What happened on the internet before content aggregators (or before you had access to them)? you'd see a cool website and tell a friend the website address or you'd send a link to a friend and they might pass it on if they cared enough, they might not. That's a few people, unless the website was seriously incredible it would never be seen by maybe a hundred people. Now with sites like reddit a "pretty cool" website can be seen by millions of people.

Music is like that. There are so many artists that produce great music but nobody has ever heard of them because their "network" extends to maybe a couple of friends and friends friends and some of their friends friends friends, unless they get a big break (like shared by an already famous artist) they'll remain pretty small, forever. I bet everyone here knows of an artist they like but who couldn't make a living from their music, whether that's a friend or someone they've seen in an obscure Youtube video.

The music industry (big labels) provide huge value to artists, so many artists would never have the reach they have now if they didn't have labels. Would Justin Bieber be known by hundred of millions if he was still making songs on Youtube?

The idea that sites like kickstarter are the future for creative endeavours is partly true, they can help fund some projects and open up artists to new ways to fund their work, but they can't replace the music industry. Very few people care enough about music to not need to be told who to listen to, or to invest in their favourite artists, they need to be given music to choose from (see: top 40) and decide what they like and buy it.

Things like selling a CD for $10 or a download for $1 are what fund the music industry, if the music industry dies so does the way we consume music. No longer will we be able to just consume, we'll have to find it too. I want the option to seek out new music, I want the option to fund artists I love that want to be independent, I don't want it to be a necessity.

    Music is so much more than sounds – 
    how else do you explain the Gathering of the Juggalos?

Music aggregators are everywhere now. HypeMachine, SoundCloud, even iTunes and Youtube all help me find great music. Even Reddit itself has subreddits that aggregate great music. Sometimes that music is curated by a label, oftentimes not.

If you do not care about music enough to seek it out (which is most people) and music is just something that's in your life when you're driving to work or doing the cleaning you rely on the "music industry" to be your aggregator, they make/take music that they know the average person will like (yay formulas!) and deliver it to you through radio, television and all the other places people listen to music.

If that disappears and music becomes something you have to actively seek out, or find yourself disliking most of the music you're hearing on the radio ("this week on the top 40 from some website that people that care about music visit...") you're just going to give up.

music is a part of our lives, yes, but not because it's something most people are passionate about, it's because it's just something that is there. I've started to enjoy music a lot recently, but for the majority of my life it wasn't something I cared about at all, I would just listen to whatever was popular and I was happy with that. My mother is the same, she'll hear a song on the radio and like it and then go out and buy the bands album and listen to that, she would never sit hunched over a computer trawling through websites sharing different music, or flick through TV channels, or switch between radio stations.

I used reddit as an example of a website that delivers content of a specific type to people that want it. The example you're using (Soundcloud, Hypemachine) would be sites like Hackernews, they cater to a specific audience. Most people that use reddit are just idle consumers, they go to reddit.com click the top 20 links, laugh at the cute cat pictures and move on. How many ever subscribe to communities they care about? A relatively small amount. That's the amount that would ever seek out music. (edit: I think a good way to explain it in simple terms is: reddit is "my first internet content aggregator", the music industry is "my first music aggregator")

How the system works now isn't PERFECT, but it's pretty great. Popular music is distributed by big labels, they control what the average person hears and "know" what most people like; people that want more than just the popular music can seek it out and/or contribute through kickstarter (which is growing, which is great). I think what the article describes is fantastic and it SHOULD happen, but alongside big labels, not as a replacement.

Music should be paid for, music should generate revenue, artists should be able to use labels to get big, but artists should also be able to stay independent, make music for making music, have their fans fund what they want to hear. That sort of thing is great, but both can exist at the same time (and I think they will)

This is already beginning to shatter. last.fm, genius on itunes and many more will just play music that you like based on some input. It works pretty well now, in five years it's going to be great.

You don't need the big labels to be the filter, there are plenty of other individuals and companies who will take that place as the arbiters of "popular" music.

If most people don't care much about music, why should we as a society spend so much money supporting the music industry?

I view the music industry & pop music as an ephemeral buisness which took advantage of the particular technology & society present in the 20th century, in the same way that some species of animal might evolve to take advantage of some ecological niche that appeared as global climate changes and then dies out once that niche dissapears.

Almost anything that you think is useless has a way that it can be used that justifies someone paying for it.

My comments:

I like the structure, but am concerned about the separation of consumption and patronage. Our society has become far more consumerist since Victorian times and ignoring that cultural shift could be problematic. I propose fortifying crowdfunded patronage with a matching fund that would match crowd patronage dollars.

In college I was cheap and pirated music. Now I care more for convenience than a few dollars and so download my music via iTunes, where cover art, filing, and synchronising is taken care of. I suggest adding an optional (or maybe not) extra $1 (or whatever) to be directed into a matching fund. This fund would then match, at a ratio to be determined after further thought (would probably be a moving scale), crowd patronage dollars to artists. Thus, the consumption and patronage are joined somewhat.

One could still have free music for those who value dollars more than time. The downside is the iTunes of this analogy would be a power centre. That said, it would be naive to assume any such system wouldn't concentrate power. It might be good to have an iTunes figure opposing the Kickstarter one.

Moving towards music distributors being required, as part of the licence, to divert a portion of revenues to matching patronage to artists would be an alternative. That way, person A, who would have supported one project for $100 000 can now support two, with $50 000 each of matching funds (assuming 1:1 matching) making up the other half. The distributors could also dis-intermediate the patrons, the difference between this model and the labels being that the artist would have the freedom to distribute their music for free as well.

Note that an un-intended consequence of this would be music losing mass appeal and catering to the tastes of the patron minority. Given the state of popular music I'm not sure if this would be a terrible loss :P.

My argument is there aren't enough dollars seeking that experience today as there are consumption dollars (which the industry has gotten used to). In the past, monetising that long tail of demand was prohibitive. Today it is not. As a single example, I would never contribute to support a musician yet my lifetime worth to the music industry is at least tens of thousands of dollars (including concert tickets).

There is enough money in that delta to fund the artists, lobby legislators, and enforce the status quo. That's the problem. If you aren't re-routing that demand you're proposing a nice but idealistic hypothetical.

The concentration of power is a good point, it would be best to have a healthy ecosystem of Kickstarter clones or at least some model that avoids a single "hottest projects" page, those damn things bleed money from everyone else to create blockbusters.

I guess there will always be a place for pay services dealing with recommendation or cloud storage but I'm assuming that the value of a digital copy of a song, streamed or not, will be zero pretty soon.

  One could still have free music for those who value 
  dollars more than time.

There's no reason in principle that an ad-supported iTunes clone couldn't do everything iTunes does - it could be more convenient, in fact, as you wouldn't have to muck around with credit card numbers and passwords. The only reason piracy is inconvenient at the moment is because it's illegal.

I am thinking of Pandoras or Shazams, perhaps with features that let me say "someone make a song like this". One could see the emergence, as a counter-movement, of heavily DRM-protected "limited release" albums.

When you make something people value free strange things happen. The most likely is still the use of force to enforce profits, i.e. some form of copyright regime.

Google, Youtube etc are all free - it's obviously economically feasible to distribute media online for just ad revenues.

http://the99percent.com/articles/6973/Francis-Ford-Coppola-O....

"We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script. This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money? In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it."

Why do people keep saying that? About the shows, I mean.

The reality is that most bands LOSE money on shows. Shows are historically a loss leader for record sales.

If you are demanding I take a shot then I have a nitpick: First paragraph has the Traditionalists, Incrementalists, Apologists, and Defeatists. What about the school of thought that the widespread ability to freely share music is inevitable and artists, as they always have, will find a way to make money because people love music? What school of thought are you and I in?

Do you think this model will turn the music industry into even more of a hits based business (like the app store model has done to software) or less of one?

I can see books moving to this model as well, but movies seem a bit more problematic unless budgets fall drastically.

I think music will always have hits and superstars, whether the gatekeeper is radio or internet. What we call "viral" today will be upgraded to how we think of "hit" today.

Overall though, I'm more excited about the "middle class" of musicians the new era of music industry can support. I personally think maintaining a profitable and real relationship with your fans will require a lot less overhead in the future. And, they can go direct to fan, which is beneficial for independent artists, imo.

I am excited about the possibility of a potentially larger middle class of musicians as well but I can also see pressure from the need for virality that works against a healthy middle class.

"You need to make the kickstarter music top ten page or else you make nothing!" is something I can see happening. At the same time, it's unlikely to be worse than the selling CD's model for those people so maybe that's just complaining about it only being "better" instead of "perfect", which is silly.

The fundamental point he gets at is that you want to 'Connect with Fans' more than anything. This is why people like Amanda Palmer, Trent Reznor and the Juggalos (oh my) have been so successful. People connect with their music and their persona.

The second part is to give those fans a 'Reason to Buy'. In your article you talked about things like close up access, neat events, and being added to the liner notes: these are all concrete reasons to buy.

That formula is sort of what you were hinting at.

Use the infinite goods (the smell of the food in your metaphor) to sell the finite goods.

(I might do a follow up to that article with some further thoughts. Basically, I think the reason the crowd patronage model is the future is because it allows the artist to cover their fixed, up-front costs. Since the Internet has made distribution costs effectively 0, covering your fixed costs is the way to go)

One great example of this in action is Hoodie Allen. He releases all his music free on Soundcloud[1] and Youtube[2], where he funds/makes his own (pretty impressive) music videos to gain his audience. No record label required. His music is on iTunes, but I'm guessing the real money is made in concerts.

[1] http://soundcloud.com/hoodieallenmusic

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_t431MAUQlQ

As for Hoodie Allen, I've actually talked to him before on the phone about his Facebooking strategy! I like him, he's smart! He's definitely the type to succeed in the new music industry. Check out the song "No Sleep till Brooklyn"... my buddy Jhameel sings the hook on it!

I think this makes a lot of sense and can work in some cases, but it remains to be seen what happens when the market is saturated with artists looking to collect voluntarily from their fan base. I suspect people will fatigue from the euphoria of being generous and the model will fade, but I hope I'm wrong.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Musicking-Meanings-Performing-Listen...

Also, it might be interesting to chat a bit more. Drop me an email - rob at [see profile for domain].

And a few great customers is better then

THAN!