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Wednesday, 8 December 2010

Making Money Opportunities

State of the indy music industry looks rosy, so why all the doom-and-gloom about music?

Cory Doctorow at 11:30 PM Wednesday, Dec 1, 2010

TuneCore's Jeff Price has a six-part series analyzing the financial state of the music industry from the point of view of an independent artist. Price offers compelling reasons to believe that although the labels are experiencing a severe downturn, artists as a group are earning more than ever, thanks to the Internet.

I have a feeling that the record industry's rejoinder to this would be, yes, more artists are earning some money from their music, and all told, there's more money going to artists than ever before, but there are fewer opportunities for an artist to sign up to a label like ours that controls so much of the distribution channel that we can guarantee large sums of money for these lottery winners.

In other words, the music industry today is much less winner-take-all, with the benefits diffused to a larger pool of artists at the expense of the few who did so well under the old system. This is what I mean when I say a good copyright system is one that encourages the broadest-possible engagement in culture: more music, from more musicians, reaching more people, at more price-points, in more formats. It's a win for free expression and for art, but it's a loss for some artists and the institutions that supported them.

I don't celebrate those losses: it's terrible to think of people who loved and lived for music losing their jobs (most of the people at labels aren't greedy tools deciding to sue 40,000 music fans; greedy tool-dom is confined to a few powerful decisionmakers). It's sad to think of the tiny pool of musicians who did so well taking a loss (though before we weep for them too much, remember that yesterday's winners are well situated to get even richer from merch, performance and licensing, even without the archaic recorded music industry and its shiny bits of plastic).

But copyright's purpose should be to get as much art made and available as possible -- it's not a full-employment scheme for administrators and marketing people and record-store clerks; it's not a lottery that makes millionaires out of a couple of lucky artists. There's nothing wrong with it doing those things, but they aren't why it's there: it's there to fuel expression and art.

The reality is:

* More musicians are making money off their music now then at any point in history.

* The cost of buying music has gotten lower but the amount of money going into the artist's pocket has increased.

* There are more people listening, sharing, buying, monetizing, stealing and engaging with music than at any other point in history.

* There are more ways for an artist to get heard, become famous and make a living off their music now than at any point in the history of this planet.

* Technology has made it possible for any artist to get distribution, to get discovered, to pursue his/her dreams with no company or person out there making the editorial decision that they are not allowed "in".

* The majority of music now being created and distributed is happening outside of the "traditional" system.

And to reiterate, sales are up...

Seeing that the Nielsen stats are readily accessible and accepted as legitimate, why then are we left with the impression that music sales and revenue are down? The simple answer is album sales and overall gross revenue from music sales (CD and downloads) are down. The increase in music purchases comes from the people buying individual songs. The decrease in revenue comes from a $0.99 song costing less than a $16.98 physical album as well as fewer purchases of physical CDs.

The State of The Music Industry & the Delegitimization of Artists

(via EFF Deep Links)

(Image: Diesel Sweeties tee)

Autodesk believes Android has grown to become a viable opportunity, enough so that it is bringing a version of its popular drawing app, SketchBook Mobile, to the platform. Autodesk, which makes powerful 2-D and 3-D design software, has a hit with SketchBook Mobile for the iPhone and iPad, recording 2.2 million downloads since first launching in September of last year. The company was waiting to see if Android would attract a vibrant user community before pulling the trigger on its first Android app, something the company says it now sees. “We’ve been keeping an eye on all the smartphone platforms, but Android stuck out; we were getting a lot of customer feedback from people requesting that we support Android,” said Chris Cheung, project manager for SketchBook Mobile during an interview last week.

Autodesk will offer both free and paid versions ($2.99 for the Pro version) of SketchBook Mobile. The apps will only work on Android 2.1 or higher, which leaves out the small but significant number of users still clinging to older versions of Android. Cheung said SketchBook Mobile for Android took six months to build and will be familiar to iOS users, though with some different elements mapped to the buttons on Android devices. Cheung said the decision to support Android was driven not only by customer demand, but also by a distinct absence of top-notch sketching apps in the Android Market. He said Android offers less competition for a company like Autodesk than iOS.

This is another sign that the Android platform is becoming a target for big-name developers. I recently talked about how Zynga, Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon were focusing more efforts on Android, giving the platform the kind of support that iOS has long had. There’s still a way to go for Android to become the primary target for developers, but established companies are sensing now is the time to get on board with Android. The user base is there, thanks to some breakneck growth. In many cases, Android Market is still ripe for the picking for larger companies, who don’t face the same high-quality competition you see the App Store.

Given the popularity of free apps in the Android Market, it will be interesting to see Autodesk’s breakdown between paid and free downloads of its new app; Cheung said about a quarter of SketchBook Mobile’s downloads on iOS are paid. With Android users’ tendency to choose free over paid apps, I don’t expect Android to match the iOS paid figure right away, but it would be good to see Autodesk get a significant number of paid downloads, because it’s a quality app that deserves it.

That will be the test for Android. It’s not enough to just attract big-name developers to Android; they have to see good money-making opportunities to keep building Android apps. Mobile advertising and in-app purchases are becoming solid ways to make money, but for companies like Autodesk, which rely on getting users to buy the paid version, that’s still the model that matters the most right now.

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub. req’d):

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In addition to today's news that promo codes for applications in Apple's iOS App Store are now valid worldwide, several other items of interest related to the iOS and Mac App Stores have surfaced yest.