Bon Jovi Vs. Steve Jobs

[Soulshine]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/0..._n_835818.html


You can download Bon Jovi songs on iTunes, but don't expect the band to be too happy about it.

Rocker Jon Bon Jovi, whose band soared to prominence with its 1986 album Slippery When Wet, reminisced in the Sunday Times Magazine about his days as a kid in New Jersey, falling in love with music -- and ripped Apple CEO Steve Jobs for taking that opportunity away from a new generation of listeners.

"Kids today have missed the whole experience of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album; and the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it," he said (via MSN), thinking back to his record buying days. Then came the less fanciful: the blame.

"God, it was a magical, magical time. I hate to sound like an old man now, but I am, and you mark my words, in a generation from now people are going to say: 'What happened?' Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business."


http://www.mosesavalon.com/mosesblog...c-biz-erosion/

Jon Bon Jovi has learned a lesson of the Internet age the hard way. The lesson he learned is that the techies, who wave the freedom-of-speech flag when it comes to music being free and net neutrality, are not so cool about free-speech when it criticizes one of their gods, like Steve Jobs. Indeed they respond rather childishly to just about anyone, no mater how famous, if even the slightest opinion about internet-related services is anything less than 10000000% positive. (Read what Bon Jovi said here.)

Now, in the before-time no one cared what geeks thought. They were in the back room. But blogs have given them the big stick in the public debate. And they want respect. They are getting it but also proving the old adage: power corrupts. Using their new tools they have silenced and intimidated those that are a threat. If they agree with you, you are launched to the top of a mountain, if you disagree with their position, they can out SEO you, out blog you and make you look ridiculous in a mater of seconds across the entire globe.

Now, most politicians and other public-people have learned this lesson years ago. Even I got a taste recently of how infantile some of these cats can get if you throw the slightest criticism at them. (I noticed an error in a Techdirt blog wherein they called IPS licensing fees, a "tax" for music. The guy freaked out on me and called me a "liar" all over Twitter.)

These techies can not take it when you disagree with them. It shatters their entire foundation and they get nasty. But poor Jon Bon Jovi, must have missed this memo. He committed the most heinous crime that a person can commit in today's blog/news world; he committed the offense of being obvious; of saying what everyone in the know, knows but is afraid to say:

iTunes is bad for music in the long run. Why, be afraid to say it? Well, you've no doubt seen the posts; because legions of keyboard jockeys will come after you in their blogs and virally disseminate a twisted version just to increase their Google rankings. They'll even Skype to each other while doing it and have a virtual party, with virtual booze and virtual girls.

Now, what did Bon Jovi say that was so terrible? Well, he spoke the truth for one thing. iTunes has helped devalue the business model that made music an industry. It may not have started the fire, but it poured gasoline on it in gallons.

Let's look at some iFacts:

1) iTunes has not, as some have suggested "saved the record business." iTunes has made up less than 10% of sales over the years since launch.

2) Nor did Steve Jobs "invent" a way for artists to get paid from the internet, (I think Al Gore did that.)

3) Finally, I believe it was Lawrence Lessig or some fool like him who promised"”"If you give people a legal way to buy music they won't steel it." Remember that one? Not true: P2P file sharing did not decrease since iTunes went on-line "” it actually increased.

What iTunes did that sucks most for music is it destabilized the "album model." Yeah, yeah, I know, many of you think that that is good for the consumer, but it's really not in the long run. Not if you're a true music fan. Why?

Point 1) Economics: It costs more to make less, which means less risks will be taken on new acts.

If you remove the 80 cents or so that songwriters used to receive for each album sale and replace is with the 9 cents they get for a single, you don't have to be a math genius to see that you need to sell about seven times more units to break even on a promotion that costs $1,000,000 whether you release an album or a single; or, a production costing about $10,000/song to produce if you do an album, but $25,000/song is you go single-for-single.

Yes, it costs majors the same money to promote a single as it does to promote an album and three times as much to record the equivalent amount of singles that an album composes.

Add to that, that without the album economics you lose the 1:14 chance of one of the cuts becoming a hit and reduce those odds to 1:1. To duplicate the effect of an "album promotion" with singles, labels would have to spend more than ten times as much to have the same shot-gun effect that an album delivers.

WHO CARES

Why should indie artists care about majors and their costs?

Well, now that it costs more to make less, these costs trickle down to everyone in the music food chain.

To sell a single for 99 cents on iTunes the indie artist ends up netting about 64%. With a CD album sold at a local store for $14 the Artist/label took almost $10 home"”almost 75%. Sold off the side of the stage for $10, the same indie artist took home almost all of it, save a $1, for manufacturing"”90%. Big winner here"” Apple.

Point 2: Art. For those interested in music as an art, the devaluation of an album as an art form has neutered the musical experience. Deep cuts are dead for the future. This decreases the value of music as an experience and as a communication method. This disembowels artists from helping do what they are supposed to do"” make the world a better place. They have been relieved of that job thanks to iTunes and P2P. Now they are just "content providers" and all we want from them are "hits" that are nice, radio safe singles. Great.

When musicians were in charge of music they helped end wars and elevate social consciousness. Now it's in the hands of the techies. I can only pray they do not abuse this power. So far, I'm not impressed. How can anyone be, with a culture that does not value one of America's greatest cultural contributions- pop music.

This is what Jon Bon Jovi was really trying to say. What he probably meant with his comments was that the glory days of music are over. They are. It's true. And iTunes did accelerate the legitimacy of that decline more so than any other vehicle. But was it Steve's fault? No. Someone else would have done it eventually anyway.

Jon, I feel ya brotha. I feel your pain. I kid you not when I say some of these guys are so cult-like in their Apple fanaticism that it would not surprise me if I read that an Apple fan threw a rock at your window. Get an extra body guard for a week or two and hire a great defamation lawyer. I have.

 

[sinnedk]

http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/14/j...hrough-the-he/ come on... he is rich as is, shouldn't be complaining about anything

 

[L.R.]

Originally Posted by sinnedk

http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/14/j...hrough-the-he/

come on... he is rich as is, shouldn't be complaining about anything

He's complaining less about the money from the music, but the quality and experience of the music.

 

[pstoller]

It's amazing how wrong Bon Jovi and Moses Avalon get this situation.

Originally Posted by Jon Bon Jovi

Kids today have missed the whole experience of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album; and the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it.
Kids can (and do) still put on headphones, close their eyes, and get lost in the music, be it an album or a playlist. No, they're not "holding the jacket" (as if they'd done so any time since the CD revolution of the '80s), but if their eyes are closed as they lose themselves in the music, what difference does that make? I came up in that "magical time" when you bought an album based on the jacket, and while that sometimes resulted in welcome surprises, it was just as often a sad waste of limited funds. Now, I have no love for lossy audio compression and louder-is-better disc mastering; if Jon is lamenting the rise of lo-fi, I'm with him on that. I'm even with him on the decline of the album format as an art form (not that Bon Jovi ever contributed anything of note to that). But, here's where we part ways again:

Originally Posted by Jon Bon Jovi

Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.
Not exactly, Jon-boy. MP3s—which were not invented by Steve Jobs or Apple—hit the 'net in 1994; iTunes came out in 2001. What Jobs and Apple did was figure out a way to monetize the situation both for itself (mostly by selling iPods) and for the music industry (which had so steadfastly refused to sell MP3s itself that the entire market was given to illegal file sharing). There is arguably one person who made digital downloads online so easy and attractive that he and his company created a paradigm shift in the way young consumers acquired music. That person is Shawn Fanning; his company, Napster, was launched in 1999. If you need to blame somebody, he's your guy. However, I think iTunes or something like it was inevitable anyway; Napster just accelerated it. But, hey, Mr. ** isn't a tech geek, he's a pop star. While I would have hoped he'd have known better than to make such an ill-informed and ill-advised comment—even off-the-cuff—I wouldn't have expected it. On the other hand, a producer/engineer and artists' rights advocate like Moses Avalon should know better than to post some of what's in his blog:

Originally Posted by Moses Avalon

1) iTunes has not, as some have suggested “saved the record business.” iTunes has made up less than 10% of sales over the years since launch.
This is disingenuous. Yes, if you average out sales from 2001 (when the service and the market for it were both new) until now, that number may be accurate: I'll give Mo the benefit of the doubt there. However, in 2010, iTunes had a 28% market share of all US music sales—more than double its nearest competitor—making it the single largest music retailer. With Amazon and Walmart at 12% each, the top three retailers have over 50% of the market. It's essential to note that none of these companies is a traditional music retailer. Amoeba notwithstanding, the record store is dead. Online downloads will soon account for half of all music sales. Pre-iTunes, there were millions of downloads, but no sales. Album sales started declining in the Napster years: 1999-2001. Avalon suggests that, without iTunes, CD sales would have grown again, but that's a pipe-dream. By then, there was no shutting Pandora's box. New P2P file sharing services that worked around some of the Napster liability issues were popping up left and right. Apple did what the music industry absolutely needed to do, but would not/could not do for itself: turn the #1 source of loss into the #1 source of revenue. If you needed another name for iTunes, it might be "Hope."

Originally Posted by Moses Avalon

2) Nor did Steve Jobs “invent” a way for artists to get paid from the internet.
From the Internet, no. From MP3 downloads, for all intents and purposes, yes. There was nothing like the iTunes Music Store before Apple launched it.

Originally Posted by Moses Avalon

3) Finally, I believe it was Lawrence Lessig or some fool like him who promised—“If you give people a legal way to buy music they won’t steel it.” Remember that one? Not true: P2P file sharing did not decrease since iTunes went on-line — it actually increased.
File sharing was increasing by leaps and bounds prior to iTunes, and would have continued to do so without it. Once iTunes gave people a legal way to buy music online, there have been over ten billion legal downloads on iTunes alone. Is there still piracy? Sure there is. Do you want to know what the piracy figures are for physical media (e.g., CDs)? Roughly 40% of all sales worldwide. I suppose that by eliminating commercial CDs we would do away with all CD piracy, but that's not a viable business model. The point is, if people want something, and you offer it for sale, many of them will buy it. If you don't sell it, they will have no recourse but to steal (not "steel") it.

Originally Posted by Moses Avalon

What iTunes did that sucks most for music is it destabilized the “album model.” Yeah, yeah, I know, many of you think that that is good for the consumer, but it’s really not in the long run. Not if you’re a true music fan.
iTunes did not "destabilize the 'album model'"; arguably, the MP3 did. It did so because younger consumers were sick of paying for albums with one or two good songs and a lot of crappy filler. Why were there so many albums with one or two desirable tracks? Because much of the the industry and audience was focusing on single-oriented musical styles and artists. I would say that this shift in musical style was just as responsible as technology in killing the album model. A third factor is that, at $14/ea., CDs were too expensive if the whole album wasn't good. Because (as Avalon later notes) there is little difference in the cost of producing and marketing physical singles vs. albums, CD singles could never be produced inexpensively enough to make much sense for record companies, nor sold cheaply enough to satisfy consumers. Then along came the MP3, perfectly filling the role left vacant by the demise of the 45 (and failure of the CD single) well before Apple got into the game. Apple simply turned it into a legit business.

Originally Posted by Moses Avalon

It costs more to make less, which means less risks will be taken on new acts. If you remove the 80 cents or so that songwriters used to receive for each album sale and replace is with the 9 cents they get for a single, you don’t have to be a math genius to see that you need to sell about seven times more units to break even on a promotion that costs $1,000,000 whether you release an album or a single; or, a production costing about $10,000/song to produce if you do an album, but $25,000/song is you go single-for-single.
This is mixing apples and oranges. Yes, fewer mechanical royalties are paid to writers and publishers for a single than for an album. However, this has little to do with what the record company makes, which is strictly a matter of unit sales. It only affects them by reducing their per-unit overhead—unless, of course, the label is also the publishing company, which is often the case because labels typically force artists to sign over half or more of their publishing. If the artist is also the songwriter, then, yes, the artist takes a hit on writer's royalties earned per unit sold. Otherwise, the professional songwriting community takes the hit because fewer songs get placed. It doesn't take a math genius to see why. However, it does take someone who knows a little bit about the record business to know that writing and publishing royalties are not recoupable. That means that writers and publishers get paid from unit one. It's the artist royalties that don't get paid until all expenses are recouped. For artists, the primary value of a hit single is that it ups the value and attendance of their live shows, where they make the real money. Record companies have long been risk-averse. The contracts they offer new artists are usurous, and they rarely spend what it would take to break an artist; only a small percentage of signed artists get serious promotion once the record is completed. This is probably just as well, as record companies have a horrendous track record when it comes to picking winners: the percentage of records that are profitable, much less hits, is so small that the most successful record company on a per product basis would be the laughing stock of almost any other industry. But I digress. With an MP3, the record label eliminates packaging, manufacturing, and distribution costs. Apple gets about a third off the top, and out of the remaining 65¢ the label pays about 9¢ to the publisher (which may be itself), recoups its expenses out of another 18¢ or so (depending on the contract), and pockets the rest. Yes, that's a lot less than a CD, but hardly cause to weep for record companies. The cost to actually produce the track is not terribly significant compared to the cost of promoting it, but record companies can easily keep it down. Now more than ever they're buying finished tracks from artists and producers, not paying anything until they've approved the track and putting a ceiling on what they'll pay to anyone without a track record regardless of their costs. Once they've decided an artist is hot enough to provide a budget up-front, they'll cut enough racks to bring the price down, even if they're only going to issue them one at a time. As for promotion, you simply don't spend $1M on an unknown who hasn't blown doors in some sort of market testing. When you do, the money functions as advance promotion for future releases, not just for the one single.

 

[Harold falcon]

That article is terrible. I loathe Bon Jovi, and I hate Steve Jobs, but the author of that article deserves a one-way ticket to dysentery for that travesty.

 

[pstoller]

(continued)

Originally Posted by Moses Avalon

Add to that, that without the album economics you lose the 1:14 chance of one of the cuts becoming a hit and reduce those odds to 1:1. To duplicate the effect of an "album promotion" with singles, labels would have to spend more than ten times as much to have the same shot-gun effect that an album delivers.
The label always picks one or two singles off an album before it promotes it. If it doesn't hear a single, there is no big promotion. While it's always possible that some music programmer will adopt an album track and make it a hit, it's never been all that common, and much less so since the consolidation of radio station ownership and the centralization of playlists. There just isn't that much of a "shot-gun effect" in real life.

Originally Posted by Moses Avalon

Why should indie artists care about majors and their costs?

Well, now that it costs more to make less, these costs trickle down to everyone in the music food chain. To sell a single for 99 cents on iTunes the indie artist ends up netting about 64%. With a CD album sold at a local store for $14 the Artist/label took almost $10 home"”almost 75%. Sold off the side of the stage for $10, the same indie artist took home almost all of it, save a $1, for manufacturing"”90%. Big winner here"”Apple.
There's a huge difference between "artist" and "artist/label." Unless said indie artist also owns the label, they ain't gettin' most of that $10 projected profit for the CD; they get about $1.50 after recoupment (about a half million units sold). The label gets everything until then"”including profit off the top"”and the lion's share afterward. Alas, without a label, it's pretty hard to get physical product placed in national chains or in indie stores around the country/world. That is, unless you have a hit via iTunes first.

It's much easier for an indie artist to operate truly independently"”without a label"”if they have no manufacturing or distribution costs and don't have to record 10+ songs before issuing product. If such artists deal directly with Apple, then they net more money because they get paid @.65¢ on the dollar from day one.

But, label or no label, having your songs available on iTunes does not preclude you from also selling CDs on your own website, on Amazon, via CDBaby, in local music stores, or at gigs. This isn't an either/or deal.

Originally Posted by Moses Avalon

For those interested in music as an art, the devaluation of an album as an art form has neutered the musical experience. Deep cuts are dead for the future. This decreases the value of music as an experience and as a communication method. This disembowels artists from helping do what they are supposed to do"”make the world a better place. They have been relieved of that job thanks to iTunes and P2P. Now they are just "content providers" and all we want from them are "hits" that are nice, radio safe singles. Great.

When musicians were in charge of music they helped end wars and elevate social consciousness. Now it's in the hands of the techies. I can only pray they do not abuse this power. So far, I'm not impressed. How can anyone be, with a culture that does not value one of America's greatest cultural contributions- pop music.

This presumes that popular music wasn't art until the rise of the LP as something other than a container for previously-issued singles in the mid-to-late '60s. For anyone who values music of the early '60s, '50s, and before, that doesn't wash. The writing, performing, and producing of individual songs/records is a perfectly viable form of musical experience and communication, as well as a legitimate platform to "make the world a better place." Besides, as I've already said, nothing about iTunes precludes artists from recording and releasing albums. They do it all the time.

I love reading about how it was "when the musicians were in charge." The musicians were never in charge; businessmen ran the majors, and most of the indies as well. Fortunately, some of those businessmen were also enamored of, and informed about, music. (Indeed, before the record biz got big, there was almost no other reason to enter it.) The industry definitely lost something when people with ears went out and the hordes of MBAs came in. That, however, was long before MP3s.

I understand romanticizing the popular music and artists of the Viet Nam War era, but there was also a ton of crap issued in those days; it's just the good stuff that we remember. Likewise, there's been plenty of good music issued since and plenty still being issued today; but the closer we are to the era and further we are from the current youth culture, the harder it is to hear the signal for the noise.

Originally Posted by Moses Avalon

This is what Jon Bon Jovi was really trying to say. What he probably meant with his comments was that the glory days of music are over. They are. It's true. And iTunes did accelerate the legitimacy of that decline more so than any other vehicle.
It's not true. The "glory days of music" are the days when whatever it is you like most was at its most popular. For many people, those days are right now. iTunes has had very little to do with shaping the style of music that's been popular for the last decade: it didn't invent the technology/format, nor did it popularize it; it doesn't create or underwrite content. The stylistic range of music available on iTunes is vast, and includes most of that great stuff from Avalon's "glory days." Apple doesn't care which music you buy"”only that you buy something. It is record labels, radio stations, music programmers, artists, and consumers who are driving musical trends"”not necessarily in that order.

Now, I like Apple products. I've worked with them professionally, both as a "techie" and as a creative artist. But, I'm not writing this from the standpoint of an Apple cult geek. I'm writing this from the standpoint of a music industry professional and music fan who loves albums as much as anyone. Sure, there's a lot of garbage music out there, and you can buy a lot of it from the iTunes Music Store. But, this is no more Apple's fault than the lousy records of the '80s were the fault of Tower Records.

The potential exists for the implosion of the music industry as-we-knew-it and the democratization of production and distribution to result in greater empowerment of independent artists than ever before. Through TuneCore (amongst other things), Apple is helping to facilitate such change. So, maybe Moses Avalon and Jon Bon Jovi should give Steve Jobs and Apple a little credit for doing what they're supposed to do"”making the world a better place.

 

[Soulshine]

Originally Posted by pstoller

It's amazing how wrong Bon Jovi and Moses Avalon get this situation.


Kids can (and do) still put on headphones, close their eyes, and get lost in the music, be it an album or a playlist. No, they're not "holding the jacket" (as if they'd done so any time since the CD revolution of the '80s), but if their eyes are closed as they lose themselves in the music, what difference does that make? I came up in that "magical time" when you bought an album based on the jacket, and while that sometimes resulted in welcome surprises, it was just as often a sad waste of limited funds.

Now, I have no love for lossy audio compression and louder-is-better disc mastering; if Jon is lamenting the rise of lo-fi, I'm with him on that. I'm even with him on the decline of the album format as an art form (not that Bon Jovi ever contributed anything of note to that). But, here's where we part ways again:


Not exactly, Jon-boy. MP3s—which were not invented by Steve Jobs or Apple—hit the 'net in 1994; iTunes came out in 2001. What Jobs and Apple did was figure out a way to monetize the situation both for itself (mostly by selling iPods) and for the music industry (which had so steadfastly refused to sell MP3s itself that the entire market was given to illegal file sharing).

There is arguably one person who made digital downloads online so easy and attractive that he and his company created a paradigm shift in the way young consumers acquired music. That person is Shawn Fanning; his company, Napster, was launched in 1999. If you need to blame somebody, he's your guy. However, I think iTunes or something like it was inevitable anyway; Napster just accelerated it.

But, hey, Mr. ** isn't a tech geek, he's a pop star. While I would have hoped he'd have known better than to make such an ill-informed and ill-advised comment—even off-the-cuff—I wouldn't have expected it.

On the other hand, a producer/engineer and artists' rights advocate like Moses Avalon should know better than to post some of what's in his blog:


This is disingenuous. Yes, if you average out sales from 2001 (when the service and the market for it were both new) until now, that number may be accurate: I'll give Mo the benefit of the doubt there. However, in 2010, iTunes had a 28% market share of all US music sales—more than double its nearest competitor—making it the single largest music retailer. With Amazon and Walmart at 12% each, the top three retailers have over 50% of the market. It's essential to note that none of these companies is a traditional music retailer. Amoeba notwithstanding, the record store is dead.

Online downloads will soon account for half of all music sales. Pre-iTunes, there were millions of downloads, but no sales. Album sales started declining in the Napster years: 1999-2001. Avalon suggests that, without iTunes, CD sales would have grown again, but that's a pipe-dream. By then, there was no shutting Pandora's box. New P2P file sharing services that worked around some of the Napster liability issues were popping up left and right. Apple did what the music industry absolutely needed to do, but would not/could not do for itself: turn the #1 source of loss into the #1 source of revenue. If you needed another name for iTunes, it might be "Hope."


From the Internet, no. From MP3 downloads, for all intents and purposes, yes. There was nothing like the iTunes Music Store before Apple launched it.


File sharing was increasing by leaps and bounds prior to iTunes, and would have continued to do so without it. Once iTunes gave people a legal way to buy music online, there have been over ten billion legal downloads on iTunes alone.

Is there still piracy? Sure there is. Do you want to know what the piracy figures are for physical media (e.g., CDs)? Roughly 40% of all sales worldwide. I suppose that by eliminating commercial CDs we would do away with all CD piracy, but that's not a viable business model. The point is, if people want something, and you offer it for sale, many of them will buy it. If you don't sell it, they will have no recourse but to steal (not "steel") it.


iTunes did not "destabilize the 'album model'"; arguably, the MP3 did. It did so because younger consumers were sick of paying for albums with one or two good songs and a lot of crappy filler. Why were there so many albums with one or two desirable tracks? Because much of the the industry and audience was focusing on single-oriented musical styles and artists. I would say that this shift in musical style was just as responsible as technology in killing the album model.

A third factor is that, at $14/ea., CDs were too expensive if the whole album wasn't good. Because (as Avalon later notes) there is little difference in the cost of producing and marketing physical singles vs. albums, CD singles could never be produced inexpensively enough to make much sense for record companies, nor sold cheaply enough to satisfy consumers. Then along came the MP3, perfectly filling the role left vacant by the demise of the 45 (and failure of the CD single) well before Apple got into the game. Apple simply turned it into a legit business.


This is mixing apples and oranges. Yes, fewer mechanical royalties are paid to writers and publishers for a single than for an album. However, this has little to do with what the record company makes, which is strictly a matter of unit sales. It only affects them by reducing their per-unit overhead—unless, of course, the label is also the publishing company, which is often the case because labels typically force artists to sign over half or more of their publishing.

If the artist is also the songwriter, then, yes, the artist takes a hit on writer's royalties earned per unit sold. Otherwise, the professional songwriting community takes the hit because fewer songs get placed. It doesn't take a math genius to see why. However, it does take someone who knows a little bit about the record business to know that writing and publishing royalties are not recoupable. That means that writers and publishers get paid from unit one. It's the artist royalties that don't get paid until all expenses are recouped. For artists, the primary value of a hit single is that it ups the value and attendance of their live shows, where they make the real money.

Record companies have long been risk-averse. The contracts they offer new artists are usurous, and they rarely spend what it would take to break an artist; only a small percentage of signed artists get serious promotion once the record is completed. This is probably just as well, as record companies have a horrendous track record when it comes to picking winners: the percentage of records that are profitable, much less hits, is so small that the most successful record company on a per product basis would be the laughing stock of almost any other industry. But I digress.

With an MP3, the record label eliminates packaging, manufacturing, and distribution costs. Apple gets about a third off the top, and out of the remaining 65¢ the label pays about 9¢ to the publisher (which may be itself), recoups its expenses out of another 18¢ or so (depending on the contract), and pockets the rest. Yes, that's a lot less than a CD, but hardly cause to weep for record companies.

The cost to actually produce the track is not terribly significant compared to the cost of promoting it, but record companies can easily keep it down. Now more than ever they're buying finished tracks from artists and producers, not paying anything until they've approved the track and putting a ceiling on what they'll pay to anyone without a track record regardless of their costs. Once they've decided an artist is hot enough to provide a budget up-front, they'll cut enough racks to bring the price down, even if they're only going to issue them one at a time.

As for promotion, you simply don't spend $1M on an unknown who hasn't blown doors in some sort of market testing. When you do, the money functions as advance promotion for future releases, not just for the one single.

I have to say that this was a really great post.

But one thing I have never really agreed with as a music enthusiast and album lover is the whole notion of an album having 1 or 2 good songs and the rest is crap. I am not saying that this doesn't happen, but for me and most of the people I know - we let an album breathe over time and more often than not, we end up preferring the deep cuts over the single(s) that the record company is trying to shove down our throats.

I think the problem is that some people today need to be entertained instantly or they get bored and move on to something else. So these people are not letting deep cut songs grow on them over a month and they are not learning to appreciate more than just the single. I don't know about you, but I have even hated albums at first and then 3 months later listened to it again and now I love it. But certainly the opposite has been true as well and bands have released very bad albums.

I could be totally wrong, but I think Jon Bon Jovi is essentially say the same thing that I am - it's all about singles and the hits. No one is falling in love with those deep cuts that may take time to appreciate and essentially when you go to concerts now, there are audiences full of people that only know the hits and seem confused when the band breaks into a deep cut song that die hard fans know, but this new generation of music fan doesn't. It must be terrible for some of these fans when a band does one of those concerts where they play an entire album or two or do extended jams.

I have also found it interesting that people give such respect to film directors in that we support the director's vision and want to watch the movie as the director intended, but we won't listen to an album as the band/musician intended for us to hear it. I don't think you can listen to snippets of a song online and decide then and there if the song is good or not. As I mentioned before, yes the song may not blow you away at first - but it could potentially grow on you over time as millions of song have for people who are album enthusiasts.

Anyway, thanks for the great post.

 

[Smithman]

Wow!! that is one hell of an article. I really liked the read ups. But I even though it does explain so well how iTunes is or will killing the music industry in the long run, I don't think if ever the music industry faces the problems related to iTune, that will solely be iTunes problem. And yes I know it stated that iTune did not start the problem but fuel it.

We are in an evolving world, where old techniques of doing things and gradually giving way to high techs and inventions. So even if iTune did not start doing what they are doing now, I think some other genius would have. So for Bon Jovi to direct his furry towards iTune, to me is a little misplaced.

 

[pstoller]

Originally Posted by Soulshine

...one thing I have never really agreed with as a music enthusiast and album lover is the whole notion of an album having 1 or 2 good songs and the rest is crap. I am not saying that this doesn't happen, but for me and most of the people I know - we let an album breathe over time and more often than not, we end up preferring the deep cuts over the single(s) that the record company is trying to shove down our throats.

Lots of albums have great deep cuts, and also a great through-story/vibe. What I was getting at was, specifically in the more singled-oriented pop genres of the last ten-fifteen years, there were more albums with big hit singles and little to no depth.

Originally Posted by Soulshine

I think the problem is that some people today need to be entertained instantly or they get bored and move on to something else. So these people are not letting deep cut songs grow on them...

Well, that's part of it. Another part is that music tailored for people with short attention spans and/or a need for instant gratification just isn't likely to generate deep cuts. That's OK, there's a place for that sort of music. But, that place isn't necessarily on an album that the artist and/or producer(s) can't sustain. Downloads are a better medium for this music and its audience than CDs are. In promoting primarily that kind of music because the hits were bigger, the record industry itself pushed us toward the digital download era.