david byrne – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Musicians On The Wrong Side Of History

from the how-medieval dept

Things are getting really odd in the latest music/internet/Silicon Valley skirmishes. It would appear that the step up in anti-streaming music, anti-silicon valley, anti-Google rhetoric by famous musicians is getting heated.

The lexicon is growing: Thom Yorke called streaming music services the last desperate fart of a dying corpse, where “corpse” refers to the recorded music industry. David Byrne joined the fray with an odd article for the Guardian last month that compelled me to write my own Op-ed rebuttal. Mr Byrne was telling of how he had removed “as much of my catalogue from Spotify I can.” I believe that is the wrong answer for all musicians, rich and poor.

I also wrote a post that offered a solution. I proposed that if the richer musicians were so concerned for their less well off brethren, and believed that culture and society was about to collapse, then perhaps they should help them out.

Not that that’s going to happen anytime soon.

The latest addition to the anti-technology list of musicians is the well-respected T Bone Burnett, who in a Halloween-inspired fit of pique, said in a Hollywood Reporter article titled: T Bone Burnett vs. Silicon Valley: ‘We Should Go Up There With Pitchforks and Torches.’

How medieval.

Mr. Burnett has a soundbite for us all — “Digital sound has dehumanized us.” If I think for a moment about the true dehumanization of societies under attack around the world — Iraq, Syria, Mali to name but a few — I can only scoff at that statement. It’s pure hyperbole.

I saw a tweet from Thom Yorke the other day where he’d taken a snap of a page from a Jaron Lanier book (I’m guessing Who Owns the Future?) where Yorke wrote “I am proudly Luddite if to be so is to criticise the power and destruction of Google etc.. J Lanier again.”

Let’s take a look at what exactly describes a Luddite — “a member of any of the bands of English workers who destroyed machinery, esp. in cotton and woolen mills, that they believed was threatening their jobs (1811–16).” And in a finer description — “The Luddites were 19th-century English textile artisans who protested against newly developed labor-saving machinery from 1811 to 1817.” [Link]

And so, if we were to take Thom at his word, the fall of Google would cause him and his supporters to dance in the streets waving their proverbial “pitchforks and torches,” while denying those in society who are not musicians the benefits of labor-saving technology that Google and other technology companies bring.

That’s about as far away from a credible position in this discussion than I can imagine. The real irony there is that the “labor-saving technologies” of today make it easier, not harder, for musicians to reach an audience. Thom’s band Radiohead posted a film, Scotch Mist, to the Google-owned YouTube where it has garnered almost 7.3 million views. Just sayin’.

Very recently Tim Quirk, a musician and a friend who I have known for some time now, gave a speech at the Future of Music Summit (you can link to it here.) At its heart Tim’s talk was an impassioned plea for musicians to understand the true value of music, not as in a price-point, but at its emotional level. He notes that you cannot devalue music’s worth at that level. He understands that musicians are fighting technology because of their misguided, nostalgic view of the recording industry. There was never a “Golden age” of music. Record deals were not built to empower musicians, they were to benefit the record labels. Most musicians hardly ever made a living from music, only those who rose to the top did. Nothing has changed.

Tim provided an image that shows the reality of a music ecosystem:

From Tim:

You can sketch this dynamic with a simple pyramid showing lots of people spending little or no money at the bottom and fewer people spending lots of money at the top. If you’re a new band, you begin at the bottom of that pyramid, but no matter how popular a given artist gets or how amazing her latest single is, there will always, always, always be more people in the world who don’t care than who do.

So the goal for every artist and every song has always been to climb this pyramid, convincing as many people as you can to part with something in exchange for listening. At first, you just want their attention. The next step is to get them to give you some money for the privilege of hearing your song whenever they happen to get the urge and as you keep climbing the pyramid, you find yourself with fewer and fewer listeners but each one who remains is happy to give you more and more money.

It has never been any different than it is now in other words. The only change is a societal shift. Young people have voted with their ears. They want to access music wherever they are, they are willing to pay for it too. If they like your music they’ll keep paying, if they don’t like it they won’t bother to even listen to it. Radio has always been free for music fans. If they heard something they liked they bought it. Today — same as it ever was. (Before you jump in and say the access to “free” music is killing careers, please remember that radio was always free, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Still is. Purchasing decisions are made around it. Online and mobile access to music creates demand if the listener perceives its value.)

Let’s take the musician’s arguments at face value and tell it like it is: they are demanding that they be singled out as a special interest group that should always be able to make an income from their work. If they hold to that position in the face of how markets actually work, e.g. a superior product at a reasonable price will sell better than an inferior product where demand creates the price points, then they will simply lose face and their audience will move on.

And prices are flexible. Arcade Fire released its new album this week and reportedly sold 140,000 copies. If another band called Arcade Ice was as popular but offered its album at $1 less it doesn’t mean it will sell 140,000 copies or more just because it’s a dollar less. That’s because fans of Arcade Fire and Arcade Ice are not necessarily fans of both bands. Each band therefore reaches the fans that will purchase their respective albums, and each band’s income will differ — not on a price point but on demand.

Musicians are in the marketplace and there’s a thing called a Demand Curve:

There’s a comment in the Demand Curve article I link to that creates an analogy — “The higher the price of a Kindle is, the less people want to buy it. If the price for a Kindle is to go up drastically, people will buy substitute goods like normal paperbacks, and the demand for ebooks will fall accordingly.”

So underpaid authors should force Amazon to increase the price of the Kindle, right? Oh, wait…

Yelling get off my lawn is not a serious response to a lack of demand.

Dave Allen is the founding member and bass player for Gang of Four ad Shriekback, and is currently Digital Creative Director at North, a Portland-based brand strategy company, where this blog post was first published (along with many other great blog posts).

Filed Under: dave allen, david byrne, history, luddites, musicians, silicon valley, t bone burnett, thom yorke, tim quirk

Why Pulling Music From Spotify Only Holds Back The Artist Doing The Pulling

from the 1.-Eliminate-revenue-stream-2.-Gripe-about-it-3.-???-4.-Profit! dept

David Byrne, former lead singer of the Talking Heads, has pulled “as much of his catalogue” as he can from Spotify. Why? Because it’s the thing to do these days. Abused math and sins of omission have led to headlines declaring Spotify to be the worst ripoff since the major labels, paying only pennies for millions of plays. Many artists have done it. Some are insulted by the low payoffs. Others believe it will cannibalize their sales.

Byrne’s editorial for the Guardian names a few of these artists — the Black Keys, Aimee Mann, Thom Yorke, etc. These artists have withheld their music from the super-popular streaming service simply because they’ve deemed the payout too low, and the risk of losing sales too high, to take part in the way people listen to music at the present. A rather strange about-face for Byrne, who previously lauded Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want experiment and other efforts along that same line.

Dave Allen, formerly of Gang of Four and Shriekback (among others) has posted a very thorough and thoughtful response to Byrne’s editorial. (And there’s plenty to respond to. When you state, “The internet will suck all the creative content out of the world,” with a straight face, you can expect to be thoroughly riposted — from multiple angles.)

Along the way to what I feel is the simplest, most succinct point to be made in this Spotify “debate,” Allen also points out how Byrne (along with Thom Yorke and others) are clouding the issue by couching the discussion of dispassionate themes (economic and technological shifts) in emotional language (“fairness,” “ethical internet”). Critics of Spotify insist the royalty payouts are too low — proof that the streaming service is evil — despite the fact that these payouts are 70% of Spotify’s revenue.

As for the decline of the recording industry — which Allen takes pains to point out is not the same thing as the “music industry” — it’s been a long time coming. This doesn’t mean music is dying — only the industry that attached itself to musicians in a remora-like fashion and sucked as much income out as possible over the past several decades is dying. As Allen puts it in his post, the recording industry simply made it possible for artists to “pay off the mortgage, but never own the house” by providing advances in exchange for copyright control.

The industry was set up to fail — an untenable construct that began to disintegrate upon the first sign of friction. What the industry considers to be right and fair and normal — selling music to make money — is nothing more than a blip on the timeline, as no less an old-school artist than Mick Jagger has stated.

[T]here was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone.

So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.

But here’s the ultimate point:

One thing is certain: When artists remove their music from Spotify they are simply ensuring that they will receive zero royalties from that service. They will also ensure that they are not in a service that provides massive distribution of their work that is not a walled garden like FM radio is. And remember, not all artists are popular therefore not all artists receive the same amount of royalties from airplay or from streaming services. It is worth noting that Spotify has one billion playlists created by users. Musicians are not the only creators. Internet users most likely make far more content to post to the Web for free than all musicians combined. It’s a societal phenomenon that can’t be denied.

The first sentence is key. As has been stated here before, you cannot achieve a positive result simply by removing a negative. Labels and movie studios may spend tons of money fighting piracy, but that doesn’t budge the needle towards a purchase. If millions of people are happy “renting” their music through streaming services (or YouTube), you can’t push them towards a purchase by removing your music. They’ll likely just find someone else to listen to, and when that artist tours or runs a Kickstarter or whatever, it’s the artists they’ve been listening to that will receive that additional support.

All these artists are doing is shutting down a revenue stream under the mistaken impression that they’ll pick up the money elsewhere. It may only be pennies, but it’s pennies they don’t need to lift a finger to collect. For every artist that has pulled their music from Spotify and pointed to first week sales as “proof” that ditching the world’s most popular streaming service “works,” there’s another list of artists that have sold just as much without resorting to cutting out streaming revenue.

Giving music fans fewer reasons to use Spotify is also short-sighted. As a streaming services, its high end is only limited by the number of users. If enough artists pull out, the service loses some of its ability to attract users. Artists should want millions more to join, which is the most efficient way to increase royalty payouts. More users is more money. If Spotify manages to find a way to attract more paid users, the amounts will increase exponentially.

Cutting Spotify out doesn’t make sense, no matter how small the checks are. You can’t “force” sales, especially not when your attitude fails to sync with a majority of your potential customers.

[Bonus: here’s some Shriekback for your listening pleasure, just in case your estimation of Dave Allen needed to be increased…]

Filed Under: business models, david byrne, music, streaming
Companies: spotify

David Byrne: One Of My Albums Sat On The Shelf For A Year Because Label Wanted DRM And I Didn't

from the drm-helping-musicians? dept

David Byrne, who has definitely been one of the more enlightened musicians for quite some time (using Creative Commons all the way back in 2004? Yup) when it comes to understanding both technology and new business models, recently sat down for an interview with Cory Doctorow about how the music business works today (which must have been really fun to watch given the two participants). The whole article is interesting, but one part in particular caught my attention:

As an artist, Byrne said that he has had his own problems with digital rights management. Following the Sony/BMG rootkit scandal—which saw thousands of CDs recalled after the built-in DRM software rendered computers vulnerable to viruses and malware—he asked his label to make sure there was no DRM software on an upcoming release. They were less than obliging.

“I’ve run up against this a couple of times,” Byrne said. “I was in the process of negotiating a record contract at the time, and I went in to the subsidiary of Warner Brothers and said, ‘I’m adding a clause into my contract that you’ll never put DRM on my record.’ And they said ‘Oh, oh, oh…’ The record was done, and the negotiation went on for a year. The record just sat on the shelf. It was very frustrating for me.”

Byrne, of course, has embraced direct to fan efforts a lot lately, and if I remember correctly, was the very first publicly announced musician to use TopSpin’s direct-to-fan tools. Some will, of course, argue that he should have just dropped working with major labels, but especially at that time there were distribution advantages to signing a deal. But the fact that they would sit around and argue over DRM — even right as the whole mess with the rootkit was happening — shows the kind of thinking that major labels have gone through with DRM.

Filed Under: copyright, cory doctorow, david byrne, drm
Companies: warner music

Why Do Politicians Keep Using Unlicensed Music In Commercials?

Why is it that politicians keep using music in commercials without getting permission first? No matter what you think of the copyright issue (and we’ll get to that), it’s amazing to me that any politician doesn’t recognize that if he or she uses a song without permission, and the musician doesn’t happen to like that politician or that politicians party or policies, that a whole news cycle will be devoted to that musician being able to bash that politician. The latest is Florida Governor, and now Senate candidate, Charlie Crist, who is being sued by former Talking Heads front-man David Byrne for one million dollars. This is similar to Jackson Browne’s lawsuit against the McCain campaign (though, in that case, the commercial wasn’t actually by the campaign, but a local party group).

Byrne keys in on the copyright issue, but seems to jump back and forth between the moral issue and the copyright issue without realizing they’re not quite the same thing:

The suit, he adds, “is not about politics…It’s about copyright and about the fact that it does imply that I would have licensed it and endorsed him and whatever he stands for.”

But, of course, in the US, we don’t have moral rights on songs like this. While it’s true that the campaign might need to license it for a commercial, Crist could easily have used it at campaign rallies (assuming the venue paid performance rights licenses) and Byrne could do nothing to stop him, no matter how upset he was that some might think he endorsed Crist’s positions.

That said, you could potentially make a pretty strong fair use case in such a commercial. It would be for political, not commercial, purposes, and it’s only a snippet of the song. Also, it’s not like the commercial is going to replace the market for the actual song, so the effect on the market should be minimal (or even potentially positive, if it reminds people of that song and gets them to go out and buy it). That said, I would imagine Byrne’s response is that it could potentially harm the market in a few ways, including the negative association of the song with a campaign, and (more convincingly) that it could potentially harm the market for Byrne to license the song to other commercial advertisements. I can see the argument either way, though I (not surprisingly) would lean towards this being fair use.

Even so, though, whether it’s fair use or not, you would think that after so many examples of this sort of thing backfiring on politicians, that they would learn to check with musicians to make sure they support the politician before using the song, just to avoid the easy headlines of “big famous musician suing politician x.”

Filed Under: charlie crist, copyright, david byrne, endorsement, fair use, moral rights, music

David Byrne Breaks Down New Business Models For Musicians; Confirms Radiohead's Success

from the changing-world dept

Wired is running a couple of stories involving well-known musician David Byrne. The first is an interview with Thom Yorke from Radiohead, where he confirms what a huge success the “name your own price” offering was, contrary to CNN’s editors calling it dumb. According to Yorke: “In terms of digital income, we’ve made more money out of this record than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together, forever.” Yorke also confirms other things that we’ve said about new business models, where touring can be a big part of the model (contrary to people who insist that’s impossible). Yorke notes: “at the moment we make money principally from touring.” Yorke admits that he’s not a fan of touring (partly for ecological reasons), but that’s how the band makes money (this is similar to what we’ve heard from other bands as well). So, again, given all the publicity around the “name your own price” deal (which Yorke admits they basically tried on a lark and only agreed to it right before announcing it), it should pay off well with more people willing to pay more money to see the band on tour. The one thing Yorke says that I disagree with is the idea that the model only works for Radiohead due to its following. As we’ve pointed out, most of the examples of bands successfully trying similar models involve much less well known acts. In fact, Byrne himself later points to the success of Jane Siberry, who tried a name your own price model years before Radiohead, and certainly didn’t have the same huge following, but found that the model was quite successful.

The second article is by Byrne himself, where he does a nice job breaking down the business models of the recording industry. Much of what he says will sound familiar to folks around here, though he adds in some interesting numbers concerning how much a musician makes per CD and per iTunes download (it’s not much). He points out that the value proposition of a record label is decreasing rapidly as areas where they used to be needed (money for recording, promotion and distribution) are approaching free in cost, meaning the labels provide little, if any, value on those points. He then lists out what he believes are the six business models a musician can adopt these days, noting that it’s nice to see more than just a single option. This highlights another point we’ve tried to make: the new business models for the music industry mean that there isn’t just one business model for every musician. In fact, just about every successful new business model we see is slightly different — though most pick up on some important economic cues. The one problem I have with Byrne’s explanation is that it still mainly focuses on one thing: how do you sell the music itself. This comes even after he talks about how the idea of selling music is only a recent phenomenon, and historically, music was always tied to the performance itself. The less bands focus on “selling music” and the more they focus on using the music to sell other stuff, the faster a path to success will become clear.

Filed Under: business models, david byrne, music, radiohead, record labels, thom yorke