Can we imagine a system where musicians could receive monetary support for producing music? The old model was simple and worked very well for a long time, even if it only favoured a tiny minority of hugely successful artists. The talent, i.e. the artist – whether a singer/songwriter or performer, would either record a demo tape and send it to a record company or be head-hunted by studio executive – basically ‘discovered’ by a music publishing company talent scout. They were offered a deal. The record company would provide money to record an album in exchange for a large percentage of the ‘royaltys’ on the sales of the music once published. ‘Royalty’ is in fact a buzzword to make musicians feel like they were getting something valuable, when in fact the music publishing company received the lion’s share of the profits. Giving money in advance to fund the recording of an album by an unknown artist is risky business. How do we know if it will see? Does the artist have a big enough following, enough fans that would buy the album? If not, then music sales may not cover the cost of recording the album and they would make a loss. This happened in most cases.
In a few cases, for reason or another, the album sold by the bucket-load – making many multiples of profits for the company, ongoing revenue as long as the album continued to remain popular and sell copies of the LP record, cassette or CD. Building the audience was everything. Promoting the artist and the album was paramount. Maximum exposure. Interviews, touring, performing concerts in as many key places as possible, gathering fans along the way. Selling concert tickets and t-shirts, posters and other such merchandise added to the revenue stream. Incredible wealth could be amassed if the artist/performer kept coming up with the foods and the fans continued to buy the albums and go to concerts. Napster changed all that. Once music could be digitized at a small enough file size to be listened to on a computer or a portable media player like an iPod, sales of CDs began to decline. Why spend 20 bucks on a piece of plastic, when you can download the contents of the disc for free? Sales of CDs gradually went the way of the dodo – almost. There are still parts of the world where you can buy cassette tapes, so CDs will be around for another while yet. Artists and record companies (established artists – used to the constant revenue stream from music sales) were up in arms over this attack on their livelihood. The reality is that the old business model of selling music is dead. You can still buy songs and album on iTunes and similar services, you can still buy CDs but why would you when you can also download them for free? Yet still, some people do. Clearly a new model and a new system are needed.