[LAU] [OT] Future of Music Distribution (and examples?)

[Louigi Verona]

Hey Andrew!

I was on a trip when I saw your post and bookmarked it, so that I can
respond to it later. Hence, a delayed response.

I would like to discuss a couple of things here: the illusion of a music
release and distribution platforms.

*The illusion of a music release*

If you look through the stats, before the Internet and self-publishing,
there was a very limited amount of music releases per year. Here's a stat:
in 1970, 4,000 albums and 5,700 singles were released in the US. Today more
tracks are uploaded to SoundCloud in an hour. Even if we imagine that the
numbers in the 90s or even current official music numbers are much higher,
self publishing will outpace these releases within hours or days.

This is not simply a qualitative difference, it introduces a qualitative
difference as well. And not even in a sense that the self-published music
is bad - after all, a lot of officially released music could be bad too.
It's just that in order to self-publish, the only person you need to
convince is yourself. "I think it's done" is the real standard today. "I
think it's interesting and important enough to be shared with the world" is
the name of the game.

But if you look at the official releases, they don't work that way. Even if
you try to publish with a small digital label, your music should go through
someone else, you might be asked to mix it better, it might be mastered,
you might even need to go through some bureaucratic process of signing a
contract or at least a quick written negotiation of what happens then.

This means that when someone in the XX century said they'd released an
album and when I say it, a self-publishing artist of the 21st century, this
means very different things. I can tell my friends - "I just released an
album". And it will sound as important as it did in the past. But it's
really not the same thing. I just uploaded some sound files to a website
and then hit "Publish".

Again, this is not to take down the quality of self-publishing works, or
the fantastic opportunities of self-publishing that we are all enjoying
today. It's just that when we are talking about music distribution, we have
to make sure that we are cognisant of the fact that most of us are
self-publishing artists, who have been vetted or supported by no one and
who are essentially alone in their quest to publish.

*Distribution platforms*

What we really want, as artists, is an audience.

An idea behind many of the distribution platforms is as outdated as the
idea of a music release. In the past, there was only a limited amount of
distribution channels. Therefore, publishing an album meant not only a
veneer of being vetted and therefore being considered worthy by someone who
knows their stuff, but also exposure to a public that essentially had very
little options. Definitely, much less options than there are today.

Therefore, the idea was that all we have to do is expose your music to the
public - and then it either works out or it doesn't. If it works, we pick
you up and for your next release we can provide some additional marketing,
radio play, etc. This can also be done if we simply believe in you from the
get go.

So, label services translated into
1. actual physical distribution
2. marketing

Today the situation has changed: the utility of physical distribution per
se is low to non-existent. *But the utility of marketing is as relevant as
ever.*

And this is a key point: modern distribution platforms promise success by
focusing on distribution, which is something they can realistically
provide, but which is trivial in the current technological landscape. But
what really gives you a chance at becoming successful is marketing, but
platforms are usually not promising this and are not equipped to provide it.

Some platforms will have mechanisms such as recommendations which might
expose your content to listeners, but even there you usually have got to
have a certain amount of plays/followers to be picked up by the algorithm.

But, most importantly, due to the sheer amount of self-publishing artists,
your name is now just one among a sea of other names. And this sea of
unknown artists is competing with some of the masters of the genre, because
the self-publishing space is global, and even established artists routinely
use it.

*Future of marketing*

And so, I think it is more meaningful to instead ask - what is the future
of music marketing? And has digital technology made the gap between known
and unknown artists actually smaller?

It's not an easy question to answer, but I think some things could be
summarized.

1. The potential gap between known and unknown artists became larger, but
so did the amount of concentric circles of sub-genres. This means that
there are now more artists who are at least somewhat successful and known,
but within each concentric circle of a sub-genre or a community becoming
successful is even harder than ever due to a rise in competition.

2. Marketing will never become a commodity due to time being a scarce
resource: you will always be competing for attention. No platform can ever
credibly promise marketing as a service. All platforms that try to sell
marketing as a commodity devalue it. A service like Distrokid is valuable,
but now simply being on Spotify doesn't mean much: everyone is on Spotify.

3. Therefore, the choice of a platform for distribution is not that
important. Not to your success or profit, anyway.

*Established platform vs own website*

The reason why I would never opt for my own website as a distribution
platform is that audiences are used to performance. For instance, Andrew, I
tried streaming tracks from your site, and it was painfully slow. It's not
your fault. It's simply that modern platforms are spending millions of
dollars to make their experience fast and responsive. I work at SoundCloud.
A team of 5 people worked on the audio player for several years to make it
as fast and responsive as it is right now.

This is especially important if you are an amateur and not known. You don't
have enough credibility, and someone might click on your track, it's not
loading - and they leave, probably forever.

So, just from a utilitarian point of view, we are forced onto an
established platform. But, it doesn't matter too much which one you chose.
Or, rather, what might matter here are personal preferences and the
minutiae of how you want to engage with your audience. Bandcamp, iTunes and
SoundCloud are all very different ways to market and consume music. But,
from the point of view of making a living - they are very similar.
Differences are contextual and might be important for a given artist, but
this is not universal and, on a larger scale, not that important.



I can talk about this forever. I'll stop here. Tell me if any of this makes
sense, maybe this is enough to start a conversation.



Louigi Verona
https://louigiverona.com/


On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 9:45 PM Andrew A. Grathwohl <andrew at grathwohl.me>
wrote:

> Hello Linux Audio folks!
>
> I wanted to see if I could get a conversation going about the future of
> music distribution. Given that we are people who make creative works with
> free software, I figured this is as decent a place as any to discuss what
> is out there, what is possible, and what should be avoided. My own personal
> approach to distribution is detailed below, but I invite others on this
> list to share their own methods and ideas.
>
> By now, most of us are probably resigned to the fact that the music world
> will look quite a bit different going forward, compared with prior eras.
> Many musicians feel that today's points of engagement with music fail to
> provide adequate revenues, and are taking to social media to criticize
> Spotify and the ilk for not being better "stewards" of music.
>
> I largely agree with those sentiments, which is why I have been taking the
> opportunity to construct a solid home base for my music project
> <https://multipli.city>, which is fully operated on my own physical
> hardware and some AWS cloud services at a cost of $7/month. It's just a
> simple jekyll template <https://github.com/SacredData/pRoJEct-NeGYa>
> hosted on GitHub Pages. However, by publishing my music releases to my own
> jekyll page one time, I get the added benefit of also publishing to all
> desired locations on the web simultaneously, including to a podcast feed
> <https://multipli.city/podcast.xml> compatible with Apple's podcast
> network.
>
> It's weird to me that we are still trying to unit-price music in a world
> where it's cheaper and easier than ever to record, produce, and distribute
> it. I am not necessarily interested in profiting from my own musical
> endeavors, but a friend of mine is a rather popular independent
> electronic artist, who has pointed out to me that despite millions of
> annual streams, streaming services alone don't provide him anywhere near a
> livable income. In  my opinion, this shouldn't be so. There's also the
> issue of being beholden to the whims of private firms who run various
> online music services. Anyone here miss SoundCloud Groups, for example?
>
> I've begun to wonder if solutions like mine could be the foundation for a
> new kind of music distribution approach - perhaps one where musicians
> maintain podcast feeds, where monetization vectors are much more profitable
> and much more flexible for individuals to exercise without betraying their
> own values.
> _______________________________________________
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>
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