This from his Twitter feed this morning
A self produced CD must sell 143 units per month to earn minimum wage, 155 if sold through CD Baby.
A downloaded MP3 album on CD Baby earns minimum wage with 1562 sold per month.
One should choose these formats to save music and musicians and stop streaming totally.
His “math” may be correct for solo artists (assuming zero recording, production and manufacturing costs), but what if there are 6 people in the band? And an mp3 album costs a tenth of the CD? Hmmm. Also how many streams needed? Isn’t it about 0.1 cents per stream so to earn $1000 one needs a million streams?
Personally I dont stream- I ordered an album yesterday from the Dodgers. The physical product was cheaper than downloading it . I have no idea why people choose the download option – it is killing the livelihood of musicians.
Because they have no means to play or rip the CD.
The vast majority of new laptops have no CD/DVD/BluRay drives. Obviously, tablets and mobiles don’t either.
Most people don’t buy desktop computers, which do still tend to have CD/DVD drives, for home use anymore because they tie you completely to a single location.
The majority of people under 50 no longer own stereos. Similar reason to that for desktop computers.
Once the current vinyl fad (which is only of appeal to those people with money to spare) dies out, sales of physical product will virtually disappear.
CD sales are still much higher than vinyl. 32M in 2018 vs 4M vinyl.
Although revenue from vinyl sales now equals that of CDs (for the simple reason that they cost more).
What????
What????
Most (all?) physical formats come with a download code. Buy the item then sell it
Huh?
None of the CDs that I’ve bought ever have had download codes with them.
Some of the ones I’ve bought from Amazon have mp3 versions freely available, but I don’t download mp3s if I have the physical product. I prefer ripping to lossless myself, if I can.
The few vinyl albums I’ve bought in recent years have mostly come with download codes, but there are a couple of exceptions.
Huh?
Buy the record.
Use the download code.
Sell the record.
Artist gets royalties.
You save some money.
Seems quite simple to me.
Or…
Buy the record.
Play it.
Is the correct answer
Not most physical formats, in my experience @lemonhope. Most vinyl, yes.
CDs, no. Unless I’m just buying the wrong CDs, i.e. the ones I want to hear.
Should we also stop buying records and books from charity shops? The artists see nothing at all from these sales.
Why should a creator get paid twice for selling a physical product?
If I built a house/made a car and got paid, I could not reasonably expect to be paid every time the house/car changed hands.
Although if you wrote a song you get a royalty each time it’s played. And in terms of ‘physical product’ the ultimate is surely visual art. There is such a thing as Artist’s Resale Right which does cover the fact that the same item may be sold over multiple times, possibly for increasing amounts. Does nothing for Vincent VG, but Damian Hirst is probably benefiting.
wow, do people still use CdBaby? Croz needs to get himself over to Bandcamp.
CDbaby actually do the packing and posting for you in return for their cut, whereas Bandcamp do nothing except provide a shop window (and charge more).
I thought the USP of Bandcamp was the ability to preview a complete album and then immediately download it in a lossless format for less than the price of a CD.
In my experience of Bandcamp, the lossless download is £7 and the CD (including an instant lossless download) is £10. I like physical things. And I like to keep my postman gainfully employed.
As I recall, after buying a CD via Bandcamp, the postage costs almost as much as the album.
Probably set by the artist. I just checked a new double CD about to be released. The CD was £20, postage £1.70
This is a wider technological and cultural shift away from music as a physical product which is now pretty much an artisan pursuit.
I don’t think this can be a matter of simply stopping streaming – really it should be for the record and streaming companies to agree a fairer fee per stream for the artist, but of course this is very unlikely to happen anytime soon…
An “artisan pursuit”! I quite like that actually.
If streaming is eventually going to be the sole means of distribution then musicians need to set up their own streaming services, possibly through the national Musicians Unions and the FIM (International Federation of Musicians).
That, it seems to me, is the only way they can be sure of getting a fair return for their work.
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Em, who is “Croz”? Is it just me who is thinking we are talking about David Crosby?? Or am I out of touch (again)?
Come on, grandpa. Get with the program. All the cool kids call him Croz. He was in Croz, Sti, Na & You. Now he’s sol, and really creat at the mom. On a prop roll.
He calls himself Croz, having titled a CD as such a couple of years ago.
That’s a very spurious model. I’m not sure that minimum wage should apply to products. What about gig revenue, song writing royalties and all those other albums released over the years?
Ultimately, some art is massively over valued and other art is massively undervalued. Those rock megastars in the 70s massively over earned. So did the big record companies. I suspect Croz did very well at his peak and didn’t share his royalties and receipts with poorer, less popular artists. He seems a little hypocritical in making this point.
The blessed Wu-Tang famously applied a different business model – sell one copy for a million dollars. Interesting to see what the Feds will do with it. Features Cher, and Barcelona FC – and how many rap albums can say that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time_in_Shaolin
A wikipedia entry with much to recommend it.
From a very quick bit of research (i.e. Wikipedia) sheet music sales still outstripped discs until 1925. Recorded music on a physical artifact that you can buy has only been in existence for around 150 years.
Some musicians made a living from this (and as we know, a lot of companies have made much more) but I wonder if physical product will be seen eventually as an era that eventually came to an end as technology evolved.
I really sympathise but not to the extent of cancelling my streaming sub, and I don’t think the genie is going back in the bottle now owing to the convenience and wide uptake (barring perhaps one of the major streaming providers shutting down and taking everyone’s carefully curated libraries & playlists with it). For similar reasons, we should also stop flying and buying comestibles packaged in single use plastic but guess what? Only the latter cases are ever likely to be discouraged through legislation or taxation; musicians shouldn’t expect either government protection or consumer sentiment to come to their aid. They’ll all be reduced to wandering minstrels before anyone steps in to safeguard their royalty payments.
Maybe we’re heading back to artists looking for a benefactor or patron, or a return to the troubador idea? You could argue given the return to live music as a key part of an artists financial model that we’re going back to the era of the minstrel.
I know this probably sounds odd but all these forms of making a living for musicians have been around a lot longer than the physical product model
And for the record. I really enjoy Crosby’s last couple of albums, especially Lighthouse and Here If You Listen. A rather unexpected late career renaissance. God thing he fell out with Nash and had to find other ways to be creative.
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Somebody told me that if a solo musician is selling his CD in the lobby after a gig, you would be giving him more money if you just went in off the street and bought his CD rather than paid (perhaps twice as much) to actually see him play. Is that right?
It depends.
Some promoters take a large slice of the ticket money and pass, say, half on to the performer. Some (like the ones I work with who do it as a break-even-if-lucky hobby) take 10% after venue hire to cover expenses (promotion, etc).
Some venues (e.g. South Bank Centre) charge 40 or 50% for CD sales from the merch table in the foyer (that person taking your money has to be paid) but less/nothing direct from the performer in the auditorium. Hence the sight of 2,000-odd audience members in the queue to buy Jane Siberry’s CD direct from her at the lip of the stage.
I’ve seen at least one performer at the Cambridge Corn Exchange announce from the stage “If you want to buy my CD, I’ll be in the Red Cow pub over the road after the show.”
I remember Bill Nelson grumbling at his gig at The Stables in Wavendon that the CD shop in the venue had demanded a cut from any CDs he sold in the foyer.
He sold his from his car in the car park instead.
I recall seeing Julian Cope at the RFH and he said he wasn’t selling any discs at the gig because of the South Bank Centre’s extortionate demands.
It depends on the venue. I was in Twitter discussion with, I think, Emily Barker a couple of weeks ago after she complained that she couldn’t sell merchandise at a venue without losing money on each item because of their take. I said that I buy stuff at gigs because I like to think of the money going to the artist, and apparently it often does but venues vary. When I saw Richard Thompson at the Cliffs in Southend last year the support band said the same from the stage. They would be glad to chat to people in the lobby at the interval, but couldn’t afford to sell them anything.
The decline in buying recorded music has at least got bands back touring regularly.
Streaming will not go away – it is simply too convenient for most people.
Spotify are starting to do direct deals with independent artists, it would have been really interesting to see what would have happened if Taylor Swift had taken the same route but she signed to Universal
I think this is the key rather than stopping streaming or blaming the streaming companies – the record companies need to pay a decent cut to the artists from streaming royalties
But aren’t we forgetting why “mainstream streaming” came along? Illegal downloading that’s what. The only way the likes of Spotify survives is to charge a tenner a month, virtually nobody would pay anything more. And for a tenner you get complete access to everything (that’s a civilian everything rather than a AW everything). Most people will never go back to paying more than a monthly streaming fee for one single CD which they may or not end up liking.
And let’s not forget that whilst they are ripping off artists none of the major streaming services are actually making money – in the last quarter for example Spotify despite adding X billion listeners posted a loss of 76 million euros!
I can only forsee more and more performers struggling to make any sort of a living and that most will end up playing to devoted audiences of 42 and sleeping on friends’ floors.
Spotify doing “direct deals” with artists doesn’t mean that artists get more money. There are currently an handful of companies whose aim is to “manage” the deals between record companies or artists and the various streaming or download portals. This makes it easier for artists to appear on different sites (without doing the tagging, uploading and contractual paperwork each time) – but these companies demand a cut from the streaming companies for their “service” (“We bring you all these customers, so YOU have to pay us, too…”).
A direct deal with Spotify still means that the artist has to do all the other sites by himself though.
Streaming companies have much to be blamed for, since the big four are currently trying to appeal against a ruling that would see streaming royalty rates increasing quite significantly.
Whether the label would pass this increase on to the artists is an other matter of course.
I sound like a right-wing apologist for the Evil Streaming Companies but if they are all losing money and Joe Public won’t anymore shell out £15 for a CD or more than a tenner per month to stream everything in the universe isn’t Joe Public to blame?
…and whatever you do, don’t send your CDs away for ripping and “storage.” Not that I can imagine anyone doing this – but apparently so.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/13/21019565/murfie-madison-wisconsin-store-stream-cd-vinyl-collection-closed
Back in 2009, Robert Fripp posted on his blog that 618 streams had resulted in a gross payment to the record company of £1.61 – the artist would receive only a cut of that of course.
Robert Fripp has his own independent label, so his personal slice of that £1.61 would be a larger percentage of the amount paid by Spotify than someone signed to one of Universal’s many labels, for instance. Also, him being an established artist with a reasonably desirable back catalogue would get his label a more favourable rate than say Twang or El Hombre would get.
Still not much though, is it.
Its pretty much the case that your recordings are a loss leader to build awareness for the touring and merchandise, plus any commercial deals if you can get them.
I think this is why labels are pushing for ‘360’ deals where they get a cut of everything