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Crowd Patronage: How A 400 Year Old Model Can Save The Music Industry

bryank.im

41–50 of 63 posts

Re: Crowd Patronage: How A 400 Year Old Model Can Save The Music Industry

#41

Music without the music industry (labels etc) is the internet without aggregators (reddit etc) What happened on the internet before content aggregators (or before you had access to them)? you'd see a cool website and tell a friend the website address or you'd send a link to a friend and they might pass it on if they cared enough, they might not. That's a few people, unless the website was seriously incredible it woul…

You could market packaged dog poop, doesn't mean lots of people are going to buy it. There's a fundamental value there for Juggalos, and I personally think it's beyond ICP's music.

You'd be surprised at the market for dog poop. It can be used as organic fertilizer, as a weapon, as a training aid (for training puppies). Seriously, I've purchased a bottle of dog pee on amazon for $7.99 with free shipping via prime. I know this sounds crazy, but I'm dead serious. I used the dog pee to teach my dog where he should go. But I wouldn't have known that was even possible without marketing.

Almost anything that you think is useless has a way that it can be used that justifies someone paying for it.

Re: Crowd Patronage: How A 400 Year Old Model Can Save The Music Industry

#43

You make some great points, but I think the "Internet Apologists" school of thought is closer to your "Crowd Patronage" idea than you realise. As you said, recorded music is fairly recent, but gathering around to enjoy a show goes waaaay back...and I think it's a great business model going forward. One great example of this in action is Hoodie Allen. He releases all his music free on Soundcloud[1] and Youtube[2], whe…

I actually agree with you, I'm an internet champion myself, so I didn't mean to pigeonhole anyone. My main point was to say that increased revenue in the concert and merch sector will not come close to replacing the gaping hole of content revenue. We have to go one step further.

As for Hoodie Allen, I've actually talked to him before on the phone about his Facebooking strategy! I like him, he's smart! He's definitely the type to succeed in the new music industry. Check out the song "No Sleep till Brooklyn"... my buddy Jhameel sings the hook on it!

Re: Crowd Patronage: How A 400 Year Old Model Can Save The Music Industry

#44
This is being done right now it's just segmented and no real platform has emerged as the place to do it. The real problem with the model from my perspective is that in artists (and their label/mgmts) desperation to remain relevant & earn a better living they are constantly on social media & watering down their celebrity. Combine that with the fact that any cute kid on YouTube can suddenly become a celebrity in his own right you have a) way more celebrities and b) way over exposed celebrities. The internet has basically commoditized being famous in some ways and in most artists desperation to try and get 'bigger' and make more money they make it worse. There will always be the massive artists where the masses go insane and people line up down the block to video chat with. Those artists don't have a problem now. The ones that are really in trouble are the every day middle of the road full time working artists (selling 50-300K records). This kind of platform will not work with enough scale & consistently enough to even begin a conversation about it replacing old record sales revenue. I think he touched on the real key to the long term music business which is embracing streaming and getting as many fans as possible to listen to your music and care enough to go to your shows. Any money a band makes from recorded music will forever be a bonus.

Re: Crowd Patronage: How A 400 Year Old Model Can Save The Music Industry

#46
post #44

This is being done right now it's just segmented and no real platform has emerged as the place to do it. The real problem with the model from my perspective is that in artists (and their label/mgmts) desperation to remain relevant & earn a better living they are constantly on social media & watering down their celebrity. Combine that with the fact that any cute kid on YouTube can suddenly become a celebrity in his ow…

>I think he touched on the real key to the long term music business which is embracing streaming and getting as many fans as possible to listen to your music and care enough to go to your shows. Any money a band makes from recorded music will forever be a bonus.

Why do people keep saying that? About the shows, I mean.

The reality is that most bands LOSE money on shows. Shows are historically a loss leader for record sales.

Re: Crowd Patronage: How A 400 Year Old Model Can Save The Music Industry

#47

Music without the music industry (labels etc) is the internet without aggregators (reddit etc) What happened on the internet before content aggregators (or before you had access to them)? you'd see a cool website and tell a friend the website address or you'd send a link to a friend and they might pass it on if they cared enough, they might not. That's a few people, unless the website was seriously incredible it woul…

You don't need to have to have your music reach a million people to make a living as a musician. The Grateful Dead for example had fans that numbered in the thousands, but those fans were actual fanatics that went to every concert and bought every piece of paraphernalia. Most artists today don't understand that model. They think success is about topping charts.

Re: Crowd Patronage: How A 400 Year Old Model Can Save The Music Industry

#48
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I explained my point poorly. If you do not care about music enough to seek it out (which is most people) and music is just something that's in your life when you're driving to work or doing the cleaning you rely on the "music industry" to be your aggregator , they make/take music that they know the average person will like (yay formulas!) and deliver it to you through radio, television and all the other place…

The music industry's disappearance won't create a void, things will move in to take their place. You don't need the big labels to be the filter, there are plenty of other individuals and companies who will take that place as the arbiters of "popular" music.

Big labels aren't even filters? They're creators. Without them we'll have no popular music. Where were Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Britney Spears, Ke$ha, Justin Bieber, .fun, Taylor Swift all before a major took them on? Nowhere. Flopsville. They create mass market products. Without them nobody will have the budget or knowledge to do it. And that'll be a sad day.

Re: Crowd Patronage: How A 400 Year Old Model Can Save The Music Industry

#49

TL;DR The arts used to be (like Mozart's time used to be) supported by wealthy patrons who commissioned works that were subsequently enjoyed by the public. The notion of music as a commodity to be consumed like sugar and paprika is a modern one, and, M Kim argues, a historical quirk whose time has passed. We should thus separate consumption from patronage, with the latter greatly enhanced by crowd-funding technology,…

  One could still have free music for those who value 
  dollars more than time.
If the music can be copied freely, couldn't the cover art and other metadata also be copied?

There's no reason in principle that an ad-supported iTunes clone couldn't do everything iTunes does - it could be more convenient, in fact, as you wouldn't have to muck around with credit card numbers and passwords. The only reason piracy is inconvenient at the moment is because it's illegal.

Re: Crowd Patronage: How A 400 Year Old Model Can Save The Music Industry

#50

Music without the music industry (labels etc) is the internet without aggregators (reddit etc) What happened on the internet before content aggregators (or before you had access to them)? you'd see a cool website and tell a friend the website address or you'd send a link to a friend and they might pass it on if they cared enough, they might not. That's a few people, unless the website was seriously incredible it woul…

You don't need to have to have your music reach a million people to make a living as a musician. The Grateful Dead for example had fans that numbered in the thousands, but those fans were actual fanatics that went to every concert and bought every piece of paraphernalia. Most artists today don't understand that model. They think success is about topping charts.

This overstates the case. The Grateful Dead might very well have had millions of fans; they just kept forgetting where they were up to in the count, and so started back at zero out of a basic sense of fairness.
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