Are MP3 Web Sites Unfair to Indie Artists?

dafunn writes "CNN is running a story [from Salon] about how times have changed, but not really. The new breed of music distributors, the online mp3 sites, are still pulling the same old 'screw the artist' tricks..." This article sure paints a bleak picture. Anyone have any personal experience from the band/artist perpective you'd like to share?

Re:Seriously now

And this is OK?

Too often do I hear "Well, they're in the business of making money" as justification for ripping people off. Because you make a buck off of it does *not* mean it's OK to rip off small-time bands.

That said, I think it's surprising that no one's actually fufilled the potential for an online cooperative music label. Instead of paying the bands for the CDs they sell, why not give the bands 85% of mp3 sales and use the 15% to run the site?

You could offer the bands all the marketing info, let them keep the copyright to all their stuff, and then sign the really popular ones with your traditional music label.

According to the article, there'd be a fairly large market for this kind of service. Why sign up with mp3.com when you can sign up with music-coop.com (or whatever) and get a much better deal?

What amazing things you could do if you didn't rip your fellow humans off. But hey... if you're in the business of making money...

This idea, BTW, isn't really mine, nor is it special. If you have the motivation to carry through with it, please do. I've got my own gig going, so I'm not likely to go from programmer to music-industry-guerilla.

here's an indie label

I think the major online music portals are of course going to "screw the artist". That attitude is a natural extension of the blatant commercialism that these companies must exhibit in order to satisfy their investors. When a common goes public the ethics/motives of the investors supplant those of the founders. Let's just hope that doesn't happen to /. someday. (Though some might argue it has already)

Anyway, if you are looking for a great indie "label" where the artists are the MAIN attraction, check out NoType [notype.com]

Anybody with a mixer?

HA! ;P

I mean, go ahead, but that's very much like saying "Anyone with a 486 and Red Hat can write the next Q3test and do serious work on the kernel". To some extent it's the equipment...

(here's a tip just for slashdotters: you can take a large sheet of plexiglass or better yet a big sheet of steel suspended from springs (plate reverb) and cut a little hole in the middle just big enough to expose the membrane of a cheap radio shack electret condenser mic (to really win you need to trim away the aluminum shielding the membrane and possibly cover the exposed bit with a little spot of windscreen) to produce a very large condenser PZM mic that will do vocals more clearly than junkware sm58s due to the lack of comb filtering effects- also, the resulting apparent distance of the sound is a good foot or two closer than the actual distance)

Now. Seemed to be a lot going on in that hack, wasn't there? Why would I, a soundengineer hacker with his own music, be giving away secrets like that?

Because that WASN'T enough. It'd help. But if you don't know how to make cables that will get as much of your signal to the A/D converters as possible... if you make the mistake of doing a lot of destructive digital changes on your data (it can be better to re-digitize a track than to normalize it over a simple gain change)... if you're using a crap digital mixer working in only 16 bits and not dithering properly, it's not going to be enough! You'll need help.

This is normal for any skilled profession, craft, or art. You wouldn't go out and get some random guy off the street for your drummer- it's no different for the sound engineer. The difference is, the audio geeks and equipment tweekers and snotty audiophile types now have a market value- and there are just as many of them out there as there are unsigned musicians.

Not everybody gets to be George Piros or Wilma Cozart or even Bob Ludwig or (shudder) Bob Clearmountain (if you don't know those names you're not a sound engineer geek. Show of hands? I bet some slashdotters know _all_ of them and why I shuddered at Clearmountain ;) ) but it's just the same as linux hacking- there are countless things to learn, it's a tremendously deep field, and you _can_ put together a 'garage' operation that competes with the big boys just the same as Linux competes with Windows NT.

It might involve a lot of geeky work. My mixing board had over 100$ of capacitors alone put into it. Not wizzy 'audiophile' caps of matching values- I increased values radically, now my board will put out bass on the order of 2 hz >:) there are most definitely audio hacks that can be done with equipment, it's a whole subculture.

I guess the long and the short of it is, at home with your PC or Mac you can _top_ the results of your average industry studio- if you're really willing to spend some years being a mad scientist audio hacker, or know someone who is. I always figure, I've been doing it for nearly 20 years, I can afford to give away everything and I'll still top ya in execution ;) so, here's a list of things to do/use/remember...

• Get serious monitoring. Learn how to place speakers in the right places from audiophiles. Get classical music or classic rock sounding great over the system- the stuff that requires the system to reproduce a soundspace (not synthesise one tho!)
• If you're using bass reflex speakers, stuff a sock in the ports. To mix very deep bass you've gotta be able to hear it. A sock will also provide resistive damping. You can enjoy port thunder later, now you need to hear what's actually happening.
• If you're using speaker wire try cutting the ends off AC extension cords (heavy duty indoor) and using those. If you're using those, try separating them all the way down into two individual wires, getting rid of capacitance effects. Crude but effective in getting more control of your highs.
• Litz wire is better than stranded or solidcore wire at transmitting analog audio in such a way that it digitizes nicely. You can make amazing cables from using all the wires in outdoor phone cable (four little wires rattling around loose in a big plastic sheath) because they'll work as sorta-litzwire and any shielding around the wire has a serious air gap for zilch capacitance over even long runs.
• Running cheap digital multitrack (like an old ADAT) into a reasonably decent analog mixer and then digitizing the result 'dithers' better than crap digital mixing software. (this is actually my next audio move- ADAT used in a hopped-up analog-uber-alles studio)
• Pitch shifting is destructive. Digital EQ is destructive. Normalizing is destructive. As with something like JPEG or MP3 these are cumulative. Don't ever edit things around like mad without backup- keep master digital copies in case you want to do a neatly executed series of digital edits on a clean copy. Screw up on this one, and your tracks will have all the life and interest of Radio Shack Casiotone demo tunes. Don't get track rot.
• Typically you can only afford to have a few sounds be 'big' or glossy or fancy- different genres approach this in different ways. Some great MODs have all the sounds big, but there's only about 2 or 3 tracks going at any one time! Conversely, some great rock mixes have, for instance, really big guitar sounds against a simple direct, dense bass tone without a lot of detail, and a very 'dry' drum tone. Even John Bonham's Led Zeppelin drum tone tended to be pretty 'dry': it just tended to sustain. When it was really wet and dense, the _guitar_ tended to be dry.
• Drum tones only sound right in context. You'll only hear what a bassdrum is doing when coupled with a bass guitar- the weight of it can be way more than you expected combined with the bass's transient attack. A snare can sound clear but boring until it's in context and sounds great- if you add stuff to make the unaccompanied snare sound hot and exciting, when it's in context you might lose most of the actual impact because everything gets muddy and confused. Think of the backbeat as a composite of drums and instruments- as if the guitar or whatever is _part_ of the snaredrum. Mix it as such.
• Never mix over headphones. Any headphones. It's a totally different presentation from speakers- your body needs to feel the sounds (even at a low volume, subliminally). Headphones are for tracking not for mixing over.
• Build monster speakers if you want to make club or house or rock music. You need to monitor over something comparable to what you'll be played on, only more accurate. I run towers with 12" 10" 8" and 6.5" woofers for (infinite baffle) bassbins. No one resonance dominates and the low end is understandably huge when required. Makes it easier to mix really serious bass content, you can hear exactly what it's doing. I also make my own tweeter elements. Audio geekiness is fun :) also, using them as computer speakers makes games and such more fun. Big explosions, and I've occasionally encountered stuff like this one alpha-quality game in which the guy had made the sounds carry _major_ subsonic rumble for the explosions. Very neat.
• Geek out on it. It doesn't take that much money, you just end up very well known at Radio Shack and very familiar with what you can get from MCM, Mouser catalogs et al. It's kind of like Linux in a way- you can DIY, and even beat hell out of the industry's approach in certain areas.

Good luck!

More info

If any musicians out there want some help avoiding getting screwed, I suggest getting "Music Law: How to Run Your Band's Business" by Nolo Press. There is a lot of great info in there that can help you avoid getting taken advantage of by anyone. You just need to know how to protect yourself. It is proving to be valuble information to my own band.

Cooperative For Artists

It seems to me that the same model that is used by a lot of farmers - establishment of a cooperative - would benefit unrecognized artists considerably.

The commercial music does not serve most artists well; we can certainly take that for a fact. Some artists hit it big, but the vast majority do not get fair recognition for their work.

In the days of the internet we have the establishment of a new means of reaching lots of people with a far less investment of capital than was previously required. It is quite possible to bootstrap oneself into national recognition ala /.

Farmers have long recognized that a single farm cannot gain direct access to distribution channels because of capital and volume requirements. However, by forming a cooperative they are able to provide enough capital and volume to in fact 'cut out the middleman'. Artists now have the same opportunity to take matters into their own hands. Sites like mp3.com are obviously using the same business model that the conventional music industry does, but via a new distribution channel. This business model does not serve the needs of most artists.

I believe that the correct approach would be the establishement of a artist's cooperative designed to use the internet as a distribution medium. The business philosophy could be taken from examination of farmer's cooperatives, and the distribution model from examination of several successful low-capital or bootstrapped internet startups.

Different outlook

I guess I have a different take on all this. I've uploaded some of my bands songs to mp3.com and I've been happy. No, I haven't made any money to speak of, but that wasn't my intent.
I figured I do so my friends can download some songs and maybe some new people will here them. I never looked at mp3.com as a way to make a living.

90% of what is on mp3.com is crap anyway (my stuff probably falls into that, but hey, it's for fun). Lots of it is just dance mixes and synth tunes that some kid programmed into a shareware MIDI sequencer. You really have to search for the gems, the actual bands that put together some good songs.

Bottom line, if people are encoding mp3's with the hope of "going big time" it's probably not going to happen. Despite the hype, mp3.com (and others) are just places to to put music so people can find them, they are NOT a record label.
If they didn't pay out AT ALL, I'm sure that people would still be uploading songs.

Like open source coding, most of us are just doing it for fun and to see what we can do, not money.

Finkployd

MP3s have made me go out and get cds...

I have downloaded tuns of mp3 files and more often than not i have gone to a music store and bought the cd from the band it came from. To have a quick and dirty way to listen when I am not around my computer. Yes, I do have a CDR drive but not much time from work to stop and burn CDs. I have discovered tuns of new bands and styles that I never would have know about if I did not hear the MP3 first.

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one. -Thomas Carlyle

Tales from an indie... (warning : bleak)

We had a 'thriving' local band.. we could sometimes do 4 gigs a month, and had a fairly good following. We had pressed our own CDs, and could sell a few, but we wanted the almighty exposure. We figured, hey, if more people heard our work, we could sell lots more CDs

So we signed up with a 'service' (that will rename nameless as long as I remain named). Mistake.

Here's the picture: we paid for top billing for a week, and had over 6,000 downloads. One of our songs was on a 'sampler' CD. Great, right?

Nope. we made exactly $0 from all this, and only sold 43 CDs. The profit we were paid lost us money over OUR costs to press each CD (our profit was about $.45 per CD, had we sold them all at that rate. But since we didn't we lost lots of money on the CDs we pressed in anticipation)

We were not told anything about the demographics of the audience downloading our CDs (I'm sure 'service' sold that information to someone else, though), and we made no money. We now have two songs that we can not ever put on CDs (at least we can play them live.) that are not sold through the 'service', and life generally sucks.

Now, even though we had a small local following, we are broken up. Could we have been contenders had we sticked it out? Probably not, but who knows... if a traditional label had signed us, we would certainly have sold more, made more, and still be playing...

Moral of the story: The record industry screws artists. The e-music industry is much worse, however, and should be avoided at all costs. Hell, I'd rather have had our mp3s pirated.

the open source experience

One of the few things I found impressive about Win98SE was the cool music that played when I first booted it after installing it. Also, games like Diablo, Rainbow Six, and Starcraft (just to name few) use music to enhance your experience.

My point is that there is a lot of room for music in the "open source experience." Alot of musicians could gain exposure if their music was distributed with open source software. The music could be part of the installation program, the documentation, or even the app itself.

There is a lot of effort made to make open source software visually appealing (see e.themes.org [themes.org].) But there is another sense to be tapped.

Adding music may seem like useless overhead, but is it really if it adds another dimension to the experience of using your software? Bandwidth will continue to open up and after a while adding a couple tunes and musical cues to your tarball/rpm won't make a significant difference.

If you find an unsigned band you like on mp3.com, e-mail them, see if they want to be involved in your project. Maybe you can work something out. Or, if you're a musician, find an open source project that interests you and offer to work with them. If the project takes off, then everyone benefits. If not, nothing really has been lost.

Just a thought...

numb

Wanted: public domain music for software

No, not vocal-filled rock tracks, just mood-inspiring MIDIs and MP3s that people can use in their software. I remember working on a couple amateur games a while back where eager programmers were a dime a dozen, but finding inspiring background music was next to impossible. The World Forge [worldforge.org] project currently has some music up, for instance, but not as much as they'll need.

The nice thing about public domain (or freely redistributable, anyway) music is even if a software project using it fails, and code written for it becomes useless, all the music is pretty much 100% salvageable.

What's so funny about peace love and free distro

From the article: .... Of course, many of these artists are "weekend warriors," whose music might have been heard by few people other than their hometown buddies before getting some exposure through an online distributor.

The article does not talk about any artist that has been harmed by this agreement.

Recently, I had buisness in Orlando, and was packing for my trip the next morning. I went to MP3.com to download some songs for the plane ride, and I found an artist that I kinda liked. As it turns out, the band was from the town I was visiting the next morning.

[click] over to the bands home page . .[click] over to there schedual [click] over to the bars home page [click] over to a mapquest link to get directions, and boom . . I'm there! I'm seeing them live!

Now I ask you, where else can a band attract over-weight white guys from another time zone to come to a club, buy some drinks, and pick up a CD to take home?

To not get screwed, don't sign with a pimp

This kind of report doesn't surprise me in the slightest. It was obvious that things were going in the wrong direction with MP3.COM as soon as details of their contractual arrangements emerged, because instead of merely offering a distribution system for bands, they were putting themselves on the same throne and in the same position of strength as the big studios.

The revolutionary thing about Internet distribution of music isn't that there are new institutions to replace the old. It is that there are no cartels nor power brokers at all, so that each band can reach out to its audience on an equal footing, without spending much money, and without signing rights away to anyone.

As has been pointed out, it verges on the trivial nowadays for a band to set up its own website and marketing machinery, and if they don't have the tech ability or desire to do it then there are countless others that will be glad to help for a very small fee.

You don't need MP3.COM guys! Go it alone, and be your own masters.

"The artists .. lack business savvy"

Just how much business savvy does it really take to understand that by putting music on the site, you grant the site's maintainers free distribution rights?

I just took a look at mp3.com's Submission Agreement (conveniently mirrored here [xoom.com]), and it is fairly direct about what you're agreeing to. The meat is all in the first part, and it's not overly long.

If people submitting to the site are so blinded by the dollar signs in their eyes that they can't read the agreement before clicking "I agree", it's a problem that no amount of education will fix.

The people who have posted (for the most part) already disagree with the idea that the sites are ripping off the artists. I personally think that with the huge amount of crap on those sites, half a CD per artist is an incredibly high rate of sales. What do I know, you say? Tell me, then.

------

Well that kind of sucks

I just bought a couple of CDs on mp3.com. But out of 6 bands I listened to in the goth rock genre, only one was what I was looking for, so I can believe those numbers. CNN gave us an average per artist, how much did the top grossing artist make? As with anything, the good bands are going to rise to the top.

CNN says an artist can create his own web site for about $20 a month, but if they're going to be selling CD's and accepting credit cards, it's going to cost considerably more. If all you want to do is promote your band, a $20 a month web site might be OK, but if you do things like goat sacrifices on stage you might want to pick an ISP that won't bow to pressure from the FBI, religious nuts and assorted other riff-raff...

Another potential issue of running your own site is that you lose the one-stop shopping that sites like MP3.com gives you. Although I suppose a yahoo category or something similar would get pretty close.

The Baptist Death Ray speaks

I've had a page on MP3.com for a while (since early this year) and more recently on AMP3.com. They both have a lot of problems, but one has more advantages than the other.

MP3.com, before it went public, talked big. The president would talk about how MP3.com was a revolution in music against the big industry players. He'd talk about how they were breaking the old model and giving artists a chance to be heard directly. And he implied, heavily, that people would be able to make a living using their D.A.M. CD system.

He was wrong on all counts -- but it's still useful, to a certain extent.

MP3.com talked a big game about being for indie artists but at the same time it was doing all sorts of favors for the "big name" artists who would grace their site. That's understandible, it's a business decision, but they wouldn't acknowledge or even mention the contradiction.

They had (and still have, as far as I know) some real problems with the way they sold and made the artists web CD's, but weren't interested in fixing them quickly or even acknowledging them. And so the primary way for artists to make money on their site was very, very underutilized.

It's quite impossible for someone to wander in and notice your band... because there are thousands and thousands and thousands of artists on that site, and you're just one.

Still, MP3.com is useful, because your music is out there.

AMP3.com has taken a somewhat different model. They tack advertisements to the front of your MP3s and you get five cents a download. I made $25.00 last month.

AMP3.com isn't perfect either, and they're sometimes slow to respond to artists demands. They're a bit disorganized (they'll start up new ideas, contests, and that kind of stuff and have to postpone them halfway through because they didn't cover all their bases) but as far as I can tell they're following through on their core promise -- pay the artist.

Some people might get very angry that AMP3.com is putting commercials (five second commercials) at the start of all the MP3 files on that site, but really -- it's five seconds, you don't pay for the MP3s, and the artist gets five cents every download. That's not a bad model, as far as it goes.

There are lots of other sites out there. MusicBuilder.com has a very nice CD-making program, even Rollingstone.com has MP3's on line. MP3.com and AMP3.com are the ones I have the most experience with, though.

The Baptist Death Ray
http://www.mp3.com/baptistdeathray
http://baptistdeathray.amp3.net
http://www.baptistdeathray.com

Our friends at IBM may have a solution

IBM's been mumbling about micropayments lately, that might just fit the bill. You don't want to bill a bunch of $.50 charges to your credit card, after all. You'd have to put some logic into this to catch things like downloads that died and other assorted glitches. Also, I find the "Free samples" on MP3.com very handy in determining whose CDs I'm buying.