Ultimate Guitar Tone Handbook Contest

Enter to win a copy of The Ultimate Guitar Tone Handbook.

My latest book (co-authored with Rich Tozzoli) provides an intensive overview of why electric and acoustic guitars, amplifiers, speaker cabinets, and effects, sound the way they do, and shows you how to get the sound you've been searching for. Also loaded with recording and production tips, interviews, and a DVD.

Click here to learn how to enter.

Music 3.0 - The Video

If explained Music 3.0 a few times in the two years I've been writing this blog, but if you're a new reader that hasn't seen those posts, here's a video that shows you just how the music industry got to this place. The information is taken from the Music 3.0 Internet Music Guidebook.

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

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

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating the music business.

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

Why The Decline In Entertainment Spending Is A Good Thing

I've been accused of being negative lately in my posts and I guess if you look at them a certain way, that's true (sorry, don't mean to be). The fact is that there aren't a whole lot of positive stories around about the music business these days.

Actually, I don't see these stories as negative from the point of view that the sky is falling, and everything sucks and is dying, as much from the viewpoint that the business is in the middle of deep change and evolution. As with life, as one part dies, another is renewed.

That being said, the LA Times ran a story the other day showing how spending has declined in most sectors (not all) of the entertainment business.

Want to know the positive of the above graphic? Perhaps homogenized corporate entertainment has finally hit the wall.

It doesn't matter what form of entertainment, it has always been at it's most creative and vital when run by passionate fans. Television, the film industry, and the music business have all had their heydays when run by entrepreneurs that truly cared about the product and their customers. It's when those entrepreneurs are bought out by multinational companies and the suits take over that the product becomes watered down in the search for greater and greater profits. Sooner or later the product suffers to a degree that the consumer is no longer an automatic buy and becomes desensitized to the entire genre. Sound familiar?

The numbers on the chart above are actually a good thing. It signals the beginning of the end of an era for many facets of the entertainment industry. Soon big business will want to divest because the profits just aren't what they used to be (if they're still there at all), and we'll be back to an era of fan/entrepreneur/owner. We may not see it happen tomorrow, but we will see it happen eventually. And our entertainment will be much better for it.

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

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.

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

The Death Of A&R

The job of A&R isn't what it used to be, and looks to be dying even faster than the major record labels, according to Rich Esra, one of the publishers of The Music Business Registry, a quarterly publication that tracks A&R people and provides their contact information. Rich knows what he's talking about since he used to be an A&R exec himself, working for 6 years at Arista Records.

Rich recently posted some reasons that he thought A&R was dying in the excellent Digital Music News newsletter. According to Rich:

"1) The major labels are hiring fewer and fewer A&R executives because the volume of acts (and more importantly the types of acts) being signed have dramatically decreased.

2) The A&R process used to be about the discovery, signing and nurturing of the act. Today, A&R executives are not looking for talent per se. They are looking for an ongoing business.

An artist that has developed some kind of traction and awareness on their own is what I'm talking about. Today, acts need to be "developed" or at least developing in a business sense for any label to have even the slightest amount of interest. The idea that today's A&R executives will discover an unknown act / artist and develop that artist is an illusion. They have neither the desire, time or money for that matter in 2011.

And by the way, this last point is about to become profoundly illustrated in the next 60-90 days - as dramatic and sweeping changes happen at Universal and Sony (massive layoffs are expected soon).

(3) This is why from an A&R perspective, only the most generic, ubiquitous type of acts get any attention from labels today. There is only a certain type of act these days that major labels are willing to sign."

According to Rich, there were only 25 A&R execs hired in 2010 while 40 were let go without a single one of them being rehired. In 2009 there were 58 hired and 51 let go, and in 2008 there were 80 hired and 64 let go.

We've all heard the stories about the meddling A&R guy who knows nothing yet demands that an artist change their music or direction, but there were far more good people employed than bad ones. Someone has to find the next generation of talent just to keep theses companies alive, and without A&R, it's more likely than ever that the major labels will die along with the position.

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

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.

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

4 Things To Know About BitTorrent

Kyle Bylin had a nice article on Hypebot recently about the 5 things to know about BitTorrent stats. I'm going to repurpose that article a bit for this post in order to make a few points. If you don't know what BitTorrent is, then you're probably not illegally file sharing or moving large amounts of data, but it's a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol for distributing large amounts of data.

That being said, if you're a content creator or owner of any kind, BitTorrent can be one of your worst nightmares as your work can be freely distributed to anyone anywhere if they so choose. Here are a few things you should now about the service.

1) BitTorrent has over 100 million monthly users. That includes over 20 million active users that download over 400,000 files daily. That does not include what may be up to a couple million unofficial clients.

2) BitTorrent has twice as many users as Hulu and Netflix combined, but it's only has about half as many users as iTunes or YouTube. This puts things into perspective a bit when you realize that twice as many people are willing to obtain their entertainment legitimately.

3) BitTorrent still makes most of its money from its toolbars. This means that unless they figure out a different business model, they're leaving a lot of potential money on the table since there's really no other way to take advantage of this massive amount of traffic.

4) Surprisingly enough, the highest searched for music item was only #47 of the most searched items (that was Eminem). All of the top 10 searches where Hollywood movies. People may be still downloading your music, but I would worry a lot more if I were a film studio, although that doesn't say too much for the popularity of music these days, does it?

What does this all mean?
A) People still are willing to pay to a quick and easy user experience.

B) Music is in trouble because people are beginning to feel that it's not worth stealing.

C) BitTorrent makes a lot of money but it's not the huge cash cow that it should be, given the amount of traffic that it has. Services like this have a tendency to be bought for their technology, or disconnect from their audience to find a new business model, so don't be surprised if one day BitTorrent isn't there anymore or becomes something else.

Read Kyle's article on Hypebot here.

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

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.

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

Some Social Media Ideas From NAMM

While most musical instrument manufacturers that exhibited at the recent NAMM show in Anaheim where hip to social media and had their mailing lists, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds, most didn't utilize their exposure to 10's of thousands of people at the show.

That being said, there's was one distributor that did an excellent job of utilizing social media and that was Loud Technologies, distributor for Ampeg, Crate, EAW and Mackie, among others. Here's what they did.

First of all, every tag identifying a product carried a QR code (like seen on the left), which linked to to more detailed online info if you had a QR scanner app in your phone. A QR code is essentially a real world web link that's designed somewhat like a barcode. Scan it with your phone and it will call up digital information from an analog source.

The other thing that Loud did was to take advantage of the power of Facebook by setting up 4 iPads. If you logged onto Mackie's (or Ampeg's) Facebook page and registered a "Like," you became eligible to win some Ampeg or Mackie products.

How can you use this if you're an artist?  You can make a sign with all of your Facebook, email and Twitter details to hang at your gigs and merch booth. You can make your own QR code by going to qrcode.Kaywa.com that takes them to your website.

Just having the social presence isn't enough sometimes. You have to let people know about it and make it easy for them to find too.

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

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.

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

The Beginning Of The Death Of MySpace

Yesterday MySpace laid off about 500 people worldwide, or about 47% of its entire staff. MySpace has been on a downward spiral since purchased by NewsCorp in 2005, mostly for not acknowledging what it was and focusing on what it wasn't instead.

At it's core, MySpace was an entertainment site centered around music. It didn't do that well enough to maintain it's audience, since instead of improving its core value, it choose to try to be more of a general social network. However, that failed miserably with Facebook coming from nowhere to dwarf its huge initial lead in both visitors and revenue.

The sad part is, there's still no obvious successor for music, as Facebook still lacks many of the core assets that MySpace offers, despite some of the available music apps like RootMusic.

What's more, MySpace still has more than 80 million visitors per month, although that looks to be declining by between 5 and 10% a month.

MySpace held such promise, and delivered little of it. It's another example of a multinational company getting involved in the music business only to slowly run it into the ground. History repeats itself again.

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

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.

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

Social Distortion Allows You To Control The Price

Punk band Social Distortion has found a new twist on allowing their fans to control the pricing of their next album. For every 100,000 streams of songs from their album Hard Times And Nursery Rhymes, the price drops a dollar on the sales price when the album is released on Amazon on January 18. There's a bit of exclusivity in the deal in that it only applies to Amazon sales in the US>

The band uses the following scale:

0  streams - $12.99
100k streams - $11.99
200k streams - $10.99
300k streams - $9.99
400k streams - $8.99
500k streams - $7.99

The band is also offering a price guarantee, meaning that whatever price you pay for the preorder, you'll end up paying only the amount that the price ends up at on January 18 after all the streams are counted.

Unfortunately, they're only sold a bit above 100,000 with about a week to go, so the discount is limited, but you've got to hand it to them for thinking out of the box in terms of pricing and promotion. Then again, they've gotten more than 128,000 paid downloads even before the album came out, which is a pretty effective variable pricing promotion after all.

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

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.

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

Winners Of The Music Producer's Handbook Giveaway

Raul Silva and Craig Green are the winners of the Music Producer's Handbook giveaway.

Thanks to everyone that participated. There's a new giveaway coming soon!

Even though you can't win this one, you can still sign up for my newsletter.

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

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.

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

UltraViolet Tries To Prove That Physical Product Isn't Dead Yet

If you thought that those shiny plastic discs that used to be so popular are over, think again. While it may be true that CDs and DVDs have seen their best days, Blu-ray discs have something up their sleeves that might give some new life to those round pieces of plastic.

The latest variation is called UltraViolet and it's an idea that actually brings several technologies, both old and new, together. The basis of UltraViolet is that it's a data locker in the cloud for the content that you've purchased, but it goes a bit further.

If you buy a Blu-ray disc of a movie or game, it gives you the enduring right for you or your family to access that content from the cloud on any Blu-ray device that you might have. But even better, the idea is that you only have to purchase that product once, and it's always available to you, even if a new higher resolution format is created at a later date. The physical Blu-ray disc that you purchased is used only a backup and a point-of-purchase device to give you some feel of tactile product ownership.

Every hardware, computer, software company and movie studio except for Apple and Disney has signed on to the UltraViolet program. Of course, they have their own competing content locker strategy that we'll see soon enough, so it should be an interesting battle for market share. My guess is that Apple will win this battle, but it's certainly too early to tell.

UltraViolet will be introduced in July. Read more about it on the UVVU.com site here.

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

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.

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

What The Beatles Unique iTunes Deal Means For Other Artists

It's recently been revealed that The Beatles/EMI deal with iTunes has a very unique feature. iTunes pays all royalties directly to both The Beatles Apple Corps and their publishing company Sony/ATV Music Publishing, bypassing EMI.

This type of payment arrangement is normally never done. The record label normally gets the payment from iTunes, then distributes the money to the artist and the publisher. By being paid directly, The Beatles made sure of a couple of things.

1) There'd be no hanky panky with the books by EMI.

2) They don't have to wait until the end of EMI's payment cycle to get paid.

But wait. There is one case where an artist is paid directly by a distributor (which is what iTunes is) and that's in a licensing deal. What's the difference? In a record deal, the record label manufactures the product. In a licensing deal, another entity is given the right to take on the burden of manufacturing from a duplicated master, but the royalty rate to the artist is then increased to as much as 50% (up from 12 to 25% on a record deal, depending upon the contract). But if EMI isn't manufacturing any product (because it's digital) and iTunes is the distributor of duplicated master, isn't that a license?

There's been a number of artists that have been arguing this is the case for the last couple of years. As I reported here, Eminem's production company F.B.T. lost its first court battle with UMG then won the appeal, but UMG has asked the court to review the decision, so the result isn't as cut and dried as it initially seemed. Cheap Trick and the Allman Brothers have also taken their labels to court for just the same issue. Cheap Trick eventually settled the case with Sony Music, but the Allman Brothers case is still continuing.

While EMI vehemently denies that the deal with iTunes is not a licensing deal, if it looks and sounds like a duck, it probably is a duck, and that sets a precedent. While you have to have some hits to play in this league, the fact that EMI agreed to such a deal (probably because they just wanted to get some revenue through the door) may ultimately cause the courts to rule against other labels the next time this situation comes up.

That doesn't mean that all artists will ultimately benefit from The Beatles/EMI/iTunes deal, but it does bring it into the realm of possibility. And once the ball starts rolling downhill, it only picks up speed.

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

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.

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

2010 Music Sales Down

This isn't any great revelation, but music sales were down again in 2010. According to Nielsen SoundScan, album sales were down 13%, although that still amounts to 376 million units (which is still a whole lot). Of those, a full 33% were sold by big box stores like Wal Mart and Target. Only 8% were sold by indie record stores.

The most ominous sign however, is that total music sales fell by 2.5% from 2009. Even digital sales were somewhat stagnant as they inched up by only 1% over the previous year (which amounted to 1.17 billion downloads). As a comparison, 2009 was up 8% over 2008, and 2008 was up a whopping 27% over 2007.

So why has digital music's growth slowed? It's entirely possible that it's because the increasing use of free streaming sources like YouTube and Pandora to listen to music. If that's the case, it sets the stage for the age of subscription music, as consumers become more comfortable with streaming instead of owning. The music industry has hungered for subscription music, and this may be the year that it finally becomes more widely adopted.

That being said, a big part of subscription appears to depend upon whether the European Spotify service launches in the States. Spotify is still having a problem obtaining licensing agreements from the major labels, and some doubt if that will ever happen, and that prevents it appearing in the US. Of course, the moment iTunes offers subscription (and there's no indication this is imminent), so goes the music world.

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

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.

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