By Cortney Harding on This Week In Music Tech.
This was the year of the treadmill.
I mean that both for me personally (ever train for an ultra-marathon during a polar vortex?) and for the music business as a whole. 2014 felt like a whole lot of running, but there was no real forward movement — everyone wound up in pretty much the same place they started.
There was some big stories, of course. Beats Music launched, attracted something like 100,000 users, and then was snapped up byApple for a cool $3 billion for…some reason, yet to be announced. Apple wants a streaming service, even though streaming services bleed money. Apple wants to be cool, because I know when I walk into a Bushwick Coffeeshop, it’s Dells as far as the eye can see. Apple wants to bundle the product with headphones, because selling a subpar product based on cool branding is the path to long term growth. Look, I’m sure they are going to do something amazing and I’ll be forced to eat my words. But from where I sit, I’m still not seeing the logic.
Amazon Prime launched a streaming music service and no one seemed to care. YouTube finally launched their streaming service and no one seemed to care, although to be fair it’s early and no numbers have been released. Deezer launched…something in the US and no one seemed to…you get the picture.
Spotify continued to grow, despiteTaylor Swift’s best efforts. They seem to be fairly comfortable with their lead, given that the last time I looked, they were hiring a full time staff member to throw parties for other staff members. Wonder how things will look when they sit down to renegotiate contracts with the labels?
A bunch of small startups launched; a bunch of small startups died. Circle of life and venture capital.
Because here’s the real reason we’re still on the treadmill — fundamentally, nothing has changed. Artists still write “songs,” which are generally a few minutes long; they record and collect those songs on albums, which are released to the public on a pre-determined date. They do lots of press around those releases, and then they go on tour. Then they tour again, and again. Maybe they sell a song to a TV show, or an ad. Maybe a bunch of people at a music/tech conference have a panel called “Islands in the Stream” or “Radio on the TV” and talk about how this isn’t “selling out” anymore. And the beat goes on, and on…
No one is asking the bigger question, which is “why are albums?” Why are release dates? Hell, why any of this?
I understand artists and labels and radio need organizing principles. And I understand that this model has worked for a very long time. But it’s worth considering that maybe it needs to shift a bit. Maybe artists should release content when it’s ready, not when it’s some pre-selected Tuesday. The technology exists for them to be recording all the time, wherever they are. Some artists, and I won’t name names, are also recording whole albums worth of content that never sees the light of day — talk about a sunk cost. Unless it’s absolute garbage, what’s the harm in putting it out? Someone will probably like it.
The kids, as they say, have ever shorter attention spans. I’m not here to rag on millennials for their crippling ADHD — but I am here to say that they have millions more options than most of us ever had. Tinder is perfect site for them — infinite choices, and if you don’t like something, move to the next thing and forget it. But they also have short memories, and if you serve them something different the next time and they like it, all is forgiven.
So clinging to this old model of releasing bodies of work on a given date, based on all that we know, seems a little off, doesn’t it? And yes, right now some of you will want to Swift-boat me, but Tay-Tay is the exception, not the rule. She’s the 1% of artists if ever there was one.
If I had a wish for 2015, it would be this: kill the album. For some artists, who really want to present a body of work and tell a story, fine, keep it. For everyone else, just scrap it. Albums probably started as a cynical ploy to get more money (“they only want one song, but they have to pay for twelve of them, even if eleven of them suck! Brilliant!”) and this definitely reached a fever pitch in the nineties — and I should know, because I bought a lot of those albums. It became all filler, no killer, and then Napster laid waste to it.
So just start putting stuff out there. Kids are fine with imperfections. Some of the stuff they love on YouTube makes me feel seasick watching it because the camera work is so bad, but it doesn’t matter. Release little clips of tracks and see what the response is. If it doesn’t get a bite, toss some more chum in the water.
2014 was pretty much a wash, and that’s OK. We’re reaching the end of an era, and we’ve been reaching it for a long time now. A while ago, there was a political cartoon that had an illustration of every president since Kennedy saying one word, and it added up to “Don’t worry, Castro will fall any minute now.” It feels like you could replicate that with every editor of Billboard saying, “Don’t worry, the old music biz model will fall any minute now.” Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it didn’t collapse in one, either. But we don’t want to get to the point of collapse — it’s far better to pivot early and get ahead of the game.
This was the year of the treadmill.
I mean that both for me personally (ever train for an ultra-marathon during a polar vortex?) and for the music business as a whole. 2014 felt like a whole lot of running, but there was no real forward movement — everyone wound up in pretty much the same place they started.
There was some big stories, of course. Beats Music launched, attracted something like 100,000 users, and then was snapped up by
Spotify continued to grow, despite
A bunch of small startups launched; a bunch of small startups died. Circle of life and venture capital.
No one is asking the bigger question, which is “why are albums?” Why are release dates? Hell, why any of this?
I understand artists and labels and radio need organizing principles. And I understand that this model has worked for a very long time. But it’s worth considering that maybe it needs to shift a bit. Maybe artists should release content when it’s ready, not when it’s some pre-selected Tuesday. The technology exists for them to be recording all the time, wherever they are. Some artists, and I won’t name names, are also recording whole albums worth of content that never sees the light of day — talk about a sunk cost. Unless it’s absolute garbage, what’s the harm in putting it out? Someone will probably like it.
The kids, as they say, have ever shorter attention spans. I’m not here to rag on millennials for their crippling ADHD — but I am here to say that they have millions more options than most of us ever had. Tinder is perfect site for them — infinite choices, and if you don’t like something, move to the next thing and forget it. But they also have short memories, and if you serve them something different the next time and they like it, all is forgiven.
So clinging to this old model of releasing bodies of work on a given date, based on all that we know, seems a little off, doesn’t it? And yes, right now some of you will want to Swift-boat me, but Tay-Tay is the exception, not the rule. She’s the 1% of artists if ever there was one.
If I had a wish for 2015, it would be this: kill the album. For some artists, who really want to present a body of work and tell a story, fine, keep it. For everyone else, just scrap it. Albums probably started as a cynical ploy to get more money (“they only want one song, but they have to pay for twelve of them, even if eleven of them suck! Brilliant!”) and this definitely reached a fever pitch in the nineties — and I should know, because I bought a lot of those albums. It became all filler, no killer, and then Napster laid waste to it.
So just start putting stuff out there. Kids are fine with imperfections. Some of the stuff they love on YouTube makes me feel seasick watching it because the camera work is so bad, but it doesn’t matter. Release little clips of tracks and see what the response is. If it doesn’t get a bite, toss some more chum in the water.
2014 was pretty much a wash, and that’s OK. We’re reaching the end of an era, and we’ve been reaching it for a long time now. A while ago, there was a political cartoon that had an illustration of every president since Kennedy saying one word, and it added up to “Don’t worry, Castro will fall any minute now.” It feels like you could replicate that with every editor of Billboard saying, “Don’t worry, the old music biz model will fall any minute now.” Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it didn’t collapse in one, either. But we don’t want to get to the point of collapse — it’s far better to pivot early and get ahead of the game.
