Posts by Simon Grigg
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Do you mean because he's in NZ, and the audience and money is overwhelmingly overseas?
Because you'd think in theory, the internet would make distance less of a problem for at least some part of being an artist - can get your music out there and gather fans by only investing time.
Primarily because he's trying to break into a market that does require some investment, more than you can reasonably raise in this part of the world. Going to a place, cap in hand, especially when they see you primarily as a one off novelty act, you have to make some hard choices. And the US is still a very conservative market as it's always been, well behind Europe.
You wanna break through the 'who the fuck are you and why should I care' attitude, it's expensive and it can't be done by sitting back on the other side of the world and saying 'I have a good song'.
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And I think that is the main thing that is going to change. Russ was talking about the Hype Machine not so long ago. The whole nature of the business and how you get noticed is changing. People are telling each other what to listen to.
Even there, the hand of the publicist and PR specialists are working. Go and ask Mark Kneebone how it works. He's a wizard.
the time period you base your hatred of the evil empire on was when it was quite expensive, and as you've said artists are more aware and the deals are more varied and fair.
Rob, I was writing contracts as recently as yesterday. The simple fact is that recording a record or a CD is a very tiny part of the cost involved if you want to make any dent beyond your mates buying the 500 discs you may press. But, if we are talking NZ, wander through the NZ album and single charts and look at the number of acts who are doing it themselves and ask yourself if they are making more money by simply paying the likes of Mark Kneebone $5000, or giving away 90% of the return to a label (who also deduct that other 10% to cover costs). Maybe they've all worked it out, I reckon so. The same is happening in the rest of the world on a bigger scale (although less so in the US..it will come). The UK album charts have been full of people who decided to go it alone in one way or another now for a few years.
surely you miss the majors expense account now. :)
No. But to be honest if I was still doing A&R I'd not even think about an act who didn't have the nous to raise $1750 to press their own CDs if they needed it, or 'just wanted to make music'. And if I wasn't interested I know the public wouldn't be either. And if you can't do it...hire a fucking manager. When I first released records I had no cash...I borrowed a couple of hundred bucks here, a couple of hundred there, made some friends at the pressing plant and then sat down and worked out how to sell the things and who I needed to schmooze. Little has changed, you just have more tools available now. And there are plenty of ways to fund things that don't involve selling your soul or your copyrights. People are doing it daily worldwide.
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cased wouldn't be a very hard, almost impossible road.
case would be a very hard, almost impossible road.
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you underplay the role of investment capital in that equation simon.
labels front for the quite sizable cost of putting the whole dance on.No, because most of that investment you talk about is marketing cost. The actual cost of making the record is a very small, and for many acts, increasingly smaller part of the equation. And for most acts the cost of recording and marketing is substantially less if they go the independent route, be it via a label or a production deal or the thousand other options that have opened up since digital turned the world on its end. Until 5 years ago, the only real way an artist could get a recording career was to sign one of those onerous deals. That is no longer the case, although they clearly still do.
I read NZ Musician when I was back and it had a story about a NZ musician doing well overseas in the charts, mostly from digital. He's signed to a major and you read the story and its glowing. Read between the lines and you groan with dismay though. But I agree though, he may have had little choice but to take the deal offered as the alternative in his particular cased wouldn't be a very hard, almost impossible road.
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And there are many (completely legal) tune sharing sites where you can download new music for free.
But to be honest Mark, much of that is crap, or at least it's music that most people don't want.
People generally want the music they are told they want, be it radio, peer pressure, 'hip' media, being part of a cool scene, or whatever, with a fraction coming from live but something needs to drive people to the right live acts. For every killer track or band you hear about there are 100 killer tracks that don't have the marketing or media momentum.
Which is what the record labels and iTunes do so well. They tell most people what to buy. Essentially what an act pays hands most of their money over to a label now for is marketing and placement.
Minor labels and independents are building their own business models and sites, and also using iTunes as well, and will, eventually, compete.
Agreed. I think iTunes' time in the sun will be relatively brief but they certainly changed the way middle America / Europe / NZ etc bought their music.
I tend to use other sites much more than iTunes (eMusic, Beatport, Boomkat etc) for the range and the ease.
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Russ, this is pretty much the model I was referring to some threads back, but Simon indicated it is much lees the case these days. Did I read you wrong, Simon?
No I think Russell's right. It really depends on the deal but there are all sorts of add ins that affect the cut to artist too. There are, depending on the contract, packaging deductions (which means that the artist is only paid royalties on reduced base price..it's essentially a scam), technology transfer fees, new tech deductions, and a thousand other ways to cut the end royalty to the act.
From the artiist's POV the key phrase is royalty base price which is (and there are a million variations on this) published price to deal (PPD) less the various deductions labels make to reduce that so that they pay less. And many of those deductions are a scam, nothing less.
So, a 35.8% markup, although it's clear that the likes of the Warehouse and JB operate on totally different wholesale prices to the rest of the retail sector.
There are a whole bunch of things used to reduce the cost to these guys. Firstly there is discounting....and the artist usually only gets paid on a reduced rate here even though, unless they are contracually specific, they have no say. Then there are freebies. You buy 500 U2 albums, we will give you 500 Dire Straits albums, or 500 assorted albums from out catalogue. On these, regardless of what they are sold for, the artist gets no royalties as the are cut outs of whatever term is current. In the US there was a court case a few years back where Universal was giving stock to juke box operators free, which was going straight into retail at full price..royalty free. There are many more....TV advertise the album and there is a much reduced royalty, and often a bill back to the artist's recoupment account.
On many acts, the royalties paid on digital by majors are appalling with all the normal scammy deductions from physical being transfered to digital (packaging deductions on mp3s?), part of which add to my reasoning that the majors really don't deserve a break on this.
Indies (but not all by any means) tend to be far more creator friendly when it comes to digital splits. But for all that, the basic premise that the artist signs to a label, pays all the costs out of their small fraction, and then owns nothing at the end, is one of the things that will cause labels to flounder. Some majors are addressing this but only because they have to as their time as new music originators passes but in my experience the contracts and paperwork surrounding all this is even more punitive than before, in other ways. Why any act would sign such a thing now is beyond me.
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In Louisiana you can buy hard liquor from a petrol station. (!)
You mean like the liquor store attached to the Gull station in New North Rd?
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Actually, he's insulted me repeatedly since he's been posting here -- and quite nastily at times too. I put up with it, but I'm really not prepared for other people to have to suffer it
No, I'm aware of that, which is why I wrote 'this thread' as I thought Rob had toned down since then and I think there is little personal in what he's saying, more bloody mindedness.
If you were still running your indie label in auckland pumping out edgy bands with attitude you might be slightly more reserved about it, not quite at the coal face as you were and not as invested in it, lucky you
Actually Rob (and this really is my final post in this thread), until a year or so I was involved at the coal face if you want to call it that, continually frustrated though by the fact that my partners in the enterprise really were stuck in the past regardless of their words. And yes, I do know Mark and I think you'll find he understands what I'm saying more than you give him credit for, as do many indies and artists worldwide.
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The corporates may not be pushing for the laws to help out the minions but those laws do help out the minions in trickle down, like our friend islander, who is avoiding big evils and keeping a tight rein herself
And more power to her for doing that, but it has nothing to with anything you are advocating Rob. The RIAA has been tracking, threatening and suing people for the best part of a decade and it's had no impact on piracy whatsoever. In fact there are pretty strong arguments that it does exactly the opposite as the stick approach decreases the publicly perceived moral high ground.
The laws you seem happy to go along with are just the latest stick and are another nail in the coffin of the industry as we've known it. The only answer is to reinvent and that means radically re-examining copyright and the way it's used and exploited. A lot of people and musicians have already started doing that and the figures I've provided prove the sky hasn't fallen yet.
Thread to thread this goes around and around. I'm out.
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I was taking issue with you saying I was keen to throw people who make music to self interested corporates
No that wasn't what I was saying, I was saying that laws should not be written to benefit corporates which is what is happening in several countries. These corporations are not pushing for these laws to benefit the copyright beneficaries that they may have under contract and have a very long history of not acting in their interests.
Try and track down Trevor Reekie's interview with Peter Jenner and listen to him talk about what happened to the YouTube settlements jsut for a start.