This model really works across the board, and especially regarding the movies. In that 'industry,' when I started to hear movies constantly referred to as product or content, I got a bad feeling in my stomach. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who really didn't give a shit about movies (they really had no serious interest), they just thought it would be cool to work in that business. Most of these people would have been as happy selling and marketing Frisbees, for all I know. They could rarely sit through screenings, and were always 'multi-tasking' when watching a 'new product' on DVD. I loved asking them about a movie, what they thought of a certain scene, and drew mainly blank faces. It became painful to work with these people, because day in and day out, they just didn't care. No wonder the film industry that became a business is now even a shadow of those origins.
This is applicable in so many areas I had to bookmark the article.
Reminds me of the James Bond dispute between Barbara Broccoli and Amazon. Broccoli was (reportedly) visibly irked when someone at Amazon called Bond films "content".
That chart is brilliant, and applies to every industry. Just substitute the word employee for creators or artists. Charting the rot beneath all business these days. When companies exist solely to reward investors, you get the red side instead of the green.
I helped run a record company (Prez & lead A&R in a Contemporary Christian and Gospel music company) from
1976-1996. Insofar as I know, we always worked diligently to keep ourselves, our attitudes and our behaviors in the green, rather than the magenta, column.
Some of the world's greatest musicians were discovered by visionary, passionate music fans who used their resources to produce concerts and recordings that are legendary and served to define important aspects of Western culture. I'm speaking of people such as John Hammond, Norman Granz and George Wein, who are a few who come to mind off the top of my head.
And at this point in my 50+year career, if someone approaches me with a deal and they're not a visionary passionate fan first and foremost, then forget it.
I work in and teach about the music business, and I find this chart to be, if rhetorically clever, facile, superficial, obsolete-minded, and ultimately wrong. It bespeaks a "let's bring back the good old days" mindset that ignores the way the industry is today, i.e., overwhelmingly dominated by streaming, which is just plain complicated.
Musical creators need to get paid. To do this these days, they need entities to "manage IP" for them. They need people who understand that "music" is actually not a very useful term on its own but is shorthand for an amalgam of different types of "content" (works, lyrics, performances, sound recordings, etc.). To do this properly these entities have to invest in "data centers," or more likely these days, rent them from big companies based in "cities with great tech" so that they can "save costs." They need, therefore, to be "administrators." The industry is full of such entities that do what they do because they are passionate about getting musicians paid what they deserve (though yes there are also entities that do it out of greed, fraud, exploitation, good initial intentions run amok, and so on).
The industry can't function without such entities. The illusion of not needing them is one that many songwriters and music publishers held well into the streaming era, with their blinkered attitudes of "I don't care about all this data stuff, I just need to get paid." I can list several such entities that got into doing this because they want to help musicians get paid. Companies like Songtrust and TuneRegistry. Various indie digital music distributors. Bandcamp. The Mechanical Licensing Collective brought about by the Music Modernization Act (a nonprofit), which has done more to educate songwriters and publishers about the need for good data management than any other organization in history.
I just came from the United Arab Emirates where I participated in WIPO-organized workshops about this stuff, where the audience was a combination of indie musicians and local business people and government officials. The UAE just launched its first collective management organization for music, EMRA (Emirates Music Rights Association). Once it gets up and running, it will "administrate" data about various forms of music "content," using "data centers," to make it so that Emirati musicians can get more money and more opportunities locally instead of leaving it to external CMOs and multinationals to sort out payments (or not). When EMRA brags, it will talk not about "profits" (EMRA is a nonprofit) but about how its activities are fostering the local creative scene and keeping money in the UAE that would otherwise evaporate out to foreign multinationals or disappear entirely. And they will create jobs by employing people locally to get this all done, in addition to the "data centers" they will need to run.
Our job at the workshops was, in part, to get creators to realize the importance of these functions, what they do, and what happens when they don't exist. It's hard for everyone to wrap their heads around the stultifying amount of detail that has to be in place for a creator to get paid whenever someone streams their music, but it's necessary.
You clearly understand how the industry has changed due to digitalization and streaming. My son is a music curator and promoter who started at the dawn of Youtube and was influential in amplifying little known artists and establishing a pay structure that prioritized artists. He upended a traditional system that was slow to recognize how the music creation and delivery system had changed.
Razor sharp slicing device. It charts the demise of publishing over the past 25 years. I started when publishers and editors engaged in deep and intense discussions about books and the aim was to nurture talent. Now instead of that, meetings are staffed by accountants, and Royalties and Copyright have been replaced by ‘fees’, assessed by meaningless measures like word counts or pages of content. So sad.
“Trust” people to be people. You know like dogs know. Some people don’t pass the sniff test. Suits (even though they usually don’t wear suits) are one breed. Your producer, requires a more intimate “trust”. You have to look thru the studio glass and trust the guy looking back will shepherd you to your best performance. Always hated the word “content” but considering all the tracks produced by drag and drop, it’s kinda accurate. A tech reliant Dj might migrate to a different locale than a jazz trio, or you can produce a viral video from a forest ala Oliver Anthony and bypass all these rules. Have faith, press “play” and hope it moves people.
With the digital age, all things changed. My music began being called "product." That wasn't good. My music is at ronhamilton.bandcamp.com - I like Bandcamp and have heard you speak of them. I learn a lot from your writing, Ted. Thank you.
Something very much like this is happening in the translation industry, where agencies have merged and merged into mammoth blobs listed on the stock exchanges and venture capital is heavily involved. Many agencies and clients lost sight decades ago of the fact that there is a living piece of meat on the other end of the transaction that has to be kept alive, so rates are being pushed down below subsistence level in many cases. They don't get quality that way, but apparently they get profits. It all stems from a failure to understand translators as providing quality communication and a misunderstanding of translation as widget production.
And it's very common now for translation companies to address translators as "Dear resource".
Don't think for a second that musicians can't be among the villains. Decades ago, I saw Elton John on TV call his songs "product". It could have been "content", but I think he said "product".
An older word for the same idea. A few years ago, I saw a documentary on the Bangles and how they broke up in 1990. The record company by that point wasn't interested in their talent and obvious synergy as a band. They wanted to push "product," and they perceived Susanna Hoffs as the main "product." They pushed her to the exclusion of the other members, alienating them, and causing the band to break up. Instead of "super-enhanced Bangles," they got "no Bangles."
(I should hasten to add that Hoffs is a very talented and nice person. I met her once on a solo tour. I don't think at the time she or anyone else quite realized what the record company was doing.)
This model really works across the board, and especially regarding the movies. In that 'industry,' when I started to hear movies constantly referred to as product or content, I got a bad feeling in my stomach. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who really didn't give a shit about movies (they really had no serious interest), they just thought it would be cool to work in that business. Most of these people would have been as happy selling and marketing Frisbees, for all I know. They could rarely sit through screenings, and were always 'multi-tasking' when watching a 'new product' on DVD. I loved asking them about a movie, what they thought of a certain scene, and drew mainly blank faces. It became painful to work with these people, because day in and day out, they just didn't care. No wonder the film industry that became a business is now even a shadow of those origins.
This is applicable in so many areas I had to bookmark the article.
Reminds me of the James Bond dispute between Barbara Broccoli and Amazon. Broccoli was (reportedly) visibly irked when someone at Amazon called Bond films "content".
The greatest trick that the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that content is the same as art.
That chart is brilliant, and applies to every industry. Just substitute the word employee for creators or artists. Charting the rot beneath all business these days. When companies exist solely to reward investors, you get the red side instead of the green.
I helped run a record company (Prez & lead A&R in a Contemporary Christian and Gospel music company) from
1976-1996. Insofar as I know, we always worked diligently to keep ourselves, our attitudes and our behaviors in the green, rather than the magenta, column.
I digitized my old Star Song Records cassettes and still listen to those songs. Thanks for keeping it in the green!
Wow! Thanks so much for that. It was all joy for me - a very blessed season~
Some of the world's greatest musicians were discovered by visionary, passionate music fans who used their resources to produce concerts and recordings that are legendary and served to define important aspects of Western culture. I'm speaking of people such as John Hammond, Norman Granz and George Wein, who are a few who come to mind off the top of my head.
And at this point in my 50+year career, if someone approaches me with a deal and they're not a visionary passionate fan first and foremost, then forget it.
Are you sure you're talking about music, and not about publishing, television, film, higher education, and coffee?
I work in and teach about the music business, and I find this chart to be, if rhetorically clever, facile, superficial, obsolete-minded, and ultimately wrong. It bespeaks a "let's bring back the good old days" mindset that ignores the way the industry is today, i.e., overwhelmingly dominated by streaming, which is just plain complicated.
Musical creators need to get paid. To do this these days, they need entities to "manage IP" for them. They need people who understand that "music" is actually not a very useful term on its own but is shorthand for an amalgam of different types of "content" (works, lyrics, performances, sound recordings, etc.). To do this properly these entities have to invest in "data centers," or more likely these days, rent them from big companies based in "cities with great tech" so that they can "save costs." They need, therefore, to be "administrators." The industry is full of such entities that do what they do because they are passionate about getting musicians paid what they deserve (though yes there are also entities that do it out of greed, fraud, exploitation, good initial intentions run amok, and so on).
The industry can't function without such entities. The illusion of not needing them is one that many songwriters and music publishers held well into the streaming era, with their blinkered attitudes of "I don't care about all this data stuff, I just need to get paid." I can list several such entities that got into doing this because they want to help musicians get paid. Companies like Songtrust and TuneRegistry. Various indie digital music distributors. Bandcamp. The Mechanical Licensing Collective brought about by the Music Modernization Act (a nonprofit), which has done more to educate songwriters and publishers about the need for good data management than any other organization in history.
I just came from the United Arab Emirates where I participated in WIPO-organized workshops about this stuff, where the audience was a combination of indie musicians and local business people and government officials. The UAE just launched its first collective management organization for music, EMRA (Emirates Music Rights Association). Once it gets up and running, it will "administrate" data about various forms of music "content," using "data centers," to make it so that Emirati musicians can get more money and more opportunities locally instead of leaving it to external CMOs and multinationals to sort out payments (or not). When EMRA brags, it will talk not about "profits" (EMRA is a nonprofit) but about how its activities are fostering the local creative scene and keeping money in the UAE that would otherwise evaporate out to foreign multinationals or disappear entirely. And they will create jobs by employing people locally to get this all done, in addition to the "data centers" they will need to run.
Our job at the workshops was, in part, to get creators to realize the importance of these functions, what they do, and what happens when they don't exist. It's hard for everyone to wrap their heads around the stultifying amount of detail that has to be in place for a creator to get paid whenever someone streams their music, but it's necessary.
You clearly understand how the industry has changed due to digitalization and streaming. My son is a music curator and promoter who started at the dawn of Youtube and was influential in amplifying little known artists and establishing a pay structure that prioritized artists. He upended a traditional system that was slow to recognize how the music creation and delivery system had changed.
Razor sharp slicing device. It charts the demise of publishing over the past 25 years. I started when publishers and editors engaged in deep and intense discussions about books and the aim was to nurture talent. Now instead of that, meetings are staffed by accountants, and Royalties and Copyright have been replaced by ‘fees’, assessed by meaningless measures like word counts or pages of content. So sad.
“Trust” people to be people. You know like dogs know. Some people don’t pass the sniff test. Suits (even though they usually don’t wear suits) are one breed. Your producer, requires a more intimate “trust”. You have to look thru the studio glass and trust the guy looking back will shepherd you to your best performance. Always hated the word “content” but considering all the tracks produced by drag and drop, it’s kinda accurate. A tech reliant Dj might migrate to a different locale than a jazz trio, or you can produce a viral video from a forest ala Oliver Anthony and bypass all these rules. Have faith, press “play” and hope it moves people.
A solid list.
"... and did we tell you the name of the game, boy..."
What category would you put Austin in? It's a city with traditionally great music, but a lot of IT has moved to.
"Sell your soul to the company/who are waiting there/to sell plasticware . . . "
With the digital age, all things changed. My music began being called "product." That wasn't good. My music is at ronhamilton.bandcamp.com - I like Bandcamp and have heard you speak of them. I learn a lot from your writing, Ted. Thank you.
Something very much like this is happening in the translation industry, where agencies have merged and merged into mammoth blobs listed on the stock exchanges and venture capital is heavily involved. Many agencies and clients lost sight decades ago of the fact that there is a living piece of meat on the other end of the transaction that has to be kept alive, so rates are being pushed down below subsistence level in many cases. They don't get quality that way, but apparently they get profits. It all stems from a failure to understand translators as providing quality communication and a misunderstanding of translation as widget production.
And it's very common now for translation companies to address translators as "Dear resource".
Don't think for a second that musicians can't be among the villains. Decades ago, I saw Elton John on TV call his songs "product". It could have been "content", but I think he said "product".
An older word for the same idea. A few years ago, I saw a documentary on the Bangles and how they broke up in 1990. The record company by that point wasn't interested in their talent and obvious synergy as a band. They wanted to push "product," and they perceived Susanna Hoffs as the main "product." They pushed her to the exclusion of the other members, alienating them, and causing the band to break up. Instead of "super-enhanced Bangles," they got "no Bangles."
(I should hasten to add that Hoffs is a very talented and nice person. I met her once on a solo tour. I don't think at the time she or anyone else quite realized what the record company was doing.)