If you were a carpenter and a song was a chair...

Anything about MUSIC but doesn't fit into the forums above.
RELATED
PRODUCTS

Post

JurijPopotnig wrote:Good night, good luck.
Wish good night to you too, also wish you luck with finding doable solution, right now, starting off with new selling platform seems most realistic and manageable, so who knows, maybe you are up on something ,don't let me discourage you, but use that in your advantage :hug:

Throwing idea in the pool, everyone could get personalized profile and crowd could fund him, he than could post videos, demo's, ideas, WIP's and etc, in order to attract more people and give them glimpse of his work, this all can be done right now, but here's all in one solution, so in the end everyone who fund him, get's his music.

That could work and it encourages originality and humanity, so many people would get on board because it's good way to finance a project and actually do something for someone.

Sure, nobody will get rich here, this isn't perfect money making machine, one exists and even if not perfect, it works and it's milking money big time, it works for them, it works for people that get paid, it doesn't work for others that want a cut, but don't want to play the game.
Last edited by Zexila on Sun Nov 29, 2015 1:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
This entire forum is wading through predictions, opinions, barely formed thoughts, drama, and whining. If you don't enjoy that, why are you here? :D ShawnG

Post

Okay, if it's not so obvious, by "Is making a living off the thing that one loves to do so wrong?" I meant songwriting. The topic after all has the word "song" in it and it was all mostly explained in the first page by the OP.

When was the last time someone made millions off physically raping anybody? Any billionaire serial killers? If people don't want to buy what you sell, they just wont. It has to be consensual, no? I guess "abnormal" people do buy the service of professional assassins so I guess there are exceptions.

What guy? If it is the guy I am thinking of... was that all about profit? Maybe it was about something else, beyond greed, beyond his own self. After all, the guy made plans encompassing a thousand years when his own life is only a tenth of that at most. But never mind that, I'm not a fan of the guy either.

Is it not possible that some (heck maybe most) songwriters just want to get off the poverty level without involving suits?

One makes something, one just wants to get paid. And if wanting 100 percent for something that one made is more greedy than just settling for 20 percent or less and the rest goes to the suits then maybe greed is not bad in this context and greed is not the right word in the first place. The words "justice" and "justified" might do, or maybe not, it's the only words I can think of at the moment. I guess everyone has different ideas of what their song is worth, but not many expressed it yet.

Anyways, assuming crowdfunding does work for other causes, why can't it work for song-selling causes? OP can just do it and find out. No need to change anything? It's all there? But I still don't see how crowdfunding sites could have better exposure for one's songs than, iTunes, for example. How big is iTunes, how big are crowdfunding sites?
ah böwakawa poussé poussé

Post

harryupbabble wrote:Okay, if it's not so obvious, by "Is making a living off the thing that one loves to do so wrong?" I meant songwriting. The topic after all has the word "song" in it and it was all mostly explained in the first page by the OP.

When was the last time someone made millions off physically raping anybody? Any billionaire serial killers? If people don't want to buy what you sell, they just wont. It has to be consensual, no? I guess "abnormal" people do buy the service of professional assassins so I guess there are exceptions.

What guy? If it is the guy I am thinking of... was that all about profit? Maybe it was about something else, beyond greed, beyond his own self. After all, the guy made plans encompassing a thousand years when his own life is only a tenth of that at most. But never mind that, I'm not a fan of the guy either.

Is it not possible that some (heck maybe most) songwriters just want to get off the poverty level without involving suits?

One makes something, one just wants to get paid. And if wanting 100 percent for something that one made is more greedy than just settling for 20 percent or less and the rest goes to the suits then maybe greed is not bad in this context and greed is not the right word in the first place. The words "justice" and "justified" might do, or maybe not, it's the only words I can think of at the moment. I guess everyone has different ideas of what their song is worth, but not many expressed it yet.

Anyways, assuming crowdfunding does work for other causes, why can't it work for song-selling causes? OP can just do it and find out. No need to change anything? It's all there? But I still don't see how crowdfunding sites could have better exposure for one's songs than, iTunes, for example. How big is iTunes, how big are crowdfunding sites?
Well, you are missing point for most part , that's because you probably read fast and don't think about it much, just shoot whatever is on your mind at that point, which leaves you with so many questions, doubts and assumptions.

Do you understand what is problem here with his vision as it is? Reality.

But if he tweaked it having reality in mind, that could actually work, that's all I'm aiming at, showing him what's realistic and what's utopian about it.

If you see my last message to him, you will see that I'm all for crowd founding idea with actually new selling platform, that idea isn't perfect either, but it's at least doable.

We are living in this world and we can't change much, only thing for one is to actually try to make a change being that change, so for him is to engage into this new platform and make it happen, everything else is "Imagine if this and that don't exist, so we can....", labels exist, it will exist, only thing to do is coexist with something else.

Well, you mentioned suits, well, if they promote your music, sell your music to people you can't reach, why they aren't entitled for their cut, that's business for them too, it's how it is, one can dream, but this is reality and something realistic actually can be done.
This entire forum is wading through predictions, opinions, barely formed thoughts, drama, and whining. If you don't enjoy that, why are you here? :D ShawnG

Post

In all seriousness, there is very little money in 'selling' your music in the sense being discussed here unless you are an A list celebrity. Even then, you have to be very careful with what you sign and who you hire to handle your affairs. There are just so many ways to get ripped off.

For normal people with musical talent, but no celebrity star power, licensing your music for commercial use offers much better rewards than selling copies of individual songs to listeners. The whole business is still quite sordid, and no one will ever ask you to sound like yourself; but the contract is a much simpler deal, and when the deal is done, you have your money in hand, as opposed to waiting to collect royalties or streaming fees or whatever.

Sampling is the way to go these days. It is the best market for original music there is in today's world. I mean, you have to cut things into much smaller pieces, and give them names like 125_bpm_number_16.wav but the ROI is as good as it gets for the independent musician.

Post

I have to agree with OP, this has nothing to do with communism. I don't get that he's asking everyone to pay, just that artists get paid to produce. This already happens in a sense on places like Kickstarter, but it's done at the album level, and only the supporters get the product for free. You have to have a following, but I think that it's a good approach for bands to leverage their fans interest. Basically artists are asking their fans to put their money where their mouth is, if you want an album, then support the group's making of that album.

You could do this with a song in certain markets, but, I'm not convinced that it will work very well. Produce the song, put a snippet on KickStarter and then ask for funds to finish the song and release it. If there aren't enough supporters, then no need to release. The problem is getting a good snippet without producing the whole song. I'm not sure that will work very well either.

It's not communism though, it's just prepayment for services.

Post

What made it like "state funded communist utopian dream " was how big his set this to be, with world decides and don't get new music and all that, like suddenly current system will not exist and world will be left on this new one only.
This entire forum is wading through predictions, opinions, barely formed thoughts, drama, and whining. If you don't enjoy that, why are you here? :D ShawnG

Post

If I was a carpenter and the song was a chair?

I'd do what I do to my songs already, take a f**king bloody hatchet to it :shrug:

Post

The TL;DR part:

- The only value of your music is what you perceive, for yourself. You wont convince a market to exist to serve you financially, on your terms.

- Post your stuff for sale and name your price based on whatever scale you see fit. It will sell or it wont. You can always reduce or raise prices in response to results. Compare pros and cons of various content delivery services. There's no magic formula (other than being in charge of a recording industry company).

- Value your work highly (or not), but realize that most people probably wont feel the same about your stuff and this is not a business to live on.

The rest of this post is probably of no interest to anyone, but i spent the time to type it and can't bear to delete it... :oops:
deastman wrote:What you're describing sounds sort of like a state funded communist utopian dream where every musician gets their share. Unfortunately, most of us live in societies governed by free enterprise, and the market decides what it is willing to pay.
Free enterprise... hah hah hah. People don't shape the market. The market shapes consumption by way of determining what is available. The illusion of choice, etc. But there are two issues here: a market and its content. i'd argue that the music sales business is a dead market, though the music DELIVERY business is not. In THAT business, there's no "free market force".

But let's first talk about the part where the "people" killed a market. The general populous said: "we see no value in paying for music. we want it for free." They spoke by stealing music en mass. They weren't ashamed of it. Most people don't even comprehend the notion of paying for immaterial goods. The people who still have disposable income are willing to buy singles, if it's convenient and cheap enough. They're also willing to subscribe to "unlimited" music services if they feel they can consume whatever their mood desires.

The industry caused its own injuries; decades of gouging its customers. Indeed the market would no longer bear the prices, because theft is free and became VERY easy. Human nature, not market forces. There wasn't some better content or better business that people migrated to. It was abandonment of the market.

It wasn't until people could steal entire catalogs of music via the internet that businesses tried to offer reasonable sales and convenience (Apple??). It took years for the recording companies to recognize that playing along was better than pretending they were going to stop theft (they're still lagging and playing politics instead of getting with the program; they fought the availability of EVERY new medium that had the ability to CREATE content rather than just consume it).

The industry finally realized it's better to make their catalogs available conveniently and less expensively so they can make sales AT ALL, rather than let all the downloads happen outside their own ecosystems. This model works good for software, too (another thing most people don't see value in and will steal if it's convenient; might as well make purchases almost as convenient as theft, because software was always an overpriced item the moment that people like Bill Gates et al thought "we can sell licenses to use this").

Artists are still screwed, of course, because reduced cost to consumers isn't coming from the recording business' profits.

So, yeah, the consumers chose somewhat. They killed a market because it had no actual value (like most IP); once the average person has easy access to a thing, it fails to be marketable. In that way, yes, "the free market" showed that music has no value or worth. Was that a good discovery?

On to the surviving business: content DELIVERY. Content selection was always under control of businesses, not consumers, though there was room for people to seek out independent artists (as there still is, but now there's too much to sort through). Once radio became beholden to record company contracts on what to play and when, music discovery / exposure went down the drain. Did the consumers change to different radio stations? Yes, until there weren't any. People born after the era of open format radio don't even know there was such a thing (if they even know that the radio isn't playing "good music only" or "what's popular with people"). Apple's trying to capitalize on this with the Beats curated stuff, but it's a weird merger of two competing fronts (a tiny clique of music makers and the mass market they successfully penetrated by skill AND luck).

The radio is governed by corporate decisions, not popular choice, and not freedom of DJ choice (are there any open format radio stations anymore that aren't low power college stations??). People who use the radio have one choice: on or off. If that's all they consume, maybe that's all they know exists.

Most people just want background sound while they're going about their activities. They want music easy to dance to/sing along with (nothing inherently wrong with that). It seems to me that people want ANY sound playing rather than silence... or whatever serves as "silence" in noisy places without music. It's hard to find such places. While music is valueless due to over-saturation, i feel like silence is the better/rarer commodity to trade: i'll PAY for some effing silence in public spaces, FFS.

Most music consumers do not analyze music. They don't spend hours focused on music with a good sound system / headphones. The people that do that, those who respect the craft of music, are probably musicians themselves (i don't mean "beat makers" / DJs), or the last vestiges of music-craft-lovers like the radio DJs put out of work by the corporate stations (i knew the last guy who did open format DJing for a big station in my area; he ended up volunteering to do shows on a local university radio station because he loves music that much).

Music has gone the way of the visual arts: it's no longer seen as special. The content isn't rare; anyone can use cheap tools to make their own (without discussing taste or quality). Accessibility of content creation was a blade that cut both ways for photography and music. Every step of the way, technology made these materials more accessible to average people (to the chagrin of the professionals who had labored at traditional production methods), at such reduction of cost that anyone who noticed quality differences shrugged "it's good enough" (until a few generations of people went by and no one even remembered the difference, and there's almost nothing to compare against any more). Skilled trade/craftsmanship is almost extinct.
If you were a carpenter and a song was a chair...
Music isn't a necessity. Carpentry is largely unnecessary anymore, either. Do you see young people getting apprenticeships and learning the craft? Has the "the free market" proclaimed that carpentry has no value to consumers, or has industry side-stepped that decision process and chosen for them? Like most other stuff in profit-obsessed USA, the big businesses have driven out the smaller ones. There's little differentiation between the products of one corporation and another.

Yes, carpentry is dead, for mass market goods. In the dwindling small markets, you have to be a carpenter of supreme skill/production to stay in business making furniture, for a tiny segment of the population that seeks, and can afford to buy, quality items at high cost and low production rates. That's a tiny market. How do you differentiate? Quality? Most people don't care about quality. The issue of quality has been removed from the equation of mass market product through decades of attrition and conditioning people with "hey, it costs less!". People are conditioned into seeing a disposable society as normal, with industry that does "greenwashing" as marketing to sell disposables (any "green" processes are to increase their profits, not lower consumer costs or save the environment). How could this NOT impact the arts??

The dwindling group of people that care about details is being driven to extinction. i would rather pay more for better goods, and i'm poor. Most people i encounter aren't like that. Those with money are as disinterested in quality goods as the poor people (when i was employed and making a living income, i was still an oddball among my peers in terms of always choosing quality over cost). Now that i'm poor, i don't buy much of anything. Address the fact that there's a small and shrinking population with the ability to spend money on non-essentials and you will partially address losses to sales of non-essential goods.

Independent carpenters live off the tiny segment of the population of people who need specialized services, or who cannot afford to dispose of repairable materials (it cost me far less to have a broken door repaired than to tear out the existing frame and replace it with a new door and frame, which wouldn't have fit the 1900 construction style of the house). i suspect that the guy i hired for that repair is the last in a line and no one will replace him. Once he's gone, people like me will be even more screwed when things need repair.

In terms of creating art, my working artist friend, who lives off an etsy business, has found that there's a much bigger market in making content for other artists than in selling art itself. The bigger market isn't "art consumers". It's hobbyists (the people that make stuff but don't make money on it; their income is from other sources). i saw this with the 3D modeling/rendering community. The hobbyists made stuff to entertain themselves; the real sellers created models, textures, etc to sell to the hobbyists. We see the same thing going on here, don't we? In the KVR realm, we have hobbyists and "developers". Do we have a population of people making a LIVING off being musicians? Maybe that's not even the question of this thread's OP.

If you enjoy creating an art form, keep doing it. If you have an audience, that's cool. If it's a big audience, then you're lucky or clever-and-lucky (cleverness isn't enough on its own). If you want to get paid to do it, you better do something either extraordinary with it (that's accessible or controversial), or figure out a way to sell your SELF as the product (popular artists have been product themselves, in some form, often being supported by a small wealthy group of fans because they're "interesting people").

People that sell art, who aren't themselves the product, may have chosen a popular genre (intentionally or not) that isn't so crowded that they can't still sell similar goods for a while... until they have to move to something else. Long term-successful artists change with the times and, yes, explore fads. Artists can scoff at the engineering of popularity and marketing, but it always comes down to doing just that, unless you want to rely solely on luck and chance.

If you can play instruments well: be a performer in small venues that will pay for live music (those that don't try to pull a "perform for exposure" cop out). i see musicians everywhere saying that performance is the last place to make money (and sell goods to fans).
- dysamoria.com
my music @ SoundCloud

Post

Zexila wrote:What made it like "state funded communist utopian dream " was how big his set this to be, with world decides and don't get new music and all that, like suddenly current system will not exist and world will be left on this new one only.
Yes it's a dream, yes it's utopian, but no it's not communist nor it is in any way state funded! It may be megalomania to think in such dimensions, yes, but I'm not telling you what or how to think and I expect my thoughts to be free as well.

Post

fluffy_little_something wrote:Nobody needs any specific song to survive, music is a luxury item for the masses, like Gucci bags made in China and sold at McDonald's 8)

Centuries ago some musicians used to work for kings and queens, i.e. kind of for the state, and they had quite a good life, much better than starving musicians today who don't want to accept that nobody likes their music.

I prefer the Carpenters to Dylan :roll:
Nobody would want to live with a yacht but no music for the rest of his life so: Music is not a luxury good, there will always be music and even if people don't have the money they'll find a way to make music. :phones:

That is why this industry grew so big in the first place, don't underestimate this. Music is not luxury it's existential for human well being.
That's why talented artist are admired by everybody.

Post

Jace-BeOS wrote:
The rest of this post is probably of no interest to anyone, but i spent the time to type it and can't bear to delete it... :oops:
This one no one has no objection to long informative posts and of the stating of viewpoints at all. Gracias, actually.
ah böwakawa poussé poussé

Post

fluffy_little_something wrote: Centuries ago some musicians used to work for kings and queens, i.e. kind of for the state, and they had quite a good life, much better than starving musicians today who don't want to accept that nobody likes their music.
Correct me if I am wrong but weren't a lot of successful musicians at first "don't want to accept that nobody likes their music." I've read somewhere that when David Bowie first started out nobody liked his music. He had to fail or be rejected a thousand times to be successful. Same with Beethoven. Same with Led Zeppelin (some powerful Rolling Stone magazine writer hated their stuff). Same with the Sex Pistols. Same with probably so many other successful musicians.

My guess is that given world exposure, a lot of "unlikeable" stuff might actually be likeable. If only 2 percent of the world population liked your stuff isn't that still humungous?

My question is... if those crowdfunding sites have low exposure and if one fails there then is that indicative of anything? Doesn't crowdfunding sites have to be as popular world-wide as YouTube or iTunes at least to count as an accurate indication of anything?
ah böwakawa poussé poussé

Post

Jace-BeOS wrote:snip
Damn dude, though I don't really disagree with anything that was ONE LONG post!

Post

Okay thanks for your responses. I know it's not easy to sort out something new but future will for sure. I think we see the last days of selling mp3s this way but I'm always a little way too ahead.

What I'd like to add is even if your music is a niche market today it's a global niche market as one of you said and the greatest challenge for us and especially programmers should be finding an algorithm that replaces music marketing. All the music suggestions I'm getting so far are at least a 97% failure and I'm sure this can be done better.

Also I'm not wasting any money on not handcrafted products anymore if there is one. Let's make music special again. Yes we can. Who if not we? It's not the consumer it was the delivery system that killed the music industry. And the old way of delivery won't bring it back. It's always the same people got rich one way then money stops floating in an they have no idea what to do and bump all resources into failing systems until future gets rid of them. I'm not one of those future will eventually get rid of. I am part of this future.

What we need is a Google for music. If we get this an artist can do all on his own from production to internet, marketing...without the need of greedy business. The individualised world is the direction we're heading since the cave and all attempts to prevent this will eventually fail. Everybody knows this.

Once we have such a thing this "crowd-buying" idea I think isn't that bad. IMO

Post

We need a new way of selling music. You know in Austria if you let your car open and it gets stolen you get a report for tempting someone to steel it. If you put a pic online you are responsible for it, not the one downloading it. It is just so against common sense how we sell music nowadays that it hurts my brains.

Post Reply

Return to “Everything Else (Music related)”