In 2008, rapper Lushlife created a website featuring an interactive, evolving version of his album Cassette City. In partnership with CASH Music, a non-profit that provides open-source tools for artists to sell, share, and promote music directly to their fans, Lushlife provided regular streams of the developing album and presented a unique picture of the iterative, time-intensive process of recording and songwriting. He openly discussed how he planned to finish a certain track, which songs he thought needed additional instrumentation, or which songs were finished but would be performed differently live. By including these notes, he increased transparency not only for his vision for the album, but also for how he wanted his work to be presented and marketed during his tour. Ultimately, Lushlife’s efforts landed him a lucrative deal with the independent record label Studio !K7.
Lushlife’s story is emblematic of the music industry’s growing interest in commemorating and showcasing the creative processes behind an album. As piracy, streaming, and other free or low-cost forms of music consumption persist, artists and labels are continually searching for innovative sources of revenue and audience, and therefore they are embracing this shifting emphasis on process over product.
Freeing Music
Although the industry consensus seems to be that fewer people are paying for access to music, the term “free music” is somewhat flawed. “Free” implies a lack of monetary exchange, yet billions of dollars are flowing into the music industry each year. In 2014, the music industry pulled in nearly $15 billion in total revenues, $6.9 billion of which came from digital sources. However, this amount has decreased from 2013’s total of $15.6 billion, and artists continue to face dire financial circumstances.
Many musicians and music executives are attributing their financial difficulties to the proliferation of free streaming options, such as those on Spotify, Pandora, and YouTube. Marty Bandier, the CEO of the music publishing group Sony/ATV, reported in a 2014 email leaked to Digital Music News that one million plays on Pandora amounted to only $60 of royalties for songwriters. More recently, at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit in San Francisco in October, Beats Electronics founder Jimmy Iovine claimed that streaming services comprised 40 percent of music consumption but only four percent of the industry’s revenue.
A possible solution for combating this financial complexity lies in economist Paul Krugman’s 1996 New York Times essay “White Collars Turn Blue,” a thorough and telling prediction of significant economic developments in the 21st century. Noting the difficulty for creators to profit from their work due to the prevalence of piracy and bootlegging, Krugman asserted that “creations must make money indirectly by promoting sales of something else.” He argued that through advertising and corporate partnerships, artists could look beyond their strictly creative work and capitalize on what he called the “celebrity economy.”
Nearly 20 years later, the music industry is embracing the celebrity economy in full force. Record labels make a continual effort to roll out albums with expensive and often non-musical marketing campaigns, frequently partnering with the fashion, TV, and technology industries to develop an attractive visual brand for their artists. A prime example is Apple’s partnership with U2, which has yielded ambitious projects, from a free, surprise copy of U2’s album Songs of Innocence in the libraries of 500 million iTunes subscribers to a music video using virtual reality technology. Another potential indication of Krugman’s framework could be the connection between the parallel rises in free music consumption services and sales of live concerts. Indeed, the decrease in overall industry revenue over the past few decades has been correlated with an increase in live concert revenue, from $1.1 billion in 1990 to $6.2 billion in 2014.
Money’s Melody
Until recently, strides in artist branding have emphasized the product or experience that comes after, not before, the creation has finished. Executives and artists have historically hidden the creative process to avoid controversy over credit allegations and to maintain an aura of mystique. In response to this void, a new wave of music startups and corporate ventures has turned this emphasis on its head by transferring attention from post-production celebrity to pre-production artistic development.
In an interview with the HPR, CASH Music cofounder Jesse von Doom explained that economic changes in the music industry made this process-over-product mindset more attractive. “Monetizing on the process is happening by necessity, not by choice,” he says. “The decrease in overall revenues has caused labels to shift a lot of their money away from A&R [Artist & Repertoire, or the artist development division] in order to break even.” Labels’ relative neglect of in-house A&R has made the creative process an opportunity for artists to raise their profiles.
Startups in this space provide infrastructure that empowers artists to engage audiences more directly in the making of an album. PledgeMusic, a for-profit website similar to CASH Music that allows artists to pre-sell, market, and distribute music projects directly to their fans, is one example of this kind of startup. An individual artist’s campaign on PledgeMusic tends to span the entire life cycle of an album, from the recording process to music videos and concerts. Furthermore, fans can contribute to artists either through a regular online market interface or through a crowdfunding platform similar to Kickstarter. In fact, PledgeMusic crowdfunding campaigns boast a success rate of over 90 percent, which exceeds those of popular platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo.
Beyond the startup world, a handful of corporations are more openly giving financial support to independent artists recording albums. The Red Bull Music Academy helps to build state-of-the-art recording studios around the world and fosters collaborations between emerging international artists and established industry professionals. Converse Rubber Tracks is a similar initiative that provides independent artists with the opportunity to record at renowned studios such as Abbey Road Studios in London and Warehouse Studio in Vancouver.
Perhaps these programs are attempts to mitigate criticisms that corporate partnerships in music deteriorate the quality of the music itself by prioritizing money over art. A recent example of that clash occurred at the Doritos stage at the South by Southwest independent music and film festival in 2014. Made to look like a five-story-tall vending machine, the stage was ridiculed by critics like Esquire’s Andy Langer as reflective of the festival’s commercialization. On the other hand, investing more resources in helping emerging artists succeed and increasing transparency in the creative development process can put these corporations in a more positive light.
Despite its growing popularity, the process-over-product approach will not work for all artists or all players in the music business. PledgeMusic campaigns, for example, tend to work only for artists who already have an established fan base. Moreover, although direct-to-fan engagement is an attractive business model for independent artists, it will not translate easily to the mainstream music industry, which thrives on the success of the very intermediaries—like labels, agents, managers, publishing companies, and performance rights organizations—that direct- to-fan platforms seek to circumvent.
However, some major labels and mainstream artists are still finding ways to capitalize on their celebrity in order to monetize and sell their pre-production processes to established fan bases without infringing on the roles of intermediaries. The past two years alone have seen documentaries of pop stars such as Beyoncé, Justin Bieber and One Direction that showcase behind-the-scenes footage from recording sessions, concert tours, and even the artists’ early childhoods. The Target deluxe edition of Taylor Swift’s 2014 album 1989 features voice memos recorded on Swift’s phone during the beginning stages of a song, giving fans a glimpse into her songwriting process.
A Change of Key
Today’s music ecosystem is much more fragmented than it was two decades ago. In the 1990s, writes Stephen Witt in his 2015 book How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy, consumers bought a CD, listened to the radio, or attended a live concert without many alternative options, which made it easier for albums to become hits and proliferate among listeners. Now, access to technology (in addition to new genres) has allowed listening habits to be compartmentalized into several smaller subcultures.
Furthermore, musicians of different genres and career stages have vastly different revenue sources, making it difficult to generalize career strategies in the industry. “It’s a complicated landscape, and every band has to find a unique model that works for them,” von Doom said. “If giving viewers a look behind the curtain works for you, and if your fans support you directly that way, that’s awesome. If not, you can find something else that works.”
Although the success of the process-over-product approach is highly contextual, the trend is promising in that it capitalizes on the more organic and previously untapped means by which listeners learn about and come to love a musician’s work. The hope is that more mainstream labels will realize the importance of sharing this process and will encourage a more nuanced culture when it comes to appreciating and ultimately paying for music.
Image Credit: Pixabay/cmallard