New Tools Reveal Music Industry's Secret Strength

If you believe everything you read, the music industry is swirling the financial drain. There’s always some new study or article that purports to show how business is much worse than it’s ever been. But every industry goes through changes at some point and either evolves or dies. Why should the music industry be any different?

The fact of the matter is that if you combine the global revenue from recorded music, licensing, publishing, merchandise and touring, 2012 was better than ever for the music business as a whole, with over $67 billion in global revenue. That said, revenue for the recorded music business slipped about .3% last year, according to the International Federation of Phonograph Industry (IFPI). 

But there are some bright signs even in the recorded music part of the business. Take Adele, for instance. Read more on Forbes.

----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

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.

Best Cities For Music Jobs

If you're looking for a job in the music business in the United States, the places you can live to do so are limited. On the other hand, there's more of them than you might think, and according to Billboard Magazine, there are actually 10.

1. Nashville - 7.8 jobs per 1000
2. Los Angeles - 2.8
3. Austin - 2.6
4. Charlotte - 2.1
5. New York - 2.0
6. Atlanta - 1.8
7. Memphis -1.8
8. Seattle - 1.8
9. Chicago - 1.7
10. New Orleans - 1.7

On the other hand, the amount of money you can make from a music job rates those same cities differently. Here's the percentage of money that you can make from a music job compared to a regular job.

1. Los Angeles - 175%
2. Nashville - 156%
3. New York - 147%
4. Chicago - 113%
5. Seattle - 105%
6. Charlotte - 99%
7. Austin - 94%
8. Atlanta - 85%
9. Memphis - 79%
10. New Orleans - 73%

When it comes down to it, LA and Nashville are still the best place to be if you want to be in the music business, while New York has dropped in influence in recent years. On the other hand, Charlotte wasn't on anyone's list 10 years ago and now has a very active music scene.

----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

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.

Nirvana's Original Contract

Here's a great piece of music history. It's part of the original recording agreement between Nirvana and the indie label Sub Pop. There are a number of interesting things here if you take the time to read it:

1. There are 4 people on the agreement, and drummer Dave Grohl isn't one of them, since he didn't join the band until a year after the deal was signed. Jason Everman had originally paid for the sessions for the band's first album Bleach (a grand total of $606.17), and was kindly included on the deal.

2. The deal is only for one year with two option years, which is pretty short when compared to a major label deal, who usually try to hold onto an artist for at least 5 to 7 years.

3. The advance for the first year was $600! The first option year was $12,000 and the the second was $24,000. The option year advances turned out to be blessing and a curse. Bleach sold about 40,000 copies the first year (a pretty good amount for an indie), but Kurt Cobain was dissatisfied with Sub Pop's promotion of the album and wanted off the label. The advance amount for the second year was too much for most indie labels to absorb, so they were forced to look for a larger record label, which turned out to be David Geffen's DGC, a label that was distributed by Warner Bros at the time.

The rest, as they say, was history, as the band's second album Nevermind blew up and sold 25 million.

----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

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.

Neil Young's Pono Music Service Illustrates Hi-Def Audio's Problems

There’s widespread industry speculation that Neil Young’s dream of a higher quality consumer music service is slowly getting closer, although a launch date is still nowhere in sight. Pono, in which Young is heavily invested, is a high-resolution audio ecosystem consisting of a download service supplying digital audio files transferred from the original audio masters at 192kHz/24 bit, and a dedicated player with the ability to play back those files at that resolution. Along with Apple’s best kept secret in their Mastered for iTunes program, Pono is an attempt to raise the bar in audio quality, a bar that has been continually lowered since just before the turn of the century thanks to the public’s acceptance of the quality impaired MP3 format.

Through the years, Young has always been a notorious stickler for audio quality, being one of the first artists to build his own personal recording studio based around hand-picked vintage audio gear, then later investing in Pacific Microsonics, which developed the HDCD audio technology that was acquired by Microsoft in 2000. He’s also been a big proponent of high-res audio formats like DVD-Audio and most recently Blu-Ray. To read the rest of the article, go to Forbes.

----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

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.

The World's 10 Best Record Stores

Amoeba Music in Hollywood

While it's true that record stores are sadly dying, they're not dead yet. To prove the case, Buzzfeed Music posted a great article on the best record stores in the world. Here's what they considered to be the top 10.

1. Amoeba Music - Hollywood, CA. (I've been there, since I live near Hollywood - it's fabulous!)

2. 12 Tonar - Reykjavik, Iceland

3. Aquarius Music - San Francisco, CA

4. Tower Records - Tokyo, Japan

5. Princeton Record Exchange - Princeton, NJ

6. Spacehall - Berlin, Germany

7. The Thing - Brooklyn, NY

8. Waterloo Records - Austin, TX

9. Forever Young Records - Grand Prairie, TX

10. Mabu Vinyl - Capetown, South Africa

The article mentions 17 additional great record stores, so for all of you vinyl aficionados, consider this your bucket list.

----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

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.