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When Old Is New Again: From Cassettes To Multicolored Vinyl

admin — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 01:00:35 +0000

This post is syndicated from Yahoo! Music Stop the Presses!

Monetizing music ain’t what it used to be. In an age where digital music files are easily ripped, downloaded and distributed, the urge to pay for that great new album has steadfastly declined.

Alongside torrents, mixtapes, and social websites like Hype Machine, Exfm and We Are Hunted, streaming services like Rdio, Rhapsody, MOG and Spotify make music discovery easy. It’s been reported that with an annual growth rate of nearly 95%, subscribers to cloud-based music services will exceed 161 million in 2016.

This makes it easier for an artist to share their work with the masses - but how can the same artist pay the bills with the concept of free?

When it comes to the actual making money part, bands have no choice but to get creative. And many are doing just that – by inventing new channels and resurrecting familiar ones.

The indie-rock band Radiohead is perhaps the ultimate example of exploring new distribution opportunities in the 21st century. In 2007, they incorporated a “pay what you want” model for the album In Rainbows.

For their recent release The King Of Limbs, the band decided to offer up several options. The album will come in two digital formats – either 320 kbps MP3s ($9) – or CD-quality, uncompressed WAV files ($14). For the super fan, the third and pricier option is a newspaper album ($48 + $53). It offers MP3s or WAVs along with vinyl, CD, several large sheets of artwork, 625 tiny pieces of artwork and a full-color piece of degradable plastic to hold it all together.

At this year’s South By Southwest Festival, musician, producer, and ultimate music hustler Jack White debuted a rolling record store to offer music and merchandise from his Third Man Records label. The concept takes the form of a food truck, and brings music and merch directly from his store in Nashville to the many fans literally roaming the streets of Austin.

Labels are making moves to diversify, too. Detroit indie label Ghostly International offers a well-curated selection of art, books, and gear in addition to music from the extensive Ghostly catalog. They even offer niche items like candies in the shape of their logo.

In a unique move bringing back old media, indie band The Mountain Goats are offering up a hand-colored cassette for purchase. The tape features demo versions and two non-album tracks, available only via the Merge Records website and in select independent stores.

For die-hard vinyl fans, colored versions of the LP will be mixed in and randomly distributed alongside the black vinyl pressing. All vinyl copies also include a link to a digital download of the album.

The resurgence of vinyl is an international epidemic, with wax spotted everywhere from the local indie music store to mainstream retailers like Target and Urban Outfitters.

Despite overall album sales dropping 13 percent in 2010, the numbers show that vinyl is distinctly on the rise. According to theNielsen Company and Billboard’s 2010 Music Industry Report, vinyl sales rose 14 percent from 2009 to 2010. In 2010, 2.8 million copies were sold, marking the most sales reported since records began to be kept in 1991. And this trend isn’t just a blip on the music radar – vinyl sales nearly doubled from 2007 to 2008.

Although these numbers don’t come close to CD sales (326.2 million sold despite being the worst year for CD sales since 1991), the trend is certainly one to be reckoned with.

The annual Record Store Day, held the third Saturday of every April, is a day when independent record stores come together to celebrate the art of music. Special vinyl and CD releases are made exclusively for the occasion, and hundreds of artists across the globe perform and make special appearances.

It’s an interesting time for the music industry. There’s a new marketplace out there that’s unrelenting and demands fresh and innovative content because, well, all of the music is free. For labels, brands, and bands alike, it can be a glass half-full situation if you’re willing to think out of the box.

What do you think? Join the conversation and tell us your thoughts in the comments section below!

A Rant on Accessibility, Part 2: Gimme Gimme

admin — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 04:44:36 +0000

Music Technology is slowly changing. It’s adopting to consumer needs by giving music fans access to music anytime, almost anywhere, from anyplace.

New models like Rdio and Spotify allow us to search and listen for pretty much anything as long as there’s a solid network connection + computer or smart phone. We can easily create playlists and share them with friends. We can discover new music and in the case of Spotify, collaborate on dynamic playlists and create artist or decade-centric radio stations.

Old models like Rhapsody work like a storefront while granting us access to music in exchange for a monthly subscription fee. This model, although advanced at the time, still doesn’t allow us to see other users’ playlists or collaborate in an interactive way.

MOG is a strong contender in the marriage of content with editorial. With a firehose of musical content coming at us constantly, it’s nice to have direction from tastemakers to learn about what’s worth checking out.

Most notably, portability has become a reality with the development of apps for the smart phone. On the open-source Android platform, music specific apps like iMusic and Chompin make listening to music on the go a breeze – and are possibly the cleverest of the new breed.

Both apps aggregate music from blogs rather than hosting the content locally.

iMusic snags it’s musical database from what users are already listening to, similar to how Last.fm agreggates possibly one of the largest collections of music metadata on the internet simply by leveraging the data provided by its users.

By aggregating music from blogs, both services eschew potential legalities of making music available that hasn’t been officially released to the marketplace yet. It also broadens search.

Crawling blogs makes the odds of finding the exact track one is looking for – a b-side, remix, or live version – much greater.

This is particularly important because music fans take pride in discovering something new and/or exclusive. We invest our time in these sites. It’s disappointing when we can’t get access to music we know is out there. We can’t play DJ, or personalize playlists on your site as much as we’d like to.

What iMusic and Chompin are doing is brilliant, not only because it makes the user experience better – but it’s also indicative of a newer and perhaps broader way of purchasing music.

Labels are still hesitant to leave content in the hands of consumers. Sure, we download illegal promos, search for torrents of leaked albums, and unflinchingly pass along un-licensed mixtapes. But in truth this isn’t a bad thing.

Here’s why: music fans do it feverishly. They do it with a passion. They chomp at the proverbial bit for these leaks.

We want to be tastemakers. We’re eager to be the first to tell our friends about something new. And when we like it, we’re telling everyone we know. Hyperdistribution, anyone? Even according to the old business model, this remains the single best way to acquire a superfan.

If a record has stickiness, it can be released into the wild and it WILL be noticed.

It might not be picked up on the traditional charts but you’ll see it on Hype Machine. It’ll appear on We Are Hunted. You’ll see friends dedicate singles to one another and watch viral videos over and over again. Let these users decide what they like. Give them access to everything, and keep an eye on the numbers. If the music is good and the marketing power behind the band is smart enough – the revenue will follow.

The concept of music ownership is affected by the aforementioned technologies anyway. Why would I want to tend to my un-wieldy music collection when I can queue up a playlist in the cloud?

To be clear, ownership is not going away. It’s simply changing.

If I can listen to a full, lo-fi version of a amazing record on repeat – for free – I’ll gladly shell out my hard-earned moolah for hi-res WAV files.

I’ll buy a ticket to the show when the band comes to town. If I’m in love with a particular record (which tends to happen every week with die-hard music fanatics), I’ll see them again and again. I’ll be inclined to purchase vinyl or limited-edition items like prints and other merch.

Make music more accessible – and let the fans decide.

If it’s good enough, they’ll tell their friends. And buy concert tickets. And a hi-res copy of the album. And subscribe to the fan club.

And so on, and so on.

A Rant on Accessibility, Part 1

Musings: Crafting Mixtapes in a Digital Age

I want to Spotify

admin — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 04:24:03 +0000

Spotify, a music service currently only available outside of the US, is a social streaming site that allows instant listening to specific tracks or albums.

Users can easily share their library with friends and collaborate on playlists.

Although ownership of music is important to users in general a more pressing issue is accessibility. Sites like Hype Machine and Imeem allow us to share songs with friends, but we can only share the content that those sites have available to us.

By employing the peer-to-peer model like Spotify does, I can upload those special gems and curated playlists I spend weeks agonizing over. My friends can then stream the music and click-through to purchase for legitimate ownership of the song.

Spotify takes advantage of the “cloud“- data living over the internet as opposed to locally on your computer. We can peruse music quickly this way without downloading it first. Then, if a user wants ownership of the song, it can be purchased – supporting the artist rather than jacking it from a blog.

Makes sense to me.

What is Spotify?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify

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