The Jager Music Awards 2021 independent music awards ceremony took place on December 11. Music journalist and IMI editorial advisor Alexander Gorbachev together with industry experts and award heroes sums up the year 2021 and talks about the main events in the world of national music.
This year the opportunity to become a hero of Jager Music Awards was given to all the heroes of music culture: artists, managers, designers, concert and party organizers and many others. The full list of 30 winners from Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus can be found on the site of the award.
Music journalist and IMI editorial advisor Alexander Gorbachev and other heroes of the award – member of Zaloom band Stepan Privezentsev, artist Acid Racer, Niki Zimov from DOPE CLVB WORLD association, as well as the music editor of show “Evening Urgant” Sergey Mudrik and the founder of Powerhouse Moscow recording studio Andrei Algorithmic – talked about the music and the music industry in 2021.
How The Sale Of Music Has Changed In Half A Century
The future of the music industry is now a big question, both for the musicians themselves and for those who make money from them. The old world is shattered, and no one has yet fully understood the new one. What will music retailers have to live off now?
Music has come a long way in the twentieth century, and it has become covered with a mass of ugly superstructures and crutches. The army of middlemen grew to absolutely obscene proportions. Thus, by the end of the nineties, a single prominent artist in the West was averaging a record label with a bunch of employees, a production company, recording studios, a bunch of outsourced personnel from designers to drivers, a touring technical team, local organizers and venues, radio stations, television, music stores (including large chain stores), various kinds of productions like discs, merchandising, printing, and many companies tied down by advertising contracts. Everyone managed to snatch a piece of someone else’s talent.
Needless to say, the increasing complexity of the service structure led to an extreme confusion of financial flows within the industry. To this day, it’s still a mystery how the money flows within the majors, and what part of it goes to them along the way. So today we will only try to figure out what has been and is happening in the main channel of communication between musicians and listeners – in the sale of musical content.
How It Used To Be
If we look far back – to a time before the invention of recording media – we find that back then it was extremely easy to live off music. Musicians earned a specific appreciable living by playing at various events, from concerts to court festivals, while composers wrote music to order and sold their sheet music. Everything lay on the surface, no questions of principle arose.
The music industry as we know it, and which has been actively crumbling for several years now, began to emerge in the twentieth century with the mass distribution of vinyl records. By the way, it was then, at the dawn of the industry, that a system of singles – recordings of one or two songs for a few minutes of sound – little understood by the Russian person, appeared. Singles, the existence of which for a long time was conditioned by technical limitations, turned out to be a great marketing tool, with the help of which labels began to successfully advertise their albums. In the USSR, however, it did not take root for obvious reasons – in the conditions of that economy, advertising was a bit of a pain in the ass. The Melody company did not know the word “marketing”.
By the middle of the century, things had finally settled down in the U.S. and, to a lesser extent, in Europe. The record companies took control of the entire process of creating and selling music, and from then on, they could shape the musical agenda according to their own needs. From that time until the beginning of the “digital revolution” of the 2000s, the threshold for entering the industry was very high. Everything cost a lot of money: studios were full of expensive equipment, media production was tied up in large factories and required a large-scale production cycle, and advertising channels – radio and, later, television – were beyond the control of consumers. People listened only to what they were given.
On such fertile ground in the U.S. an impressive culture of record stores emerged. Americans were taught to pay for music: a longplay then cost $10-12, a single a couple of bucks, and you could hear something for free either on the radio or at some label’s promotional event. Distribution schemes had been fine-tuned for years, and by the time of the “digital revolution” in the United States, music stores of various sizes were feeding a sizable army of their owners.
The sale of music in those days was the main source of income for the label and its artists, because it was transparent and controllable. Concert activity was mainly under the article of advertising, and the industry earned on the banal trade – both the music itself and the rights to it, as well as all sorts of by-products like souvenirs and branded products. As a rule, the label itself determined how much it was willing to invest in an artist, but in any case the lion’s share of the income did not reach the musicians.
How It Is Now
The music industry went through three radical format changes in half a century, and each time it found itself in the role of catching up with the preferences of the masses. Records changed to audiocassettes, those to CDs, and only the fourth change of course proved to be too sweeping. The industry could not digest the Internet.
In fact, the reason for the collapse of the old notions of music sales was the ultimate loss of control by the labels over the consumer. The process began in the 1980s with the advent of audio cassettes, which could be recorded at home, and at first looked rather innocuous. The new format only gave an impetus to the underground scene, which had no influence on the musical tastes of the majority. People with different preferences from the mainstream just silently exchanged the records they needed and did not disturb anyone.
A little later, this process led to the creation of an independent music industry, including independent distribution networks and record stores, but there was never any serious money involved, and the two worlds existed in parallel for a long time. But that was the first bell: that was when the consciousness of some people first got out from under the control of the big music corporations. The majors were no longer in control of everything.
The second – and most powerful – blow was, of course, the emergence and spread of digital technology. It meant the loss of the industry’s monopoly on the most expensive thing of all: recording. The cost of studio equipment fell by orders of magnitude, and after a certain transitional period in which people were learning new possibilities, and technology was at a breakneck pace being fine-tuned to acceptable standards, home studios began to produce recordings that were as good as tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of work. The concept of “recording studio contract” suddenly lost its meaning, as the creation and sale of a musical product in practice began to drift farther and farther away from each other. The bar to enter the market collapsed, and it was flooded by unknown musicians with their interesting music, recorded at home for a penny. Indie labels blossomed, many of which quickly succeeded in imposing serious competition on the majors.
However, despite the general fall in sales, the music corporations still had a few years before they finally lost control of the situation, which, let’s face it, they spent in a completely mediocre way. Decades of serene life within the established system had lulled them to such an extent that the industry once again missed a radical change in trends. But this time it turned out to be really serious because of the advent of high-speed Internet.
Truly mass access to the web turned all the financial flows in music upside down.
People were able to reach music and its creators directly, and the huge dam built by the record companies, which had been cracking for years, was finally breached. Music was being poured on people absolutely free. The old industry had completely lost control over the listener: instead of the radio and TV advertising channels under its control, completely uncontrollable social networks appeared, no one needed CDs, and free downloading was not amenable to any court decisions. People didn’t care about the army of freeloaders and listened to music the way they wanted.
But when the first ecstasy of the new world passed, many people had questions. First and foremost, the musicians themselves, who had seemingly unlimited opportunities to promote their music. The complaints, characteristically, were the same: bad people don’t want to pay for musical content.
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The musicians, who grew up in the old system of coordinates, were not ready for such a radical change of financial principles. Especially since the situation was completely new, and no one knew how to behave now. Music simply stopped selling, and it was urgent to look for new monetization schemes.
The first obvious solution was to change the financial priority from records to live performances. Concerts and CDs switched roles: now the artist was touring to make money, and the recordings were preparing the ground for performances. Not so long ago, it was exactly the opposite. Many pure studio projects grabbed their heads, gathered musicians, and went to recover at least the recording costs; this was followed by an army of concert venues, equipment rentals, booking agencies; in a word, the infrastructure came to life.
The second obvious solution was to try to get something out of their own recordings. Musicians started to launch crowdfunding projects, to beg for an album “as much as they could”, to google complaining about their records, and even to sue everyone, from torrent tracker owners to their own listeners. All this had little effect, because the income of the united music industry began to tend to an average value, which gravitated towards absolute zero for indie musicians, and the claims of the former mastodons had no effect on the trend. Money began to be distributed fundamentally differently, and it turned out to be extremely difficult to take it out of the pockets of the listeners directly into your own pocket.
At the same time, in these conditions, copyright activists, another piece of the crowd of idlers, who had been profiting from music for at least half a century, blossomed wildly. As a rule, their activity causes no more than annoyance to the listeners: they are especially reliable, for example, on YouTube, where they chase “licensed compositions” in the dubbing of video clips. It looks extremely ridiculous and more like the impotent agony of Scrooge McDuck losing his last million. Obviously, the old legal practices do not work under the new conditions either, if only because of the lack of control instruments.
The reorganization of the world has been going on for years, but no one has yet come up with an unambiguously working formula for monetizing music.
Experiments continue, new rules are derived empirically, and no one can predict what the music industry will become in a couple of years – especially in view of the shrinking spiral of technological progress.
Digital sales and content subscriptions are nothing more than props for an industry suspended in obscurity. Apparently, music will no longer be sold in any form: brand, expert opinion, merchandise, affiliation – anything but music – will be sold. And that’s a damn good thing.