Making Entrepreneurial Music – One Man’s Protest Song
by Greg Nisbet
Swimming With Sharks
The tunnel at Green Park station
Once upon a time, before I had any real responsibilities, I used to sing protest songs in London’s Green Park Tube tunnel. I used to sing other kinds of songs as well, and do all kinds of other crazy stuff, but the protest songs were the ones that really came from my heart. Since then, I have come to believe that absence of a sense of real responsibility is almost a prerequisite for making any kind of protest art. Almost, but not quite.
One of the big digital music headlines last week was Daniel Ek’s contention that Spotify is out to “save the music business”. Glass-half-empty types might immediately have pointed to the fact that it’s pretty hard to do that when 18% of your company is owned by the major record labels. Well, I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy, so I’m going to give Mr. Ek the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he shares my long-held belief that the only way to affect any kind of significant change is to swim with the sharks rather than question their right to exist. To deeply understand any business, and thereafter influence its direction, you have to work as an insider. In the music business, this means that you have to get into the old boy network to expect them to help you give your organization the juice it needs to do what you want to do as an entrepreneur.
I never had enough musical talent to move from the subway to the concert hall, so building tools for sharing music eventually became my own way of making music. As a result, I find myself travelling down a similar road to Mr. Ek, with the crash course on the inside of the music industry that that necessarily entails. Before I get to the place where he is currently standing, however, I wanted to take this opportunity to make the protest part of my voice heard while it still has an edge. Someone who knows me well recently mentioned that, for a guy known most of his life for shooting his mouth off regardless of the consequences, I’ve been remarkably muzzled lately. His statement was both painful and true, so, in the spirit of the openness with which I have recently become re-infected, I figured it was time to distill what I’ve learned and give you my perspective on what the music business looks like from the inside. This is my voice, my protest song, unedited and uncensored, probably unwisely and perhaps for the last time, as an attempt to hold on to some of my street cred before it becomes diluted by my association with The Man. That said, it still comes with a disclaimer. It is an exposé but not a judgement, because I’m hoping you’ll understand that I have to stop short of making this one of those protest songs that you know is so good that it is going to completely ruin your chances of ever signing that big deal.
The Spirit of Radio
I’ll start with radio. I was a little surprised that nobody really bit on my mention of the role of independent promotion companies in my last post on FYI music. If you don’t know what I mean, there’s a great article describing exactly how the whole scam worked, which I never would have thought to look for had I not spent a couple hours with a music industry veteran hearing all the gory details up close and personal. Perhaps I was missing something and the existence of this “evolved payola” system is common knowledge, or perhaps the feeling is “Relax, hippie, it’s just business”, but this intimate relationship between big money and the recommendation of music makes the idea of a “music meritocracy”, in which
Image courtesy of Salon.com
the best music finds enough market support to keep getting made, virtually unattainable. The system was “officially” abolished in 2004, but its legacy lives on in the way that new artists are “discovered” and promoted, so much so that it has forced new artists into the situation in which they currently find themselves, having to set aside their music and gulp down and digest knowledge of social media, music production, and contracts just to make a living. This is all stuff that used to be done for them in the early days of the music biz, so they could concentrate on making and playing great music.
The common defense of the existence of most kinds of commercial radio, and ‘Top 40′ radio in particular, is that it’s what the masses like, but I find this ridiculous generalization to be quite insulting to the ability of “the masses” to discern quality. Large-scale musical tastemaking is more about the tastemakers’ money than the listeners’ preferences, and any argument that advocates maintaining the current structure of music radio is musically indefensible. The fact that some amount of quality music is delivered through this channel is merely an accidentally positive side effect of a very bad trip. It must be changed with the view of protecting those with good musical intentions currently making a living off it, musicians and their support networks, but gutted to work in such a way that both tastemakers and artists can still profit while bringing much better music to those fabled masses.
The Establishment Principle
Radio, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg. The bigger lesson I take from the horror story of independent promotion companies is that it’s not the major labels that are the core of the problem, it’s the financial establishment of which all these companies are a symptom. An establishment of any kind never likes change, until it has figured out a way to profit from it. In my most popular music-related post so far, I mentioned the consideration of music being displaced by the consideration of money in running a record label. This was meant to be an observation, not a condemnation, as it is a typical stage in the evolution of a business. Once your investment becomes successful, running the business becomes about protecting the investment, which makes sense. Part of protecting any investment is the necessity to devote at least a small portion to innovation, but in most successful companies it’s much easier to acquire someone else’s innovation than to continually maintain a company culture of innovation. This ‘protect your investment’ model works fine for widget makers, but when the product is music, innovation is too important to the product to take an organizational back seat.
I’ve also seen this “establishment principle” at play on a personal level. There is a way of doing business taught and learned at the highest level business schools and carried into the highest level boardrooms, of using one’s existing trusted business relationships to meet one’s new partners and discover one’s new opportunities. My experience is that “big music” runs on very much the same principle. Some of the younger music generation is fond of thinking that the very way of doing business is going to change and usher in a new era where relationships of influence will no longer be the currency of artistic success, but I think that’s a little unrealistic. It’s unrealistic, because it isn’t specifically a generational thing, it’s more of a lifestyle thing. In any industry, those close to you in business help you support your own lifestyle, and if the lifestyle is one you like, you will have very little incentive to broaden your professional horizons and create more work and uncertainty for yourself. Channel 4 Chairman Luke Johnson, very much a part of this establishment, wrote a great article in the Financial Times (free subscription required) elaborating on this very principle. The closer you get to retirement, the more this principle applies, and the more you’ll likely sympathize with the point I’m making here. I find that most criticism of how the major record labels do business tends to ignore this inevitable human tendency. For meaningful change to occur, there needs to be a way for those accustomed to this method of doing business to allow change to enter their world comfortably and through their existing relationships, but that also allows new tastemakers with new artists much better access to the “airwaves”.
Our Version of Real Radio
This is where Mediazoic comes in. Partly out of fear of being squashed by the establishment I’ve just outlined, I can’t yet show you what our software does, but there are a few things I can tell you. We have a new model for real radio, different from Pandora, different from Spotify, complementary rather than competitive to either of them because neither of them is what I would call real radio. When I say real radio, I don’t mean going to a web service and searching for what you want to hear. That is not radio, that is a record store. Radio is curated, monetized content, brought to you by someone whose opinion you, and sometimes the community at large, have deemed worthy of recognition. Mediazoic’s platform makes the fan, rather than the artist or the label, primarily responsible for finding a way for the artist to be financially supported, not just by listening to them but by actually getting them airplay. In some senses, the better a fan understands the music, the more s/he will be able to do to support the artist. Just as posting quality tweets increases your true influence on Twitter, the better choices you make as a music fan on Mediazoic, the more support your favourite music will receive.
Another thing about real radio is that it does not depend on subscribing to a particular service, which in computer terms means requiring a particular piece of software. Life in the Mediazoic Era is about not having to make this kind of choice in order to listen to what is being broadcast. You should be able to change stations as easily as you turn a radio dial. To approximate true broadcasting, anyone with any receiver (software or hardware) should be able to tune it. This implies also allowing the carriage of not only commercial but also public service messages. After all, radio’s earliest application was all about news and navigation rather than entertainment.
Entrepreneurial Art
Certainly, my preference would be to just make our software freely available to my fellow music lovers and let them figure out how to use it, to donate this beautiful piece of entrepreneurial art, as it were. This admittedly idealistic inclination probably arises because my life is roughly divided in half between being an entrepreneur in some form and being an artist in some form. I have little personal interest in being uber-wealthy, and, like James Dyson says in his commercials, I just like things to work properly, after which I’m happy to just make a decent living. I understand how the musician feels because I’m great at the artistic part and I only do the money part because I have to. I also know what it means to have to deeply consider
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia
compromising the artistic vision in order to “sell” the artistic item. Finally, I understand completely that it is not the amount of people who “get it” that has any determination of the quality of the work, and it should not be the criterion for determining whether or not it is made, or how it is made. What I really need as an artist is creative space, courtesy of a benefactor who doesn’t really care about making money, with an almost parental faith in the ability of me as an individual to make it work, the same faith that I have in music fans to make it pay for itself. However, the problem with having entrepreneurship as your art, as opposed to painting, literature, music or other art forms whose spark is seen to be primarily above commerce, is that your patrons tend to be in it more for the money than the art.
So, while secretly hoping for a phone call from such non-beholden music industry heavyweights as Trent Reznor, Steve Earle, or Thom Yorke to inform me that they’ve become so inspired that they insist on marshalling their resources to send me into my own development bubble for a few months, I have had to figure out how to get my art made in the real world. In June, I packed up my shiny new tool and started not with the tech business but the music business, thinking a bit naively that it was all about the music, when in fact it is really all about the business. I kept hearing the same message coming from different mouths:
“This is a revolutionary application of technology that would be great if you were in some Asian backwater or European pirate haven and didn’t want to make any money.”
And:
“It’s the best tool we’ve ever seen for people who really love music to share their music, but unless you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it can make a ton of money, it has no place in the market.”
The good old days...
I guess the artist still occupied a significant part of me, because, to me, that was like finding a cure for cancer and not releasing it because nobody could make enough off the treatment drug. If you have a cure for cancer, you have a moral obilgation to share it. Now, I’m not saying we have something as important to the world as a cure for cancer, or even that my motivation for wanting to release it is strictly moral, but I have no doubt whatsoever that we have a new treatment for some of the numerous cancers currently multiplying through the bloodstream of the music business. Still, the entrepreneur in me saw the good business advice inherent in such dire diagnoses, and the result was a fairly significant surgical procedure on the business model that was likely necessary for any chance at long-term health.
With that surgery completed, it seems now that we’ll have a pretty good shot at tackling some of those cancers. I received word yesterday that one of the most successful advertising companies in the market thinks that, with a little work, we may have “a better advertising platform than Facebook.” This is wonderful news for our as-yet-unconvinced ‘patrons’, as it means a great potential return on investment, and even greater news for the artists who will also benefit, but it likely means the “entrepreneurial music” I’ll be making will start to feel some pressure to change from protest songs to hit songs. The busker in me might be a little ashamed, but the entrepreneur in me won’t miss waiting for the next coin to drop into the case. That’s why, with the wait almost over, I thought I’d better get this particular protest song out of my system while I still could.
Your Protest Song
What’s your protest song? What music business cancer would you like to excise? Use the Comment box below as your soapbox, and sing me a protest song!
17 Comments on Making Entrepreneurial Music – One Man’s Protest Song
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by aboveGround Magazine, Greg Nisbet. Greg Nisbet said: Making Entrepreneurial Music – One Man’s Protest Song – Mediazoic Blog – http://bit.ly/4wJ6fV [...]
My philosophy has always been this. Music is art, and art is about personal expression. How can art be about personal expression if it’s owned and controlled by a corporation full of thousands of people? It seems self evident that little or no meaningful music can come from a corporate structure. That’s why I support independent and “underground” hip-hop. It’s the real side of rap. It’s the average joe’s flow.
Hi Greg,
I’m taking up on your offer on Twitter to read and participate in the discussion here. It’s very interesting to see what you’ve got in store for us, musicians, and how this new platform could benefit or change the music business as a whole.
Since there’s a lot of information and theory shared here without actual clues as to how it’s going to look like or what revolutionary change it brings – it’s going to be hard to me to sing a protest song…
@alexhudish: Thanks, Alex. Would that I could share it with you publicly! I thought about putting up some screenshots in this post, but I was wisely talked out of it by one of the members of the Mediazoic team. Perhaps someone who has seen it in action can weigh in and add some comments…
@abovegroundmagazine: Amen to that, Tyler! I love what you guys are doing to keep it real. People point to hip hop’s big kids as an argument that the genre has gone downhill, but one listen to some of the artists you feature would quickly dispel that myth. Can’t wait to get what we’ve got into hands like yours!
Having read this, I find myself first and foremost wanting to ask you to change up the color scheme on this site. Yellow on black was physically bothering my eyes by the end of it. It looks good but it doesn’t read well, especially for a long post like this.
That said, excellent writing, I enjoyed the personal dimension especially.
Personally, I love the music business right now. It is wide-open and I have a vast horizon of options. I am surrounded by competition and the level of artistry, in any genre, is truly insane, compared to decades past.
No complaints here.
Thanks, Justin. Changed the font colour – hopefully it’s a bit less hard on the eyes.
Vast horizon of options, indeed. Very well put. With Audible Hype/World Around, you seem to be managing to stay close to the ground and therefore close to the music while at the same time getting up for a bird’s eye view on behalf of your artists. Keep walking that tightrope!
By the way, great job on the new site!
To anyone still reading this far down, there’s a great parallel discussion going on over at the ‘Music Industry Forum’ group on LinkedIn. To view it, you’ll need to have a LinkedIn profile and be a member of the ‘Music Industry Forum’ group. It’s a very open group, so if you aren’t a member, request to join and you’ll be approved as long as you have some connection to the music business.
And if you’re in the music business, and you’re not on LinkedIn, you should be! It’s free, and it’s a great place to either just observe (if you’re not the sharing type) or participate in some really valuable discussions.
I have worked in the music industry for all of my adult life and for the last year I have been battling breast cancer. I see the dilemma and conflict outlined in your article as something that applies to the broader business community at a Global level. The balance between innovation and creativity and commerce is historically a difficult one. If you site the ‘cure for cancer’ argument I would just like to point out that there is a similar conflict in the search for that cure. Opinion is divided between conventional and unconventional treatments and when you actually get the big ‘C’ diagnosis this is baffling. On the one had all your hippy friends will try to convince you to eat raw food. On the other the medical profession tell you, your situation is life threatening if you don’t follow the surgery, chemo, radiotherapy route. With young children it is hard to ignore Doctors so I followed the conventional path and then read Dr David Servan-Schreiber’s book ‘The Anti Cancer Diet’, he is a Doctor and he has had Cancer a few times and he has used alternative medicine and had chemo in his fight against the disease. As he states there is Science that is backing up the link between diet and a cure for the big ‘C’ but the problem is no one can commercialize the raspberry or green tea or tumeric because they are all freely available and all oddly enough effective against cancer. Tumeric and green tea cause cancer cells to implode in the lab. Similarly human beings make music freely to express something they have to express, therefore how do you make that expression commercially viable? The truth is people who want to make money and artists are always going to have differing agendas. I came into this industry as a green hippy kid who wrote poetry and who suddenly found herself signed to a major label and making a half a million pound album. Which inevitably never saw the light of day. I then realized I loved music so much that I would work with it, in it anyway I could, so I became a PR/Plugger for independent musicians and labels and that is where I have spent most of my life. After a long break from music I have started writing again and I do it because I love it. I have learnt a great deal about the ‘dark side’ of the industry but I refuse to give up. For me it is all about balance and not letting the prevailing ethos get to you and staying true to your own ethics. I have seen the calm, measured and balanced approach get results for many artists who thrive outside the limits of the mainstream machine. That is what inspires me and as I come out of the biggest crisis of my adult life, that is my focus as I approach my muse with renewed faith. So much is possible now if you hold onto your vision with integrity. The old boys may be clinging onto there outworn structures because they can but I believe the wider community can see that the system is unfair and in the end they will go looking for other sources of information. It is easy to entrance my kids with X Factor dreams of a new kind of hyper-super super stardom and I love the wish fulfillment of seeing these artists and records reach the top of the charts and breaking all sales records since recorded time (perfect at Christmas). However we all know it is a system and a predictable process where all the retail positioning and marketing are in place months before the record is recorded or the ‘winner’ is ‘chosen’ by the public. The cancer that I would like to address is the fragmentation of the independent sector and our almost codependent envy of other peoples success within the current or historic systems. Focus on what you can do and don’t give your power away, there are con men in the independent sector and there are ethical people working at major labels. In the end the future is in our hands, for myself when dealing with the metaphysical ‘musical cancer’ or the actual version on a physical level, I research and I look for best practice wherever it may be, in the establishment or on the fringes because in my heart I know my life depends on it as an artist and as a living vital human being.
Thanks for this deeply personal and well-considered comment, Eugenie. I’m a former cancer patient myself, now six years cancer-free, so I can keenly appreciate how being diagnosed with it compels a person to look inward and find a way of dealing with things that puts her or his own mental and physical health first. I sincerely hope you are successful in your own battle.
I definitely agree with your “diagnosis” about envy of other peoples’ success. Because there are a few “overnight successes”, some are led to believe that such a path is the rule rather than the exception, when you and I both know that just isn’t the way things work. A focus on research and best practices is great advice – find the positive paths to keeping you going where and when you can, and pretty soon you’ll realize you’re just where you wanted to be.
Try to be terse. No one has the time for these things.
Maybe Brian, by your values, you should have said NOTHING.
Brian: Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” was long too, and sometimes hard to follow, but it needed to be said.
There are no miracles in physics.
Three things:
What I really need as an artist is creative space, courtesy of a benefactor who doesn’t really care about making money
I think artists want to benefit from their work as much as everybody else. If this was real artist’s attitude s/he would not need patrons…to be in it more for the money than the art but rather would upload her/his songs to a website and let people listen to them for free, and maybe to just make a decent living s/he would put Google ads around it. This is one thing.
Humans do exploit other humans for their own benefits, it is in our nature. And yes, music industry does it too. It exploits musicians and their fans. Artists want to sell their songs for as much as they can. The fans try to get them the cheapest way, possibly by torrent or the like. Music industry solves this problem by staying in the middle. So they are not all evil. They are helping artists to draw money from their fans and providing the fans with the music. Everybody should be happy, but humans are also greedy so we keep complaining. This is the second thing.
Mediazoic’s role here is (there is nothing wrong with it, it is the way is should be, it is physics) to take part of the music industry’s business and make both sides of the fence (the fans and artists) to complain little less. So, Mediazoic will put artist’s songs on their website and put Google ads around them and do a revenue split between themselves and the artist. The fans will listen for free as they wanted but they have to click the ads. That is the third thing.
The money equation remains constant.
Physicist – Thanks for your comments. I appreciate your taking the time to read and digest my post.
There are indeed miracles in physics, until they are fully understood, and with so much of physics as yet not fully understood, that leaves a lot of miracles. Particle spin, string and membrane theory, and even gravity are a few of my favourites.
As for artists wanting to benefit from their work, I think the question is one of extent. I know quite a few musicians who are happy just to be able to make enough to continue making music – that is the type I’m referencing in my comment about the desirability of artistic patronage. Certainly, that doesn’t cover every musician, and perhaps it doesn’t even cover most. There’s a great interview with Moby in which he addresses this very point, at:
http://kara.allthingsd.com/20090811/mossberg-does-moby/
I certainly did not say or mean to imply that even the most obviously “shark-like” music industry folks are evil. In fact, I took pains to show that it is the process itself that I think is the issue. Put another way, sharks are a part of the ocean’s ecosystem, and are as essential to its well-being as any other other creature. Just as one creature’s prey is another creature’s predator, one person’s “exploitation” is another person’s promotion.
Finally, I’m not sure where I led a reader to believe that our application had anything to do with “putting artist’s songs on our website and putting Google ads around them”. In fact, our application is nothing like that – it is a completely new way of delivering music that has nothing to with putting songs on web sites and nothing to do with Google ads, although you were correct in assuming that there is a revenue split for the artist. I hope when I finally get to let the cat out of the bag that you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what you find.
[...] way I started was to construct a couple posts, of the digital kind, one about monetizing music and the other about what I found most divisive about the industry. Since then, a diverse little armada of feedback [...]
DJ’s
Are we ready for a change Greg. NO MORE DJ’s. We are no longer Disc Jockey.
We are ‘MUSIC MASTERS’. Those to can put and theme a show should be called what they truly are. MUSIC MASTERS. Take the lead on this. Maybe put it out to your network and see what comes back. I used to be a DJ but now I’m a MM.
Dave Charles
Thanks, Dave. I agree that the “disc jockey” moniker doesn’t really apply. When we were looking at names for Mediazoic’s first product, for Internet “deejays”, we talked about various alternatives but never really came up with one. I do like the “jockey” image, which suggests the active “riding/driving” nature of someone choosing good music to share. Along with your “master” (as in Jedi or Zen master?), other images that might work could be “pilot” or “captain”.
This is where crowd-sourcing might work – I agree with your idea that we put it out to the community to see if we can coin a new phrase more in keeping with the times.