New Model

As discussed in our somewhat pessimistic column a few fortnights ago, the music industry is on rather unsteady footing at the moment. Necessity being the mother of invention, it was inevitable that people would rise to the challenge and figure out ways to combat the new problems. So far there have been a few interesting developments and in the interest of not always being so bitter I’m going to try on a little optimism and highlight a few of them.

Now firmly established as one of the main places consumers turn to when they want to buy new music, iTunes is something that just about every musician in the world wants their releases on. The problem with that is that Apple are notoriously difficult to deal with and have never made it easy for artists to interface with the system. This has led to a number of companies sprouting up who act as an intermediary, connecting the artists not only with iTunes but also a myriad of other digital distributors such as Amazon, eMusic, Lala, Annie Street, Napster, Spotify etc…

Tunecore are perhaps the most recognized of these agents, thanks largely to big names such as Nine Inch Nails, Public Enemy, Brian Eno, David Byrne and a host of others using their services to make their albums available in the digital marketplace. For an upfront payment of US$9.99 per single or US$46.99 per album, an artist has their release available on the stores they select for a year before they pay anything else and they keep one hundred percent of the money they make in sales.

This is an exciting thing as even though there is still a middle man of sorts, it puts so much more power (and income) into the hands of the artist and circumvents record labels from squandering earnings and artistic integrity. Not that every artist has the ability to successfully produce and market their own product – only a small percentage of the 1,000,000+ releases on iTunes have been purchased even once - but it certainly allows for a more direct connection with the business end of the business than would be possible in the traditional model.

Another interesting concept is Sellaband, a Dutch company that allows artists to set a budget for their next release and sell “parts” (essentially shares) to their fans in order to raise the intended amount. Public Enemy were the first notable artist to become involved with Sellaband and there are currently somewhere in the vicinity of 3700 artists on the roster. The proprietors of Sellaband filed for bankruptcy in February this year but it was immediately purchased by a Germany company who has upheld all standing contracts and hopes to improve the system. So far forty-seven artists have reached their proposed budget (which ranged from US$10,000 to US$50,000) and interestingly, all of these artists are unknowns.

Physical sales (especially of CDs) have been taking the proverbial back-seat for the last few years and it’s not surprising to find many artists and labels deciding against even issuing physical versions of their output. There are also those who take the viewpoint that the physical version should be something that is treasured and issue smaller prints for those who care while making downloads the standard format, such as Modwheelmood, who released their last EP as a download and only issued 100 CD copies. And then there are artists who don’t particularly care for physical products at all, Autechre’s Sean Booth quoted as saying “I’d prefer people to download it than buy it physically. It fits our agenda much better that way… The actual product is the FLAC file.”

With the announcement by Rubber Records that they were ceasing physical releases altogether it’s become increasingly evident that this is an opinion that is shared by many in the industry. It certainly brings manufacturing costs down and is even the environmentally friendly option… You can’t get much more optimistic than that!