You Now Have To Pay To Play At The Superbowl

Pay to play is the bane of musicians everywhere, but it's especially prevalent in New York City and Los Angeles. For decades, club promoters have effectively been auctioning off time slots to any band or artist willing to purchase 100 advance tickets that they're then free to resell, or most likely just give away. Musicians in most other parts of the country are used to getting paid for their services, but that all changes in the "big city."

But now the NFL is turning the Superbowl halftime show into the ultimate pay-to-play gig. Instead of the league paying a top-shelf act like U2 or Bruce Springsteen to play the show, it's now asking the acts to pay in order to get in front of 100+ million viewers that will be watching.

The price the NFL is asking hasn't been revealed, but the first three "candidates" that were chosen for the 2015 Superbowl to be held in Pheonix, Coldplay, Rihanna and Katy Perry, have been decidedly cool on the idea.

That said, an appearance at the world's largest gig can lead to years of prosperity afterwards, as evidenced by the 2007 appearance by Prince, who's sold-out venues ever since. His career had been lagging before the appearance.

To be fair, the NFL has never actually paid performers to appear at the Superbowl, but has supplied what's amounted to millions of dollars in expenses, which can be extensive for most acts appearing.

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Prince Comes Back To Warner Bros And Shows The Boundaries of DIY

The rallying cry of many musicians today is “Do It Yourself” or DIY, meaning that it’s now possible to do so much of the grunt work necessary to make it without the help of a record label. For instance, you don’t need a label to act as a bank to supply money for recording any more, since most every musician has a studio at home these days that’s far more powerful than what The Beatles used in their heyday. You don’t need the label to manufacture your product, since it’s now possible to print limited runs of CDs if necessary, and virtual products cost very little to distribute. As far as promotion, social media and YouTube play such a big part in getting the word out, and so much of that can be done directly by the artist.

DIY is indeed a viable option until the point where the artist rises to the level of star, then all DIY bets are off. In order to break on through to the other side of international superstardom, the marketing infrastructure provided by a major record label is almost a necessity. A DIY artist can opt to try to reinvent the wheel, or go to a label with experience and expertise to make things happen on a larger scale. 

This is exactly where superstar Prince finds himself, as his recently announced new deal once again returns him to the Warner Music fold, a surprising move that many industry observers thought could never happen. Warners was the label that originally launched Prince into stardom, but the falling out between the parties became so vile that Prince labeled himself a “slave,” then changed his name to that unpronounceable insignia as to create a new trademark that would not promote his previous Warner releases. Read more on Forbes.

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Prince's New Record Deal

We tend to think of record labels not changing much even in the face of the major paradigm shift that is Music 3.0, but while that may hold true for the major labels, there are a few that are forward thinking. Take Kobalt Music, for instance, which is an independent publishing company that launched their version of a label last year with the idea of giving control back to the artist, allowing them to not only maintain ownership of their work, but when and how it's made available as well.

The latest to sign a deal with Kobalt is superstar Prince, who joins the likes of Dave Grohl, Paul McCartney, Dave Stewart and Eddie Veder (among others) who've decided that this is the way to go in the future. Of course Prince is all about control, even changing his name to that unpronounceable symbol in order to get out from under the clutches of his deal with Warner Bros.

One of the things that he gets in the new Kobalt deal is access to their new software that closely monitors the streaming world, thereby increasing the royalties. Every artist and songwriter is concerned about streaming and what it will do to their career, so any way to get a foot up is attractive, which is why Kobalt seems to be making the splash that it is at the moment.

It's still to be determined just how successful their software tools actually will be, but there's a lot of music heavyweights that are convinced that Kobalt has something they need. You'll hear more about them in the future.

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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.

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Prince And Gaga Prove The New Music Business Model

By now I'm sure that everyone's heard about Lady Gaga selling 1.1 million copies of her "Born This Way" album last week. On the surface this seems like a huge number, especially for an artist these days, but there's more here than meets the eye.

First of all, the digital sales were about 660,000, but 440,000 of them came from Amazon's two day $.99 promotion. This set a one-week SoundScan record for most digital sales, and became the eighth best-selling U.S. digital album of all time. But the significant thing here is the price, 99 cents, which we'll get to in a minute.

Next in the news was the fact that Prince just ended his 19 day run playing the Forum in Los Angeles. What's significant here is that the majority of the tickets in the 18,000 seat venue were priced at only $25.

Why is that important? Because it shows a new trend in the entertainment business were price is a motivating factor in purchases.

Way back before music became the commodity that it is today, everyone felt they got a fair value when purchasing either an album or a concert ticket. The price was cheap enough that if you bought something that you didn't like, you didn't feel ripped off or filled with buyer's remorse. It was easy enough to buy the next album or a ticket to the concert without feeling it in your pocketbook too much.

Of course all this changed when Wall Street became involved in the music business after it smelled big money in the 80's. The prices for premium artist's CD's were double what consumers were used to paying for vinyl records, so if you bought one that you didn't like or only had one good song on it, you indeed felt the financial pain of a near worthless purchase.

Likewise for concerts. It was nothing for a music fan to go to several concerts a month during that era. They were cheap enough that you didn't feel like you'd have to miss lunch for the next two weeks to pay for it, and you felt comfortable about spending money to see a new unfamiliar act.

Of course that all changed when the price of tickets, concessions, parking and service charges went to the sky. Music lover's buying habits slowed to only a show or two a year instead of every month. In it's greed, the industry tried to milk every single dime from the consumer at the expense of a making them a returning customer.

With Gaga signing on for the Amazon promotion, it proves that consumers are more price conscious than ever with music, and will buy in large number if the price is right. With Prince lowering the ticket price to $25, and doing a good business in doing so, it proves that people will still show up if the price is right.

Although the numbers are unofficial, it seems that prince sold as few as 6,000 seats on some nights, but that's still enough to make money since both his and the venue's overhead was amortized over the number of dates played. Gaga still sold more than 500,000 albums at $13 to 16, despite the 99 cent promotion (although her number have steeply fallen since), once again proving that online, the more you give it away (or almost give it away), the more you sell.

It's about time that the industry learns that price is a barrier to sales. It's hard to believe they didn't know that in the first place.

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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 daily discussion of music, recording, and production tips and tricks.

Prince CD Sales Up, Bombing Online

Prince might think the Internet is over (or maybe not), but one thing is for sure, hype still works to sell product. As I posted a few days ago, Prince's comments on the Internet were well-planned in order to make people aware of his new album 20TEN.

As he did with his previous Planet Earth album in July 2007, 20TEN was released as a free giveaway attached to the London's The Mail on Sunday newspaper. In this case, the sales of the paper were up 27% (from 1,230,000 to 1,572,000). Planet Earth reached more people (2,801,000), but the increase was only 23% for the newspaper.

But that doesn't mean that the album has any Internet P2P traction though. According BigChampagne's Eric Garland, who's company measures the file sharing world, 20TEN has seen very little online activity, with downloads only in the low thousands. According to Prince, the album will not be available for digital distribution, but it seems that so far no one online cares anyway.

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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.

Prince Says "The Internet Is Over"

By now everyone has heard about the exclusive interview that Prince gave to the UK's Daily Mirror newspaper where he was quoted as saying, "The Internet Is Over," among other things that seemed pretty out-of-touch.

Haven't heard? Ok, some more quotes:
"The Internet is like MTV. Once it was hip and then suddenly it was outdated."

“The Internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it, and then they get angry when they can’t get it.”

"Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you."


Prince has shut down his official website, and he's never been on any social network, so it appears his online presence is nil. But are we being manipulated here?

Could it be that he knows very well what he's saying, and just saying it to get the maximum exposure for his new album, 20TEN? If so, wouldn't it be better that we were discussing how great his music is rather than a controversy?

Prince's new album will again be distributed as a CD inside the Daily Mirror, and he may even have a distribution deal Warner Brothers again, despite the major falling out they had some years ago. When the album comes out, let's see what the comments are then.

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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.