The Business of Music

Today I want to talk about a man named Mark Andrews. Mark Andrews is better known by his stage name, Sisqo. According to Sisqo's Wikipedia page, he is best known as the lead singer of the singing group Dru Hill. I would tend to disagree, as most people only know him because of the "Thong Song." A dude with silver hair griped this nation approximately ten years ago, singing about a particular piece of women's clothing, and we were all a little bit dumber afterwards for it. Here's the thing, if Thong Song hadn't been such a huge hit, I probably wouldn't hate that song, it would just be some other novelty song from the late 90's that was a gimmick, but didn't work. Well, that's the problem, this was a gimmick that actually worked. There were (are) a lot of gimmicks in modern music. How else do you think stupid shit sticks?

What got me to think about Sisqo this morning? I was reading my book "All you need to know about the music business" and they were talking about music videos. I always thought music videos are self-funded, but that's apparently not true. Well anyway, it reminded me of a music video that was shot in the year 2000, that was deemed so bad, it wasn't even released. The problem with it is that they spent an ungodly amount of money producing the thing. But it was a cheese-ball video that didn't even get released. It just goes to show that the industry was quite the monster back then that it certainly is not now.

MTV stopped playing videos, and that's okay with me. I understand that that is a business, and the way to make money is to cut things that don't make money and keep the things that do. Music videos, even though people claim is what they really want out of MTV, apparently doesn't make MTV any money. Snooki makes MTV money. You can't argue with that. If you don't like what's on, don't fucking watch it. MTV created a market for the music video as the premise of their channel, and killed the music video when they decided to stop playing them, even though the channel remained successful. The music video is irrelevant now, even though most bands still make them, and you can find them on the internet. I haven't really watched videos in quite a while, because I just don't care. If you were going to play me a block of videos on a screen in front of me and I have no control over the content, I would likely watch them. If I get to choose the videos, I'm probably not going to watch. Don't ask me why, that's just how it is. But anyway, Sisqo made a terrible and yet very expensive music video that few people ever saw. (one being me, they eventually played it on MTV telling people that this video was never released because it sucks, so since it was on MTV, I'm probably not the only one who's seen it.) Why mention it to you? Because it's an example of industry excess that those executives figured would never end and would only increase. Oh, how the businessmen and women of America are so short-sighted.

I read an amazing book a while back called "Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of The Record Industry in the Digital Age." It basically talked about how the entire industry collapsed after Shawn Fanning created Napster. If Fanning had never created Napster, someone else would have, because this thing was bound to happen. That book, coupled with the book I'm currently reading, it looks like a career as a musician just ain't what it used to be. Oh, how I wish I was making music ten years ago. This all would have been so easy.

I know I sorta already wrote this blog before, and I hope you don't mind me talking about some more. The only person making great music videos anymore is Lady Gaga. She has done an amazing job of capturing the internet audience, while other haven't. I honestly can't cite numbers of examples, but I just know. The one figure I know is that her videos have been collectively viewed over a billion times. I heard that like, a month ago, so it's probably like 1.5 billion now. Fucking amazing. In the age of industry turmoil, Lady Gaga is the only shining star to come out of it. She hasn't managed to replicate the album sales of the industries' past, but she certainly has figured out how to be successful without the old business model. The last artist to sell 10,000,000 copies of an album was Usher...in 2004. The best selling album of 2009 was Taylor Swift, and that only sold 6 million. Lil Wayne sold 3.2 million in 2008. By contrast, the best selling album in 2001 was (I just found this out, by the way) Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park. That sold 9.6 million albums in the U.S. alone to date. (can't find figures from 2001 alone) Those numbers will probably never come back. How do musicians make money in the future? Not sure anyone really knows the answer to that. All I know that you'll have to change the culture of the listener again, and that will probably involve telling them to pay up, and they will probably not like it at first. It took iTunes a year to sell 50 million songs. iTunes has sold 11 billion songs since it's launch in 2003. Impressive, but it's a very small fraction of the songs downloaded illegally. Here's the stat blowin' my mind right now: 40 Billion songs were "shared" illegally in 2008. Holy fuck. I guess I didn't realize how bad it got. It's good if you simply want you're song to be heard by people, because that's obviously happening, but you're not getting paid for it. I guess I understand the defeatism that musicians express when talking about illegal downloads. They know there's nothing they can do about it anymore. This stat has just changed everything for me.

This stat might kill the dream a little. It's not possible anymore. And that makes me pretty sad.

So to tie things together from beginning to end, you used to be able to put out a music video and sell 10 million albums. Now, you make a record, it gets stolen, and you try to make a buck some other way. You could also argue that music videos sold records, and they don't play videos on MTV anymore. But illegal downloads killed the industry as we knew it, yet artists still make records and videos. I guess it shows that it's not always about the money as it was starting to become. I don't see a reason for an artist to make a music video anymore, honestly. And I really didn't know at the time when all these illegal downloading sites started popping up what impact they really would have on the industry. Lars Ulrich of Metallica was absolutely correct back then, and he was hung out to dry by people that felt they were entitled to getting things for free. I'd like to hear your opinion on illegal downloads if you would like to share them.