state51

Category: strategy

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Streaming versus Downloads? The Fight is Far From Won

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    The recent decline in the music download market, coupled with an acceleration in the streaming revenue numbers, has led many to predict the kind of transition that saw the end of the cassette tape, or indeed the cart and horse. There are a few reasons, some a bit less obvious, why this might not be such…

  • Change How We Think First, Technology Second

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    Many years ago I was asked to discuss with the board of a trade association how the music industry was changing. One prominent executive summed up by saying “complexity has served us well”. A few days ago Spotify’s James Duffett-Smith was moved to exclaim “music industry licensing and copyright structures are legendary in their complexity”…

  • Dear Music Industry, There is No Saviour Machine!

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    My beloved music industry is winding itself up again in one of its periodic pursuits of a saviour, and this time the lucky victim is the blockchain. It will go through much the same process as any of the other manic episodes in our recent history, and end up in the same kind of bewildered…

  • Two Ideas for a Bigger, Better Music Industry

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    We have come a long way in the music industry since the first faltering attempts to sell music online in the mid 1990s. A couple of personal anecdotes (names withheld to protect the guilty) from those years illustrate just how much music industry attitudes have changed. A top UK band manager raged in one meeting, ‘get [my…

  • It’s a Playlist World. Time to Break the Lock-in!

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    Playlists are moving to the front and centre of music discovery and consumption. They alter the balance of power in the industry in some obvious, and some less obvious ways. So who is winning in a playlist world, and how can we make sure the power of the playlist is used for the benefit of…

  • Equal Pay for Equal Play is Only Fair for Streaming

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    Popular music is popular because it is listened to by more people, and that includes more people who are not such great music fans. The music industry needs to take this kind of information on board as we plan for the future. We have enough perverse incentives already embedded in the way we do business…