Paul's Posts — 22 February 2012
By Paul McGowan
You probably read that Steve Jobs of Apple listened mostly to vinyl instead of his fabled iPod creation. He was a real music lover and preferred the sound of vinyl to that of digital.
What you may not know, however, is what he accomplished when he launched iTunes. He set the stage for musicians getting paid a larger percentage than they did in the past.
In yesterday’s post I mentioned how the old and dying model of the label getting the lion’s share of the revenue – the musician getting only a fraction of the money – was always doomed to failure and rightfully so. Why? Because when the merchant gets far more than the creator there’s a natural imbalance that somehow must be corrected to survive.
The new era has started and we have Jobs to thank for part of it. With iTunes, when you buy music, the typical split is 30 to 35% for Apple (the merchant) and 65 to 70% for the artist (the creator). This is a much better split IF you’re an independent artist without a label and a much worse split IF you are an artist with a label.
I can see the fireworks starting now – but please just take a deep breath and ask yourself if this isn’t a step in the right direction.
I would ask myself why I need a label if I have iTunes to distributer it for me?
Could be the start of something good.
Forward to a friend and help us engage more readers
Related Articles
Share
About Author
(11) Readers Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Mr. Pulstec
Hello Paul,
Thanks for your daily comments that I read every day, while having my coffee. I’m an apple user since 1985 and have I tunes seen coming. However until now I’ve never purchased one song via Itunes. To be honest it’s spotify that serves music if I want some.
Why is that ? Having a lot of CD and SACD’s, I’d purchase music via I tunes if I tunes would offer the ability to download music in an uncompressed version as well. As we all know that is not possible, so I keep buying
SACD’s from labels like pentatone. On an experimental base I’ve started to buy some albums from HD tracks.
Let’s see what it brings.
Basically I agree with you that Apple gives a fair share of our payments to the creative composers and that is what it should be. Apple could help these musicians in order to make it easy to stream their music to all of us.
Recordlabels will not like it, and the question is if Apple will find a way to stimulate the creative without frustrating the business they have setup with the record companies.
Regards,
Gert R.J. Smit
Holland
Paul McGowan
Agreed and I too wish they would offer something other than compressed music – but as bandwidth improves I’ll bet that gets closer to happening. It also shows that companies like HD Tracks who is offering uncompressed music and high resolution at that can do ok – as you point out.
zamazeev
Dear Paul.
Imagine sportsman without his coach.
Imagine a man without guru.
Imagine opera diva who never went to conservatory .
Imagine what will become of The Beatles without the producer and recording company? I think just a drug-addicted band playing in local restaurant.
We talk too much of money, profit and not too much of quality of music.
If you talk about music as business – you are on a side of recording company.
So where are you, Paul? ))))
Paul McGowan
It should be pretty obvious where I stand on this – on the side of creative people making great music available easily and readily and being supported doing it. And quality? Heck yes. I would think it obvious I want the highest quality recordings I can get with the best music available – after all, this is about high-end and without well recorded music there’s nothing for us to play.
But you’re right, we’ve been focusing a lot lately on the business side of things because I see the biggest side of change happening there and it’s a dynamic worth discussing.
MountainSufi
In an interview a while back, Mick Jagger said musicians have never made much money selling albums; you have to tour to support yourself.
I hope the new paradigm evolving will improve the lot of struggling, talented musicians.
On spotify, I’ve made a playlist of sailing songs, sea chanties & bawdy songs. An hour of work/play got me 21 days of music. LEGALLY. I like the thought that musicians get a fraction of a cent every time I play a cut. When bandwidth increases to allow uncompressed streaming, the audiophile world will be turned upside down.
Brian
Paul,
Many young bands received invaluable coaching at the major labels that brought them from obscurity to prominence. Spend a little time studying about the best producers of the last 50 years and what they were able to accomplish with young, raw talent.
Were all the producers great? No. Was it always worth the cut the record label took from sales? No. Was it sometimes worth every penny they took and then some. Of course, beacuse some of the greatest talent of the last fifty years may have been lost to us if there hadn’t been a guiding hand and some money to get them started.
I think that the major labels have been guilty of many sins and that there is likely little dissent on this point. However, some of the greatest music we know can also be attributed to them. I think is is naive to suggest that young bands face a bright new future because they can just record something and put it up on iTunes, YouTube, or whatever and somehow gain a widespread audience and economic stability. Some will make it, but many who needed help at the start and who may have become the greatest artists will wither and die without the structure and support of an economically sound and artistically accomplished label. And, are young jazz and classical artists supposed to embrace and flourish in this brave new world you suggest?
Paul McGowan
Producers are invaluable – just like directors and coaches – they need to be around for musicians to make good music. There are numerous examples.
This “brave new world” I suggest is here whether we like it or not – that’s the whole point of these articles. I am not pushing for this to happen, I am not suggesting it’s better in all respects and I am certainly not trying to move it in any direction other than the one that brings the best music to the most people and provides a means for artists to thrive.
I do not know what that course is our how this new world looks. If I did, I’d be right in the middle of making it happen any way I could.
We are living through one of the greatest revolutions in history – perhaps THE greatest revolution in the short span of humankind. We all missed the industrial revolution, but we are here, now, in the thick of this amazing transition of the human race.
The information revolution is changing our world in every imaginable way – music, art, hi-fi, high-end, you name it included.
The question I will keep asking is what are you doing about it? Are you a musician that is struggling to cling onto to the model that has been abandoned? If so, what are you doing about it? Simply leaving music to do something else? I guess that’s OK – wouldn’t be my choice if music was truly my passion – but then changing the world has always been part of my DNA and I accept it isn’t everyone’s.
I, for one, do not intend to waste this amazing opportunity for change. Look back through history and note there are very few golden moments of change this dramatic – and to be alive during this era is a privilege – one you can decide to really take advantage of or hide and hope it doesn’t scrape you up too badly.
You know my choice.
straylight
When Steve Jobs initially proposed the idea of iTunes he invited the most rich and influential record producers & recording company executives to attend a seminar at Apple. This prolific meeting began with the record companies complaining, arguing, and bickering in petty fashion with each other over why there should be any need for changes to their secure little empire. Jobs stopped the meeting cold by telling them that they had had their collective heads up their a** for years and that it was time for a new model, one that actually served the buying public. Amazingly the pettiness stopped, the meeting continued, and the rest is history. This is what leadership can accomplish. But this only brought mainstream compressed music to the masses, HD formats are still considered taboo by most in the recording industry, and this outmoded outlook is stiffeling innovation and is still a large problem for the consumer. That fact that entire countries contribute to copy infringement and do not believe in Intellectual Property, is feeding this fear.
Steve Jobs knew that people wanted to buy bits, even high density bits, lots and lots of bits and were willing to pay for it. He could only take the initial step. If you can buy a license to use software bits then why can’t you do the same for HD music bits? Reason (1) is paranoia of all things digital (hence the flawed and over-reaching – Digital Millennium Act…if you can figure out a way to make a single back-up of your own purchased copy of music/movie media you’ve already broken the law and (2) a failure of recording industry to re-invest in their own degrading industry…how about creating a licensing model for their product line? The reality is this costs money and they want it, they don’t want to part with it, and could care less for the consumer’s needs. Greed rules the day.
One could argue that the music industry is perfectly content to do nothing, and they could be right, until the next ‘shake-up’ comes along. They are the proverbial mule refusing to go up the latter…If you don’t push them they won’t do. The average consumer and to a larger extent the audiophile music consumer has experienced years of draught or ‘dead’ formats and degraded audio output jacks that will likely continue unless there is some leadership provided to this decaying industry. DRM software, costly and elaborate copy prevention schemes are this industry’s answer to the digital world that blooms with so much potential. These continued practices are more likely to starve the world of high quality music than to sooth the troubled masses.
Paul McGowan
Amen brother, you’re preaching to the choir.
straylight
One last side-note about Steve, I just received my new PerfectWave DAC this week and I really think Steve Jobs would have loved your packaging…when I first opened the package and saw that silver DAC bobbing & floating freely between two clear membrane-layers of cellophane wrap…it was apparent that this special packaging could reduce every bone-jarring bump and grind imposed by every repressed and angry UPS package-carrier to a mere gentle, harmless oscillation.
I think this would have reated an “insanely great” by the apple-man himself. Nice job on packaging and the DAC survived! Sorry for the off-topic comment but couldn’t resist!
Paul McGowan
Thanks!