Making Music Pay

Date: 14/5/2009

Its crystal clear to everyone apart from the RIAA and other dinosaurs that music sharing is completely endemic across the connected part of the Planet and is utterly unstoppable despite their best efforts to sue Internet Service Providers and a few random individuals they suspect of file sharing. So if fewer and fewer people pay to access recorded music (and increasingly films and video) how can musicians get paid for their work?

I think that the record labels of today are largely dead and buried even if they refuse to acknowledge it yet and that in the future, the Internet and mobile phone in particular will increasingly directly connect a band to their fans. Now digital media has obviously changed the entire landscape, and it is obvious to all there is simply no real future for selling bits of plastic as music recordings in retail outlets any more.  

So could a return to a form of mass patronage be the answer?

In the dark and distant past, artists were given commissions by patrons to produce a particular piece of work such as a piece of music, painting or sculpture that was then viewed by all largely for free.  The point was for the patron to gain kudos by being seen to sponsor the arts and as a peer leader in their particular community.  In some cases richer patrons "owned" a particular artist who was paid to develop work for them alone. Popular music as such was played by musicians who were paid by their audience or employer for playing "live".

The first example of mass consumerism for music I can think of would have been in the 19th Century when sheet music was sold by the song for (mainly middle class) people to take home and play themselves and their friends for entertainment. Paying for individual items of music only came into being when recordings could be sold on wax cylinder or later as records from the 1880's onwards. Services such as MySpace, FaceBook and others have enabled many performers to enter into a "dialogue" of sorts with their fans, where they can keep fans up to date with their progress, publicise gigs, and showcase new music and videos, many of which can then be bought online either directly or via the all-conquering iTunes.  However, huge numbers of consumers simply search for the tracks online and download them for free via various file sharing sites which then deprives the musician(s) of their share of any potential revenues.

We at Mi-Pay did a lot of work with the MVNO operator Blyk in the early days of their development.  One of the interesting things they did was to conduct a survey asking their 200,000 16-24 year olds in the UK whether they would pay a small fee to get access to their favourite performers music first or wait and get it for free.  The surprising answer was that the majority were happy to pay to receive certain tracks on their phones and PC's some time ahead of general release so that they can become viewed as a "peer-leader" amongst their friends.

So rather than paying for music that is already out there, will the new generation of media consumers bypass record labels to act as patrons, directly "sponsoring" their favourite bands to make music for them and get it first, before then distributing it to their friends for free as a means of increasing the bands reach to new consumers, a proportion of which will become paying patrons and so on.....

Simon

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