state51

Category: markets

  • AI Will Help and Hurt Music. Here’s How.

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    Computers have been helping us make and store music for many years. Music AI is not so new either; already by the early 1990s there was widely available software runing on consumer grade desktop computers which could generate and regenerate music-like patterns of sound. The last 30 years have seen incremental improvements in the way…

  • Hypercompetition. How Platforms Destroy Markets.

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    The first rule of platform business success: increase supply as far beyond the market’s ability to sustain the suppliers as possible. It doesn’t really matter how – and many tactics have been tried. It doesn’t matter what it costs either – the prize is worth it. And it seems structural, by which I mean that…

  • Three Conditions for Independent Music to Survive

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    My biggest mistake was to assume that major labels would not want to buy margin-shrinking and inherently weak independent distribution companies. Since 2015, several ‘insider’ distributors (the kind whose founders and owners sit on trade association boards) have been sold to major labels, or major owned distributors. It’s impossible to understand these acquisitions any way…

  • My Platform, Right or Wrong!

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    It was an early hero of the United States navy, Stephen Decatur, Jr., who gave the world the dubious chant of nationalist zealots, reportedly in an after dinner toast to, Our country – in her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right, and always successful, right or wrong. a notion which…

  • A New Social Contract For Music

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    Music, in its various forms, has done quite well in the age of copyright. Digital technology has brought with it many tipping points, when old certainties give way to chaos before finding new stable states. Any new stability will rely, as copyright always did, on some strong ideas to act as a foundation on which we…

  • Record Labels! Beware of Fake Independence!

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    Giant corporate groups are a fairly recent development in the music industry. The most extraordinary and wonderful music has always been produced outside the city walls by innovative and committed independent record labels. Around 40% of recorded music industry value is created by independent record labels, but 65% of that independent music is captured by…

  • A Fair Way to Bridge the Value Gap

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    The music industry says that artists, labels, and songwriters are getting a raw deal from services that allow users to upload content. The beef is that user-uploaded songs, which may generate advertising revenue for the service and the uploader, compete directly with those same songs uploaded by the copyright owner. The difference in revenue between…

  • Pricing Music Fans in the New Data Economy

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    In 2003 digital artist Angie Waller released a wonderful project she called ‘Data Mining the Amazon’. Asked about it by art community Rhizome Waller offered the following: I was surprised that books about military battles and corporate takeovers pointed to the soothing CDs of Enya and Sarah Brightman. No record shop until Amazon had been able to…

  • The Simple Maths of the New Music Industry

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    The pre-modern music industry could be navigated with some very simple maths. Bands made records, record labels sold them to shops. Wholesale revenue wasn’t that much more complicated than units x price. And what mattered to most bands was the size of the advance, even if recording contracts were adept at slicing percentages here and there.…

  • The Sadness of Crowds

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    Marillion’s 2001 release, Anoraknophobia, was a pun for a different age. Singer Steve Hogarth told the BBC in May of that year, “In those days everyone was pointing and laughing and calling us nerds. Now it’s the trendy thing to do.” They were getting laughed at because in the mid 1990s they had staked their future on…