Technology and the musician

Bob-Dubery

Richard Thompson, who cut his first album in '67, recently performed at something called Techonomy in the USA. He did performance and interviews. There was a lot of talk about how technology impacted on musicians. In this clip Thompson talks about how technology has effected the way he records, his income, the way he collaborates, the way he interacts with fans and the way he gets music for listening to. It's quite interesting given that he's been in the business since the 60s and has seen and coped with lots of changes. Also because he's still a hard working musician - still tours a lot, still releases new work regularly, does collaborative work with other artists. Never having had big hits he's not able to sit back and watch the royalties from multi-platinum albums come in - IE he's in the same boat as many working musicians.

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Interesting for me are his comment about ticket prices for shows. One revenue stream is declining and so musicians pump another harder and push the price up. This, I think, also explains why so many bands are reforming and hitting the road again.

The "on tape" recording he refers to was made at Buddy Miller's studio in Nashville.

There's another, longer, clip available via his website. What's interesting here (I haven't watched the whole thing) are his comments about Spotify. Seems that some of these music streaming sites are not putting much money into the artist's pocket.

Bob-Dubery

This report http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/aug/17/major-labels-spotify suggests that major labels (thought not necessarily the acts signed to them) may like Spotify a lot, and of course we know that the listeners do. For everybody else involved it's not so good.

Indie labels and their artists don't do well out of Spotify at all.

There are indie labels that, as opposed to the majors and Merlin members, receive no advance, receive no minimum per stream and only get a 50% share of ad revenue on a pro-rata basis (which so far has amounted to next to nothing).

If you're signed to a major label then the label might get the money, but you might not get so much.

For artists who "signed up to a label" there's a tangible risk that revenue which comes from a possible sale of shares by the label would end up in the proverbial "blackbox" (non-attributable revenue that remains with the label). There's growing concern about this in the artist management community and, a few weeks ago, Bob Dylan decided to pull his back catalogue from UK streaming services.