Quote:
Ad supported music takes the choice of music away from music fans and hands it over to advertisers who want to choose music that will sort people into different demographic groups.
In truth, advertising supported anything has virtually always been artistic suicide.
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In all reality, its the artist that gets to make that decision, not the music fan, and where have you been? Record labels have been sifting music group catalogs into demographics, since oh just recently, the 1950's.
However, seeing that you are in the business, I figured Id respond from the opposite side of the fence, as a musician.
Musicians, especially unsigned musicians, have been enticed with the social networking concept so much that they officially give their songs away everyday on Myspace, Tagworld, Garageband.com in exchange for attention, all while making the parent website rich with advertisement dollars. Nothing however of those dollars goes to the content provider. Attention is always nice and some bands have even grown a following based on the tools that these websites provide. However, the whole thing is ad based and deceptive.In fact, you may be like most people and still believe "Tom" of Myspace started the website and that he started it from his garage, which is a big little
PR Lie to get people to come for the advertisement. They decided along time ago that the social networking site needed a face that people could relate to and the fact that Myspace offered bands a way to promote their music after MP3.com failed, eUniversal the actual company that started myspace, felt that it was a golden idea to increase market share. Since the fact was, that artist would never be paid to put their music on the website and such was voluntary, in exchange, Myspace got to convert the music to its own use without royalty.
However, for the most part, the deludge and enormous amount of choices in music on these major sites. The music fan and or regular users of these sites are becoming more and more aware of the trickery that bands utilize to get people to hear their music. The biggest question is for what? So they can say, "hey cool song" and "hey I'll come to a show". Most of the people never do, the traditional method of gigging until you make it, still applies for all new artists.
The idea that someone might purchase from the ever so popular "Snocap", which was supposed to be the saving grace to musicians on Myspace, in my utter opinion has flopped, so has I-tunes! When on average the general ipod owner only purchases 15 songs a year, that's less than one album. Yet oddly enough, the average user listens to more than 900 songs a year and in certain demographics exponentially more. Have you ever seen an Ipod with only 15 songs in it? Neither have I. They got the music somewhere, and I truly doubt that all of it was purchased. Why is this okay? Where in society can you walk in and rip something off and say well Im a fan, I need to have this song. Its not stealing. Yes, it is.
My research shows that common users dont want to buy music, they want it free, at least in digital form. If they really like the band, they will purchase CD's and if they really really like the song, they will download it from I-Tunes which has the largest market share of Digital downloads even though I mentioned how troubling the statistics really are. Of course the user would rather buy the hard copy, since its tangible. But even then, most artists find it troubling to get on to I-tunes, while others have discovered Tunecore.com which basically resells its memebership to I-Tunes to artist who could not be approved by I-Tunes originally.
When someone hears a bands music on commercial radio, most users never stop to think about the support that artist is getting, and the studios, the mixing engineers, the mastering engineers, the lawyers, labels, publicist, managers, and every other person who makes a successful artist commercial.
The ad supported model promotes that people listen to the songs and the advertisement just like you an I watch Television. The radio stations long ago addressed the issue of providing royalty to artists for their content. Why should the internet be any different? For far too long, the music industry has been held hostage by illegal piracy and users demanding that the business either give it away for free, let them listen for free, or something that doesn't involve the user shelling out dollars for the entertainment that the artist provides. Apparently, some where along the way it has become socially acceptable that artists do it for the music, which believe it or not they do in part. However, music comes with an economical and realistic price tag. "There aint no such thing as a free lunch", Whereas, if the artist is not earning a living off its endeavors, it is forced to work day jobs, release less content, and be protective of everything it gives to the user and or listener. Additionally, labels are signing less and less artists to their rosters, for fear of failure, losses towards piracy, and only signing artist whom have spammed millions of people to get their rankings up. Without a new model like the one proposed , Studios like that on Gearslutz will suffer greatly in the long run. Artist like myself will be screwed....
Devon Drake