Where did the wheels fall off?

In 1989 Karlheinz Brandenburg, a postgraduate student at the University of Erlangen in southern Germany changed everything. You probably don’t even know what Karlheinz did, he doesn’t get mentioned much. He invented the mp3, a way of compressing digital music which makes music easy to store and, crucially, easy to share.

We all know what happened next
Over time we began sharing and listening to digital music as mp3s. Illegally at first with the help of Napster, uTorrent and others, now legitimately via streaming platforms like Spotify and iTunes (although it can be argued there’s still an element of robbery going on - more on that later).

Now streaming music is the norm and buying it is not. 67% of total music industry revenue comes from streaming vs just 16.1% from physical sales (Exploding Topics).

This, combined with other technological advances has created a perfect storm for musicians. Although there are many benefits to this new way of publishing music, there’s one very big problem and we’ve only just started to see the effects.

Here's the problem

Releasing music is now easy. It’s possible for any musician to do everything themselves from writing and recording to publishing. What used to take weeks or months at great expense can now be done in a few hours for free! That may not seem like a problem but trust me, it is.

Before the streaming explosion the only way to get your music published was via a record label. If you were lucky enough to get signed, your label would give you a nice advance on sales and do pretty much everything to help you succeed, from production to promotion.

Now, with the ability self-release, you no longer need to rely on prostituting yourself to the labels for your music to reach the masses. Savvy artists are now setting up their own labels, protecting their own publishing and taking control.

But here's where it starts getting tricky

It's so easy to publish music now that more people are doing it. Consumers have more new music to choose from ... a lot more! Around 100,000 new songs are uploaded to Spotify every single day (and 20% of those will never get played).

As a result if you're an independent artist, it doesn't matter how amazing your music is, you have 99,999 other songs to compete against on any given day.

It's about to get worse

Back in the days of physical sale there were a lot of record labels to choose from, big names and independents. Now there are three; Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group. They have pretty much gobbled up all the smaller labels and now control 85% of the industry.

That means everyone else gets to fight amongst the scraps. 15% of the market share.

A quick talk about money

Let's see how that all stacks up if you're an independent musician and you want to actually earn a living (good luck with that).

Pre streaming it was the record label stumping up the cash and to a degree taking on the risk. If you were lucky and had the right people behind you, you could earn a living.

Now you have to be very lucky. With the cards already stacked against you, the streaming services are about to pay you a pittance for your hard work.

Spotify pay around $0.005 per stream. That whopping sum then gets shared between the publisher, songwriter and whoever owns the master. If all those are you happy(ish) days! (dittomusic)

However before Spotify start splashing the cash you have to reach over 1,000 streams. Oh and to count as a stream someone needs to listen to more than 30 seconds of your song.

Therefore if you're an unsigned artist - even a bloody good one. It's unlikely your published music is even going to buy you a cup of coffee.

To make any money at all, most musicians have only one option, playing live but with so many small venues closing even that's getting tricky.

The death of innovation

In my experience there are some really exciting things happening in the world of independent music. Even in my mid 50's I still get excited about new music and music that pushes the art form. But can you name a big music shift since hip hop? That stuff exploded 40 years ago.

In my opinion, the music being published by the big three can be pretty homogenous and ‘safe’ at best. I very rarely get excited about it. Take the biggest grossing musician right now, Ed Sheeran. He really is doing nothing that wasn't done 50 years ago. I'm sure he's a nice guy and everything but he's really not pushing new ground at all.

There are also countless other musicians getting decent exposure who pretty much sound the same. The big three are just playing safe and selling what sells.

Meanwhile the people with less to lose are making bolder steps and taking bigger risks. I've been involved in a project to help expose unsigned artists (The Jam). Last year alone I filmed over 90 independent artists and every year I make a music video for one of them for free (see more here).

This is where the really exciting stuff is going on. But my fear is the real innovators will eventually be lost because they can't get the exposure or make the money they deserve,

What's the solution? In theory it's easy but in practice much harder. Independent, unsigned musicians are literally having to do everything that a record label would have done for them. This means musicians are literally running small businesses. So they have to step up and learn all the things they didn't need to know 20 years ago. The biggest part of that is marketing. Without it, nobody hears their music and nobody pays them money.

Of course the other solution is the big three start growing some balls and taking some risks but that's less likely to happen.

There is a future for new music but it's a very different one to the world we were living in when I had a wall of CDs in my living room.

What can you do?

If you're an artist, it's time to learn some new skills (find out how I can help here).

If you're a music lover start digging. Don't rely on Spotify's algorithm to serve up music for you. Get out there and start looking for it. Visit small venues and support unsigned artists. Follow them on social media and encourage them. Pay them for their talent and start supporting them.

Without them the future is filled with Ed Sheeran!