Category: New Music Strategies

Here’s an interesting data set – a list of the best selling singles ever, divided into physical and digital. It lists anything with ‘verified’ sales of above 5 million (though those numbers are often rightly questioned because of the way that ‘sales’ are reported – there are 185 references at the bottom of the wiki page 🙂 )…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_singles

One of the interesting bits for me is the time span of each era – the physical sales cover 1935 (Bing Crosby, Silent Night: 30 million sales – at a time when it must’ve been owned by pretty much everyone on the planet that had a record player, was before albums existed, probably sold even more copies as sheet music and was a song in the public domain!) through to 2004 (Green Day’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams: 7 million physical copies, of a track that was also on an album that sold 15 million too.) So that’s a 69 year span, with 128 singles selling more than 5 million copies. It’s worth keeping in mind what percentage of the records released those were (how many records had even been made, let alone were stocked in shops, by the end of the 40s/50s/60s etc…)

The digital list covers 2004-2012 (8 years), and has 104 singles selling more than 5 million copies. All of which also appeared on (numerous) albums, were licensed for films/games, earned some money for streaming/youtube/other usage, and were no doubt torrented extensively. But, crucially, none of them required any plastic discs to be made and shipped around the world. No shops to stock them, no trucks to carry them across the country… So in terms of where the money went, far less of the gross revenue needed to go on the fixed cost of physical manufacture and distribution of a scarce good.  Continue reading “What Do Singles Sales Tell Us About The Health Of The Music Industries?”

It’s kind of in the job description, for Lobbyists to try and limit the parameters of any discussion to the ones that concern their particular paid interest. Lobbying is high-dollar stuff and getting into time-wasting concepts like ‘fairness’ and ‘seeing things as they really are’ are not what good lobbyists get paid for.

They get paid for ‘conversational hegemony’ – taking over the parameters of any discussion, so that even before they put their point across, the fencing around the subject is skewed in their favour. Thus recording industry lobbyists, like the BPI in the UK and the RIAA in the US, have successfully made so much of the discussion about ‘music’ – particularly at a policy/government level – about their particular set of economic concerns. Namely:

“how do we protect the virtual monopoly that we’ve had until now on defining ‘success’ for recording artists, controlling the avenues of manufacture, distribution,  promotion and publishing/licensing, and thus leave in place our usurious terms of engagement with the artists whose recordings we exploit for financial gain?” Continue reading ““conversational hegemony”, or how lobbyists hijack the terms of engagement”

As you know, I’m in the middle of mixing and mastering 11 hours of new music. It’s taking a long time, but the results are some of the best audio work I’ve ever done. So let’s have a chat about audio recording. 🙂

My thesis: The received wisdom of how and why things are done is, it seems to me, based on a resource equation that exists in a paid studio environment.

The factors are time, budget & complexity.

The assumption is that if a project is simple it’s because the budget is small and therefore time will be tight. Thus mixing from the multi-track to 2 track without getting too fixated on the final version maximises time in the studio, doing what studios do best. You make it sound as good as possible through the speakers there & don’t worry too much about continuity between tracks, consistent leveling etc. Those wouldn’t be a productive use of mix time. Continue reading “Expanding Audio Orthodoxy – Recording, Mixing, Mastering”

Just had a rather extensive twitter-rant about art, commerce, indie, labels, work, commerce… that sort of stuff. Here are the tweets: Continue reading “Twitter Brain-dump About The New Music Economy”