Music in a Declining Economy

I'm working on a series of blog posts on gift economies. It's a complex subject, so it's taking me awhile to pull it all together in a logical fashion.

In the meantime, I've been seeing a wave of articles on spending patterns during the recession. Not just about people buying less, but even giving away what they already have. I want to collect them here and do a short piece on how all of this might impact the future of music.

Recently the thinking has been that musicians should provide free digital music to create demand for salable merchandise and for shows and other types of experiences. But I haven't seen much attention paid to the fact that people either may not be able to afford what musicians are selling, or if they can, they may not want it.

First let's look at some economic figures (this is just a brief sample of what can be found):

Dubbed “median wage stagnation” by economists, the annual incomes of the bottom 90 per cent of US families have been essentially flat since 1973 – having risen by only 10 per cent in real terms over the past 37 years. That means most Americans have been treading water for more than a generation. Over the same period the incomes of the top 1 per cent have tripled. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the multiple is above 300. "The crisis of middle-class America," Financial Times, 7/30/10.

Explained Sanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett: “When the bottom 40 percent has [only] $100 to spend every month after shelter, food and transportation, the idea that it’s OK to charge $80 for basic cable is very dangerous. "Analysts Bullish on the Eve of Upfront Week," MediaWeek, 5/16/10.

And when Americans are spending, the money is going to tech and telecom companies, which may not be putting money into musicians' pockets:

Right there up at the top is America’s love affair with mobile devices, where spending has soared almost 17% since the recession started. Also supporting my thesis of a communications boom – spending on wired, wireless, and cable services have risen by 5%. "Where Americans Are Spending More..." Mandel on Innovation and Growth, 8/9/10.

"Tech Gadgets Steal Sales From Appliances, Clothes."

And some people are going so far as to get rid of their possessions.

Many have begun trading in CD, DVD, and book collections for digital music, movies, and e-books. But this trend in digital technology is now influencing some to get rid of nearly all of their physical possessions - from photographs to furniture to homes altogether. "Cult of less: Living out of a hard drive," BBC News, 8/16/10.

Most people live their life trying to acquire more and more things. Living a minimalist lifestyle is completely the opposite. It’s about trying to live with less and less things. It’s about trying to get back to the bare minimum of possessions. In doing that, it frees up your life to pursue the things you most value. "Becoming minimalist: when having fewer possessions means living a better life," SmartPlanet, 8/12/10.

Is it possible to own nothing?

Well, maybe not nothing. Nothing is a little extreme. But is it possible to own close to the nothing? I hope to have the answer to that question soon. Inspired by a a book or two, I’ve decided to try to see if I can rid my life of most of the clutter. The goal? Condense my life into 2 bags and 2 boxes. "Is it possible to own nothing?" Cult of Less Blog, 9/8/09.

If people either can't afford, or don't want, possessions, that knocks out t-shirt sales and limited edition books, albums, and art objects.

On the other hand, the good thing about owning less is that it helps us prioritize what is really important to us. There have been quite a few studies lately about happiness; many indicate that experiences mean more to us than possessions.

We find that only one component of consumption is positively related to happiness — leisure consumption. In contrast, consumption of durables, charity, personal care, food, health care, vehicles, and housing are not significantly associated with happiness. Second, we find that leisure consumption is associated with higher levels of happiness partially through its effect on social connectedness, as indexed by measures of loneliness and embeddedness in social networks. "Does consumption buy happiness? Evidence from the United States."

This might be good news for music, which can be all about the experience. However, given that there is less money to spend, not all experiences are doing equally well. For example, we already know the high end concert market has been hit hard.

Our Top 100 Tours for the first six months have a combined gross of $965.5 million, down $196.8 million, or 17 percent, from the same period one year ago. If you want to find a lower number you’ll have to go back to 2005 when the mid-year gross volume was $730.9 million. "2010 By The Numbers (So Far)," Pollstar, 7/9/10.

And some data has been coming in to suggest the low end might be affected as well, but it's probably too soon to know about that yet.

The live music industry exhibited a productivity gain in 2009 by generating more money through fewer events.

... as reported last year, the gap between the grass roots acts and superstars is widening, both in touring and at events where the big names are needed to attract fans. ... Down in the tail, the closure of pubs (49 a week, according to The Publican) puts more pressure on the low end of the market, which makes it increasingly difficult for emerging talent to find an audience. "Adding up the UK music industry for 2009," PRS for Music, 8/4/10.

Working in favor of the low end of the live music market is that for consumers doing something small on a regular basis can be more fulfilling than blowing a lot of money on an occasional big experience.

Scholars have discovered that one way consumers combat hedonic adaptation is to buy many small pleasures instead of one big one. Instead of a new Jaguar, Professor Lyubomirsky advises, buy a massage once a week, have lots of fresh flowers delivered and make phone calls to friends in Europe. Instead of a two-week long vacation, take a few three-day weekends. "Consumers Find Ways to Spend Less and Find Happiness," New York Times, 8/8/10.

The three-day weekend vacations have worked well for some music festivals. Consumer costs can be kept down if the festival is in your own town and you sleep at home, or it's a festival with a campground.

However, I have long maintained that the heart of live music is local, and this research seems to reinforce that:

Being able to spend money on purchases designed to create positive experiences increased people's happiness. The best way to increase happiness, though, was to make a series of smaller purchases rather than one big one. Think of it this way. The people who went to a series concerts by a few local bands were happier overall than the people who spent the same amount of money but got great seats at a concert by a top band. "Money can buy happiness if you spent it right," Psychology Today, 5/21/10.

I've touched upon just a small amount of research on consumer spending patterns, so this blog post isn't meant to cover the subject in great depth. But I wanted to add to the conversation by suggesting that some of the newly proposed music business models seem to assume that fans are sitting on cash that they will use to buy music-related stuff if only we are smart enough to offer it to them. People will always want music, but if and when they can obtain all the music they want for free, they may not feel the need to spend more for it.

More on the economics of it all in my upcoming posts on gift economies.

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

UPDATE 8/26/10

"Musicians currently have half the gigs they did before the flood, and this work pays less than pre-Katrina," says Gabriela Hernandez, executive director of the non-profit relief agency Sweet Home New Orleans (SHNO), which released the report. "At the same time, the recession has eliminated a lot of the service industry day jobs they've previously relied on. So while the cost of living has skyrocketed in the city, musicians are seeing their opportunities to earn money dry up."

SHNO published the report this morning, using its 4,500 clients to provide insights into the well-being of the city's famed music community. There's good news: Despite fears about the storm's impact on neighborhood-based institutions such as Mardi Gras Indians and the second-line community, those groups are back to pre-Katrina levels of activity. Musicians, on the other hand, have experienced a drop in the average number of gigs from 12 to six in a month, and earnings are down 43% to a ballpark income of $15,000 per year. "The state of working musicians in New Orleans: 'Half the gigs ... and the work pays less'," Los Angeles Times, 8/26/10.

What It Takes to Succeed in Music

There are a lot of people who will tell you what you need to do to succeed in (or at least making a living at) music.

Unfortunately, people are recommending all sorts of strategies, some of it conflicting.

I decided to make a list of many of the suggestions I've read.

MAKE GREAT MUSIC.
Lots of people start with this, although not everyone does. (People can cite examples of musicians who don't make great music, but still do well.)

But what exactly is great music? Who decides? If it sells, is that a sufficient indicator? Does it have to be perceived as great now, or does great mean it will be revered 30 years from now?

Do you have to write it yourself? Or can you cover someone else's as long as that is great? Or does the music have to be original but not necessarily written by you?

Can great music consist of mashups? Can combining other people's music be the path to success?

How much great music must you put out? A new song a week? A new song a month?

HAVE GREAT PERFORMANCE SKILLS
Since recorded music is getting harder to sell, some people say the key to making it is the quality of the live show. But what is a great performance?

Do you need to play an instrument? Do you need to play it well? Or just in a showy manner?

Do you need to be able to sing?

Does dancing count as a great performance?

Is a well-rehearsed show the way to go? Or is impromptu better? Or are you supposed to make it look impromptu, but you've really heavily rehearsed all of those meaningful moments?

RELATE TO YOUR FANS

On stage?

After the show?

In a blog?

In videos?

In a newsletter?

On Facebook?

On Twitter?

Do you have to do it yourself, or can a team member do it?

Should you hire a band member precisely for his/her social skills and give him/her the job?

Are you running contests for your fans so they are creating videos and remixing your songs?

HAVE STUFF TO SELL

Do you have great looking merchandise? Or maybe not so great looking merchandise, but you made it yourself and you're marking up the price like crazy?

Are you offering merchandise at multiple price points?

Do you have something for the guys and something different for the girls?

Limited edition items?

Vinyl?

A snazzy display table?

A sexy merch person?

Have you created special events?

Are you selling membership subscriptions?

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Can you make frequent videos? At home? On tour? Using split screen? Animation?

Can you do all of your recording in a home studio that you've put together yourself?

IMAGE

Are you authentic?

Or maybe you've totally invented yourself and you keep the fans guessing? What will you be this week?

Have you built a good story? Around yourself? Around your music?

And how do you look on stage? What are you wearing? Do you have lights?

What's your one line description of yourself? Of your music?

EXPOSURE

Do you have a website?

Are you blogging?

Are you microblogging?

Are you on YouTube?

Are you on ReverbNation? What about all the other music websites?

Have you gotten your music on TV yet?

And have you mailed out your music to college radio stations?

And have you contacted all relevant music bloggers? And gotten to know them first, before pitching your songs?

And are you giving away your music everywhere you can? And collecting email addresses? Or not.

Are you going to music conferences?

TOURING

Are you touring? Or maybe you're staying local until you're selling out there first.

Are you booking lots of shows? Maybe 200 a year?

Are you living in a van and/or sleeping on people's floors and couches?

Have you raised money on Kickstarter for touring? Or sold lifetime show passes to 1000 of your best fans to buy a van?

Okay, folks. Now do it. Do it all. Or maybe don't any of it. And then if you succeed anyway, people will go back to figure out why you succeeded and then recommend that as a blueprint.

Have I left anything out? Have you gone to a music conference and then left with your head spinning because you've gotten too much advice, particularly conflicting advice? If so, what didn't work for you?

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

Collaborating on "Creative Things"

The post below was originally the last half of this post, The Rise of the "Creative Thing," but to keep the amount of reading to a manageable level, I moved it into its own post.

___________

Of the three ways to create multimedia productions (do it yourself, hire someone, or collaborate) collaboration is the most complex because establishing how everyone gets paid can be tricky. Payment can be based on:

everyone's individual contribution, or

an equal distribution, no matter who does what, or

an unequal distribution based on what everyone brings to the table in terms power/influence/prestige.

Denver-based John Common reached out to artists while working on his most recent album. They were invited to decorate wooden boxes which, in addition to serving as fancy CD packages, would be displayed and sold in an art gallery. The band, the artist, and the gallery would each share equally from the sale.

Completed boxes will be returned to the Bailey/Common team where they will be prepared for exhibition/sale. All boxes will be exhibited from July 9 -17 at Abecedarian Gallery. Base prices for each artwork will be mutually agreed on by the artist and Bailey/Common team. Once sold each artist receives 35% of the sale price, along with a copy of the new CD. Common Box Project: Prospectus

Amanda Palmer has done multiple collaborations. In most cases she hasn't said who gets paid what, but she did go on record in this case, involving a troupe of performance artists who went on tour with her.

Lisa: Is it true The Danger Ensemble perform with you for free?

Amanda: I can’t afford to pay them, so we have been touring for five months cutting costs wherever we can, staying with fans and handing out donation baskets after the show, sometimes the fans even bring food in. This system has been working well, if it didn’t they wouldn’t be here, so far they have been making more money from tips than their regular jobs. "Who Killed Amanda Palmer? An Interview with the Queen of Punk Cabaret," LifeMusicMedia, 2/26/09.

Here is what she says in general about collaborations.

Having done a long career with the Dresden Dolls and a couple of years with a solo career, I've really been able to divine what's important to me. And it's not money. It's not commercial success. What I really want to do is make art with my friends. And if possible make people happy by doing that. ...

That being said, I've also seen enough friendships destroyed by creative collaboration that you have to choose very carefully what you're doing and who you're doing it with. There was once in this collaboration -- not creatively, because we work creatively and business-wise really well together -- but when it got to the point that some people got upset about the project, that really strained our relationship. Because all of a sudden -- our intentions are completely good, we were loving our recording and loving planning our tour and playing this wonderful game with our fans. But as soon as critics from the outside came and rained on our parade, we had different recactions to it. And that was a challenge for us. We're wise enough people and good enough friends that it only lasted a day. "Interview: Amanda Palmer on Neil Gaiman, Frances Bean Cobain, and why her people think Evelyn Evelyn is career suicide," The Phoenix, 4/12/10.

Denver-based photographer Lucia De Giovanni told me her collaborations are often friend-based projects as well.

It's usually a mutual interest - a lot of friendships are born out of photoshoots for which I get approached, and then people get interested in what else I have cooking up and start collaborating, usually over dinner or drinks! I would say that people are very respectful of certain artistic boundaries - for example, I usually have carte blanche for a photoshoot, but I don't think of that as my project, it's something I do to promote them. And vice versa - when I select music for a slideshow, it's certainly a collaborative project, but the composer is providing a piece of the big project... they're a part of it, under my umbrella. And it works because we're all friends and supportive of each other's creative outlets - I don't know if it would have the same "feel" if we didn't know each other. Then, I guess, it reverts to a service provider, you hire me. But that doesn't mean it's not their project as well, they're a HUGE part of it... it works because creatively we are on the same wave length.

And here is what David Byrne has to say on collaborations.

I have done a number of collaborations myself – with designers, other musicians, theatre directors and choreographers. It’s always a little bit different one project from another, but the collaborative process has certain similarities. I find someone has to be boss. Though we might claim open source, no censorship and willingness to listen, veto power resides somewhere, and has to be acknowledged as such. Someone, as subtly as possible, has to keep things on track and focused. There are ways to do this that are dictatorial and other ways that are benign, subtle, almost invisible – but the guiding hand needs to be there. In my experience I sometimes choose to defer to the other collaborator, and I make that clear from the start; other times it’s the other way around. "Interview: Bruce Mau and David Byrne," Contemporary, Issue #69, 2004.

Here are three resources which might be of use if you are thinking of collaborations.

Building a Collaborative Entertainment Property

Small-Scale Network Modeling for Interdisciplinary Art Collaborations (Powerpoint presentation)

Dividing Ownership in a Group Project (Added 10/4/10.)

Palmer's latest project, Evelyn Evelyn, is also a collaboration.

“It was really a wonderful, true collaboration,” Palmer says of Evelyn Evelyn’s origins, on the line from a Prague tour stop. “Jason [Webley] and I, looking back on having written some of these songs two years ago, can’t remember who did what. We can’t remember who wrote which line, who came up with which melody idea. And I think that’s actually a really good sign that our minds really melded during the songwriting process.

“It was like playing a really manic game of songwriter Ping-Pong,” she continues, “where one of us would come up with a concept and we would just bat ideas back and forth over Thai food, cracking each other up. It’s so funny—you can come up with all sorts of artsy, highfalutin ideas and reasons why we did this project, but really, we just wanted to hang out together.” "Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley make Evelyn Evelyn twice as fun," Straight.com, 5/13/10.

I think it’s important to point at that this record never had a “message”. But in that Malcolm McLuhan way, the record itself is the message. We are two artists who love games, theater and dark humor. In giving ourselves permission to do a project this ridiculous, we’re probably saying something that we’ve never said with our more self-serious solo records. "An interview with Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley on Evelyn Evelyn," NewBeats, 5/10/10.

In addition to the album, there will be a graphic novel, a concept that has been embraced by other musicians as well.

Is the pairing up of the graphic novel and the album the future? Palmer isn’t so sure. “As artists are getting cleverer about capitalising on their releases, some will do some groundbreaking stuff with graphic novels. But for others, it won’t make sense. Sure you may see the pop star du jour putting one out but that doesn’t mean it’s this great new thing. I’d love to read what a brilliant mind like Robyn Hitchcock would do in the genre but, to be honest, I don’t know if I’d want to see the Beyonce graphic novel.” "Pop stars branch out into graphic novels," Financial Times, 4/16/10.

Cynthia Von Buhler, who will do the artwork for the Evelyn Evelyn graphic novel, is herself a multimedia artist and frequent collaborator.

Cynthia von Buhler is an internationally exhibiting visual artist, illustrator, children's book author, and performer living in New York City. Von Buhler uses traditional as well as unconventional media: painting, sculpture, performance, video projection, installation, living fauna, collage, photography, human detritus, and electronic audio.

... Von Buhler's paintings have appeared in more than a thousand magazines, books, publications, billboards, and CDs. ...

Von Buhler is also involved in the music industry and performance art, and has performed at museums, galleries, and nightclubs in major cities around the country. Von Buhler's seminal, underground performance troupe, “Women of Sodom” won a Best Music Poll Award from The Boston Phoenix and paved the way for the revival of burlesque and cabaret acts in Boston such as the Dresden Dolls. ... Von Buhler also formed and managed the band Splashdown, who were for a time signed to Capitol Records. She also co-owned Castle von Buhler Records with her ex-husband and Splashdown member, Adam Buhler and Clifford Stoltze. Castle von Buhler released a series of three art and music CD compilations which won many art and design awards. The Curriculum Vitae of Von Buhler

Some of her projects are more lucrative than others.

Cynthia von Buhler entered the field in the mid-1980s but found it slow going at first. In fact, she contemplated being a stripper so she could work on illustrations during the day. “I got two jobs my first year, but then it picked up and I quit my day job.

... "Through the years, I have tried other fields like band management, record label ownership, and running my own band, and in all I was disadvantaged due to my sex, but in illustration I have always felt that it doesn’t matter what I look like and it doesn’t matter that I’m a woman.” "What Inequality?" Step Inside Design, Nov/Dec 2005.

I’m getting royalties from my books now and it is a nice surprise to receive unexpected money in the mail. It isn’t enough to live on yet but I’m working on it. I do fine art, illustration and run my own gallery/event space so I make my money from various sources. I see my book royalties as my retirement fund. "Getting Published—Myth or Reality?" Communication Arts, 7/5/07.

I have found nothing specific about how she gets paid on her collaborations, but I did find this, which suggests she doesn't expect everything to make money.

Illustration is her bread and butter; von Buhler's works have appeared in The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, Atlantic Monthly, and Vogue, on the cover of the Juilliard String Quartet's ''Intimate Letters'' CD, and in countless periodicals. But her immediate focus is on creating an exhibition space for ''artists who want to do things that aren't market-driven, that aren't necessarily for sale, that are cutting-edge. Art that you probably wouldn't want to put in your house but is really interesting to view, and opens your mind to new ideas.'' "Original Cynthia." Boston Globe, 3/30/2000.

Another musician/designer is Nathan Johnson. He does film scores, produces visual art, and is a member of a design studio. He also created The Cinematic Underground, a performance ensemble, which included multiple siblings and a sister-in-law.

Imagine this: a film composer, a classically-trained piano instructor, a log-cabin builder, a high-school student, a dancer, a grade-school teacher, an actor, an architect, a struggling novelist, an illustrator and a landscape gardener all move together under one Boston roof. "Interview w/ The Cinematic Underground," Sounds Good, 11/9/05.

Their big project was Annasthesia.

We wrote basically a literal concept narrative album, which is quite different from your standard concept album because . . . it actually is a literal story with exterior characters. It's called Annasthesia. The story is about love and escape and risk. And kind of the choice you make that either has to do with numbing yourself or engaging with life . . . it's sort of an anti-love story, and that's the album we're touring. . . The album comes with a 24 page color graphic novella that my brother Zach did all the illustrations for. So you actually read it like a comic book as you listen to the album. And what we're doing this year is we're taking that and putting it on the stage, so the show becomes a mash-up between a concert and a graphic novel, and kind of a weird narrative storytelling form.

It's not acting 'as such,' but I'm in character on the show and my sister is as well . . . So the way that we do it is we actually play all the songs live, but we project all of the graphic novel onto the stage on this big screen behind us. I'm kind of the [lead character.] So it's not acting in the sense that . . . well, we don't have lines but we definitely perform it as an abstract theater piece, a concert, and a comic book. It's really fun.

The thing that really drives it is the storytelling aspect of it. And that's something that I think is apparent in the way we made the album. We wrote the story before the music. I recorded it in my brother's bedroom in my parents' house. We had these massive charts up all over the wall where I was madly working out how to structure this story and what was drawn. That really laid the groundwork and the restrictions for the music. The music came out of that and filled the different parts we needed in the story. "Interview w/ The Cinematic Underground," Sounds Good, 11/9/05.

The Past, Present, and Future of "The Creative Thing" Musical Production

Creating a story and then writing music to fit has long been part of opera, operettas, and musical theater. And perhaps that's the way it should be done. Green Day's American Idiot was turned into a musical after the fact. But as one critic pointed out, you'll get a more cohesive production if you coordinate a story with the songs from the beginning.

... the qualities that can make an indie-rock album so compelling — attitude, mood, grit — are probably not going to be able to sustain a theatrical journey. Drama needs more connective tissue. "Critic's Notebook: 'American Idiot' and the fate of the contemporary musical," Los Angeles Times, 5/20/10.

Aside from the fact that most bands don't have the talent to write a rock musical/opera, there are at least two challenges which may limit the popularity of this format: not all fans want to follow a linear story line at a concert and not all music venues can accommodate a stage production.

Still, Byrne's latest release, Here Lies Love, about Imelda Marcos, appears to be headed that direction.

The package contains a small illustrated book, with notes and lyrics by Byrne, plus an additional DVD of documentary footage. If he can secure the financial backing, Byrne hopes to present this in future as a sort of club-based musical.

“Some people may feel it’s a bit too close to Evita, but I’ve made a point not to see that show, so I don’t really know,” says Byrne. In truth, he says, he’s not that keen on straight musicals, but he accepts that this is what Here Lies Love will probably end up being. He prefers to see it as a drama set to music, a portrait of a flawed and needy attention-seeker. "Imelda Marcos gets the Evita treatment," Times Online, 2/21/10.

To put today's musical into context, here's a good overview of music combined with theater down through the ages.

And for fun, here's a big list of concept albums, the vast majority of which will never be turned into musical theater or movies.

At this point, I'd like to expand into a discussion of transmedia, but I'll save that for the next blog post: An Overview of Transmedia

More Examples of Multimedia Projects or Collectives that Involve Music

Ride, Rise, Roar

The songwriter essentially invited three choreographers to wrap him up within their sometimes faux-naive, sometimes sexy, often transfixing compositions, and even fans who hang on [David] Byrne's every gesture may have a hard time keeping their attention off the dancers who leap over him, dart between him and his microphone, coast by him on office chairs and cavort abstractly around the stage.

Color performance footage is intercut with black-and-white behind-the-scenes material that offers some insight into the choreographers' creative agendas and hints at the collaborative process that led to the latest Byrne/Eno record, "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today." "Ride, Rise, Roar," The Hollywood Reporter, 3/16/10.

77 Million Paintings

Hard to say what this Brian Eno invention is. Part book, part screen saver, part gallery painting, part DVD video, part music, part software. It slices and dices your perceptions! The accompanying book in this package makes it clear that this an art piece that is normally exhibited in a large room. Here it comes disguised as DVD that you load onto your computer (Windows or Mac). "Cool Tools: 77 Million Paintings," kk.org, 12/19/06.

Ghostly International

Ghostly International is a multi-platform cultural curator, a tightly knit aesthetic universe fulfilling the roles of art gallery, design house, clothing designer, technology innovator, music-publishing company—and, yes, record label—in one. In the years since its birth in 1999, Ghostly has grown from a boutique label known for its experimental-pop and -techno acumen to an internationally recognized platform for the work of the world's best visual artists, designers, technologists, and musicians.

Alligator Mouth Improv

Drawing on theater, movement, vocals, music, storytelling, and video, and using audience stories, themes and ideas as inspiration, we offer one-of-a-kind performances created in the moment.

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

UPDATE 6/6/10

Here's a very good overview of how new American musicals are differing from older forms and the fact that traditional forms still sell better. My take is that the newer forms are going to be more popular with audiences that never attend Broadway-style shows. That means reaching those audiences elsewhere. But to do that means staging productions which are much cheaper to produce and can be offered in a bigger variety of venues. "New York 2010: Out with the old American musical"

And here's a piece on Jim Lewis, who collaborated on Fela!, one of those new musicals.

The idea that [choreographer Bill T. Jones] and I could create a new kind of show that would appeal to a really diverse audience, more accustomed to MTV than a well-made play, fueled our work over the next five years. How could something closer to the energy of a concert also tell a story and inspire young people to strive to change the world? ...

... our dreams of that alternate space were replaced by a new reality: to do the show we’d created would cost too much to run anywhere but Broadway. "Fela! Scribe Jim Lewis on the Show's Wild Ride to 11 Tony Nominations," Broadway.com, 5/25/10.

Here's an essay that discusses the Internet and collaboration and how "art" is no longer a fixed object anymore.

... where art is concerned the single most important effect of Wiki-culture may be what it portends for the very idea of a tangible art object like a book or painting and what this would portend for industries dedicated to art. Take the Johnny Cash Project again. Like much Wiki-Art, it is organic and ever-changing. The work may reside on the Internet, but, in truth, there is no work — no single art object. It is an ongoing, dynamic series, potentially infinite. "Technology changes how art is created and perceived," LA Times, 6/6/10.

UPDATE 6/13/10
An exploration of where today's music is headed.
Broadway rocks, conclude The Times' theater and pop critics

UPDATE 6/15/10
I had been waiting for more information about this project before posting it, and now I have it. What looked like a good music/graphic novel/theater presentation isn't.

Gorillaz' planned opera with Watchmen and V For Vendetta creator Alan Moore has been ditched....

Going on to explain he had already "wrote a third of it", the writer added that "nobody had done anything else upon the opera" and that other commitments from both parties had decided the fate of the collaboration.

"I had too many commitments as well," Moore admitted. "And since I had never received any money or a contract, I was alright saying, 'Yeah, I'm pulling out of this. You can do your own opera about Dr Dee, I don't own Dr Dee, I don't own the concept of opera'." "Gorillaz ditch opera project with 'Watchman''s Alan Moore," NME.COM, 6/14/10.

UPDATE 6/21/10
Here's another resource on collaborative projects.
Co-creating Value through Collaborative Entertainment

UPDATE 6/27/10
Here's a story about Cirque du Soleil's attempt at creating a scripted show which didn't fare well.

The show struck executives as a little of everything (vaudeville, theater, clowning, acrobatics) but neither entrancing nor memorable by the standards of Cirque — whose popular shows include “Ka” (a gravity-defying production, inspired by martial arts performers) and “O” (a water show). ...

“The reality is, people have very specific expectations with Cirque shows, and ‘Banana Shpeel’ turned out to be neither fish nor fowl — neither circus act nor theatrical vaudeville entertainment,” [Paul Binder, the founding artistic director of Big Apple Circus] said. “So I think it was probably difficult to get a large audience excited about a show when many didn’t really understand what it was.” "When Cirque du Soleil Met Theater - ‘Shpeel’ Failure," New York Times, 6/26/10.

The Rise of the "Creative Thing"

The Devaluation of Music

A number of people have embraced the idea that since it costs nothing, or nearly nothing, to make unlimited digital copies of your music, you should freely give it away for the exposure and then sell limited objects and experiences to those who want more and are willing to pay for it.

What recorded music becomes, then, is the promotional or marketing vehicle for something else. Increasingly it can't be sold as a standalone product because people expect it to be free. Our perceptions of recorded music have changed.

For example, consider these two scenarios:

1. Buy the CD and get the T-shirt for free.
2. Buy the T-shirt and get the CD for free.

If getting music for free has conditioned people to think it has no monetary value, then whatever monetary value they assign to the bundle will be for the T-shirt.

(In contrast to how music is being presented these days, the infomercial trick is to assign a value to the bundle by telling people that all the items in the bundle have a value.

For $20 you get a $15 CD AND $15 T-shirt. A $30 value!!

A smart infomercial person would never say, "Hey, we're not losing any money if you download our music for free, so please do.")

Once we come to accept that recorded music isn't much of a standalone product, we start looking for what we can couple it with to enhance its value. Even Justin Bieber’s manager, Scooter Braun, says as much.

... he was willing to admit that, “music has to become a multimedia business.” The product is no longer the music in and of itself. The product is the musician’s story and the experience of being a part of it. "TechCrunch Disrupt - Day 3," SoundCtrl, 5/27/10.

One of the most obvious shifts in music presentation has been the move from just recording a song to including it in a video. That's increasingly how we consume music.

[Comparing the same one-week period] the ten most-played music videos on YouTube racked 57.3 million views, while the top ten on MySpace Music generated 7.5 million. "YouTube v. MySpace Music: What a Difference Two Years Makes..." Digital Music News, 5/12/10.

Another example to illustrate that the video can be more important than the music is OK Go.

Their new video for This Too Shall Pass is another viral smash (8m views and counting), but their record sales have been nothing short of a disaster. It hasn't even sold 25,000 copies in the US. ...

[This Too Shall Pass is] endlessly watchable, using a panoply of junk to create a colourful, impossibly complex Rube Goldberg machine. [The video is] certainly popular, but might be just as viral if it contained no sound at all. "OK Go find more viral success – but not real success," The Guardian, 3/18/10.

Thus, combining music with video appears to be good for exposure, but you still need to find something to sell. That leads us to a point where musicians are looking for even more stuff to tack onto the music.

Speaking at Twitter's first-ever developers' conference, Black Eyed Peas frontman, Will.i.am outlined a vision of the music industry of the future where developers will be just as important to a band as the musicians that play on the record. He claimed:

"A band's going to be a singer, a guitar player, a bass player, a code writer, a guy who makes applications, a guy who does computer animation; that is a group. It's going to be self-contained content providers and digital distributers." "Why musicians need digital creatives," StrategyEye, 5/27/10.

Explaining the "Creative Thing"

I'll take it a step further than Will.i.am. I envision a day in the near future where music will be so intertwined with additional forms of media and experiences that it may become nearly meaningless to speak of it as a distinct entity. It will become an inseparable part of a bigger concept, which I will call a "creative thing." There won't be a discernible line between the music and what it is bundled with, which will mean the music business as such will no longer exist. There will be people who continue to specialize in creating music, but since the packaging of music (in whatever form: sound, performance, products) will involve more than just music, music becomes an adjunct of a bigger whole.

You can find good examples of "creative things" on Kickstarter. Artists are trying to raise money for all manner of creative projects. To entice people to contribute money, the project creators offer a variety of premiums. Often neither the projects nor the premiums fall into any sort of neatly defined box. (Examples: A musician offered home-cooked meals. A performance artist offered lip prints. A magazine publisher offered handmade quilts.) The creativity of the project, the offerings, and the presentation/communication of it all blur into a gestalt. Every aspect of each Kickstarter "creative thing" is connected to and reinforces the concept as a whole.

The publisher who offered quilts on Kickstarter is Lee Tusman. One of his music-related activities is serving as a traveling art/music show host.

For Lee, “Running with the Night” is only moonlighting: his day job is curator of the Riverside Art Museum, but his list of artistic extracurriculars is extensive. He created the quilts (or “quiltz” as he likes to call them) that spill out of the Vanagon, as well as many others; he runs a micro-record label called Jewish Noise, which combines abstract electronica/noise with traditional chanting and singing; he sews one-armed cloth dolls; he operates an occasional pizza delivery service out of the Vanagon—people call him, and he makes a gourmet pie from scratch, puts it into a hand-painted pizza box and drives it to the door; he curates the Vanagallery, a mobile art space that’s housed a carousel of artistic works; and most recently, he’s producing a magazine called JANKY. "Behind the Zine," Inland Empire Weekly, 3/11/10.

Not associated with Kickstarter, but one of the best examples of someone in music thinking three-dimensionally is Amanda Palmer.

The wonderful thing about rock is that it's a truly multimedia forum. There's the album artwork, the posters, the live shows, the stage design, the costumes, the videos....it's perfect for a gesamtkunstwerk hound like myself. "Art Space Talk: Amanda Palmer," myartspace> blog, 1/6/09.

In the above interview she also talks about her experience as a performance artist, living in a building housing artists from a variety of media, and having painters creating art during some of her shows.

Who Does the Creating?

To function in this world of "creative things," musicians will need at least one of three approaches:

Personally be able to create more than just music.

Hire people or work with a team who can supplement what they don't/can't do.

Collaborate with artists in other media so that together they create multi-dimensional packages/experiences.

There are a variety of economic and creative ramifications to each arrangement (e.g., Who is going to generate the creative vision? Is everyone going to be paid for their efforts and if so, how?).

The Multidimensional Musician

When the musicians can do everything by themselves, it keeps the economics simple. Whether the music leads to an art sale or the art leads to a music sale, it's all going to the same creator.

Jeffrey Hoover creates works that include both music and visual art.

People sometimes wonder whether the music or the art comes first. It can be either way, and sometimes the work develops simultaneously. In the case of Peacock Blue and An American Toccata the music was written first, then the paintings were created. I wrestled with the idea of how to best represent the music. Would a graphic score be appropriate, or some type of freely conceived representation? I resolved this dilemma by the majority of the painting being an intuitive representation of the music, inserting a graphic score/sonic representation as an entablature on the bottom of the painting. "new work for the eye and ear," Composer NewsUpdate, Vol. 3, No. 1, January, 1999.

Brian Eno has always done art and music together.

Neither my visual nor my musical directions would have taken the shape they did without each other. I make no distinction between the development of my visual and musical output as the two have been growing together, feeding and informing the other. "Brian Eno: The life of Brian," The Independent, 7/25/06.

Another example: A Denver-based band, Lil' Slugger, is putting out a series of comic books they have created themselves.

[Band members] Martin and Couch wrote the books, and Martin’s girlfriend, Beth Link, drew all the pictures, which Martin himself then manipulated in Photoshop. “All credit goes to her,” he says, “and all blame goes to me. It was a totally nightmarish process and no one should ever do it.” "Lil' Slugger's art rock and comic books," The Denver Post, 5/21/10.

Using Specialists to Fill in the Blanks

More typical is the musician/band/label paying creative contractors to do the non-music art. Generally this is a work-for-hire arrangement where the contractor is paid a fee and whoever commissions the art owns it outright and can do whatever he/she/they want with it. A work-for-hire arrangement usually costs more money upfront, but if the musician/band/label think they can sell a lot of copies, it's probably a better deal in the long run because they don't have to share any revenues with the contractor.

Do you ever approach bands you would like to design for?

Sometimes, but mostly they approach me... I prefer working on assignment. ... I need a frame for my work. ... there is a message to be sent to the audience. By looking at my poster, people should be able to see what to expect from a band or gig. An interview with graphics designer Wytse, FuryRocks, 10/4/08.

However, as music is declining as a standalone product, I anticipate we'll see more visual artists realizing what they create is what actually sells. Therefore they may not relinquish their rights so quickly.

The self-supporting graphic-art scene that's flowering now has its own back-story. It was the music business that first really allowed graphic artists off the creative leash; from Milton Glaser's kaleidoscope-haired Bob Dylan poster for CBS in 1966 through to Peter Saville's emotive imagery for Factory Records in the early 1980s, by way of some far-out Pink Floyd gatefolds. As King notes, "Even at the end of the 1980s people went into graphic design because they wanted to produce record sleeves, and that link sadly faded away when vinyl disappeared."

With this avenue of free expression shut down, graphic artists moved over into the rag trade. During the 1990s, the likes of James Jarvis and Fergus Purcell helped create a new trend for limited-run printed T-shirts. At the same time, bookshops such as Magma had started selling monographed design products, and a new breed of graphic-design nerds and collectors was soon multiplying. Once the internet arrived, there was no stopping them. "Warning: graphic content - how a new wave of illustrators is blowing the art world apart," The Independent, 5/16/10.

If designers anticipate more income down the road rather than upfront, they might start asking for a percentage of each sale (often in the form of a licensing fee) rather than a one-time payment. Or, for that matter, leverage might shift entirely. We may find designers commissioning music to go with the art and paying the musicians a fixed, work-for-hire fee. (It's less likely that we'd see the designer creating the art, finding music to go with it, and then giving the musician a percentage of each sale because music has already established itself as the marketing vehicle, not the product itself.)

On to Collaborations

Since this blog post has grown rather long, I'll discuss collaborations in my next post, Collaborating on "Creative Things."

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

UPDATE 8/3/10

We used to give many of these tchotchke items away for free in an effort to entice people to pay for the music, but we're considering flipping our strategy so that people pay for the toy and receive the music for free. Just a thought. "Sub Pop's Considering Selling Band Merch and Giving the Music Away For Free," Seattle Weekly, 7/30/10.

UPDATE 10/23/10
I knew Liz Clark awhile back when she was still living in Denver. Now she spends part of her time in NYC, part in Ireland (where her bandmate/partner is from), and part of the time on the road. According to their bio:

Liz and Tessa’s philosophy of simplicity manifests itself by spending part of their year as homeless troubadours, touring the USA and sharing their love of music. The rest of the year is spent in Ireland, working a 10 acre organic garden and running an award-winning cafe on the Emerald Island’s West Coast.

They have developed this idea which is a nice variation on the usual house concert.

... we are starting a new concert series to raise money for the album and we are calling it "Beat Roots". It is going to be a food and music series. ... So the idea is that we, L & the M, will come to your house and cook a 3 course gourmet meal for you and your friends, using the finest produce from your locality and while you are eating your dessert we will treat you to an acousic house concert of our L & the M songs. There is a price of course and for the works (which includes a glass of wine or 2) it is $50 a head but we are flexible. Maybe you just want appetizers and wine and we could probably do that for about $30. "Beat Roots," Lonely and the Moose, 10/23/10.

Hypercompetition, Scarcity, and the Economics of Music

I saw this last week and decided to pull together a blog post on several topics I've been thinking about:

About 1 million design students in China, compared to about 40,000 in the U.S. Implication: your competition for jobs is about to expand exponentially. Welcome to the flat world. ...

The supply is currently outstripping demand, so compensation for things like logo design is going to be low. "Crowdsourcing & Disruption Event at Pratt: Realities & Denial," eyecube, 3/11/10.

And also this:

There are too many films out there, there are too many filmmakers. "SxSW: Nobody Wants to Watch Your Film: Realities of Online Film Distribution," Magnet Media, 3/14/10.

Because of the Internet and global competition, we're seeing declining income in a number of creative fields (e.g., design, writing, music, video). People are competing for these jobs even when there is little or no payment.

RU Sirius, former editor of Mondo 2000 summed up the problem at a recent Net 2.0 conference in Amsterdam: “Get people to work for free.” That has essentially become the motto of the post-scarcity economy. "NET 2.0: Post-Scarcity Economics and the problem with Google," Medialternatives, 2/2/08.

One line of thinking is that if you give away your digital content, you'll gain exposure, build an audience, and then sell "scarce" goods and services. Here are two posts on the subject:

The Technium: Better Than Free

The Grand Unified Theory On The Economics Of Free

While I am not going to argue the rightness or wrongness of "free" (it's already a reality, so I don't think there is much to be gained by exploring the concept here), I am skeptical that there are a lot scarcities to sell. At least not in the areas related to creative content and to human labor. Pretty much anything you offer as "scarce" in these areas can and will be duplicated. Once people see there is money to be made, they will begin offering their own versions until the price is driven down. This is what is now commonly referred to as hypercompetition.

You may think your business offers rare and valuable goods and services. But the chances are that, somewhere, a recent entrant or potential competitor is preparing to do something similar, for a lower price. As the author says: "Everything becomes a commodity eventually." "A more virulent form of hypercompetition," FT.com, 12/16/09.

Here's a definition:

Hypercompetition:
A situation in which there is a lot of very strong competition between companies, markets are changing very quickly, and it is easy to enter a new market, so that it is not possible for one company to keep a competitive advantage for a long time.

And two more explorations on the subject:

From our financial models, such as using net present value analysis to value projects, to our investment models, which presume more or less predictable and long life-spans for given business activities, we have built a lot of operating frameworks on the idea that our lines of business will be around for a while. And not only around, but profitable.

All this began to change in the early 1990's, when a number of scholars, such as my colleague Ian MacMillan and his co-author Rich D'Aveni, started talking about a phenomenon they called "Hypercompetition." In hyper-competitive environments, to paraphrase Hobbes, the life of a competitive advantage is nasty, brutish and short. In other words, advantages don't last for very long before competitive entry, imitation and matching erode their edge, or customers move on, or the environment changes in such a way that the advantage becomes irrelevant. "Competitive Advantage Is Fleeting (And It's Okay to Admit It)," Harvard Business Review, June 2009.

"Welcome to Hypercompetition—Competitive Advantage at its Fastest"

Barriers of entry have kept some competitors out, but technology is reducing some of those. For example:

The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3-D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door, and once it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production, making hundreds, thousands, or more. They can become a virtual micro-factory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; products can be assembled and drop-shipped by contractors who serve hundreds of such customers simultaneously. "In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits," Wired, January 2010.

The revolution that is brewing now will get us much closer to another seemingly impossible Star Trek technology: the Replicator. You won't be able (for some time) to press a button and get a whole meal synthesized on the fly, but we are at the stage where a short time after pressing the button you can have a wide variety of objects appear magically. These range from tiny, fully functional gears to large, colorful pieces of art and cover materials as broad as glass, ceramics, metal and plastic. Yes, glass, ceramics and metal! "Communicator: Done. Replicator: Next. The Future of Making Stuff," usv.com, 3/22/10.

The music industry used to have significant barriers of entry, but now that everyone can cheaply record and distribute music, the flood gates have opened. There are still some barriers (e.g., getting on broadcast radio), but artists are being told there are many opportunities for them these days. Sure, they may have to give away their recorded music to get some attention, but to make money they can offer fans goods and services that aren't easily duplicated.

However, I'm saying that just about everything an artist or band can offer can be duplicated:

Develop some interesting merchandise, and it will be copied.

Representatives for the jam-band Phish are due in federal court this afternoon to argue that it should be allowed to stop bootleggers from selling T-shirts, jackets, bumper stickers and other merchandise bearing its trademarked name during its upcoming reunion tour. ...

The issue isn't necessarily about money, the lawsuit says. The band says the unauthorized merchandise sales "threaten" the band's reputation because it relinquishes control over the quality and appearance of the merchandise, according to the suit. "Phish in court this afternoon to block bootleg merchandise," The Virginian-Pilot, 3/5/09.

Create a great live act, and that can be copied as well.

... the sheer number and variety of tribute bands has exploded, branching out to modern-era acts such as Pearl Jam, the Dave Matthews Band, and even the Arctic Monkeys. "Tribute bands are music to fans’ ears, wallets," The Boston Globe, 3/6/10.

Even relationships aren't perceived as scarce. While it's nice to think that artists/bands will hang on to their fans for life, the reality is we're a society where people too often change friends, even spouses, when they see someone better. Toss in commitment phobia and you have a situation where relationships aren't a sure thing.

Given all of the above, I question the usefulness in talking about scarcities as a music business strategy. In addition, much of what we buy has little to do with scarcity anyway. Sometimes it just comes down to being in the right place at the right time. For example, if we want a cup of coffee, and we see coffee vendors on all four sides of the street, the reason we pick one over the other isn't a scarcity issue. Similarly, if every girl on our block is selling Girl Scout cookies, we may end up buying from whomever comes to our door first. Or maybe we'll buy a box from each one of them.

Buying behavior is much more complicated than saying people will pay a premium for scarcity. Here are a few resources that outline the many factors which determine why we buy what we buy:

Factors Which Influence Consumer Choice. If you want the PowerPoint version, go here.

Buyer Behaviour: Stimulus-Response Model.

The Black Box Model of Consumer Behavior.

So I think talking about "selling scarcity" can be the wrong strategy. As I have already mentioned, hypercompetition suggests that as soon as you have an idea, someone else will copy it and drive down the price. For musicians, that means being on an endless treadmill trying to find scarcities to sell. As soon as you come up with something fans will pay for, many other bands and artists will try it too. There will be a glut.

You may make money in music, but I doubt that offering scarce goods and services will be the key. For virtually every option that an artist/band offers, there already is or will be someone else offering something similar. And it won't take much effort for fans and potential fans to find it. All anyone has to say is, "I want ... " and the marketplace will provide it, often in multiple ways. Think of the various "saleables" that artists/bands currently offer (e.g., entertainment, merchandise, community, engagement, celebrity access) and there are equivalents both within and outside of music.

We're running out of scarcity. ...

It seems as though once a category becomes successful, the headlong rush to knock it off is stronger (and quicker) than it ever was before. ...

While there are almost half a million lawyers practicing in the United States today, there are (gasp!) more than 125,000 in school right now. ...

The same thing is true for doctors, Web sites, T-shirt shops, sushi restaurants, thumbtack manufacturers, and brands of blank CD-ROM disks. ...

If it's remotely digital (like music), then it's easy to mimic. And if it's easy to mimic, someone wins if they can knock off the original--the sooner the better. When someone starts to sell exactly what you sell but for half the price, how long does your good-service, first-mover, nice-person advantage last? "The Scarcity Shortage," Seth Godin's Blog, 8/27/07.

And even the fallback argument, that talent is scarce and people will pay for access to it, doesn't really hold water because making money in music and having the most talent do not necessarily go together.

SUCCESS = SOME TALENT + LUCK
GREAT SUCCESS = SOME TALENT + A LOT OF LUCK
Nobel prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman quoted in "FORMULAE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY," Edge.org, 10/13/07.

Godin acknowledges there might be a few scarcities, but even those may not confer a lasting advantage.

So what's scarce now? Respect. Honesty. Good judgment. Long-term relationships that lead to trust. None of these things guarantee loyalty in the face of cut-rate competition, though.

Some people are even suggesting that we're surrounded by so much abundance that now we want less. J. Walker Smith, president of Yankelovich Inc., lays it out in an article, and then Mike Heronime, Partner/Strategic Services Director, Numantra, expands upon the idea in a presentation.

Enough of Too Much

Marketing to Consumers in a Post-Abundance Economy

However, these models tend to benefit people and companies that provide filters rather than artists trying to sell their music and music-related products. It would be a bit like having a musician say, "Pay me to go away."

So let's jump ahead and envision a world where there's more stuff than any of us can consume. Imagine a scenario where people are making a ton of music and art, but there are few economic transactions. So how do artists (or anyone for that matter) make a living in the post-scarcity society?

In the post-scarcity world, technological advances will facilitate decreasing costs until conceivably almost everything is “free” to the consumer. Scarcity will no longer exist in this world, and, without scarcity, the concept of charging a price to consumers as a means of generating revenue will be unworkable. The post-scarcity world will put tremendous pressure on current business models, potentially rendering them irrelevant and obsolete in the future. If traditional businesses do not adapt to this emerging “free” world, many of the strong, traditional organizations of the early twenty-first century will cease to exist over the next 50 years. "The Post-Scarcity World of 2050-2075"

If products are no longer scarce, does this mean that the only jobs left will be service positions? Are there enough service positions for everyone? Or do people do the services that they find fulfilling, leaving others to lounge around and/or be non-productively creative?

I'm not a regular Burning Man attendee -- the schedule rarely works out -- but I have gone. My first time wandering the playa, visiting the various camps offering gifts of art, services and/or more physical forms of entertainment, I was struck with a realization: this is one model of what a post-nanotech world might look like. Assume your material needs for food, water, shelter and toys were met, and that you no longer needed to work; what might result is a world where creativity, mutuality, and the gift economy ruled... or a world where sex, drugs and sleeping until 2pm ruled. Or, as with Burning Man, both. "Abundance, Scarcity and Beta-Testing Tomorrow," Open the Future, 9/12/06.

How are we to survive as producers and creators in an age, in which value is no longer determined by scarcity, but rather the accumulation of bits and bytes, the 1s and Os that describe information?

... We figure out a system of revenue sharing, in which the exchange of information is granted value. ...

One day we will awake to find the proverbial Google cheque in the mail. It will be a dividend in which all the clicks on the internet have been divided by the total population of the world and squared with the amount of money earned by the earth’s service providers. The legend will say: You are user # 51 298 123 187 here is you ten-cents (US$) for the 8kb of data we actually siphoned off your site. We know its yours, because the IP number says it’s yours.

The result, I predict, will be a practical and infinitely rewarding utopia in which everybody would have a guaranteed income, courtesy of Google Corporation. This is the kind of error, which could make life worth living. "NET 2.0: Post-Scarcity Economics and the problem with Google," Medialternatives, 2/2/08.

The above scenarios, where EVERYTHING is abundant, are still in the future. But the world where music (and everything associated with it) is abundant is already headed our way. The oft-proposed solutions, based on some sort of scarcity, are going to be hard to sustain. So I suggest we look beyond that.

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

UPDATE 4/4/10
This article says that there are now so many photos online available for licensing that the price paid per photo has gone down significantly.
For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path

UPDATE 7/14/10
This article talks about how museums sometimes pay a great deal of money for something that turns out to be fake. The value isn't in the object itself, but in the perceived artist. Therefore, if you can produce a copy and convince someone it is real, they may pay you the same amount as if it is real.
Testing Art for Authenticity at London’s National Gallery

UPDATE 10/17/10
I mentioned in the post that as a society we will even replace personal relationships if someone better comes along. Here's a recent article on the same subject.

[Writes sociologist Eva Illouz in Cold Intimacies,] "Romantic relations are not only organized within the market, but have themselves become commodities produced on an assembly line, to be consumed fast, efficiently, cheaply, and in great abundance.” In other words, as dating (or ersatz love) has migrated to the internet, it has undergone the same changes as everything else that has moved online: it has been remade by the ethic of convenience into something more solipsistic and disposable. "Love Worth Fighting For," The New Inquiry, 9/30/10.

The Potential iPhone Musical Revolution

I've been following along some of the developments concerning iPhones and music. Not as in "the iPhone as a device to play of other people's music," but as in "the iPhone as a tool to create one's own music." This very much reinforces my idea that focusing too much on people as consumers of music and not enough on them as creators of and participants in music will prove to be shortsighted. Some of the consumer money and time that music business types and artists are counting on to sustain themselves via fan purchases may instead be directed to more user-generated content.

Here are a couple of quotes which illustrate how iPhone tools are opening up music creation to more people.

There’s something about an iPhone music app. For musicians, it’s like having an instrument in your pocket. For nonmusicians, it’s a way to coax sounds -- often programmed to stay on key no matter what note one actually plays -- out of what may be the only instrumentlike device they ever pick up.

A main goal for many of these apps’ developers is to introduce nonmusical people to music, and musical people to different kinds of music. And when taken less as a serious instrument and more as a sampler for the wide world of music, these devices are wildly successful. "Music Apps Blur the Gap Between You and Clapton," New York Times, 10/1/09.

Ge Wang, the assistant professor of music who leads [the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra] says the iPhone may be the first instrument — electronic or acoustic — that millions of people will carry in their pockets. “I can’t bring my guitar or my piano or my cello wherever I go, but I do have my iPhone at all times,” he said.

Professor Wang said he would like to democratize the process of making music, so that anyone with a cellphone could become a musician. “Part of my philosophy is people are inherently creative,” he said. “It’s not just people who think of themselves as artists.” "From Pocket to Stage, Music in the Key of iPhone," New York Times, 12/5/09.

In this article Wang talks about how he has has used a sense of fun and portability, combined with marketing via YouTube and sharing via iPhone, to engage users.

Now, to give you something of an overview of iPhone music creation applications, I've organized them into five categories:

1. Applications that turn iPhones into instruments.
The one cited most often is the Ocarina, which is the digital version of a simple wind instrument. It is made by Smule, a software company co-founded by Stanford professor Ge Wang.

Said Wang, "We at Smule are really trying to bring this idea of unlocking creativity to as many people as possible."

He thinks the Ocarina encourages amatures who might not otherwise pick up an instrument. "App turns iPhone into musical instrument," Public Radio International, 9/1/09.

Here are two other articles on the application.

"Is That Ocarina Music Coming from Your iPhone?"

"Enthusiasts keep pushing Smule’s Ocarina iPhone app to higher numbers"

Smule (which just received an additional $8 million in VC funding) also offers other musical applications including I Am T-Pain, which allows you to Auto-Tune your own singing. Recently Apple named two of Smule's applications (I Am T-Pain and Leaf Trombone: World Stage) among its 10 Best iPhone Applications of 2009.

Another company that makes a variety of instrument applications is MooCowMusic.

And here's more:

The universe of mobile guitar software can be split roughly into three categories: those that replace traditional guitar accessories like tuners and metronomes; practice apps that simulate a fretboard; and apps that contain chords, scales and tablature. There’s even dedicated hardware for attaching your phone to your guitar, but more on that later. "For Real Guitar Players, New Ways to Rock on a Phone," New York Times, 12/3/09.

"10 cool videos of the iPhone as a music instrument."

"10 Best Musical Instrument Apps for the iPhone for Under $1."

2. Groups of people performing together using iPhones.
More ambitious than playing music on an iPhone by yourself is doing it in a group.

A group called iBand (www.iband.at) is using the iPhone and iPod Touch to write and perform music live. Their website currently has two songs available for download, “Vitality” and “Life Is Greater Than the Internet,” both made with instruments available in the App Store. "Music Made With iPhone Musical Instrument Apps," Art of the iPhone, 2/5/09.

Here's another article about the band. "With Software and an iBand, There’s No Need for Roadies."

Here's a video of the group The Mentalists covering MGMT's “Kids."

And here's a video of song played by using a variety of different iPhone musical instrument applications and then spliced together using Final Cut Pro.

More elaborate than these YouTube performances are orchestras being organized to advance the cause of mobile music applications. Here are sites for some of them.

Stanford iPhone Orchestra

Michigan Mobile Phone Ensemble

Helsinki MoPhO

3. Looping and mixing applications.
For some, iPhone becomes a mobile editing tool.

Plenty of programs over the years have promised the non-musically-inclined the magical ability to play music, but few deliver. Judging from the songs people are already uploading to MyZoozBeat, this app one really does let people from anywhere in the musical experience spectrum make 'beats,' as they call rhythm and melody loops these days, then sing, rap or talk on top of them — and, with this latest release, share the resulting recordings.

With all of the sharing of other people’s music that goes on, it’s refreshing to see that this app encourages people to share their own creations — and puts such easy tools in their hands that they have a decent chance at making something worth listening to, if only by themselves and their friends and family. (If you make your recordings public, other MyZoozBeat users will be able to hear them too.) "Anyone, Really, Can Make and Share Music with ZoozMobile’s iPhone App," Wired, 4/22/09.

... an iPhone application called ZOOZbeat, which helps anyone -- regardless of musical talent or lack thereof -- create songs by selecting instruments from a list and then waving his or her phone around.

"You don't have to know anything. You go in there and click on it, and it's playing guitar chords," Sheridan said. "It's pretty neat, actually."

A quick flick of the wrist produces a high note. A gentler movement belches out a lower tone. The app loops the sounds and lets users edit their tracks on the fly or afterwards. "The new musical instrument: Your phone," CNN, 10/28/09.

If you want to learn more about ZOOZBeat, go here.

Another product is Bebot.

The major advancement of the iPhone is the multi-touch screen, Rudess said. It opens up the possibility of sliding between notes and playing several at one time. It's more akin to a violin or cello than a keyboard or drum pad, the standard tools for electronic instruments and music software.

This is the very feature that Bebot exploits to produce its unique, sliding sounds.

"It makes the iPhone potentially one of the most versatile musical instruments, and it fits right in your pocket," said Russell Black, the Melbourne inventor of the product. "Musicians flex creative muscles on iPhones," San Francisco Chronicle, 9/8/09.

Here's a overview of more mixing/looping applications: "Best Ways to Produce Music on an iPhone."

4. Interactive music programs.
Some music creators are providing applications which are more artistic experiences than they are music-making tools. Ambient pioneer Brian Eno and musician/software designer Peter Chilvers have created three which you can find here.

5. Music-related games.
There are also music games which, in many cases, function just like their non-game music-application equivalents.

... I found “Beaterator” absolutely absorbing. Layering track upon track, building drumbeats and various instrumental sounds, crafting my own songs and hearing them played back — for someone who’s never done anything like this before, it was a thrilling and eye-opening experience. And though “Beaterator” can get pretty deep pretty quickly, it did a reasonably good job of holding my hand and walking me through the meticulous music-making process....

And that’s the great thing about games like “Beaterator” ... They encourage us to think about music and, more importantly, to imagine ourselves at the center of it. They encourage us to do something we might not otherwise do — to try our hand at music making when perhaps making music seems like something only other people do. And as much as they may seem like trifling and sometimes silly little toys, they put modern music making within reach of us all.

As Timbaland says, “I tried to give people a game but I also tried to give people who love music hope of making their own music.” "Gaming our way to musical genius," Citizen Gamer, 10/12/09.

The Muppets Animal Drummer [is] a rhythm game that lets you drum along with Animal, as well as a free play mode where you (and he) “rock out” to the songs in your iTunes music library." "Disney launches Muppets Animal Drummer for iPhone," Music Ally, 12/16/09.

"10 Free Music Based Games for the iPhone & iPod Touch"

Although iPhone musical applications haven't yet transformed music creation, I think they have the potential to do so. Just as other recent technologies (e.g., Pro Tools, Auto-Tune, YouTube) have encouraged more people to express themselves creatively, I think the fact that companies are developing applications specifically to enable people (often with little or no musical training) to make music easily and quickly will have a major impact. As technology reduces the barriers of entry to music, we have seen that the pool of people recording, uploading, and promoting their music has greatly expanded. And I think the economics of the music industry will continue to reflect these technological developments.

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

UPDATE, 12/27/09
Best of 2009: 10 iPhone/iPod Touch Music/Sound Apps

UPDATE, 1/10/10

Apple has given Mix Me In a spot in the latest New & Noteworthy section of its App Store. The application enables users to mix existing songs into their own versions. So, if they want to hear, say, a rock song as an acoustic ballad, then Mix It In does the business.

The app, from Fried Green Apps, also allows consumers to mix themselves into tracks, adding vocals, guitar riffs, drums, or whatever takes their fancy. "Adding to mix tech to the tune," brand-m.biz, 1/8/10.

VoiceBand transforms your voice in real time into almost a dozen instruments. You can lay down tracks, layer new performances one at a time, and build up an audio performance that you can then e-mail to yourself or friends. "VoiceBand: Personal music artistry gone wild," TUAW, 1/8/10.

UPDATE, 1/18/10

Sprite has teamed with Zooz Mobile Inc., developers of a mobile music studio application, to launch Zoozbeat Sprite, the first iPhone application to be offered through Sprite’s ongoing Under the Cap promotion....

Zoozbeat Sprite transforms iPhones into mobile music studios, letting users create their own tracks with downloadable beats and samples from music producers and artists such as Dallas Austin.

Zoozbeat Sprite works by shaking, tilting or tapping the iPhone screen to create and combine rhythmic and melodic tracks that can be uploaded to the Web for listening and sharing in mp3 format with friends.

Users can unlock additional beats within the application by twisting the cap off any Sprite or Sprite Zero bottle and texting in the keyword ZOOZ followed by the code under the cap.

Sprite will then provide consumers with a Zoozbeat Sprite code that can use be used to unlock more beats. "Coca-Cola: Mobile integral to 360-degree marketing strategy," Mobile Marketer, 12/24/09.

UPDATE, 3/4/10
Here's a blog that is all about mobile music making: Palm Sounds.
You'll find info on many applications.

UPDATE, 3/19/10
"SXSW: LaDiDa iPhone App Lets Anyone With a Voice Make Music in Seconds"

The Lure of the One-of-a-Kind Item

I plan to write more about developing limited edition items for musicians to sell to their hardcore fans. But before I revisit that, I want to post a few thoughts about another trend I'm currently seeing: the one-of-a-kind item. Of course, many artworks and craft items are marketed this way, but examples are popping up in less traditional places, too.

For example, I saw this on Carly Simon's website.

Each limited-edition, Carly Simon Heirloom Box includes one unique item from Carly's private career archives, personally selected by Carly herself.

No two Heirloom Boxes will receive the same original item. Each Heirloom Box is made by hand and includes a Certificate of Authenticity.

And at the upcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver, each medal will be a unique, hand-cropped section of a larger work.

...each medal will include its own signature elements of the orca and raven artwork, such as the suggestion of the orca’s eye, the curve of its dorsal fin, or perhaps the contours of the raven’s wing. A silk scarf printed with the master artwork will be presented to each Olympian or Paralympian with their medal enabling them to see how their medal connects with those awarded to other athletes at the Games to make the whole design. "Vancouver 2010 medals each a one-of-a-kind work of contemporary Aboriginal art," Vancouver2010.com, 10/15/09.

The concept is also being used for running shoes. New Balance has a new handmade shoe, the 574 Clips. Only 480 pairs will be made and each pair has a unique identity.

The campaign will be centered around a website that will feature 480 short videos. 480 video clips were recorded of each of the shoes’ unique experience before reaching the consumer. These videos were shot at locations throughout the US including Los Angeles, New York City and Lawrence, Massachusetts, where the shoes are manufactured.

To compliment the 480 short films, a Polaroid photo has been taken of the shoe’s experience and placed in the corresponding shoe box, conveying a trading card collector feel. The back of each Polaroid will indicate the shoe’s limited edition number (example: 017/480), size and color. A find tab will list the ten retail locations where the collection can be purchased. Consumers can then visit the 574 Clips website and search for the exclusive video created specifically for their shoe. Once the consumer has found their “clip”, they can watch the short video featuring their pair. After the video is finished playing, the Polaroid will flip over and the owner has the option to “claim” their shoe by entering a unique 5 digit code and their name. Once clips are claimed, they can still be viewed, but the owner’s name will be shown at the end of the short. "New Balance 574 Clips Campaign," Hypebeast, 9/15/09.

What's interesting about this campaign is that even though these are limited edition, handmade shoes, they aren't being sold at a premium price.

The individual attention is meant to underscore the unusual, all-American lineage of the shoes: Each are composed of leftover material clippings in New Balance's Lawrence, Mass., factory, (hence "Clips.")

The 574 Clips will sell for $75, so the goal is not so much related to revenues from the line, but to creating a positive buzz among sneaker bloggers or "sneakerheads" as they're known in the industry. "New Balance Woos the Sneakerheads," Brandweek, 9/17/09.

Another example of one-of-a-kind-ness comes from Sufjan Stevens, who gave one fan his own song. Other songwriters have done that too, but the interesting part is what the fan has chosen to do with it.

Mr. Duffy, a 33-year-old theater director, owns the song. He won the exclusive rights to it in a contest that the singer held in 2007.

... after a year of wondering just what to do with the song, Mr. Duffy decided that putting it on the Internet wasn't special enough. He wondered: What if the only way the song could be heard was in person, in intimate gatherings?

"This is the finest way we felt we could curate this song," Mr. Duffy says. "It brings people together," he adds, rather than "being lost among 14,000 iTunes."

The experiment lures strangers to Mr. Duffy's living room about once a week, to "recapture an era when to get one's hands on a particular album or song was a real experience," as he says on an invitation posted on the Web site of his theater company. ... He doesn't charge them to hear it. ...

From a goldenrod wingback chair, Mr. Duffy passed around the package sent with his prize. A personal letter from Mr. Stevens describes "hibernating bears trapped in our imagination" and the "muffled insulation of snow banks on either side of you" as inspiration for the song. There's also a Christmas card from Mr. Stevens -- which arrived in January.

To prevent recordings -- and, ultimately, dissemination -- of the song, listeners don headphones hooked up to Mr. Duffy's iPod or laptop. "Not-So-Easy Listening: It Takes a Trek to Hear This Track," Wall Street Journal, 6/12/09.

An older, but wildly successful example of giving each customer something unique was the Cabbage Patch doll.

With great flair for merchandising, Xavier [Roberts, the creator] announced that every doll was different and dreamt up the cabbage patch story line. Perhaps the biggest selling point was that each baby came with an adoption certificate and its own special name. Millions of people were enthralled by the idea of owning a unique cloth baby, and little girls were enchanted to know that their doll was the only one of its kind in the whole wide world. World Collectors Net

For the most part, artists and marketers will promote one-of-a-kind items as more expensive than their mass-produced counterparts. But there are inexpensive one-of-a-kind items. For example, fortune cookies and Cracker Jacks prizes. Well, these aren't actually one-of-a-kind items, but there's enough variety that among a group of people opening cookies or boxes together, each person is likely to get something different.

Musicians who want to intrigue their fans with one-of-a-kind items can either go the Carly Simon route and make them part of expensive packages. Or they can go the fortune cookie route and create items that are very inexpensive to produce, but fun to provide at shows. Some ideas for low-end giveaways or in exchange for tips or signing an email list:

Printed items that fans can draw from a bowl (e.g., fortunes; trivia; ID cards or wearable labels with silly personalities or quotes). I can say from personal experience that it works. I went to a party thrown by an ad agency and all the guests got to pick out name tags that had fake, but very clever descriptions that we could choose from. It made for far more interesting conversations than if we identified ourselves with our real names and companies.

One-of-a-kind buttons created from clip art or other sources of images. If you have your own button maker, produce lots of different buttons rather than just one or two designs.

One-of-a-kind magnets. (You can buy sheets of magnetic paper and print them yourself. You can either get sheets that snap apart into business card-sized pieces, or you can buy unscored sheets and cut them yourself into whatever sizes and shapes you want.)

Grab bags or small boxes with individualized collections of inexpensive favors. (You can find sources under party favors and vending machine supplies.)

One-of-a-kind temporary tattoos.

This is not to say that every band/artist must or should go the one-of-the-kind route. But it is currently being done to create a stronger connection to fans. I think most of us are at least a little intrigued or amused when we get something unique and can tell our friends about it or compare it to what they received.

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter