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Tag: YouTube

Artists Are Getting Screwed in the New Music Business

November 17, 2014

“The music industry is dwindling, but only for the artists. Something’s not right here. Artists can’t make a living anymore. They’re having to go get second jobs to pay the bills. But look at the profits of music companies like YouTube, iTunes, Spotify and the evil publicly-traded Pandora (who recently sued artists and record labels to be allowed to pay even less per stream — they won btw and are now only obligated to pay a royalty rate of .0007 per stream. Yes, as incomprehensible as that is to fathom, that’s 7/1000th of one penny –that’s all we as artists get paid every time someone listens to a song of ours on Pandora. They’re revenue is in the billions. It’s hard to believe, I get it. It is just as hard for us, the content creators/product suppliers, to believe as well. The problem is the labels. I know and like these guys. And I’ve told them this to their face. They’ll sell their own mother for $25. They’ve got to change and start helping the artists more.” — Garth Brooks to CNN November 17, 2014

Hearing Garth say the words above in an interview today sparked me. It’s easy to feel like you’re being an ungrateful whiner when you’ve lived a life like mine — one that many could easily claim has been privileged, and yet you’re going around complaining about “artist royalty compensation” and other such seemingly elitist issues when regular folks are having a tough time making ends meet or even finding a job in the first place. It’s a subject Princess Little Tree and I discuss often: do I stir the flames of protest publicly about what’s happening in the music business to us the artists and tell people how bad it is? Or do I just play it cool? Is it bad for business? Or is it the right thing to do? Will people think I’m being ungrateful? Or greedy? Will I lose my street cred by bringing up the subject of money — which to certain circles of people shouldn’t even hold a place in the same conversation as music or art…?

Earlier this year I started the Fair Pay for Fair Play campaign to address just these issues. Accessing the Facebook page is the easiest way to get informed and involved in this cause and if you care about music and the artists who create it I encourage you to do just that. Visit the page. Like it. Share it with your friends. Because the truth is we are struggling in a way that we have never seen before in modern times. Artists are quite literally starving. Because we are being squeezed out of the very industry that we create the product for.

There are many many reasons for this sad state of affairs and over the last few months I have used these usually more literary Transcendence Diaries to discuss some of the root causes of this issue. No one diary entry is going to address the entire issue in its entirety. That would be impossible. It would take a volume of books to do the cause any real justice. But at the very least we are getting ball rolling in terms of alerting the public not just to the problem itself but to just how serious it is becoming. The easiest way to sum it up is to remind people that over the last ten years we have moved away from consuming music via purchasing it, through CDs or vinyl or through digital downloads ala iTunes, and shifted instead towards consuming music via “streaming it” online using services like Pandora or Spotify or YouTube.

For you and me as music lovers this has been an exciting trend, a revolutionary transition to a world where any and every thing that has ever been recorded by anyone we’ve ever heard of (or not) can be accessed immediately from anywhere in the world. Even on the go right from our phones. In fact most of us now listen to music via our phones more often than home stereos (remember those?) Besides the most obvious abhorrent problem with this shift — the fact that we use extremely expensive state of the art equipment worth millions of dollars to create the most pristine sounding music we possibly can for the audience and it is now being degraded to sound like shit through phone speakers, there’s another problem: as technology companies quickly take control of the distribution of the music — through the aforementioned streaming services, deals have been and are being struck that leave less than pennies for the artist, or worse yet leave them out of the equation entirely. And the sad part is that is most people have no idea that this is what’s going down. They just assume that because it’s all being done above board and publicly that “surely the artists are being paid as they always have.” But the answer is “No. They are not.”

It’s only been a few weeks since U2 shocked (and to some annoyed) the world by giving away their new album for free via Apple due to the realization that it probably wouldn’t sell many copies and thus like Jay Z, Kanye, Coldplay and Thom Yorke before, they’d be better off just giving it away rather than risking low sales figures.

Even more recently Taylor Swift rocked the music world by pulling her albums, including her very successful new one, off of Spotify completely — due to the fact that Spotify only pays us approximately 7/1000th of a penny per play. Consider that for a moment: Spotify doesn’t even pay us one cent per spin. That’s the cold hard truth. No matter how they try to spin it. And trust me, as a music lover I personally LOVE Spotify and it’s potential as a listening device. But as an artist there isn’t anything I can think of off the top of my head that I loath more than Spotify. Piracy, e.g. people who don’t pay for music at all and just go online to download it for free via bit torrent type piracy sites ranks just a bit higher on my hate list. But Spotify Pandora and YouTube come in a close second. Why? Because at least piracy sites are upfront and honest about what they are doing. They’re criminals and often times proud of it. They see “free music” as some sort of cause of rebellion, as if by stealing music they’re somehow sticking it to The Man. But companies like YouTube and Spotify pretend to be “working with the record labels and artists to create a fair playing field for everyone”. But that claim is total bollocks. It’s just completely untrue.

Today it was announced that platinum country rocker Garth Brooks decided to sell his new album via his own website, something called Ghost Tunes, instead of via iTunes. Why? For pretty much the same reasons. He’ll make a much larger profit that way without having to sell even a fifth of the copies he would have to via iTunes.

Caveat: I and my boys in Transcendence are on an independent label, Dying Van Gogh Records, one which we have a large stake of ownership in. And so we make a larger percentage of sales than artists like Brooks and Swift. We make at least 50% of sales. Whereas artists on larger labels like Garth Brooks and Taylor Swift only make 10% of total sales if they’re lucky.

So do the math. If Spotify is only paying out 7/1000th of one penny per spin of any one song and 90% of THAT goes to the label, leaving only 10% to the artist…well how is that artist supposed to make a living? Sales and downloads?

Well therein lies the problem: because streaming has become so popular, people are buying and downloading less and less music. In a nutshell sales and downloads of music — personal ownership of music has nearly come crashing to a halt. It’s a failed business model. (Unfortunately that also means that album artwork and photography is a dying art form as well. A sad often overlooked side effect of this trend.)

But okay let’s look at downloads still because there are some artists who can still sell some serious numbers. Taylor Swift being one of them. iTunes only takes about 28%, leaving the label and artist a full 72% of gross sales. Not bad right? But again if the label is taking 90% of THAT, leaving the artist only 10% of it…there we are again, asking how can the artist make any real money?

It’s no wonder that both Swift and Brooks have tried to create work-arounds to try to make more money from their new music. It’s only natural.

Speaking about this situation personally, this past weekend it was brought to my attention that the lead singles from my last solo album had huge spikes in their views on YouTube. Granted, they’re nothing close to big platinum selling artists like U2, Taylor Swift or Garth Brooks. But they’re significant. “Scene in San Francisco” somehow managed to hit 225,000 views; “New Orleans Dreams” close to that and “Hello My Dove” still hovers around 20,000. And yes I’m sure if we sat down and did more research we would find that plenty of the other songs we have on YouTube have even higher view counts than these three, because they are older classics and have the advantage of having been around longer, but I am referring to these songs specifically because they are the NEWEST songs from our catalogue. Just those three songs alone have pulled in a healthy half a million views on YouTube since their release. Not bad.

Any normal rational thinking music lover is going to assume that we the artist MUST BE earning something from all this action. After all we are forced to sit through a ten to thirty second commercial before every single song we listen to on YouTube. It only makes sense that if YouTube is profiting from all these commercial spins that at least some of that has to get passed on to the artist and their record label.

Now here’s the deal: we do NOT get paid directly from YouTube. That would be too easy. Too fair. The music business has never been fair or easy. Nope. We the artists get paid by YouTube paying out “public performance royalties” to the PROs (Performing Rights Organizations) like ASCAP, SESAC and BMI on a quarterly basis who are supposed to turn around and pass on ALL that money to us, the artists. Remember, these PROs portend that they are NON-PROFIT, that they are ONLY in business to “serve the needs of the artists”. And yet when we have called our PRO, ASCAP, they have repeatedly told us “hey wow Ed Hale that’s great man. Congratulations! You’re really making good traction with the new songs! But see, with our proprietary system we really don’t even pay out on YouTube views until a song gets at least half a million to a million views. And even then you would have to accumulate those views at a rate of half a million views per month in order for us to calculate them and pay you any for them. So as unfair as it seems we can’t really pay you for any of those views for your new songs sorry to say.”

Needless to say every time I have this conversation with them I hang up that phone angry and discouraged. See, there’s no shortage of new fans for the music what with all these new ways to experience our music… But we the artists are just getting screwed out of the process. And yet it is WE WHO ARE CREATING THE PRODUCT!!! Without us there would be NO product for YouTube to play. Nor Spotify or Pandora or iTunes.

I ran the numbers in my head this morning as I was watching Garth complain about the same thing… Even if YouTube only paid us ONE CENT per spin I would make at least $5,000 just for those three songs alone this year. If they paid us just TWO CENTS per spin or view those songs would generate $10,000. No that’s not enough to support a family. But it’s certainly better than ZERO! And zero is what we are currently being paid from YouTube views.

See, the problem is that just a few short years ago we would make that kind of money in just a few weeks from putting out a new album and selling it. Either via a CD or via iTunes downloads. But with every song we release becoming instantly available online there is really no incentive for a fan to make that purchase. They can just go to YouTube or Spotify. And as a music lover myself I totally get how awesome that is. I do it myself. At least I used to. But if these streaming services are not going to compensate the artists for the streaming because of some “proprietary system” ala YouTube or only pay the artist 7/1000th of a penny per spin…the fans and music lovers are getting just as duped as we the artists are — believing their favorite artists are being compensated for the listening pleasure that their music is providing when in reality no such thing is happening.

If you’ve been wondering lately where your favorite artist is or where they have been and why you haven’t heard from them in a while, and who hasn’t… This is the reason why. They’re still alive. They just cannot afford to make music any longer. And this is by no means an exaggeration. As an artist myself I promise you that it is much worse than I have made it out to be simply because it is just too embarrassing to fully admit publicly — especially regarding other people who may or may not want the world to know how tough things are for them. That decision has to be up to each artist and their respective family. But suffice it to say I personally know many who are big names and plenty of smaller names who simply cannot afford to make music at the present time. And that is a very sad thing for all of us.

Of course there is much more to all of this. But this is a start. We will continue to explore this in future updates. In the meantime YOU can do something by simply publicly letting the above mentioned companies know that you believe they need to start compensating artists fairly. Something needs to change. And as always that change begins and ends with us — we the people can turn this tragic episode around and create for ourselves the miraculous happy ending that we all hope and wish for just as we always do in all world affairs.

– Posted by The Ambassador aka Ed Hale using BlogPress on an iPhone



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Uncategorized ed hale, Garth Brooks, itunes, music streaming killing the music business, Pandora, spotify, Taylor swift, YouTube

Correcting Some Myths Regarding YouTube Spotify & Artist Compensation

September 29, 2014

The always entertaining Bob Lefsetz sent out an otherwise illuminating blog post today entitled “NAPSTER WOULD KILL CREATION AND NO ONE WOULD MAKE MUSIC”. “Otherwise” illuminating because in the first sentence he made a glaring error that is going to just further perpetuate the already pervasive and excruciatingly painful myth with the masses that “it’s okay if we only stream music through all those high tech new services like Beats Music because they’re paying the artists now, right?”. WRONG. They’re not. At least not in a manner that anyone with half a brain would consider anything close to a livable wage. I already knew I would come here to The Diaries and post a rebuttal to straighten out the facts of Bob’s post. But I also decided to write Bob a quick note to ask him to also correct the facts himself. Below is both the first few sentences of his post (PS — subscribe to his blog. It’s almost always worth the read) and my correction of the actual facts.

Below that I have also pasted another blog post of his from a few days ago that deals with the same issue and Thom Yorke’s decision to release his new album on bit torrent. It makes some great points. Again, Lefsetz is completely mistaken in his assertion that “YouTube and Spotify are compensating artists 70% just like iTunes does”. That’s not even close to being true, and it makes one wonder from where he is getting his information. Perhaps he just makes it up to prove his enlightening points? Or perhaps he knows of certain artists at certain large companies who have managed to negotiate completely different terms than almost every other artist in the world today. Not sure. But don’t let the erroneous facts of his post minimize the importance of some of his finer points. They’re cutting edge insightful and almost always entertaining if nothing else. He just happens to be very wrong about the current state of artist compensation in the music business.

“On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 3:04 PM, Bob Lefsetz <xxxx@xxxx.com> wrote:

NAPSTER WOULD KILL CREATION AND NO ONE WOULD MAKE MUSIC

Just the opposite has happened. With new tools for production and distribution that bring the cost of creating and getting your work out at close to zero it seems like everybody’s got a song in them. More people are making more music than ever before, leaving the audience overwhelmed with productions.

MUSIC IS FREE

It just feels that way.

America’s #1 music service, YouTube, pays rights holders, as does Spotify. Can we stop the mantra that music is free? Sure, piracy exists, but it always did. If you think kids are busy stealing instead of streaming you probably went to the Apple Store to stock up on the discontinued iPod.”

 

Hi Bob.

As you know I’m a fan; often even sharing your posts through my own social media profiles occasionally when I find them extraordinarily prescient or insightful. But you can’t be sending out posts that say things like “YouTube and Spotify are now compensating rights holders” — especially not to what I would guess is largely a musician/music biz exec audience — when these statements are almost entirely untrue. Sure guys like me and others who are buried neck deep in the business and understand how it works understand the finer points of what you are saying, but most people take you at your word and then go to hunt down this $$$ that YouTube and Sp and the like are supposed to be paying them because Bob Lefsetz said so and they come up with nothing. Why? Because as those of us in the biz recognize, YT, SP, Beats and P are “trying” to compensate rights holders to a certain degree, but they have systems set up that are so heinous and prohibitive that it basically means that 99% of artists are NOT being compensated in any way from YouTube, Spotify, Beats or Pandora. Take a little thing they like to call “threshholds”; i.e. YouTube doesn’t pay out unless a song reaches over 500,000 to one million views AND that has to be within the quarter. So even if you get to 499,999 views that quarter you get paid ZERO $$$ from YouTube. ZERO. Now THAT is NOT compensating the artist nor the rights holder. Period. Just pick up the phone and call ASCAP, BMI or SESAC to confirm this fact for God’s sake. It’s common knowledge.

Spotify and Pandora pay us approx .005 to .0007 per stream. As in 500 streams to earn ONE CENT or in the other case 7000 streams to earn one cent. (!!!) So saying “Now that YouTube and Spotify are compensating rights holders…” is completely erroneous and misleading. Not only that, but it then renders the rest of your post less credible. Of course this is just IMHO and I will certainly share my thoughts in the Transcendence Diaries. But rather than have me as “the bearer of truth and light corrections in response to Bob Lefsetz’s erroneous claims”, wouldn’t it be easier (certainly on me) if you just fact-checked before posting? All said with the utmost respect of course as always.

Sincerely,

The Ambassador

The Transcendence Embassy

c/o Dying Van Gogh Records

304 Park Avenue South

11th Floor

New York, NY 10010
800.827.7763
www.dyingvangogh.com
www.edhale.com
www.transcendence.com
www.transcendencediaries.com

 

In the above letter I only point to a very small number of roadblocks that have been built into the new system of the music business that prevent artists and labels from being able to make a living from music creation. There are a TON of them presently. YES the music being created today is as creative and exciting as it’s ever been. But the artists are not just being paid “less than they ever have”, they ARE NOT BEING PAID almost exclusively. This is WHY Radiohead’s Thom Yorke DID decide to release his latest album for free on a flagrant music piracy site — as a statement, as in “fuck all of you if you’re going to stream our music for free allowing these giant new tech companies like Spotify and Beats to profit in the millions while I don’t make shit, I’ll just give my music directly to the FANS!”

U2 decided to do the same thing, choosing instead to sell their new album to Apple so as not to risk putting it out on the market and not achieving any sales. Coldplay used Target. Jay Z used ATT. Artists are nothing if not creative and in this new age of no money for music we are having to be just as creative outside of the studio as we are inside — in an attempt to try to figure out how to squeeze a few nickels out of the fans who very clearly still love our music. That’s right, we totally get that YOU the music lover still love our music and that you’re not directly involved in what’s happening in our industry. I hear it from fans all the time. “I had no idea you weren’t getting paid!” they exclaim. And some even pay that $10 to Spotify or Beats every month. But when these companies are reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in profits per quarter, that should be a tip off to all of us, artist and consumer alike, that there might be a good chance that the artists aren’t getting paid.

So what CAN we do about it? Well, number one, we can always go back to downloading albums from iTunes. Or songs if you like. Yep, iTunes PAYS US. And they pay us well. No complaints from Apple. And they’re still the largest most profitable company on planet earth. Go figure. So next time you hear anyone try to defend Beats, or Spotify or Pandora, in ANY way, regarding their claim that they would be “unable to fairly compensate the artists in the same manner that iTunes does or we’d go bankrupt” just remind them of how many hundreds of millions of dollars they reported earning last quarter. It’s all s smokescreen. They figure that if the consumer doesn’t mind ripping off the artist then they don’t mind profiting from it. And that’s where WE come in.

If you like music, if you love it, if you enjoy it, then shoot off an email to Spotify and Pandora. Let them know that although you’ve been thinking about starting up an account with them, or currently have a paid account with them, you just cannot justify it any longer as long as they are not compensating the artists whose music they are selling. It’s pretty simple. These companies are in the business of SELLING MUSIC. But the problem is that they aren’t BUYING THE MUSIC. In any other world that would be considered criminal. Stealing. And at its eessence that’s exactly what is happening. Legal stealing. Music piracy is already bad enough, but these new streaming services are killing today’s working artists. Ever wonder why they’re starting to appear on singing competition shows as judges? Or cheesy TV commercials? Yep. There’s a reason. Basically because of music streaming services NOT compensating us for our music that they are selling to you the consumer they are forcing musical artists to do anything and everything to try to bring home the bacon. And we’re no longer talking about striking it rich here. We’re talking about just trying to make enough to make a decent living, to pay the bills. That’s what it’s come down to now. I personally make MORE money from buying and selling Pandora stock in a week than I will make from Pandora paying me for streams in an entire quarter. Why? Because no one can make a living from being paid .007 cents per stream.

People complaining about the need to raise the minimum wage have NO idea how much worse it is for musical artists. I would LOVE to be guaranteed a steady stream of income every week from my hard work. But in this ever changing industry, where any moment some new young upstart can grab your entire recorded catalog and throw it up on the internet and call it a new business — completely forgetting to address how the artist will actually be paid, we artists do not have the luxury of anything close to a guaranteed stream of income. It’s potluck now. But again, there IS something that can be done about it. All we have to do is get YouTube, Spotify, Pandora and the rest of them to start paying the artists a decent living wage. It really is that simple. You the consumer will do the rest, as you always have, by consuming the music we make. And as always we are forever grateful to you for that. This isn’t your fault. You just caught in the middle.

 

As always, more later…

 

 

To read the rest of Bob’s (like i said) otherwise brilliant post, go here: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/



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Uncategorized artist compensation, ASCAP, Beats, BMI, Bob Lefsetz, ed hale, royalty rate, SESAC, spotify, Thom Yorke, U2, YouTube

U2 Proves Rock is Dead. And So Is the Album

September 11, 2014

The below is the latest blog entry from music-culture blogger and general curmudgeon, Bob Lefsetz. In it he plainly and clearly argues that the release of the latest U2 album — through giving it away for free via Apple’s iTunes platform — was yet another red flag that rock music AND the album as a viable art-form is utterly entirely and completely dead. He argues a lot of things in the article below. Much of it makes sense and rings true. One of things he emphatically states is that no one has time to dig through 11 songs on a rock music album (or any album for that matter) and therefore U2 wasted years creating their newest magnum opus. They should have just released a 4 song EP instead. You can read it below for yourself. Frankly I don’t have the time to respond to Bob’s ideas — and THIS gives testimony to just how accurate he is in his latest treatise on the rapidly changing cultural world around us.

For my part, I CAN say this. Everyone knows that I am an avid U2 fan. I own all their albums and buy them as soon as they come out or soon afterwards. I have seen them live in concert more times than I can count. But have I heard this new one yet? Nope. Do I even own it? Nope. And they’re giving it away for FREE!!! Yet I still don’t own it. Yep. This fact proves Bob’s point more than I’d like it to. To further prove the validity of his statements below, he is right in these assertions as well: I didn’t want to go to iTunes to download the album — while at the gym I obviously wasn’t able to do this. What I wanted to do was LISTEN TO the album. As in STREAM IT via Spotify. But U2 made the irreversible error of making the album NOT available on Spotify for at least a month or two. By that time no one will be talking about or interested in the new U2 album. We’ll all be discussing something else entirely. So they lost that shot. The next place I went to try to hear the new album? YouTube. Just like Bob predicted we all would. And as can probably be guessed, the new U2 album is not yet available on YouTube. So they dropped that ball too.

This is why, three days later I still don’t own the new U2 album. And I’m an actual FAN. Forget about the ex-fans or never-have-been-fans or the flat-out haters. They’re all having a field day making fun of and insulting Bono and company. They’ve become the punchline of the hour, the battering ram of the week — right after Ray Rice, ISIS and Ferguson, Missouri.

It’s a damn sad day when one of the greatest musical acts of all time can become so lambasted, negatively perceived and devoured by mainstream society for such a small and simple mistake. It’s even more disturbing that Lefsetz appears to be right not only in his assertion that rock music has lost all credibility and influence in modern Western society AND so too has the album as a viable art-form SIMPLY BECAUSE no one has the time for either of them. Especially for yours truly, who still bathes in the illusion that I make my living from recording and releasing albums of primarily “rock” music. Oh well. Oh well. Oh well. Better luck next time.

What follows below is the article by Bob Lefsetz. Happy reading. Feel free to share your thoughts.

Ambassador

 

NEWS FOR A DAY

No different from a rape or a murder, but with even less legs. In today’s world it’s not about making an impact, but sustaining. Could it be that Bono’s been living too long in the echo chamber, hanging with forty and fiftysomethings who think they rule the world but truly don’t? Yes, older people build the tools, but it’s young people who utilize them. The older bloke will lament the loss of the record shop, the younger person has never been. If you want to make it in today’s marketing culture you must be online 24/7, picking up the nuances. Because it is about cred and it is about cool but if you think the old rules apply, you probably can’t name a YouTube star.

EVANESCENCE

This is an analog of the above. Here today, gone tomorrow. How could the band be so stupid as to believe anybody would actually play their music, especially the 500 million it was pushed to. Where’s the afterplan? Nonexistent.

PUSH

We live in a pull economy. Nothing pisses off the audience more than pushing something they don’t want and didn’t ask for to their devices. Even if you don’t download the album, it’s sitting there in your purchases, pissing you off.

HOW TO

Did you have iCloud turned on in iTunes? Even those who wanted the album weren’t quite sure how to get it.

ALBUM

How many tracks did PSY have? One!

OVERLOAD

No one’s got time to listen to a complete album, especially when it’s pushed upon them, that’s just too much material. Yes, a nascent artist on his way up might have people check out more tracks on his album out of curiosity, but no one’s curious about U2, they already know everything about them. One must factor in that we’re all overloaded with stimuli and you must point us to the paramount item and make it digestible in a matter of moments. If we love it, we’ll want more. If we don’t, we’re never going to get to the rest of your opus that you spent years creating.

ALBUM TWO

Make it an EP. Four tracks. People haven’t finished Piketty’s tome. It would have been better off as a magazine article. People bought it, they just didn’t read it, who’s got the time?

ENGAGEMENT

Now what. Where’s the game, where’s the jaw-dropping viral video? Where’s the element we can all point to and talk about. If anything, we’re talking about the stunt, not the music.

WRONG SERVICE

They’d have been better off releasing it on YouTube, that’s where the digital generation goes for music. iTunes is a backwater. It may be the number one sales outlet, but it’s not the number one music platform, not even close.

UNHIP

Put it on Spotify. Try to look cutting edge. Meanwhile, having the quality of your music trumpeted by Tim Cook is like having Ed Sullivan say your tunes are good.

CLOSED DOORS

This is the problem vexing filmed entertainment/video, there’s not one platform with everything. But in music we’ve solved this problem, Spotify and YouTube have all the tracks and you can access them for free, but putting hype over practicality, U2 failed to see they were playing in a walled garden, to their detriment.

This was a stunt, poorly executed. Everybody forgets that despite all the hoopla about naming your own price, “In Rainbows” was a disaster, with only hard core fans familiar with the material. Yup, Radiohead may be independent, but they’ve done a good job of marginalizing themselves.

And at least Beyonce had the videos, somewhere to click to.

And Weird Al had videos too, but after a week, few cared.

Because at the end of the day we only care about the music. And U2 didn’t cut that one indelible track that stops us in our tracks, that we want to listen to again and again and pass on. Sure, the song they played at the Apple soiree was good, but good is no longer good enough.

Furthermore, when Bono talked he lost all charisma.

This looked like nothing so much as what it was, old farts using their connections to shove material down the throats of those who don’t want it. It’s what we hate so much about today’s environment, rich people who think they know better and our entitled to their behavior.

Don’t listen to the press. Rock writers are antiques who are underpaid who are in it for access and free tickets.

And the business press doesn’t care about the music.

And the old fart fortysomethings who talk about this music should be ignored. It’s no different from a Jason Isbell fan testifying about his tracks. No offense, but it’s a tiny world. Sure, U2’s is bigger, but until U2 cuts a track that makes the rest of us care, we don’t.

Meanwhile, Jason Isbell had a hit today, he tweeted: “U2 PHONES IT IN.”

Yup, that’s Internet culture, where someone who raises their head above is fodder for criticism.

But it gets worse.

Cultofmac said:

“But trotting out aging Irish rockers after you’ve wowed the world with the first glimpse of the glorious Apple Watch? That’s not thinking different. That’s a pity-f__k for a band that’s lost its edge, and an unfortunate bum note for a company that’s rarely perceived as tone-deaf.”

http://www.cultofmac.com/295084/u2-apple-event/

Whew!

All over the web people are criticizing U2. And that’s where music now lives, online.

So, so long Bono and crew. You’ll continue to sell tickets, but you’re no longer au courant.

So long rock that does not break through on Top Forty. U2 would have been better off cutting a country track, that would have been a better fit with a fighting chance of airplay.

So long albums. If you’ve got an hour to listen to once that which must be listened to ten times to get you’ve got no life, but everyone does, and they’re the center of it, glued to their devices, and to distract them you’ve got to be pretty damn good and the talk of the town for an extended period of time, U2’s new music is not.

So long stunts with no aftermath. If you’re not in the news every damn day, you’re getting it wrong. The biggest pop stars are the Kardashians. Ever notice not a day goes by without them in the news? Bono, et al, would be better off hanging with the sisters than heads of state, at least if they want to have a hit.

And so long the fiction that Guy Oseary would do a better job than Paul McGuinness. There might be a patina of new school, but this album release is positively old school.

Here’s how it goes:

Make everyone aware.

Put tickets on sale.

Make it an event, a la the Stones, i.e. if you don’t come now, you may never be able to experience it again.

Trump up traditional press so wankers believe there’s something happening.

But there’s not.

Because “I Will Follow” was inspired. It sounded like nothing else. It had urgency. It had attitude. You needed to hear it again. It was so good you wanted to hear what else the band was up to.

The new album is paint-by-numbers disposable.

Today we have to pull you into our world. And we only hold you in our bosom if we believe your music is repeatable and deserves our time.

Bono’s on top of the world, he’ll reject everything I say.

Rapino and Oseary will keep shoveling, hoping to keep this alive.

And you and me?

WE’RE ALREADY OVER IT!



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Uncategorized Ambassador, Apple, Bob Lefsetz, ed hale, ferguson, isis, itunes, new album, ray rice, rock music is dead, spotify, the album is dead, Tim cook, U2, YouTube

Seeking a Silver Lining

December 27, 2012

It took a while but it finally happened. IT happened. Maybe it’s a good thing… When it happens to us it often hurts… So we resist it. We often label it “bad” and thus put it off, or even when it does happen we continue to label it bad, which then prevents us from seeing the good in it. A little backstory…

Last night we saw the film Silver Linings Playbook. I had no idea what the film was about, but was sucked in from the very first minute. See it. It’s better than good. Due to this new trend of infinite potential greatness in art all happening simultaneously, I found it easy to exclaim that Silver Linings was the best movie of the year, beating out even Speilberg’s Lincoln, before settling back down into recognizing that we are now in an age when it’s possible for there to be MANY “best movies of the year” all at the same time.

[This is a fairly new and exciting trend, due to many factors; globalization being one, another being the continued decline of the cost of the tools and technologies of all the various fields of art. Whether filmmaking or music making or just about anything else, the cost of entering, the entry fee, has come down to a price point making it possible for anyone to make a movie or an album or whatever else the heart and mind can imagine. It’s one of the Signatures of the Personal Expression Age and has both good and bad ramifications. It’s not the purpose of this particular post, but in the book I’ve been working on for the last six years, we elaborate on it in much more detail. Suffice it to say that this Signature has created a world where there is more “Best Of the Year” projects being released simultaneously than any one consumer could possibly take in — unless you make being a consumer of art your career.]

So towards the end of the film, during the end credits roll actually, we hear this song, an amazing song, an incredible song, sounded like the Stone, or the Faces, maybe Chris Robinson’s new band. As always I waited till the very end of the movie to see who the artist was. It turned out to be a group called Alabama Shakes. The song was called “Always Alright.” I took a note of it in my phone in the usual file where I note music that I plan on purchasing later. The film ended. We exited the theatre, talking idly about how great the film was, how believable, how real, how moving; our dialogue occasionally interspersed with my excited exclamations of “how fucking great that song was, wow!”

In the men’s room a few minutes later I was still thinking about that song, fantasizing about that moment when I would be able to go home and buy it and listen to it over and over. And then it hit me, just standing there in front of the urinal. I didn’t need to wait till I got home. I could pull out my phone right there while still taking a piss and download the song using iTunes and listen to it immediately. So i reached into my pocket to grab my phone. But then another realization. I didn’t need to go to iTunes. I could probably just go to YouTube and do a Search for it. So i did. Sure enough, ten to twenty different versions of this particular songs came up and I began to listen to each one until I found the one I was looking for. (I never did. Instead I listened to a few live versions of the song, never finding the actual recording of the song itself.) But that was enough. I got my fill of it. At least for the moment.

When we got in the car to drive home, I took it further and plugged my phone into a little quarter inch jack we’ve rigged into our car stereo so we can listen to our iPods and iPhones through the car’s stereo system. I didn’t think much about this experience truth be told. For whatever reason, IT didn’t happen then. But it did this morning.

This morning I woke up with the song “This Guys’s in Love with You”, the Herb Albert version, in my head while I was dreaming. With eyes still closed I fumbled my hands around the bed seeking my phone so I could check my iTunes library to see if i had already downloaded the song. I wanted to hear it. Right then and there, before I woke up fully and the day started. And THAT’S when IT hit me. I didn’t need to check my iTunes library to listen to the song. Who cares if i had already downloaded the song. All i had to do was go to YouTube. Sure enough, there it was. In hundreds of different forms, uploaded by hundreds of different people. Within less than a minute I was listening to this haunting and beautiful Burt Bacharach song over and over again and not paying a dime for it. And THIS is when it really hit me.

For the last six months I have been struggling like a mother fucker to make ends meet for my family. My last big hit was in May of this year. The checks from sales and royalty checks roll in eventually and that’s always a great thing. But they aren’t what they used to be. Not even close. Something has changed. Many things have changed. You can have a song that goes to #1 in cities all over America and even jump up into the Top 30 on Billboard and still not be able to support yourself as a working musician. It’s not something we talk about. Call it denial. No one wants to talk about it. But it’s happening. Access to music has become so easy for all of us as consumers that it’s become impossible for those of us who make music for a living to make an actual living at it. It’s no one’s fault per se. It’s just the way the industry has shifted.

Sure we make money every time someone downloads one of our songs or albums. We do. And it’s good money. If it’s done in the traditional legal and above board fashion, ala going through amazon.com or iTunes, we get paid for that. So the first thing is just to continue to encourage friends and fans to buy our songs and albums. Because that is still our primary means of making a living. But this morning I watched it happen with my own eyes. Not as a working musician, but as a consumer and lover of music. I just wanted my fix in that moment of this song. And I went to the fastest way i knew how to get it. YouTube. And the sad truth of the matter is that we as artists don’t get paid when people listen to our music on YouTube. It doesn’t matter that “Gangam Style” has become the most viewed video on YouTube in terms of the artist making any money from it. He doesn’t. It might feel good. And yes, surely it leads to other potential money making opportunities. Maybe. But the act itself does not make any money. Nor did it help Herb Alpert or Burt Bacharach when I listened to “This Guy’s in Love With You” ten times in a row this morning on YouTube. Hell, I even Shared the song on Facebook and Twitter to spread the joy with my friends and fans. And that led to more people listening to the song on YouTube. For free.

And that’s the operating word now in our industry. Free. People that like having easy access to music and listening to music for free will jump at this point in the discussion to point out that artists DO get paid if people listen to our music on Pandora or Spotify. But let’s yank that cat out of the bag once and for all so the whole world can feel the shock and pain of it as much as we who make the music do. You ever wonder how much we get paid each time someone listens to one of our songs on Pandora or Spotify? It looks like this: $00.0001. That’s what it looks like. On the statements we receive each month or quarter from the various different companies who collect and distribute the data and money to us. Hundreds of pages comprise these statements. And we do get to see each and every time someone listens to (streams) or downloads one of our songs or albums.

Sometimes it’s in the millions. Or even tens of millions. “Scene in San Francisco” has been streamed more times than I can count at this point. But at that rate of pay, it amounts to less than enough to make your mortgage payment. Which is why most working musicians rent. And worse, that’s ONLY if people are listening through very firmly established music services, like MOG or turntable.fm or Spotify or Pandora. Most of the places people go online to listen to music, like YouTube for example, don’t offer a way for the artist to make even one-one-hundredth of a cent from that experience. Not a penny. Not half a penny. Not a tenth or even a hundredth of a penny. Zero. Combine that with the fact that most people have stopped buying music — why WOULD you BUY music when you can listen to it for free anytime you want to from a device that is literally in your hands 23 out of every 24 hours in a day? — and what you end up with is an industry where 99% of the people working in it aren’t able to make a living from it.

This was a huge realization for me this morning. For months I have been struggling to decide what to do about this. I have never seen anything as heart breaking as my poor new wife crying her eyes out in fear that we are already broke and penniless because my well ran dry so fast after having two Top 30 hits this year. I’ve never seen anyone so frightened. “I’m not used to this like you are,” she scream-mumbled in between big sobs and moans… “What are we going to do???” she asked me. I had no answer. Only, “I’ll think of something honey. I promise. Our new album just came out. We’ll get money from the sales of that.”

But i knew I was kidding myself, being delusional. Those days of big sales numbers from a new album release for most of us started drying up in ’05. Sooner than that for some people. Adele’s last album, 21, just topped the 10 million mark I believe, making it one of the few albums in decades to sell that many. Albums that now sell a million, what we call Platinum, are few and far between. It’s a small earthquake in our industry when it happens. Selling half a million, what we call Gold, happen a bit more, but we are talking about maybe five to ten artists a year now. For the most part, the large majority of working music makers sell in the thousands. The last stat I read was disarmingly sad and sobering. It showed that out of the 5,000 albums a month that are released each year, less than one-thousand of them sell a thousand copies or more. Most of those are in the classical music genre. That’s 60,000 albums a year that get released, with less than 1000 of them selling even one-thousand copies. Don’t bother doing the math. It’s so far below the poverty line that it isn’t even worth considering how much those artists make. It certainly isn’t enough to support a family.

For me the big realization happened towards the end of this year. We were convinced that with all the hype and sales and radio airplay and Billboard hit making that we were doing earlier in the year that it would lead to bigger and better things, i.e. more money. At least enough to live comfortably. Or live, period. But it happened fast. The money comes and the money goes. Whatever you make usually goes right back into either making more music or marketing and promoting the music you’ve already made in an attempt to reach more people and make a bigger splash. It’s throwing money after money is what it is. It used to work. And for a very few it still does. But they’re few and far between.

We are supposed to make money every time our songs get played on the radio. This is true. So with a song like “Scene in San Francisco” where it received tens of thousands of spins on radio stations all over America and eventually the world, you would think we would have received tens of thousands of dollars from it. But it doesn’t work that way. There are three companies in the entire world that collect all that money for every musician on planet earth. ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. And they collect hundreds of billions of dollars each year from our music being played on the radio. But their systems are crooked. They don’t pay per spin. They claim to have a proprietary system that they can’t reveal to anyone. Not even Congress, who has been breathing down their backs for nearly a century to try to get them to conduct a more honest and transparent business.

So big hit or not, two big hits or not, what ASCAP wanted to pay me personally came to less than $3,000. I went into a bloody apoplectic seizure when I found out. See, it isn’t that they didn’t collect the money. They collected the money alright. From every single radio station in America and beyond they collect plenty of money. And it’s not that they cannot see how many times each song has been played. They can. The system is all computerized now. It’s easy to discover how many millions of times your song has been played on radio each year. That’s not the issue. The issue is that they “cannot reveal their proprietary system” to the artists that shows how they calculate how much money they are going to pay out for all your radio spins. It’s a fucking nightmare. They’re the mafia of the music industry. Pirates. Raking in huge sums of money on behalf of every working musician in the world with no intention of paying it out.

That’s radio airplay. Sales is a different matter. Coldplay’s record label spent five million dollars just on promotion of their last album (the one before this latest one) in their attempt to get the sales they needed to pay for the recording of the album. I never bothered to check to see if they made the money back. I just couldn’t believe that they spent five million dollars on marketing and promotion alone. It was an astounding figure. A huge risk. But for a very established act.

Most artists don’t have that kind of established reputation in the industry, nor access to a record label with enough liquidity to be able to afford to do something like that. For their last album, just a few short years had gone by, but by this point their record label had gone bankrupt, gotten divided up and all the little pieces sold off to a variety of different other players, and so the money for marketing and promotion wasn’t there. Instead of throwing five million dollars around for marketing and promotion, they chose a different path. They teamed up with Google Music and put the new album up for sale for .99 cents to try to market it. They sold an 250,000 units through that stunt. Which was considerably more than they had sold up until that point. And that’s a huge artist.

But again do the math. If the artist only receives ten percent of the net proceeds…. Yikes. Split that 25 grand four ways if you’re in a band and you better be married to Gwyneth Paltrow, because you aren’t eating if you aren’t. Personally speaking, I’m not. So I need to come up with a different plan of action to make a living and support my family. And fast. It doesn’t mean I don’t love making music. I do. I’ve already written a few thousand songs. So for me the whole mission is to just try to record and release as many of the songs I’ve written over the last thirty years as I can before I die. The fans I do have deserve it. I know that. And I deserve it. I want to. There is nothing more painful than having thousands of songs sitting in notebooks unrecorded. Nothing I can think of. At least not for an artist. But I also need to make a living.

After this morning’s experience, after watching how easy it was for me, me, a working musician myself, someone who has always resisted the trends of accessing music or free for fear it might jeopardize the livelihood of the musicians I love the most, even I found myself taking advantage of this new system and simply heading to YouTube to spin a few songs I love five to ten times, knowing full well that the men and women who created that music that I love so much wouldn’t make a cent from it. It’s just not the same industry anymore. For all of us. Yes, something CAN be done about it. YouTube could enforce a law that ALL music that gets uploaded to their servers MUST go through a database that tracks the airplay, the spins, the views, that somehow cycles back to the musicians themselves. But who knows when that will happen.

In the meantime, the Ambassador is going to have to find another way to make a living that permits me to still be able to make music at the same time. It won’t be easy. The trick with being a musician is that every cent you make from whatever it is you do you want to take all that money and put it back into recording and production and marketing more music. So one needs a job that pays you twice as much as you need to live. Either that or you starve as you spend every cent you make from your job on making music. I did that all through my teens and twenties. As everyone already knows. You get used to living without a car or a phone or electricity or even food. Your teeth fall out one by one because you can’t afford to go to doctors or dentists. But you’re making music. You’re fulfilling your life’s purpose. You’re happy. You have fans who love what you do and it makes you happy thinking about how your music makes them happy.

But things are different now. And I know it. I finally took the big leap I had both dreaded and wished for my entire life. I got married. I have a wife that I love. I have step daughters that I love. We’ve been trying to have children of our own for years. Eventually we’ll achieve that goal, either naturally or through adoption (which I have started to see only recently is a very cool thing). And children are expensive. I have to stop trying to change the music industry to go back to the way it used to be. I also have to stop living in denial. I either need a HUGE break, as in times past, one that propels me to a place where a backflip into poverty once more could never happen again; or I have to invent or devise or discover some new way to make a fortune from continuing to make music for a living.

Or i need to choose another way entirely to support myself and the family. I’ve been meditating and praying about it incessantly. And miraculously money has been flying in from all over the place. Loads of it. So as we gratefully and graciously have been able to pay the bills as of late all of a sudden, I’ve been scrambling to try to figure out what the hell I’m going to do. Perhaps that big break will come. Perhaps it won’t. Maybe the industry will change and musicians will begin to get compensated commensurate with how much their music is enjoyed. But until then… I cannot help but feel that somewhere around the bend is this silver lining. There always is. Perhaps this waking up and recognizing how the music business really is now was a good thing, even though it felt like a bad thing. Perhaps it’s one step closer. I hope so.



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Uncategorized Alabama Shakes, best movies of the year, invent a new way to make a living, listening to the song for free, radio airplay, sales, Silver Linings Playbook, working musician, YouTube

Videos of New Songs Live Ed Hale

December 13, 2009

New Songs Log Playlist


YouTube Playlist of on-going series of Ed Hale working out new songs roughly recorded here and there as they come and then posted to YouTube. Usually under-rehearsed and too soon after they were written. But a cool thing. Definitely a good way to keep track of songs that might get away for future use, and good reference for the tuning and chords used.

 

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Music, Music Videos, Personal Life ed hale, new songs, playing live, playlist, songwriting, videos, YouTube

A private little world for me… a private little world for you. The online journals and musings of singer-songwriter author and activist Ed Hale. The Transcendence Diaries have been posting regularly online since 2001. Comments are always welcomed. And so are YOU.

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