a new era for music

[four card flush]

65% of teenagers now regularly use live music streaming services such as Spotify and last.fm, and many more are set to follow. This free file sharing and live streaming has meant illegal file sharing between 14-18 year olds has dropped significantly from 42 to 26%. Leading artists such as Kings of Leon sold over 100,000 copies of their album digitally, whereas physical CD single formats plunged 43.5% last year.

We are entering a new era for music. It is an arena that is constantly evolving with technology, and the behaviour of music consumers. Where we used to only be able to buy physical formats such as vinyl records, cassette or CDs with cover artwork and lyric books, we now have a very different experience of accessing and buying music. We can now listen to music before we choose to buy it, or not buy at all by listening to live streaming on Spotify. Music now exists as digital files, transferred from computer to MP3 player.

What do you think is the future for browsing, buying and listening to music?

[Dec]

Art being removed from commerce is the best thing since Zig Zags.

[mishelle]

I think it means bye bye HMV

[pANDAS Radio]

Originally Posted by four card flush

What do you think is the future for browsing?

Ignoring half of your threads because they're just links to a thread of the exact same name, on the same forum.

Why don't you search out one of the 5,000 threads on here that already discuss this topic?

[Treetop Flyer]

Haha you are a shock jock! Pandamoanium.

I don't think it's good to remove commerce completely although I think word of mouth would lead us to better music than mass marketing. I think remuneration is vital to allow people to focus on being creative.

A great thing is bands will have to gig more to make their money or to make the same amount bands used to in the 90s

[pANDAS Radio]

How do you conclude that? It's not just record shops that may close, it's labels. More bands selling their own product directly to the consumer means less middlemen and more profit for the band.

It's obvious.

We started out with live music that you couldn't buy recording of = bands making money from gigs alone.
Recording becomes cheaper so we get bands recording and gigging = bands making money from gigs + the percentage/fee they made from recordings that were sold (along with the studio, record label, distributor and vendor).
Home recording becomes very cheap + the internet can be used by anyone who bothers to spend a few hours learning about eCommerce = bands making money from gigs and being able to record/produce/distribute their own material as cd or digitally.

Bands won't have to gig in other cities or countries to attract sales from there, neither will they need local or international distribution - all they'll need is a bit of savvy on how to spread the word about themselves.

I don't think shops like HMV will vanish, but they'll diversify and maybe downsize over time. People will always buy physical formats as long as they're available, and the record shops will probably end up selling more equipment (pushing some of the equipment retailers out of the market).

At the end of the day, you can still buy vinyl - and it's meant to be a dead format. When was the last time a band released anything on minidisc? That was meant to be revolutionary, but died on it's arse. All we're doing is watching the market morph into something sustainable, which will eventually happen. Instead of discussing what will happen, realise that it is somehow being shaped by the buying habits of every person who buys music in one form or another. It's a pointless issue, it's like wondering how your cold will progress - it's something you actually have a say in whether you notice it or not.

[Treetop Flyer]

Everything you say is right (all the time) but isn't there a bit of a problem with home recording when it comes to production? How many bands in the past produced their own albums to a high standard? So won't people buy the music that is best produced? All other things being equal of course. So there will still be a lot of investors/record companies paying for high end production up front?

[pANDAS Radio]

If someone wants to learn about home production, and is willing to actually bother learning properly, there is no reason why they shouldn't be able to. All the programs are out there for people to learn, and they're the exact same ones being used to be produce these albums with "high end production".

Aside from home production, it's a lot cheaper to hire a recording studio these days. As long as the band have everything well rehearsed and don't fanny about, there's no reason why they can't get a single, e.p. or album recorded for a reasonable amount.

Bands shouldn't worry about investors or recording companies, especially not when it comes to paying for studio time. It quite often results in a band owing the label a lot of money that they can't afford to pay back. And if you take your own recordings to a record label then all you've done is save them a load of money. There is an interview on here that I did with Heitham from Senser, it highlights the danger of bands with the ability to record their own stuff taking it to a reputable record label.

Alternative Nation: The band has just started it's own label, was that a reaction to how little time and effort One Little Indian spent on SCHEMAtic?

Heitham Al-Sayed: They didn't do anything. SCHEMAtic's got it flaws but i think it could have done a lot better than it did. They just didn't let people know it was there and we're determined to do better. I think any fucker could do better, to be honest with you. It was almost insulting, we didn't even get them to pay for making it. We made it ourselves and all they had to do was let people know it was there, they couldn't even do that. The amount they spent on it was pathetic.

AN: So it was self recorded and self promoted as well, with a record company saying "we'll put our stamp on this"?

H: Yeah, and "we'll take the money, thanks". It was really like the worst possible mistake you could imagine making. The only person that really sniffed it out was Kerstin, she said "they're under no obligation to do anything here, they haven't invested in anything so they don't even have to make any money back". We could have sold copies of that record if the people who were into the band knew that it existed, but they never did and that was really irritating. It cost us a lot of time and energy, it's a lot of wasted energy. At the end of the day you're still where you were in terms of trying to let people know that you're being creative again and making music.

Heitham later told me how much money One Little Indian spent on promotion, it was less that £5000.

[Treetop Flyer]

That is a horror story but what I meant was a good 'producer' not just that ability to produce. Likes of Phil Spector or Eddie Kramer, there must be people out there like that who make a lot of money still because they make albums sound 'better'.

[pANDAS Radio]

There are, and they're used by the people who can afford them. Sad fact is that once an album is recorded the record company will bill them for it, so they're the sort of people that will be getting less and less work as the industry tightens it's belt and more bands go down the indie route - unless the band can afford to pay up front. And to be fair, neither of those producers have done much production work in the past 15 years. Even looking at Brian Eno's production credits shows that you're gonna need a lot of money to work with him.

[MarkMono]

Albini apparently has a very reasonable sliding scale, from tens of thousands down to zero in some cases.

[pANDAS Radio]

Aye, but men like him are rare.

[Treetop Flyer]

If Wikipedia is to be believed he sounds like a pretty gen up guy. I like his attitude when it comes to producing, that it's the job of the producer/eningeer to capture the sound of the musicians as best possible and not to influence or alter the sound. Although the entry also says his stamp is audible as he likes to record musicians live in the studio, it can hardly be a bad thing as good bands are best heard live. I guess that is one problem with home recording, it is quite difficult to capture a band live, a solution possiibly being taking the computer and mics to a rehearsal studio? This line is cool

Originally Posted by Steve Albini-1986

I don't give two splats of an old negro junkie's vomit for your politico-philosophical treatises, kiddies. I like noise. I like big-ass vicious noise that makes my head spin. I wanna feel it whipping through me like a fucking jolt. We're so dilapidated and crushed by our pathetic existence we need it like a fix

[Charlie Parker]

teenagers are arseholes and crap like lastfm lasts ten minutes in my house. why stream when there's a world of radio? Physical formats will always exist, even if its to cater for folk like my dad and to replace his copies of best of Yes.

[pANDAS Radio]

The best of Yes is The Yes Album.