Category Archives: Blog

The new business model for the music industry

For many years now, the tech industry has told the music industry to “get with it” and create “new” business models.

Well, they`re here now in the form of

  • outrageous ticket prices
  • constant marketing mailing/viral campaigns
  • increased corporate sponsorships (which is just splendid for artistic freedom, but who`s watching, right?)
  • investment in venture capital and thus tech startups as you can see from the article below

What`s gone is:

  • investment in A&R
  • advances for producing albums for young bands / artists
  • the middle class career in music
  • the small indie label investing in niche music out of love

There is only one solution to this whole dilemma that will bring back freedom to create art:

The audience has to come back with their wallet and directly (!) support the artists they like. Even if those artists happen to be signed to a label. Not all labels are Mega-Corporation-Labels with terrible deals for their roster. A lot of the do really great work and love what they do.

Your choice:

Support and buy the albums directly from artists

or

Have a winner-take-all music world dominated by corporate / artistic relationships based on marketing research and capital.

Maverick Managers | Billboard.

Why nerd culture must die

Thank you Pete Warden for the article Why nerd culture must die

As a musician/composer heavily reliant on copyright as a means of at least some form of power in relationship to my clients (tv production companies and tv stations mostly) and as a tech lover (since my days on the C64 who never really went into science, coding or engineering because music was the bigger love for me) for the past 10 years I’ve experienced the “wrath of the internet” first hand and in painful personal attacks. And what hurts most was, that I felt the dreams painted by the geeks where my dreams (open culture, removing the middle men, direct access) but then the geeks started to actively destroy my professional field (the one that lets me provide for my family) and at the same time ignored the writings on the wall (the steady decline in revenue and the loss of the middle class musician/composer due to piracy).

There was mockery, victim blaming, talk of a “new business model” that nobody really defined. Not even the really smart people in tech managed to come up with a “new model” that actually works for the lower and middle class musicians. For them, the best solution is still to sell an album (digital or physical) for roughly ten bucks.

Throughout those last 10 years the “ignoring outsiders and believing in ourselves” that I deeply admire and that I feel I`m a part of in my field has built up such a high barrier between otherwise like minded people (nerds and musicians are always visionaries, they recognize things that most people don’t). Even though I have built up a strong resistance for it, it still hurts the sensitive side in me.

Let us work on bridging that gap.

 

 

Rogerio Marques – Whole Lotta Love

a) who is that guy????

b) it makes me sad we no longer have a culture where playing music reflects a state of being and makes a statement in relation to the world. You can now just “perform” the breaking out of the norms on a nightly talk show for a minute, get the claps, laughs and wows but it leaves emptiness.

To add insult to injury the uploader (some Russian dude now raking in clicks and making money on top of a performance he had absolutely nothing to do with, but that`s a whole other discussion) filed this video under Comedy.

c) Not sorry for being a downer, I had to say it.

Rogerio Marques – YouTube.

Whoever says troll first, wins

Have you ever noticed that in a discussion you have (mostly in Twitter) and it’s an actual discussion that goes to the core of a persons views, there are two options, either the person is a big enough person to “expose” themselves and stand behind their viewpoint.

Or, and this is what usually happens, they’ll cry “troll” pretty quickly and thereby put the other person under pressure, to say the least, by discrediting and shaming them.

This is a pattern that I have observed many many times in the discussions surrounding authors rights: whenever I stand up for my assertion that a strong individual authors right modeled after the European legal system empowers the individual and forces “bigger” business partners to actually having to negotiate. Whereas a simple copyright as in the Anglo-American legal system favors the aggregators (labels, publishers, film studios), infrastructure providers (ISPs, hosting providers) and media services (YouTube, Spotify etc).

So when I ask individuals who work in promoting the copyleft movement, what their thinking, motivation and benefit behind weakening the authors rights are, I get attacked and called a troll.

I can openly say what the benefits of a strong authors right to both the individual and the culture businesses are. Why can’t my “opponents” practice the same openness and have to resort to attacking me? And in this case the “me” and “them” is the collective behind each movement. But it speaks volumes that the copyleftists don’t really name their motivation: because their motivation is targeted at destroying a market.

Used books and money left on the street

I have to get something off my chest that has bothered me for quite some time. To start I have to mention that my cousin wrote the fantastic book “Albtraum Sicherheit – Interessen und Geschäfte hinter der Sicherheitspolitik” (nightmare security – interests and business behind the politics of security). The book was available on Amazon from day one and also from day one there were offers for € 0,99 cents of used copies of the book. Leaving the question aside where those used copies came from I want to focus on a more capitalistic aspect of those used books.

Let’s suppose a book costs € 12.99 on the day it is published. Right next to it, Amazon allows a third party store to sell used books. These used books typically start at € 0.99 + € 3.00 shipping.

Why does the used book seller not operate with the following equation in mind:

  € 12.99 cost of the new book
– €   3.00 shipping
– €   3.90 (30% discount towards the price of the new book, assumed a mint condition)
————
€  6.09

This means that even with a 30% discount towards the original price of the book the used book seller could have a 5 times higher revenue to the tune of € 6.09 – € 0.99 = € 5.10

Can someone please explain to me, how it makes sense financially to leave this money on the table? You would still undercut the new version of the book. You would not even have to share the extra revenue with the author or the publisher (which I personally think is a shame, but that’s a different story).

Please leave a comment to get me to understand the thinking behind this!