Copyright Math: The $8 Billion iPod

The music industry has constantly bellowed about how much money it's been losing to piracy since 1999 or so, and the numbers they've thrown around have been nothing short of outrageous.

The one I love is that for each download that's legally purchased, 20 more are downloaded illegally. They've somehow determined that the worth of each illegal download is $150,000, which is the initial number that the RIAA used in all it's lawsuits against file sharers until they realized the futility of using that number.

Rob Reid, author and founder of the company that created Rhapsody, had an interesting and humorous take on what he termed "copyright math" in a presentation at a recent TED Conference.

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MTV Gets Back Into Music

Believe it or not, MTV used to be strictly a music channel and had a huge influence on the charts and music in general during the 80's and into the 90's. It has since become more of a lifestyle channel and now has much more of cultural significance rather than a musical one, but the network wants to change that by introducing a new online platform dedicated to music called Artists.MTV.

YouTube is currently the go-to place for music discovery, and MTV wants a piece of it, hence the venture. Not only will Artists.MTV be a place for indie and major label acts, but also for unsigned artists as well. MTV wants to be able to have a place where new acts can be heard, promoted and hopefully (doubtfully) paid, but this seems like a real uphill battle.

Van Toffler, president of MTV parent Viacom Music Group, stated at SXSW last week that the goal is to be an all-encompassing musical experience. "You may discover music on Spotify, Pandora, or even MTV Hive," he said, "then you look them up on Wikipedia. Then you go to your Facebook page and tell your friends. Then you go to Songkick and see if they're touring. Then if the artist is lucky, you go to iTunes. It feels like there's an infinite environment to discover music - buy it, listen to it or pirate it, but there doesn't seem to be a uniformed galvanized place where artists could get information to their fans." Well, how about the artist's website, Facebook page or Twitter feed?

So what exactly does Artists.MTV have to offer to artists? Not only will artists have another place for fans to discover their music, but thanks to a partnership with Topspin, artists will be able to sell their music, concert tickets and merch directly to their fans, as well as receive direct payments via a "tip jar."

But the biggest carrot is the promise to connect bands to MTV itself. Artists.MTV will offer a program called Full Frontal where one artist a month is selected for a promo campaign on MTV, VH1 and CMT. The band will be picked by the fans and a committee of artists, managers and producers.

The site will be open to artists in May, and fans can view the site via a private beta soon, although the official launch won't be until sometime during the summer.

Artists already have too many options available to them and feel overwhelmed by them. Artists.MTV might be different in that the network brand still has some cache, but they've long been out of the real music business, and the networks demographic may not be transferrable for all but a few acts. Time will tell whether Artists.MTV will be just another shot in the dark or will have some real traction, but if I were a betting man, I'm not so sure I'd be placing any money on them.

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The Value Of A Fast Page Load

We live in a very impatient world and that impatience could cost you fans, users or sales. A study created by the OnlineGraduateProgram.com found a number of startling facts about our desire for online speed:

• 1 in 4 people abandon a web page if it takes more than 4 seconds to load.

• 50% of mobile users abandon a page if it doesn't load in 10 seconds.

• 40% of mobile shoppers will abandon an e-commerce site that doesn't load in 3 seconds.

• Google found that slowing search results by just 4/10ths of a second would reduce the number of searches by 8 million a day.

• Amazon estimates that it could lose up to $1.6 billion a year because of as little as a 1 second web page delay.

This means that you can't count on our ever expanding bandwidth for your site to load fast, you still must optimize it for speed, because tenths of a second count more than ever. This is one of the reasons to get a pro to build you website in order to be sure to get efficient, streamlined code. Page loading has become so much more than slimmed down graphics files these days.

A couple of other quick facts; the majority of Americans will not wait in line longer than 15 minutes, and half of them would not return to an establishment that kept them waiting. But we didn't need a study to tell us that.

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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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Billboard Finally Updates Its Charts

It took some time and is probably about 5 years too late in coming, but Billboard has finally updated its charts to include on-demand streams from services such as Spotify, Rhapsody, Muve, MOG, Slacker and Rdio to determine chart position. It announced it will also introduce a new chart for top on-demand streaming tunes immediately.

What's interesting is that the new charts are a product not only of Billboard, but also of Nielsen Broadcast Data System and the National Association of Recording Merchandisers. That said, the charts will mostly rely on data from Nielsen.

It's little known that Nielsen has been tracking music data streams since 2005, but has largely kept the data to itself. What they did finally release was pretty interesting, like in the first 70 days of the year it had tracked more than 4.5 billion audio streams, 625 million in the last week alone.

Another nugget is that streaming activity rose 17% in the week after Christmas while digital download sales jumped 20%, and that digital single song sales are up 7% this year so far.

A possible flaw in the system is that Nielsen doesn't track Pandora and what their more than 20 million users are listening to, but at least what they've done is a vast improvement of the past way of doing it, which was strictly by sales.

Billboard has been losing it's relevance for quite some time now and desperately needed to step into the future in order to survive. With fewer and fewer music stores and labels around, it's customers and influence is dwindling, and the company has laid off some of it's best people recently as a result.

Will this be too little, too late?

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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.

The Square Register Make Merch Sales Easy

One of the major developments in the last year or so in the world of merch sales is Square. If you've been following this blog or have read my Music 3.0 book, you know that Square is a way to do credit card transactions on an iPhone or iPad very cheaply and easily. It caught on in a big way because it's way better than using a bank in terms of their transaction costs and the cost of a traditional credit card reader.

Now Square has done it again with a new iPad application called Square Register that's designed to let merchants ring up and track sales and just like a traditional cash register.

Register works with Square's existing card reader that plugs into the iPad's headphone jack, and also with Card Case, which is a mobile app for both iPhone and Android that lets you pay retailers without even removing the phone from your wallet. And if shoppers want to, they can even pay with cash (what a concept)!

The Square card reader is free, and you pay 2.75% of each transaction to Square, which is cheaper than just about any bank for a credit card transaction. Square Register lets the seller display all of the products offered for sale, so the person selling just has to tap to make the sale. The sale is tied to a dashboard app that lets you track inventory, taxes and other relavent sales info. Plus, you don't have to worry about the person on the merch table making a mistake or pocketing any of the profits.

Here's a way that makes merch sales so very easy that's it's no wonder it's taken the touring business by storm, yet it's cheap enough that any band can get in on it. Check out this short movie, then check Square Register out.

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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 discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Music's Top 10 Moneymakers

Billboard Magazine recently came out with it's top 40 moneymakers of 2011. Here are the top 10, which probably won't be much of a surprise. Keep in mind that these are not gross numbers, just estimates of the final rounded off net that went into the artist's pocket.

10. Adele - $13,000,000

9. Jason Aldean - $13,400,000

8. Celine Dion - $14,200,000

7. Bon Jovi - $15,800,000

6. Sade - $16,400,000

5. Lil Wayne - $23,200,000

4. Lady Gaga - 25,300,000

3. Kenny Chesney - $29,800,000

2. U2 - $32,100,000

1. Taylor Swift - $35,700,00

Interestingly, Journey came in at 12, the Cast of Glee at #11, and Foo Fighters at #31. Also, The Beatles came in at #24 just on the basis of CD and download sales alone.

Read the full list for yourself here.

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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 discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Sony Caves To Artists In Class Action Suit

If you've read this blog much, you know that I've been keeping you up to date on the Eminem v. Universal lawsuit all the way along. The suit, which was eventually won by Eminem's production company FBT, was significant because it changed the way the music industry values a digital download.

The record labels considered a download sale to be just like a CD sale and therefore subject to the same royalty rate, which could be anywhere from 12 to 20 percent. FBT contended that a download was in fact, NOT a sale, and really was a license, which was subject to a much higher royalty rate of 50%. When HBC/Eminem won, it was predicted that there'd be a flood of classic artists suing their record labels. Sure enough, that's what happened, with a number of acts including The Allman Brothers, Cheap Trick and The Youngbloods filing a class-action suit right away.

Now it's been reported that Sony Music has filed a motion to settle with these acts, paying around $8 million and raising the royalty rate 3% in most cases, and 4.7% in the case of The Youngbloods. If this is approved, artists who have had at least 28,500 downloads on iTunes will be eligible. Ironically, many acts are choosing not to settle or be part of this action, preferring to file their own suit to get an even better deal.

This might seem like a win for the artists, but consider this. 8 million bucks is a drop in the bucket to a major label, and raising the royalty rate isn't that great either. The digital download cat has been out of the bag for sometime, which means that there won't be that many download sales forthcoming, and the next music distribution frontier is subscription, which pays even worse.

Yes, this seems like a victory, but at the end of the day the artists only received what will amount to a little bump. This isn't the only suit that's ongoing however, and it will be interesting to see if any of the others have endings along these same lines.

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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 discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Hashtags On TV

You know that a social phenomena has really broken out when you begin to see it pop up on television. Once upon a time not all that long ago, it was a big deal when a brand's website URL was presented during a commercial; now it's commonplace. The same with Facebook, where a brand page URL is shown on not only commercials, but sporting events, prime time shows and talk shows.

But another new social element heretofore relegated to only online is now beginning to show up - Twitter hashtags. For those of you who don't know, a hashtag is a keyword with a # sign in front of it. Using one or more can make your tweet easier to find if someone does a Twitter search for that particular keyword (see more about hashtags in this post.) This is how breaking news can travel so fast (see Arab Spring).

As an example, the Daytona 500 recently ran "#Daytona500" and "Raindelay" bugs on the upper right screen during the event (see the graphic on the left). The Oscar telecast then tried the same thing with "#Oscars," but implemented it poorly by only briefly flashing it before commercials. I've even seen some hashtags recently on some regional baseball broadcasts on the MLB Network. Image that - it's made it down to the regional level already.

Regardless of the implementation, the fact of the matter is that when a huge mass-media like television finally adopts something, you can consider it in the everyday consciousness of the average viewer. Ladies and gentleman, you may or may not use this social network yet, but Twitter is now mainstream.

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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 discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Music Sales Increase Again

For the second consecutive year, music and CD sales have increased in the US, according to NPD's annual music survey. The study found that total music sales were up 4 percent in 2011 over the previous year, and the number of CD buyers up 2 percent.

Paid downloads were up 14 percent, and the average annual spend on iTunes, Amazon and other music stores was up 6 percent over the previous year to $49.

While many in the music industry might debate the stat, NPD found that illegal downloading was also down, decreasing to 13 perent of listeners from a peak of 19 percent in 2006.

Why all the good news? NPD sites several factors, including the improving economy and better music, but the final factor sits right where I've always suggested in previous blog posts and books. The research firms feels that increased use of online subscription music services like Pandora and Spotify was responsible, since consumers get a chance to sample the song, then become fans and choose to buy it rather than download it illegally.

One last stat that I found interesting; the study found that listing to online radio grew 29 percent from a couple of years ago, which means that a full 43 percent on Internet users currently engage in the action.

As I've always said, the music business in not dying. It may be changing, evolving and morphing, but people still enjoy music as much as ever.

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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 discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

The First Socially Made Superstar

It's time for another excerpt from Music 3.0: A Survival Guide For Making Music In The Internet Age. This time it's about how social media can not only make someone a star, but a superstar.

The first socially-made superstar was actually Justin Bieber, and before you recoil in horror (I know you Bieber-haters are out there), remember that this isn't an endorsement of his music, it's about how he and a number of others did it in the new age we live in - Music 3.0.
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"To many Justin Bieber is just another example of a short-on-substance teen idol, but if you forget about the artist and look at how he was discovered and how his career was built, you’ll find the perfect example of how social media can work in in a big way in Music 3.0.

Justin Bieber was the first artist made by YouTube. He was discovered there, and has prospered there almost more than any artist other than Lady Gaga. In fact, Bieber’s song “Baby” had more than 500 million views alone and all of his videos together equal more than 1.5 billion total views (which is  number one of all musical artists) as of the writing of this book.

His career began when he was captured on a cellphone video as he was busking outside the Avon Theatre in Stratford, Ontario (population 32,000) hoping to get noticed, a moment that has since been shared some 3.2 million times on YouTube. In just a little over 9 months, Bieber went from playing to 40 people at an outdoor water park in Poughkeepsie to headlining 86 sold out arena shows in 2010, all this while moving over 10 million albums worldwide over 14 months, opening his first movie on 3,000-plus screens with box-office earnings that topped $20 million, and inspiring hundreds of licensed merchandise items.

More than that, Bieber is one of the first artists to use social media to achieve superstardom, utilizing all forms of social media to capitalize on his success with over 9 million Twitter followers and 25 million Facebook fans. In fact, he is #1 in the top 100 Twitters and accounts for about 3% of all Twitter traffic as of the writing of this book in Spring 2011.

Bieber is not the only M3.0 superstar to fully utilize social media though; Lady Gaga, Eminem, Rhianna, Shikira, Katy Perry, Linken Park, L’ll Wayne, Taylor Swift and Akon all have 20+ million Facebook fans according to Famecount.com. Lady Gaga, Shakira, Katy Perry, Britney Spears, Taylor Swift, and Selena Gomez all have more than 5 million Twitter followers. All of the these stars have more than 100 million YouTube views, with several over or near a billion.

It’s a fact that the superstar of today cannot reach that stage illustrious stage without a large social media presence. While Twitter and Facebook strengthen the connection with the fan, YouTube acts not only as a the major music delivery system, but now plays a huge part in music discovery as well. Even though superstars have the resources to better craft a message and media campaign than a new act just starting out, social media is essential to artists at all levels in order to prosper."

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Some of the numbers above aren't up to date since the book was written 6 months ago, but the numbers don't matter as much as the concept (they're still enormous). The point is that social media does indeed make it possible to go from a nobody to a superstar in a matter of months under the right circumstances. As you can see, it's been done.

To read additional excerpts from this and my other books, go to bobbyowsinski.com.

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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 discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

What Bands Get Paid

There's a pretty cool street festival in LA that's been going on for years called the Sunset Junction. Unfortunately it began to run into financial trouble recently due to the downturn in the economy, and as a result, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. In doing so, they had to list how much each act scheduled to perform was to be paid. Here's a partial list of the acts involved and how much they were to receive.

Butthole Surfers - $24,000.00
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - $22,000.00
Hanson - $20,000.00
k.d. lang - $20,000.00
Ozomatli - $20,000.00
Bobby Womack - $15,000.00
Gayngs - $13,000.00
Peaches - $12,800.00
Lil' Jon - $10,000.00
Tapes 'n Tapes - $10,000.00
Art Brut - $8000.00
Arthur Adams - $6000.00
Charles Bradley - $5500.00
Dum Dum Girls - $5000.00
Helmet - $5000.00
Rooney - $5000.00
The Growlers - $5000.00
The Melvins - $3300.00
Butch Walker & the Black Widows - $3000.00
EC Twins - $3000.00
The Original Vandellas - $2500.00
Kim Weston - $2250.00
Brenda Holloway - $1500.00
DJ Trent Cantrelle - $1500.00
Morgan Page - $1500.00
Natalia Kills - $1500.00
The Hundred Days - $1250.00 400
Blows - $1000.00
Cary Brothers - $1000.00
Madi Diaz - $1000.00
Soft Pack - $1000.00
The Rescues - $1000.00

There's a slew of under $1k acts, but you get the idea. We don't often get to see what acts are being paid across such a wide spectrum, but it's good to see so you can calibrate your expectations.

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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 discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

After The Album Is Finished

CD Baby's excellent DIY Musician blog recently had a post regarding the steps to take when your album is finished. I liked their suggestions but decided to put together a few of my own based on the article.

Here are 10 steps to take after your CD is completed.

1. Get some photos taken. If you don't have the album artwork together, then you may need photos for that. But even if that's well in hand, you're going to need new press photos. Get them shot by a professional ASAP. Check out this article for advice on photos.

2. Update your press kit. You do have one, right? If you do, update it to reflect your latest release. If not, time to get started on it. Check out this article on electronic press kits for more info, as well as this article.

3. Update your website. Once again, it's time to reflect the fact that you have new music to offer. Updating a site takes time, so the sooner you get to it, the better. Before you begin your update, check out this article on the 7 mistakes that bands make on their websites.

4. Determine your distribution. If you aren't signed to a record label, now's the time to get with Tunecore or CD Baby to help make your music available to the world.

5. Determine your release schedule. If you've just completed an album, ask yourself these questions: When is the official album release date? What will be the first single and when will it be released? What will be the second and third singles and when will they be released? Check out this article for a new look at release schedules.

6. Submit your album to Gracenote and All Music Guide. Gracenote is the service that recognizes the songs on a CD when you put it into your computer. All Music Guide provides all the pictures and bio info that you see on iTunes. Submit to both so people get all the details they need when they play your CD.
Click here to find out how to submit your music to Gracenote.
Click here to find out how to submit your music to All Media Guide.

7. Plan your social media campaign. This includes email blasts to your fans as well as posts on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. You want to determine just when everything will happen, in what order it will happen, and who's responsible for getting it done.

8. Create some videos. Many people get all of their new music strictly from videos on YouTube. Get a video out ASAP even if it's only composed of a picture and the music. Real videos take time and you can release the official video later. Get something out there now.

9. Book your album release party. If for no other reason, it's a good reason to have a party and celebrate the fact that you've accomplished something that took a lot of work. That said, it's also the best way to get the word out about your new album, especially to the local press.

10. Play to support the album. It's time to get out there and play for people to expose them to your new music. Some artists and bands gig to support the album while others use the album to support their gigging. Decide which category you fall under, make a plan on what you're going to do, and follow it through.

There are more things that you can do, but these are the bare minimum. Remember, just because you've made an album, the world won't beat a path to your door. You have to be proactive in getting the word out.

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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 discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.