There’s a great article in this month’s Wired magazine (16.02) by David Byrne, former member of the Talking Heads. Byrne interviewed Thom Yorke of Radiohead about that band’s marketing experiment with their latest album, In Rainbows. (In short, Radiohead leaked their album to the internet in advance of the CD going on sale January 1, 2008 and let users download it by making their own decision on how much they should pay. Any amount was fair game, including zero, zilch, nada. They decided to let the users set the value. As of Byrne’s interview, Yorke said the band had made about $3 million using the “pay what you want” model.)
In the article linked above, Byrne does a nice job of breaking down the various models by which musicians have traditionally related to the “music industry” and created their revenue streams.
1. The Equity Deal — The record company foots the bill for everything and has ultimate creative control. The record company more or less owns the “act”.
2. Standard Distribution — The record company foots the bill for everything and owns the copyrights on the music. The artist gets royalties, but has a bit more creative control over the final product.
3. The License Deal — The artist owns the copyright and the master recordings, but leases them to a record company for a set period of time in exchange for production, distribution and advertising services. After that period, all rights revert back to the artist.
4. Profit Sharing — The artist owns the copyright and the masters. Costs and profits are split evenly with the record label.
5. Manufacturing and Distribution Deal — Just what it sounds like. The artist has complete creative control but subleases the business pieces to a label.
6. Self-Distribution Model — The artist owns everything and does everything.
Byrne makes the observation that artistic freedom increases as one makes his or her way down the list. The more work you’re willing to do yourself, the more rights you control and the more creative latitude you retain. Which makes perfect sense. People (i.e., record labels) demand more rights to the final product as their financial investment increases. Or, as Byrne writes early in the article, “What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over.”
(Which, oddly enough, is something that scans as vaguely familiar to me for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on.)
This is not to say that I’m predicting the end of paper publishing as we know it. God knows that I would be severely annoyed if printed books went away. The environmentalists would be annoyed because we’d quickly gorge out the landfills with empty print cartridges and reams of print-offs. On top of that, some poor soul would have to fund a charity or three to support all the out-of-work English majors displaced by the collapse of the print publishing industry. (And yes, I know that the poor slobs filling the trenches at most publishing houses do it for the love of literature. You can only stretch $25k in annual salary so far in New York.)
What I am saying here is that blook writers (or whatever the fuck you call us), bloggers and “new media” content producers would do well to pay attention to how the artists in the music industry are grappling with their revenue models. There are plenty of mistakes to be made, and the more we can spread them out across industries, the better it will be for all of us. More importantly, in the New Media, there isn’t one way or even necessarily a “right” way for content creators to be successful.
As Byrne writes it:
No single model will work for everyone. There’s room for all of us. Some artists are the Coke and Pepsi of music, while others are the fine wine — or the funky home-brewed moonshine. And that’s fine. I like Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and Christina Aguilera’s “Ain’t No Other Man.” Sometimes a corporate soft drink is what you want — just not at the expense of the other thing. In the recent past, it often seemed like all or nothing, but maybe now we won’t be forced to choose.
(And don’t even get me started on Andrew “Fucking” Keen and his obsession with the cult of the amateur. He’s a dick weed whose fifteen minutes has gone on about fourteen and a half minutes too long.)
Filed under: Blooks and Blognovel Analysis Tagged: | blook, David Byrne, Wired magazine article
