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.