Pretty accurate (Gaming)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Thursday, June 02, 2016, 00:29 (2904 days ago) @ marmot 1333

Adding on to that, or maybe to the side, is that a lot of these "new" techniques really play into bands that already have a solid fan base. Radiohead released In Rainbows as Pay-What-You-Want and there were lots of think pieces written about how it was going to Change Music Forever TM. The thing is, if they had been a brand new band releasing their debut album, they would have made less than $100 on that. As it was, they never released their sales figures, but they abandoned that release model for their next album, so I guess they thought they would either make more money the other way, or it wasn't worth the technical hurdles of handling all the hosting/downloads themselves.

Beyonce released her last two albums with absolutely no press lead up (maybe like a week of notice, or maybe just some teasers.) Have you heard of Beyonce? Would anyone have known or cared about her albums if they had not already heard of Beyonce since the mid-90s? (No.)

Getting big in the old system and using it to build brand and name recognition, and then carrying that over to and using the new systems to make it even bigger works really well. It's good work, if you can get it.

All excellent points. I'm in the process of wading back into this whole world right now, and the most consistent feedback I'm hearing is that all but the biggest of the big artist will get little more than pennies for their music through digital distribution. And even then, any artist who wants to make real money needs to do it by selling merch or other side avenues (Dr Dre has made more money from Beats headphones than anything related to his music, and he's Dr Freaking Dre!). On the flip side, I can go from recording a song to having it for sale on iTunes in a matter of days, while maintaining complete ownership and control of my work, which is pretty darn cool.

That being said--I'm ecstatic that I can afford pro-sumer level studio equipment to record music myself, because that is my biggest creative passion in life. I write weird music that no label would ever front recording session costs for.

Do you have any of your music posted anywhere? I'd love to hear it :)