Remember Peter Serafinowicz? Yeah you do… that guy who did the voice for Darth Maul… the ****head housemate from Sean of the Dead… looks a bit like a cross between Tony Slattery and Marcus Mumford. Well, after his short lived run with the imaginitively titled ‘The Peter Serafinowicz’ show on the BBC, he has been allowed to run amok with Hot Chip’s new video for their track ‘I Feel Better’, taken from their latest album, ‘One Life Stand’. What can you expect?How about good old INRI [or maybeV'ger] firin’ his lazer and melting some boy bands.
The king of pop’s estate has signed a deal with Sony to release 10 albums of Jackson’s material – as many as he released solo albums while he was alive. The price tag on the deal is truly staggering; £132 million, even without hitting any sales targets. The concert film ‘This Is It’ was also a big earner, grossing £171 million at the box office, and the two between them clear the massive debts that the estate owed, estimated at around £263 million, with a £40 million overspill to be divvied up between the beneficiaries. Quite how MJ managed to run up such a phenomenal overdraft in the first place is another question – obviously owning a personal zoo doesn’t come cheap.
The RIAA have loosed another volley against the filesharing contingent that they believe are bleeding the profitability out of the music industry. The arguments are pretty solid: those who choose to download music illegally instead of paying for it through legal physical and digital channels are not enjoying the fruits of the people working in the industry without contributing to their livelihood. Bad people, right? Not proper music fans, right? Theft is insupportable, but there are questions of degree to be considered… From the RIAA’s press release:
According to SoundScan, the top 10 albums in 2009 sold a total of 21 million copies, and the top 10 tracks totaled 36 million paid downloads. But the top 10 albums in 1999 totaled 55 million in sales. Even with digital track sales factored in, those top sellers fell by more than 50%. In the last 10 years, the major record labels’ direct employment in the United States fell from about 25,000 people in 1999 to less than 10,000 today – a drastic reduction of over 60% in people who enable the creation and development of new music.
In the music industry, it takes the investment of many peoples’ money, effort, and time to create the songs and albums we all get to choose from and enjoy. Since most acts never even reach the breakeven point in sales, music labels need to operate like venture capitalists and count on the successes to subsidize the continued development of many artists and releases that may never break out of the red. And it’s easy to ignore the harm being done when you’re only stealing one copy.
Stealing music is wrong. This is undeniable, but there is something about what the RIAA say – it’s easy for a punter to ignore the criminality of nicking one album at a time ‘just to hear it’, and so the solution to the problem has to be slightly more nuanced than cutting off the consumer’s internet connection, or suing individuals for vast damages in high profile cases. Legal, profitable channels of consumption have got to compete directly with the illegal, risky, but free-to-consume-unless-you-get-caught methods like filesharing and illegal streaming.
Picking on individuals makes the recording industry look like the aggressor rather than the victim, which they are not; they’re just trying to safeguard their sources of income, and their jobs. It’s hard to think of Edgar Bronfman’s kids going hungry, or Puff Daddy having to sell his jet to make the mortgage payments, but there are real people doing good work whose livelihoods are on the line. That said, progress is inevitable (see the video at the tail of the post), and the music industry has got to roll with the punches and capitalise on the massive innovation that’s happening in the digital sector if it is to thrive as it has in the past.
Another thing to consider is how much this piracy actually costs the industry. If the pirates couldn’t get hold of the music easily and for free, would they bother getting hold of it at all? Does the money not spent on records all get spent on eyepatches, stuffed parrots and WOW subscriptions, or does some of it come back to the music industry in other ways? Concert revenues are certainly up over the last few years, and some artists are making money against the trend of decline by using clever andnon-traditionalmarketing methods, selling coolphysicalproducts, and using new outlets like Spotify and eMusic (to whom RouteNote will happily distribute your music, by the way) to boost waning physical revenues. Is it better then, for the industry to put a death-grip on sometime pirates who may also be gig-goers and box-set-buyers, and look backwards at the fantastic success they had with physical formats, or to look forward to an era when everything is digital and try to maximise it’s readiness and thus it’s profitability? Perhaps we’ll see things go full circle, and recorded music sales will tail off completely as we all go back to being regular concert goers, just like in the 1800’s…
In what’s got to be the most impressive piece of jobsworthery this year, airport securtiy at Heathrow forced pop-divorcee and charity campaigner Heather Mills was forced to allow a guard to hold up her false leg and swab it with an explosives detector. Components in her prosthetic had apparently set off the metal detecting arch as she made for her flight to the US, so the humourless officials ran her through the search protocols with the same good grace as they would a hook handed muslim cleric. A piece of offensive over-zealousness, or good common sense? Unlikely as it is that Heather has renounced capitalism since her lucrative divorce from Sir Paul, it’s nice to see that airport security are equally officious to everyone that passes under their wand. Music News carries more of the story.
The Dream Weavers, somewhat of a novelty act in its day in the fact that it was one of the first mixed sex groups of to score in the top five, let alone score a number one. A Vocal group comprised of two guys and one girl, sang around Miami in the mid fifties.
Its Almost Tomorrow, lyrics written Wade Buff and the music and melodies by Gene Adkinson, both memebers of the group, described the song as “a wedding song with a difference as the singer is losing his girl to another man…….”
The duo,who later recruited Sally Sanborn, Mary Carr and Mary Rude to name a few to fill in for the female parts, managed to impress Milt Gabler at US Decca. Gabler was the man who had the foresight to sign Bill Haley and was equally quick to spot the petential of ‘It’s Almost Tomorrow’. The song went to number seven on the US charts and earned the Dream Weavers a gold record. Their only other US hit was with ‘A Little Love Can Go A Long way’ from the the popular TV play Joey the year after. After another short successful stint the duo had hits with ‘Into The Night’ and ‘Give Us This Day’, before they quickly disbanded. The world never really saw a Dream Weavers record/album because they only had eight professional recordings.
The Dream Weavers did have more UK success though. They eventually gained that elusive number one for the week beginning 16th March 1956. After re-releasing their famed ‘Its Almost Tomorrow’, this time with a guest singer in the form of David Whitfield, who earlier that year appeared on the charity single ‘All Star Hit Parade’. The new line-up seemed to be doing the trick, finally with the timings re-arranged with interventions by Tony Hatch it was a job well done. Hatch recollects “The Dream Weaver originally did it in a 3/4 timing and we changed it to a 4/4 with a more country feel”.
The not-so-cherubic singer has signed with music investment group Power Amp, a fund that specialises in “providing equitable finance for established artists to record and market new music.” The deal will provide her with the funds to record and produce a new album independently, in return for revenues from all aspects of Charlotte’s music career:
“Rather than investing in an artists record only, Power Amp invests in all areas of an artists career: recording, publishing, touring, merchandising and sponsorship etc.”
Which sounds pretty much like a 360 deal to us. Madonna’s got one, so why shouldn’t Charlotte Church? She’s quoted on the FT as saying:
‘[The deal] provides me with a financial commitment equivalent to that of a major record company but with a much greater degree of control and ownership over my career’
Fair enough, if you’ve got national profile and the experience of releasing an album with a major label under your belt – C.C. released her previous album with Sony BMG – and the trend certainly seems to be towards self releasing music and working with independent digital music distributors like us here at RouteNote, which we obviously welcome. At any rate, why Ms. Church needs to borrow the money from an investment group rather than funding herself is a little mysterious… Perhaps her fee for being a chat show host wasn’t quite as astronomically high as Clarkson’s.
Who earned most in the US music industry last year? Here’s a rundown of the top ten, from Billboard (read the rest of their list here)
10 Metallica
$25,564,234
The release of “Guitar Hero – Metallica” backed up solid tour and back catalogue income for these vintage rock legends (their biggest selling track in 2009 was released in 1991!).
9 Kenny Chesney
$26,581,141
Country’s biggest star sold a lot of physical product and live tickets as well as 500,000 ringtones to achieve this total. Absolutely zero exposure this side of the pond though… 8 Coldplay
$27,326,562
$24 million in touring revenue, but only $1 million in album sales… still, not bad for a band so bland they have to rip off Joe Satriani.
7 Jonas Brothers
$33,596,576
Riding the Mouse train all the way to the bank. 6 Pink
$36,347,658
Pink is another artist who did well touring last year, with revenues of $35 million from live shows bolstered by lots of TV airtime and healthy album sales. 5 Britney Spears
$38,885,267
More touring, more album sales, more breakdowns, more wierd haircuts. I think it’s probably worth it for almost forty million dollars a year. She can retire before she’s 30 and just think about taking care of the kids… 4 AC/DC
$43,650,466
Over a million album sales last year, coupled with guess what? The 4th biggest grossing tour last year put these Aussie lads very firmly back in the black. 3 Madonna
$47,237,774
Leather skinned Yogi Madonna pulled the biggest tour of her career under her Live Nation deal.
2 Bruce Springsteen
$57,619,037
Making more money than ever before in his career, with highlights including a headline slot at Glastonbury and a performance at the Superbowl, Mr. S. shows us what the long tail really means. 1 U2
$108,601,283
A clever new 360 degree stadium stage setup means that the biggest earning band of last year could pack even more bodies into their stadium tour.
Can music streaming ever be a viable alternative to hard copy and download music sales? WMG’s Edgar Bronfman has his doubts, and looking at some of the figures being published in the media they might seem reasonable. Increases in the number of users on services that provide on-demand music streaming (where you pick the track you want to hear like MOG, Spotify, and Grooveshark) correspond to decreases in music sales, while increases in use of radio’ streaming services [Last.fm, Pandora] seemed to drive more sales. There doesn’t seem to be any mystery as to why this might be; Spotify’s and MOG’s users no longer have any reason to buy music from other sources once they’re signed up (particularly as they can put their playlists on their iPods and other mobile devices if they buy a premium account), while Pandora and Last.fm’s customers have no guarantee of getting a particular track on their playlist again, so they have to buy it to hear it whenever they want. This might seem to be an open and shut case for the record labels; one service drives sales, while another cuts revenue – but it’s not quite as simple as that. Spotify has massive customer appeal, as the hordes that try and sign up every time they re-open user registration prove, and it also drives a lot of interaction with listeners; according to Spotify’s own figures the average use playlists around 15,000 tracks. The vast majority of Spotify’s users might be on the free-to-listen ad supported plan, with only single figure percentages signed up to their £10 a month premium package, but it’s clear that the proposition is incredibly attractive to consumers. The premium users represent a healthy annual income for the record labels to share with the platform; £120 a year is not an insignificant spend, and the potential for fledgling on demand platforms to increase their advertising revenue so that even the non-paying customers are generating profits for the record labels is proportional to the platforms’ desirability and popularity,
On demand services are what the consumer wants, and are proven to reduce the incidence of file sharing and online music piracy, something that unequivocally costs the music industry. Cutting off support for such services would surely drive a proportion of users back to illegal, non-revenue-generating, methods of consumption. Assessing the profitability of on demand against radio streaming will have to be done over the coming years as the platforms mature and adjust their business models, but it seems unlikely that killing off the most eagerly recieved of the net’s music biz babies just as they’re getting established would be a rational strategy for the industry.
For our part, we’re seeing tangible revenues come back for our artists from on demand services, and we’re happy to be able to help independent artists get music up on Spotify and in other online stores.
The new Gorillaz album, plastic beach is out next week, and the video for ‘Stylo’, the first single to be drawn from was posted on YouTube yesterday – featuring an El Camino driving, sunglass toting, Bruce Willis. Bruce proceeds to chase the 3D animated crew across the California desert in a Mad Max style chase ending in true Hollywood style. We can’t embed the video, but you can watch it here, and check out the intro to their Plastic Beach concept below:
Remember Peter Serafinowicz? Yeah you do… that guy who did the voice for Darth Maul… the ****head housemate from Sean of the Dead… looks a bit like a cross between Tony Slattery and Marcus Mumford. Well, after his short lived run with the imaginitively titled ‘The Peter Serafinowicz’ show on the BBC, he has been allowed to run amok with Hot Chip’s new video for their track ‘I Feel Better’, taken from their latest album, ‘One Life Stand’. What can you expect?How about good old INRI [or maybe V'ger] firin’ his lazer and melting some boy bands.
managed to impress Milt Gabler at US Decca. Gabler was the man who had the foresight to sign Bill Haley and was equally quick to spot the petential of ‘It’s Almost Tomorrow’. The song went to number seven on the US charts and earned the Dream Weavers a gold record. Their only other US hit was with ‘A Little Love Can Go A Long way’ from the the popular TV play Joey the year after. After another short successful stint the duo had hits with ‘Into The Night’ and ‘Give Us This Day’, before they quickly disbanded. The world never really saw a Dream Weavers record/album because they only had eight professional recordings.
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