The Living Room Tour Trend: Selling Context, Not Content

Last night, veteran musician David Bazan, known for being the man behind the seminal indie/emo group Pedro the Lion, played for a few dozen people in someone’s living room in Lubbock, TX.

Bazan spent almost half the year playing exclusively for people in living rooms. It’s not like he had to — his music career is quite accomplished. Tickets for his November/December tour of real venues are going fast, in part because he’s embracing another recent trend of playing classic albums in their entirety — in this case, honoring the 10th anniversary of Pedro the Lion’s finest concept album, Control.

Bazan clearly is right at home in yours:

Certainly, not every musician has the kind of intimate, almost humble delivery that makes Bazan’s solo performances a perfect fit for living rooms across America. But he is actually part of a long tradition that dates back to the origins of much louder, more aggressive music than his — punk and indie rock in the 70s and 80s.

Last year, NPR ran a blog post about the re-emerging popularity of living room shows, pointing out the convergence of digital event planning tools like Eventful with the new economic realities for musicians in a world of free or near-free access to recorded music.

Most of today’s unsigned, independent bands that have toured the country with no booking agent and no management have played their share of living rooms. I know I have. But these living rooms are not often the kind of urbane, sitting-down affairs you see Bazan playing for 30-somethings. Rather, the hybrid living room/venue is rooted in “punk houses” where a bunch of high school and college-age music fans get together to hang out, party and host local and touring bands. I can honestly say from personal experience these house shows are some of the most fun and inspiring shows I’ve ever played. Our fans have crowdsurfed into ceiling fans more than once (pictured here). But the reason these shows are so memorable has just as much to do with the performance as it does with the camaraderie of being able to meet and entertain people in their homes.

The real convergence spurring the living room tour revival can be explained by a concept I often use describe the music economy in an era of free music. The record business is no longer about selling content, it’s about selling context.

What I mean by that is, we never really paid for music, we paid for access to it. Now that access is relatively free, we’re paying for the experience of listening to it in a particular context. Besides a heartfelt need to compensate the artist (a sentiment that record labels destroyed through exploitation), pretty much the only reason people pay for music anymore is to have the convenience of accessing it in whatever context they’d like. There are few technological hurdles left in making music freely available this way, but corporate interests in the content industry continue to do everything in their power to prevent us from moving forward culturally. These corporations aren’t protecting the welfare of artists, they’re protecting their own bottom line.

As far as context goes, you can’t beat a live performance. Remember, before the phonograph was invented just over 100 years ago, the entire music industry revolved around live performance. Playing a piece live was the only way to summon music for listening, whether it was a world-renowned opera singer in an ornate hall or a family gathered around the piano in — you guessed it — their living room. With the record, suddenly we could experience music in any context we wanted… provided we paid the price.

But music is going back to the living room, and it’s headed there from two different directions. From the bottom up, more listeners are becoming amateur musicians. When they venture out to perform, they enter a network of home venues ranging from punk squats to the kind of well-kept living rooms Bazan has toured so successfully. Bazan doesn’t come from the bottom up, but nor is it at all accurate to say his career took a dive, requiring him to play living rooms. Rather, Bazan and more professional musicians like him are evolving their touring strategy to embrace modern music listening and consumption habits. He’s essentially an early adopter of a new model for professional music tours, where the idea of crowd sourcing meets a post-recording music industry in which context is the new commodity.

The truth is there’s not a whole lot of difference between the crusty punk squats and their tidier counterparts, dwelled in by young professionals — except, that is, for the money involved. At $20 a head, Bazan is charging a fairly comparable amount to a cover charge at a real venue. But consider that there are no other costs to cover besides food, transportation and lodging (some of which the hosts even provide). The venue gets no cut. The fans don’t have to pay for drinks, and have more money to spend on merch. And Bazan is almost guaranteed to make a killing selling merch because his audiences have a much higher concentration of total fanatics. That he sells out the vast majority of his appearances is a testament to this (although admittedly living rooms fill up pretty quick).

Now, the back-of-the-napkin calculation I come up with is that they’re netting in the low four figures at a sold-out show. A show at a “real venue” might be more lucrative for Bazan, but by what degree? And as a musician, I can tell you there is a certain psychological value in playing for a room full of fanatics instead of the somewhat random lottery of attendees at a “real” venue, not to mention all the business baggage that comes with dealing with promoters.

Bazan has clearly made a decision that these living room shows are the shows he wants to play even if it means taking a slight pay cut. Real musicians make music to celebrate its true meaning and power to move us emotionally, physically and spiritually, and unite us socially. We don’t make music to make money. Most of us simply want a lifestyle in which we can make our music, connect with our fans, and have them support us modestly. As direct musician-to-fan connections become the currency of the music industry, don’t be surprised if more well-known musicians start showing up in your living room.

Do you think today’s living room tours are more of the same, or is there something more there?

Best Web Services for Independent Musicians

Well, I’ve finally been dragged into the Pinterest milieu. Last week I posted my first “board”: Best Web Services for Bands and Musicians. I give the rundown on each of the web-based services I would recommend to musicians, and provide pricing info as well. Please check it out and comment if you’ve used any of these services.

Cataloguing the best online services for bands has been something of a pastime for me since my early, pre-2000 days of digital music blogging, so it’s nice to return with something much more publicly visible.

Certainly, the list of worthwhile web services for bands has grown quite a bit. There are over 20 great services on my board, and more I’ve probably yet to discover or are about to launch.

So, which of these services should you enlist with? It depends on where you are in your musical career, but even professional musicians will find something that can boost their revenue. In terms of budget, there’s something for everyone — these services range from free with a standard 10-20% revenue share to flat subscription and submission fees. Ultimately, my advice is to take it one service at a time and build slowly and strategically, out from the core of a strong band website. As always, none of this will matter if your music is no good, so don’t squander your hard-earned money until you’re confident in your songwriting and production skills.

Check out the Pinterest board for all the services, here is an overview:

Band Website: It’s hard to beat Bandcamp for setting up a band website with your music, and allowing fans to buy it directly from you. Other honorable mentions include BandPage, Bandzoogle and CDBaby. CASH Music is an exciting new open-source band website project that should pique the interest of developers. For less development-inclined but somewhat tech-savvy website construction TopSpin is leading the industry with a suite of widgets for band websites and social pages that accomplish pretty much anything you’d want a band website to do, with a focus on generating revenue.

Band Marketing: There are a number of great marketing avenues for bands. MusicHype is a great way to identify and engage your top fans. FanBridge is an easy-to-use email and social marketing platform purpose-built for bands. These specialized tools are simple compared to ReverbNation, which basically does anything you could think of in terms of band marketing.

Band Booking: SonicBids has been around forever and is still very useful for the right band to land the right gig. Indaba Music is a newcomer that helps match bands with music industry opportunities, including shows.

Crowd Funding: Sellaband predates Kickstarter as a powerful fundraising platform for musicians primarily based in Europe looking to support large production and marketing efforts. Pledge Music is a fairly new crowd funding platform that deserves attention for being purpose-built for musicians.

Digital Distribution: There are a number of solutions here, and which is right for you depends on your projected sales. CDBaby.com is best for musicians who expect to sell a low volume over a long period of time, as their one-time fee of $50 for album setup and low 9% royalty rate. For those who want to target specific digital distributors, ONErpm features low submission fees and no annual recurring cost. Finally, if you expect to net at least $100 in revenue from album sales, you might want to check out TuneCore, which takes 0% of your revenue but charges a recurring $50 per year fee whether you’re selling or not.

Music Licensing / A&R: MusicXRay, SoundOut, Taxi.com and Pump Audio are great low-risk options to get your music licensed. Which one works best for you ultimately depends on the type of music you play, and your expectations for licensing fees and opportunities.

Music Lessons: Independent musicians teaching amateur musicians is a growing revenue stream, and Bandhappy helps connect teachers with students to make lessons happen across web video connections or even in person.

Book Update #3: Table of Contents Revealed, Writing Almost Done

It’s been a while since you’ve heard from me, and for good reason. As my summer sabbatical draws to a close, so to does my writing process. That’s right, the book is in its final writing stage, the end is in sight!

Of course, I still have the modest task of editing ahead of me, but I will be getting some help from friends over the coming weeks. I plan on having a finished, edited, designed eBook ready for publication in November 2012.

Though my original plan was to self-publish the entire book, I’m now thinking it’s strong enough to seek a real publisher. Besides, what have I got to lose? If I don’t get a publishing deal on favorable terms I am fully confident I can self-publish and reach a sizable audience on my own. Not sure if I’ll go all the way with a literary agent, but there are about a dozen publishers on my short list and a few connected people in the social network, so we’ll see what they think of the book… if I can get it through the door.

As I muddle out the release details, I’ve been sprinting to the writing finish line. A surprising portion of the writing process has essentially been rewriting, or editing as I go along. It seems like for every four paragraphs I put into the book, only one comes out. This is intentional because I want every sentence to be important and every paragraph to read well yet be packed with information. It’s almost more like sculpture than writing.

Another part of the original plan — to write a brief work of 150 pages or less — has steadily faded from view over the past weeks as the book pushes 200 pages and still has a way to go. A nontrivial part of that was my decision to include footnotes and annotations with the text. Part of the challenge of writing the book is leaving out highly illustrative details for the sake of clarity of prose, so the added notes give me the satisfaction of revealing deeper meaning to the concepts put forth. It’s turning in to a full-on non-fiction epic with hundreds of cited sources.

Lest I leave you with nothing but an update, I’d like to reveal a little glimpse into the finished product. While I’m still a ways from publishing excerpts (let’s wait until it’s edited), the organization of the chapters hasn’t changed in weeks so I’m confident that I’ve arrived at a final list.

Oh, and one last thing before I share the chapters. The name of the book will not be Mediapocalypse. While the book certainly takes a pessimistic view of the music industry, it is ultimately an optimistic book about rediscovering the true meaning and power of music, and using technology to eradicate the old, corrupt record business. Therefore, Mediapocalypse was relegated to a chapter title. So what is the new book title? For several reasons, I can’t tell you yet. But I guarantee it will spark a lot of controversy. Stay tuned!

CHAPTER LIST (with brief descriptions):

  • Introduction– Why it’s time to change the way we think about music.

PART I – [title of the book which I’m not yet revealing]

  • Chapter 1 – You Are the Music – Music exists within us, the music industry exists to control our access to it.
  • Chapter 2 – Broken Records – How the business of recorded music cyclically destroyed and renewed our relationship to it.
  • Chapter 3 – The First Song – Recent scientific research into the origins of music reveals how utterly central it is to the human experience on both individual and social levels. This is the evolutionary case for the true meaning and power of music in a world that views it merely as entertainment product.

PART II – A People’s History of the Music Industry

  • Chapter 4 – Performance Anxiety – How the music industry emerged from performance in ancient societies, the church, and how music was redefined by a wave of pre-Industrial technologies (approx. 0AD-1875).
  • Chapter 5 – His Master’s Voice – The invention of recorded music and the seedy origins of the modern music industry. (approx. 1875-1925).
  • Chapter 6 – Around the Dial – Broadcast technology reshapes the industry as exploitation of recorded music and its artists reaches new heights (approx. 1925-1950).
  • Chapter 7 – Low Ethics, High Fidelity – As technology advances, so too does systematic corruption within the music industry. A generation rediscovers the power of music only to relinquish control of culture to corporations. (approx. 1950-1975)
  • Chapter 8 – The Diamond Industry – The obscene wealth of the music industry grows more consolidated, seemingly in direct relation to its ethical and cultural bankruptcy. (approx. 1975-2000)
  • Chapter 9 – Napstermath – As digital technology shatters the industry’s control, the record business adopts litigation and lobbying as its primary business model, stagnating but not stopping the inevitable musical revolution. (approx. 2000-2010)
  • Chapter 10 – Mediapocalypse – The end of the record business is the start of a brave new music industry. As we enter a markedly different new golden era of music driven by digital music technology, the old business model refuses to go quietly.

PART III – Listening to the Future

  • Chapter 11 – The New Musician – Moving from exploitation to patronage by directly connecting with fans and growing in number and purpose, the new musician blurs the line between amateur and professional to the benefit of our culture.
  • Chapter 12 – The New Listener – Interactive, participatory listening and a direct artist connection means today’s listeners are more involved in the music ecosystem than ever. We explore how the frequency, diversity and depth with which people listen to music is increasing.
  • Chapter 13 – The New Industry – Examining survivors of the apocalyptic war on digital music, and the light at the end of the tunnel.
  • Chapter 14 – Sound Visions – Educated guesses on trends in the near-future of music.
  • Epilogue – Post-Music – Considering the heady implications of a post-music future, from singularity to apocalypse and everything in between.

How the Record Industry Destroyed Digital Music and Chilled Innovation (in Their Own Words)

Since Napster was sued out of existence in 2001, the record industry has ruined digital music time and time again. The result has been to stifle innovation and creativity as the industry dug its own grave with respect to consumer support. We will never really know just how much music and culture suffered from their corruption, ineptitude and negligence. But now we can get a rough idea.

Anyone in the digital music world knows that record labels continue to sue competitors out of existence rather than negotiating a settlement and moving forward progressively (Grooveshark being the most recent example). Until now, this knowledge has been intuitive. But a new groundbreaking study by Rutgers law professor Michael A. Carrier offers stunning admissions by the world’s top music executives that they have been destroying digital music for a decade. Carrier is blowing the whistle loud to expose the culture-crushing tactics of a record industry hell-bent on saving its dying revenue streams. What’s incredible is how many of these smoking-gun admissions of the record industry’s practice of destroying music through litigation and intimidation continue to this day.

For the study, Carrier interviewed and anonymously quoted CEOs and VPs of major music and technology companies. All the major labels and nearly every digital music service worth mentioning from the days of Napster are represented here, with 31 top-ranking officers included as sources for the report. Even the infamous Hilary Rosen of the Napster-era RIAA makes an appearance. The 63 pages of the report are full of juicy, candid admissions that will make your jaw drop and the whole report is worth a read, but here are a few highlights:

• The labels shut Napster down just as filtering technology was being developed to weed out copyright infringing files and/or pay rights holders for use of their content — the same kind of software being developed and used now at YouTube. Had the labels continued to develop this filtering technology, it would be much more efficient and effective today at preventing copyright infringement. Worse, by banning p2p technology, labels just pushed the technology underground and it developed in a way to make it harder to apply such filters.

• The labels were very aware that tying a great single to a lackluster album of songs was akin to “selling 1 pound of shit in a 10 pound bag” and that one of Napster’s biggest lasting effects was to destroy the idea of bundling music in albums. However, they chose to ignore this sea change in music consumption because it ran directly counter to their business model. That the album was not sunsetted for the single continues to be pure willful ignorance.

• In the face of digital music, the labels used litigation as their primary business model. Their attitude was that they were not going to license their content to anyone. This strategy, akin to “not negotiating with terrorists”, (indeed file sharers were labeled as “pirates”) meant that no “legitimate” digital music service would emerge until the iTunes store. Steve Jobs made it happen through personal connections, and the labels basically handed the digital download industry over to Apple’s “walled garden” media ecosystem. Prior to that, the iPod drove the demand for music file sharing through the roof. By not negotiating with digital music services, the industry encouraged the “underground” to flourish an eventually empowered Apple to unseat the music retailers. By the time “legitimate” means of acquiring music emerged, the consumer base was already well used to free, unfettered access to music.

• The CD retail shops basically committed suicide. They were complicit in the labels’ litigious fight against digital music innovators. The labels saw the retailers as their customers, not the listeners themselves. After all, the retailers bought 90% of record industry products. Because the labels would allow no viable digital music alternative, an entire generation learned to consume digital music without industry consent. As a result, retailers essentially evaporated when the industry finally began throwing its weight behind the sanctioned digital music retailers as mentioned above.

• Much of the industry’s irrational behavior can be explained by the “Innovator’s Dilemma”, a somewhat obvious idea that large corporations are dis-incentivized to pursue new innovations that threaten existing business models. Just to demonstrate how out-of-whack executives were with reality, here’s an excerpt from the study:

…before iTunes offered 99-cent singles, one label was “adamant” that “the single should be priced at $3.25.” The reason was that if customers bought “two or three,” then they would “make up lost sales on the album by the sale of singles.” The respondents reaction was: “You’re out of your mind” since “people aren’t going to pay $3.25 for a single.”

• The business structure of the record labels was set up for short-term success in deference of any long-term thinking. Political power struggles were common. In short, the bureaucracy of these labels, themselves consolidated into larger corporate bureaucracies, lacked the ability to innovate in the first place. The result was that litigation was the only way to sustain the business model. Technology startups simply could not go on functioning with the massive legal costs associated with defending a record label lawsuit, especially when all the labels ganged up on one company as they often did (and still do).

• We all know that the RIAA terrorized consumers with lawsuits alleging personal infringement of copyright (remember, retailers were the labels’ customers, not the public, so why should they care about offending the public?). What many don’t realize is how CEOs of tech companies were terrorized with the same allegations of personal infringement in addition to having their companies sued out of existence. Additionally, because of the obscene statutory fines associated with willful copyright infringement, this created ridiculous situations, such as Limewire being sued for statutory damages of $75 trillion, which is more that the GDP of the entire world.

• The litigious affront by labels had a real negative impact on the economy. As it sued digital music services out of existence, venture capital for any new project was hard to come by. This created a chilling effect around digital music services that persists to this day. It’s hard to convince investors to support a project when in the past they have been personally sued for willful copyright infringement simply for investing in a digital music product. Today we have very few compelling digital music services as a direct result of the industry’s approach to using litigation as a business model.

• The report does more than dispel myths about “piracy”, it clearly shows the record industry is to blame for not only its own downfall, but the downfall of music itself. The loss of innovation and venture capital was certainly a blow to society at large, but the effect of this corrupt crusade on the music itself was equally tragic. Though hard to quantify, some of the “magic of music” as it were has been lost, or at the very least transformed irrevocably by the willful negligence of the music industry. Not mentioned directly in the report is the mountains of money denied to musicians themselves, the ultimate enablers of the industry who so often get screwed by it. Fortunately, all this chaos has spurred the public to adopt radical new business models — patronage and crowd funding chief among them — and we are finally starting to “bounce back” from the damage record labels have inflicted on the culture and economy of music.

It has never been more clear that despite bringing music to millions of people across the globe, the record industry has had a net negative effect on music, particularly in the last decade. This being one of the central theses of my upcoming book, I have overjoyed to have this report as a smoking gun source for what anyone in the digital music world knows intuitively to be true. Read the report to see what I mean.

Mid-Week Wrap-Up: The David Lowery vs. Emily White Debate and Three Music Apps I’m Using

Writing has been heady and traffic has been heavy on the blog this week. I’ve been fully engaged in this David Lowery vs. Emily White debate as it goes viral. Boing Boing has a great wrap-up of rebuttals and of course you can check out my original piece here.

It’s been incredible reading all sides of the debate and I think we’ve all come away learning something important about each other. I know I’m reinvigorated to get back to writing the book full-time as well as getting my new music non-profit venture founded and funded. You may see less of me on the blog in the coming days, but rest assured I’m in a basement somewhere in Upstate NY hunched over a keyboard next to stacks of books.

Before I split to get on with it, I wanted to share with you some of the cool new music app discoveries I’ve made recently. They’re thanks in no small part to the incredible API masters at The Echo Nest and their wonderful Evolver.fm site which reports on all the latest music apps.

This is My Jam is built on an utterly simple concept. Each week, you choose a single song and tout it to the world as your current favorite. This is My Jam does a number of things right to make this app a compelling experience. First, I think the idea itself is great because it hits the sweet spot in terms of how much of my listening experience I want to share with everyone. To me, pushing updates every day on what I’m listening to seems excessive. Last.fm is cool because it makes my listening history available without pushing it to the world all day. Once a week seems like the perfect quality control too — it ensures whatever song I pick will be the best of the best. As someone who spends at least a few hours a week listening for new music, it’s the perfect balance. Add to that a well-designed UI, a robust music catalog to choose from and just the right balance of reminder emails to drive engagement, and This is My Jam is something with staying power. Check out my jam here.

TastemakerX is a fantasy stock market for music. You buy and sell shares of bands, that’s it! It’s a fun little diversion to check into each day and see how your band portfolio is doing. Some buy shares in their favorite bands, others try to play the market and notice emerging trends. I’ve taken the latter approach, doing research on sites like Metacritic and Pitchfork to check for new releases (would have done that anyway). Since there’s a 5% commission on all sales, and a 25,000 unit starting bankroll for everyone, you really are forced from the start to be shrewd and patient with your trades (it’s all play money of course). The mobile app makes for a great waiting-in-line time-waster, and the full-featured website gives a home base to track your portfolio. It’ll be way more fun when a few friends start to play, but for now I’m enjoying trying to climb up the leaderboards, and going long on R. Kelly.

WhiteNoisePro is handily the best white noise app in the iTunes app store. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the iPad and as such have been using the WhiteNoisePro app in my headphones to drown out background noises. There are dozens of sounds that can be blended and customized to create a unique aural atmosphere. The UI is most impressive in the mode where you’re placing audio sources in your environment and changing their volume, pitch and other parameters. I’ve got a nice crackling fire with some wind and ocean waves, and a mechanical hum to ground it all. It’s funny to be enamored with an app that basically does its job best when you don’t notice it, but I’d recommend it for any of your white noise needs.

Answering the Question, “How Do Musicians Make Money in a Free Culture?”

Thanks to the hundreds of readers who made yesterday the most-visited day for my blog yet! And a big thanks to QuestionCopyright.org for their kind words about the article everyone was reading. If you haven’t checked out their site, it’s great.

As you can imagine I’ve been getting a lot of feedback, both positive and negative. I’d like to respond to a F.A.Q. that boils down to something Upton Sinclair said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” (thanks to Aaron Wolf for the quote).

In other words, if I’m a musician that acknowledges free or near-free music as an inevitability, and I’m watching my income depreciate thanks to this effect, what the hell am I supposed to do? Isn’t it impossible to make a living as a musician if one’s music is available for free?

It’s an issue that Free Culture advocates should be acutely sensitive to. In fact, I believe most of the negative feedback I’ve received stems from the frustration of artists who don’t know how to approach this new business of free music.

First, I need to dispel this myth that musicians are getting paid by the people consuming their music. In fact, it is the labels, publishers and performing rights organizations that get paid and then distribute money to musicians. Along the way, that money is subject to all manner of recoupment, administrative fees and questionable distribution formulas that favor corporate-backed music enterprises. So forget about this idea that when you buy music, the musician is making money. Too often, musicians making money is the exception to the rule.

Second, I need to dispel another myth — that when musicians make money, it’s because their music is good, or at least popular. It’s certainly much harder to make money off of bad music, though a casual glance at the Billboard top 100 shows it can be done if you throw enough money at the problem.

But creating music people enjoy is only a small part of the business of success as a musician. It’s the musician’s business team that often determines how lucrative and sustainable the artist’s career is. You may be surprised to compare two artists with the same amount of album downloads and see that one is broke while the other is buying an iced-out watch. A good or bad manager or lawyer is all it takes to make the difference there.

So, now that we understand musicians make money when they have a successful business team that knows how to play the game of squeezing money from labels, publishers and performing rights organizations, we are more qualified to answer the question, “How are musicians supposed to make money in a free culture?”

As you can see, it’s the musician’s business partners that first must answer this question. And no matter how well they understand the potential answers, it may be moot if the labels, publishers and performing rights organizations continue in vein to put off changing their old business models to new ones that embrace technology. I probably don’t have to tell you that this is exactly what’s happening to a large extent.

While efforts drag on to reform mechanical licensing and manage the complex micropayment chaos threatening the industry’s ability to compensate anyone fairly, the truth is none of the musician-industry intermediates are going to be making graceful paradigm shifts into a free or near-free music model anytime soon.

Therefore, the onus is on us, the musicians, to work with our business teams in ways that obviate the need for old methods of making money.

In fact this is exactly what’s happening. Steve “Renman” Rennie, manager of the uber-successful band Incubus, has publicly stated that record labels no longer have much to offer a profitable act. The list of bands foregoing labels is huge — keep in mind that it’s not the musicians saying, “we’re fed up with the old way of doing things” but the business team themselves. When the lawyers, wheelers and dealers that have to keep the money coming in are telling the labels they suck, we ought to take note.

Self-publishing is reaching new heights as well, with the ability to license music through any number of democratizing Internet services that aggregate independent music for paying licensees. And while the performing artist organizations (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and SoundExchange here in the U.S.) continue to try to adapt to the changing landscape, musicians and businesspeople alike are starting to question their efficacy in helping small music businesses make money, noticing how much of the spoils are concentrated among wealthily, powerful industry incumbents.

The question is “How do musicians make money in a Free Culture?” and by now you’ve seen they can’t rely on record labels, publishing companies or performing rights organizations like they used to.

You’ve also seen this is a question that musicians aren’t asking rhetorically out into the ether — their business teams are hearing it, probably once a week at least.

Allow me to answer the question with a quick but relevant anecdotal aside. All around me I see people choosing to go into business for themselves rather than get a job at a corporation. In addition to the difficulty of finding a job opening in the first place, they know that we no longer live in a world where you work for 40 years and automatically become a company man/woman with a fat retirement package and full benefits. So I see many people making the smart move to control their own destiny and start their own small business. They know they can no longer rely on the corporations for sustainability.

The same exact thing is happening in music. Musicians and their business teams are realizing they need to aggressively pursue their own small businesses, no longer able to rely on the old methods of making money. They are taking matters into their own hands and taking full responsibility for their own success or failure.

I realize this may be more abstract of an answer than you were expecting. I’m telling you the way to make money in Free Culture is to look outside labels, publishing and performing/mechanical rights, but not giving any specifics as to what those outside sources are.

The Future of Music Coalition’s recent landmark study on Artist Revenue Streams is the best place to start looking for specific money sources. It identifies 42 discrete revenue streams that musicians and their business teams can draw upon. Granted, a bunch of them have to do with labels, publishing or PROs, but plenty don’t. The short, specific answer would be to comb this list for those exceptions — particularly those under the headers ‘Brand-Related Revenue’ and ‘Fan, Corporate and Foundation Funding’.

I have a marketing background, so I’m keen on thinking of everything as a “marketing funnel”. Basically, picture a funnel where the wide end represents casual interest in your band, and the nozzle is where true fans pass through with their money. Somewhere in the middle are your Facebook and other social media followers.

Free or near-free music represents the widest, cheapest funnel entry possible. In fact, it no longer becomes about marketing music in the traditional sense of manufacturing popularity. By democratizing music discovery, small music businesses have a shot at eking out a modest living. (If that’s at the expense of R Kelly having to take a taxi instead of a limo, so be it.)

Social media provides a filter for the funnel to catch and keep people’s attention. Looked at in purely capitalist terms, following a band on a social network or app is akin to saying, “I would consider spending money on this band or a product affiliated with its music”.

If you’re going to push fans into the money-making nozzle of the funnel, this is where you begin. Not somehow interacting with your online following, especially when it’s in the three- or four-figure range, is like opening a retail store and not staffing it. This is where the concept of “band as brand” becomes critical. If that whole idea makes you want to puke, well, you won’t be puking your way to the bank. Besides, that’s what managers are for.

Now that you’ve pulled your fans to the edge of spending money on your band, it’s time to push them over. This is where the formula for making money as a musician is super-easy to understand. Getting them to a live show to buy a T-shirt is your goal now. Clearly this will not add up to rock and roll riches, but will provide the cash-on-hand you need to run the business of your band. The second this basic revenue stream dries up, so does your business. This was true before Free Culture and still is.

Now, give the fans what they truly want: The ability to directly support you, and feel part and parcel toward your success. Patronage through crowd funding and other inventive means is the new label deal — a deal with your fans who are excited to know their money is going “directly to the cause”. They can see their money paying off in front of their eyes through behind-the-scenes updates leading up to the launch of the product they backed. It truly is one of the most exciting things happening on the Internet and if you’re not privy or convinced, read my recent article Top 3 Reasons Musicians are Scared of Crowd Funding and Why They Should Get Over It.

If that’s not specific enough for you, I’ll give you one more. It may be the least specific idea in and of itself, but from it you can draw many specific streams of revenue. My red-letter advice to musicians trying to make a living in a time of ubiquitous, free access to music…

Make something scarce.

Rather, make anything scarce — it doesn’t matter. Make limited edition vinyl. Make original artwork. Do you have a contingent of golf fans in your audience? Make custom golf balls. Make leather dog collars with your band name. Make a custom ringtone on commission. The only thing it takes is imagination to make something scarce — something sorely in short supply. But something tells me this movement to take back culture from the subjugation of industry and oppressive intellectual property law could mean we’ve got a lot more imagination to spare — and that’s a good thing.

Not incidentally, the same idea of scarcity that applies to your business applies to your music itself. The new scarcity in music is not about how many copies are made available — infinite copies have reached near-zero distribution costs on the Internet. The new scarcity in music is, “how awesome is it?”

We have our whole lives to struggle to make a living, but life is too short not to be awesome.

And remember, true musicians don’t make music to make money. We continue to rock whether it pays the bills or not.

Top 3 Reasons Musicians are Scared of Crowd Funding and Why They Should Get Over It

Crowd funding is so huge now that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is subjecting the hot fundraising trend to a serious regulatory review (and yes, you should probably be worried — but you already knew that.)

We’re talking about sites like Kickstarter, PledgeMusic and IndieGogo — places where creative entrepreneurs can tap the power of the Internet crowd to pay for their projects and businesses. By collecting small amounts amounts of money from a large group in exchange for perks, these platforms aggregate the finances of the many to serve a specific financial goal set by the creator.

For musicians, there is another crowd funding option available, what I would call “exclusive subscription platforms.” These include Sellaband, Artistshare and Patronism. Here you can charge fans a regular subscription fee, and they get access to exclusive, behind-the-scenes content delivered by you on a regular basis. It’s likely we’ll see the two models continue to converge in the next few years, perhaps until they are indistinguishable.

For musicians, this should be an exciting time. Musician Amanda Palmer just raised $1.2 million dollars on Kickstarter. Maybe you’re not the hyper-talented, super-creative, digital media whiz she is. Maybe you have a fan base of hundreds rather than thousands. The truth is you only need a few dozen fans to raise a few thousand dollars in a matter of months. I’ve seen it happen with some regularity.

Unfortunately, I’ve heard from plenty of musicians that don’t crowd fund for a number of reasons — even a few who did the whole thing, raised their goal money, and still hated the experience. Granted, it’s is not for everyone. But it’s here to stay and will only grow in time. More importantly, crowd funding is not based on exploiting musicians yet raises significant chunks of cash for us, and therefore deserves our support as a business model. In a way, crowd funding is the new patronage. Therefore, I would highly recommend that musicians start getting used to the following three scary things, and overcome for the sake of their ability to make money playing music.

Scary Crowd Funding Thing #1 – We can’t beg our fans for money.

At first I was surprised that this was the top reason musicians were scared to get into crowd funding. Then I remembered that most musicians are allergic to business and understandably would feel conflicted. But as I’ve pointed out before, until a manager comes along, you are your own manager. And you’re just not managing a business if you’re not taking advantage of the hottest revenue stream to happen to musicians in a long time.

There are easy ways to get around you having to physically appear on camera asking your supporters for money. You can simply use text and images to communicate the goal of your fundraising project. Or find someone peripheral or unrelated to the project to ask for you. If you object to the concept on philosophical grounds, I can respect that. But realize that if you have a merch table, you’re already asking your fans for money. Crowd funding is not analogous to begging — they will understand you’re just asking for their support, and they won’t feel obligated if they don’t want to give it. It’s certainly less awkward than asking fans to go to iTunes and pay Apple a fee to access to your music.

Scary Crowd Funding Thing #2 – I don’t know what to provide as incentives.

This is super-easy to solve. Something I encourage all musicians embarking on crowd funding is to do some research on their platform of choice and compare platforms to find the best fit for you. Take a look at similar musicians with similar funding goals in similar genres. Check out their incentives, and see what’s perks are hot and what’s getting ignored. This should give you a really good idea of what incentives will work for you. Setting these up can be the most fun part! Actually creating them and shipping them to all your backers can be a nightmare though, so don’t bite off more than you can chew. The goal here is not to sell merch pre-orders, but to raise money well over the cost to produce the perks. The other thing to remember is that some perks don’t involve an outlay of cash. In fact, the sweat-equity perks like commissioned songs, autographs and original artwork are some of the most premium and well-paid for.

Scary Crowd Funding Thing #3 – What if I set my fundraising goals too high or too low?

Many bands I talk to simply aren’t confident they can raise the amount they’d really like, so they settle on something super-conservative, reasoning that any overage is icing on the cake. Too often, however, they are leaving hundreds or thousands of dollars on the table. Remember there is a flurry of backing action in the closing days of a drive that’s close to reaching its goal. If it’s already met ahead of time, money will continue to trickle in, but not the way it would have if you were a grand or so away from crossing the finish line.

Some bands seize on this and choose to beef up their asking amounts, holding in reserve a grand or so of their own money to artificially increase their asking amount by the same figure they hold in reserve. This way, they can pump cash into their project at the last minute if they fail to generate last-minute support they sought and still make their goal. At the same time, you don’t want to blow the whole thing and ask for more than you can realistically raise, or have to rely on more of your own money than you bargained for to meet your goal.

Again, figuring out how much to ask for isn’t as tough as you might think. You can probably write a short list of the people you feel would give you at least $100 on the spot for a set of cool perks. It’ll include super fans you know by name, as well as friends, family and colleagues you think you can get significant support from. You can also easily estimate how many fans would shell out $20 for a modest perk. Dividing your total Facebook following by ten is a good place to start, but use your intuition and your knowledge of your fan base’s past purchase behavior. Finally, as in step #2, carefully research what comparable bands are asking for in relation to comparable projects and perks.

This should give you a ballpark of what to ask for. You could round this number down to the nearest thousand to be safe. You could add a grand if you feel like you’ll be expanding your fan base during the crowd funding drive. But you won’t get any money without asking, so it’s best to just set a number and see how it goes. Get out there and start crowd funding — and don’t forget that once you start, you’ll have a lot of hard work promoting your funding drive ahead of you. That hard work, however, will pay off nicely if you truly rise to the challenge.

In Defense of Free Music: A Generational, Ethical High Road Over the Industry’s Corruption and Exploitation

Note: This was posted as a response to David Lowery’s Letter to Emily White, which was in response to her article “I Never Owned Any Music to Begin With”. White is an intern at NPR’s All Songs Considered, Lowery is a contributor for The Trichordist, a technology and ethics blog.

As a musician and huge music fan, your emotional plea for our generation to renounce Free Culture so that musicians can make a living was indeed stirring. But beyond the choir you’re preaching to, we both know it’s falling on deaf ears. Asking today’s music consumers to kindly start paying for recorded music again because it’s the ethical thing to do isn’t only unviable — it’s not the ethical thing to do anymore. Free Culture is an ethic, and I think I can speak for my generation when I say we believe it to be the high ground over the way the music industry used to be run.

Your heart is clearly in the right place. But unlike you, I think most of us, our generation included, have a deep, unwavering motivation to compensate the musicians who enrich our lives. Here’s the crux of our disagreement: You claim listeners aren’t paying as much for access to music anymore because they’re unethical and no longer find it important to compensate artists. You and many others make this accusation over and over again without providing any clear evidence other than unconvincing anecdotes.

I believe the opposite can be clearly proven: Today’s musicians are held in higher esteem by listeners than ever before, and it’s the industry that has lost their respect (and money), due to a history of unethical behavior. The first point is proven by the sheer unprecedented volume of music now being consumed. The latter point is proven by even a casual glance into the history of the music industry.

Should listeners feel guilty for having free access to music? Of course not. It’s the best thing ever to happen to a music lover. Sometimes I wonder if all the Free Culture-haters are just jealous that they had to pay $20 per CD. You realize that price point had nothing to do with compensating artists, right? That ridiculous number was the product of illegal price fixing, obscene recoupments, payola, unethical ‘breakage’ fees and keeping statutory royalty rates for artists low, to name just a few reasons. Meanwhile, our generation experiences the ecstasy of free or near-free access to the global jukebox.

Should musicians feel threatened by listeners accessing their music for free? Only if their entire business model is based on forcing their fans (and potential fans) to pay for access to music. This is a model that our generation is using technology to reject. The exposure granted by free access to music is exactly what most musicians are after. Free exposure is only a lost profit opportunity for the minority of musicians who succeeded in the pre-digital record business paradigm. Most of the time musicians didn’t profit beyond statutory royalties anyway, because they could never recoup the cost of marketing and advertising. Now good music goes viral for free, and even generates ad revenue for the creator!

I’m going to level with you. You and many other Free Culture detractors are people from social circles with musicians that did well in the past but whose revenue dropped dramatically along with industry profits. I think the driver behind this blithely unrealistic “let’s go back to the way things were in the 90s” movement is pretty straightforward — you tasted profits from a business model that is no longer sustainable. You want your industry back.

We don’t.

Consider for a moment how were the profits of the “old” music industry won: By subjecting listeners and musicians — and indeed, our very culture — to a laundry list of horrendous commercial exploitation. Price fixing, payola, unpaid royalties, market monopolies, ticket surcharges, obscenely exploitative record contracts, manufactured popularity, censorship, perpetual copyright and destruction of fair use and the public domain… the list goes on and on. In short, the old way of doing things sucked and we don’t care if a few of that era’s successful artists no longer get mailbox money for music they recorded decades ago. We certainly don’t care if the record industry, which enabled these injustices, dies a slow, public death.

On the other side of the Free Culture argument, you have people like me: unsuccessful musicians and frustrated music fans. We are by far the majority, but our apathy is high. Critically, this does not translate into consumer apathy for compensating musicians. Quite the contrary, our apathy for corporations is driving a new appreciation for the original creators and producers of music, based on free access to recordings.

I believe my story is somewhat typical of the unsuccessful musician. After years of false starts and bad management I finally “made it” and got signed to an emerging indie. The advance was small, the recoupment high. But we had a great booking agent, nationwide tour support and opened for big bands in NYC. We got a sync license with MTV and some film placements. We had a high-powered manager and one of Britney Spears’s lawyers. Our friends were signed to Capitol, Sony began showing interest in us. We were on the cusp of making a living playing music. But while our fan base was rabid and widespread, it just wasn’t big enough. It wasn’t just a matter of “exposure” as most musicians whine. The business of the band didn’t scale, and eventually petered out. While I never quit playing music or trying to make a business of it, music became more of a hobby and I was now among the vast ranks of unsuccessful musicians.

Guess who was pissed (besides our band)? Our fans. Having supported us all those years, they now saw the apparatus of the music industry whittle away our faith in the business of our band to the point where we quit. It’s easy to look over this fact, but it’s critical not to: Music fans talk to musicians, and most musicians have historically not been happy with the way the industry worked. It wasn’t that we had bad music or bad management — our fan base just wouldn’t scale big enough to support our business team. I can see why those who succeeded in the past want to protect the old business model. It strongly favored the incumbents and built a nearly insurmountable barrier of entry that the average musician had little chance of scaling.

For both musicians and listeners, failure was the common narrative of the record industry. We sat and watched our friends write great music people loved, yet they were unable to make a living doing so, even and especially after they were signed. We saw the rare few musicians who truly made it big falter in the excesses of the industry, becoming drug addicts as the drive for manufactured popularity hollowed out the meaning of their music. Add to that the aforementioned widespread industry corruption. Factor in decades of consumers buying albums of mediocre music for one or two good singles. Pile on a digital distribution cost of near zero. Put a recording studio in every home with a computer. Lastly, drop the RIAA suing music fans for sharing music as the cherry on top, and there you have our generation’s hatred of paying for access to music.

If there is an ethical dilemma here, clearly it is your generation’s music industry, not our generation of listeners, that must bear the brunt of the blame.

I appreciate your statement that “on nearly every count [our] generation is much more ethical and fair than [your] generation”, but I don’t understand why you’d single out musician’s rights as something we specifically don’t respect. After such praise, a claim like that just seems silly.

Free Culture opponents often suggest technology somehow caused our generation’s desire for compensating musicians to evaporate. But it was clearly the corruption and ineptitude of the industry itself that is to blame for this negative attitude toward paying for music. Digital music technology provided the opportunity musicians and listeners have been waiting decades for — to balance the industry’s unchecked power, and maybe eke out a more sustainable living in the process.

Fans formerly had no apparatus to directly compensate artists. Now that they have tools like Kickstarter and Bandcamp, we’re seeing millions of dollars pouring directly into musician’s pockets. This represents a fraction of the so-called “lost value” of paid access to music, but given all the money and lobbyists the old industry has thrown at and against digital music innovation, it’s remarkable nonetheless.

That’s the thing about asking our generation to fix the record industry. We’re already doing it. We’re connecting artists directly to fans and bringing back patronage, a far less exploitative model that is emerging as the foundation of the new music career. We’re using crowdfunding to finance our work. We’re using digital tools to democratize distribution and licensing, with fairer publishing deals. Instead of basing our entire career on one album dropping or flopping huge, we’re ditching the LP in favor of a steady stream of singles, what fans really want. Apps are the new album. Production is going more lo-fi but is becoming more diverse and original in the process. These are the viable solutions I was talking about earlier. It’s all actually quite liberating because none of it involves being exploited by the music industry, and if it does, it’s certainly far less than in the past.

And yes, we’re selling T-shirts. I wouldn’t have to sell ‘em if I had a dollar for every time I heard, “your music is free, so what, you’re going to make a living selling T-shirts?” But the profit margin is good and they’re moving off the merch table like CDs used to. You have to realize that when the physical media that holds the music is no longer a profitable product, there are myriad replacements which tie the music to a physical product that can be profitably sold. The critical thing to realize here: the devaluation of the music recording increases the value of merch for the artist. Our fans are gonna spend $10 at our merch table anyway — should we sell them a T-shirt they will wear everywhere for a 150% markup, or should we sell them a CD they’ll burn and shelve for the statutory rate of 9.1 cents per song?

Besides selling recorded music, there are dozens of revenue streams for us to pursue. Many are accessible to musicians directly for the first time thanks to the democratizing effect of digital technology. For you to blame technology for unfair artist compensation is odd, for it was unethical industry dominance over the technology of vinyl, radio, cassettes, CDs and the overall apparatus of distribution that created the record business in the first place. The only difference with today’s technology is that the exploitation-crazy record business doesn’t yet have a stranglehold on it. Whether musicians succeed or fail is now up to the musicians and the fans themselves, not the industry.

So when you ask my generation to fix the music industry, we shrug our shoulders — but not out of apathy for music or musicians. We know the music industry sucked and can be better, so we’re not going to support the old way of doing things. We are at a crossroads. There will be a period of hardship and confusion. But don’t tell me we ethically don’t support artists. We listen to vastly more music than your generation ever did. We like, on average, a greater diversity of music than your generation ever did. And we’re still spending money, we’re just being attentive to where it’s going. We want to compensate the musicians, not the industry. It’s not only our choice, but our cause and our fight. The industry is throwing all the money, lobbyists and lawyers it can toward legally protecting its right to intermediate the direct fan-to-artist connection we have sought for decades and finally hold in our hands. We’re not going to allow Free Culture detractors to let that slip away just so they can collect royalties and recoup advances on music made in a bygone era.

We’d love to solve the music industry — really, we would — but we kind of need to save our culture first. Not incidentally, we believe artist compensation as critical to saving our culture. Pining for the old days when we enriched entertainment conglomerates instead of technology conglomerates? Who cares which industry is trying to co-opt our culture today, let’s take as much control as we can while technology affords us the opportunity.

I hear lots of crying about the traditions of the old business model, from the beauty of album art to the selling of millions of records. But you know what’s really sad? It will only be a few years before the entertainment conglomerates including the “Big 4″ record labels (or soon to be “Big 3″, how fair is that?) push back against the technology industry with a SOPA, PIPA or CISPA-like bill that passes into law. By then it will be too late and we’ll be crying over a lot more than our lost free access to music. Our culture may be lost in the unsustainable abyss of capitalism run amok if we the people lose too much control over technology during this critical transition.

I think I speak for most musicians when I say I’m going to make the best music I can until the day I die, and that money only determines how much time I can dedicate to that pursuit. There are way too many other musicians out there getting exposure for me to even entertain the argument that the current environment dissuades one from being a musician. I have a $1,000 studio in my basement that would have cost $100,000 a decade ago. I can make and distribute an album for free, and crowdfund a basic living doing nothing but music if I can generate at least 1,000 fans who spend $50/year with me on average (many $20 supporters and a few big backers). All I need to do is write a year’s worth of good music. With fifteen years as a musician under my belt I think I can manage.

(Not incidentally, I have other life skills I am employing to make my living, which is a very underrated issue in and of itself. What percentage of your income must be derived from music to be considered as “making a living playing music?” What about those whose non-music careers enable their music success, like website designers or audio engineers? If you manage a great music career, are you a successful musician or a successful manager? Furthermore, aren’t we all musicians? Most of us have the ability to make music but just don’t practice. Instrument and recording equipment sales are on the rise, so musicianship must be too. Everyone is already a DJ, how long before listeners are considered musicians? But that’s a subject for another article…)

It’s obvious this new music industry is crappy for scaling a band into a big blockbuster. But we are slowly getting over the rock star trip. The new music industry helps numerous smaller bands scale into moderate success. As the success stories mount, fans are starting to believe in supporting music again. Try to tell Amanda Palmer or her 24,883 fans who collectively raised $1.2 million dollars on Kickstarter that the old way of doing things was better. Then realize her story is becoming less of an exception with each passing day.

All this talk about not being able to make a living as a musician is nothing new at best. At worst, it’s dangerous, because it perpetuates the myth that only through charging access to music can one have a music career. It’s that myth that is keeping us from entering a new golden age in music. Emily White was simply telling us the truth. Come on, you know she would not have written the article if she didn’t care about compensating musicians. She works for freakin’ NPR on a show that regularly breaks new acts. It’s time to look inward and consider that Free Culture is our generation’s reaction to the ethical failings of your generation’s music industry.

Musicians and Listeners, Your Mission, if You Choose to Accept It: Save Our Culture

Music evolved alongside language and culture over millions of years to form a universal method of communicating emotion. For most of our species’ history, music’s primary purpose was to unify communities. Over time, various forces conspired to make music’s primary purpose entertainment. Chief among these was the music industry, which subjugated and exploited cultural evolution and unity for profit.

The original intent of copyright law was to protect content creators’ livelihoods while promoting cultural evolution by preserving the creative environment. Instead, the music industry (itself now a subset of a hyper-consolidated military-industrial media oligopoly) corrupted the law to steal musicians’ profits and stifle creativity. While the industry’s rapid expansion of the market during the 20th century certainly helped spread music for and wide, the cost of this commodification on our culture and creativity was heavy.

Over the previous decade, digital technology has disrupted the balance of power between musicians, listeners and industry. The record business is no longer sustainable in an era of free access to music. Unsurprisingly, the music industry, with its history of ineptitude and entitlement, is once again throwing all the money and lawyers it can at changing the laws in their favor. As musicians and listeners, we stand at a crossroads. Do we take advantage of the opportunities technology has given us and actively redefine music in the 21st century to be a force of unification once again? Or do we continue to allow the industry to subjugate the universal method of communicating as a means for enriching corporations?

I Wrote a Guest Post for the Musicians’ Union in the UK

Recently I wrote a guest post for the Music Supported Here blog, which is run by the Musicians’ Union, “a globally-respected organisation of over 30,000 musicians working in all sectors of the music business” out of the UK.

I was asked to write about “what it takes to be a musician today”. Since I was writing for an audience of professional musicians, I figured I’d write about “what it takes to be a successful musician today”, defining success as making a living playing music. Of course, I started by pointing out that money is rarely the reason we play music, but money is the only reason we’re in business. Therefore, while it takes great music to succeed, all the hit songs in the world won’t make you money unless you or your manager can run a business profitably.

The days of the entrepreneur musician are upon us, and I’m trying to do my part to spread the gospel. Read my guest post here.

What the Origin of Music Reveals About its True Meaning

Did you ever stop and wonder, “Where the hell did music come from?”

The public has many misconceptions about how music began. Perhaps the biggest of all is that music had its origin as entertainment — a superfluous if enjoyable pastime.

It is easy to see where we might have gotten this idea. For decades the culture industry ensured that music’s primary role in our society was as entertainment. They were strongly motivated to do so mostly because this made recordings eminently more consumable and profitable for the corporations that exploited music’s creators and producers.

Entertainment is surely one of the purposes of music. To be fair, most people do realize it’s not the only purpose. Live performances can and have united broad swaths of society in ways that transcend simple amusement. Music can be used as therapy or as a call to action. Songs can move us to tears or lift our spirits far beyond a simple diversion. The right song played at the right time is not just a part of one’s music library, but a part of one’s soul. And it would be hard to argue the entertainment value of the funeral dirge or the sonic torture of Iraqi prisoners of war. Clearly, there is something more to music than mere entertainment.

Most of us don’t need empirical evidence to prove the power of music extends beyond entertainment — this fact is intuitive. But it turns out that we had very few facts about the origin of music until quite recently. Only in the last few years that the fields of neurology, cognitive science, psychology, sociology, anthropology and linguistics overlapped in some pretty remarkable patterns. In the process, academia is beginning to reveal the true nature of the origin of music. Humans can now grasp the meaning of music in ways that were inaccessible for millions of years.

Though a mountain of academic research has built up over the past few years, a trio of layman’s nonfiction books brilliantly lay out the three key pieces of the origin of music puzzle.

Steven Mithin’s The Singing Neanderthals: The Origin of Language, Mind and Body blew the topic wide open in 2005. The eminent archaeologist revealed music as a precursor and shaping force of language, imbuing it with the emotional meaning that pure semantics could not evoke. His ‘Hmmmm’ theory describes primitive verbalization as a combination of holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and mimetic functions. Essentially, our system of communication was formed by representing nature with the sounds we could make (in addition to, and inseparable from parallel evolutions in gesture and bodily expression).

Over time, this communication system not only evolved along with the growing sophistication of our brains, but was directly responsible for said evolution. Evolutionary changes to our vocal tract and bipedal capacity for rhythmic movement helped amplify and articulate interpersonal interaction within primitive human societies. The result was that music functioned to unify primitive humans by providing ways for them to evoke emotion and meaning in each other with vocalizations and body movement.

Since Mithin’s book was published in 2005, one might say that more happened in the interdisciplinary study of the origin and meaning of music than in all years previous. Much of this work was highly academic and analytical. Then last year another breakthrough theory of the origin of music hit the scene of layman nonfiction. Mark Changizi’s Harnessed: How Language Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man followed the wave of evidence suggesting that the high-level functions of our brain (for example, appreciating a symphony) were emergent from lower-level functions that had evolved over millions of years by miming nature as a form of interpersonal communication. In other words, our brains were not “mind over matter” so much as “mind from matter”.

Changizi’s book makes a lucid, elegant case for a simple hypothesis: “music sounds like humans moving and behaving (usually expressively)” or in other words, “music moves us because it literally sounds like moving.” Harnessed details how virtually every major facet of music has a counterpart in the sound generated from the movement of our bodies and other physical objects in space. This is particularly true when it comes to interactions with other humans and our ability to perceive mood, intent, proximity and a host of other important sensory cues from the sound of their movement, whether or not they were paired with visual cues.

In nature, most visual stimuli are stationary and when movement does occur there is no guarantee it will be in view, but nearly every movement event makes a sound. Furthermore, each event has a sound signature that we have evolved to detect intuitively, down to the microtonal nuance.

Audition is important because at any given time, objects and events in eyeshot are only a fraction of what is in earshot. Our primitive ancestors would have been highly attuned to the sounds around them, and used sound and gesture to mimic environmental sensory input to communicate elemental concepts and feelings to their brothers and sisters. Music’s meaning to primitive humans was that of unification and interaction, so they could help each other survive. Of course this does not preclude the idea that some primitive musical communication was also meant purely to evoke pathos or joy, absent any deeper representative meaning — in other words, the first signs of music as entertainment.

When Changizi proudly proclaims in his book that ‘Soylent Music’ is made out of people, he means that musical sound is literally derived from the four elemental parameters of the movement of an individual in relation to another human. To paraphrase, he classifies these parameters as (1) proximity, (2) direction, (3) speed and (4) gait. They share a respective relationship with the four elemental parameters of music: (1) loudness, (2) pitch (and specifically, the Doppler effect), (3) tempo and (4) beat/rhythm. Without reading the text this may all sound quite abstract, but when the concept sinks it can profoundly alter one’s understanding of what music is on the most fundamental level.

To provide a quick example before wrapping up, consider the ubiquitous pop song. Like fast food or nicotine, pop music is highly consumable because it stokes our brains with pleasure chemicals and makes our brains beg for more.

Taking the parameters above, we see that pop music’s proximity/loudness mimics intimacy and leaves the listener feeling as if the singer is within arm’s reach. The direction/pitch of pop hooks rises and falls in a way that mimics the subtle movements (and subsequent sounds) of two bodies interacting in significant social rituals. The speed/tempo of these songs is almost always mid- or up-tempo, specifically calibrated to make you want to move your body. Finally the, gait/rhythm literally represents the ‘shuffle’ of our body parts as we move through space. The highly syncopated rhythms of popular music are analogous to movement that would be screaming for our attention. In fact, the whole package is designed not only to scream for our body’s attention, but to create a series of expectations and resolutions using the metaphor of movement. Though this is not exactly what cognitive scientist Steven Pinker was talking about when he controversially called music “auditory cheesecake”, a more apt description for pop music is hard to come by — it is engineered to tickle all our most pleasurable deep-seated movement instincts.

The last book in the origin of music trio helps to put Mithin’s and Changizi’s work into perspective. Bernie Krause’s The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places is half-layman’s science nonfiction, half memoir of his world travels as recorder of soundscapes. In one of the coolest jobs on the planet, Krause traversed the globe and recorded all manner of sound, natural and unnatural.

The author breaks these sound sources into three types: “(1) nonbiological natural sounds — the geophony; (2) sounds originating from nonhuman, nondomestic biological sources — the biophony; and (3) human-generated sound — anthrophony — where it intrudes and, in a few cases, blends.”

The previous authors rightly focus on the third type of sound as ground zero for the emergence of music and language. Krause puts it all back in perspective by contrasting our noisy, human-dominated modern soundscapes with the natural sound tableaus that served as the inspiration for our audition adaptations. If we listen closely, we can hear nature — the original source of our inspiration — being drowned out by the noise of modernity.

Krause’s rumination on how the soundscape of our lives has changed from one that was directly in tune with nature to one that blares dissonantly and incessantly in our ears does not break the same theoretical ground the first two books do. What it does do is humanize the science behind the origin of music. As a culture and society, we would all do well to learn from the way music began, if only to help contrast today’s entertainment-dominated music industry with music’s more deeply meaningful roots as a unifying force. Perhaps then musicians and listeners can start to take steps to reclaim music’s power from market forces.

Mediapocalypse Book Update #2

Well, folks, I’m back for another book update as the first month of project Mediapocalypse comes to a close. With the book having pretty much taken over my life at this point, on the rare occasion that I venture into the outside world I get the same two questions: How’s the booking coming along? What’s it about?

It’s coming along great, thanks. As is my style, I’ve been inventing my own method as I go along, only to later find how close it is to the established process. This is most apparent in my focus over the last couple of weeks: the bibliography.

In many ways, writing a book is like writing an album. Songs are very much reconstituted from influences, or as Kirby Ferguson would say, Everything is a Remix. Similarly, a nonfiction book begins as the sum of its sources.

Since I first became interested in the subject a decade ago, I have amassed a voluminous library of music nonfiction. Thus, half of my bibliography was already done — I simply had to dust off my MLA style guidelines and start typing.

I am unashamed to admit that during the rest of the bibliography process, I got a huge assist from Amazon.com. Once I had catalogued my own collection, it became clear that I had a single mission: to find any and every other book that would be a useful source. Luckily, Amazon.com made discovery painless, with its related product referrals and faceted search. Even better, it was easy to ascertain the quality and content of the works via customer reviews and the ‘look inside this book’ feature. What’s a library again?

My bibliography (at least the book portion) is now complete. I’m sure to find a handful of secondary and tertiary sources during the writing process, but right now I feel super-confident about my factual foundation.

Posting the bibliography before the book seems sacrilegious and anticlimactic — like playing an audience tracks from your favorite artists and then asking them to guess what your album will sound like. Instead, I will give you some stats…

There are 107 nonfiction book titles currently in my bibliography, comprised of 17 primary sources, 34 secondary sources and 56 tertiary sources. I read each primary and secondary source carefully, and key passages are highlighted and marked on a 1-4 scale of importance. Any relevant notes are scribbled in the back of the book (or, on the iPad, in Evernote). The tertiary sources are skimmed rather than read cover to cover. Many of these are the dryly academic texts, from which I am seeking only to mine facts and evidence.

Of the key sources, I’m 30 for 51, meaning I have 21 more full books to read, along with a few dozen tertiary sources to skim. Yeah, that’s a lot of reading. At present, I’m reading at about 150 pages per day, which averages to around three nonfiction books per week, so I should be done sometime in mid-June.

Thinking myself rather smart for inventing the bibliography-first method of nonfiction book writing, my lovely wife, who holds a Master’s Degree to my High School Diploma, pointed out this has been standard practice for decades. Maybe I should pick up a book on nonfiction writing? Nah, making it up as I go along is too much fun.

Enough with the reading, you say, how is the actual writing going? And what the hell is the book about?

My writing process at this point is essentially the opposite of pulling meat off the bone. Poring through my source notes, I attach meaty facts and concepts to my skeletal outline in a program called OmniOutliner, nesting text into hierarchies. In the process, themes and topics emerge almost organically. In a way, I’m not deciding what the book is about explicitly — the patterns in my notes of interest are telling me what it’s about.

The dispassionate answer to the topical question can be found in a tag cloud. I tagged each of the books in my bibliography from a list of 60 terms describing topics, and then fed them into TagCrowd to see what my major themes were. Here were the top 20:

business, cognitive, commodification, copyright, corruption, culture, digital, history, industry, legislation, listener, litigation, meaning, musician, neuroscience, origin, philosophy, society, sound, technology

I think that’s a pretty good description of what I’m going for. But to give you a better idea, I will share with you the general structure of the book, in terms of the major “parts” that I will organize chapters within. This builds off my decision to proceed chronologically, interweaving the story of the musician, listener and industry to build my overall thesis. It’s shaping up to be a sort of “People’s History of the Music Industry” Howard Zinn-like epic retelling of history from the perspective of its losers — in this case, musicians.

After a typical introduction, the book will be comprised of three major parts:

Part I tells the story of the origin of music, and how musicians and listeners came into being. I seek to answer the question “What is music?” by defining the relationships between these two groups, using all the interdisciplinary tools at my disposal. This epic story spans from millions of years ago to the dawn of the 20th century, as we end Part I by introducing the origins of the music industry.

If Part I tells the story of how and why musicians, listeners and industry came into being, Part II describes how the industry came to dominate the relationship shared by those groups. Over the course of the 20th century, we witness the subjugation of music’s meaning and purpose to commerce, and examine the paradox of popular music. This section appropriately ends with the rise of Napster at the beginning of the new millennium.

Part III brings us from the digital music revolution to our present-day crossroads. This is where the payload of my thesis is delivered. The narrative threads of musician, listener and industry culminate in a blunt and critical appraisal of why the record business deserved to die, and the unprecedented opportunities listeners and musicians have in the aftermath of the industry’s fall. It ends by looking ahead to the new business of music, and how digital technology will continue to shape its future.

I’ll wrap it all up with a unique epilogue, which will use the book’s content to look ahead to chart a futuristic vision of the relationship between musician, listener and industry during the rest of the century.

In the end, I hope to publish a book that can be enjoyed by musicians, listeners and industry alike, though they may all get something different out of it. Core to my mission is to challenge readers to reconsider everything they thought they knew about music, and to become a more active participant in its creation and/or consumption.

That blog post may have been a book unto itself, but what can I say, I’ve got the writing bug. Stay tuned for more updates and announcements.