If record companies can’t adapt to this new world, they will die out; and without advances, so will the futures of many talented bands.
I think there is a bit of a double-standard here. While digital music technology is disabling the ability for record companies to make money using their current model, it is enabling musicians to do more of what the record companies used to provide.
A talented musician today can record, edit and mix an album using computers and software that can be obtained for free or less(1). They can then distribute and promote a single world-wide and make the album available in both electronic and physical formats with small or no up-front cost and no ongoing risk (excess inventory, etc.). As this article points out, videos can be made for small amounts of money and distributed world-wide (as long as you haven't already sold your right to do so) to promote the band and the album as well.
There certainly are things that are still hard to do without a record company behind you but a significant amount of the risk these companies used to incur (namely studio time, marketing and distribution) are now all within the reach of anyone with talent and ambition.
Essentially musicians (and to an extent, novelists and filmmakers) are enjoying the position that software developers have enjoyed for decades. That is to say, it is not easy, or common, to see "rock stars" emerge from this process but with the reduced overhead it allows, it is possible to "make art your day-job" with a much smaller fan/customer base than it would be if you had to foot the bill for an entire studio and all of the other musicians that come with it.
So I believe, that to imply that the demise of record companies (as we know them) will be anything but a net gain for good music, is a dubious assumption.
(1)Many companies now pay to have computers capable of these tasks disposed of so you may even get paid to acquire the hardware, and there have been open-source applications capable of multitrack digital recording for years.
I completely disagree, the total number of amazing indie games, for example, can be written on the back of a matchbox.
The total number of paid for by publishers games numbers in the hundreds each year.
The number of amazing movies paid for by studios? Compared to the two or three indie films I can even think of in my entire lifetime.
It is delusional to believe that one person can have the skills to create great music, market that music, perform PR for the band and manage themselves. Those kind of people are so few and far between that if you want to bet the future of music on them that then we're in for a rough period musically speaking.
Don't get me wrong, I have great respect for these types of artists (Amanda Palmer is one that immediately springs to mind whose music I love).
But if it makes you feel better about the impending financing disaster approaching music by telling yourself that anyone can become a jack-of-all-trades you're just plain wrong.
And that recorded music has meant a massive decline in paid live bands. So you can't get paid for gigging. So how are you going to get your 10,000 hours in like the beatles? You don't get resident bands in bars and pubs anymore.
I don't think it's useful to compare music to movies or games. The effort and range of skills required is completely different.
Aha, you think it's EASY don't you! Oh yes, anyone can be Nirvana if they grow their hair long huh?
It's not, grow up. The pure fact there are so many people who wanted to be a rock star and never were is a testament to the difficulty.
Also in the past movies = plays, games = Chess, backgammon, cards, etc. Plays cost money, chess boards cost money. And a poor person would never have had a chance to listen to Bach 300 years ago. All forms of entertainment have been around forever, the format changes with the times, but amazingly people always got paid.
Before recorded music, people just played music for fun, or were mainly employed by very rich people to play music.
If we go back to that, I don't think music as such will suffer. People create music mainly because it's fun, not because they want to be rich.
You certainly do get live bands in good pubs. Find a better pub.
And yes, I think creating music is far far easier than creating a movie or a modern game, where you have to organize music, lighting, casting, voices, graphics, gameplay, camerwork etc etc
The bar/restaurant down the street has a down-stairs lounge area. Five or so nights a week there is free live (acoustic) music down there. Many times the same band will play the same night each week. They have fun doing it, and play for tips (not a cover).
The bar opening up next door to it will have a performance space in the back.
There's a place a quarter mile away that is (coffee shop | beer/wine bar | performance space | thrift store | art gallery).
There's a performance space down the block in the other direction; usually they host plays. Right now a local band has been performing a play + music performance for the past month.
It was sold out last night.
Maybe you don't get the traditional resident bands much anymore. But here in Bushwick, local talent is playing for local residents and having a smashing time doing it. A friend's band is about to go on tour to LA with money they've saved up from doing local gigs.
Bands / musical performers are hearkening back to the concept of a traveling minstrel rather than the superstar performer of the last century. It's never something you did "to get rich" - only the very lucky got that. The best performers have done it because they needed to.
To produce a song you need: a band. A recording engineer. (and possibly a song-writer). That will let you produce something on the scale of "Thriller" or :Like a Rolling Stone" or "Hey Jude".
To produce a game the scale of Halo you need significantly more people. Hundreds.
To produce a game like chess - you need 1 person with a good idea. Lets be honest - the difficult part of creating any boardgame is in the idea. A song (or a video game) has an awful lot to do with the implementation.
To promote each artform, you need similar skills - so I'm ignoring that process.
Aha, you think it's EASY don't you! Oh yes, anyone can be Nirvana if they grow their hair long huh?
Don't be silly. If you honestly think that the same amount of time expenditure that goes into creating a video game goes into creating an album, you're insane. Look at how many albums are released every year compared to albums. Do you think this is because people don't want to make games?
"There was absolutely fantastic music before, there'll be absolutely fantastic music after."
You're being a Polyanna. While there were definitely "popular" songs prior to the advent of the phonograph, music wasn't as vibrant and diverse as it has been for the last century. Before recording, music was a local phenomenon. Music was spread by sheet music (if at all), played locally, and the performances of the rare "star" were accessible only to the wealthy and elite.
Saying that there was "absolutely fantastic music" before recording is like saying that there were "absolutely fantastic" plays before the advent of film. Yes, there were -- but not nearly as many or as fantastic as those produced since.
Right now my favorite musicians are from places like New York, Toronto, Long Island, various Scandinavian countries, England...all around the world. Many of them are dead. Most of them are more talented than whatever local bands I'd see in a pub.
We're in an increasingly globalized world where I can enjoy things created by people around the world, and you think we should give that all up for local pub bands?
Not at all, maybe I was unclear. Recorded music is pretty much freely available now, so you can enjoy it as much as you like from the whole range.
I'm really into New Orleans Jazz at the moment, so I'd really like to visit there one day to see some live.
What I do think is that the age where you can record a few songs on a CD, and live off the profit for years, is coming to a close. Recorded music will likely just be advertising to get people to come see the live show.
Cave Story
Eversion
Minecraft
World of Goo
La Mualana
Knytt Stories
VVVVVV
Hammerfight
Aquaria
AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity
Megaman 2.5D (Unreleased but looks amazing)
Spelunky
I Wanna Be The Guy
etc. etc.
Of course, the list is far from complete and very subjective. Many amazing games were left out. But the total number of amazing indie games can most definitely fill up at least a few matchboxes.
I was thinking the same thing, actually (and you missed a V). And as to sheer number, Indie significantly eclipses the Industry, especially when competitions often result in thousands of new games in a few days. Certainly, most never get past the competitions, but some do (World of Goo, anyone?).
Honestly, indie games make up most of my gaming because they're usually significantly more replayable, and have more refined gameplay. AAA titles usually have option overkill (which I like, but detracts for many), but seriously underdeveloped game mechanics that expose themselves more and more as you play.
To make an even stronger argument, remember CS and DoD before they went commercial? Indie, mere mods on a good engine. And have you looked at the progress on Natural Selection 2?
> It is delusional to believe that one person can have the skills to create great music, market that music, perform PR for the band and manage themselves.
If only there were some global network that could connect people who wanted to work together, so people didn't have to do it solo. oh, wait...
Bands can make it big on their own too, and did even before the Internet was common (NOFX sells out shows worldwide and has for years). You have to tour like mad and work extra hard. Nothing wrong with that, and now the Internet is one more tool for them to use.
Local, just-for-fun rock bands have 3 to 6 members.
Independent films are made by crews of less than 30. They may also hire a firm to do some marketing for them.
Indie bands working their way around the music scene have 3 to 6 members. They may also hire a firm to do some marketing for them.
AAA games are made by teams of 50 to 100 core employees and maybe 100 more support staff.
Big record label funded bands have 3 to 6 members. They likely have a large support staff to do marketing for them.
--
I think the grandparent post is dead on. Record labels provide resources and services, many of which are no longer rare, expensive, or difficult to obtain. The few things that still are rare, expensive, or difficult to obtain can be easily enumerated (like marketing). Each of those things are available via other channels and without having to give away your intellectual property or compromise your artistic integrity.
The number of members isn't as instructive as the number of man hours that went into the development of the product.
Plants Vs. Zombies (an 'amazing' indie game) apparently took 12 man years of development (and probably at > 40 hr / weeks). That's a lot more effort than most albums, that's for sure. Even if a band takes a few years to put an album together, there's not spending 40/hrs a week in the recording studio for two years.
AAA games have hundreds of man years of development.
When you start talking about long, uninterrupted development cycles, it's very difficult to do that without external funding. A small band can go on tour and play gigs while working on their album - or even have a day job to pay the bills. If you have a day job while working on a game, you're not going to finish (anything non-trivial).
It is delusional to believe that one person can have the skills to create great music, market that music, perform PR for the band and manage themselves.
I would venture to say that not only is indie music far bigger than you think it is--but I would go further--that there is more indie music than there is professionally published music. This applies much more to music than to games, and more to games than to movies, due to budget issues (obviously).
It's just that you don't see most of it unless you're looking for it.
One of my music folders has around 64 days of music in it. This folder contains entirely indie music, produced by a single category of fans, published biyearly at Comiket. A large portion of it sounds professionally produced; I would say the ratio of "good to bad" is no different than that of professionally published music.
... and this is from one category of fans, from a single set of conventions.
For every professionally published album, there are a dozen garage bands publishing their own. And even among those who do publish through a record label, there are thousands of indie labels. When I hear a song I like and look it up on Wikipedia, a major label is the exception, not the rule.
Of course, I mostly listen to electronic music, so it might be different here. But I doubt it.
Define amazing. Much (if not most) of my favorite music has been long out of print. In fact, that's true of many of my favorite books. As for movies, yes, Avatar 3D was truly amazing, but in the last decade I've enjoyed far more indie releases than Hollywood blockbusters. Amazing is qualitative, not quantitative, and highly subjective. The article itself describes a video that many people found to be amazing (including me), yet it was made on a low budget without any support from the record label.
Thanks to the Internet, I've been able to hear some amazing music again after decades of being unobtainable. If those artists released some interesting new material and/or started touring again, I'd even consider seeing a show. I don't care if they have a label or not, and frankly, I'll be happy to hear them in the small venues they'll inevitably play in instead of huge arenas. I see that as an all-around win for music & musicians, as opposed to letting labels be the arbiters of taste and the ultimate gatekeepers.
I didn't mean to imply that the entire operation should consist of one person, but re-reading my post I can see how you may have gotten that.
I definitely agree that it is rare that the skills necessary to do this exist in one person however my position doesn't exclude groups from taking this approach as well.
This was something I actually hadn't seen before in this debate:
companies are cutting back spending on all but their biggest stars, and not signing nearly as many new acts.
I can sort of see how the big labels could stumble along their old path using heavy-handed techniques and lobbying for stronger copyright laws keep themselves in power as long as they actually supplied a constant stream of new music.
But not investing in their own future - that makes their demise a certainty.
Not exactly. There are new stars born every minute, so even if a couple of the big labels decide to sit out for a year or two they can easily get back in the game later. They can watch which mistakes the competitors make, think of new and better ways to adapt to the shifting music market, and so on.
It's better to make no investment in the future than to make investments you know to be bad.
This touches on something that I have been wondering for a while: why embed videos? On the Web, we don't embed text or images (if someone "embeds" one of your Web pages, many people would call that plagiarism or spam) but we embed videos. A video has to be embeddable to be seen as having value. Why? How did we get to this place?
There are definite UX "costs" to following a Youtube link rather than watching an embedded video: it breaks the reading flow, it distances you from the context that the embedding site often provides, it opens a separate tab or window that you'll need to manage, you need to wait for the Youtube page to load, etc. These might seem like minor things but watching videos is often an impulse act, so any operational or psychological obstacle to the user acting on that impulse makes it less likely that they'll follow through. And the opposite is true too; an embedded video is more visually interesting (think of the still frame) than a generic link, making it more likely that you'll bother to actually watch the video.
There's also a cost to the embedding site -- embedded videos keep the viewer's attention local, whereas linked videos send them offsite, possibly never to return. Many sites will just pick something different to embed rather than risk losing the viewer to the endless morass of distracting content on Youtube.
I think there is a bit of a double-standard here. While digital music technology is disabling the ability for record companies to make money using their current model, it is enabling musicians to do more of what the record companies used to provide.
A talented musician today can record, edit and mix an album using computers and software that can be obtained for free or less(1). They can then distribute and promote a single world-wide and make the album available in both electronic and physical formats with small or no up-front cost and no ongoing risk (excess inventory, etc.). As this article points out, videos can be made for small amounts of money and distributed world-wide (as long as you haven't already sold your right to do so) to promote the band and the album as well.
There certainly are things that are still hard to do without a record company behind you but a significant amount of the risk these companies used to incur (namely studio time, marketing and distribution) are now all within the reach of anyone with talent and ambition.
Essentially musicians (and to an extent, novelists and filmmakers) are enjoying the position that software developers have enjoyed for decades. That is to say, it is not easy, or common, to see "rock stars" emerge from this process but with the reduced overhead it allows, it is possible to "make art your day-job" with a much smaller fan/customer base than it would be if you had to foot the bill for an entire studio and all of the other musicians that come with it.
So I believe, that to imply that the demise of record companies (as we know them) will be anything but a net gain for good music, is a dubious assumption.
(1)Many companies now pay to have computers capable of these tasks disposed of so you may even get paid to acquire the hardware, and there have been open-source applications capable of multitrack digital recording for years.