This is an interview taken from the research The Online Music Economy for Independent Music Entrepreneurs.
Andrew Dubber is a music consultant, academic and visionary thinker on the new online music economy. He is the author of a reputed free e-book The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online, and his blog and website New Music Strategies is a focus for many discussions from the global independent music community on music in the digital age. I spoke to Andrew in February 2009 to get his view on how independent musicians could adapt in the face of the changing technologies and business models of online music.
Susi O’Neill: I wanted to talk about the relationships between artists and fans. In your e-book you talk about the need for using web 2.0 and ‘forget product, sell relationships’, how an artist should use their web presence to create an environment. Some of the journalists and artists I’ve spoken to feel this goes again music as an art form and is part of the traditional music industry of marketing over quality, and many great artists aren’t able or willing to become an environment. How would you counteract that?
Andrew Dubber: I’ve been working with Jo Hamilton and her thing is being enigmatic. She made a video that didn’t show her face, it was all about the artwork. I guess the story is her art and an attempt to connect as human beings would sully this in some way. It’s really hard if you want to support that kind of game, it works well in traditional media, but online it’s really hard to do.
Internet media is conversational and social and you have this problem when someone is trying to be this enigmatic artist figure, they’re up against it online, it’s quite hard work. While you can do that with print and television and traditional broadcast media, with something that is as many to many as online, that kind of approach suffers.
SO: Do you think that would have always been a problem in traditional media as well, I know a songwriter who’s signed to Universal music, he’s a very quiet, enigmatic person but a gifted songwriter. But in a new economy model he probably wouldn’t have got to the stage of having an international publisher and label.
AD: It is quite hard to make the most of online technologies if you insist on being enigmatic and unapproachable. There’s a weird idea that music is an art form that people create then business comes along and does its dirty work, just so the artist can get paid, and it has to do all these awful and insidious things to lovely pure musical artistry – which completely misunderstand popular music. Without the music business there wouldn’t be any bands, there wouldn’t be any recordings, so to say they are separate things and that commerce is something which is done to music misses the whole point.
You can get around that by talking about music as media, which I do a lot. It’s like television, it’s like radio, it’s like press in the sense that it gets composed, it gets produced, it gets distributed, it gets promoted and it gets consumed in the same way that a television programme does. Once you understand it as that, it can be artistic, in the same way that you can get very artistic and authentic television programmes, but they understand themselves as television programmes and know that there is a commercial framework and all these things are part of a bigger thing that we call media. As soon as you stop going ‘is music art or commerce’, but say music is media – it solves that problem.
But different media work differently, and the other thing I talk about is from quite a McLuhanist perspective is that the content of any new medium is its predecessor. So if you accept that music is media, and you accept that you can put music online, then you have to say that music is the content of the internet medium. People who think that they’re reading newspapers online or think that they’re listening to the radio online, or think that they’re watching television online, are missing the fact that they’re using an online medium – they’re not watching television or listening to the radio, they’re on the internet. I think the same is true when you put music online – it becomes something else.
SO: It becomes part of the experience of digital communication, it becomes something different in a different context you mean, to say listening to a CD.
AD: Yes, and from a strategic perspective, you have to say what is the criteria of the new media. The story I use is of a theatre director who’s really good at making really great plays and pointing actors in the right direction, doing stuff in the theatre, and then the television cameras turn up. His choices are, does he continue to make televised plays or should he start making TV shows. Musicians and music businesses today have the same kind of dilemma in front of them, do I continue resolutely to make music media, or shall I start making internet.
SO: Some of the artists I’ve spoken to feel that the online music industry requires a totally new skill set to succeed – those who understand online technologies, online communities and PR can succeed through that, but it’s more time-consuming than in previous generations when there were limited routes to market when there was a more traditional music industry and publications. So with some people there’s a sense of despair, particularly those who’ve been through the traditional music industry, that they can’t do all these things and they can’t reach all these people.
AD: It’s about understanding your environment. People who were really good at understanding how sheet music was produced and distributed had the same problem when recorded music became the main way people consumed popular music. So yes, absolutely, whoever understands the new medium is ahead of the curve, the biggest problem you’ll have is if you dig your heels in the sand and resolutely refuse to accept that the world is changing, you’re going to run into problems and you’re going to have difficulties. People think that I’m some kind of evangelist for new technologies – I’m just saying it’s happening and you’re going to have to deal with it or you’re in trouble. To an extent, they’re right, but by the same token, if you acknowledge that it’s a necessity, you don’t necessarily need to have those skills yourself but identify people who do have those skills and put them on your team.
The difference is not that it used to be easy and now it’s hard – it used to be expensive with money and now it’s expensive with time, that’s the difference. You can invest an awful lot of time in doing stuff but it doesn’t cost you any money. It used to be that you’d pay thousands of pounds to a PR and a plugger and they would do their stuff for you. Now the investment that it requires is of a similar kind of level but it’s time rather than money.
SO: Some of the artists I’ve spoken to talk about the devaluation of music, that exact word came up several times, from the all-you-can-eat pervasity of downloading. I wondered how you thought independent artists could benefit from bit-torrents and downloading, particularly if an artist isn’t a live act, how could they make up the lost revenue from ticket sales or merchandising.
AD: I know so many people who do not perform live. They record in their bedroom, they record amazing stuff, but they find interesting ways to make money, there are all different kinds of way to slice it. But the devaluation of music thing, I find hilarious, this idea that somehow music is less valuable because it costs less. I think those two things are completely detached from each other. People value music more highly than they’ve ever valued it in their lives – it’s more integrated into their lives, they carry their personal collection around in their pocket. It’s like friendship: you don’t value friendship less because you have more of it. Music might cost less money now, which is what people are concerned about. The people saying music has been devalued are saying I’m not making as much money as I used to – which is not the same at all. It’s become a convenient catchphrase to describe how it’s harder for me to make money in the ways that I used to make money because things have changed.
SO: You talk about the death of scarcity and how musicians can benefit from the long tail, are there any particular ways of framing music, if musicians feel they’re being devalued they feel they’re losing something, are there different tactics they can engage in?
AD: Personally I think the easiest way to make money from music is to bundle it. If you’re a singer-songwriter and you make an album and try to sell it on your website, it’s hard work, but if you set up a website to cater to people who like singer-songwriters and you build a scene and a culture, and a critical mass of artists and bands and fans and bring them all together, you’ve got a much better shot at it. The long tail is not people who are obscure will now make more money than ever, the long tail is you can make more money by selling lots of small amounts of things.
SO: So would the strategy be frequency, to produce more products and more different types of product?
AD: Yes but also teaming up. It’s not about the star anymore and this is the biggest problem people have. They say ‘I’m the singer, I’m the creative genius, and I need to be treated on my own merits on my own terms’, which is perfectly possible but it’s the hard road. But if you say I’m part of a scene and a sub-genre and I’m part of a bigger thing – and as a collective we are approachable here, and people who like this may also like that – by super serving an audience, by looking at it from the fan’s perspective, rather than “I’m the auteur, pay me money”. It’s a balancing of ratios, things change so much that the environment’s shifted, and what used to be the main way of things happening is the less dominant way. It’s not that it can’t happen, it’s just harder.
SO: So it’s how the artist fits in as part of an existing community, or different communities of interest through social media rather than an auteur on an island of their own.
AD: Yes, and that’s why I talk about artists becoming a character or narrative that people can weave into their own lives, that they make sense of people and how I relate to them, which is why blogging is so powerful, why Twitter is so powerful, because it’s an ongoing engagement with the artist rather than these idealised droppings the artist leaves as clues as to the impenetrable wonders of their mind.
SO: Do you think the online music industry is replacing the traditional music industry with a different set of gatekeepers, Last.fm and MySpace replacing major labels, which are controlled and dominated by major corporations?
AD: I think you’re on the right track, but replacing is the wrong word. And I do come back to this idea of ratio and environments. As things come into the environment, some things become more dominant and other things less dominant, the mammals that looked like they were the small and runt-like part of the equation suddenly become important and the dinosaurs that are lumbering about suddenly become more specialist.
What you get is these gatekeepers, as you call them. It’s not a simple shift that we’ve turned the light switch off on these guys and turned the light switch on on these guys, but actually the more interesting gatekeepers are people like Internet Service Providers and technology manufacturers and these things that get over hurdles people have, like I need a laptop or I need to get connected to the internet or I need hosting for my website. Those sorts of things are the miniature gatekeeper barriers. There are so many more opinion leaders and tastemakers – you can approach as many people through a lot more people. So instead of going to get airplay on Radio 2, you approach music bloggers where it’s so much easier to get coverage but it takes a lot more bloggers than it does Terry Wogan’s to get heard.
SO: There’s a lot of noise in these spaces, particularly MySpace, so how can an independent business get through the noise when the major labels are still dominating these spaces, because they’ve got the budget to get exposure?
AD: There is that, you can always solve a problem by throwing money at it, particularly in a copyright exploitation framework. I used to get sent promos when I did a jazz radio show – 90 percent of everything was crap. But if 90 percent of everything is crap but there’s a hundred million times more of it, that 10 percent is going to be enormous. What it encourages is people to develop sophisticated filtering systems, personal recommendation and interactive engagement and conversation. People say “you’ve got to check this out here’s a link to it” and it won’t take you to a radio station with 100,000 different things – it will take you to that one thing. And that’s more precise and more targeted, and cuts out the noise much more effectively than dialling round the radio band.
SO: So do you think potentially that consumption could increase, if the 10 percent of good stuff is increasing?
AD: The elephant in the room in all these kind of discussions, when people say “oh it’s so hard to get my music heard”, is that your music isn’t good – because I defy anyone to point me to something on the internet that is amazing and has not been found. And if it’s amazing, and if it’s interesting and if it’s remarkable the people will remark on it, and people will point people to it. Things become viral because they’re interesting, because they push our buttons. We find them funny or engaging, or ‘wow this is an amazing piece of music, you’d better check this out!’ But people who are relying on ‘if I just throw activity or just throw money at it’ but the music is mediocre – it’s hard work, and rightly so.
SO: In previous days of tape-sharing – I grew up in an era when my main access to music was tapes from the library and tapes from friends – it would happen in the same way but perhaps more slowly than today.
AD: Absolutely, but the point is people weren’t going round saying how do I get my mediocre music onto your tape. It was about what’s great, and it’s always been about what’s great. Now everybody can say I am part of the music industries and it’s hard. Maybe for you it’s rightly hard, maybe your music is not as good as you think it is.
I can’t solve the music industry for people, all I can do is say here are some things to try that could bear results. But I can’t make hundreds of thousands of people love your music.
SO: So it’s elbow grease and application, which it always was for independent musicians. There’s been much debate over the transforming nature of music online, with discussion of music becoming more of a service than a product with Gerd Leonard’s infamous quote that “music should be free like water”. We’re starting to see that now with services like Last.fm, Spotify and Nokia’s Comes With Music offer. What are your thoughts on how independent musicians could adapt their working practices or their attitudes to view their product as a service, or if indeed that is a good thing or not?
AD: How people look at it is a complicated one because the problem with the music like water idea is that music consumption is about discovering and listening to music, which misunderstand consumption. I’m a record buyer. People make meaning from music, people discover music, they talk about music, they buy it, they order it, they make sense of it, they make their own personal narrative out of music, and they listen to it and play it to other people and they put together compilations – they do all sorts of things. This idea that you can turn it on and off like a faucet is the smallest slice of what people do with music. And while things like Last.fm and Spotify seem great, they are additional ways of negotiating music consumption.
There is something collectable about a physical music product which isn’t collectable about a digital music product, so to treat them differently is probably a first strategy. I treat this on a case-by-case basis. One of the problems I have with one-size-fits-all solutions is that they misunderstand music culture – how people generate scenes. I use a big piece of paper metaphor: you get a piece of paper and on one side write ‘I am this kind of artist, this is the kind of thing I do, these are the assets I have, these are the things that I’m good at’. On the other side of the paper you write what your fans are, this is what they’re like, this is how they interact with my music, this is how they understand it.
Then you put in the middle all the bits of technology – right from the wax cylinder to Spotify – and just list every possible avenue of putting it together. Then you join the dots of what is meaningful for your music and your audience using what’s available. And some of it might be I’ll give my music to Last.fm because it’s a really good promotional strategy, or it’s the way I draw people to my gigs, or the way I build a particular type of music taste so my music will be used on video games. It’s about what strategically works for each individual, and trying to come up with ‘the model was that and now it’s this’ is trying to second guess in a not very helpful way.
Find out more about Andrew’s views on the online music economy on his New Music Strategies website
Online Music Economy research index
