Week 6- Digital Marketplace for Musicians

For this week’s readings I gathered a mixture of peer-reviewed journal articles and blog postings from prominent industry figures in order to get a clearer picture of the range of digital marketing options for independent musicians.

These readings helped contextualize first the history of music marketing and its various stages, revealing that the music industry model has, in many ways, come full circle. “Interpersonal music marketing” was the first incarnation of delivering music to an audience, direct from musician to consumer (Ogden, Ogden & Long, 120). With the development of recording technology, radio, distribution channels, and the 20^th century music business model many more components and players were introduced to the process. One effect of these developments was to galvanize resources and power at level of the major record label, resulting in ballooning profit margins and less control for the artist (ibid, 123-124).

Beginning in the later 1990s, these business models slowly collapsed in spectacular fashion, victims of their own avarice and the stiff resistance to shifts in digital music distribution and consumption. The wake of this disintegration has left the remnants of these labels and artists alike struggling to find new ways of generating sustainable revenue streams (significantly less than the salad days of the pre-naughties). One such strategy (and completing the aforementioned historical “circle” of music marketing) is what is known as the “direct to fan” business model- websites like Bandcamp et al. that allow musicians to sell directly to their fan base. In the case of Bandcamp, the artist’s page can be set up to allow consumers to set the price they are comfortable paying for the product or allowing for a donation type scenario. Berklee School of Music’s music marketing guru Mike King blogs about the band Metric, what he describes as a “middle class” act who sell in the vicinity of 50,000 copies of a given release (King, 2). This is less than what a major act would sell, but still, coming from an underground musician background myself, is certainly a benchmark of sustainable success. King goes on to show that the direct to fan marketing can work for mega-acts like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, etc. as well as mid-size bands like Metric. This business model works in that it greatly reduces the costs associated with bloated record label production and distribution methods, allowing for a much higher profit margin for the artist. I plan to look into the success of this model for smaller independent artists as a part of my larger research project. Watch this space…

Running counter to some of the conventional thinking on the current state of artist survival, Chris Wochagg believes that there is still a way for musicians to focus on the production of music as their main source of revenue. The more common viewpoint sees the music that artists create as “calling cards,” generating little revenue from sales but increasing the artist’s cache and profile (which in turn can allow for sustainable revenue streams from performances, merchandising, etc.). He argues that if online music services were set up in a more “transparent” manner (e.g. defining what amount of money the artist will receive from any given purchase) fans would be more willing to part with their money. He advocates for a “fairtrade” music policy similar to the programme set up for coffee producers (Wochagg, 1). Unfortunately, as one blog commenter points out, this doesn’t take into account that music, unlike coffee, can be shared and re-consumed infinitely through digital means. It also is slow to recognize that music consumers are increasingly moving toward “access models” of music distribution like Spotify, which allow consumers to enjoy music without actually owning it (Wikström, 7).

Works Cited

King, Mike. “Direct to Fan Model Working for Metric.”mikeking.berkleemusicblogs.com. Accessed Sept. 14, 2012. http://mikeking.berkleemusicblogs.com/2009/04/16/direct-to-fan-model-working-for-metric/

Lefsetz, Bob. “Today’s Music Business Paradigm.” Lefstetz.com. Accessed Sept. 14, 2012.             http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2010/12/17/to days-music-business-paradigm/

Ogden, James R., Denise T. Ogden, and Karl Long. “Music marketing: A history  and landscape.” Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 18 (2011): 120–125.

Wikström, Patrik. “A Typology of Music Distribution Models.” International Journal of Music Business Research 1:1 (April 2012): 7-20. 

Week 5- Ruminations on Online Presence for Musicians

The last ten years has seen a radical transformation in the way the music industry, and musicians in particular, operate. Part of the task of an independent musician in the digital age is to not only sell and distribute one’s music but also find new ways in which to develop and maintain a fan base. In order to compete and survive, musicians are increasingly finding themselves using various online applications in order to push their musical output. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Ustream, Youtube channels, and blog sites are a number of ways that musicians regularly connect with their public (and, if set up efficiently, often feed into one another).

One key concept here is “regularity”. In my own experience, frequency of output has a direct bearing on the attention span of your fan base. This applies to both the regularity of musical releases and use of social networking. Patchy and sporadic use of these online tools is far less effective than a measured flow of updates, information and output. This output doesn’t need to be ridiculously dense but regular enough to engage your public’s interest and keep them coming back to periodically check for updates. The problem of course is finding the right balance between online presence and studio endeavours- it makes little sense to spend all of one’s time developing an audience without producing music or having means of making money from this network (e.g. music for sale, performances, merchandise etc.).

Two online tools we have explored in the past weeks are Twitter and Youtube. For our latest digital project, we looked at one of Youtube’s most simple applications- archiving media. In the case of a producer/DJ, being able to share rare and out of print music with the public is a way of increasing your cultural cache and reaching like-minded music fans (especially if you have a song that has yet to surface on Youtube). While uploading copyrighted material can often prove problematic for website and users alike, posting little known songs from unsung musicians can help expose both the artist as well as one’s Youtube channel (especially useful, for instance, if promoting a radio show via that channel) and is less likely of being removed due to copyright infringement. What we attempted to do was create a video embodying the experience of not only hearing the music (in the highest possible Youtube audio resolution) but also of the simple pleasures of seeing a record playing juxtaposed with a cover shot of the album (re-creating, in some way, the physical and aural experience of enjoying vinyl). For this video we chose the song “Mandei Buscar” from the little known Brazilian album De Savoya from 1972. While sound quality was an important aspect of this project we realized after the fact this particular copy of the album had been fairly well played, not quite getting the sound we’d hoped. Nonetheless, being able to upload a hi-resolution vinyl rip to Youtube for the first time will help in casting a net for new fans.

While a Youtube channel may seem like a “long game” approach to amassing a like-minded fan base (it may take months or years for people to start discovering your videos), Twitter can function in a much more immediate, regular and abbreviated manner. Besides regularlity, part of the strategy of Twitter is minimizing phatic (i.e. banal) tweets in favour of topical, interesting, unsung, funny and insightful material. These tweets, coupled with plugging musical projects and strategic networking with other artists and fans, can effectively expand one’s followers in a short amount of time. For a portion of my research project I would like to examine how a number of music artists’ frequency and style of tweets impacts the number of followers they accrue. I would then cross-reference their twitter use with other popularity indicators and industry factors (i.e. how many “likes” their Facebook fan page might have, how many followers they have on Soundcloud, if they are signed to a major or independent label, where they are located, how long they have been relesing music etc.). Through this method of research I hope to reach some conclusions that will help me enhance and improve my own online presence.

Works Cited

danah boyd and Alice Marwick (2012) I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience New Media and Society, 13(1), 114-133.

Ruth A. Deller (2011). Twittering on: audience research and participation using Twitter. Participations, 8 (1).

Kate Crawford (2009). Following you: Disciplines of listening in social media. Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 23 (4), 525-535.

Week 4- YouTube and Online Video

Boosters of internet technology commonly celebrate its transformative effect on culture. The frequency of this fervor endorses a uniformity of opinion, discouraging critical analysis of these suppositions. While there can be little doubt the digital age has radically shifted the manner in which we communicate and share information, there is a need for deeper investigation into how, and how much, these innovations have actually affected various strata of global society. 

In Wall’s “Africa on YouTube,” Ghana and Kenya are case studies in the claim that YouTube has granted Africans greater access to information and, more specific to this study, means of self-representation. While technology is commonly claimed as empowering African citizenry in communication and commerce, Wall’s examination reveals that only a small minority of Africans have access to the internet. The vast majority of YouTube postings about both Ghana and Kenya are made by people living in the West, raising the specter of stereotypical representations of “otherness”, primitive lifestyles and other tropes endemic to colonialist narratives (especially within tourist-themed videos, second most common in this study). What Wall's study reveals is the potential for the internet (and specifically YouTube) to redress issues of global communication, information sharing and self-representation is ultimately dependant on access. 

While Wall’s research is useful in challenging the rhetoric of African self-empowerment through technology, it is undermined somewhat by YouTube’s user profile architecture. The study is admittedly unable to discern which of the participants are of Western heritage and which belong to the wider African diaspora. If one’s ability to engender technological self-representation is dependent on access to said technology, it would serve to reason that Africans living in the west would have more potential to do so. Consider that the majority of the videos Wall uncovers are for entertainment purposes, primarily music videos. Wall notes that many of these videos are emulations of Western musical forms (namely hip-hop), thus by association a phenomenon connected to colonialist legacy. And while America in particular maintains an undeniable cultural hegemony over much of the world, the study overlooks the significant fact that hip-hop in itself is a musical form derived from diasporic African traditions (e.g. griots, Jamaican soundsystem culture, etc.), an exercise of self-expression adapted by African-Americans and in turn emulated by Africans. What I’m suggesting is the reality of African post-colonial representation is more nuanced than Wall’s study would suggest, especially when one considers the role of Africa’s wider diaspora in formation of identity. Okayafrica.com is a good example of a US-based website that gives a platform for greater exposure to African musicians (including but not limited to Ghana and Kenya) and continental issues. 

Works Cited: 

Lucas Hilderbrand (2007). YouTube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge. Film Quarterly. Vol. 61(1), pp48-57. 

Patricia G. Lange ‘(Mis)conceptions about YouTube’ in Lovink, G. and Niederer, S. (eds) Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008. Download under Creative Commons License here: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/publications/inc-readers/videovortex/ 

Melissa Wall (2009). Africa on YouTube: Musicians, Tourists, Missionaries and Aid Workers. International Communication Gazette, Vol. 71(5), pp393-407.

Week 3- Online Audio Culture

As a professional independent musician since the late 1990s, I (and, without exception, all of my contemporaries) have felt the effects of the digital age first-hand. Up to the early-mid noughties we could depend on regular royalty checks from our record labels, a result of selling vinyl records and CDs to a small but consistent audience of underground music enthusiasts. Unless you had a certified underground smash hit (e.g. 10,000+ sales and up) you weren’t getting checks for more than a few thousand dollars at a time, but what we did receive enabled us to pay our rents, bills, expand music collections and occasionally upgrade music gear. In other words, we made a modest living from selling our music.  

It should be no surprise that the changes of the last ten years have seriously challenged our business and artistic practices. As an example, a good record for me would sell 4-5000 vinyl copies in 2000; today I’m lucky to sell 750. Luckily there is a still a niche market for vinyl records, but this has not been the case for CDs which continue to reach new sales lows with each passing year. My own experiences are clearly reflected in the greater music industry- sales of recorded music is down 64% since 1999 (Lowery, 3).

Due to these realities, we have been forced to continually re-evaluate how we reach our markets, sell our wares and make ends meet. While the digital age has decimated music sales, conventional thinking tells us it has also leveled the playing field between (what is left of) the “major labels” and independent labels and musicians. As artists, social media tools such a Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, Soundcloud, Instagram, etc. have all allowed us to reach fans and expand our audience in more intimate and effective ways. We also, via sites like Bandcamp and the like, have the means to sell our music directly to the public. 

Alas, this DIY narrative doesn’t truly reflect the difficulties artists have had surviving, and several of the indie, youtube etc. “success” stories of the past several years were actually PR stunts that had industry backing (McLean, 1370). In addition to this, the past ten years has created an environment where vast sections of music consumers now perceive music as being free (the perceived legality of it bears little consequence), clearly reflected in the nose-diving of music revenues. While a small portion of the public still purchases music, the royalties garnered from these sales are miniscule compared to what they were in the 1990s. Now Spotify, an increasingly popular streaming music service launched in 2008, creates the illusion of legitimacy for consumers while artists are compensated paltry sums. Indie labels who have licenced their catalogues to Spotify are particulary disadvantaged, receiving no advances, no minimum per stream royalty guarantee and a lesser share of ad revenue than major labels enjoy (McLean, 1372). 

I, like most artists, have come to realize that the business model we were used to prior to the noughties will never return and we need to find new ways to create revenue from our artisty (namely gigs, merchandise, synchronization licencing etc.). Nonetheless, we cling to hope that there is a chance for a fairer, more egalitarian business model that will provide artists modest revenues from music sales while still meeting the needs and expectations of the music consumer in the digital age.

Works Cited

Sudip Bhattacharjee, Ram D. Gopal, James R. Marsden (2009). Re-tuning the music industry: can they re-attain business resonance? Communications of the ACM. Vol. 52 (6,) pp136-140.

Rebecca Coyle (2006). Editorial: Ether to 01 - Digitizing Radio. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. Vol. 12(2), pp.123-127.

David Lowery (2012). Letter to Emily White at NPR All Things Considered. Thetrichordist.wordpress.com. 18 June, 2012. Web. 20 June 2012.

Rachel McLean, Paul G. Oliver, David W. Wainwright (2010). The myths of empowerment through information communication technologies; An exploration of the music industries and fan bases. Management Decision, Vol. 48(9), pp.1365-1377.

Week 2- Blogging and Authorship

This week's readings deal with a number of interconnected issues in relation to the practice of blogging. These issues range from technological determinism, affordance, social individualization, phatic culture, and online ethics- all concepts deeply interwoven into the developing practice of blogging.

To date my primary experience with blogging has had to do with posting my weekly radio show (with which I would include play list, a short summary and highlights of the show, and sometimes background a given topic/special/feature for that week) as well as informing visitors of musical projects I was involved with, upcoming gigs, musical or cultural points of interest, etc. Due to time limitations I have scaled back these activities (now using a new site to simply host/podcast the radio show), but the overall goal here was to develop an audience and promote my musical output and viewpoints to a wider audience. Twitter, Soundcloud and Facebook have also been used to the same end.

So with this background I found this week's articles particularly interesting. I realized my own blogging experiences to be, while at the root of it a personalized experience, somewhat limited, specialized, and goal-oriented in scope. In contrast to this, purely personal blogs are one instance of what Vincent Miller refers to in his article as phenomena embodying traits of "phatic communication"- in essence using communication as a means of sharing feelings and establishing social ties instead of to convey ideas or information (Miller, 387-388). This type of communication is clearly endemic to digital culture, one rife with user's status updates and tweets sharing fairly banal moments in their lives. This phenomenon is a product of the increasingly individualization of society, where "communities are less bound by history, place and tradition," (388). In such a community, individuals seek social intimacy via different means (in this case by way of various social media) and are highly dependent on the "trust and security" garnered through these social connections.

While I myself have been known to transmit the occasional personalized tweet or updates (functioning in this "phatic" mode), I feel this type of communication can be a liability for reaching new audiences. If, as a musician, my goal is to expand my fan base and market, then any engagement I have with social media should be topical, interesting, funny, entertaining, artistic, and/or pertinent to who I am as an artist. I would argue that minimizing this type of communication is essential, especially in the early stages of acruing followers, "friends", etc. This is especially true when attempting to reach people who do not know you personally (their need to know what you just ate isn't necessarily pertinent to why they are following you- one would presume to find out more about your artistic output and opinion). Having said that, established artists/celebrities/cultural icons can and do use social media in this "phatic" mode in order to create imagined social intimacy with fans/followers. In some sense this runs counter to the conventional thinking that public figures value privacy, but in this way social media is an indispensable tool for promoting, marketing, and growing one's fan base.

Works Cited

Mark Cenite et al (2009). Doing the right thing online: a survey of bloggers' ethical beliefs and practices. New Media and Society. Vol. 11(4), pp575-97.

Lucas Graves (2007). The affordances of blogging: a case study in culture and technological effects. Journal of Communication Inquiry. Vol. 31(4), pp331-46.

Vincent Miller (2008). New Media, Networking and Phatic Culture. Convergence. Vol. 14(4), pp387-400.

Week 1- Web 2.0 Empowerment

Welcome to Attache, a collection of humble rumblings related to the themes covered in FTVMS712 Digital Media.

For week one the readings I focussed on primarily dealt with the broad implications of Web  2.0 and how its clearly transformative effect on society deserves more scrutiny. Much Web 2.0 rhetoric relies on a marriage of countercultural and capitalist overtones, bearing many similarities to the language of political manifestos. For instance, Web 2.0 manifestos, like their political counterparts, employ tactics such as addressing their audience as "we" (reinforcing the collectivist "prosumer" aesthetic of these new platforms) as well as referencing the present day as the "beginning a new era" in which users are equally consumers and producers of information (Djiek, Nieborg, 857-858). Contrary to this characterization, recent studies show that only 13 percent of people online are actual content creators, begging the question of how much old business models of has really changed (861). That said, It would be worth exploring how this has changed since these studies were conducted (2007-2008) and how "content creator" is defined- surely with the recent popularization of Facebook more users contribute and share (albeit often banal) content on a daily basis.

David Beer's article, "Power through the algorithm? Participatory web cultures and the technological unconcious" questions just how empowered the individual has become under Web 2.0. As a frequent and regular user of Facebook, Twitter, and Soundcloud I, and I would guess most users, work under the assumption that the design and functionality of Web 2.0 is a positive development. As web users, we are no longer restricted to singular roles but now can operate and interact on a multitude of levels. Due to the size and compexity of the task, David Beer doesn't have definitive answers at hand but by laying out a set of considered and critical questioning has challenged people to seek these answers for themselves.

These lines of critique are an important cautionary counterbalance to our collective impulse to dive head first into the new age of Web 2.0. They ask serious questions about issues of privacy, how and to what end our personal information and habits are being collated, who will use this information and why. Also, how these platforms and algorithms both empower our ability to interact and acquire/share information but how they might also be shaping our tastes, habits and opinions in ways not fully considered.

I would like to continue exploring these issues and use the fairly manic changes in music industry of the last fifteen years as a working case study. How has the digital age and Web 2.0 spefically affected this industry? Has it benefited/hurt the consumer? The artist? How? Is the rhetoric behind new music streaming sites like Spotify legitimizing the further decline of music sales?

Works Cited

David Beer (2009). Power through the algorithm? Participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious. New Media & Society, Vol. 11(6), pp985-1002. 

José van Dijck and David Nieborg (2009). Wikinomics and its discontents: a critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos. New Media and Society. Vol. 11(5), pp855-74.

Trebor Scholz (2008). Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0. First Monday. Vol. 13(3): http://firstmonday.org