How Music Works (44 page)

manufacturing, etc. That’s a lot more than any indie band could ever afford.

We wound up generating $964,000 in total income. So minus the $315,000

in expenses, that left us with $649,000, 50 percent of which went to Eno,

leaving me with $324,500. Since we were the record company, we paid our

own mechanicals out of our profit.

I was elated. Here, finally, was the future. I made $324,500 on this “self-distributed” record, compared to the $58,000 I made on the standard royalty-deal record
Grown Backwards
—and the two sold nearly the same number of copies: 140,000 for
Grown Backwards
, and 160,000 for
Everything That Happens
. Wow, the writing is on the wall here! Well, that enthusiasm might be justified if you can afford the $315,000 that we paid to assemble the apparatus needed to make, sell, and market a record. (It should be pointed out that some of those costs were start-up, learning-as-you go costs. Presumably they wouldn’t be as high down the road, as the infrastructure has been built.)

Whenever I get too excited about these figures, I need to remind myself that I splurged on the
Grown Backwards
recording costs, which came in at $218,000.

I didn’t have to front that money; it came out of the advance from Nonesuch.

The recording costs for
Everything That Happens
were $49,000, so if I had kept the costs similarly low for
Grown Backwards
, then, redoing the math, I could have made $167,000 more than I ended up making on that album. My net for

Grown Backwards
would then have been about $225,000. So in this hypothetical scenario in which the recording costs were equal, I actually would have made only about $89,000 more on the somewhat self-distributed
Everything That
Happens
. That’s still quite nice, and if you amortize that $323,000 over the two years of writing and recording, it’s a “salary” of about $160k a year. Way better than an elementary school teacher in New Jersey. (For the record, I think most teachers are woefully underpaid.)

244 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

But if
Everything That Happens
had been a real solo record, if it had been just me like it was on
Grown Backwards
, then I would have walked home with the full $626,000 as my net income. Now we’re talking! That’s nearly three times what I made with
Grown Backwards
, even assuming that that record could have been made equally cheaply. Of course,
Grown Backwards
would have been a completely different record had I chosen to record with fewer musicians, and
Everything that Happens
wouldn’t have been the same without the Eno collaboration. It’s really hard to compare records, given all the variables, but you get my point. With this particular situation one could indeed imagine living off sales of one’s recordings via self-distribution. It’s even enough income to allow time for writing—or the occasional flop.

Can this distribution model eventually net enough so that even an emerg-

ing artist could live on their own music sales (excluding live performing

income)? Could more musicians and composers have a life in music this way?

There are no guarantees, but if you don’t need a huge recording budget, tour support, and a big marketing effort, then this approach is worth exploring.

Self-distributing didn’t work as well for me in Europe and in the UK as it did domestically. We didn’t do extensive marketing. I did press, and we gave a free advance copy of one song as an exclusive to some music blogs, but there weren’t the traditional ads and paid radio promotions. In North America, music blogs are replacing print music-journalism. They respond faster to breaking news

and to feedback from their readers, and they can link to video clips, streaming music, and websites provided by the artist. Music fans get more and more of

their information from the internet in North America, so there was a little bit of a viral effect that happened here without us having the usual expense of ads and conventional marketing. The Europeans in general aren’t buying or reading as much stuff online as North Americans do. Digital sales are generally lower there, and they seem still to look to print as their main source of news. There are lots of countries with varying musical tastes and different languages, so one campaign can’t blanket the whole region as it can in North America.

I toured for about a year after
Everything That Happens
came out, on and off through 2008 and 2009. The shows were super well received; we all had

a wonderful time performing. I made some money from the tour as well, but

it was expensive to mount. I examined the receipts when it was done, and if

most shows hadn’t sold out, I would have lost money. That’s not a good omen

for anyone who isn’t sure they can fill seats. I am still not convinced the tour DAV I D BY R N E | 245

really helped sell records. Maybe it helped a little, but not, for example, like getting wide radio-play would have. Some songs were played on NPR, and

on indie and college stations, but the larger, more commercial stations never jumped on board. That’s not a surprise; the record is what it is. However, well after the record came out, another way of getting the songs in front of people presented itself. And this opportunity highlights a few of the advantages of retaining some ownership and publishing rights.

LICENSING

Another source of income for recording artists is licensing. That means

letting a movie, TV show, or commercial use your song in exchange for

cash. I don’t license songs to commercials, but I still see more money from

licensing songs to films and TV than I do in actual record sales. Those who

allow their songs to be used in ads can become instantly familiar to a wide

audience overnight—or at least that one song does. This too is a form of

marketing, one that is usually completely separate from and unreliant on the record company.

A few years after
Everything That Happens
came out, Oliver Stone included a substantial number of songs from it in his movie
Wall Street: Money Never
Sleeps
. A fair number of people commented on the fine songs we’d written for that film, not realizing that the record they appeared on had been out for quite some time. That confirmed for me that while distribution is moving online

relatively quickly, getting the word out still requires some traditional marketing effort and muscle—and money. For artists without recognizable names,

that would have been even more true.

Eno and I might be exceptions, but films will often license a song from a

record or band that isn’t that well known. I suspect that there’s a cool-factor at work—many film directors are covert music geeks. The late singer-songwriter

Nick Drake didn’t sell a lot of records and wasn’t that well known, but whoever handles his publishing is doing okay. His songs have been used more than once in big ad campaigns, movies, and TV shows.

If you hold on to the rights, and your song is sampled, that, too, becomes

a source of income. If a song is sampled by another artist, it’s usually because of a musical or sonic quality, not because it was already a hit. In fact, sampling 246 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

a hit is anathema, so the obscure artist has a better shot. Even a relative

unknown can sometimes find himself with a surprise source of income if his

song is sampled, but that income is always more significant for the writer if he has held on to a good percentage of those publishing rights.

The more a writer or band holds on to their publishing or even, when pos-

sible, their master recording rights, the more they will benefit from income sources like these—though it might take a while. One licensing deal can provide more income than a whole tour, and certainly more than royalties from

CD sales through a label. Often a band or songwriter will feel it is necessary to give away some of their publishing for the cash in hand that will get them through their struggling years, but if you can hold on to that stuff, it turns out much better for you pretty quickly. Musicians often don’t have pension plans, sad to say, so planning ahead can be critical.

Some decades ago, when MTV was doing well, pulling in viewers and mak-

ing money, the big record labels decided that the commonly held idea

that MTV was providing free exposure for the labels’ acts wasn’t acceptable

anymore. They began to see MTV reaping profits while the record labels were

providing all the network’s content for free. So the labels made deals with

MTV to continue providing music videos, but now for a flat fee. The labels

said that they would then funnel some of that considerable income back to

their artists, but I don’t think they ever did. Eventually MTV played fewer

and fewer music videos, turning instead to cheap reality shows, which they

could own and syndicate. Part of that change had to be motivated by not

wanting to pay the record labels for content.

A similar situation has now developed on the Internet. Lots of websites

and apps such as Pandora and Spotify have emerged that stream music to

their customers. This isn’t about giving you access to songs you have pre-

viously purchased, but rather about hearing music you don’t physically or

digitally own. Spotify has reached agreements with the major labels, just as MTV did before them. And just as before, the artist, who should be entitled to a share of that equity, is missing from the equation. Maybe this time around that will get fixed, and if it does then streaming will be an additional source of income for artists—especially if the artists hold on to the rights to their songwriting and recordings. But that remains to be seen.

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FREEDOM VERSUS PRAGMATISM

The models I’ve outlined are not absolute. They can morph and evolve.

Aimee Mann and her manager initially went the 100 percent DIY route,

but they eventually made deals with various distributors to get their records into retail outlets.

In the future we will see more artists mix-and-match elements of the

models I’ve described to create hybrid deals. The business is more flexible

than it used to be, which is a good thing for both veteran and emerging art-

ists. We read over and over that the music business is going down the drain, but this is actually a great time to be making music—full of possibility. A

life in music—which is what we’re actually talking about, not just fame and

glory—is indeed still possible.

The wealth of options can be paralyzing though. Many who take a good

amount of cash upfront will never know the benefits of long-range thinking.

Hanging on to more rights in exchange for less money is usually the wiser

course of action. Mega pop-artists will still need that mighty push and mar-

keting effort for their new releases, and that is something that only traditional record companies (or record companies in combination with concert promoters) can provide. For others, what we now call a record label could be replaced by a new entity, a small company that essentially funnels the income and invoices from the various entities and vendors and keeps all the different accounts in order. A consortium of mid-level artists who share the services of such an

entity could make that model work—a kind of music business co-op.

United Musicians, the company that Michael Hausman founded, is one

such example. He mentioned to me that there is a scale below which such

an organization cannot support itself. One needs to have a number of artists on board to amortize the costs of staff, publicists, administration, and rent.

But since most artists aren’t in synch—one is often writing while another

is recording—this can work. The administrative staff doesn’t suddenly find

itself without work or the business without a steady income when one artist

decides that he or she needs to hole up to write new material.

No single model will work for everyone. There’s room for all of us. Like

a lot of people, I liked Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and Christina Aguilera’s “Ain’t No Other Man.” Sometimes corporate pop is what I want, but I don’t want it

at the expense of everything else. At times it has seemed that we have been

248 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

offered a Hobson’s choice: corporate pop or nothing. But perhaps that’s no

longer the case.

This is exciting. Ultimately, all these scenarios have to satisfy the same

human urges: What do we need music to do? How do we visit the land in our

head and the place in our heart that music is so good at taking us to? Isn’t
that
what we really want to buy, sell, trade, or download? We can’t, though, not really. No matter what format music is delivered in, the experience we

treasure, the thing we value, is still ephemeral and intangible. Advertisers have always tempted us with the idea that the pleasurable sensations, the joy and surprise of music can be bottled or affixed to some tangible artifact, like perfume, shoes, jeans, or a car—but it can’t be. It’s a slippery beast, and that’s part of its appeal.

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c h a p t e r e i g h t

How to

Make a Scene

c h a p t e r e i g h t

How to

Make a Scene

I’m not referring to how best to insult your host at a dinner party. I’m

referring to that special moment when a creative flowering seems to

issue forth from a social nexus—a clump of galleries, a neighborhood,

or a bar that doubles as a music club. I’ve often asked myself why such

efflorescence happens when and where it does, rather than at some

other time, in some other place.

The bar and music club CBGB that was located on the Bowery in New