Create, Produce, Consume: New Models for Understanding Music Business
424
Create, Produce, Consume: New Models for Understanding Music Business
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520972735 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 10/08/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 424 |
| Sales rank: | 411,529 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Inception
Creation, Production, Reception
Music most often begins as an idea or a feeling in the mind or heart of one person. Understanding how or why is a mystery beyond the scope of this text. Here, we will take musical creation as a given and focus on what comes after: shared musical experience, what makes it happen, and the forms of value it can generate.
Musical experience depends upon someone making and someone else listening to music. Performance can be technologically mediated so that performer and listener don't need to be in the same space at the same time. Or the performer and listener can be in the same room (or even be the same person). But for music to have wider impact, the minimum "equation" is one performer plus one listener equals a musical experience.
How music moves from an idea — creation — to the ears of listeners — reception — is where the production structures of music enterprise come into play. All forms of music production provide access to musical experience, regardless of venue or technological medium. Access to music and musicians is what brings music commerce, community, and culture to life. Consequently, managing access and the complex relationship between artist and audience is the essential mission of every music enterprise, regardless of where or when or in what genre it happens.
This chapter begins with an overview of the processes through which producers bring music, musical artists, and audiences together. This is followed by an introduction to fundamental concepts, analytical tools, and a methodology for new venture creation, all of which will be referenced throughout the remaining chapters.
PRODUCTION PROCESS: ACCESS, DISCOVERY, ENGAGEMENT
Because the inception of music is so often personal, the first challenge for anyone wanting to use it to create value is to make it possible for someone besides the creator to hear it. At the most fundamental level, this is a question of access.
For centuries, access to music meant that the listener had to be in the same space as the performer while the performance was happening. Late in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, technologies such as audio recording/playback and radio broadcasting made access possible even when artists and audiences were far apart or the acts of performing and listening were separated in time. A record played on the radio made it possible for a listener in Arizona to hear a performance recorded in Massachusetts, two years earlier.
New technologies that increased access to music — particularly those that made it more convenient or cheaper — changed listening and commercial consumption patterns. Musical styles previously limited to the players and listeners of a specific geographical region could be heard all over the country and, ultimately, the world. The scale of consumption changed as well: "handcrafted," one-of-a-kind local performances could become mass-produced products for audiences of millions. As the musical experiences and social/economic opportunities of creators expanded, creative practices changed too.
In addition, by the mid-twentieth century, broadcast and recording technologies moved musical experiences, previously available only in public spaces, into private ones. Music in a vast array of styles, from all over the world, could be heard in the comfort and convenience of one's own home via radio and records. The digital technologies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries intensified these effects. Today, it is no exaggeration to say that access to any music, anywhere, at any time is a reality across the industrialized world.
Incredibly, this near universal, on-demand access to music is available at minimal or no cost to listeners. Musical experience — from the listener's perspective — has never been richer or more convenient. But at the same time, the emergence of this reception utopia has caused a major crisis for producers.
For music producers there has always been tension between facilitating access and controlling it. If music is too difficult to find, people won't hear it, let alone purchase it. If access is too easy, people don't need to pay and may even be able to function as "pirates," creating and distributing illegal copies.
The point of access to music is always also the point of monetization, whether in the form of a ticket that lets you into a concert or the purchase of a recording. Even broadcast media like radio monetize access — by providing advertisers access to listeners who must listen to or watch ads in order to hear (have access to) music.
When a new technology, a changing social behavior, or a combination of the two changes access it also affects both control and monetization, to which producers must respond. This phenomenon is both cyclic and inevitable (see chapter 8 for a discussion of this cycle) and has happened many times. But, fueled by the "compressive effects" of digital technologies, the conflict between access and control became unusually intense early in the twenty-first century. In later chapters we will look at some of the winners and losers in these rapidly evolving frameworks for production and consumption.
In addition to unparalleled ease of access and an increasing difficulty monetizing it, the contemporary music business faces another issue. Since the early 2000s, it has been possible for anyone to reach a global audience with musical (really any digital) product via the Internet. The production, distribution, and promotion of such products, ranging from professionally done recordings of original songs to home-made lip synch videos, became possible at minimal cost via web-based media hosting platforms like YouTube, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp (as well as Zoella and KSI for Gen Z-ers), and networking utilities like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Musical.ly (for Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z, in roughly in that order of usage).
The mechanisms of production, distribution, and promotion previously controlled by (and beneficial to) record labels and radio stations were democratized by the Internet. Much more music by many more creators and producers was available than ever before. The downside was that in removing the gate-keeping function of labels and networks, the curatorial function was removed as well. Everything becomes equally available online: good, bad, and ridiculous. The bandwidth is enormous but the signal-to-noise ratio is very poor. Because so much music is discoverable via the Web, for producers the question becomes one of how to ensure that listeners discover their music amid the millions of choices.
For most of the twentieth century, music discovery (how listeners find music) depended upon a coordination of radio play, retail record sales, and live shows, supplemented with print and broadcast media advertising and promotional appearances. Traditional discovery was part of a process that was relatively stable and well understood. As explained by Samuel Potts (Head of Radio, Columbia UK): "Previously, in the era of the traditional customer journey, we generated discovery for 8 to 12 weeks (allowing customers to discover new music by promoting through intermediaries such as TV, radio and press), and then the purchase or 'consumption' of music would come afterwards."
Today, discovery increasingly depends on Internet-based platforms that incorporate a social networking component. In one sense this is not new, in that "telling your friends" has always been a valuable tool to promote music. But, like other aspects of the multidirectional networking on the Internet, the speed, scale, and interactivity in the present environment are unprecedented. In addition, Internet-based "fame" is extremely transitory and may last hours, perhaps a day or so at best.
As a result, the question confronting producers today is not only one of driving traffic to a YouTube channel, for example, but also one of fostering listener engagement with the content there. It is not now — nor has it ever been — sufficient to lead listeners to find an artist. A listener must personally connect to the artist's music and to the artist as a human being. This connection is the basis for longer-term relationships. Neither economic success nor cultural influence is achieved by way of "one and done" musical encounters. Successful management of the production process requires an integration of artist/music discovery and engagement, followed by consumption — ideally via multiple purchases of products and experiences — over time. As explored in later chapters, this process has been accelerated, compressed, demonetized/remonetized, and fundamentally altered in the digital era.
Developing a working understanding of the creation-production-reception cycle — and its potential to generate commercial consumption — depends upon knowledge of a wide range of historical and contemporary examples, as well as a degree of skill using concepts, theoretical frameworks, and analytical tools to analyze, compare, adapt, and apply them to emerging or entirely new musical ventures.
FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS
In this chapter we introduce three concepts and a brief overview of the theories from which they emerge: complex systems, stability/disruption cycles, and adaptive expertise. All are highly relevant to music enterprise across virtually all genres, eras, and locales. As such they are presented as foundational perspectives to which we will return a number of times throughout the text.
Complexity
The term "complex system" has a number of specific meanings that, depending upon context, can range from the casual — that how something works is "complicated" — to formal discipline-based meanings. These include, in mathematics, chaos theory; in biology, the physical processes of organisms; and in computer networking, the Internet. All of these "things" (except the casual, conversational usage) share some critical characteristics: that there are many seemingly independent elements, that these appear to function without central control and yet somehow "act together" to make the whole thing work.
We will take a deeper look at complex adaptive systems in chapter 8. But for now, a basic interpretation of complexity applicable to music enterprise might look something like this: a complex system is one that has many "moving parts" (people, products, processes) that are relatively simple to understand individually, but that act together to be productive and efficient without the benefit of a controlling authority.
Let's take that working definition for a spin.
There is, for example, no individual or organization that can with certainty produce a "number 1 hit single." That distinction is the result of a large number of actions and interactions by and among songwriters, performers, producers, marketers, advertisers, communications experts, retailers, broadcast and web-based media platforms (and more) all acting independently (or at least semi-independently) but whose aggregate actions produce a "hit," a "song of the summer," a Grammy or CMA award nomination, or even the recognition of an artist as the "voice of a generation."
And that's just the production side of the process.
Even the combined expertise of all these actors and the considerable resources at their disposal will not, absent the enthusiastic participation of listeners/consumers, make a song rise to the top spot on the charts. The complex system for hit songs includes the listening public as well as the creators and producers and, since the early years of the twentieth century, music businesses have sought to understand what makes people love a song enough to make it a hit. Despite increasingly sophisticated research, sometimes the "hit-making machine" works exactly as planned, while at other times it does not.
The issue then is, perhaps, not how we see the "machinery" in all its complexity. The greater challenge is to know what specific action — what "button" to push — to make the system reliably and repeatably produce an intended result. In other words, the task for the artist/entrepreneur is doing it "on purpose" rather than waiting for "magic to happen." Consequently, the most critical consideration about the complex system of music production and reception is one of control.
A number of processes were developed by the music industry over the years intended to improve the chances of producing a hit and making a musical artist a star. For example, increasing public awareness of the artist and product via advertising and promotional activities is one such process. Tours to put the artist physically in front of audiences to create a personal connection and shared experience is another. For most of the twentieth century, the synergistic relationship between radio, record sales, and live shows was the foundational method believed to "engineer" successful outcomes most reliably.
Obviously, as a matter of historical fact, these control mechanisms did not always work. A big promotional budget and even an established brand do not necessarily produce a number one hit, a profitable record, or a successful tour. For example, the legendary "sophomore slump," in which artists with a popular debut album disappoint economically or artistically on their second release, is both common and yet not certain. For emerging artists and first albums the results are even less predictable. What catches on and what disappears without a trace can depend upon variables that are not apparent during the creative or production phases or that simply don't work the way they are "supposed to" work.
The embarrassingly negative public response to the U2 and iTunes partnership in which the band provided their album Songs of Innocence, released in 2014, free to Apple customers is an example of such unpredicted and unintended results. Fan demands to remove the "unwanted" product from the music libraries of their mobile devices were strident and incredibly well publicized in both social and professional media. The fiasco prompted embarrassed apologies from both Apple and Bono, on behalf of the band. Clearly this was not what the artists or the company intended.
Why one result and not another?
The issue is, complex systems are just that: complicated. There are too many moving parts (people, processes, and motivations) interacting in too many ways, often too quickly, for control to be easy. The Arctic Monkeys' groundbreaking online release of their debut album was initially considered a disastrous mistake by their label (a "leak" of massive proportions) until it turned out to be an industry-changing innovation. "What just happened here?" is not an unusual reaction in the business of breaking new music to the public.
Central to the difficulty of predicting outcomes, or even understanding results after the fact, is that it is possible to look too closely at an individual event and miss the larger picture. The converse is also true: an overarching brand strategy that is timely and appropriate doesn't matter if we (the audience) "don't hear a single." But it is the premise here that it is possible to do both: see the larger pattern as well as the individual elements and, more critically, their constantly morphing interactions.
That said, what this book cannot do — because, arguably, it cannot be done — is explain, once and for all, "how it works." There is no "trick" to it. Complex systems are self-organizing (people like what they like and do what they want), nonlinear (advertising does not necessarily equal sales and neither do social media "likes"), emergent (new technologies, trends, and behaviors appear), and dynamic in their movement from chaotic to ordered conditions and back again. Consequently, what worked beautifully for Band A last week may or may not work at all for Artist B today.
Because complex systems are dynamic and their behaviors are hard to predict, investments tend to be high risk. Much of the history of the music business — the growth of major record labels, as well as the promotional relationships between them, radio networks, and concert promoters — is a quest to control that complexity, or — depending on your point of view — to game the system. If, for example, one could suppress the competition and control the choices available to retailers and consumers, a streamlined process could — theoretically — emerge: a "star maker machine" that outputs "stars" and "hits" at a reasonably predictable rate.
Such practices can and do work. Until they don't. This variability is also a process, the result of a recurring cycle between stability and disruption in business, economics, and culture. The next step toward understanding complexity in the music business is found in the relationship between stable and disruptive states.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Create, Produce, Consume"
by .
Copyright © 2019 David Bruenger.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction1. Inception: Creation, Production, Reception
2. Production: Art, Science, Enterprise
3. Reception: Listeners, Fans, Consumers
4. Commodification: Product, Process, Culture
5. Monetization: Publishing, Performing, Recording
6. Location: Scenes, Venues, Labels
7. Diffusion: Here, There, Everywhere
8. Disruption: Pattern, Deviation, Adaptation
9. Connection: Artists, Audiences, Networks
10. Incorporation: Production, Monetization, Affiliation
11. Aggregation: Consumption, Production, Prediction
12. Simulation: Creation, Production, Consumption
Notes
Bibliography
Index