Stories like this don't really affect us much because I doubt any of us are at this level but it sure sounds bad. It just reinforces what many of us have been saying for years. The money is in touring, not record sales and touring can really suck for lots of reasons.

One question I've been wondering about for a while now is what's the definition of an album "sale"? It used to be a physical record or CD, do they still mean that or is a sale considered a paid download of an entire album or what?

http://www.showbiz411.com/2018/03/13/record-sales-plunge-as-top-artists-justin-timberlake-u2-even-taylor-swift-sell-fractions-of-previous-numbers

Bob

The best part of the article is where they said that Justin Bieber will not have any new "music" out in 2018. With quotations around the word "music".... Implying "If you can call that music..."

This article reflects that the public is not paying for commerical music that the likes of Nashville, Sony and other corporate giants are dishing out. Music created to a formula for sales only, nothing creativitely innovative or spectacular, but the same bottled format. But who cares as we're not in that league. Looking forward to where music is going in the future, where truly talented creative artists can express and do original music.

I wonder how they factor into this thesis that we can now buy just the 2 songs we like from the CD for 99 cents each instead of 15 bucks for 2 good songs and 10 fillers? And everybody may like 2 different "good" songs from a collection. SO wile albums may not be selling, digital downloads give the consumer a la carte options that weren't available 12-15 years ago.

Meager as it may be, my revenue almost fully switched about four years ago from actual CD sales to download sales and streams.

That's very true Eddie and that concept has been touted as the great benefit of the current system. BUT...

How does that financially support the artists? Like it or not the "two good songs and 10 fillers" is what paid everybody for the last 75 years.

Now what do we have? You, me and most here are out of the business as a career but I'm certainly sympathetic to those who are in it and what's the future for them? Continually touring to make a living with no income from music sales is no way to live. Not that it's ever been easy but still, it seems like it's really getting beyond ridiculous.

Bob

Hi
Just wondering whats you guys advice on downloads and/or streaming.
I have a song done that I want to sell but am wondering whats ur experience,I dont have website so I want to put up a single song just as a trial more or less .Any advice is as usual very welcome.The song is mastered to varying lufs levels etc for youtube and I am in the process of getting a simple lyric video done
thanks Hugh

I wonder why journalists continue to use phrases like “the only way to make money is touring”. They should say “one of the primary ways” rather than “only”.

Artists like Justin Timberlake should look for alternative ways to make money in the face of declining album revenue (which, lets face it, is a relatively easy way to make money for the artists), of which the hard work of touring is one but there are loads of others.

Independent artists are not scared to put in the hard work into things like Patreon, podcasting, youtube, cypto currency services, live streaming, licensing and many many more. A wake up call for these “top” artists for sure.

Edited to add: not to mention online courses. If little old me can get 100 people on my little course (with not much markerting) imagine how many people would sign up for a Taylor Swift online song writing course

I've been a live musician all my life. I've done some 'sax for hire' studio work, and have been in groups with local releases, but primarily I'm a live musician.

I've toured, done cruise ships, did house gigs, schlepped one-nighters, and so on. I've made a living, paid off the mortgage, taken vacations here and abroad, and lived a happy life so far.

Musicians have for all of history made their living playing live. In the early days of vinyl, the 78 and 45 RPM disks were primarily a promotion for the artists' live performances. Glenn Miller, The Dorsey Brothers, Artie Shaw, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and their 'big band singers' didn't make money from their records, but they brought fans out to the shows. The money from recordings came very late for the folks in the big band era.

For a very, very short period of time, musicians made their money via recordings. Probably less than 1% of the total time that there have been musicians. Keep that in mind, making money from your recordings is the exception, not the rule, and that exception seems to be waning. The peak is over. Will it happen again? Who knows?

And for most, recording didn't make money for the artists, just the record company.

I was in a road band that was lucky enough to be the warm-up act for major stars in concert, Four Seasons, Association, Kingsmen, Shirelles, and quite a few others. After warming up for a few Motown acts, Berry Gordy took an interest in us.

At the time Motown had no white groups, and Bob Seger was making number 1 records on Detroit radio. Berry, who was a businessman, not a racist decided he needed a white group to compete.

Our manager hired entertainment lawyers to negotiate. They started at 4 cents a record, with so many guaranteed releases and a bunch of other terms this 19 year old kid didn't understand.

When the last offer came around, it was 2 cents a record. Out of the "2 cent per" royalties Motown was to take inflated recording costs, inflated promotional costs, and inflated distribution costs. They also wanted to control the publishing rights and take half the songwriting credits. And after all that they wanted us to change our name so that they could own the name, hire and fire whoever they wanted, and have 3 or 4 bands with the same name touring.

After all the expenses that Motown wanted to take out of our royalties, our management figured we would have to sell more than a million copies of our first LP just to end up not owing Motown any money. And in the late 60s a million copies from a new group was unheard of.

When our management tried to get better terms, they quit talking to us, and picked their second choice, The Sunliners with the Motown owned new name "Rare Earth".

The exorbitant fees for recording, distribution, plus publishing rights and other record company profits coupled with the low pennies per sale to the artist is the main reason why the vast majority of single artists and groups have been one-hit-wonders or one-CD-wonders. They became big stars for a while and never made enough to pay back the debt to the record company - who made a fortune on the recordings.

Want to do another record? You need to pay your back fees that your royalties didn't cover first. One-hit-wonder land.

But if you had a number one hit on Billboard, you got better gigs if you could work out a deal to keep your name and pay part of your live performance money to the record company.

Sure, there are the exceptions. If your first recording goes viral, you become an 'automatic' and can negotiate better terms for your next album. The 1% or so of the people that made hits got to do this and became megastars.

The rest of us make our living playing live, in front of an audience. That could be touring, or playing singles clubs, yacht/country clubs, cruise ships, show clubs, Elk's/Moose lodges, Nursing Homes or anything in-between.

Most of the money is not in touring, but all kinds of playing live in front of an appreciative audience, and other than a short period of time when recordings were king, it has been this way for all of history.

Insights and incites by Notes

It doesn't "support" them, but it gives them SOME sales revenue. If the a la carte purchase option benefits anybody it benefits the consumer. In my case, as a notoriously cheap Slovenian, they can have my 2 song purchase or I won't buy. So from a 10 song CD offering, they can have 20% of a CD sale or 100% of nothing, because I am not buying 8 garbage tracks to get the 2 I want.

And let's not even open the can of worms that is pirating....

I'll be honest with you Hugh, get it out to as many stream sources as you can. CD Baby, Reverb Nation and whatever the rest of them are, but be realistic about it and expect little more than "friends and family" sales. Nobody knows who you are. Nobody is searching the internet hardly waiting for your next release.

There are a million of you out there who think they have the next White Christmas. There are hundreds of you on THIS forum!! If your song is that great, more power to you and good luck with it. Do you sing at the level of a Steve Perry or a Michael Buble (depending on your genre)? If the answer is no, shop it any way you can to people the world knows about already.

You could try sending it to college radio stations and hope for airplay there, and possibly someone connected to a major performer will hear it and contact you.

Do you gig? Play it live a few times and see how the crowd reaction is.

Just for perspective, I think I have written some GREAT songs. The problem is, nobody that matters has ever heard them, which in a way is a good thing, because I can keep living in my delusional state that I write great songs.

One other thing to factor into this is that equation is that studio time used to run into hundreds of thousands for an album. Digital recording helped ease that pain. A bad patch can be punched in and fixed now rather than having to run the song all the way from the head if there was a flub. Labels used to front bands $250,000 or more to record the next album. That wasn't a gift, so the first $250,000 in sales paid for the studio time. Then the label ate the rest. The labels want the publishing rights, and half the writing royalties.

I saw an interview with Dolly Parton. When she wrote "I Will Always Love You" (which I hate, but that doesn't matter), she got a call from Col Tom Parker because Elvis wanted to do the song. Parker said that the usual deal with Elvis was that he got half the publishing. Dolly dug her heels in and said "Well we have a problem there. I keep my publishing or we have nothing to talk about." And Elvis never did the song.

Now many of, if not most of, the bands not in that rarefied air of major act, self publish. One less layer of lawyer involved that way. Most now also self record and self publish. Those recording budgets are LONG gone for lower tier acts. And the business, like most of the world, is more corrupt than ever.

I think it is Matt who is on Spotify or one of those stream services, and he may be willing to enlighten us, but the last thing I saw I think it was some ridiculous figure like .0004 cents per stream. THEY make a lot of money from sponsors, but THEY also keep most of it.

The musician has to be happy with patiently adding up nickels, dimes and quarters. Enough Xs and Ys can add up to a nice Z over time.

There is money to be made somewhere, but it is almost funny to read articles in different places where one says "You don't make any money on record sales anymore. You make money touring." And the next one says "You don't make money touring anymore. You make money on record sales." Another will say "There's lots of money to be made in merchandising." Those people really need to talk and get the story straight! The "you and me" level artists don't tour, don't sell records, and nobody wants a t-shirt or cap with my ugly mug on it, so merchandising is not the key.

Also remember that "money" is relative. $1000 means something very different to a millionaire than it doe to a guy living in a refrigerator box on the street. I remember seeing Joe Walsh say "You can't make any money in music anymore." Well Joe, maybe what is "any money" to YOU is very different than the rest of us. When the Eagles last played Cleveland, the cheap seats were $200 a ticket. They played Quicken Loans arena, which holds 21,000 for concerts. It was sold out. Even if ALL the seats were $200, that is $4,200,000 in ticket sales alone. And I am thinking a lot of people bought the $60 t-shirts. This from a has-been, hanger-on type act. And I don't even remember when their last new work was released!! I didn't (wouldn't) go, but I was told that there was a half dozen Henley tunes, a half dozen Walsh tunes, a couple from Tim Schmidt.... that's like half the show. So for that $200 people got half Eagles songs and the other half solo artist material.

So, which part of that triangle is the money coming from? Sales, touring, or merch?

Hi Eddie,
Thanks for the reply.What im looking to do is just to have a place to refer poeple too if they want the song.Dont sing dance or chew and I dont go with girls that do!lol Cd baby seems to be a good place where I can just put my song up and send people to for a download,My expectations are fairly low but id like to put it out there .Should I register the song before uploading or is it enough that its going to a recognised distributer like Cd Baby for the first time I wonder?
thanks Hugh

Hugh,

May I suggest you look at +++ SoundCloud +++ , +++ SoundClick +++ and +++ BandLab +++ then choose which one you like best. I'm a member of all three. Of the three I like SoundCloud the best. SoundCloud is easy to upload songs to, SoundCloud lets you upload wav files and has an attractive and easy to use player. SounClick has a much simpler user interface but seems to delete content without warning. BandLab is built around music collaboration so if you want to collaborate with others you can find others with the same interest you have.

If you want something more private, try +++ 4Shared.com +++ . 15 GBs of free cloud storage. You provide links to the people you want to hear your music. It uses a browser media player or people can select to download the music file.

Of all the choices I've listed I'd start with SoundCloud. It does what you want, is free and many people have heard of it. The bad news is it is losing money (so is SoundClick but it's no longer a major player like it use to be) so you can never tell when the site might close; but it hasn't so far.

CD Baby, Bandicamp and ReverbNation are structured more for supporting acts that sell music, merchandise and tour. There's just a lot of features you'll likely never use.

What do you mean by register? Copyright? If so, do not upload it ANYWHERE until you do that. If you do, you will have a real tough time proving it was stolen if it ever becomes a hit.

Hi Jim,
Thanks Ive looked at soundcloud and someone said you can add a buy button to ur account is that right? h

Hi Bob,
Love ur story and the norton styles h

Hi Eddie,
yeah copyright where is the best place to send a song .I know technically its copyrighted when its made but as thats hard to prove ,what are the best steps to take?thanks in advance hugh

Hugh,

Where do you live? This Forum is an International community and the copyright law is not the same around the world.

Hi Keith ,Thanks for reply,
Im living in Ireland.I realize that the copyright law is different and I suppose thats what makes it difficult.I have been looking at this site and that appears to be what I want .What do you think?My only question which I emailed them was ,What happens if the artist singing the song is a demo singer as in my case,should I send in the song with me singing (trying)
https://www.songrite.eu/

Truer words have never been spoken.

In the late 1960s I was making $400/week doing two 45 minute sets on two days as an opening act for the majors. That was a lot of money back them (4 times as much as a plumber).

To me that was riches. I talked to the leader of the Association backstage and he was making $2,000 per show. We never got there.

In my experiment in being "normal" I was a Field Engineer for a Cable TV manufacturer. It paid well, I basically worked 3 days a week (Monday and Friday were travel days but I could take the red-eye out on Monday and the red-eye back on Thursday so I could still gig on the weekends).

If I stayed there I would have made a lot more money than I made as a full-time musician which I've done for most of my life so far. But they did me a favor when they laid off everybody who had less than 15 years and I had almost 5.

I realized 2 things (1) being normal is over-rated (2) I'm happier making less money but enjoying my life a lot more by gigging for a living.

I'm not rich and don't buy as many possessions as many other people do, but I find I prefer experiences to possessions. So it works for me. I've traveled the world, bought new cars but drove them a few hundred miles until the became undependable, don't wear jewelry, but feel I am one of the luckiest people I know.

I get up in the morning, and if it's a gig day, it's the brightest day of the week and I can't wait to get to work. And we have plenty of gig days. Tonight is the fourth one this week.

People on the gigs ask me if I have a CD for sale. Since my home is not acoustically great for recording, I would have to rent time at a commercial studio. That would cost me a lot of money. And how many will I sell? My fans are a limited market, and once they have the CD, there is no need to buy another. So I doubt I would cover my expenses.

Live music is gone immediately, and then they need another dose.

I've was a 'sax for hire' at a local studio for a long time. It's no longer there thanks to home recording gig. But when I was doing it, I played on self-produced CDs in the smooth jazz, country and pop genres. None of them have gone viral and none of them are stars. The competition is fierce and getting noticed is very difficult.

In the few months of Summer when the gigging is slow, I make new BiaB aftermarket products in my spare time. I sell multiple copies of them because my 'audience' is global. And the work with BiaB helps me make better backing tracks for my duo (I don't buy them, but do my own). http://www.nortonmusic.com/backing_tracks.html -- I play drums, sax, guitar, bass, wind synth, flute, and keyboard synth, took arranging in school, and both BiaB and my backing tracks help me improve my arranging chops.

But for me the biggest demand is playing live, and that's great because playing live in front of an audience is the most fun I can have with my clothes on.

Of course YMMV.

And although I am of retirement age now, I have no plans of retiring. As long as I can fog a mirror and get gigs, I'll be gigging. And I have an early gig today, so I better quit 'yakking' here.

Notes

Notes, if you chose to, couldn't you travel regionally and fill those summer months?

The busiest band I was ever in played a house gig on Tuesday, rehearsed Wednesday, played a house gig Thursday night, played regular local bar gigs on Friday and Saturday, and a Sunday night house gig.

In summer though, when it was nice enough to play outside, it got crazy. Thursday night, Friday happy hour outside, then a bar gig after that, Saturday afternoon outside, a bar gig after that, Sunday afternoon outside, then the Sunday night house gig. 7 shows in 4 days. Every weekend.

Monday we stayed in bed all day! And nobody was allowed to call each other so we did not have to speak. The throat is not meant to sing that much.

We got to the point where some of those doubleheaders were so far apart that we would have a rental PA dropped off, send our PA system to the night gig, have crew guys set it up, then come back to the first gig to pick up the rental PA, take it to the rehearsal hall, and come back to the night gig for load out at 2am. We moved and set up our own stage gear.

Not about sales at all, but expanding on Notes comment.

Regionally, no. The tourist season in South Florida dies at Easter and gets buried on Mother's Day. Like everybody else in the hospitality industry, we make more than 3/4 of our yearly income between Halloween and Easter.

When we first started, we did Cruise Ships from the beginning of April to the beginning of December, 3 years in a row. That was nice, but after 3 years it was enough, Too much time on the ship, and not enough time in the ports.

By our 4th year out we had enough local reputation to work all summer, so I declined to renew the Cruise Ship contract.

I happen to really like Summer in South Florida, so if I traveled to Georgia or Jacksonville (South Georgia to a Floridian) I'd have to pack up and leave the home and live in a motel.

I'd rather stay here and enjoy the rainy season. So I choose to stay and work perhaps 4-6 gigs a month instead of 4-6 gigs a week.

And by having slow summer gigging seasons, it gives me a chance to work on new Band-in-a-Box aftermarket products. I like making styles for BiaB because it gives me a chance to play drums, bass, and other instruments. I record parts live into a MIDI sequencer, and then take snippets of what I play and import them into the StyleMaker. I have to figure ways to work around the limitations of BiaB and when it's all done I have something I can listen to and be proud of.

Sometime late in the slow season I'll block out a few weeks to take a vacation. I like to travel, and I've been to 49 US States, much of Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico and down to Costa Rica in this hemisphere. I've also been to over a half dozen European countries and a few in Asia and Africa. I planned to go to Madagascar last summer, but they are having an epidemic of the Bubonic Plague so we drove to Idaho to see the eclipse instead and hit a few parks on the way back.

As much as I like traveling, being on the road with a lot of gear to schlep myself isn't appealing to me. Get off the gig, haul it all into the motel room, put it back in the van in the morning, set up, gig, tear down, and do it all over again.

I'm very happy with my life. I get to make a living doing music and nothing but music. Most of my money comes from gigging, and the Band-in-a-Box moonlighting gig is satisfying and makes a few bucks while I am having fun.

I wrote my first styles for myself. Being a guy who played drums, bass, guitar, keys, sax, and flute in working bands, I wanted styles that sounded more like what working bands did. I figured it would be a short-cut to making backing tracks. I had no intention of making a business out of it.

I gave away my styles to my musician friends who were into BiaB, and they all told me they liked them better than the PG Music styles (Aren't friends great!). A guitarist I know who used to teach jazz guitar at the University of Miami told me I should sell them. The idea mulled around in my head for a while, and I put a set up for sale via classified ads in EM and Keyboard magazines.

In a few months I found myself with a second business. I learned to be a mail order businessman, then when the Internet arrived here I embraced it, learned how to write web sites, and now it is decades later and the challenge is to come with new products that are both useful, and not similar to ones I've already released.

The gigging season is almost over, Easter comes early this year, and I'm actually looking forward to making new styles from the short ideas I've recorded during the busy season.

If I like what I do this summer, and feel proud enough to put my name on it, I'll release new products next winter.

Plus I'm also selling products made by other BiaB creators, David Bailey, Roy Hawkesford, Sherry Mayrent, and Jim Wedd. I send them a check 4 times a year and make them smile.

I do all of this instead of watching TV. I disconnected the cable in the late 1980s, never bothered to put up an antenna, and never got a digital converter. I'd rather live my life vicariously by doing things instead of living my life by watching actors pretend to do things. That's just me, and fortunately Leilani is the same way. Perhaps being weird together is one of the things that keeps us close.

And on every gig day I'll say to myself how lucky I am to be able to do this for a living. I could have been a printer like my dad or an insurance salesman or a 9-5 at a desk. Instead I get to pick up my sax, flute, wind synth, and guitar and play them to a live, appreciative audience over my self-created backing tracks, stick my face on the mic and sing, and tell bad jokes on the mic, and get paid for it.

What could be better than that?

Insights and incites by Notes

Never having relied upon being paid for music in any fashion, what is happening in Music incomes for artists appears to be a squashing of the hill on the left end of the Pareto chart and pushing it out to the right.

For me, it has never seemed more positive at all of the opportunities to make a little bit of money making music, with tools that yield higher quality than I ever thought possible for next to no money invested.

That said, I have yet to step over that line to make a serious attempt to make money making music.

I found this article very interesting. It appears that CDs and vinyl isn't dead yet.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/finance/technology/cds-and-vinyl-are-outselling-digital-music-downloads/ar-BBKA30n