open09 turtle

With very little music talent or technical ability these days just about anyone can produce a record. In the furture will we all make our own soundtrack for our lives? And what does this mean for 'real' musicians?

I came across this company presenting a new business model?
What are your thoughts on this... http://www.musicglue.com/

presents something interesting or is this common now?

seems to cut out the publisher? any thoughts?

It's interesting because the MusicGlue business model that Simon mentions assumes 3 major things
1. That P2P is the key driver of online music consumption. MusicGlue thus attempts to use is it positively so that up and coming artists can connect with their audience.

2. The self-sufficiency of 'unsigned' bands in their ability to create saleable quality products (recordings, merchandise, gigs etc), as Jade recognises in her post, and have the savvy and ability to market and sell them to the audience they have identified or created through the platform.

3. The band will cut out the record company/label, (which is what I think Simon meant by publisher) and will happily perform all of these functions in the pursuit of having their music heard and earning some money from it. An idea both Mushroom concepts and I seem equally wary of.

MusicGlue is certainly an interesting concept and may well be very successful over the next few years. Its assumptions are informative as it is also reflective of the current conventional wisdom of the digital music landscape. i.e. Recorded music is almost worthless the money is in live performance etc.etc. However, it is the 3 assumptions (above) that its business model is founded on that I find most interesting. And they raise two very important questions.

1. Has the digitisation of recorded music undermined its value forever? (This also relates to Jades observations about the death of the Indie record store)

2. Has digitisation meant musicians have had to become amateur producers, film makers, graphic designers, press agents, web editors, marketing gurus and entrepreneurs at the expense of being songwriters & musicians?

Actually, re. another point you mentioned earlier in the same post, about the money in live. All that's different is the ratio of live income to income from recordings. It's still all relative to status and can be misleading for new and aspiring artists who think they can give away their recordings because it'll help them sell loads of gig tickets.

If you are an artist in the extremely tall thin pointy bit at the top of the pyramid, then you're enjoying significant amounts of all the income streams available.

If you're struggling for traction in the middle somewhere, I suspect you're earning moderate amounts of as many income streams as you've got the capacity to harvest.

If you are down at the infinitely wide and continually expanding base ('The No-Tail') then you're still only getting pennies for your live work too.

In response to Dub P, I agree the term 'real musicians' is inflammatory. Maybe professional would have been a better term. However, the dividing line between amateur and professional is increasingly blurred with digital technology. This resonates with the 'Jack of All trades' idea that is hardly a new concept. Most professional musicians have portfolio careers, as Dub P demonstrates, a bit of teaching, performing, writing, recording etc. but I suppose many of the secondary skills now expected that are not primarily music specific.

So could we ask, has the access to cheap production/marketing technology to the intermittently interested amateur demystified or even diminished the notions of exceptional skills or abilities usually appropriated to or associated with professional level musicianship?

Following on from that, if as Mushroom Concepts accepts that the value of recorded music has been undermined forever and that only the top of the pyramid in pop music make significant profits from live performance, is there an argument to be made that the career professional musician is going to be a dying breed in the 21st Century?