If You’re a Musician, Blockchain May Keep Music from Being Free
As a musician, you work hard at your craft. You expect to be paid for your talents and abilities yet you’re frustrated by the fact no one seems to want to pay for music. If you haven’t given up in despair, there may be someone on the horizon that may change things. From De-mass’d:
Will the blockchain free music from being free?
The idea of a path of least resistance makes only too much sense, yet so often it’s not the path we find ourselves on. And don’t worry, this blog, whose focus is the media and entertainment industries in the digital era, is not about to go all self-help on you. Instead, I will bring you some wisdom gleaned from a talk I attended yesterday, given by Grammy-nominated producer and musician Darryl Neudorf.
His name may not ring a bell but one of these names probably will: Neko Case, Sarah McLachlan, The New Pornographers — all artists with whom he’s worked. Oh, and he co-wrote this song, a Top 10 hit for Hootie & The Blowfish in 1997.
Neudorf took us through a fairly quick but compelling presentation that outlined the state of the music industry today, namely musicians getting fractions of pennies for streams on services such as Spotify, then explaining how we got here, and then laying out his plan for a better tomorrow for the music business. Lofty goals and a big vision, but incremental thinking is probably not what’s called for, 17 years post Napster, and still no working business model for the music industry.
Whether obtained legally or illegally online, the advent of digital music has meant songs becoming unbundled from albums; and the music industry’s unit economics were traditionally based on album sales, which tended to be 1 or 2 songs you wanted and 8 to 10 you didn’t want. Too bad, you’re stuck with the whole pizza, even the slices covered in anchovies that you don’t want to get anywhere near. That’s just how it worked.
Furthermore, platforms aka streaming services, such as Pandora and Spotify, have a business model based on the freeconomy, in which tens to hundreds of millions of users, at aggregate, create an attractive market for advertisers. A small percentage of users pay for an ad-free service, which usually runs about $9.99 month, but most do not, paying, instead with data, not dollars. Also known as the great 21st century tradeoff.
