by adrians wall » Sat Jul 12, 2014 2:25 am
Right this is a big topic with lots of different points that can be made.
First off in general music is making considerably less money that it used to say 20 years ago. The days of selling 2 million copies of a single are gone and even hugely popular artists like Beyonce have suffered huge reductions in album sales. Beyonce's first album in 2003 sold a total of 11 million official copies world wide pretty much all as cd's with no downloads. Her most recent album despite going to number 1 in the album charts and being the most successful album of 2013 has only sold 4 million copies world wide including copies sold online which outsold physical copies by quite a margin, in fact it was release on iTunes a week before you could even buy it in a store on a CD and in that week it sold more than 1 million copies. The main culprit for this seems to be streaming services such as spotify, pandora & even youtube which allow consumers to listen to music for free with minimal return to the artist. There are a few majorly successful producers who have put out their earnings from streaming sites and its minimal, not enough to make a living off for sure.
As music has become cheaper and easier to produce the market has changed, there is a lot of stuff out there and very little to separate one tune from another from a marketing perspective. This makes it very hard for people to break out and find success, typically to actually make any sort of return you will need for a tune to go "viral" which when you consider the number of tunes that do go viral to the number being produced you have better odds of winning the lottery.
All of this has lead to a resurgence in live performances in order to make money back on the investment put into creating the music. Look at hugely successful pop acts and you will see them pushing live events as they can make much more money performing 20 shows that they would from the album release. You have people like Lady Gaga who is averaging 1 show every 2.85 days which is a huge number compared to equivalent artists in the 90's.
Obviously trends in pop music don't necessarily apply to niche music like reggae in the same way but I think it is fair to say that the internet has had a huge effect on the economics of our chosen genre. The money to be made as a singer in reggae music is from live shows and dubplate sales. You take an artist who has a hit song and then 20 sounds want a dubplate at $100 each thats 2 grand profit from the tune, which is going to be more than they ever received for recording it in the first place or in royalties from the initial release. That hit song also rises the artists profile and allows them to get better placing on festival line ups, more shows on their own and so forth.
As a producer there is also money in live shows but there is some money to made from the release of vinyl as in the reggae scene there is still a demand for physical copies of music, a much much higher demand than any other genre I know collectors of, especially when you consider new release stuff. Even the soul scene doesn't come close to the amount of new music coming out on vinyl as reggae does, sure they have a lot of reissues but the new stuff is mainly small run vinyl & CD with digital download. The demand for reggae on vinyl seems to run hand in hand with the demand for the tunes to not be available to stream or download, or even on CD as the desired exclusivity that has always been at the forefront of the record buying public's mind is still there. I also think that online web stores have massively increased the numbers of consumers who actually have access to the music and as such increases the number of sales. previously you had to go to a dance or a record shop to get your tunes and that meant if you lived on the other side of the earth you simply couldn't get access to lots of the music.
Incidentally another genre that seems to be doing well on the sales front compared to others styles is Country & Western music in the USA. This is still bought mainly on CD and doesn't seem to have suffered the same fate as pop, rock & hip hop moving to online.
So the question as to why do artists release music on line for free?
The simple answer is exposure, putting music out there for free gets you known by people who would have otherwise passed over your music. I will use the example of Randy Valentine, he released his album online for free from his website, I downloaded it and enjoyed some of the tunes, when I saw his name on a 7" a year or 2 later on out of the hundred or so tunes in the box I was digging through his tune was one of the ones I selected to go and have a listen to. Had I not have downloaded that album for free I wouldn't have pulled his tune out of the box to listen to and in the end buy. Now weather he actually made any money from me buying that 7" is another matter but Id like to think that he got more than if I had simply streamed it off youtube.
The other thing to note is that the overheads of making music have been significantly reduced as technology has improved. All you need now is a laptop & a mic and away you go. You can now download the software for free and there is a wealth of free information out there to teach you how to use it. The days of hiring a studio to record a demo are done, you go round your mates house, link up to his laptop and go. Its the time that's the killer now days. I remember being 16 and going to record a 3 track, 12 minute demo with a band that took us 3 days and cost about 2000 pounds in total to record & master. 14 years later those same mates who were in that band have recorded a complete album of 12 songs totaling over an hour at home for the price of a handful of microphones (most of which where borrowed from various people) and a digital input box for a laptop. They have since released the album on iTunes and its sold a couple of thousand copies & about 1000 phsyical CD copies. Still the only way this band makes any money is from shows and even then as its a 7 piece the profit after expenses from a show is minimal and all gets invested back into merchandising, pressing CD's, T-shirts, hoodies etc. The point of the band is not to make money or become famous, its so a bunch of mates can hang out playing music and have a good time doing so. I do have this feeling that there are people out there who are making music with the express intention of becoming rich and famous which to me is terrible, you should make music because you feel it, if you become rich and famous from it then enjoy your success but humble yourself.
I guess the question I feel that needs to be answered is do you think people should be able to make a living exclusively from making music and if so how many people should be able to do so? 1%, 10% or 100% of the population cause if 100% of the population are relying on music who is going to buy it? Still today the vast majority of sound system owners, producers, singers & record label owners have an alternate source of income.