Future Of Music

As a musician in the 21st century, you need to learn how to define your expectations. Otherwise, how will you know when you have achieved your goal, or even what to aim for? For a project, for a tour, for your career, and for your life – what are you trying to accomplish?

Most people in the music business want to “make it,” but what does that really mean? What is making it for you? What does the finish line look like? How would you recognize making it? Do you want a record deal? What does that record deal look like? Do you want to sell a million CDs? Do you want a publishing deal? What does that publishing deal look like? Do you want your music played on Grey’s Anatomy or your songbook published by Hal Leonard?

Once you know what your expectations are, then you can plan accordingly and know what to shoot for. Is success for you playing huge stadiums? That would mean you have to make a plan and probably dedicate yourself to work full-time for many years to get there.

Or, is success for you to have a steady gig on weekends? This is more achievable and something you can do on a local level and perhaps as a part-time endeavor. Is recording a CD and selling 10,000 copies your definition of success? If so, you can create a plan to achieve that perhaps on a regional level.

Or, is success for you writing songs that other people play? That would require you to network with other musicians and focus on writing, publishing, and placing your songs. Or, is success for you recording an EP and playing it for your family?

What do you want to be? What does success look like for you? Be as specific as possible when setting your expectations. Don’t be vague because it won’t lead you anywhere and just breeds sloppy thinking. First, define exactly what you want to do, and then you can break it down and make a plan to do it.

If you’ve ever felt grateful for the list of titles and track lengths that appear when you pop a CD into your player, David Hyman’s Gracenote is the company to thank. It enters all that data so you don’t have to. After Hyman helped expand Gracenote from a tiny metadata venture into the world’s largest database of CD titles and track lists, Sony bought the company for $250 million in 2008. That delivered nice returns for early investors, including Jones and Simon. “I showed them a good time. Then I brought them to Mog,” says Hyman.

Now Hyman has a new vision: fusing portability, social networking and unlimited music streaming at a single site. Mog will deliver this in a new music medium–the smartphone–expected to soon overtake PCs as the prime gateway to the Web. In March Hyman unveiled Mog’s mobile app at the South by Southwest music conference in Austin. With a couple of commands a phone user can segue to a screen offering access to 7 million songs spanning a century. All this to chase an elusive dream: technologically uniting a fractured music market.

His backers are betting Hyman, can succeed in a business that has ruined many a provider of capital. A decade ago a dozen labels dominated an industry drawing $40 billion in annual revenue. It is now half that. Streaming services with cryptic names like Spotify and Pandora now vie for users who listen to music not on CDs but PCs. And what happened to that $20 billion? Some of it was lost to music pirates; some of it to newcomers like iTunes, which takes in $2 billion a year.

Digital disruption of the music industry seemed to offer plenty of entree for new music distributors. Offering its own player and music store, iTunes thrived. But MTV, Yahoo and AOL all tried, then abandoned, selling music online (they now mostly stream it for free). Squeezing profits from online listeners turned out to be dicier than imagined. Smaller operators like Pandora carved out a niche following among “passive listeners.” Type the name of a song into Pandora’s search engine and it instantly produces an entire station around the track. It does this by mapping songs using 400 characteristics, from melodies to orchestration. This musical fingerprint associates one composition with another.

Hyman’s brainchild is a clever hybrid inspired by scrappy competitors. Like Pandora, Mog’s slider bar can be moved to add artists similar to ones you like, building your own playlist. Like Microsoft’s Zune player, it delivers ultrahigh fidelity. Hyman has taken a page from Twitter, too, running feeds from like-minded music fans, allowing users to find new music through “social discovery.”

Can Hyman triumph where bigger brands have failed? He has one edge: Mog’s blog network. Hyman built it by hiring the former top ad salesman at mtv.com, Alex Brough, who integrated content from other blogs with RSS feeds onto the Mog site. Hyman sold ads against this content and split the revenue with bloggers. The site now hosts 1,000 of the largest online music blogs in the U.S. Hyman will tap into this network, mostly using ad inventory, to build Mog’s brand.

To win, Mog will have to score a steep trajectory of subscriptions at $10 per month ($5 more than his PC-based subscription). Mog will also have to deliver “interoperability.” That’s the means by which music in disparate locations, say your laptop and home office, can be married and live together in Mog’s “cloud” (servers back at headquarters). “We’ll be able to add what’s on your hard drive to your Web-based library, grab your playlists and combine all of this legacy data in one place, along with new music from your Mog subscription,” he promises. The streaming service that delivers the best such interoperability should be a big selling point to music junkies.

Of course, if you stop paying, your cloud vanishes. How will that go down with music lovers? “The hard part for people to swallow will be that they won’t own the music they pay to hear,” says Kevin Burden, mobile device practice director at ABI Research. “It’s like leasing a car. You don’t have upfront costs, and you get a new model every two to three years. There’s value to that, but you don’t own it.”

Mog’s competitors think it’s worth the risk. Rhapsody, Catch Media and Spotify all have licensing agreements from music publishers for cloud-based streaming. So does digital music service Lala, bought by Apple last year. Apple recently announced plans to move every iTunes user’s music collection to Apple’s cloud this year. Death of the music download may be at hand.

One burden Hyman shares with his peers is the cost of content. The labels charge up to half a penny per stream per subscriber. European music giant Spotify, now with 320,000 paid subscribers, wants to bring its free service to the American market, but the labels want to be paid more than Spotify can likely afford. That won’t stop Mog’s coming showdown with its larger competitor. Watch for war clouds soon in Europe, as Hyman challenges Spotify on its own turf this summer.

Read more about the difficult work of creating the river of music at Forbes here.

It’s a new era for the music business. The music industry is rapidly changing, the traditional gatekeepers are evolving (or disappearing), and new distribution outlets, marketing techniques, and business models are popping up all the time. For those that are educated on these changes, there is more opportunity in the “new” music business than ever. Get The Handbook Now!

Berkleemusic’s Music Business Handbook collects some of the essential knowledge from our instructors in one easy-to-navigate guide. The music industry of the future will be driven by educated, focused, entrepreneurship-minded individuals, and this handbook will prove to be a starting point in your lifelong music business education.

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Last week host of Networking Musician Radio, David Vignola interviewed me about Music Power Network and the Future of Music.  Here is the audio interview along with a link to David’s site.  Great resource for indie artists.

Music Power Network provides a wide variety of music business education, tools, interviews and lots of resources for the D.I.Y. musician. The site also offers an equal wealth of information / education for producers, managers or publishers.

Guest Post by MC Lars

Back in 2005, my former manager at Nettwerk, Tom Gates, gave me a copy of Kusek’s “Future of Music” book.

“Read it,” Gates said.  “It might be interesting to you.”

I read the whole book in a weekend and was inspired to write a song detailing the changes Kusek proposed, many of which have come true.  It seemed crazy then.  Five years later, there has been an ideological shift made very apparent by the new generation of artists and consumers; music isn’t really a physical product anymore, it’s a service that artists provide that they are then paid for (if the service they provide has cultural and/or emotional value).

The song I wrote was called “Download This Song“, and it charted in Australia where I did TRL on MTV.  The YouTube video received a half a million plays and the single was given press in the NME, the UK’s biggest music magazine.  Afterwards, a girl in Texas who was being sued by the RIAA heard the song and contacted me.  I forwarded it to Gates.  Gates sent it to Terry McBride.  Nettwerk paid for her legal fees because one of the songs in her collection was by an artist they managed.  Clearly the ideas in the book and my song had reached a large audience.

It’s honestly somewhat eerie how much of what Kusek predicted came true.  Gone is the ineffectual A&R I described in songs like “Signing Emo” who races to find “the next hit” to get their band on the radio through payola and a $200,000 video that only recoups 10% of the time.  WTF? Gone is the idea that record labels are necessary or even always helpful.  Gone too is MTV’s agency as a music network, platinum albums, and commercial music retailers like Tower Records and Circuit City.

It might seem very bleak to the common music fan, but from an artist’s perfective, things have never been better.  In the independent hip-hop community, thousands and thousands of regional pockets of talented artists working hard to perfect and distribute their material have all popped up across America and the world.  No longer do artists aim to get $1,000,000 advances, a ridiculous and usually unrecoupable amount, but find themselves as part of an emerging middle-class that Kusek predicted would come to be.

Rap crews like Twiztid and the Psychopathic collective have used their underground and independent acumen to build empires and continue to bring tens of thousands of kids to their annual midwest hip-hop festival.  Upstate New York’s Weerd Science have become a credible and influential voice in the hip-hop underground on the strength of their 2005 debut – an impressive feet for a group with no strong label backing or touring history.   Records and regional tours have directly translated to lucrative career music for some of these artists.

The Peter Principal states that in the workplace, “each employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence”.  Basically this means that you will keep getting promoted and promoted until you are unable to do the next job and that there is a subjectively manifested glass ceiling based on one’s ability to do their job.  This is reflected in the music scene because artists now get to become as famous as they care to be or deserve.  If the music is good, it sticks with people.

And this meritocracy is the future Kusek predicted – catalyzed, in part, by the broadband technological improvements made in the last few years.  HD YouTube videos are a click away, downloading speeds have increased and you can get any artist’s discography for free within a  few clicks.  I listen to most of my new albums on Rhapsody because it’s easier than keeping track of the stacks hard drives full of mp3s I’ve collected over the years.  There’s a Zen to music consumption now, one of the new simplicity of it all.

And for the record, I’m living proof that downloading doesn’t hurt artists.  Without the advent of torrents, kids can quickly get any of my albums for free at any time from basically anywhere.  And that’s awesome!  Kids have my albums, even the rare out-of-print ones, because they’ve found them for free online.  Some of them decide to help support me in other ways by buying t-shirts or getting the occasional track from iTunes, which adds up if the net is wide enough.  I then pay my bills with digital sales, college gigs, and international touring.

I can’t buy a mansion in Hollywood, but that was never the goal.  I get by comfortably and will keep making music until I die.  High five!  What more could I ask for?  The 14 year old version of myself would be very proud of how I turned out at 27.

“Music was a product, now it is a service”.

Check out a new favorite crew of mine from South Africa, Die Antwoord, luminaries in the Johannesburg “zef-rap” scene.  In a truly viral word-of-mouth fashion, another artist I’d worked with (Tina Root from Switchblade Symphony) sent me the YouTube link.

“You’ll like this,” she said. “It’s different.”  She was right.

I checked out their “Enter the Ninja” video – the raps were tight, the chorus was very catchy, the visuals were unique, and the editing was dope!  I then researched zef-rap and learned that it is an international postmodern culture that takes every regional hip-hop tradition I could imagine and amalgamates it into one thing.  It’s hip-hop of the future that I had found by the web from a colleague.

This is how it “zef” a uniquely postmodern hip-hop form: In one video, a rapper named Jack Parow “ghostrides” his car, dancing along side of it.  This is a hip-hop tradition that was popularized in the Bay Area in the last decade, a reflection of the car culture being so integral to “hyphy” rappers like E-40 and Mac Dre.  Zef-rap incorporates many regional hip-hop movements into one genre, which is why I’m so in love with it these days!  Would I have heard of this genre otherwise?  Probably not.  It’s all because of this viral video my friend sent.  Now I can’t stop talking about them.

When kids ask me how I got into music, I always tell them this; if you want to have a career in indie hip-hop or any other genre of music these days, you need to be dedicated, come original, and work on building your brand as something real and human that people can relate to.  Don’t expect to make money on albums, labels are essentially just banks that help promote artists as brands, with CDs being their main promotional tool.

Kusek gave me hope when I was starting out that the playing field would be leveled if you believe in your art.  The punk rock ethics that I grew up with as a teenager in the late 90s are very conducive to the new culture of music listening and consumption.

I’d also like to thank Dave for his support through the years and also for getting me into classes at the Berklee College of Music in 2007 – I’ve learned a lot from him and trust you all can too.

Much respect to anyone working to make a career in music.

Welcome to the future!

MC Lars

mclars.tv
mclars.com
comics.mclars.com

Do you want to create a successful career in music?  How you think about your future is critically important. Always be as positive as you possibly can be. Think about what success means to you and how you can get there.  Define your goals and be realistic in what you are trying to achieve.  Get others to join in your vision and support your efforts.

Be honest and dependable in your pursuits. The music business is a very small world, and it is likely that you will form a network of people that will help you at various times along your path. Treat them with respect and take responsibility for your actions, and you will find a lot of support when you need it.  Often times things you setup at one point in your career, will come around again and be available to cross your path.  Be sure you that the encounter will be something you expect and not an unpleasant surprise.

Make a 360 degree deal with yourself and find ways to generate revenue from your writing, performing, brand, name, activities, and interests that suit you and what you stand for.  You do not want to sell your soul to another entity that will control your career options and minimize the revenue opportunities that you will have down the road.

Build a team around yourself.  It is impossible for one person to do everything that needs to get done. In the case of an artist or writer, you need to write, create, record, and produce art.  You need someone else to promote your work and manage the business side of things. You are forming a musician business around yourself, and eventually you will need help. The team you need will depend on what stage of your career you are at.

Eventually, as you begin to take off, you will need some combination of a manager, booking agent, producer, publisher, lawyer, publicist, agent, marketing person, online specialists, technologist, and others to help you. What does your mix look like? Imagine an organizational chart in your head, with you as the CEO. Who do you need on your team?

When trying to recruit people to your team, sell your vision and art, and get them to join in with you. It is a good reality check to try recruiting people to your dream to see if it resonates with them. Learn to understand, listen to, and ultimately motivate others by communicating clearly. Build a team around you.

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”  This is a great quote from Alan Kay, one of the creative geniuses behind the laptop computer and the mouse.  Musician can apply this thinking to their own careers by planning for success in a dedicated and systematic way.

I came across this great guest post by Kevin English on Creative Deconstruction that talks about the “Lower Class Musician” and suggestions for how to lift yourself out of that class into a middle or upper class status through controlling your overhead, aligning your expectations, creating a plan, getting a good and current education and diversifying your product offering.  These are all things that I have blogged about in great detail in the past and agree with completely.

Here in an excerpt from Kevin’s post:

“Learn to structure yourself like any other startup and formulate a strategy on paper that will sustain you for three to five years. You’ll soon find out that overspending on manufacturing, marketing, promotion and distribution is very difficult to recoup.

Adjust Your Expectations

For some of us, music is a hobby and that is okay. However, if you plan on feeding your children by touring the Chitlin’ circuit, that’s another thing entirely. When I realized that writing songs for Columbia Records and recording demos with The Fugees wasn’t going to sustain me forever, I had to adjust my expectations. These gigs were few and far in between and often times didn’t pay half as much as you would expect them to.

I studied profitable ideas, people, and businesses to find a common denominator. I learned that nine out of ten successful startups had a business plan. Not just any old plan, but one that was standard across all industries. Financial planning, marketing, and the management of people and products/services cannot be done on the fly. If all you want is for people to hear your music that is fine. But again, you can’t necessarily expect to make a decent living.

Accelerate Your Learning

Hundreds of books have been written on the subject of business plans, yet no one in the music business seems to think they need one — until, of course, they run out of cash. I spent years in my local SBA in Newark, NJ looking at sample plans, meeting with retired CEOs of successful companies, and learning how basic businesses operate.

If you do the same you’ll realize that most startups have more similarities than you’d expect. However, it is important to point out that no two plans are alike. You will still need to write a plan specifically based around your music-related products and services. My first plan was a disaster. I asked my uncle for $75K with a promise to return 20% of the loan over the next five years. He had a good laugh over that one, but at least he knew I was serious about my dreams.”

To read his full post look here.

I was hanging out with my friend Charlie McEnerney last night and asked him about his interview with Larry Lessig.  Here is his post and a link to the complete interview from Well Rounded Radio.  Check it out.

In many music and entertainment circles, the name Lawrence Lessig needs no introduction, but for those who don’t know his work, here’s some background.

Lessig is a lawyer and activist whose interests are mostly in intellectual property, copyright, technology, and political reform. He’s has written five influential books, including Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (2000), The Future of Ideas (2001), Free Culture (2004), Code: Version 2.0 (2006), and Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (2008).

Remix was just published in paperback in October 2009.

Over the past 10 years, Lessig has worked for both Harvard Law School and Stanford Law School. He is currently a lawyer at Harvard Law School and director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

Lessig is a founding board member of Creative Commons. In 2008, Lessig launched the Change Congress campaign, now called Fix Congress First.

Lessig talks about Creative Commons during the interview, but in a nutshell it’s an organization with copyright tools that allows content creators to give various levels of freedom to others for them to remix and build upon the original work.

The idea behind remix culture is how an artist can take a work that a pervious artist has produced and build upon it to create something new. The term has become more commonplace in the last decade, but in fact the concept has been in use for decades, most notably in rap music starting 30 years ago.

Growing up in Queens, New York, I was lucky enough to hear the rap bands of the first era pretty early on (granted, thanks to bands like Blondie and The Clash and college radio putting Grandmaster Flash, The Sugar Hill Gang, Kurtis Blow, and Afrika Bambaattaa on my radar) which usually utilized sampling techniques when creating their music.

I have long been a fan of the groups who fine tuned the ideas behind audio sampling to perfection, in Long Island’s Public Enemy and De La Soul. I’ve always thought both groups pushed the ideas behind sampling in ways that few others did before or since, albeit in very different directions.

With Public Enemy’s 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and De La Soul’s 1989 album 3 Feet High and Rising, at the moment it seemed like the idea of what music “is” was being reinvented.

But, after a series of lawsuits for a variety of musicians and labels, the art of sampling and remixing was largely hobbled, in either using others work with or without their consent.

Twenty years later, it is still mostly the domain of those willing to tread in dangerous waters or for artists who want to engage their own fans by allowing them to remix work as part of the growing participatory culture community. For remix artists who might be looking to push their ideas further, it’s unlikely they can put their work into the public without a sizable budget.

Having read all of Lessig’s work and seen two recent documentaries about the remix culture (Brett Gaylor’s RIP: A Remix Manifesto and Benjamin Franzen’s Copyright Criminals), I wanted to speak with Lessig about how current musicians could utilize Creative Commons and share with their own audience as well as look at how we music fans can better understand this era of shared creativity, which dramatically changes the idea of those performers vs. us in the audience.

In addition to these films and Lessig’s Remix book, some good reads on the subject include DJ Spooky’s book Sound Unbound (2008) and Matt Mason’s The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism (2009).

The show includes music from the earlier era of sampling as well as some recent examples of mainstream musicians offering up their work for remixing, including David Byrne and Brian Eno, Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, and Bjork.

I sat down with Lessig at his office at Harvard Law School to discuss:
* why it’s unlikely the current copyright system will change
* why Greg Gillis, also known as Girl Talk, has not been sued
* how Creative Commons works and how musicians can use it to engage their fans even more

Songs included in the interview include:
1) Public Enemy: Welcome to the Terrordome (Welcome to the Terrordome) (in preview)
2) Grandmaster Flash: The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel
3) De La Soul: Me Myself and I (3 Feet High and Rising)
4) Public Enemy: Night of the Living Baseheads
5) DJ Moule: Black Sabotage remix of Beastie Boys‘s Sabotage
6) Radiohead: Reckoner (In Rainbows)
7) Nick Olivetti: Nasty Fish remix of Radiohead‘s Reckoner David Byrne + Brian Eno: Help Me Somebody (My Life in the Bush of Ghosts)
9) Owl Garden: Secret Somebody remix of David Byrne + Brian Eno‘s Help Me Somebody
10) Mr. Briggs Hit me somebody remix of David Byrne + Brian Eno‘s Help Me Somebody
11) Girl Talk: No Pause (Feed the Animals)
12) Girl Talk: In Step (Feed the Animals)
13) Danger Mouse: Encore (The Gray Album)
14) The Album Leaf‘s remix of Nina Simone‘s Lilac Wine from Verve Remixed
15) Vind‘s remix of Bjork‘s Venus as a Boy
16) Fatboy Slim: Praise You (You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby)
17) Amplive‘s remix of Radiohead‘s Weird Fishes

Get the audio interview here.

Again and again, I have heard this sage advice when asking producers, label executives, and publishers about artist development. Take your time. The first and most important thing to do is to get the music right: love your music, immerse yourself in it, and live it.

As an artist/writer, your coin of the realm is your songs, and they need to be great, polished, and professional. The worst thing you can do is go to market too soon. Without careful preparation, practice, understanding, listening to others, testing your material, developing its quality, and crafting and articulating a unique story to tell, you will probably enter the marketplace too early and will most likely fail. Start out slowly. Practice. A lot.

Another critical component of artist development is live performance. Any venue will do to get started. Play the smallest clubs to get used to performing and being in front of an audience. Everybody gets better over time, and live performance in front of a crowd does many positive things for your career. When you play live, you develop sets of songs that you play and expand your repertoire. Don’t be afraid to play other people’s material mixed in with your own. Covers create a sense of familiarity that you can use to build your audience. You are also learning by playing the songs of other great artists.

Performing live helps you build your confidence and song quality, lets you interact with an audience, and experience their reactions to your songs. Also, when you play live, you can test out different material and approaches to your songs. You can experiment and find out new things about the song, tempo, bridge, chorus, lyric, etc. You can see which songs are the most popular, what should be the rhythm of your set, where the audience loses its attention, and how best to open and close a show.

Live performance and touring is a major cornerstone to any artist’s career and is one of the best ways to develop an audience. Over time, your audience will grow with you as you refine your art. Superstars Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, James Taylor, Paul Simon, and countless others all played small clubs for very minimal dollars at first, refining their approach, music, and brands to small audiences that grew over time. Just look at the size of their audiences now.

Many successful executives have told me that good music finds an audience and is very difficult to keep under wraps. If you want to have a long career in the music business, take a good look at yourself, who are you, and the package that you bring to the table. Do you have the songs, do you have the talent, do you have the charisma, and are you really ready to go to market? Develop, refine, write, practice, play live, listen, and collaborate.

Listen to Others

Great artists and writers take the time to develop, but they also listen to people around them who they can trust to give them feedback and keep them honest about what they are trying to do and how well they are accomplishing it. This is role of the A&R person, record producer, publisher, and artist manager. You simply cannot believe your own press and expect to be successful. You also cannot rely on your mother or family to be objective about what you are doing. You need to get honest opinions from a lot of different people who will tell you the truth. Listen carefully to them as a sounding board for your career and ask hard questions like the following: Do you like my songs? How do I look on stage? What do I need to do to improve? What advice can you give me?

Your fans are the ultimate source of feedback. Set up a blog or some other means of creating two-way communication. Encourage people to tell you what they think. Hand out postcards at your gigs, collect your fans email and cell phone numbers, and ask them what they think of your set, your songs, your performance, etc. Don’t be afraid of what you might hear, and use the feedback to learn, refine, and further develop your brand and music.

Collaborate

Having a band is a great way to collaborate, and hopefully you will find other musicians to play and write with at various points in your career. Another hallmark of great artists and writers is that they work with different musicians to write songs, perform together, cover each other’s songs, and most importantly learn from one another. Collaboration and the exchange of ideas are the life-blood of creative artistry.

Collaboration does not mean that you are joined at the hip with another artist forever. You can move in and out of collaborative partnerships when you need something new to spark the creative juices or just get you going in another direction. Working with other talented musicians can be a challenge. Quincy Jones has great advice for when you walk into the studio to work with other artists. He says, “Check your ego at the door.” Find people you can work with, who you enjoy being around, and who make you feel good.

There are many examples of great songwriting collaborations, including Holland, Holland & Dozier, Lennon and McCartney, and Elton John and Bernie Taupin. The list is long. Don’t be afraid to cowrite with other people or to record other songwriter’s material. This can help you reach a broader audience, develop your talents in new directions, and potentially open up your brand by association with other great artists.

One of the most successful songwriters of the last 30 years is Don Henley of the Eagles. He talks about identifying your strengths and weaknesses through collaboration with great writers like Jackson Brown and Glen Frey, and being willing to put someone else’s songs on your record if they are better than your own. Seems to have worked for him.

Many of the most successful songs of all time have come out of collaborative partnerships that were organized on a formal level at some of the songwriting factories of the past, including the Brill Building, Motown, and Philadelphia International. Collaboration helps you to stand on the shoulders of others and to peer over a horizon that you might not be able to see on your own.