Longing for the day ...

Music like exercise

For the parts of the music industry that based their business model on recording music this change has been devastating but for the parts concerned with making music it has been a bonus. More music is being written and performed than ever before, which means that more musical instruments and equipment are being sold and more music education is being demanded.

The future of music is more like exercise than water. It's something we should all do more of for our own health and wellbeing, but the vast majority of people will never be any more than amateurs. It's about participation, not consumption.

I have been asked to speculate at this point about what the future might hold but I'm not going to speculate about the entire industry. This book concerns Independent musicians - especially those who self-publish. For them I have four insights:

1) It is vital for your business and your sanity that you separate your art from the industry. If you want to make art in your lounge room, please do and enjoy doing it. Be as out-there creative as you like - but don't assume you can make a living. Building or finding a market for your art requires compromise. It's that simple.

2) Don't assume that enforcing your copyright is the only way to derive income from your creativity. Controlling use and deriving income were linked in the 20th century because of an accident of technological history. Music is not a product, it's the service of entertaining people and touching their lives. Locking the music away removes your music from the marketplace or deters people who want your music.

3) Music careers in this century will be built on relationships with people whose lives your art touches. It is far better to use the products of your music business to build relationships with people and provide a service to them. They will reward you for your gifts. The best way to reach out is to make a gift of your music and know that enough people will appreciate your gifts to support you.

4) The 21st century has seen a heap of new revenue streams for musicians to tap. A pretty good summary of these is found here but more will almost certainly emerge over the next few years. The musicians who take best advantage of these will be the ones who think laterally about what they do and why people want to support it. Further innovation will be needed.

Summary:

The past few yeas have shaken the music industry to its core, put many people out of work and created unprecedented opportunities to musicians who frustrated for most of the 20th century. Those who look ahead and think creatively about these opportunities will flourish in the 21st century, while those stuck on old thinking will struggle.

To thine own self be true

Being tall doesn't make you a good basketballer. Being fast doesn't make you a good footballer. Being smart doesn't make you a good doctor. Those things help, and it's more difficult to succeed without them, but they're not enough on their own.

There are many other aspects to making any kind of career, most of which involve years of learning, training and development. A great deal of teamwork is also required, whether team mates are on the field or in the coach's box, or wearing a physiotherapy coat during rehab sessions.

Similarly, being good at playing guitar or singing doesn't make you a rock star. If you're not prepared to put the effort into developing as an artist, learning to use technologies, meeting people, doing accounting etc, you will struggle to build a career as a professional musician. The careers of the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and U2 took years of growth and the support of many non-musicians.

Building a sustainable music career is too big to do alone. The key too growth is to know your strengths and weaknesses and work to build a team that takes on the responsibilities at which you are weakest and allows you to concentrate on your strengths. This is the tentacle metaphor at work and the reason to build esteem among peers and colleagues.

If you're honest about your strengths and weaknesses, team building can be prioritised and strategised. You may need help with publicity or accounting but are confident booking gigs. If you have a bandmate or peer - or even a fan - who's good at those roles, figure out what you can do for them and do a contra deal. If it works, everyone moves ahead and you're relieved of a burden into the future.

Remember that it is perfectly fine to only want to play a covers set at the local bar once a month with your mates but there's no glory in being a Hobbyist-in-Denial. The success of the music industry has always been based on the efforts of amateur and semi-professional musicians in finding talent, grooming talent and giving talent an opportunity to stand out from the crowd.

There are no right or wrong answers to questions of your musical ambition. Perhaps your Glorious Musical Future lies in giving up dreams of super-stardom and helping others to achieve their musical goals.

Summary:

A brutally frank self awareness is essential if you want to reach your goals. This helps identify aspects of a music business that take up time that would be better spent on other things and finding someone else to share the load. Sometimes this involves knowing that you love performing and writing but suck at it. Some of the best and happiest agents, managers and publicists were once wanna-be performers.

Third legs, tentacles and trust

Having designed your music business with these 5 principles in mind, you should operate the business based on three pillars: third legs, tentacles and trust. These are the things that will help you rise above the crowd, grow your music career, and ensure your future.

The third leg metaphor is discussed in the pages above. It is a reason for people to talk about your act and need not be musical. What contribution do you want your music to make to other people's lives and to the culture more broadly? Does your act have an interesting back story? Do you stand for cause? Are you prepared to do things to produce or promote your music that no-one else has done before? What cane you do that will get people interested in you and keen to find out about your music?

Tentacles are a metaphor for the networks through which you collect Esteem and convert it into services and free labour. The tentacles extend from a central point and act to bring all the services, cash, expressions of support and offers of assistance back to your base. They also work to take messages from your base into your fanbase, out to your peers and colleagues. As your career grows, the tentacles reach further into the industry and into the community.

Trust is the basis of Esteem, upon which the strength of the business depends. People must trust that your songs will be meaningful; that your performances will always be memorable; that your act will be professional; and that your negotiations will be reasonable. In turn, you must trust that they will support your efforts. Relationships built on this trust will sustain a career through the inevitable setbacks and hardships.

These three pillars help to apply the Novelty Principle in a way that is consistent with your Personality to gather Esteem that centralises at a point under your direction (Propinquity) and accrues over time (Synchrony)?

The combination of these three operational pillars with the 5 design principles on the previous page provides a solid foundation for any 21st century music business. But the details of the business plan will needs to be tailored to each musician's individual circumstances - starting with their goals.

Summary:

Being creative and reliable in non-musical ways can attract the attention of networks of people. It is then up to the musicians to deliver on their promises and build trust in them and their music. If they can do that, a business structured according to the 5 principles offers the best chance to convert their esteem into income.

5 principles for the digital future

There is no sure-fire digital-media recipe for making a living as an Independent musician but these 5 principles underpin the strategy that musicians with long-term sustainable careers take:

1) Esteem. Part 2 discusses this in detail. Anyone who wants a career as a musician must look to build esteem strategically from the various sources: fans, peers and colleagues. It must apply to all aspects of what a musician does, including non-musical ones. Base a career on people who love who you are and what you do.

2) Propinquity - refers to the tendency for things to come to a central point. The Long Tail theory works only when abundant resources can be administered at very low marginal cost and an efficient business of this kind will, for example, update all of their social media statuses at a single point such as Artistsdata.com and collect revenue from all sales points at one account like Paypal.

3) Synchrony - refers to a tendency for all times to become one. Everything a musician does accumulates a benefit over time. When people find the musician's latest release, they want to know about that musician's back catalogue. They will be interested in the aggregated career history and back story that can be found on a blog that has operated continuously for years. Each effort in the present builds on the successes of the past and can be counted on in the future.

4) Personality - everything a musician does should be consistent with the act's personality, even changing over time. This is a key aspect of branding the act but it goes waaay beyond image and sound. It includes life perspective in songs over time (fans age at the same rate as the songwriters), it includes social causes, product endorsements and political statements. This works harshly against one-hit wonders and novelty acts and requires a real human connection between artist and fan.

5) Novelty - giving a musician's sources of esteem regular reasons to think about them is vital for career momentum. Regular blog updates, status updates, new songs, and new shows are good stuff but opinions on current events, reviews of TV shows or movies also add value. Anything that gives fans, peers or colleagues a reason to keep an artist top-of-mind, no matter how fleetingly. Care must be taken not to overdo it though, or you might become viewed as a spammer. It's important to stay focused on one personality.

Summary:

Successful, sustainable 21st century music businesses will be designed on 5 principles: Esteem, Propinquity, Synchrony, Personality and Novelty. They will tailor these principles to their particular quirks and goals, but will have to ensure that all of them are included in their business design.

The power lies in the network

Great art is never created in isolation. It requires interaction for inspiration and cultural context. It requires materials and tools from other sources. It requires development and refinement - and a third party to answer the eternal question: "Does this piece really say what I'm trying to say?"

More broadly, artists have to be taught their skills and practice them with guidance from others. Most of the great artists of history learned from a number of teachers and reached the highest levels with a mentor who was usually a great artist.

Finally, in order to become great art, a work needs a huge number of people to appreciate it, discuss it and thus promote it. A work cannot touch anyone's life if no-one knows it exists.

This is the great asset of the major labels: a large network of very efficient production, distribution and promotions people. They were able to do so because of the dominance of broadcast media but those economics have changed in the 21st century. Although the majors still dominate the broadcast media, those media are no longer the only way for musicians to find their audience.

Independent musicians have to develop the same capacities: highly effective production, distribution and promotion. For a musician who just wants to be a musician, this can be the major stumbling block in a career.

Fortunately, another effect of 21st century technologies has been the growth in the number of people who specialise in these areas. Like musicians, some of these are talented amateurs and some are full-time professionals. It is up to the musicians to find people who can help them extend their business.

Help of this kind might come from fans, peers or colleagues but it will only come if a musician builds a large network of these. That requires genuine engagement with fans, community engagement with peers and business networking with colleagues. Get to know them and understand their abilities and preferences. Learn as much as you can from everyone. Get their feedback and offer to help them in their work.

Then it is simply a matter of asking the right person at the right time. You want to hear the words "Sure. I will help you with that."

Summary:

The opportunity to take your career to the next level will probably come from someone who knows someone you know. Make a conscious effort to get involved with as many music industry people as you can: agents, managers, lawyers, promoters, songwriters, performers, songwriting and performance teachers, songwriting and performance groups, and so on. If you do, there is no limit to your career potential.

How-to is the new What

The traditional view of a musician's work is that they write and/or perform a song and then try to sell the song and/or recording to other performers or to fans. However, Part 1 of this book is dedicated to demonstrating the narrowness and folly of this view.

What artists of all kinds actually do is touch other people's lives and help them enjoy their existence - by growing their business, sharing their experiences, or enabling their escape from the mundane. When you view a musician's work in this way, many more sources of value and esteem become apparent.

Under the 20th century model, musicians produced a musical product and fans consumed 'What' the band produced. In the 21st century it is increasingly difficult to make money from selling the 'what'. Music is not a product, it is a service. Showing people 'How-to' do what you do can be more lucrative than selling 'What' you did.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and many people would pay good money to get a one-hour guitar masterclass from Eddie Van Halen or a session on production from Timbaland even though they may never believe they can be as good as those guys. Private music teaching has always been about this and as the cottage-industry structure takes over, this also applies to local songwriters, video makers and other creative types who have a record of esteemable creativity.

Your How-to output need not be limited to face-to-face classes. Instructional DVDs, books, blog posts and Youtube video can get the same effect. The key is to become involved in sharing tips, tricks and techniques with people - building aspirational new relationships and gathering more esteem from all sources in online and offline communities.

Many mid-level musicians have always known this and moved into a How-to career after their performing career ended (or at least, after it peaked). They took up other roles in the industry, or became teachers, speakers, authors or academics.

Adding a how-to element to a musician's business plan can be the tipping point at which the day job can be left behind. This may be very lucrative and enable musicians to moving between the 12 categories mentioned above: from The Unsigned, DIY to The DTF-With-a-Team; or from The Professional, Gigging Musician to The Signed Artist.

Summary:

Helping others to improve their skills by sharing yours can be a fulfilling as well as lucrative addition to a musician's business. This involves making connections with others and thinking laterally about what you do as a musician - and being prepared to share it and gather esteem for your contribution to others' lives.

It's cheap but it's not that easy

Starting with recordings in the early 1850s, music technologies worked to concentrate industrial power into the hands of ever-larger businesses, who had the financial resources to mass-market music-related product. But since MIDI the 1970s, music production technologies have worked to reduce production costs and allow less-financial musicians to create and perform on their terms.

Home-studio equipment, starting with clunky reel-to-reel multi-tracks, then four-track cassette tape machines, SMTP hybrid systems and eventually fully on-board PC recording, reduced the cost of recording and processing sound dramatically. Developments in microphone and monitor technologies made capturing and reproducing studio-quality sound achievable in a Do-It-Yourself home studio.

Portable CD burners meant that digital recordings could be compiled into albums and replicated for a fraction of the cost of manufacturing in a commercial plant. Email allowed musicians to communicate Direct-To-Fans, peers, and colleagues for almost nothing; the world-wide web allowed almost unlimited distribution of perfect copies of digital files; and social networks have enabled people to form into like-minded groups and to actively seek others with interests similar to their own.

There are two problems in this wonderland of opportunity. First, there is nothing to stop others from doing the same thing - meaning that there is a lot more music in the market and it's more difficult to call attention to your music. Hence the complaint about hobbyists.

The second is that being able to own the technology does not automatically mean that the technology will be used well. Hence the growth in small commercial studios, Independent labels and home-based promotion businesses. Most of the recordings available are not very good and very few of them will set the world on fire. Similarly, most of the world's music marketing efforts suffer from poor writing and lousy communication design. Many musicians struggle to embed store widgets in web pages.

It takes years of training and practice to become a good audio engineer or online marketer. It takes even more to produce and market a world-class. Musicians either have to pay either way: spend their time and money learning to use the equipment or hire someone who has already developed their skills and studio.

Summary:

New technologies enable cost-effective DIY production and DTF distribution and promotion but access to the technologies is not enough. Adopting the technology requires and investment in learning to use them. Sometimes it is more cost-effective to employ a person who has the expertise and networks than to spend the time developing them.

It's still a long way to the top

A 2003 Australian study called Don't give up your day job found that musicians did better from their art than any other type of artist. But on average their incomes were "little different from those of all occupational groups, including non-professional and blue-collar occupations".

The commercial challenges of artistic creativity were highlighted by the finding that although artists spent 81% of their time on artistic work, they earned only 66% of their income from it. This frightening statistic appears more dire when put next to "about half of Australia's practicing professional artists earned less than $10,000 from their creative work".

This pattern of non-musical income supporting musical efforts is repeated all over the Western world, with the proportion of self-described musicians who have a day job consistently in the low-90%. In most cases, musicians' day jobs involve teaching music or selling musical equipment, which is really just a low-brow version of what brand-endorsed recording artists have done for years.

In the cottage industry described on the previous page, Independent musicians range from amateur stay-home songwriters to full-time professional writer/performers. Despite the massive investment in musical education in schools, the abilities, priorities and expectations of Independent musicians remain as varied as the music they produce.

Some stop playing the clarinet after high school. Some will quit their band and get a "real" job when they graduate from university and many will turn their talents to performing in amateur theatres, community bands and "Weekend Warriors" acts because they enjoy the show without the pressure of having to make a living from their efforts. A precious few will make a living from their music business.

One recent article outlined 12 categories of musician ranging from "The Hobbyist" to "The Superstar Signed Artist", with detours into non-performing songwriters and producers. The difference in the 21st century is that it is much easier for musicians to change between categories to suit their goals and lifestyle choices than it has ever been before - but it is also more difficult for an act to stand out among this enormous depth of talent unless they have a massive promotion budget.

Summary:

Twenty-first century technologies have leveled the musical playing field. It is easier for musicians to achieve modest goals, including a sustainable living from their music, than ever before but it is also more difficult to achieve superstar status and even more difficult to achieve superstar income. You don't need to "beak through" any more just to make something out of your music.

These things will change, can you feel it now?

In the 1996 Australian Census, 4910 Australians listed "instrumental musician" or "singer" as the main job they were doing in the week before census night and 217 nominated "composer". By 2006 these figures were reduced to 29 musicians and 11 composers.

However, there were 541 businesses "comprising record companies, distributors, manufacturers of recorded music, music publishers and sound recording studios active in the field of music" in 1996 and by 2006 there were 855 sound recording studios and 678 recorded media manufacturing & publishing businesses. Further, in 2006 more than half of these (58%) were non-employing, or solo owner-operated, businesses.

This represents a major industry restructure and is repeated all over the Western world. It is the result of the increased affordability of production and distribution technologies discussed in Part 1, combined with a trend for schools and colleges to provide training in how to use the new technologies and a trend for advertisers to sync to chart hits rather than musicians who write and record jingles. It is a great opportunity for musicians to enter the market and build a small music business.

There are less full-time professional musicians but more semi-professional and part-time musicians and, consequently, more services helping those musicians to do their thing. This is exactly the redistribution that Chris Anderson's Long Tail theory predicts and it has been occurring since DJs playing records were found to be more cost-effective than live musicians for gathering audiences for broadcast or at dance halls.

Recently, the decline in full-time employment of musicians has caught the attention of the blogosphere, with Tommy Silverman complaining about "hobbyists" who "clutter the music environment with crap" and destroy the fortunes of full-time musicians. What he's really saying is that it's much more difficult for the major companies' handful of big acts to dominate they way they used to - even with their massive marketing budgets - while more modest acts like Corey Smith have risen to comparative prominence by playing well-written songs live and forming meaningful relationships with their fans.

Summary:

The music industry is reverting to the cottage industry it was before technology created a temporary scarcity of access to musical experiences. The new industry will be typified by a huge number of amateur and semi-professional musicians, a smaller "musical middle class" of almost-professional and professional musicians making a living from some combination of several music-related revenue streams, and a very few people who can make a decent living as full-time music stars.