Music Formats

Do people still do that?

There is a “performance” in opening a new cd/vinyl, appreciating the artwork, reading the lyrics etc, wipe the surface if the disc and pressing play or placing the needle onto the record. But in reality nowadays it’s more like “Alexa play............”

 

I refuse to stream music and buy everything I listen to. I know too many folk involved in music that make nowt from it. ☹️

 

I think it a double edge sword, the steaming services be that subscription or free (with adverts) does open the music up to a far wider audience,one which may never have forked out for a whole album on an artist they don't know or have only heard 1 song? And on the back of that audience it must have a positive impact on touring and merchandising and they make far more money from that than through CD or Album sales.

The reality is that without the likes of Apple Music, Amazon, Spotify etc what sort of state would the music industry be in. They were losing the battle against the likes of Napster then Bit Torrent and Limewire for which the artist and record company were getting 1 CD sale and then it was shared to millions for nothing!
Luckily the industry got on board with Steve Jobs idea for his iTunes Store although they weren't initially happy with the idea of selling songs individually at 99cents, felling they would lose out on the profits of a whole album sale, fortunately they saw sense.

 

When I was mobile, I used to buy vinyl from either Flashback Records in London of Forest Vinyl in The Forest of Dean.


http://forestvinyl.co.uk/
https://flashback.co.uk/
I've got all of my vinyl and CDs in mp3 formal and play stuff on my computer or music centre as they both take sticks (where I store everything). I find that this works well and I can have one place to store everything. Nowadays, I buy modern stuff but just download it on mp3 format - but I do BUY it!

 

As a musician and sound engineer I would like people to purchase music rather than listen to it for free.

I have to admit that when I have to learn a song that I don’t already own a copy of I don’t pay for it. I listen to it for free. However the artist does get money from PRS when I play their song live. The artists in this case are well established highly successful acts that have had many top 40 hits so they hopefully won’t miss the fact that I didn’t buy one of their songs.

The way things are at the moment smaller artists don’t make money from recorded music. They make money from live performances.

One of my friend’s songs has over 1.5 million watches on YouTube. He earned nothing from that because the majority of the views were on other people’s channels who had posted his song for people to hear. However it did result in him getting gigs all over the world.

Many bands who can draw crowds of 1,000 plus to their gigs earn so little from their music that they have to have day jobs.

What is happening to the music business is that it is only artists who can afford not to work who have the time to dedicate to their music and the online promotion of it who are likely to become successful. There has been a significant increase in the number of artists who are funded by their parents in recent years.

The ease of access to music online, which gives artists the ability to reach wider audiences, is unfortunately reducing the number of artists making music and restricting new music creation to those who can afford to fund it themselves and don’t need to make money from it.

 

I buy my music & then digitally convert it too highest quality formats my sat nav et cetra use.

 

I go down the library and borrow albums then copy them onto C90 cassettes - is that what you're meant to do?

Got all the 'Now that's what I call music' stuff

 

Has anything really changed then? New artists have never been paid much for what they produce, for years EMI paid The Beatles 1.4%, 1 old penny per single and 2 shillings per album and overseas sales were only half a penny.

 

I prefer having control over my music in my way. That has meant I buy the cd and then download it to any device I wish no matter what the operating system is. If something hits the fan then I've gotten the start from new refresh cd.

 

Artists have always been exploited by record companies and managers and that hasn’t changed. You only have to see the contract that X Factor competitors have to sign to realise that exploitation in the music business is still alive and well. In essence the contract says that you are their property to do with as they want until such time as they decide they don’t want you and they own every photo, video and audio recording that has ever been taken of you and they can do whatever they want with them.

But some things have changed with the advent of readily available free music. It has really hit the record companies quite hard. Their traditional business model of selling a product by an artist no longer works. They now sign artists on what are known as 360 deals, where they have their fingers in everything that the artist does (touring, merchandise, publishing, etc.). Gone are the days when bands like Iron Maiden could finance a tour just from selling t-shirts. That worked because the record company had nothing to do with the tour or merchandise and weren’t taking a percentage of everything. It was a separate entity run by the band and their management. Tours and promotional events for an artist’s next album are now booked a year or more in advance, before they have even started writing the songs. The dates are set in stone. Budgets for recording are strictly controlled and are far smaller than they used to be, which has resulted in the closure of many recording studios. Many quite successful bands have run out of record company paid for studio time in recent years and have had to finish albums off using their own money rather than an advance on their future earnings, which is what the record company’s money is. Gone are the days when bands could delay the release of an album by months and go massively over budget (e.g. Songs In The Key of Life by Stevie Wonder).

Record companies used to sign unknown bands from demos, give them a large advance and put them in a studio with a producer to record some songs. Now a record company advance will be tiny if it even exists. The record companies aren’t interested in you unless you’ve already got hundreds of thousands of social media followers and millions of listens to your music. You also need to be playing gigs to thousands of people a night. However without a big sum of money behind you and lots of free time how are you going to achieve that? Thing is, if you can do that what do you need a record company for? Just for distribution of your product. Which rather scuppers the business model of the record companies.

For dance music producers things have changed as well. 15 years ago you would get paid a good fee to do a remix of someone’s song. Now you’re expected to do the remix for free (along with several other producers) and if your mix is released by the record company you’ll only get royalties (a very small non-negotiable percentage). That can mean weeks or even months of work for no money. Even if something is released you probably won’t see any money until at least six months after you did the work. You need to already have a lot of money, have someone else bankrolling you or a rather flexible well paid part time job to be able to work like that.

 

My sandwich maker is also a classically trained pianist, so she plays really good tunes for me.

 

what like when SkyNet crash the system and the machines take over?