Posts by Simon Grigg
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I wouldn't trust anything that guy says.
nah, me neither. Wanna buy a Nice'n'Urlich box set?
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didn't know this was a council thang - thats well cool
The label itself wasn't council but grew from the council scheme which funded the people who set it up.
Sadly the label is yet another example of a thing that is slowly being tossed into history and forgotten as a result of the fact that New Zealand doesn't have a dedicated music archive (and yes I know we have a sound archive which touches on that but not the same thing).
A couple of other things:
1) the physical format is not dead despite the noise we hear. CD sales still dominate, and even more so in a country like NZ where we don't seem to have quite the digital music penetration of other nations (there is not a major record store left on Manhattan now). What percentage of Susan Boyle albums sold on mp3? I don't know the split but I bet digital was a distant second to the CD.
2) the album is alive and well and selling across almost all genres, the exceptions being pop, dance, r'n'b and hip-hop which are totally dominated by digital track sales. Alt rock too is increasingly digital and tracks; oh and vinyl (worldwide I'm talking, perhaps not NZ).
3) you can argue that 1) & 2) are a generational thing and to a degree you would be right. The people buying CDs and albums tend to be older people bought up on older formats, and as we (the people who have posted here as to their album preferences are mostly in that age group) pass from the buying demographic, the album will continue to be marginalised as will physical.
4)But neither will disappear. Who are buying things like the XX album, which has supposedly sold a million copies worldwide. It is not all old folks. And some genres, classical, jazz etc are always going to be album orientated although both genres are very small as a percentage of the marketplace, and the retail environment for physical will, within a few years, be niche specialist stores and on-line retailers where in places like the US East Coast and much of Asia it already is.Unless there is some unforeseen revolution in formats I think the future of the album and the CD are pretty well mapped out and neither face extinction.
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I dont think this kind of state support leads to bludging: what it does do (in the 3 instances I have experienced - all over 20 years ago-) is give a kind of sigh of relief from financial repression for the immediate term - and a wonderful kick-in of creative energy
Auckland City was very proactive this way in the early-mid 1980s employing a bunch of very talented musicians to make music on lowish salaries. It gave a huge leg-up to several musicians who went on to do some fairly special things (the likes of Ivan Zagni, John Quigley, Peter Scholes, Margaret Urlich, Tom Ludvigson, and I think Wayne Laird).
They even ran their own label for a while and it was a thoroughly worthwhile exercise in many ways.
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A lot of us will do it for love, up to a point, but we need to eat and pay the rent just like anyone else.
The positive side is that the restructuring of the business side of the audio arts in recent years has made it a lot easier for artists to get paid. Performance income (not live performance but performance royalties via APRA / Amcos and the global network they are part of) to writers and performers are hugely up over the past decade, plus the democratising of the means of distribution with the rise of the net has simply changed the music industry beyond recognition. Much more than piracy.
Look at someone like The Phoenix Foundation: they own, control and benefit from everything, as do Fat Freddies Drop and many more, and not only that, but they now benefit globally from that, as the net removes the regional barriers.
Unless you are relying on eMusic of course.
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I gather Simon has had problems with downloads in Thailand, but I do like Bandcamp as a place to buy music.
Just that one album actually, Buffalo. The rest of the time I have had no issues. Took a day to get it down the pipe.
eMusic cut me off when I needed to change credit cards, just got a message telling me to get stuffed from now on. Sadly they have large amounts of stuff that I can't find elsewhere online and my attitude is I will buy it if I can find it legitimately, but if I'm blocked because of late 20th century territorial imitations I will take it, which brings me back to Martin Mills and his statement about making it easy to buy and more convenient than stealing. I wonder what percentage of the sales of something like the Savage single were ringtones or direct to phone. I bet they were a massive, likely overwhelming, percentage, and it's nuts that buying full tracks from the likes of iTunes isn't as easy. Its hard to whine about piracy if it ain't.
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Well, you bother because;
a) you have to get your music out there or you brain will explode
Best line ever on a PAS music thread. Sums it all up. Little else anyone can add.
But I will:
b) if a record company screws you sideways money wise (which I do not believe to be the case these days) they are still promoting your band/brand.
True, but why any act would sign a 360 deal with a major is beyond me
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But your challenge then is getting noticed -- it's the marketing and presence that the majors use to justify their much larger cut (I think they can take as much as 85% of the retail price of downloads -- Simon?).
It can be less than that. It really depends on the deal. Some have the label taking 85% of income received, not retail price, then there are packaging deductions and up to 50% reductions in base royalties if they stick the album on TV etc,
But Samuel is right, for many acts the majors are the way to go. I can't imagine legacy acts like Dylan or Springsteen existing outside the system (although hats off to Paul McCartney who is doing just that) and many younger acts just want to make records. It's only later on they start to grumble. And the big labels do work very bloody hard, likely far harder now than they did a few years back, to get you to listen in a crowded environment where they are not only on the artistic but the technological and innovative backfoot much of the time.
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Sorry, I'm just a layperson, could you explain what these terms mean?
Sorry, I tend to ramble on like this from time to time and need a slap to force me to speak English.
Publishing mechanicals are the (statutory) percentage of a music sale which is paid to the songwriters, and is independent of the royalty to the performers.
Recoupment is the system whereby the cost of recording and parts of the cost of promoting a record are billed back to the recording artist by a record company. This is then extracted from the artist's royalty stream and they don't get paid royalties until it is recovered, which for most acts signed to majors is never.
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If you're going to make that claim,
It excludes two important bits of data for a start: publishing mechanicals (which is a positive to the act if they are writers); and an allowance for recoupment (which for may acts means the figures quoted as returns are about as relevant as flight data for the tooth fairy).
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I'd recommend this recent interview from the owner of the world's most successful indie as a point of reference
There is not a lot in there that others haven't been saying for a long time but Mills' position puts substance to much of it
"You read the industry is 60 per cent of the size it was ten years ago. But that 40 per cent that has gone is almost entirely the cream at the top. Records that sold two million now sell 500,000 - that's where that's gone. At the same time it's easier to sell those slightly smaller levels.
"What's called pejoratively 'the new middle class' is someone like, say, Calexico or Midlake, who can sell 100,000 plus records every time they put out a record; they can play to 3-4,000 people in 30 or 40 cities around the world. And they can make a pretty good living out of that, doing what they love doing, and can do it on their own terms, and that's fantastic. We've got a bunch of bands like that, they're not necessarily seeking stardom or riches. That's incredibly healthy."
He's long since worked out that enemy of the recording industry is not just free music but that awful bloat that makes people like Warners and EMI so marginal on sales of a million copies of a record, but makes his Beggar's Group so, as he says, incredibly healthy, on sales of 100,000.
And that the majors still haven't quite worked out the whys before they attacked the hows of piracy;
Mills stresses that it's now up to the industry to get better at selling music, in all kinds of ways:
I'm still astounded that you need a credit card for iTunes, something beyond the reach of most teenagers, while you can't buy music by text message, I said. Then the music industry wondered why 12-18s found it easier to download illegally.
"The last ten years shows the record industry is not able to provide its own solutions - you need an iTunes to do it." He says the industry has to recognise the skills of retailers again. It's never been very good at introducing these things, "perhaps understandably, because it's not their business ... majors tend to be about control".
But he thinks even though music is digital, independent music stores will come back again, as places to discover music again.
It's unusual to hear an optimistic view of selling music, but Beggars and the leading British Independents point the way to a revival.