Have you talked with a lot of artists about it?

Labels are especially helpful now, when PR job is a thankless grunt work involving a lot of know-how. Personally, I've worked with a couple of labels and promotion groups, and the amount of effort label puts into promotion has tremendous impact on the outcome.

Basically, there's almost no listeners who actively look for new artists and music that is outside of view of some spot of spotlight — and to get into that spotlight, you have to work. I'm not even talking about publications of scale of Pitchfork or xlr8r now; much smaller blogs get flooded with review requests and demos.

But most importantly, the kind of activity you have to do to actively sell yourself on social media is completely psychologically repulsive to a lot of artists. I've talked to a lot of people about it, and most agree that while they could see themselves pushing someone else's creations, doing it for themselves too often pushes one into apathy, self-doubt and depression.

The awesome stories that you hear about self-made success suffer from survivorship bias. Labels are there for a reason, and they deserve every penny that they take.

Edit: sorry, I missed your link. I get ~80% of my releases; didn't realize you were talking about the big dinosaur labels here.

> But most importantly, the kind of activity you have to do to actively sell yourself on social media is completely psychologically repulsive to a lot of artists.

And fans, stupidly, sometimes aren't supportive either.

There was an article recently talking about some very popular YouTube celebrities who are still waiting tables. And, when they tried to monetize their channel, got sreamed at by lots of fans.

It's a no win situation for artists.

It sounds more like a problem of trying to make a living in an industry with a very low barrier to entry. Fans expect to get it for free because they know that the only cost their favorite Youtube artist had was a cell phone camera.

If their favorite performer can't make a living, then the fans will just move to one of dozens (or hundreds or even thousands) of choices.

That same ease of entry that helped the Youtube performer gain thousands of viewers after posting a funny cat video will also let some other Youtube performer do the same thing.

It's a different world out there for artists, some for the better (it's easy to record your work and get it out there), some for the worst (it's also easy for thousands of others to do the same so you have to find a way to differentiate yourself).

> Fans expect to get it for free because they know that the only cost their favorite Youtube artist had was a cell phone camera.

Completely forgetting that the time spent to make something interesting isn't free.

> There was an article recently talking about some very popular YouTube celebrities who are still waiting tables. And, when they tried to monetize their channel, got sreamed at by lots of fans.

I don't know about youtube celebs, but the notion that musicians can live off their music is basically laughable right now. No one I know even tries to do that, unless they're ready to perform three times a week in cities all over the world — it's usually just DJ sets (as live sets make logistics much harder), which aren't as stressful, but still. And it includes musicians with 10s and 100s of thousands of subscribers on SoundCloud, with constant media presence in publications like xlr8r, RA, pitchfork and others.

A lot of them get income from music, but it's usually writing soundtracks, sound design, running a label/promotion agency/party line, being an art director of a club, stuff like that. And it involves a lot of hard work apart from actually writing music.

I listen to a lot of music off the Ektoplazm (http://www.ektoplazm.com/) label. It's not all great, but I like about 20% to 30% of and maybe 10% is excellent. It's all released free under a creative commons license. I don't even know what pop music is these days since I don't watch TV or listen to the radio.

Music, like a long distance telephone call, is basically free now. Technology has made these things incredibly cheap and the people who used to make money off this stuff have to find ways to restrict the supply using lobbying and lawsuits in order to make a profit. I think other industries are allowed to die a quicker death because they aren't so tied into the big media companies which have a lot of political power.

>Artists getting a 10-20% slice[1], the typical revenue-split, sounds like a rip-off to me.

SoundExchange normally pays something like 50% to the copyright holder, 45% to the 'featured artist' and 5% to session musicians and the like for performance royalties (which is what it pays out for). [1]

SoundExchange is the organization set up to distribute royalties when performance royalties were brought to the US. They only are paid, and thus pay out for, digital music streaming, including cable TV, streaming radio like Pandora (when using the statutory license), and satellite radio.

In the case of an indie group that also owned the copyright, at least 95% of the royalties would flow to the members of the group itself.

I should note that there are other organizations like SoundExchange worldwide. PPL [2] is the British equivalent. There are also other organizations that deal with different rights, e.g. rights to the sheet music. The laws regarding each will vary considerably.

[1] http://www.soundexchange.com/artist-copyright-owner/digital-...

[2] http://www.ppluk.com/

Interesting, though if I understood it correctly[1] this is for radio (which is different from Spotify and other streaming services, where you control which music you listen to). I.e. the effective royalty is still 10-20% for streaming services.

But please enlighten me if I'm wrong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundExchange

Gramo and Tono, the Norwegian organizations, collect both a copyright fee and fees from public performance on behalf of performers and song writers. Copyright fees were historically 9 % of revenue from physical and digital copies sold, but I'm not sure it would apply to streaming. Public performance include broadcasting, concerts and playback in public places (shops, restaurants etc.)

EDIT: These organizations also collect and distribute from and to other countries.

It only applies to digital streaming and satellite radio, and then only if no direct license is agreed to.

Good artists certainly do need PR help. Truly horrible "artists" top the charts every day. Turning music into money and fame has little to do with being a good artist.

Studios know how to handle images. They know when and where to push something. They can tell musicians what will sell in 6/12/18 months. For instance, a good song today will still fail if it's theme/tempo/key doesn't mesh with the times or has too many similar competitors on the charts. Many artists have no grasp of such external factors. Studios may be evil, but they specialize in turning the good into the marketable.

These are good points, I agree (partly). There are probably useful things these record labels do, which I'm not aware of.

Still, I'd like to argue that their value-add is much lower today, since they both distribution and marketing/outreach can be handled by the artist herself (more or less).

Marketing and outreach are essential, but I would say the studios really do there thing during the creative process.

I remember an interview with Christina Aquilera about doing her first music video. The studio had people on set with reports on exactly what highschool girls in the target market were wearing, how they did their make-up. She was meant to look like the pretty girl at school, every school, not a model or red-carpet celeb with professionals doing their hair. That video was the result of hundreds of hours of market research. She was under no illusions about who defined her image. Net result: massive sales and filled stadiums.

I don't that its that simple. For awhile now, YouTubers have "labels" too, they just don't use that term. One of the "labels" was bought for a fairly large sum by Disney.

Record labels also act as banks by providing advances.

At the rate of payday loans? :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payday_loan

You could easily argue the labels create all the value. They can pretty much turn any type of talent into bankable star.

And in thst world I almost prefer the honesty of the Korean/Japanese music factories where the singers just get salaries instead of this whole system of Hollywood accounting where an artist is just an expense account with all expenses to be paid to their label, never to go into the black...

> They can pretty much turn any type of talent into bankable star.

For all of their successes they have many, many failures.

They "create" it artificially by not allowing radio stations to play music that isn't part of their cartel.

IIRC labels also carry out talent discovery and growth nurturing, so that probably shouldn't be discounted.

Like how they "discovered" the Byrds, then never paid them anything ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_McGuinn

"and that to date [July 11, 2000 ], The Byrds had not received any royalties for their greatest successes, "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Turn, Turn, Turn" – they only received advances, which were split five ways and were just "a few thousand dollars" per band member"

Just a note - they didn't write either of the two songs you cited.

Ah, well that makes me feel better. I didn't write any of the songs I downloaded on bittorrent either.

But the article is about music publishers, not music labels.