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| ISBN-13: | 9780520966062 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 09/06/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Making Money, Making Music
History and Core Concepts
By David Bruenger
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96606-2
CHAPTER 1
Musical Experience as Transaction
The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. — Herbert Marcuse
This is a book about making money, making music, and using the one to accomplish the other. It is not concerned with formal definitions of music or with practical music making. Nor will it provide specific guidance on how to promote your band, start a record label, or fill out a copyright registration form. This is an exploration of value in its many forms — artistic, social, cultural, and economic — and the capacity of music to create it. It is an examination of the human experience of music, why people place a value on that experience, and — perhaps most critically — how that value is measured.
One way to measure the value of music is by applying "aesthetic" criteria. If we define aesthetic as "being pleasing," then the simplest criterion would be, does a given piece of music please the listener? Since this kind of value is personal and entirely subjective, opinions will vary widely, and comparisons will be difficult. If, on the other hand, we define aesthetic as "a set of ideas or opinions about beauty or art," we have the basis for a system that can support comparisons between works of music and those who create them.
By adopting formal aesthetic measures based on expert-established standards, musical artifacts — songs and larger compositions — can be ranked in terms of quality. The European classical music tradition is an example of this kind of value system. In it, music critics and scholars apply expertise gained from years of critical listening and study to evaluate and compare both established and new musical works and performances.
Outside of the classical tradition, musical quality tends to be measured in other ways, using criteria on the spectrum from high-level expertise to purely personal, in-the-moment reactions. These include various "Top 100" or "Best of" lists, such as Best Love Songs of All Time, Best Summer Anthems of the 2000s, or Best Dance Tracks of 2014, and so on. For lists like these, sometimes the public votes, or the list might be a compilation of a panel of pop music critics' opinions.
Collective judgments like these suggest that one can look at musical value through a social lens rather than a purely aesthetic one. The widespread practice of singing "Happy Birthday," playing Mendelssohn's "Wedding March" for weddings, singing carols at Christmas, "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" or "Rock and Roll, Part 2" for sporting events are all markers for musical value as measured by social adoption — popularity. Taken across a large enough sample and over time, this kind of popularity is a measure of the usefulness, familiarity, and "tradition value" of particular pieces of music for specific social events.
Ultimately though, whether value is assessed individually, by breadth of social adoption, by expert authority, in the moment, or over time, "goodness" in music is both situational and difficult to quantify. It is one thing to argue — either in the abstract or for a particular purpose — that Beethoven's Symphony no. 5 is "better" than Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines." But answering the question "how much better?" is much more complicated. Aesthetic and popular assessments only underscore one's personal tastes.
There is, however, one system of measurement — a metric — that can quantify musical value objectively and consistently, and that supports comparative analysis across styles and contexts.
Money.
Purely as a measure of artistic quality or individual appeal, money has obvious limitations. The value and meaning of music is about more than the revenue it generates. It is commonly believed that art and commerce are mutually exclusive, that the people engaged in these aspects of the music enterprise are diametrically opposed, and that the artistic world is divided between creators, who are "good," and exploiters, who are "bad." This polarized view — expressed, for example, by the quote at the beginning of the chapter — powerfully shapes public perception and public policy about music and the arts.
However, virtually no music exists entirely outside an economic context. Even the greatest composers of the European classical music tradition were concerned with compensation; their survival depended upon it. Moreover, the economic constraints of classical music affected not only the lives of the musicians themselves but also the nature of their art. Thus, even though the study of classical music tends to avoid discussing money, a complete assessment of the productivity of iconic composers such as J. S. Bach, Franz Josef Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or Ludwig van Beethoven is not possible without also considering the economic and social conditions in which their music was created.
The increasing professionalization and industrialization of music in the twentieth century amplified the importance of the economic realities that constrain and support the musical arts. In truth, while the value of music cannot be measured only in terms of money, we absolutely cannot talk about the music business or, more broadly, music enterprise, without talking about people who are making money while making music. Ultimately, a failure to understand and function within an economic context undermines the sustainability of any music enterprise, thus diminishing both the artistic and social value that it can create.
As a result, every music enterprise must be assessed in terms of its capacity to create multiple forms of value: good music, social purpose, and a sustainable economic model. Put another way, those metrics become a question: why and how do musicians, audiences, and economic opportunity come together?
MUSIC: SICIOECONOMIC CONTEXT
Musical endeavors can be entirely personal and never intended for public ears, let alone commercial consumption. Yet more often than not, music occurs in a social setting. Most simply, music happens when someone is making it and someone else is listening. In that context, the experience of making and listening to music can be understood as an exchange, or transaction, between performer and listener. It is only when music is placed in such a social context — where the musical experience is an exchange between people — that its full potential to create value can be realized. This is the first core principle of the text.
The places — whether physical or technologically mediated — where musical artists, audiences, and economic opportunity come together are the marketplaces for music. Since musical experiences are as varied and diverse as the many different styles of music, multiplied by the number of performers and listeners, music marketplaces come in many forms. In addition, styles and tastes change and so do markets. Methods of production and delivery appear and permeate society or fade into obsolescence. New social behaviors emerge and traditions evolve.
Business models arise, are codified, and then, with the next wave of change, are rendered obsolete. As a result, the enterprise of creating value through music can be seen as cycling between bursts of innovation and periods of relative stability. On the one hand, this is an entertaining feature of studying the music business: things are not static. On the other hand, studying the music business can be frustrating; styles fluctuate, and the means of creation, production, and consumption are reinvented over and over again. And if it were your money and career at stake, it is easy to see how such volatility could be terrifying.
One thing that does not change, however, is that a musical experience can be understood as a relationship between people. Performers provide music and listeners provide their attention and, in that shared experience, there is an exchange of meaning and value, whether simple appreciation, admiration, money, or all of the above.
Framing musical experience as a transaction is a useful tool. It helps us to describe how musical value was created historically, to see how it is produced today, and to predict the contexts in which it is likely to develop in the future. It is the first operative dynamic — and the most foundational — of this text. Like all such dynamics (and core principles), it is scalable and applicable across different times, styles, business structures, and socioeconomic contexts.
The circles in the diagram in figure 1 describe the two essential components of the musical experience: creation and reception. In their most common form, the two elements are performing and listening. Each of the circles can also represent the agents — the people — engaged in these activities. Whether we define the person(s) acting on the left side of the diagram as performers, composers, or teachers, and the person(s) on the right as listeners, patrons, or students, the relationship between them always consists of an exchange of something: a "this" for "that" transaction (or quid pro quo) represented by the arrows that connect the circles.
There is an immense utility in recognizing patterns and their recurrence, because the music business is nothing if not cyclical. Even though (as noted in the introduction) musical styles, social behaviors, and the tools of production, distribution, and consumption were all quite different in 1899, the practical concerns of music content providers at the turn of that century were quite similar to those in 1999: piracy, new media, and changing consumer attitudes and patterns of consumption.
A practical understanding of past patterns and their relevance today, requires — in addition to awareness of them — the ability to distinguish between the elements and relationships that remain relatively stable over time and those that change more often. As we consider consistency and change, we will examine the forces that both drive and resist change, as well as the larger economic, cultural, and social frameworks in which those forces act.
TRANSACTIONS: COMPOSING, TEACHING, AND PERFORMING
In addition to the performing-listening transaction, two other musical activities have traditionally supported value creation in music. Both composing and teaching music have long been integral to the professional lives of performing musicians, and both remain relevant to the performance enterprise of many musicians today.
Composing
Some musical cultures are based on learning traditional music aurally, while others emphasize improvising music in the moment. In the classical European tradition, by contrast, music is normally composed in advance of a performance, sometimes on demand for specific occasions. As a result, the role of the composer is prominent in the classical music tradition, as is the songwriter in the realm of popular, commercial music.
But regardless of the stylistic framework, in situations where there are a large number of performers or a limited amount of time to prepare a performance, being able to pre-arrange music via written notation (or other "instructions") has practical and economic value. For much of history, to the present day, many performers also compose and even more create written arrangements of compositions to customize their performances.
In earlier centuries, music writing and arranging were typically compensated with one-time, event-specific payment, or were unpaid yet necessary for a paid performance to occur. It was not until music publishing emerged in the mid to late 1800s and subsequently functional copyright laws were written to support the rights of musical content producers that the ongoing revenue potential of music composition was fully realized by composers. The development of music publishing and copyright laws affecting it is discussed in more detail chapter 2.
Teaching
Music education — teaching people how to play music — also has a long history of integration into the work lives of professional performers. As part of the European patronage model, providing music lessons for the children of the patron's household was a standard duty for a court com- poser/performer. It was not, however, until the emergence of a true "middle class" in the 1800s (people with leisure time and discretionary income) that expanding the scale of music lessons to a larger segment of the population — and selling printed instructional and student-level performance music — became practical. The musico-economic implications of the rising middle class in Europe are also discussed in the next chapter.
Music composition, music lessons, and music performance in various combinations remain relevant and continue to produce revenue streams for the majority of professional musicians in the twenty-first century. At the heart of the musical experience and the musical enterprise, however, is performance.
Performing
The foundational relationship for realizing musical experience has been (and remains) performing music live for an in-person audience. This practice dates as far back as there is history and occurs across virtually every place on the planet. There are few if any cultural or historical settings where people do or did not appreciate listening to music or incorporating music (and, therefore, musicians) into life's important, celebratory, and solemn moments. We know, for example, that in the 1700s musicians in northern Europe often made money by playing for dances, weddings, church services, and important civic events. Those activities and events would also describe the professional schedule of many musical performers so far in the 2000s and all the decades in between.
It is important to observe that many of the foundational historic models discussed in this text — particularly in the early chapters — are drawn from European traditions in music and music commerce. These models are relevant to us today for two reasons. First, European practice in music performance, composition, education, publishing, and copyright law directly informed the emergence and development of those practices in North America. Second, even when non-European musicians, musical styles, and audiences emerged and developed — blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, and so on — they were supported, constrained, and in some cases exploited via those same cultural values and practical frameworks.
While specifics change, the fundamental process models that support transactional music relationships between performers and audiences have remained remarkably constant over time. One feature common to all such models is the importance of recurrence; that is, of ensuring ongoing opportunities for performers and audiences to connect and reconnect.
PERFORMER-LISTENER TRANSACTION MODELS
One way to look at the performer-listener connection is to consider it from an economic perspective: how much money a performer needs to make within a given time frame and how to connect with the listener(s) willing to provide it. Consider a musician who needs to earn $1 million per year. Factoring that amount against the number of listeners/ consumers necessary to provide it yields possibilities ranging from one person who will pay $1 million for a single performance to 1 million people who will pay a dollar each — either collectively (an audience of a million people) or individually (a million one-to-one performances).
Obviously there are additional variables. You could find someone willing to pay $100,000 for ten performances or a thousand people to pay a $1,000 at a single performance. The abstract permutations are nearly endless, but in reality, there are constraining factors that limit the number of practical options.
The primary constraints to this kind of music endeavor are the logistics of delivery and the economic conditions and divisions in society. Doing a million individual performances in a year would mean performing over twenty-seven hundred times per day, which is obviously impossible. Performing one time for 1 million people is possible today, thanks to massive sound systems (not to mention, recordings, broadcast media, and the Internet). But, before electrical amplification was invented (around 1909) and applied to musical performance (around 1925), playing "live" for more than a few hundred (or, under ideal conditions, a few thousand) listeners at one time was impractical simply because the performance could not be heard by everyone in attendance.
Further, even if the maximum number of people heard (and paid for) the maximum number of performances per day, there are still limitations to consider. How far could a performer travel in a year to reach the requisite number of listeners? How many people in each location's potential audience pool would be willing — and financially able — to buy the musical experience being sold on a given day?
One way to view the significance of later technological developments such as recording, broadcasting, and so on, is in terms of how they have affected or, in the case of emerging technologies, have the potential to affect the constraints on performer-to-listener delivery models. But, regardless of whatever performance-enhancing technology is available, sustaining economic models in music (supporting a musical career) always depends upon "repeat sales" — audiences who are willing to pay for multiple experiences over time.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Making Money, Making Music by David Bruenger. Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California. 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. Musical Experience as Transaction
2. Transience to Permanence
3. The Rise of Commercial Markets
4. Media Revolutions
5. Convergence and Crossover
6. Massification
7. Scaling and Selling Live Performance
8. Visual Media
9. Artists, Audiences, and Brands
10. Digitization
11. State of the Art
Notes
Bibliography
Index