Here’s another great article on the “behind the scenes” money stories of the music industry. This comes from a posting over at techdirt.

We recently had a fun post about Hollywood accounting, about how the movie industry makes sure even big hit movies “lose money” on paper. So how about the recording industry? Well, they’re pretty famous for doing something quite similar.

Reader Jay pointed out in the comments an article from The Root that goes through who gets paid what for music sales, and the basic answer is not the musician. That report suggests that for every $1,000 sold, the average musician gets $23.40.

Here’s the chart that the article shows, though you should read the whole article for all of the details:

Of course, it’s actually even more ridiculous than this report makes it out to be.

Going back ten years ago, Courtney Love famously laid out the details of recording economics, where the label can make $11 million… and the actual artists make absolutely nothing. It starts off with a band getting a massive $1 million advance, and then you follow the money…

Read the rest of the article here…

RIAA Accounting: Why Even Major Label Musicians Rarely Make Money From Album Sales is a post from: Home Recording Studio Guru

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This is a very interesting post from Greg Sandoval over at Cnet News.

The Internet is a killer of art–at least that’s how a couple of former rock ‘n’ roll gods see it.

John Mellencamp, known for such ’80s hits as “Jack and Diane” and “Hurts So Good,” last week said the Web is the most dangerous creation since the atomic bomb. Stevie Nicks, the Fleetwood Mac songstress, concluded in an interview this week that the “Internet has destroyed rock.”

We have to be free enough with our music to permit people to adapt it for their own purposes. - Jack Holzman (Credit: Warner Music Group)

Jac Holzman, the man who discovered The Doors, founded Elektra Records, and nudged the big recording companies into adopting the compact disc, considers the Web and says: “I think the music industry has a bright future.”

Wow, that’s quite a contrast in views. The difference is Holzman has witnessed most of the industry-shaking technologies during his six decades in the music business–and he’s not panicking.

This year, the 79-year-old celebrates Elektra’s 60th anniversary, and at a life stage when Holzman’s biggest trouble might be choosing the right 9-iron, he’s helping to search for answers to the music industry’s burning digital questions. He has said in the past that there were those in the record business who didn’t think he was relevant any longer, but Holzman is back in the thick of it. Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. sought him out, hired him as a senior adviser, and sees value in the context Holzman can provide.

“I love the way Jac approaches the intersection of music and technology–through the lens of opportunity,” Bronfman said.

At spotting opportunities, Holzman has a notable record. As a 19-year-old, Holzman started Elektra with $300 he received at his bar mitzvah. The label would later go to sign such acts as Queen, Judy Collins, The Stooges, and Jim Morrison. After Holzman sold Electra to Warner Communication (a forerunner of Warner Music Group and Warner Bros. Pictures), he became WCI’s chief technology officer. In that role, he helped oversee some of the company’s film and TV ventures.

When Jack Valenti, the chief of the Motion Picture Association of America, was trying to kill video recorders and comparing them to the Boston Strangler, Holzman was pushing WCI leaders to embrace the home-video market. With cable TV he recognized its potential early and contributed to the development of pay-per-view programming.

In music, Holzman saw the rise of the LP, 8-track tape, DAT, compact disc, MP3, and BitTorrent. After all that, new technologies don’t spook him. On the contrary, he says many of these technologies helped make a lot of artists and industry people rich. When it comes to the Internet and digital distribution, Holzman is confident music labels can capitalize on them too. He says they really don’t have a choice.

Read the rest of the article here…

Music Tech Guru Says Web Is Not The Enemy is a post from: Home Recording Studio Guru

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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

Is The Future Of Music Really This Bleak? is a post from: Home Recording Studio Guru

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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.

“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.”

Go to the rest of the article at Bohemian.com »

“Begun, The Loudness War Has.” is a post from: Home Recording Studio Guru

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