The Future

In the future, downloading is good. In the future, musicians and when available their record labels, will be whatever it takes to get you to download their music. The most profitable music will be the music that makes a profound emotional connection with its fans, not disposable of-the-moment pop.

In the future, CDs will be plentifully available and have the nicest most well thought out packaging imaginable. And in the future, ultimately successful artist’s early supporters are rewarded culturally and even financially for their taste.

In the future, you can download all the music you want for free and musicians get paid anyway.

How it works

How does this all work? If everyone is downloading music for free, how is anybody paying the bills? Why would a fan buy an expensively packaged CD when they already have the music it contains? Why? Because they are a fan.

Once they’ve established a fan base, in addition to personal appearances/performances, an artist is able to support themselves by selling CDs and other tokens to their fans. The value of these items is not explicit but rather that they represent support of and affiliation with the artist.

Why it works

It works because of fans. A fan starts as a civilian. Civilians like music but haven’t formed the connection with a particular artist that it takes to become a fan. They make this connection by experiencing the artist’s art; in this case music. The best way to encourage this experience has always been to give it to them for free. The majority of the radio business was built around this function for years, now we have the Internet.

Once successfully turned from a civilian into a fan, the desire to support and affiliate with the artist is basic human nature. Fan support has always been the basic unit of currency an artist has to trade for mundane things like food and shelter. There’s a reason people bought all those over priced t-shirts at over priced arena rock shows, they were fans.

The recent development (<200 years) of recording provided a useful way of industrializing the process making money from fans, but the ultra-recent development (<30 years) of network technology is removing that anomaly. Life will go on.

What it does

The top of the music business today is like a traveling circus. Setup a big tent, march the elephants down Main Street making promises, then charge people to get in. The temptation to pull a few clowns out of the tent and put them to work on the street is strong. Once the kids are inside the tent you’ve already got their money, it’s getting them inside in the first place that you most need to worry about.

The Internet has burned down the tent. Now you have to sober up the clowns, put on a hell of a show and hope people will want to buy Bozo’s merchandise.

As people get back to the traditional way of experiencing music; for free, the content of music can only benefit. The music that is most likely to turn a civilian into a life long fan is the music that forms a strong emotional attachment with the fan. Pop isn’t going to cut it; you’ll need to be in for the long haul.

The effect is a bit like Google’s AdSense program compared to old style cash-per-click (CPC) banners. The best way to make money under the AdSense program is to play fair and make lots of good content people are interested in, as opposed to CPC where making money had little to do with content and everything to do with cunning.

It’s a change to a much more nature goal. Develop fans, offer them things they desire. Instead of develop hype, setup a ticket booth and promise delights within.

Artists desire their work to be experienced by all; but artists also desire to eat and setting up the ticket booth is a nice way to do that if you can get away with it. It’s never been ideal and passing around a hat after the show can work too.

How to get there

Okay future boy, sounds great, but what am I suppose to do as an artist?

For a budding artist today, here’s what I’d advocate.

Sell five hundred super-nice CDs at $30 a year and get a few paid gigs, you’re breaking even and already doing better then 99% of acts today. Scale that up to 5000 CDs, you just cleared at least $100k. The key is you have to make some real good music in the opinion of a fair sized number of people. In the future, talent matters.