I get at it? What’s the best way to sell music online?
I tend to start answering that question by taking a quick poll. It’s a little game I play, and I’ll play it with you now:
“Hands up, everyone in this room who considers themselves a professional musician.” Generally speaking the room is full of people with their hands in the air.
“Now, keep your hand up if you currently make more than 50% of your income from the sale of recordings.” I counted 3 people. At one of the seminars. Once. They were in the same band.
There’s a presupposition in the question “How can I sell my music online?” — and that is the notion that the way that you make money from music is through the sale of recordings.
It’s one way, sure. It’s an obvious one, too. But it’s not, typically speaking, the way that most musicians make their money outside of the internet — so it strikes me as odd that it seems to be the only thing that they’ll think of to try online.
Selling music online
There’s this weird notion that the internet is a shopping mall — and so if you want to be successful in that environment, you have to open a shop. Every artist and every record label who has a website suddenly wants to go into business as a retailer. The thought would never occur to them in the “real” world - but give them a webpage and they want a cash register.
It’s strange because for most artists and independent music businesses that I come into contact with (even, it has to be said, some of the retailers), the majority of the money does not come from the sale of circular pieces of plastic. And yet, the presence of the internet seems to make them believe that they once did.
And it has always struck me as odd that a group of people who spend more time training for their career than most brain surgeons, and who spend every waking hour of their day creating value from thin air believe that the little slice of time they spend in a darkened room fashioning idealised versions of their songs and turning them into things for sale is the only way through which they can earn a living.
This idea also gets us into problems when people start sharing music for free. If making money from music online is about selling songs, then sharing must therefore be theft. Now, of course I’m aware that there ARE musicians and people in the music industries who make money solely from recordings. My point is that they are in the minority.
So the better question might be: How can the internet help me make money from my music?it depends“. The internet can offer opportunities for promotion, distribution, business and communication efficiencies - even for the composition and production of music. And the answer, of course, is “
The internet is not a shopping mall or a marketplace. It’s a technology that allows for human beings to communicate and for information to be processed and moved around in new and accelerated ways. You can sell music on it, of course - and there are services that will help you do that. I’ll list them when I answer that specific question.
But for now, I just want to plant the seed that there are ways to make money from music. You can use the internet to enhance and expand upon these ways of working. And then you can use the internet to develop new ways of making money from music along the way.
Here’s what I suggest: if you have recorded music you want to sell online, then have a look at a few services and start the process. Either go with a digital aggregator like The Orchard or CD Baby — or submit to some of the bigger online music retailers through a service like TuneCore. Perhaps you could use one of the e-commerce platforms available to sell your music directly from your website. I’ll talk you through that process and make some recommendations later on. But feel free to just get started without me.
But once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to get that ‘how do I sell music?’ question off your mind so you can focus on the more interesting question of ‘how do I make money from music online?’
Because the chances are high that those two questions have quite different answers.
