The Internet: All the music in the world that nobody's buying…

[DeepFiber]

I love the intarnets, before I had the intarnets I could only listen to what I could buy at the store, and all the sudden I found alot of new things, and I found out I liked the new stuff better, but still to this day I cant find any music i like in a physical store I've been to. But on the net its full of it. I like. I dont know I dont think there is any money to make in electronic club music, it doesnt seem like it is, I wouldnt quit my dayjob..
Ok some superstar djs make a few bucks, but theyre superstars. Very few of them tho. Also I like music on vinyl, can only buy vinyl on the net.

sorry I forgot the topic, what was it again?

[dj ray]

The A&R people at the record companies used to wade through mountains of demos and dicard most of it.

Now, instead of being discarded it is all up on the internet. And there is a lot more of it.

Yes, that's a great point. A lot of demos are ending up 'for sale' on download shops.

[zircon]

All the music is free, and anyone can submit a track to be hosted and promoted on the site, but we reject at least 90% of what gets submitted to us. Thus when you hear something on our front page you know it's going to be good.

Only good by your tastes and standards then, yes?

We have a set of standards and guidelines that we've been refining for about 10 years, and a panel of judges that we handpick to be as objective as possible. Is it a perfect system? No. Is there good music that doesn't fit our standards? Yes. However, the point is that the filter generally results in the cream of the crop and saves people the time of listening to 99 bad remixes to get to 1 good one. It's not a perfect system, and it's not like you can't just post your video game music elsewhere. But getting your arrangement/remix posted on our site is like a badge of honor. You can't buy your way in.

Which brings me to this:

I'd rather have a cluster f*ck of dodgy music than be spoon-fed the 'taste' of some coked-up A&R chimp. I'm old enough to remember how shyte it was to have a few dominant companies that dictated what was worthy and what was not.

Totally agree.

The difference here is that your average major label A&R rep seeks (or sought) to find artists appealing to the maximum number of people. In many cases these artists are (were) chosen on the basis of looks/demographic appeal rather than pure talent, and/or sacrifices are made to appeal to the greatest number of people. However, if we were strictly speaking in average terms, your average person would probably enjoy a major label act more than a randomly picked act from the pool of bands and artists in the world.

Derek Sivers of CD Baby wrote about this at some length. Filters are extremely important even for indie artists. Without filters - be they a panel of judges at OC ReMix, A&R reps, or whatever else - it becomes extraordinarily hard to sort through the magnitude of awful music out there. Sure, you can have a searching/browsing system, but what if your search for the latest nu-skool breaks tunes comes up with 500 pages of tracks (probably roughly accurate?) How do you expect to find the artists who are the most talented, or, if you don't believe in that, how do you know you're not missing out on that amazing artist on page 475?

With a filter system, ideally the better artists get more attention, more fans, more listeners and thus make more money and continue to make more (and better) music.

[metamorphosis]

The "demos" of yore are nothing compared to the 'demos' of now.
The "demos" of yore were written on tape decks, or in the best case scenarios, 4-tracks.
The 'demos' of now are usually fully-furnished songs, but without some of the top-end detail that comes into studio tracks.

Comsumer greed ruined the music industry for everyone.
The internet could've been the ultimate for indie artists, as they could've price-competed with the most expensive artists.
Instead, everything is downloaded illegally, so instead of discovering new stuff, people go for the 'name brands' - as a 90% rule.

Very few people, statistically, illegally download indie stuff.

In the end, consumer greed has reinforced the corporate greed that all the wannabe
wanker pro-piracy fuckwits bitched about in the first place.

And if you want new stuff, all the new systems are there. All of them. Emusic, amiestreet, all of it's there, the systems are in place.
Is anybody buying? No. People are assholes and would rather find complicated ways of justifying greed than genuinely supporting the new systems which work to support newer creativity.
Piracy=more bullshit for the consumer and the artist. Full-stop.

M@

[ghettosynth]

...

[D N A]

I disagree with the author.

1. Yes, There's lot more music
2. Yes, single track "life curve" is much shorter than 10-20 years ago
3. Yes, lot of released music is crap (I could give Beatport example: if that's what people are listening then I just feel sorry. A lot of "top 10" tracks are worser than tracks hidden deeply "underground")
4. Yes, "everyone" can create it's music and release it
5. Yes, massive downloading illegal mp3 "seems ok" because "everyone" is doing that.

But, If you really love music then:
1. You can find your favourite producer and listen to his audio auditions, podcasts where you can find lot of tracks that will suit your musical taste
2. There are some nice music review sites - again, you can find the one you like, the one you trust
3. If you have plenty of time, or you're a dj (and need to find time for proper music selection) then you can find the good tracks on your own, just by surfing through these all mp3 selling websites like itunes, beatport, junodownload, audiojelly etc. and analyzing top charts etc.
4. You dont need a traditional music store anymore. You can just sit at home and listen the tracks the way you like (like, with beer, alone or with girlfriend etc.)
5. Commercial radio stations, tv stations have been hitted hard. They're not in "that" position anymore. What does "that" position mean ? They were deciding what you "want" to listen and what you will listen. Now (like I said earlier) - I can decide on my own by having access to almost infinite amount of tracks.

I mean, 8-10 years ago, thanks to internet, I was able to listen some underground trance (pretty different from all that mainstream trance such as Paul Van Dyk played on Viva music channel) I would never find in my country (at local music shop, or tv, radio). I had a chance to fall in love in this, or other music, normally unavailable in my country.

The only problem is proper selection - Most sites seem illegal and they do not care about selection. I would love to see a lot more websites reviewsing, introducing tracks in their subjective way.

ps. yes, I buy music but almost never bought anything from "old" musical store. Why ? I didn't liked an idea of buying 1-2 tracks I like with an additional 10-15 crap tunes, and pay like 10 $ per 1 good track. I would say that big labels pretty much deserved all of this.

One thing I would love to see. Traditional music stores replaced by physical beatport-store, itunes-store etc. with tons of terminals where you can navigate, and listen all of these music (available in the internet), create your playlist and record it on pendrive for example (and pay for it of course). I believe that it would be a huge sucess. Why ? Because the truth is, that for most people, "internet music store" is still the weird thing.
With physical store they could "accidentally" (just like womens accidentally enter shops with shoes ) visit such music store, and buy something for few bucks and instantly listen to it on their cellphones, caraudios, ipods etc. Also, older people not necessary know itunes, not necessary understand these all internet technology... (yep, still that's the case). And for younger people, it could be similar to cinema place where they can have a lot of fun by listening to the music in group, not alone in front of computer...

[Lotuzia]

So now A&R people have been replaced by advertisers, and you now need your song to fit the needs of the peanut manufacturer and please him to make a living out of your music ? Wow THAT is a revolution

You can buy music legally but nobodys doest it. The movie industry is in distress and in France at least live gigs of local major artist suffered around 30% lowering in ..... one year

Lets face it : Nobody wants to pay for music, it did not began with the internet and peer to peer but with cd writers and duplication. I remember some students havings shelves full of duplicated CDs, and even ..... selling them.

One of them ( A Rap Dj Wanabee with some mixing talent ) told us one day that you have to be an to still pay for music nowadays. So I asked him who were the guys who were supposed to buy HIS music in the future ? I guess he just felt a bit like a at that time ...... This happened in 1995.

And it's just that. The fact that you can steal music very easily, and even more now, has made the break.

Its only a matter of education. Normal radios do pay royalties, redistributed by "Minors" ( used to be called 'majors" ) a few decades ago. Internet Radios dont pay nothing. Is it legal, or a good thing ? I let you decide.

Music is free. Music doesnt worth anything. You can expect to see less and less skilled and mature muscians in the future, just because there wont have time and money to allow themselves to grow, become educated, and put experience and thought in their art.

This is the era of the primal scream. You have one thing to say, you become famous for ten minutes, then you disappear and leave the room for the next one. Andy Wharol was right : Famous for 5mns.

Only education and a little common moral sense can imho revert these tendencies. If young people will feel proud to pay for the music they love instead of feeling like well ...... things could -eventually- change. Very slowly .......

Enjoy the digital era my friends

LtZ

[P.T.]

I see music becoming hobbyist orientated.
People who make music because they like to make music.
Internet radio won't need to pay royalties because the hobbyists won't demand royalties. Or the ones who expect to make money won't get played on those stations.

I think music without money would be a good thing.
I didn't learn to play guitar with ideas of money or fame in my head.
I learned because I loved the thing.

I also didn't learn to use a computer studio to make music with ideas of fame and fortune or even minimun wage in mind.

I do it because I enjoy it.

I hate the fame and fortune seekers.
They are just prostituting music.

[Rangtangtang]

A few words for you

There is probably too much music about cause anyone can try and so it does not that value like gold which is limited in supply. The older tracks use to have a lot more value in it cause only a few could do it and distribution as well as promotion was quite tight, you didn't realy have choice of what to listen to. But, because when there was value in it production was a lot higher compared to now. There are a lot of pairs hands working on that hit tune you know and the guy on the cover didn't sing it. There is a lot of talk about the special 80's here, well that was the decade that budget technology was in reach by more and so a lot of people were trying to jump onto the bandwagon and so production values were quite poor, thats where we have transistor versus the valve and analog versus digital

There is a few things the industry could try. How do I find the the tracks I like out of the pile of rubbish out there. Well just like compilation tapes, you could have different versions, like jacks compilation tape, jims compilation tape....i.e jacks music web store and its just a matter of matching personal tastes. The most difficult issue is the illegal copying of tapes, and probably too difficult. You could try to put it on a different medium that cannot be copied? May I say is that being too popular may not pay. Pick a genere that not everyone is interested in, especially if potential fans are spread out thinly around the world you might pick up something for your troubles.

[dbrane]

I think the article has a point, but music was marketed like toothpaste and detergent years before the spamming of mp3's on the internet. There was a ton of crap in '93 too. It sold because some people (a large number, I think) are high volume consumers of music. Some of those people might make up a substantial part of the creators of the 800 new electro releases the author complains about. You can just download a high volume of crap today, illegally or not, and get over it quickly.

I'll take the chaos of the internet where no-one gets paid over the aggressively marketed cd-rack at the gas station, but I kind of believe that music fans would pay to get some quality control they can trust in.

[Hitch]

The internet has helped me find many Creative Commons artists who I would otherwise never have discovered. Yes, there's dross in both the commercial and legally free worlds, and there's far too much music to comprehend, but that's a consequence of near universal access to the net. It's like having a conversation in a crowded bar; you can hear many voices but you listen to the ones you trust and like. The difficulty lies in the matchmaking.

[KVRdataminer]

The outlook from the foregoings on sounds more like that of the US dollar. Are sales really that bad? See RIAA statistics, link below.

http://www.riaa.com/keystatistics.php

Physical units sales are down but (legal downloads) digital is up.

[dbrane]

The difficulty lies in the matchmaking.

Your sig just provided me with a matchmaking feed to subscribe to Thanks!

Oh... had not seen that Stephen Fry clip before. Thanks for that too!

[stk]

I went into an actual store today, the kind with walls and a roof, and purchased two compact discs full of music.

Quite proud of myself, really. Been a while.

[androidlove]

here are the sales
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=266651