The times ARE a changing in the music biz. Artists told to embrace it

Yes, streaming music is the future of music consumption.

No, that doesn’t mean that royalties to artists will dry up.

In fact, many artists who are not as big as Taylor Swift should be able to take advantage of new possibilities created by streaming music, such as helping them find and cultivate a fan base.

This whole transition from CDs and permanent downloads to streaming music is likely to take a few more years to run its course.

These are some of the takeaway messages from a fascinating article on the CNet website by author Joan E. Solsman  titled “Attention, Artists: Streaming music is the Inescapable Future. Embrace It.” The entire article is well worth reading. A link is below.

Solsman’s article responds to the news last week from Taylor Swift, who pulled her new album, “1989,” and all her back catalog from Spotify, a popular music streaming service that is available in both free and paid subscription versions. Swift has complained about the small share of revenues that are trickling down to the musical artists. Several other hugely popular artists, including Jimmy Buffet, have aired similar gripes.

For a look at how quickly streaming musical services have gained a larger share of total U.S. music industry revenues in the first half of 2014, have a look at the Recording Industry of America (RIAA) mid-year report, also linked below. Total streaming services bring in about the same amount of revenue as physical music formats, such as CDs. Streaming accounted for 27 percent of the pie, physical formats 28 percent, and permanent downloads (think iTunes) have the biggest share at 41 percent. But streaming music’s share has been growing rapidly in recent years, while CDs and downloads have been shrinking.

Solsman’s article on CNet makes several important points:

First, artist royalties may be small now, but will get much larger as the music-listening public continues to make the transition to streaming music. When CDs began replacing vinyl LPs, they didn’t produce much in the way of royalties, either.

Second, artists have always made less money from recordings than from merchandise, touring and sponsorship, and that’s still the case. “Streaming actually bolsters those,” according to Solsman. Streaming and the audience data it produces can allow enterprising artists to take advantage of opportunities to target certain concert venues, as well as market opportunities for fans to have personal experiences with artists.

Third, streaming services offer the artist instant access to massive worldwide audiences, which was harder for smaller, independent artists to attain when exposure depended on making physical product available for sale.

As I said, the entire article is well worth reading. It paints a convincing picture of a future music industry that makes not guarantees to struggling, young artists, as has always been the case. Hell, there aren’t any guarantees for established or famous artists, either. But the changing landscape opens up opportunities that weren’t there before, especially for new, independent artists.

Sources:

Attention, Artists: Streaming music is the Inescapable Future. Embrace It by Joan E. Solsman. Nov. 14, 2014. Accessed at CNet: http://www.cnet.com/news/attention-artists-streaming-music-is-the-inescapable-future-embrace-it/

News and Notes on 2014 Mid-Year RIAA Shipment and Revenue Statistics. Joshua P. Friedlander, Vice President, Strategic Data Analysis, RIAA. Accessed at: http://www.musicrow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/RIAA-2014-Mid-Year-shipments-memo-and-2-yr-table.pdf

For music buyers, the times they are a changin'

Digital download or streaming, Taylor?

Tipping point has become an overused phrase, in my opinion. But I also think it’s the best way to describe 2014 when it comes to how people buy music and listen to it. Recent months have seen several articles about music buying and listening preferences from industry watchers.

Links to the articles are at the end of this post, but here are the headlines:

Earlier this year, Billboardbiz.com reported that year-to-date total sales of digital albums exceeded those of CDs for the third week, a first. You might think digital albums have outsold CDs for several years, and downloads of SONGS had been surging for years. But when sales of ALBUMS are compared, digital formats didn’t quite get over the hump. There are two ways of counting digital downloads of albums, by the way. One way is to count only the downloads of entire albums. Another is to include Track Equivalent Sales, which count 10 song downloads as an album. A little over 11 million albums in each format – download and CD – in the first month of the year.

At the same time as digital albums appear to be overtaking CDs, the total sales from digital downloads is in a free fall because of streaming services such as Spotify. Midyear figures from Nielsen Soundscan showed that total album sales, digital album sales, digital track sales, and CD album sales all posted double-digit declines from the same point in 2013. On-demand streams increased by 42 percent.

The problem with streaming music services is that artists don’t get as much revenue as they do from digital or physical sales. Some artists are complaining, or taking action. Taylor Swift pulled her new album “1989,” and all her old albums, from Spotify because artists get very little of the revenue from subscriptions to streaming services.

What does it all mean?

I’m not sure there’s a common thread here. Rather, data points keep piling up that document that the way people consume information (including the way they listen to music) is changing faster than ever in the digital age. Just ask newspapers and radio stations. 

But there seem to be several trends. CDs, which have been around for about 30 years, continue to give way to other forms of music consumption. It’s unclear whether the new dominant format will be digital downloads or streaming music. Digital downloads seem to be on the decline, just a few years after their emergence as a distinct musical format. Streaming music seems poised to leave them both in the dust.

But will there be any new music to stream if all the artists are starving because they aren’t getting paid for making albums? If anybody can bring attention to that issue, and possibly change it, it’s Taylor Swift.

Sources:

CD Album Sales Fall Behind Album Downloads, Is 2014 The Year Digital Takes Over? By Keith Caulfield, Los Angeles. February 11, 2014. Accessed at: http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-mobile/5901188/cd-album-sales-fall-behind-album-downloads-is-2014-the

Digital music sales are in a free fall, as Spotify does to iTunes what iTunes did to CDs By David Holmes. July 3, 2014. Accessed at: http://pando.com/2014/07/03/digital-music-sales-are-in-a-free-fall-as-spotify-does-to-itunes-what-itunes-did-to-cds/

Nielsen Entertainment & Billboard’s 2014 Mid-Year Music Industry Report: Overall Music Consumption – Sales & Streaming Activity –Down 3.3% from Last Year. Accessed at: http://www.nielsen.com/content/dam/corporate/us/en/public%20factsheets/Soundscan/nielsen-music-2014-mid-year-us-release.pdf

Taylor Swift Pulls All Of Her Albums From Spotify By Pamela Engel. Nov. 3, 2014. Accessed at: http://www.businessinsider.com/taylor-swift-pulled-all-of-her-albums-from-spotify-2014-11#ixzz3J11et4og

The Allman Brothers call it a career

A long, strange yet remarkable chapter in the history of popular music ended early the morning of Oct. 29. The Allman Brothers Band played the last encore of its last concert ever, capping a 45-year, off-and-on career marked by the deaths of two original members, All-World guitarist Duane Allman and bass guitarist Berry Oakley, and the firing of a third founder, co-lead guitarist Dickey Betts. Between 1969 and 2014 the Allman Brothers Band also experienced other personnel comings and goings, as well as drugs, celebrity marriage and divorce, decline, dissolution, redemption, and a resurgence over the past decade during which they played their improvisational blend of rock, blues and jazz with as much fire and daring as the early, glory days.

The Allman brothers formed in March 1969. They were just achieving creative and commercial breakthroughs by 1971, when Allman died in a motorcycle accident. Oakley died on a motorcycle a year later. The band might have folded. But Allman was replaced by a pianist, the gifted Chuck Leavell, and Lamar Williams filled Oakley’s bass seat. The newcomers joined original singer-keyboardist Gregg Allman, guitarist Dickey Betts, and drummers Butch Trucks and Jai Johanny Johanson, and by 1973 the band had its biggest hit, “Ramblin’ Man,” as well as the reputation and fame to headline stadium shows and massive rock festivals. But wealth and celebrity soon helped blow out their creative spark amid drugs, betrayal, and conflicting loyalties.

The Allman Brothers Band spent much of the 1980s on hiatus while some of the members pursued solo projects. In 1989 they re-emerged. With Allman, Betts, Trucks and Johanson joined by new second guitarist Warren Haynes, bassist Allen Woody and percussionist Marc Quinones, a re-energized band issued several studio and live albums in the ‘90s. But they couldn’t tolerate success again, and by the turn of the century, Haynes and Woody had left and Betts had been fired.

Yet the Allman Brothers Band reinvented itself again. Betts was replaced by Derek Trucks, the young nephew of Butch Trucks. Haynes returned, and bass guitarist Oteil Burbridge joined Quinones, Gregg Allmann, Trucks and Johanson. Their 2003 release “Hittin’ the Note” might have been their best album since 1973. They released a series of archival concert recordings from the early 1970s, some of which were very nearly as good as the classic 1971 “Live at Fillmore East.” And they have been releasing pristine-sounding CDs of virtually every concert they have played in recent years. A fan can go on their website today and order a box set of their entire last stand of shows at New York’s Beacon Theatre. As I write this, I’m waiting for my mail carrier to deliver a 3-CD set of the final concert, which according to several published reviews was marked by fiery and precise playing and singing matched only by a few concerts over the decades.

So this time, it appears that the reports of the death of the Allman Brothers Band will stick.

A fan video (not professional quality) of “Blue Sky” from the Allman Brothers’ final week of shows at the Beacon Theatre at New York:

Sources:

Allmusic.com: http://www.allmusic.com/artist/the-allman-brothers-band-mn0000745964

Allman Brothers Band website: http://www.allmanbrothersband.com/

Paul, Alan: Allman Brothers put focus on Duane at final Beacon Theatre Show”  posted Oct. 29, 2014, at Billboard.com: http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6297018/allman-brothers-band-final-beacon-theatre-show-new-york

Unforgettable songs from a pair of Canadian sisters

If somebody made a movie, a musical biopic about a pair of highly regarded songwriters who provided material for some of the most popular and influential pop, folk and country singers of the day, they wouldn’t cast a pair of French-speaking sisters from a small Canadian village outside Montreal as the leads. Yet that is the real-life story of Kate and Anna McGarrigle, who wrote songs for Linda Ronstadt (including the title song of her breakthrough album “Heart Like a Wheel”), country queen Emmylou Harris, and Maria Muldaur.

But luckily the McGarrigles also sang and played their own songs. Over the course of 30 years (1975-2005), the sisters recorded 10 albums, two of them sung completely in French. Occasionally they ventured out on concert tours. Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s albums often sounded like recitals from the family living room in the village of Saint Sauveur des Monts, Quebec – folksy blends of pianos, guitars, fiddles, banjos, accordions and harmonicas.

But the songs are unforgettable. The rich blend of acoustic instruments and vocal harmonies showcase deeply felt and incisive lyrics about life, love and family, filled with the insight, passion and inner life of an Emily Dickinson poem. They give life to the joy, sweetness, sorrow and anger of romantic and familial love. “Talk to Me of Mendocino” recalls the longing and reverie of a romantic getaway in the California Redwoods. “I Eat Dinner” embodies the loneliness of divorce.  “Leave Me Be” tells of a parent’s worst fears realized when her child first faces the world alone.

The McGarrigles are considered folk artists. They came of age during the 1960s folk renaissance, and Kate was a part of the scene in Greenwich Village, where she met and married singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. But even if their musical arrangements employed banjos, accordions, fiddles and guitars, their songs hark to popular songcraft from an earlier era, including Cole Porter and Stephen Foster. In fact, they frequently covered songs such as “Gentle Annie,” “Hard Times Come Again No More,” and “What’ll I Do.” Their vocal harmonies, often including members of the extended family, also harked back to an era of singing old songs in the parlor.

Joe Boyd, who produced the McGarrigles, summed up the sisters’ unique origins and appeal in the liner notes to “Tell My Sister,” a box set of their first two albums:

“(Kate) and Anna have given us a bridge to a sensibility from another time: they grew up north of Montreal in a house with no TV, a piano, and a father who was born in the 19^th century. Her parents and older sister Janie sang in the evenings, and the way to earn approval was to find a harmony part. Yet Kate and Anna resisted being filed under folk, and they were right. They might not have been pop stars, but they occupy an uncharted landscape on the border between Cole Porter, Quebecois traditions, Stephen Foster, and the innocent early years of the folk revival. Wherever you locate it, the heart of North American song isn’t far.”

Kate McGarrigle died  of cancer in 2010, but the McGarrigles' music hasn't been completely silenced. Kate and Anna were/are the matriarchs of an extended musical clan made up of spouses, children and friends and relatives. Kate was mother to singing stars Rufus Wainwright and Martha Wainwright, both children of her marriage Loudon Wainwright III. The extended McGarrigle family has recorded a memorial concert, and various family members are still performing. Rufus and Martha probably have long careers in popular music ahead of them.

Kate and Anna McGarrigle sing Heart Like A Wheel, with help from Linda Ronstadt, who made the McGarrigles’ song a hit in 1975, and Maria Muldaur, who also recorded McGarrigle songs:

"Talk to Me of Mendocino:

   

"Mother Mother:"