Curious about the music industry? Find out stuff.

[Keepitclean]

Hey Bonsai, nice thread. It's answered a lot of my questions.

I've read a lot of this thread but I'm not sure if you have answered this yet. What do labels look out for when determining the marketablity of a musician?

 

[BonsaiK]

Hey Bonsai, nice thread. It's answered a lot of my questions.

I've read a lot of this thread but I'm not sure if you have answered this yet. What do labels look out for when determining the marketablity of a musician?

Well, if we're talking about marketability, we have to look at the market. Dani Filth isn't going to sell to Justin Beiber's audience or vice versa. Different markets have different things that they look for, and different artists will be pitched to different markets. Sometimes when a really promising act fails, it's because the label wasn't in touch with what that particular market wanted, or didn't market their artist appropriately. So there's no one set of things that will definitely make an artist marketable across all genres and situations.

One example - the industry is very ageist, and youth is a desired factor in a lot of genres. In pop music, generally, the younger the artist, the better. But there are situations where that's reversed. Getting someone to buy a blues record made by someone under a certain age is a struggle because there's a perception by that market that the artist hasn't "paid their dues", some well-known artists in this style didn't get decent commercial success until they were at least in their 40s. Of course, if they're really, really young, like 10 years old, they might sell a few records on novelty value, but that will dry up by the time the artist turns 18.

Another example - young females are marketed with a heavy emphasis on the body and it's no secret that sexuality is used as a way to bring attention to music and thus increase record sales. It works too... but only in moderation. When artists get too sexy, their audience will often backlash, and there's been quite a few instances where all-girl pop groups have sexed up their image a little too much in an attempt to secure the teenage boy market, but those kids don't give a fuck, they're all buying Disturbed or whatever - as far as they're concerned it's music for pre-pubescent girls. Meanwhile the real dollars behind the pre-pubescent girl audience (which is parents who buy the singles for their daughters) start to feel a little too edgy and nervous about buying something which has four girls on the cover with their boobs half hanging out of their tops, and for understandable reasons they start to think "this is actually aimed at teenage boys, this isn't for my daughter".

So yeah. It gets complicated, a lot more so than it seems on the surface. Marketing, just like playing an instrument, only seems easy when you see someone do it right.

 

[campofapproval]

why didn't that shudder to think album go platinum? also, is that whole "space reptiles run the record industry" rumor true?

 

[BonsaiK]

why didn't that shudder to think album go platinum? also, is that whole "space reptiles run the record industry" rumor true?

"Which one?" and "of courzzzze notttt, pathetic humanzzzz", respectively.

 

[campofapproval]

why didn't that shudder to think album go platinum? also, is that whole "space reptiles run the record industry" rumor true?

"Which one?" and "of courzzzze notttt, pathetic humanzzzz", respectively.

pony express record, aka the best record of 1994 (though, curiously, it has never been released on vinyl as far as i can tell. go figure.)

 

[BonsaiK]

why didn't that shudder to think album go platinum? also, is that whole "space reptiles run the record industry" rumor true?

"Which one?" and "of courzzzze notttt, pathetic humanzzzz", respectively.

pony express record, aka the best record of 1994 (though, curiously, it has never been released on vinyl as far as i can tell. go figure.)

I don't really like the album at all, personally, I don't care what critical opinion is, I just find it dull, there are other records I enjoyed a lot more in 1994, so I guess maybe a fair few other people felt as I do about it. I have no idea why it didn't do that well other than that maybe they alienated some of their older fans by leaving Dischord, going with a major label and softening their sound a bit, but failed to pick up too many new fans by essentially still playing some reasonably non-commercial music. Falling in between two stools perhaps.

 

[BonsaiK]

A few quick questions; If you have answered any of these before just tell me roughly waht page and i can just find them myself.

Is the music indistry really changing towards a more "Do it yourself", more opened up model as many would have us believe?

What are the real effects of File-Sharing on how the industry operated? What has really changed and has anything been suprising?

Is the state of pop music/ chart music really as dire creatively as many beleive?

I've answered them all before but it's quicker to answer them again than go searching, and no-one's phrased the questions quite like you have so it's probably worth addressing your questions specifically anyway.

1. A little bit. Most of the new DIY thing is bullshit, because for it to work you need an already-established name for yourself. Someone like Trent Reznor can deal completely over the Internet and that's fine, but he made a bunch of albums and distributed them via conventional methods first to build up a name for himself. Same goes for Amanda Palmer, Radiohead and many other artists embracing the DIY digital thing. These are big artists with already-established careers. Some little guy with no reputation and no name for himself hasn't got a hope in hell of getting a foothold starting out that way, so they still have to dance with the devil and sign deals with labels etc...

However, on a smaller scale, DIY is more viable than ever. If you don't care that you may only sell 10 copies it's quite liberating that literally anybody can release music now and have it heard by whoever. It's only when you try and make a living out of it, that the whole thing falls apart a bit.

2. CD sales have plummeted. Ticket prices and merchandise prices have skyrocketed as a result, because the artists and the record company both have to recoup somewhere. Those things are now way more important than ever before. If you really want to put money in your favourite artist's pocket, the best way is to go to their gig and buy their t-shirt. Because of all the above, studio-only artists simply can't get signed anymore - those acts now make fuck all money, labels won't take them on, too much of a risk. Even electronic bleep-bloop laptop bands must tour to be financially viable. On the other hand vinyl sales have stabilised and are doing quite well, and box sets/boutique packages are more common now than ever before.

3. Anyone who thinks music is in some sort of dire trouble these days simply hasn't done their research and is just mouthing off because they don't happen to like the current crop of pop stuff. Posts in this thread you can read that talk about various current elements of popular music relevant to your question:

Post 134 on page 4 discusses the history of ultra-commercial pop music in a fairly broad sense.

Post 291 and 301 on page 9 discuss the cultural context of "gangsta rap" music, one of The Escapist's favourite whipping-boys.

Post 367 on page 11 discusses another whipping-boy, Auto-tune, why it's popular, and why it's in a lot of popular music right now.

I could potentially add more detail to any of that stuff, so if reading that stuff prompts further questions for you, fire away.

 

[Ham_authority95]

2. CD sales have plummeted. Ticket prices and merchandise prices have skyrocketed as a result, because the artists and the record company both have to recoup somewhere. Those things are now way more important than ever before. If you really want to put money in your favourite artist's pocket, the best way is to go to their gig and buy their t-shirt. Because of all the above, studio-only artists simply can't get signed anymore - those acts now make fuck all money, labels won't take them on, too much of a risk. Even electronic bleep-bloop laptop bands must tour to be financially viable. On the other hand vinyl sales have stabilised and are doing quite well, and box sets/boutique packages are more common now than ever before.

What is the commercial viability of a band that only releases vinyl as their physical unit?

 

[ChaoticKraus]

1. To me it seems that different kinds of electronic dance music are having its glory moment right now. It can be heard plentily (around where i live anyways) on the radio and modern pop obviously takes its ques from the genre aswell. Is that the sound we can expect for the next couple of years? Do you think it's here to stay in the mainstream, or is it a passing trend?

2. I'm not really a metal guy so maybe the appeal is lost on me, but i can't for the life of me figure out why growling has become so popular. I guess you would be the one to ask. I can't for the life of me figure out what they are singing, and if it's intended as a "cool" vocal effect i must miss the point aswell cause it just sounds grating and annoying to me. Kind of funny when people claim that the lyrics to metal is "deep" and you can't even hear what they're supposed to be.

The few metal bands i occasionally listen to are stuff with clear vocals and instruments that actually change pitch(Alestorm, Sabaton, Nightwish). I don't really "get" the low-pitch instrumental mush and growling of something like Cannibal Corpse. Not hating, just asking.

3. You wouldn't know why youtube is full of people claiming that popular bands/artists are either Illuminati-affiliated, devil-worshipping or both? Appearently they brainwash people but if i wanted to brainwash people i would focus more on TV and blockbluster movies, those things are more general than music taste. Why has the music industry been singled out? I havent seen those comments on movie/tv related videos.

 

[campofapproval]

why didn't that shudder to think album go platinum? also, is that whole "space reptiles run the record industry" rumor true?

"Which one?" and "of courzzzze notttt, pathetic humanzzzz", respectively.

pony express record, aka the best record of 1994 (though, curiously, it has never been released on vinyl as far as i can tell. go figure.)

I don't really like the album at all, personally, I don't care what critical opinion is, I just find it dull, there are other records I enjoyed a lot more in 1994, so I guess maybe a fair few other people felt as I do about it. I have no idea why it didn't do that well other than that maybe they alienated some of their older fans by leaving Dischord, going with a major label and softening their sound a bit, but failed to pick up too many new fans by essentially still playing some reasonably non-commercial music. Falling in between two stools perhaps.

fair enough.
by the way, what do you think of this odd future wolf gang kill em all business? that's a lot of buzz for just a bunch of teenagers releasing mixtapes on blogs. now they're doing coachella and all that. also, witch house?

 

[BonsaiK]

2. CD sales have plummeted. Ticket prices and merchandise prices have skyrocketed as a result, because the artists and the record company both have to recoup somewhere. Those things are now way more important than ever before. If you really want to put money in your favourite artist's pocket, the best way is to go to their gig and buy their t-shirt. Because of all the above, studio-only artists simply can't get signed anymore - those acts now make fuck all money, labels won't take them on, too much of a risk. Even electronic bleep-bloop laptop bands must tour to be financially viable. On the other hand vinyl sales have stabilised and are doing quite well, and box sets/boutique packages are more common now than ever before.

What is the commercial viability of a band that only releases vinyl as their physical unit?

None unless they're making some form of electronic dance music. Vinyl's quite expensive to make anyway, so few bands do only-vinyl pressings in anything other than very short runs.

 

[BonsaiK]

1. To me it seems that different kinds of electronic dance music are having its glory moment right now. It can be heard plentily (around where i live anyways) on the radio and modern pop obviously takes its ques from the genre aswell. Is that the sound we can expect for the next couple of years? Do you think it's here to stay in the mainstream, or is it a passing trend?

2. I'm not really a metal guy so maybe the appeal is lost on me, but i can't for the life of me figure out why growling has become so popular. I guess you would be the one to ask. I can't for the life of me figure out what they are singing, and if it's intended as a "cool" vocal effect i must miss the point aswell cause it just sounds grating and annoying to me. Kind of funny when people claim that the lyrics to metal is "deep" and you can't even hear what they're supposed to be.

The few metal bands i occasionally listen to are stuff with clear vocals and instruments that actually change pitch(Alestorm, Sabaton, Nightwish). I don't really "get" the low-pitch instrumental mush and growling of something like Cannibal Corpse. Not hating, just asking.

3. You wouldn't know why youtube is full of people claiming that popular bands/artists are either Illuminati-affiliated, devil-worshipping or both? Appearently they brainwash people but if i wanted to brainwash people i would focus more on TV and blockbluster movies, those things are more general than music taste. Why has the music industry been singled out? I havent seen those comments on movie/tv related videos.

1. Now that the means to create it has been invented and refined somewhat from its original form, it would be impossible to put that particular genie back in the box. Electronic dance music is here to stay. The popular genres will certainly change and mutate over time (the dubstep people are listening to now will sound a lot different in 15 years time, just like today's dancefloor techno sound very different to early 90's rave music) but at no point is there going to be a mass movement away from electronic generation of beats. People like it because it's easy to create, anybody with a creative idea can have a go at it and get a good result if they are musically sharp without the need for years of painstaking un-fun practice, and the means to do it is readily available and more convenient than dragging drum kits around. In this sense electronic music is analogous to punk music as they both embody the same "ideas are more important than technicality of execution" spirit. Physical drums and acoustic music will always have its place, and these acts certainly have an advantage in a live setting, but electronic music isn't going anywhere.

2. The growling Cannibal Corpse style vocal delivery didn't just happen, it kind of evolved. In the early-mid 80s as metal was developing and changing very fast, there was definitely friendly competition between different bands to see who could be "heavier" than the competition. Venom were one of the first "non-melodic vocals" type of bands and people heard that at the time and were blown away by the heaviness - however in retrospect, those early Venom albums sound dated and not really that heavy at all. That's because other musicians heard Venom and went "if we could go heavier than that we'd be awesome". One way to get heavier music is to make it more focused on rhythm, and one way to make people focus more on rhythm is to remove things other than rhythm (such as melody) so the music comes across as primarily rhythm-based. By the 1990s a standard guttural growl had evolved as "the most heavy vocal style (TM)" for British and American death metal bands. In the meantime Scandinavians had other ideas and favoured a different type of growl which became standard for the black metal scene, this also evolved from early exponents, not just Venom but Bathory and others with a similar (mostly) friendly rivalry going on between bands. But the answer to your question is that you're supposed to be enjoying the rhythmic aspect of the vocals, not the melody. In a sense, this makes death/black metal and metalcore the metalhead's equivalent of rap music, and metal and rap are equivalent on a great deal of levels (sounds like shit when combined though).

I wouldn't say the lyrics to metal is deeper than anything else, they just touch on different subject matter. You can have a "deep" love song and a "shallow" love song, you can also have a "deep" song about death, war, violence and destruction or a "shallow" one. And who says the "deep" one is better anyway? I think that sometimes it's fine to enjoy things at face-value rather than trying to get all arty and pretentious.

3. Music fans and conspiracy theorists both have a lot of time on their hands, so sometimes their babble crosses paths, that's all. Some artists know this and deliberately play into the speculation of fans for some free publicity (the generation of mystique around your group is a good way to get mentioned on speculative blogs etc, see the Witch House post I'm about to make below) and others genuinely believe it also. Musicians aren't always the most educated bunch and don't always make sensible decisions about their ideology - I guess that's why they're musicians, not politicians. You don't see people actually in politics talking about that kind of stuff and the real reason why is not some cover-up, but because those people actually know the whole boring, uninteresting truth about how the world does actually work because they deal with it every day, so they don't feel the need to dribble on about some nonsense.

 

[BonsaiK]

what do you think of this odd future wolf gang kill em all business? that's a lot of buzz for just a bunch of teenagers releasing mixtapes on blogs. now they're doing coachella and all that. also, witch house?

OFWG don't really excite me much. They're got some really sharp lyrical delivery but the music behind it is pretty meh. In fact a lot of American rap has this problem right now (rap in my country has the opposite problem - great beats almost across the board but almost no-one can fucking rap). I got bored of TR-808s and that whole sound in the late 80s when NWA was doing it, maybe it sounds fresh to kids these days, I dunno. Someone's digging it so who am I to judge?

Witch House have realised that people like a bit of mystique, and they just love to speculate on bullshit. (If you want proof, google your favourite industrial band and put the word "nazis" at the end). They also realise that this mystique wears off once you know everything about an artist. They're not the first people to have tried such stuff, but they're doing okay at creating interest with minimal effort because once you strip away all the mystique fairy-floss the music is actually quite well put-together.

 

[BonsaiK]

Is Dream Theater a good band? Not really a proper question.

Maybe.

That's not really a proper answer.

 

[xedi]

In a sense, this makes death/black metal and metalcore the metalhead's equivalent of rap music, and metal and rap are equivalent on a great deal of levels (sounds like shit when combined though).

I don't agree when it comes down to metalcore (and maybe black metal, but I am not too knowledgeable regarding that genre). Metalcore has more emphasis on screams and bands like sikth,underoath or confide have quite melodic and dynamic screaming.

I personally enjoy harsh vocal not so much because of the rhythm aspect, but if used right (or rather to my liking ), because they make the experience more intense in a melodramatic sense. However, I am not much into constant growls as used in death metal, so my tastes are probably irrelevant to the original question.

Since we are talking already about metalcore I would like to ask you also a question: Will metalcore die like nu-metal or rather stay in some form as one of the numerous metal genres?

The reason I ask is following: At least since 2006 people are complaining that metalcore is oversaturated (you mentioned it, too, I believe) and nobody will listen to it soon, since it is always the same stereotypical sound.

Now In 2011 I don't think that happened. If we look at the latest albums from August burns Red, Bring Me the Horizon or Underoath I don't see any stagnation or oversaturation. ABR have now a progressive touch, BMTH got quite experimental with symphonic elements and Underoath, well, they had always their unique sound.

Of course I do not have industry insides and maybe I am just biased because of my tastes, since ABR and BMTH blew me quite aways and surprised me with their latest albums. However, they seem to do financially well, too, so it is hard for me to believe that metalcore is dead or will be soon. Probably rather change like all genres do.

I also think the situation is analogue to post-hardcore, bands like Broadway or PM Today are further progressing the genre.

A dead genre IMO would be nu-metal, since not even nu-metal fans are listening to it anymore, however Limp Bizkit will release a new album soon. Do you think it is too soon or is the world ready for a nu-metal revival?

And one last question: I am a huge progressive metal/rock fan so it feels for me like forever waiting for a new Tool album. In case you have any info or opinion: When do you expect it to be released?

Thanks a lot for all the long answers you are giving us, it is an incredibly interesting read.

 

[BonsaiK]

Wow erm... thankyou for your comprehensive and well formatted reply it is very much apprecitated = ) . So things in terms of studio are THAT dire are they? Wow i didn't quite realise we had got to that stage. I still buy a lot of albums albums, CDs at that, but i do also tend not to buy much merch.

Ok i more open question, how do YOU think the music industry could make studio acts viable again? How can things be improved out there?

If you do decide to buy merch, buy it at gigs. Don't buy it anywhere else.

The only way the music industry could make studio acts viable in the future is to eliminate piracy. I can't see that happening, so I think that it's safe to say that things are not going to get better in the forseeable future.

 

[campofapproval]

Wow erm... thankyou for your comprehensive and well formatted reply it is very much apprecitated = ) . So things in terms of studio are THAT dire are they? Wow i didn't quite realise we had got to that stage. I still buy a lot of albums albums, CDs at that, but i do also tend not to buy much merch.

Ok i more open question, how do YOU think the music industry could make studio acts viable again? How can things be improved out there?

If you do decide to buy merch, buy it at gigs. Don't buy it anywhere else.

The only way the music industry could make studio acts viable in the future is to eliminate piracy. I can't see that happening, so I think that it's safe to say that things are not going to get better in the forseeable future.

the press has covered how the riaa has spent tens of millions (at least) going after file-sharers and the like with little to show for it ($60-some million from '06-'08, with a little more than $1 million in return.) you think this is due to industry execs choosing to throw money down a black hole, or do you think this is something labels would be doing at the requests of their shareholders and outside pressures?