I Know Why The Music Industry is Struggling

This got me thinking. While I see what the poster is saying and even want to agree with it, I don't think it's true.

Think of the recording industry's "golden days" - ask absolutely anyone who was involved in it and they will tell you that it was all about business. Big business. Lots of money. Limited creative freedom for artists, but huge returns on the ones that found success.

What has changed? Technology. It's technology that's changed our lives in the past several decades, and it's affected the recording industry in fundamental ways.


I happened to have become an adult in the 90s when technology was democratizing music in a way it never had before. Previously, the best a composer could hope to do would be to write down in staff notation (that means "sheet music") their ideas they worked out using a piano and then sell it to a publisher, or else somehow cobble together a lo-fi recording using a home cassette deck and if the gods of music smiled upon them, some record company executive would discover them and front the cash necessary to buy them some time in a proper studio with an engineer.

 "Where do I find the Sausage Fattener in this room?"

This required a huge amount of vision on behalf of the publishers and record company scouts, to see through a poorly recorded demo or a flat sheet of paper to the underlying song and how it could be if they invested in it. It's like buying a run-down house with the plans to renovate it: you need to have the vision of how it could be once you invest in it.

An example of what record companies used to get as a demo.

Recording studios cost tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up and maintain and had to be staffed by engineers with highly specialized skills. Then, once the recording was made thousands of physical vinyl records, audio cassettes and even compact discs had to be manufactured and distributed and then promoted, all of which is a huge up-front investment and a risky one at that.

Because of this model - that is to say, because of the enormous expense and risk of investment - the contracts were structured to benefit the labels heavily because they needed their return on investment. Today we shun the labels for setting artists up with a 3% of net sales royalty, but the simple business truth about it is that the labels needed the lions share of the revenue to subsidize the overhead of putting out an album.

 Only a few of the acts record companies invested in didn't make it to this bin.

All that has changed since digital recording became a consumer commodity and computers advanced enough that high-quality recording could be done from a personal computer.

I've run various labels over the past decade and have seen this advancement from both sides, as a label boss and as an artist. Opportunities rarely say "high quality home demo" anymore because "home demos" don't really exist - the music is entirely produced by the composer more often than not. And consequently A&R reps don't need to imagine how a song will be when it's done because scouts essentially receive a finished product.

So this cleared a huge portion of the cost of producing an album from the accounting ledgers of the record labels, and for a while they enjoyed it - the contract percentages didn't change but the cost of the material was almost eliminated. Imagine you're a retailer and one day you get a machine that makes your products on site for free rather than having to pay the manufacturer.


While all of this is happening, something else changed that my kids can't wrap their heads around because it's always been like this for them - high bandwidth internet.

 It's not just for porn.

Think about it! When I was a kid, the only way to discover new music was to either see it on MTV or Much Music (here in Canada), hear it on the radio, spend hours at local independent record stores digging through the bins and previewing it at listening stations on headphones, or hear it from a friend who'd done the same.

 Teens would trade mixtapes to share music with their friends.

I kept a cassette tape loaded and ready to record so that when a song I liked came on the radio I could record it and then listen to it over and over. Records and mixtapes were sloppily shared between friends and communities of people. So the only music we heard was what the executives had deemed a good investment and had taken the time and risk of producing an album and distributing and promoting it.

This also meant that for the musical consumer, enjoying music to enjoy was also expensive. If you didn't want it to sound like total garbage one had to invest thousands in a hifi stereo system - each component, from the amp to the tape deck to the reel-to-reel cost hundreds of dollars - even having an EQ, something we take for granted on our ipods was an "add-on" ... and don't even get me started on speakers and cabling.

This is all before you even have to shell out $20-$30 (sometimes more for imports) per record.

Being a music lover meant being broke, back in the day.

Enter web 2.0 and all of the sudden the underground has a megaphone.

A huge fucking megaphone.

Much was said of this at the time, but I think it's worth remembering - you literally had no other way to discover new music. Now, at any time from anywhere in the world you can, in the palm of your hand, prowl through YouTube and Soundcloud and discover music made by anyone, anywhere. And it was fresh! The music on a vinyl record was always at least a few months old, even when it was a new release because of the timelines of having it recorded, produced, manufactured and distributed. Now I can make a song in an afternoon and post it to Soundcloud and it's immediately accessible to anyone with an internet connection mere minutes after it was made.

Something else having all this access to technology did, besides turning the way music is made and where it is made on its head, is it changed who it is made by.

Yes, "16 year old producer" is a thing now.

Let's go back - waaaaaay back. Think Debussy. Mozart. Beethoven. Musical composition was a complex thing, requiring a lifetime of education on the subject making it an entirely elitist undertaking. Composers would have to imagine the sound of the orchestra and its various parts in their heads and write it down on paper and then take it to a group of similarly highly trained and privileged musicians to play.

Yes, folk music existed and some of those songs survive today, but we do not know the names of their composers. For every Ludwig Van there was 50,000 nameless serfs, toiling in the field by day and then banging on pots and bottles in the evening. How many of them had the spark of creativity within them that never had the opportunity to blossom into true artists and earn the same eternal recognition their more privileged contemporaries have today?

 Mozart didn't have to decide between eating and paying the rent.

I think I might have been one of them, had I been born then. While I always loved music, I didn't have any special training in it (in fact, I failed band class in middle school) and if computers hadn't suddenly become capable of manifesting my ideas, I likely never would have composed anything beyond a couple of tunes using just my guitar or piano and certainly wouldn't have been able to hear it really come to life with a full orchestra.

Yet I can sit down at my computer and using the tools I have at my disposal which were acquired for a fraction of the price of a "real studio" I can instantly hear an entire orchestra playing my music.

 One of my more recent studio setups.

This goes for many talented artists today. I've worked with countless artists and I think the majority of them were not what would have been considered terribly "musical" when they were kids, but by virtue of merely having access to the technology have discovered that they in fact have a gift for composition and production that would have gone overlooked in another era.

Moreso, because it is so accessible, it has created new genres. Technology has for the past hundred years really driven the kind of music we are capable of playing. Electric guitars begat rock and roll. Samplers begat hiphop. Synths begat electronica.

Every day I work with artists who are pushing the boundaries of our genre descriptors. We can push buttons and twiddle knobs and faders to create sounds that have literally never been heard before.

 One of the genre maps for electronica.

Prior to this, there was a feeling that "it had all been done before". There is a limited number of notes and chords one can play on a guitar and whatever order you put them in, they've been put in that order before by someone, somewhere. The addition of the synthesizers to the music scene didn't just add one instrument to the repertoire of tools available to composers but an unlimited number of new instruments.

While all this is great for people like myself who otherwise probably never would have had the chance to discover their natural talents, making accessible the ability to create, it has also meant a gargantuan increase in the amount of mediocre/shitty music we have to wade through.

Not only are there exponentially more people making exponentially more different kinds of music, but it is all readily available to anyone. More options with fewer filters means discovery has changed from being the thing you looked forward to doing on Saturday afternoons, hunched over record bins thumbing through artists that were screened for talent and quality over and over before it found your hands into a chore of wading through an endless sea of new music.

It's a daunting task. The sheer volume of new artists and music makes looking for new music utterly overwhelming and musical consumers are forced to stumble through a constantly refreshing dogpile of digital audio they couldn't hope to actually make their way through even if everyone stopped making new music immediately and they lived to be 10,000 years old and they only listened to ten seconds from every song.

Only 651,000,000 available options? C'mon, Internets. I am disappoint.

And every one of those artists is shouting "listen to me!", whether they completely suck or are totally awesome. The rising cacophony of promotion coupled with virtually unlimited options has devalued the product.

No, I don't think the music business is struggling because it's more of a business - if anything, it's far more creative, with artists unreliant upon labels to help them fund and release their music and with unfettered creative license to produce whatever their imagination and tools are capable of rendering.

It's struggling because it's not enough of a business anymore. There is an endless tidal wave of music swamping our internet connections, and the vast majority of it is available for free.

Let's review Economics 101: Supply & Demand. In any market where the demand is high and there is a scarcity of supply, the price is high. This is why gold and oil cost so damn much. And while it is true that people today have more of an appetite than ever for music, the simple fact is that the supply has flooded the market and it has driven the price down to virtually nothing.

Now that I've put a graph in here I'm going to say words like "synergy".

This is why I believe labels still have a role to play in the industry today. It is true that anyone with a computer can produce and then release their music to the world, but the utopian dream of the indie artist has become a nightmare because it has been destroying the value of our own products. Labels need to be in the business to act as filters so that our customers - the listeners - can come to us to help them mitigate the fear of drowning in mediocre sounds.

As an independent artist for almost twenty years now it has taken me a long time to come to this realization. The royalty structure in contracts and the relationships between artists and labels have changed, as the enormous overhead cost and risk of investment has almost entirely disappeared. Today my label has an 80/20 split in favor of the artists. The label keeps 20% to help offset the costs of servers and time invested slogging through thousands of tracks a month but we don't have to put anything up front to finance the cost of recording or distributing a recording.

So, if you're wondering why the music business is struggling, it's our own fault. As artists, we have flooded the market with our product which has cut the prices so drastically that the average consumer, far from investing thousands of dollars in their beloved music collection, now hesitates to spend any money at all on it.

They don't see the value.

Why is it that the same people who won't spend five bucks on new music they will love and enjoy over and over will not even bat an eye at a five dollar coffee?

They don't see the value.

We as artists and music industry professionals need to be more diligent about what we release and how much we give away. Menchie's may offer you a sample cup for free but when you find the one you like, you fill the cup and they charge you for it.

The music business needs to get back to business.

So let's get going.

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To preview some of the hundreds of songs I've composed and produced FOR FREE (irony intended) visit http://deekaph.com