Letter to Emily White at NPR All Songs Considered. (A Must Read)

[The Computer Audiophile]

Hey Guys - A colleague just sent me a link to this article. It's a truly great read. I highly recommend you spend 15 minutes reading the entire article. You won't be sorry. It won't be a waste of time.

 

From The Trichodist

"Recently Emily White, an intern at NPR All Songs Considered and GM of what appears to be her college radio station, wrote a post on the NPR blog in which she acknowledged that while she had 11,000 songs in her music library, she’s only paid for 15 CDs in her life. Our intention is not to embarrass or shame her. We believe young people like Emily White who are fully engaged in the music scene are the artist’s biggest allies. We also believe–for reasons we’ll get into–that she has been been badly misinformed by the Free Culture movement. We only ask the opportunity to present a countervailing viewpoint."

 

Letter to Emily White at NPR All Songs Considered. | The Trichordist

[AudioDoctor]

Personally, I think he is exactly right.

[The Computer Audiophile]

He has some great points.

[Paul R]

Well presented points. I wonder though, 11,000 songs would be much closer to $10,000 than $2300. That's the only point that stood out as not right to me.

 

-Paul

[driven -- by sound]

A great read indeed. Thanks for bringing it to us, Chris.

[Mister Wednesday]

Hey Guys - A colleague just sent me a link to this article. It's a truly great read. I highly recommend you spend 15 minutes reading the entire article. You won't be sorry. It won't be a waste of time.

 

From The Trichodist

"Recently Emily White, an intern at NPR All Songs Considered and GM of what appears to be her college radio station, wrote a post on the NPR blog in which she acknowledged that while she had 11,000 songs in her music library, she’s only paid for 15 CDs in her life. Our intention is not to embarrass or shame her. We believe young people like Emily White who are fully engaged in the music scene are the artist’s biggest allies. We also believe–for reasons we’ll get into–that she has been been badly misinformed by the Free Culture movement. We only ask the opportunity to present a countervailing viewpoint."

 

Letter to Emily White at NPR All Songs Considered. | The Trichordist

 

Chris,

 

Thanks for posting this link to The Trichordist website editorial.

 

As you said, well worth the time to read through entirely. Artists do matter in our society and do deserve to make a decent living from their work just like any of us in our own chosen professions.

 

Regards,

 

Mister Wednesday

[wgscott]

I suppose this question might be answered in the linked article, which I haven't read yet (my eyes hurt), but "she acknowledged that while she had 11,000 songs in her music library, she’s only paid for 15 CDs in her life" could mean several things, including that she purchased downloads rather than physical media..

[The Computer Audiophile]

Hi Bill - Incorrect.

[Melvin]

Chris,

 

Thanks for posting this link to The Trichordist website editorial.

 

As you said, well worth the time to read through entirely. Artists do matter in our society and do deserve to make a decent living from their work just like any of us in our own chosen professions.

 

Regards,

 

Mister Wednesday

 

+1

[wgscott]

Well I read her posting first. It is a bit ambiguous, apart from the end where she ripped all the promo CDs in the radio studio.

[souptin]

At the end of the article there's a couple of paras about their editorial policy on publishing comments... "If you play bass we delete" Outrageous! Ruined the whole thing for me! Oh, alright, it made me laugh. Some good points, but I have to say I found the article kind of hard going. Why are some music streaming services praised but, in another part of the article, Spotify is criticised? For sure musicians seem to be stuck with a business model that doesn't serve them very well, but I didn't see much in that article suggesting alternatives, just a lot of steam being let off. Which is fair enough, come to think of it. Personally I found many of the stealing analogies and moral arguments (especially in the comments) confusing and not very helpful to the discussion.

 

Ps, to go back to Emily's original blog, I fail to see why we can't support artists through (her words) "t shirts and concert tickets".

[wgscott]

Yeah, the Dead thrived on bootlegs and a bunch of people wandering around scalping tickets, selling T-shirts and $3 hits of acid. Good point. ;-)

 

Although I am basically in agreement with the letter writer, the points he wanted to make were hammered on sufficiently within the first 20 paragraphs or so. I stopped reading about where he blamed the suicide of his neighbor, apparently some minor musician, on kids downloading music for free.

[The Computer Audiophile]

Ps, to go back to Emily's original blog, I fail to see why we can't support artists through (her words) "t shirts and concert tickets".

 

Hi souptin - Did you read the part about how little money musicians make from concert ticket sales and touring? Not many artists make Lady Gaga kind of money on tour.

[souptin]

Confession: yes, but I read about artists not making much money from touring after I posted here. It made me realise that it's nowhere near as simple as I was suggesting - for example touring with a full orchestra would be much more expensive than with a three piece band, but the size of venue you could fill and the likely ticket price the same. Therefore much harder for the former to generate a decent income for the musicians.

 

However, please allow me to make a comparison to my own job: I work in graphic design, and while I enjoy it, the graphics I design, which earn my living, are rarely what I would be producing from choice for purely personal creative purposes. Also I have to keep producing new work if I want to get paid - I don't get the equivalent of a royalty payment every time someone looks at one of my layouts.

[souptin]

I hate to think that the only two ways of running a financially viable tour are best represented by Lady Gaga on the one hand and the Grateful Dead on the other. Unless they were to share the stage, obviously.

[jerico]

Well presented points. I wonder though, 11,000 songs would be much closer to $10,000 than $2300. That's the only point that stood out as not right to me.

 

-Paul

 

Hi Paul,

 

I think he was just talking about what the royalties to the artist would be - not the total cost of the media. I thought that was a bit of a silly calculation, since none of us buys music without the cost of production overhead - we pay the $10k you mentioned.

 

J

[souptin]

Hi Paul,

 

I thought that was a bit of a silly calculation, since none of us buys music without the cost of production overhead.

 

J

 

In this particular case (if I understand it properly) the girl copied the music from the promotional cds at the radio station but didn't take the physical cds. Therefore perhaps the royalties are a better / fairer calculation than the retail price, given that the production & distribution costs for these particular cds would have come from the record labels' promotional budgets. By copying them she hasn't done anything to prevent their being used as intended.

 

Cue lots of legal wrangling - I imagine a lawyer representing the record label would argue that it's not acceptable to bypass the label by paying royalties direct to artists, but equally a lawyer defending the girl could argue that as an intern at a radio station she might reasonably make copies of the music in the course of her work, for example if she was researching a program playlist. Kind of a distraction from the main thrust of the argument (fair payment for artists), though, don't you think?

 

For me, the whole essay loses the plot a bit somewhere around half-way through, when we are told by the author:

 

- 99.9% of artists are 'working class' - so presumably the (still very considerable) amount of money made by the music industry is concentrated in the hands of 0.1% of artists. Doesn't sound very equitable, does it?

 

- He tells us about the suicide of a musician neighbour & to my mind is implying that illegal downloading is to blame (as already pointed out by wgscott)

 

- Having started the essay by saying he does not want to publicly humiliate Emily, he ends by listing music related charities that he thinks she should donate the money she has saved.

[The Computer Audiophile]

Hi souptin - Very interesting points. I see this article very differently from you, and likely wgscott, but our discussion here is a great example how we all see things so differently when it seems so clear in our individual minds.

 

Good stuff.

[Steverinho]

Emily White's behavior isn't much different to that of most young music fans since the 1970s. When I was about 15 (i.e. 1974) I got a cassette recorder for my birthday -- a typical portable mono thing. I'd record music from the radio (with a microphone! and later with a cable) and thus compile a music library on cassettes. That's what those cassette recorders were for: what else would you want to record but music? Later, with a proper stereo cassette deck, I'd record LPs borrowed from friends or from the library. Everyone made mix tapes and copied albums for their friends. I'd be surprised if most middle-aged CA readers didn't grow up discovering and sharing music that way. If you are too young to know those days, read Nick Hornby's High Fidelity (which everyone should read anyway).

 

 

I did buy quite a few records, perhaps because cassette copies weren't as good as the original vinyl. But for a long while I had a bigger music library on cassettes. What's changed between my and Emily White's generations is the technology of music copying and distribution. Digital music can be copied and recopied indefinitely, and above all can be shared over the internet (which is not, btw, how White got most of her music: she did it the old fashioned way, copying from the originals in the library of her college radio station.)

 

 

So what has changed isn't the young consumer but the technology. The question of whether music-copying is bad for the artist goes way back. I've always assumed (or perhaps rationalized, to assuage my guilt) that my adult obsession with music grew out of the time when music was "borrowed" and exchanged so freely among friends. I now own thousands of LPs and CDs (far in excess of the music I copied illegally as a teenager and college student) and have spent more money on stereo equipment than I care to calculate. In the long run the music industry has surely benefitted by feeding my habit when I was young.

 

 

I don't think we know if the same "long-term payback" will happen with White's generation. Part of her argument is that it will if the music industry allows it to. She's not as attached to the artefact, to owning the original LP or CD, as I am. Instead she wants streaming access to all the music ever recorded, which she'll happily pay for as long as royalties go to the artist. I think she's probably right: that is what young people want, and when they're older they'll probably pay for it as happily as they'll pay for TV and cellphones and internet service.

[firedog]

Emily White's behavior isn't much different to that of most young music fans since the 1970s. When I was about 15 (i.e. 1974) I got a cassette recorder for my birthday -- a typical portable mono thing. I'd record music from the radio (with a microphone! and later with a cable) and thus compile a music library on cassettes. That's what those cassette recorders were for: what else would you want to record but music? Later, with a proper stereo cassette deck, I'd record LPs borrowed from friends or from the library. Everyone made mix tapes and copied albums for their friends. I'd be surprised if most middle-aged CA readers didn't grow up discovering and sharing music that way. If you are too young to know those days, read Nick Hornby's High Fidelity (which everyone should read anyway).

 

 

I did buy quite a few records, perhaps because cassette copies weren't as good as the original vinyl. But for a long while I had a bigger music library on cassettes. What's changed between my and Emily White's generations is the technology of music copying and distribution. Digital music can be copied and recopied indefinitely, and above all can be shared over the internet (which is not, btw, how White got most of her music: she did it the old fashioned way, copying from the originals in the library of her college radio station.)

 

 

So what has changed isn't the young consumer but the technology. The question of whether music-copying is bad for the artist goes way back. I've always assumed (or perhaps rationalized, to assuage my guilt) that my adult obsession with music grew out of the time when music was "borrowed" and exchanged so freely among friends. I now own thousands of LPs and CDs (far in excess of the music I copied illegally as a teenager and college student) and have spent more money on stereo equipment than I care to calculate. In the long run the music industry has surely benefitted by feeding my habit when I was young.

 

 

I don't think we know if the same "long-term payback" will happen with White's generation. Part of her argument is that it will if the music industry allows it to. She's not as attached to the artefact, to owning the original LP or CD, as I am. Instead she wants streaming access to all the music ever recorded, which she'll happily pay for as long as royalties go to the artist. I think she's probably right: that is what young people want, and when they're older they'll probably pay for it as happily as they'll pay for TV and cellphones and internet service.

The big difference today is the ease of downloading, the improved SQ, and the small amount of space your downloads take up.

 

Emily wouldn't have had 11,000 songs on cassette back in the day, b/c it was too bulky and too much trouble to record. Probably something more like hundreds of songs, or at most a couple of thousand.

 

She also wouldn't have had easy access to any song she felt like copying. Even working at NPR, it would have been difficult to copy and store that much music on cassette. And cassettes cost money. So sure lots of us had "illegal copies" back then, but we also bought music. Both because the SQ of legal copies was much better, and b/c we didn't have easy access to something to copy.

 

So the magnitude of the problem today is much greater; the proof is in the declining sales of recorded music. The change in technology has changed the nature of the problem.

[lastgoodbye]

Hey Guys - A colleague just sent me a link to this article. It's a truly great read. I highly recommend you spend 15 minutes reading the entire article. You won't be sorry. It won't be a waste of time.

 

From The Trichodist

"Recently Emily White, an intern at NPR All Songs Considered and GM of what appears to be her college radio station, wrote a post on the NPR blog in which she acknowledged that while she had 11,000 songs in her music library, she’s only paid for 15 CDs in her life. Our intention is not to embarrass or shame her. We believe young people like Emily White who are fully engaged in the music scene are the artist’s biggest allies. We also believe–for reasons we’ll get into–that she has been been badly misinformed by the Free Culture movement. We only ask the opportunity to present a countervailing viewpoint."

 

Letter to Emily White at NPR All Songs Considered. | The Trichordist

 

The David Lowery article has certainly been abuzz for the past few weeks and almost immediately after the writing of the article there have been a few excellent rebuttals to his remarks. To me, Lowery came off very out of touch and condescending. Lowery didn't make a ton of money not because people STOLE his music, but because his bands were mediocre and obscure. I'm certainly not advocating piracy, but my stance is that a musicians greatest challenge is obscurity and not piracy.

 

"...a few weeks earlier, famed music producer Steve Albini did an AMA on Reddit, in which he was asked a similar question, to which he responded:

I reject the term "piracy." It's people listening to music and sharing it with other people, and it's good for musicians because it widens the audience for music. The record industry doesn't like trading music because they see it as lost sales, but that's nonsense. Sales have declined because physical discs are no longer the distribution medium for mass-appeal pop music, and expecting people to treat files as physical objects to be inventoried and bought individually is absurd.

 

The downtrend in sales has hurt the recording business, obviously, but not us specifically because we never relied on the mainstream record industry for our clientele. Bands are always going to want to record themselves, and there will always be a market among serious music fans for well-made record albums. I'll point to the success of the Chicago label Numero Group as an example.

 

There won't ever be a mass-market record industry again, and that's fine with me because that industry didn't operate for the benefit of the musicians or the audience, the only classes of people I care about.

 

Free distribution of music has created a huge growth in the audience for live music performance, where most bands spend most of their time and energy anyway. Ticket prices have risen to the point that even club-level touring bands can earn a middle-class income if they keep their shit together, and every band now has access to a world-wide audience at no cost of acquisition. That's fantastic.

 

Additionally, places poorly-served by the old-school record business (small or isolate towns, third-world and non-english-speaking countries) now have access to everything instead of a small sampling of music controlled by a hidebound local industry. When my band toured Eastern Europe a couple of years ago we had full houses despite having sold literally no records in most of those countries. Thank you internets.

"

[lastgoodbye]

Gang of Four musician Dave Allen also had an interesting piece The Internet Could Not Care Less About Your Mediocre Band

 

My biggest takeaway from the article:

 

"The convenience that Emily is searching for is, as she mentions, provided by Spotify – by doing so she shows us that a musician’s enemy is not the music downloader. The enemy is Spotify, MOG, Rdio et al who license entire music catalogs from labels at great cost. The labels (in my case Warner Bros) then pay a pittance in royalties to the artists. The winners in this vast charade are the labels and venture capitalists.

 

Believe me I know. I recently received a royalty statement from Warner Bros in which I found that one of our most popular songs, ‘Natural’s Not In It’ had been streamed or downloaded through paid online services, almost 7000 times. That netted me $17.35. Now that was just one song out of our entire Gang of Four catalog. The statement amount in total, my share, came to $21.08. There was a big, red-inked stamped message on the last page that read, “Under $25 do not pay.”

 

Lowery points out in his passive/aggressive “Letter to Emily” that people are buying less music these days. I wonder if it has ever occurred to him that maybe that’s because they are being served up an all-you-can-eat cheap buffet of music from the likes of Spotify?"

[jerico]

Good point(s), Souptin.

 

I just thought that particular metric, while (possibly?) specifiic to her situation, was a bit silly since the author is using her as a representation of a larger group (and a bigger problem). But I certainly see your point!

[Akapod]

I have three quibbles with the Trichordist.

 

1. He makes a big deal about these claims:

 

• Recorded music revenue is down 64% since 1999.
  
• 
  
• Per capita spending on music is 47% lower than it was in 1973!!
  
• 
  
• The number of professional musicians has fallen 25% since 2000.
  
• 
  
• Of the 75,000 albums released in 2010 only 2,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. Only 1,000 sold more than 10,000 copies. Without going into details, 10,000 albums is about the point where independent artists begin to go into the black on professional album production, marketing and promotion.
  

But he fails to provide a link to support any of them. Oddly, for the first two, I can.

 

2. Piracy is a problem, but I think it's over-blown. I cranked some numbers based off a report on the RIAA web site in this post, and it looks like piracy is responsible for somewhere between $400 and $800 million in lost revenue per annum. Unfortunately, the recording industry has lost over 50% of its yearly revenue -- some $7.4 billion -- since 2000. Piracy, according to the industry's own estimates account for around 10% of that.

 

I think there are two other culprits, and neither gets much attention in these discussions. The first is that the number of entertainment options have exploded over the last ten years -- internet, cable, X-box, iPads, Kindles, etc. The second is the iTunes Store.

 

With the iTunes store, music lovers got the option to buy only the good song (or songs) off an album, something which those of us who grew up with LPs and and CDs did not. (Yes, there were 45s, but they sounded like crap, and CD singles were always over-priced). There was a total of one billion units sold in 2000, and a total of 1.7 billion units sold in 2010. That's great! Unfortunately, in 2010, 1.2 billion of those units were downloaded singles.

 

3. The Trichordist slides over other sources of revenue, such as touring. He is correct to say that most touring was done in support of the release of a new album. The tour was typically supported by the label (recoupable) and was supposed to help break the band (and the album) into new markets.

 

But there are other tours which focus on an established fan base, and which are money-makers. If you're popular in the Northeast, doing a Boston -- Hartford -- New Haven -- New York run makes sense. It probably doesn't make sense to drive to Kansas City, try to get on radio to do some publicity and hope a hundred people buy concert tix. Also, making your own merchandise (t-shirts and caps, plus CDs) adds more revenue.

 

You won't get rich doing these things, but many, many musicians survive by doing this. The late Chuck Brown hadn't recorded an album with a major in thirty years, but he could still pack the old Tramps in New York which, I'll ballpark, could hold 1000 people. At $20 a ticket, it was a pretty good day's work. (Chuck and his eight-piece band would usually drive back to DC after the show.)

 

I have no interest in being an apologist for Emily White (but kudos to her for 'fessing up). But if you're really interested in the state of the music business, I don't think rallying around (against?) the pirate flag is enough.

[Akapod]

Sorry -- should have included this below.

 

A while back the London Times ran an article (sorry, link broken) on music revenue, and tossed up this chart and analysis:

 

 

The most immediate revelation, of course, is that at some point next year revenues from gigs payable to artists will for the first time overtake revenues accrued by labels from sales of recorded music.

 

Why live revenues have grown so stridently is beyond the scope of this article, but our data - compiled from a PRS for Music report and the BPI - make two things clear: one, that the growth in live revenue shows no signs of slowing and two, that live is by far and away the most lucrative section of industry revenue for artists themselves, because they retain such a big percentage of the money from ticket sales.