David Byrne on the New Music Business

In this very informative article in Wired, David Byrne does a great job of breaking down the business models available to musicians today, from DIY to join-the-borg equity deals (where you get lots o' cash up front from a major label and no ownership or control).

"What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music," Byrne writes. "At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. But that's not bad news for music, and it's certainly not bad news for musicians. Indeed, with all the ways to reach an audience, there have never been more opportunities for artists."

You should absolutely read this article if you want to know what he perceives to be the six business models available today. (There is a companion piece talking about Radiohead's pay-what-you-will Internet sales model, which I found less valuable.) But the following are words to live by:

In the past, music was something you heard and experienced — it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. Epic songs and ballads, troubadours, courtly entertainments, church music, shamanic chants, pub sing-alongs, ceremonial music, military music, dance music — it was pretty much all tied to specific social functions. It was communal and often utilitarian. You couldn't take it home, copy it, sell it as a commodity (except as sheet music, but that's not music), or even hear it again. Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone — a memory.

Technology changed all that in the 20th century. Music — or its recorded artifact, at least — became a product, a thing that could be bought, sold, traded, and replayed endlessly in any context. This upended the economics of music, but our human instincts remained intact. I spend plenty of time with buds in my ears listening to recorded music, but I still get out to stand in a crowd with an audience. I sing to myself, and, yes, I play an instrument (not always well).

We'll always want to use music as part of our social fabric: to congregate at concerts and in bars, even if the sound sucks; to pass music from hand to hand (or via the Internet) as a form of social currency; to build temples where only "our kind of people" can hear music (opera houses and symphony halls); to want to know more about our favorite bards — their love lives, their clothes, their political beliefs. This betrays an eternal urge to have a larger context beyond a piece of plastic. One might say this urge is part of our genetic makeup.

These are the other words to live by:

Touring is not just promotion. Live performances used to be seen as essentially a way to publicize a new release — a means to an end, not an end in itself. Bands would go into debt in order to tour, anticipating that they'd recover their losses later through increased record sales. This, to be blunt, is all wrong. It's backward. Performing is a thing in itself, a distinct skill, different from making recordings. And for those who can do it, it's a way to make a living.

Amen, amen, amen. Isn't it widely known that George Harrison and the Beatles were the first to turn the album into an art form distinct from live performance? Having made four studio recordings in the last four years, I will say that nothing compares to the intense learning you gain via that process, in all spheres of music (songwriting, arranging, practicing, musical technique, recording and production, marketing, distribution). The missing piece? Performance.

In the last year I have steadily increased my performing. It can be frustrating at times, because there's a steep learning curve there too. I have been performing as a singer all my life, from a very young age (with my first major solo, at a show with Bobby McFerrin in a theater packed with hundreds, coming at age 11). But you can spend your whole life refining your repertoire and artistic definition. If you are lucky, you begin to perform on your own terms. You learn what works, what moves people, what gets them on their feet, what brings tears to their eyes. It's showmanship, baby, and there ain't no way to learn it but live and on the stage.