At the annual SanFran MusicTech Summit held last week at the Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco, I heard some great discussions about the state the of the music industry and had the pleasure of speaking on the Musicians as Active Participants in Their Own Careers panel. The attendees consisted mainly of music biz professionals, musicians, entrepreneurs, and lawyers —all meeting up to talk about where the industry is going next.
The music world is in the midst of major changes right now – a fact reflected in all of the discussions I heard. With less money to go around, everyone in the business is scrambling to figure out how to survive. The hottest topic up for discussion was the search for a way to confront the rapidly dropping sales of music due to file-sharing sites.
One potential solution that’s been gaining steam and that was discussed on many of the panels was the idea of having the ISP’s charge a monthly fee to customers for free access to all the music they want. That fee would then go to the labels and artists. For example, an AT&T customer could opt in and pay $10/month to download any song from any artist completely legally. That $10 subsequently would be split among the labels, publishers, and artists based on which songs were played the most. The concept has a lot of hurdles to overcome with respect to organizing the many thousands of rights holders that would need to provide clearance and then be paid—but at this point the idea seems to show promise.
As we get ready to enable audio licensing in LicenseStream, I talked to a lot of musicians about what the service can offer them and they were very enthusiastic about making money through licensing. LicenseStream provides an automated service for registering, licensing, tracking and collecting and distributing royalty payments. It can handle the enormous complexity of both accepting and distributing the royalty splits to labels, publishers and artists. In fact, I spoke with several musicians about what such a service could offer them. They were especially enthusiastic about a service that would automate licensing transactions, making it easier for them to make money through licensing their music to movie studios, ad agencies, and TV shows etc. After all, DIY is the name of the game these days and most musicians are looking for ways to monetize their content without losing control.
Licensing was just one of the many topics on the agenda of a Musicians as Active Participants in Their Own Careers panel, which was a good discussion about what it takes to survive as a musician today. Drawing from my experience as the guitar player and co-manager of Stroke 9, I discussed with the other panelists how nowadays musicians need to be extremely involved in every aspect of their careers from recording to promotion to business management. We all agreed that while every musician needs to be up to date with all social networking vehicles, including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, imeem, etc., most important is that they don’t lose focus on their number one priority—writing good music.
Though you could sense a lot of uncertainty at the Summit, there was still a lot of optimism about how things will look once we get to the other side. The “old world” models of rights, pricing, and distribution will need to change drastically for creativity and commerce to thrive together in the digital age. Who knows how long this restructuring will take, but most people I talked to said that ultimately, it will be better for both musicians and music fans.
