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Is The Future Of Music Really This Bleak?

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

Here’s an interesting article from the Chicago Tribune about album sales in 2008 and what it could mean for the future. Personally, I think it’s more evidence that the future is bright for the inventive independent artist.

The Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit got rolling Sunday, an annual meeting of musicians, tech-heads, artist managers, academics and music-biz entrepreneurs. The summit’s forward-looking approach is all about making the best of the new reality created by Internet technology and how that might be affected by government policy decisions.

Sounds like heavy stuff. But wonkiness goes hand in hand with the myriad possibilities that await artists in a music industry very different from the one that existed a decade ago, before peer-to-peer file came along.

Further evidence that sales of recorded music are not the way of the future for artists. Instead, it increasingly appears that recordings will be more like advertisements for opportunities that actually do make money: live performances, merchandise, licensing to movies, commercials and video games, ring tones, etc.

We”ll have plenty more in upcoming days, but as a backdrop for the summit, here are a few tidbits of information shared by publicist Ariel Hyatt about U.S. album sales in 2008:

More than 115,000 albums were released

Only 110 sold more than 250,000 copies

A mere 1,500 topped 10,000 sales

Fewer than 6,000 cracked the 1,000 barrier

Further evidence that sales of recorded music are not the way of the future for artists. Instead, it increasingly appears that recordings will be more like adverstisements for opportunities that actually do make money: live performances, merchandise, licensing to movies, commercials and video games, ring tones, etc.

Link to the original article

04.10.2009 Music Business No Comments

“Begun, The Loudness War Has.”

Monday, June 29th, 2009

Okay, so technically the Loudness War began a looooong time ago.

I was recently interviewed for a featured article on this because of my connection with TurnMeUp.org. More on that in a moment.

If this whole “Loudness War” thing is unfamiliar to you, here’s the quick and dirty from Wikipedia:

The trend of increasing loudness as shown by waveform images of Something by The Beatles mastered on CD four times since 1983.

“The loudness war (or loudness race) is the music industry’s tendency to record, produce, and broadcast music at progressively increasing levels of loudness to attempt to create a sound that stands out from others.

“This phenomenon can be observed in many areas of the music industry, particularly broadcasting and albums released on CD and DVD. In the case of CDs, the war stems from artists’ and producers’ desires to create CDs that sound as loud as possible, or louder than CDs from competing artists or recording labels.

“However, as the maximum amplitude of a CD is at a fixed level, once that level has been reached, the overall loudness can only be increased by a combination of dynamic range compression and make-up gain. This is done by applying an increasingly high ratio of compression to the dynamic range of the recording and then increasing the gain of the recording until the peaks have reached maximum. Certain extreme uses of dynamic range compression can introduce distortion or clipping to the waveform of the recording.”

Here’s a video that also explains the Loudness War in a very quick and easy manner:

Now we come to the self-serving part of this post.

A while back, Charles Dye, John Ralston and I founded http://TurnMeUp.org as way for an artist to fight back against the loudness trend and release a dynamic record if they so choose.

I was recently interviewed on the subject by David Sason of Bohemian.com and the it’s now out. Here’s the beginning of the interview with a link to the rest of it. Thanks for the great story David!

It’s called “soundcheck” on the iPod. On some television sets, its name is “steady sound.” Today, virtually every electronic entertainment device has some sort of built-in volume control, seeking to level the increasingly jarring fluctuation in the loudness of audio or video content in the 21st century. “What’s probably most noticeable to people is how loud a commercial is on television when it comes on,” says Allen “Big Al” Wagner, recording industry veteran and proprietor of Big Toe Studio in Vancouver, Wash. “That’s the same technology being used to make music louder.”

As the cofounder of Turn Me Up!, Wagner, along with engineer-producer Charles Dye and rock musician John Ralston, is trying to counter a trend that’s quickly entering the cultural lexicon via a dramatic term: the “loudness wars,” a moniker that aptly describes the aggressiveness with which the loudness race has progressed and the destructive effect it’s had on the audio arts. Whether rock, hip-hop or jazz, music is roaring like never before. Turn Me Up!–the name tells listeners what to do with quieter, more dynamic albums–aims to hush the blast.

“It’s the equivalent of someone screaming everything they say,” says Wagner. “Imagine taking a painting and saying, ‘It’s not bright enough, so let’s take the Mona Lisa and go over it with all day-glo colors so that all the colors scream, all the time.”