It was only last year Maria Taylor was telling me she was considering quitting the music business ebcause she couldn’t afford to stay in it. Even ten, fifteen years g, you could make a living recording music for an indie label (she is on Saddle Creek) but she can’t do it any more. This is a real problem and it is infecting the entire music industry. The obvious answer is to lower the prices again. with no distribution and no manufacturing, why should digital albums cost as much as CDs?
The new paradigm appears to be get enough streams and they will come to your live shows and stream your albums, but if you are still beginning, how do you hold on? A quick look at her numbers finds “Bulletproof” was streamed 30M times on Spotify and sold 8M copies, but this is what she told Digital Spy: “Having all the music in the world for a set fee, I hope one day it works and benefits the artist as much as I think it should. I think that’s what all those services are hopefully trying to work towards, but at the moment it’s difficult and there is so, so little money in music. I’ve never made any money from record sales, and we sold nearly 8 million records if you count all the singles. There’s something not right about that. That’s like saying, ‘My toilet’s broken, but I feel like I have the right to a toilet so therefore I shouldn’t have to pay for a plumber to come out and fix it’. It doesn’t work like that.”
What La Roux is telling you is simple enough: there is no money in recorded work. You can go up and down but what that amounts to is a terrifying truth, they haven’t found a way for recording stars to be rich. Incidentally, that is one reason why rock stars in the 2010s are so much more accessible than rock stars in the 1980s: they don;t have the money to buffer themselves from the audience. yes, that isConor Oberst standing next to you buying vegan eggs.
There is another reason for this, the record companies own a portion of the streaming services and sold you down the river.
