Generally speaking, the creative industries are full of people and businesses that operate by screwing over creative people.
They view creative people the way a miner views a resource in the ground: as something to be strip mined and then discarded. I've encountered raw contempt... in a sense they are jealous of the ability of creative people to be creative, and this fuels their desire to co-opt it and take some of that glory for themselves.
But, part of the reason there's so much of this is that creative types are often horrible businesspeople and have no desire to learn. Instead, there is this myth that you get "discovered" and then someone else does the business for you.
Reality: you get "discovered" by a predator. If you don't want to be prey, you have to do it yourself.
Edit: this doesn't mean you have to be a 100% indy do-everything-yourself self-publisher or bootstrapper. But going into things with your eyes open, reading the fine print, and thinking like a businessperson is part of doing it yourself. Businesspeople do go into business with other people and other businesses, but they don't think "wow! I'm getting discovered, now I'm set!" They think "hmm... what's the value proposition here?" and they run spreadsheets and they look for hidden places where they might lose value or not get enough value for their money. Then they push back, and negotiate. Think like this or you get screwed.
Oh, and if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.
The best programmers are creative in their work, but that's different than being a creative professional. The programming equivalent of a creative (not the verb but a noun) is the person who comes up with the next big thing, or at least tries to do this. Woz, Bill Gates, Zuck, etc. all fall into this category -- but the person slinging .net code to keep an insurance database isn't in the same category. And those in that later group are engineers, and there's nothing wrong with being an engineer -- but that's different than being an architect or a product designer if you know what I mean.
No, I don't know what you mean. Woz, Gates, and Zuck made names for themselves with good execution on the right idea at the right time.
While admirable, that's not exactly the definition of "creativity" in my books, especially not in the programming sense.
In fact, I would speculate that somewhere out there, there are .net DBA code monkeys doing more creative things to keep an aging insurance database infrastructure from collapsing than Zuckerberg did for facebook.
how about this... if a product manager hands you a spec with mockups and youre expected to return pixel perfect code in return, you're on the engineer end of the scale.
I rather think that it has nothing to do with either. Comp engineers may be creative, but they're not in a creative field. They're in a field of artisanry, where they produce specialized, more or less hand made goods. Some of those people become famous for doing incredibly detailed work, but many just build chairs. Just because you come up with a creative solution does not make what you're doing art.
I can't believe Courtney Love wrote this. I had a low oppinion of her, but this seems really well written. Also, she's a fan of Neal Stephenson? That quote almost makes me wonder if this were written by some nerd and attributed to her...
I've often wondered if famous people tend to go off the deep end more than the rest of us because they're constantly surrounded by people who tell the what they want to hear.
...because the wild women of grunge can't possibly have brains too? Disingenuous, my friend. There are famous rockers with PhDs (the guy from green day comes to mind).
First, I don't think anyone in Green Day has a PhD.
Second, I wasn't surprised because she was a women, or a musician, or because she was part of the grunge scene. I know there are lots of smart women, and lots of smart women in music. I wasn't saying anything about a correlation between gender and intelligence or professions and intelligence. I was suprised because she's Courtney Love, and most of what I've read and seen of her prior to this makes her seem like an idiot. And this article seemed well-thought out, thus surprising me.
My bad about Green Day -- it was the Offspring I was thinking about (can't blame me, they're almost interchangeable as bands). On the other hand, rockers with PhDs:
Dexter Holland from Offspring (molecular biology, but dropped out with a masters)
Greg Gaffin from Bad Religion (zoology, 2007)
Brian May from Queen (astrophysics)
James Lilja from Offspring (medical degree, not PhD)
Sterling Morrison from the Velvet Underground (medieval literature, 80s)
I've done a lot of work for Dexter Holland in the past (and a little for Bad Religion but I never met Graffin) and I can vouch for him being a seriously smart guy.
Accomplished pilot, small business owner and inventor (several patents on LBS stuff from early 90s).
Juli Crockett of the Evangenitals is only an overdue (philosophy) dissertation away (and now that she's pregnant she may never get the damn thing finished).
People use drugs, the mild ones and the strong ones (including alcohol), in every class. Rich or poor, smart or dumb. Some get addicted, others find some other interests in life.
I've managed a couple passing conversations while she was staying in SoHo NYC and she definitely has an idea of what she wants out of things but I can't say there wasn't an amount of fakeness to the whole situation (recalling the defamation lawsuit in this case). To her credit, she explains things very well and certainly doesn't give in lightly to things. I guess it takes an extremely determined personality to live her life.
I'm convinced that she knows the record label situation well but it was probably after having the same conversation many times with many other folks in the industry. Still, none of that is necessarily a bad thing nor does it make this a poor piece of writing (regardless of any editors).
(I still find it really satisfying when I google for something I know is true and find myself as the #1 advocate of it on Google -- in this case the search "steve albini courtney love plagiarism")
Nonsense. The Albini article covers a lot less ground and has far fewer ideas. In particular it says nothing about alternative distribution models or the internet.
My belief was that Courtney Love had been influenced by the Albini document (which might have originated as a speech that Courney Love heard) but she brings enough in the way of sufficient new ideas to the table that it doesn't really matter that she doesn't cite her source.
I think it's incredible how wild woman [1], with so many issues are also very smart, I guess they have too much time in hands to thinker about so many things.
[1] I dated a girl who Coutney Love might as well be her role model... a total disaster, the girl read piles of books, had tons of great ideas, learned math for fun, etc etc etc.
2. Love’s thesis: Through lobbying and collusion, the big labels (she calls them distributors) essentially own artists, which she calls “slaves” and “sharecroppers.” Following, an excerpt from the Sponsorships section.
> When I agreed to allow a large cola company to promote a live show, I couldn't have been more miserable. They screwed up every single thing imaginable. The venue was empty but sold out. There were thousands of people outside who wanted to be there, trying to get tickets. And there were the empty seats the company had purchased for a lump sum and failed to market because they were clueless about music.
> It was really dumb. You had to buy the cola. You had to dial a number. You had to press a bunch of buttons. You had to do all this crap that nobody wanted to do. Why not just bring a can to the [venue] door?
> … They were a condescending bunch of little guys. They treated me like I was an ungrateful little bitch who should be groveling for the experience to play for their damn soda.
> I ended up playing without my shirt on and ordering a six-pack of the rival cola onstage. Also lots of unwholesome cursing and nudity occurred. This way I knew that no matter how tempting the cash was, they'd never do business with me again.
> If you want some little obedient slave content provider, then fine. But I think most musicians don't want to be responsible for your clean-cut, wholesome, all-American, sugar corrosive cancer-causing, all white people, no women allowed sodapop images.
> Nor, on the converse, do we want to be responsible for your vice-inducing, liver-rotting, child-labor-law-violating, all white people, no-women-allowed booze images.
And that may be the least interesting part of the screed.
I do not disagree with Courtney Love that the system is not great for artists but the solution is probably not in the distribution method, or the structure of the financing. It is most likely in solving the cost problem.
If it costs $500,000 to produce a record, like she says it does, that would create limited room for a great number of bands and artist to record. The market size ($s of world wide discretionary income) can only support a certain level of production.
Figuring out how to lowering that number would be far more productive than trying to create the next huge app which helps starving artists with terrible recording quality get their music heard or some other distribution method.
(She also fails to add in concert revenue which may be lucrative for artists)
I think the cost problem has largely been solved. Someone can throw together a DAW for $2 or $3k and start creating really great sounding music following hours of practice. I think most young musicians know about and go this route when they are learning.
The world Courtney Love is from is the old world, where you needed a specialist to do all these different jobs. You needed to pay a producer, engineers, buy studio time (sometimes these are packaged but the more well known the pricier, and acts like Hole use well known outfits), this is what drives costs up. Not to mention marketting, distribution, etc.
In today's world a poor musician who wants to record and distribute his or her music can, and the best of them will be able to demand a price, or merchandise.
The hardware is only the start, though. Unless the music is totally electronic you'll need microphones and someone who knows how to record those. Many guitar players will want to use their amps and speakers to get a certain sound. There's still a lot of craft in the front end that can't be learned in hours.
Also, a big part of recording is having a producer/engineer, who knows how to capture the essence of a performance in a recording. If you've watched American Idol's last season you could see how high profile musicians and producers zero in on strengths and weaknesses of a performance.
I think one thing the Love piece really pointed out is that there is a lot more to getting your music out there than recording. The distribution system is about to be solved but all the other problems, the really big problems, still exist.
Everything you say is true, you need to practice to get good.
The hardware, everything I mentioned and one or several mics (or a guitar amp), is still only about $3k to get started. SM58s (great for guitar cabs and ok for rock vocals) are used all over the place, they cost $99. An introductory condenser, like an SM81 (acoustic guitar, drum overheads, most acoustic instruments, some vocals), is about $300. If your voice is what you want to showcase, spend $1000 on a Nuemann TLM103 (my college roommate had one of these). $1000 is about the cost of a guitar amp and a guitar to get started.
This equipment will not make you rich, but it will give you access to the tools you need to learn the craft. I'm contrasting to a time (the 60s) when you needed half a million dollars just to put a sound on tape. Putting a sound on 'tape' these days doesn't even cost anything, the technology is everywhere.
Edit: To more specifically address your post, yes you're right, the talent is still the "hard part" of making music. My point was that if you have the talent, recording it is not as expensive as it once was.
What people can do and what they do do are a little different. I can't think of anyone who stopped building their rig at $3k, but it's possible to produce demo-quality records with a $600 computer, a nice A/D/A converter and software like Reason, or Ableton. All of which can be purchased with $3k. I personally own about $10k of recording gear and instruments, and I've never made a penny off any of it and don't regret the purchase.
That aside, the guy who recorded the "Owl City" records started out by releasing tracks from his parent's basement while working at Coca-Cola. Imogen Heap I think started off on home recording gear and recorded her entire first album herself. Also check out YouTube for Ronald Jenkies, that will give you an idea of what you can accomplish with a modern workstation, which will run you $3k new, decently equipped.
Edit: It has also occurred to me that if you're a band, and you can perform your music well (everything in 1 take), you can probably buy enough studio time to get a good sounding album for under $3k. I can't think of any specific music this applies to, but a great deal of grunge music in the 90s was recorded in this kind of a scenario.
I was looking for the web site, but a couple I know who sing typically folk songs put out a Christmas Album on CD and it cost them less than $5K for a production master and a bunch of copies of the CD.
This piece is interesting to read 11 years later, amazing how much the distribution question has already changed.
My kids pretty much use Grooveshark, Pandora and iTunes to play music. CDs are only used in the car and even there we frequently use MP3 players. Even though we still have a vinyl record player for my old Blue Note records it's not used very often.
What hasn't changed is the fact that there's a lot more record companies do than distribute the final product. It's pretty clear that the reason these companies have so much power is that they produce and market artists. Without that power the distribution wouldn't be so valuable. Someone still has to pay for studios, producers, designers, publicists, etc. This is particularly true for bands that survive not so much on the musical skill of their members but the overall sound and image.
I have a promising start-up, with several hundred users in specific geographic locations. I will need "$4.6m" to scale, and I want to take out $1m for the cofounders.
In our market, 32,000 such companies launch each year, and of those, only 250 generate more than $200,000 in revenue. Only 30 generate $20m.
What is a fair percentage to offer the VCs?
Yes, I appreciate that there are many differences between bands and start-ups, but if, as she says, only 250 of 32,000 albums sell more than 10,000 units, then this $10m the record company makes from her band must go, in a large part, to cover the costs of funding all the bands that dont make it. Maybe they are still making a handsome profit, but its not as unjust as she makes out.
They view creative people the way a miner views a resource in the ground: as something to be strip mined and then discarded. I've encountered raw contempt... in a sense they are jealous of the ability of creative people to be creative, and this fuels their desire to co-opt it and take some of that glory for themselves.
But, part of the reason there's so much of this is that creative types are often horrible businesspeople and have no desire to learn. Instead, there is this myth that you get "discovered" and then someone else does the business for you.
Reality: you get "discovered" by a predator. If you don't want to be prey, you have to do it yourself.
Edit: this doesn't mean you have to be a 100% indy do-everything-yourself self-publisher or bootstrapper. But going into things with your eyes open, reading the fine print, and thinking like a businessperson is part of doing it yourself. Businesspeople do go into business with other people and other businesses, but they don't think "wow! I'm getting discovered, now I'm set!" They think "hmm... what's the value proposition here?" and they run spreadsheets and they look for hidden places where they might lose value or not get enough value for their money. Then they push back, and negotiate. Think like this or you get screwed.
Oh, and if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.