Manifesto of a Modern Musician

or: The Emperor is Looking a Bit Chilly

Y'know, the thing that gets me about the stock market is that if humans weren't pre-wired to just copy each other without rationally thinking things through, the whole thing wouldn't work. OK, occasionally a company might extort money from it's customers under flimsy pretenses and then make massive profits (I'm looking at you, British Gas), paying shareholders a dividend, but by and large people only buy stocks because other people are buying stocks. The fact that other people are buying stocks gives them value even when really they have no intrinsic value (if a company goes bankrupt then the shareholders are the last people to get any return on their investment). It works (and is worth billions) solely because people aren't willing to sit down and go "Hey, wait a minute, this share certificate is only worth money if people imagine it's worth money."

Tinkerbell would make a killing in The City. She understood that shit.

The music industry has been rather like this as well. It's evolved in a particular way and through no particular individual's or label's fault it's wound up in the not-so-great position it finds itself in today. The entire business model is ass-backwards for a start. In a shop, the popular brands that get people through the doors are marked down as loss-leaders. In the music industry they're often marked up. The most popular musicians generate the majority of income and help support irrational investment in economically less-viable acts. Not true of all labels, and the indies are far less guilty of such craziness because they don't have the loose cash to play with, but it does happen. I'll not bore you with the full balance sheet (if you're interested in that then go read Steve Albini's excellent article), but the short version is that when you've paid for production, artwork, legal fees, manager's fees, promotion, tours, CDs, website, etc. and the record company have reclaimed that advance (i.e. loan) they gave you back before you actually did the sums or looked up what "recoupable from royalties" meant down in the small print on that deal memo (really, don't EVER sign a damn thing in your life that's worth money until you've had every part explained by a solicitor) there's often pretty much nothing left to show for your 12-18 months of writing, recording, touring and promotion.

And, by this point, you'll either be fat from junk food and beer, or skinny from drugs. Either way you'll look awful from lack of sunlight, probably have some sort of disease, and you'd have earnt more temping.

Your soul is now gone.

But you signed a three-album deal. A deal which you're stuck in, but the record company can and will hastily back out of (i.e. drop you and end the deal) if it looks like you're not going to make them any scratch this time around. Hey, it was all there in black and white up-front and you readily agreed to it. Your fault, not theirs.

But how can you make them cash? As Miranda Sawyer pointed out in The Observer Music Monthly a couple of weeks ago, downloads have eaten into the margins of physical CDs. Albums are one of the few consumer goods that have definitely bucked inflation in recent years, falling from prices around £12-£15 to less than a tenner in order to compete with iTunes. They still cost the same (if not more) to make, but now they're sold cheaper than ever. And, of course, the artist suffers in this case. Deals of a few percent of net (not gross) profits are common, since the label has other costs to cover for stuff like talent-development and promotion across all the kajillion different possible musical outlets that exist today (countless radio stations, silly numbers of specialist TV stations, music-related shows and opportunities on the major channels, MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, a clutch of online download services like iTunes, magazines, endless websites and ads, mobile phone ringtones, etc. etc.).

Suppose you manage to shift 60,000 units of your debut album (a silver record, and pretty good work for a debut these days). Great, 60,000 people like you. Each sells for the currently quite exhorbitant price of a tenner, earning just over a cool half mil. But this is gross; net profits might be more like £100,000 (or, more likely, less). And if you signed for what amounts to around 5% after you've paid for everything and the label has recouped its advance (which is a ball-park figure for a new artist's debut release) then you've earned just 5 grand to split between however many people are in the band.

And then there's downloads. Christina Aguilera's last album, Back to Basics, was a double-CD job. 23 tracks. Of which, four (ish) tracks were released as singles. None of them made the UK top ten. In my opinion, Ain't No Other Man was good, Candyman was OK, and the rest I could happily leave. Why on earth should I pay full price for the album, or download all of the tracks at a cost of over £18, when I could get the ones I'm interested in for under £1.60? Die-hard fans may front the cash, but casual listeners are in the majority and they sure as hell aren't going to shell out for filler.

So, I find myself wondering whether it makes sense any more for any new artists to get signed. The software is readily available to let you home-produce your music to a high standard. With minimal investment you can build a studio, of sorts, as I have done. Through the internet you can reach a wider audience than you could in a decade of gigging. You can also publish, release and distribute music yourself. You can own your own music, as Robyn has done, and you never need find yourself in the position that a company owns rights to your name as Prince did (that "Symbol" crap did have a serious point that most commentators at the time glossed over - he didn't own the trademark to his name, and Prince is his real name, remember), or that a company you don't even work for any more has retained copyright to your artistic creations, as The Beatles found. See Courtney Love's slightly ranty piece, in which she gives serious thought to the future of releasing music way back in 2000.

Now let's look at the numbers again. If I ask people nicely to donate if they like the music, and if for every ten downloads of the album I get £1 (and I hope that you'd pay more and that more than one in ten of you would be willing to pay, frankly, but I'm trying to be conservative with my figures) then suppose I shift 60,000 units like in the example above. My overheads are close to zero and I'm taking donations via PayPal, so 60,000 × 10% × £1 = £6,000 gross, less a small amount for hosting fees etc.

Yes. That's right. Provided you can record and produce your music yourself (definitely do-able on the cheap in your bedroom) and bash together some sort of site (not too difficult) then it's probably more profitable to go it alone.

All you need is a good enough reason for people to download the music, tell their friends, and pay for it.

Without packaging and promotion it comes down to one thing; good music. Remember Bad by Michael Jackson? He released damn near every track off that album, and people bought them even though the album was out, because they were just so damn good. When was the last time you bought an album and genuinely loved over 80% of the music on there? When was the last time you bought an album that had more than three really stand-out great tracks? When was the last time you really thought "I wonder which track will be the next single?"

That's what I'm going to try to do. Make a dozen tracks that are all good. Maybe you'll disagree. They certainly won't all be the same, though there will be a common theme running through them (the current track I'm working on, Lupine Slopes, is an instrumental with a freeform jazz non-looping structure but built on breakbeat and electro samples, but it's still audibly a sister to The Modern Menace and they belong on the same album). I will like all of them. I can't make music that I don't like; I don't know how. I can only hope that you feel the same.

This, I guess, is my manifesto. The Manifesto of a Modern Musician. It could be an unremarkable blip in the history of music, or it might just be a blueprint for the future. History is an unpredictable judge, but I have nothing to lose and a world to play with. Glad you're along for the ride.

Seej 500

Yorkshire, UK, 25/2/2008

UPDATE, 2/1/2009

So, where is The Modern Menace then Seej? Why are you putting Black Ice up on iTunes? Give us free stuff you lying fuck!

Well, allow me to explain. 2008 was a hell of a year for me in terms of musical development; I've put some serious work into improving what I can do and, not to sound big-headed or anything, I've significantly raised my game. So now I look back at where I was in Q1 of 2008 and think I can do better. I think the lesson here is to work faster. This is not to say that my work back then was without merit. One thing I've always been able to do is to spot a hook, and there's plenty in there, but before I released any of it I'd want to go back and do some heavy re-editing and production on it. I did say on my blog (which you all read religiously, of course) that I was gonna upload my half-finished efforts so you could have your filthy way with them, but having given it some more thought I've come to the conclusion that it would be to the eventual detriment of the album, so here's the new plan; 1. I've got some remixes on my hands that may prove to lead to actual proper paid work in the long term, and they need to be finished by mid-January 2009, so that's where all my focus is right now, because it'd be nice to actually get paid for doing this. One of them I'm actually supposed to be working on as I type this, but I didn't become King of The Procrastinators by doing what I'm supposed to, so I'm doing this update instead. 2. Black Ice was never intended to be part of The Modern Menace. It's definitely not something which would fit on there; it was more of an exploration of some new bits and pieces I got my hands on and, in all honesty, I recorded the whole thing in a single day and didn't really know what to do with it other than send to iTunes. So that's what I did. 3. 2009 may be a busy year for me or it may not. What am I, fucking psychic? So I wouldn't like to say at the moment when I expect to have a newer, stronger, more lethal version of Menace ready for you. Maybe by Summer. Maybe next year? It will come eventually though, and those of you who've been supportive so far, I appreciate your interest and do intend to make good on my promise, albeit quite late. Sorry.

So, I hope that answers those burning questions. Anything else you need to know about? See the email addresses below. Cheers,

Seej 500

UPDATE, 30/10/2009

Various very interesting articles have cropped up talking about digital downloads and what artists earn. I thought it was worth adding them to this article:

Liberal Conspiracy have a good, detailed look at the numbers behind this. They use pie charts. Specifically focuses on the flaws in the arguments of artists against downloads, as well as contributing their piece on why Mandleson's sucking up to the industry is the transparent attempt to get back on David Geffen's yacht again that we all know it is.
A mystery blogger that is actually one or more of Hot Chip quietly weighed in with an artist response that was more considered than most, and which amounts to more than just retreading Metallica's old Napster Bad argument.
Ben Goldacre turns his eye for figures, his ability to do basic maths, and his crazy insistence that if people make headline-grabbing claims then they back them up with, y'know, actual evidence and research, and analyses the scare stories in the media. Guess what? It turns out someone's made a "mistake" in their calculations, but let's not let that get in the way of a good story, eh?
The BPI, yes, the British Phonographic Industry themselves (i.e. the UK's version of the RIAA) admits that 2009 has been a record year for sales of singles. Yup, despite stories of doom, of quadrillions of pounds not being spent on music, of an industry that's being crushed by people giving the same thing away for free, we bought more singles this year than any other year ever. But... but I don't understand, who's buying all these records if all this illegal downloading is happening?
Well, to answer the question raised by the previous article, The Guardian may be able to help us. They've got a fascinating story about a Norwegian study that found, and I hope you're sitting down (and you should probably also charge up the defibrillator and have a crash team standing by) because this is going to be a shock, but they found that pirates are ten times as likely to buy music as people who don't download illegally. The implication being, by pursuing pirates artists are persecuting their biggest fans, and the people who are likely to spend the most money on them in the long run. Now there's some food for thought.