The gospel according to Andy Taylor...

[latebar]

Most frequently asked... If everybody were to give music away, how could you survive & prosper?

Let me try to broadly explain to you where I believe we are at

There are 595,000 illegal downloads every 5 minutes -

Only 1 in every 100 tunes are now purchased [on a scale of 1-100 can't get any lower]

Doesn't that sound like - GAME OVER...

Additionally, there are some common myths regarding the cost of, sale & distribution of music

Firstly, we are talking about digital music files, which have relatively small distribution costs

If you have already made a ton of money or can produce stuff at 2.0 costs then this should not present you to much of a dilemma

Is there something so radically wrong with giving your fans & customers a good deal, free deal - every other business does it...

The music business is the only business where the company has no loyalty connection with its customer, which explains why they treat them like shit!

Traditionally, 90% of the revenue from CD/music sales never went anywhere near the artist

And of the 10% that did, then maybe 1 in 10 artists made a profit - therefore as little as 1% of the gross revenue made the artists personal pocket [after costs of course]

So - artists are not getting their bucks now - & they never were!!!

Essentially, artists are no more suffering today than in previous incarnations...

Aspiration, excessive creativity, or just simply better than a real job, these are what kept the flow of artists coming, not their future prospects or job security

Do you know that it takes approximately 1,000,000 CD sales for an artist to recoup the content production & promo costs of the 1.0 labels success today

As most artists will never sell anywhere near that - you may as well give it away for free

It will probably be enjoyed by many more people & certainly won't get deleted...

Ask yourself the question - Do I want listeners ??? Sounds like a good place to start...

Before anybody gives a hoot about your WAGS shopping trips, people have to love what you sound like, not so complicated eh...

Before anybody buys into you financially on whatever level, they would need to connect emotionally with you, initially thru hearing your music & wanting to shag you!!!

This is nothing new - Music & Video have always been given away for free to support this - Lots of listeners were once important to artists & labels - The promotion of "listening to music" was fundamental to your success, but labels lost their way and the public went elsewhere!

Now they even want to charge you for that [Spotify]... Madness sheer madness - The labels missed the boat & should have been way smarter with their own platforms 10-years ago!!!

If you stop to count the number of individual listens per day when [free] radio was at its peak, you will find numbers that would excite even the most optimistic tekkie of today

Radio-1 alone had around 7-8 million listeners - there were 1000's of radio stations in North America

When there was a centralized service, the numbers were staggering - they still are

It's called YouTube... It was called MTV & Top 40 radio previously [& the labels had that lot in their brown paper bag]

Now they have nobody & no money to fill up the bag... The MP3, file sharing scenario is in many ways a smoke screen for decades of failure in completely missing the boat with the likes of YouTube - itunes - myspace et all.

Let me remind you that... MTV never once paid for the production or use of a popular video - they were given to the station by the labels, to promote the artists - at the artists expense of course -

I should know, we have the most popular video ever on MTV, they were serviced with it for $0 & we had a fckuin great holiday at the time...

MTV is worth about 2-billion bucks [or was at one point]

Any of this sound familiar -

What exactly does YouTube pay for???

Maybe there is no next or change, well not in the way the game is played

Just a new Sheriff in town & one that's not straddling some clapped out old NAG


Andy Taylor
June 15th 2009

[Frau_Blucher]

Gospel = principle accepted as an undeniable truth
Rant = disjointed spew of notions by a crackhead

[latebar]

"gospel" here i used it for sarcasm, cheers!

[DJ Phoenix]

Dead on with ALL of it actually. he was a part of one of the most successful groups of the 80s too, so I think he knows a thing or 3 about this sorta thing?

"Keepin the '80s alive!"

[obs]

Yeah, he does make some pretty good points.

Mind you, when he has to give away music for free just to get people to listen to his solo stuff ... [:)]

[Spectre General]

So, it is more or less true that you could sum this up by simply saying "Some like it hot and some sweat when the heat is on?"

-------------------------------------------------
What is love after all
but occasional steps
of a dance.........
.......In a trance?

[quietman]

I found it quite insightful. Andy knows what he's talking about.