Summer's here and the time is right...to go see a show...

[JRL]

BTW Apple Records was pretty much a fiasco, and weren't they affiliated with a major for distrabution?

Believe it or else, Steve Miller helped change the standard contract as much as anyone. He held out for a couple years before signing.

[laughingwillow]

At ten bucks a pop, an artist would have to sell 2000 copies of their work to break even if it cost $20,000 to produce. And even those numbers might be tough for obscure groups living in the sticks.

The internet has changed that, somewhat. The potential audience is now global but so is the competition among artists. So we're back to touring in order to gain recognition needed to sell discs. Even then, unloading 2,000 copies of a release for an unknown artist is a shot in the dark, imo. But the bills keep coming due. Those 2,000 copies are not going to sell overnight. And even after moving that much product, the independent artist has yet to put a dime in his/her pocket.

The odds of selling a million copies of ANYTHING are slim and none for the vast majority of folks making a living in the music bidness. Selling 2,000 copies would be a stretch for most artists, imo. (And that's 500X less than the million you propose at a buck a disc, more or less.) At that rate, the music isn't worth much more than the disc it was printed on, and I value my musical experiences more than that.

The Beatles and Apple Records, eh? I fail to see what that business model has to do with this conversation today. Memory longing for the past tends to gloss over important details, as JRL mentioned above concerning the fiasco at Apple Records, imo.  

Btw, those mop-topped role models were smoking reefer and gobbling acid in between video takes san cigarettes. Trust me, parents of that day and age didn't see that crew as role model material for their children. That only works if you attempt to view events of 40 years ago through a lens with a focal point on today.

lw

[JRL]

And there were drug references in Hard Day's Night: in an early scene, when the lads first enter the hotel room John grabs a coke bottle and shouts "Lets DO something!" and sticks the bottle to his nose.

lw,you are right. The numbers don't look good. And take it from me, 1000 cds are a lot. It's no wonder real business talent in the music biz is way rarer than music talent. Anyone with real business savy would rather be selling something you can make money on. An exception is a guy like Marty DeAnda(sp) who quit a corporate six figure job to manage Jackie Greene and start a record label. It's a rare combination of love of music and business smarts that has made all the difference for C**** *****n

[Stonehenge]

JRL, you are still stuck in old style thinking. Most of us are. You need to gear up your outlook to a world market and non physical recordings. When I said there were 500 million people in the world with the equipment, that neglects all the people who don't own a computer and internet connection but have access to one. In the third world, sharing is much more common than it is here. Your potential market is well over a billion now. Music transcends the language barrier.

Sell a tune for a dime, get a nickel and the recipient burns his own disc for about a quarter. The middle man bums get nothing. Sounds like you'd rather get a few thousand sticking to the old model than tens or hundreds of times as much going new wave.

$15 for a disc is a lot of money. Even more so to the poor people of the world. Even the middle class here have to watch their spending and can't get even a fraction of what they'd like. By keeping prices high, you are shutting out a majority of the potential market. I'd say go farther than that. Set up your website distribution and then go around and for advertising, give people a 20 or 30 second free clip of one of your tunes. Get em hooked and tell them it's only a dime a tune and you'll have as much traffic as your site can bear.

You might do a million DL's a day after you get rolling!

[laughingwillow]

Stoney: Your bidness model is an interesting one, but unrealistic, imo. At least for 99% of the groups out there who are scratching to get by. The top-shelf acts might keep their heads above water due to name recognition but the vast majority of acts would just be giving their work away, basically.  

I really fail to see how jrl is stuck in an outdated mode of thinking. You seem to fail to realize that there is a HUGE number of independent artists throughout the world, scratching to get by. Put them all in an online data base and you might get a million hits a day. And with any luck, every one of the million independent artists will sell a track at ten cents every day of the week. (And that would come to seventy cents a week, cause the interwebs don't sleep.)

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are a ton of cheap-skates out there who would love to pay a buck for an album. But if that's all its worth to you, I don't know why we are even having this conversation in the groove.

Unless we're talking about mp3's. I'm with you on a dime a cut there, brawh.....

lw

[JRL]

To sell a million copies, one in 500 would need to buy. In the words of my yuppie millionaire friend: That doesn't pencil out.

And since most of my sales happen on gigs, when people buy a cd at a show, they are doing it as a way of supporting the art form, not because its a good deal. They are just putting their money where their heart is.

[Stonehenge]

That's what everybody said when the idea of buying stuff on the internet came up. "no one will do it" "You can't trust anyone you can't see" so on and so on. Your thinking that 1 in 500 (or 1 in 1000) is hard to get is based on old thinking that includes the idea of expensive music. Yes, if you are talking about cd's then getting 1 customer in 1000 even is very hard. Unless you are a big name group.

When you talk about 10 cent tunes, then you are talking about a whole new ballgame. Even 25 cent or a dollar is new. I might be stuck in the old model myself. Why charge a whopping dime when you can get more customers for a lower price? Rhapsody, among other sites, charges by the month and you get access to millions of tunes. Unlimited downloading, so they say. If you got even a penny a tune times a million hits a month, that adds up.

Throw away your dinosaur thinking that involves cd's, tapes, vinyl and so on. No more greedy middlemen getting the bulk of the money. For every dollar you got, JRL, the middle men got 5 and they didn't play a note. You satisfied with that? Sometimes you got nothing after expenses and they still got their fat checks.

If anyone in the world can get any piece of music they want for a dime or so, maybe less, they will have a big library. Why not have every tune that exists in the genres you like? If you can afford $100 or so, you could do it. Or pay by the month. A little guy in Thailand with talent might make $100,000 a year within a few years of starting out. A really talented person or group might make a million a month or more.

How many tunes would each of you buy if it were that cheap? I'd have a library of 1000's of tunes adding more every month. Each time I heard something I liked on the radio, I'd get all that group's stuff.

[laughingwillow]

I wouldn't pay a nickel to download an mp3.

lw

[JRL]

Well sir, I have never had a middle man in my recording history. It's all been self produced. And even then its been hard to recoup the production costs. On the current project  I am involved in we are doing whta we can to cut costs. $500 bought us a day in the studio, we slammed through a whole cd's worth of basic tracks. The overdubs and mixing are being done in Ron's office on a computer he assembled.

CD's sold from the stage are still popular, people want something they can bring home from a show. In my world a million downloads is just not gonna happen.

[Stonehenge]

"In my world a million downloads is just not gonna happen."

Yeah but you got to quit carrying around that club and wearing a bearskin one of these days.

[JRL]

I resent that just bit, sir. I think I have dealt with the real world of music fairly well. My family has never gone hungry, and I get to play music of great integrity almost every night of the week. Would this be happening if I hadn't adapted to the reality of the situation?  Funny how your view changes when paying your mortgage is the issue.

Like I said in the other thread: I don't disagree with your model, I just don't see it working for me in the years I got left to do this.

[laughingwillow]

I don't blame you for resenting those comments, jrl. Stoney is being unrealistic in his projections and faulting your mode of reasoning in the process.

I saw that some pop band released their cd on line for free awhile back. I thought it was a good deal, publicity and such.  But that group comes from the top one percent of of bands based on world exposure before free material was released.

Btw, stoney, jrl and I come from a tradition of bands that allow fans to record their shows and trade them as long as no profit is realized. Most in the music industry consider that to be a stoopid move, but it works in the real world.

lw

[JRL]

To elaborate: my aformentioned client offers quite a few of the songs off his CDs for free download at Sounclick. He prolly gets a royalty from the websites owner. It used to be $.25 a play, another friend got well into double digit dollars on occaison. But he(my client) still drags his whole cataloge of 10+ albums with him on tour and sells em from his site.

It's just that music with less than super broad apeall doesn't pay for itself at .05 or even .25 cents a pop. Too much work goes into making a ggod product.

[laughingwillow]

And its unrealistic to expect any but the chart toppers to sell a million of anything, imo. The industry gives awards for that.

But, hey ,the beatles did it, eh?

lw

[JRL]

Yeah, but they were pretty good