Thursday, November 22, 2012

When An Artist Has A Meltdown

Here's a series of videos that are at the same time funny, sad and wonderfully informative. The first video shows the singer of the Antaris, Kris Roe, go bonkers on his drummer in the middle of the gig. There's more about that on my Big Picture production blog, but the real learning experience is the response videos.




Here's a video from the band attempting to explain what happened. It's all well and good, but it drones on and on for 6 plus minutes. By the end, it seems counterproductive, as you start to side with the drummer for having to put up with a hyper-controlling frontman.




Now here's a video response from drummer Rob Felicitti, as it defends himself.


Here's the upshot. Regardless of who you feel is right or wrong, this is a wonderful use of YouTube and social media. It enables the band to take an unfortunate incident and get in front of it, and it enables the drummer to both defend himself and raise his profile in the process. I'm not picking sides here, just saying that whether the parties were aware of it or not, they did absolutely the right thing by making these videos. From a PR standpoint, they caused an event, then followed up on it, raising the profile of the band(s) and the individuals involved along the way. From a professional standpoint..........well, read the Big Picture blog.

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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

The Top 10 Lists

Top 10 Lists image from Bobby Owsinski's Music 3.0 blog
Happy Thanksgiving to all those of you who celebrate it. I'm going to use today to look backwards a little at some of the lists that I've posted over the last year. There's a lot more than I was aware of, so determining the top 10 was next to impossible, so here are simply 10 lists that I liked from the past year.

The 6 Top Earning Dead Musicians In 2012

5 Ways To Take The Pulse Of Your Fans

Check D's 5 Tips For Music Industry Survival

3 Common Mistakes Made By Independent Musicians

The 3 Pillars Of A Successful Brand

8 Reasons For A Bad Band Picture

7 Tips For A Great Newsletter

10 Great Music Marketing Ideas

7 Tips From The Advertising Giants

13 Questions To Ask About Your Publishing Contract

Considering that I do about 260 posts a year, there are probably another 20 or so that could've been included in this list, and perhaps you'll see some more during the upcoming Christmas holiday. In the meantime, enjoy these, and email me with your favorite.

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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Spotify Says 200 Streams Equal One Download

Spotify logo image from Bobby Owsinski's Music 3.0 blog
Spotify seems to be taking off is so many ways, with a service that now features over 20 million songs that's now available in 17 countries. With the company valued at just over $3 billion (!!, that's a little high to say the least), it just scored another cool $100 million round of venture funding. All this for a company that sports just a little over 4 million subscribers world-wide (although 15 million are said to use the free service each month), according to the latest estimates.

There's been a lot of speculation regarding how much an artist actually makes from the service that's getting so much traction, and Spotify's founder and CEO Daniel Ek didn't help the situation the other day when he stated in an article on Quartz:
“They’re saying, oh, they’re just paying a fraction of a cent every time someone plays a song,” says Ek. “And then you compare it versus the download revenue. Well, I can tell you it will take you 200 song listens before you make the same amount of money [as a download]. But because the consumption behavior is entirely different, and the revenue then increases in perpetuity, it’s not even a question of if this model is better, it’s just when in the lifecycle it’s better.”
So that means that on a 10 song album, you'd need 2000 streams to equal one download, right? It appears that there's a lot of BS being thrown around here. By most other calculations, Ek has his numbers very wrong. It's looks like the numbers are closer to almost 48,000 on Spotify, although it's been calculated that it takes over 300,000 plays on Pandora to equal a single album download. This was all illustrated quite nicely in an article by Damon Krukowski on Pitchfork a week or so ago.

So as Pandora beats up Congress for a royalty recalculation to a lower rate, the poor artist in the middle is making even less than before.

OK, here's the secret that no one has been talking about. All of the streaming services have already paid huge chunks of change to the labels for the rights to use their songs, but most of it goes right to the label's bottom line and not much ever reaches the artist. What's more, Spotify is partially owned by the major labels. Is that a conflict of interest or what?

Now there are a lot of artists that are outraged by the situation, and by all rights they really should be, but here's the bottom line. If we go all the way back to Sinatra, Elvis, The Beatles and up through today, 95% of a hit artist's income came from sources other than recorded music. That means that most of the a hit artist's income comes from touring, merchandise, licensing and publishing, and not recorded music.

It doesn't matter where you're at in the music artist food chain - your music is your marketing! If you're a new artist, it's more important to get your music heard than to make money from it (it won't be much anyway). If you're an established artist, it's more important that you stay alive in listener's minds so they'll pay to come and see you live and buy your merch. If they can't hear you, you're forgotten. Your music is your marketing. Remember those words.

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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Monday, November 19, 2012

AC/DC The Latest To LIft Their iTunes Ban

AC/DC box set image from Bobby Owsinski's Music 3.0 blog
While the vast majority of recording artists were receiving a new income stream from iTunes, acts like The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Metallica, Kid Rock and AC/DC refused to budge when it came to releasing their albums digitally. The hope of these rock legends was to preserve the integrity of the physical album, and with that, the cashflow that came from it.

One by one these bands started to realize that no matter how much they wanted that to happen, at least some of the world had moved on from CDs. If they wanted more income, the only way was to go digital and join the iTunes club.

AC/DC finally came to that conclusion and announced the news on their website this morning that their entire catalog was now available on iTunes. Although they gave no reason for the departure from their former hard-core stance, the band does have a new live album due out soon. Their last album Black Ice was distributed exclusively by Wal Mart, so there was a big payday there, but with no similar alternative this time around, going digital must have finally made sense financially.

There are not that many hold-outs from iTunes these days, with Garth Brooks and Tool being the most notable left.

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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Sunday, November 18, 2012

The 36 Rules Of Social Media

Here are some very relevant socia media rules that have come from all over the Interent but condensed into a nice infographic below. Most are common sense, but it's nice to have them all in one place. Pay fair heed to the them though, since they do cover just about all the basics of social media.

The 36 Rules Of Social Media image from Bobby Owsinski's Music 3.0 blog




































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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.


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