Who controls the flows of money in music?

Traditionally, when you start to make music you’re looking for three things:

  • A manager
  • A record deal
  • A publishing deal

Of course, that third one is only if you’re a songwriter or composer. But these are the three ways you, as an artist, will look to turn your IP into profit. We’re currently moving through a paradigm shift in music – and the internet more broadly – when it comes to creation, ownership, fandom, and monetization. As this process accelerates, the previous traditional deals and contracts will also shift, adapt, change, and potentially subsumed by other types of agreements. But let’s start with some recent history on those traditional deals.

The Manager

As the music industry’s bible puts it, the single most important thing is the team an artist puts around themselves to help them grow. The first person they usually find is a manager. Together, the artist and manager work to put the music out into the world, attract fans, go on tour, build a brand, etc. Because the manager and artist should have a complete alignment of interests, the manager usually gets a flat fee on all the revenues that come through from the artist’s IP. Unfortunately, just as traditional as the mostly symbiotic relationship between manager and artist so is the fact that it’s based on a ‘handshake deal.’

Even one of the most famous independent artists, Chance the Rapper, and his manager, Pat ‘the Manager’ Corcoran, worked together for years on nothing more than an oral agreement. Even when they set up three separate companies to support merchandise, touring, and other income derived from streaming, licensing, etc., they never signed an official agreement together. Eventually, the relationship turned sour and first Pat sued Chance, and then Chance sued Pat. What’s most striking about these lawsuits isn’t the money involved, or even that the manager-artist relationship was based on a handshake deal, but how personal the filings are. What shines through everything is a deep and particular relationship. Reading those filings also shows how the manager involves themselves in every aspect of the artist’s career and brand. Again, this is aided by the monetary agreements. But if the artist is a brand, and in Chance’s case a brand with three different companies, then the manager isn’t a manager but a COO (chief of operations) to the artist’s CEO (chief executive officer) position. As artists develop this brand and entrepreneurial side of themselves and their music, they would do well to look for COOs instead of managers. The products and vision related to the music has changed from the time of the artist-manager relationship heyday.

The record deal

The proverbial golden egg that most musicians still want the most. Why? Status, advances, global marketing power, etc. There’s still a lot of pull from having a big, established, company look after your production, distribution, promotion, royalty registration and collection, and that takes care of the necessary clearances. And there’s something to be said about the luxury of an advance to help you produce your album. But that luxury comes at the expense of ownership as you mostly sign away the rights to your music to the label.

Moreover, the promise of revenues once your album is out, the royalties you agreed on, disappers into thin air when the cost deductions are taken into account. Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes once did some fantastic napkin math on this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKEjTTKGIUo

How this works? It’s all about the language in the contracts. Remember when Kanye West dropped his contracts onto Twitter? There’s a helpful clause in there about ‘recoupment’. It goes as follows: “all costs incurred by UMG in connection with the … album shall be included in costs when determining recoupment.” So that’s all costs without a specific definition of what they include. For a contact which otherwise wins out in how it specifies everything, that’s remarkable. It’s also industry-standard. All in all, Kanye was not on a bad deal with his record label, but that’s beside the point. What matters is that artists do not retain their own rights.

The publisher

When you’re a songwriter or composer you deal with publishers. Throughout the 20th Century most of the money coming in through copyright flowed to those songwriters. That, however, is changing. Partly, because of how some of the rights these publishing deals are based on are archaic. And partly, because of how the industry has developed an ever increasing focus towards recorded music.

The former relates to things like mechanical rights. Something developed in the USA in the early 20th Century to make sure that composers would get paid from this new technology called the pianola, or player piano.

Nowhere and nobody in more than 100 years has been able to actually change the copyright. Instead every new technological development has been shoehorned into this mechanical right. At the very least, it should now be an electronic, or digital, right. Some moves are being made towards the establishment of digital rights, but what’s clear is that copyright will always lag technology.

Besides, whenever a new technology pops up – be it audio streaming, video streaming, creator tools, etc. – whoever is charge doesn’t do any deals surrounding copyright. Then, when a new company gets a big user base, the first ones to come calling are the major record labels. They represent the recording artists, not the songwriters or the composers. Hence, the first deals bring the money towards those labels, and officially to their roster of artists.

There’s another reason songwriters and composers are being left behind by recorded music in the flows of money. Record labels tend to invest in start-ups while publishers do not. Take Spotify, all three major labels invested in the early phases of the company. Hence, when they went public in 2018 they all stood to make quite the windfall. Of course, they all promised to share these profits with their sub labels and artists. But look at Sony Music, who was the first major to sell part of their stake in Spotify. They earned roughly $750 million from selling 50% of their share in Spotify. Not long after, Sony took a 60% share of EMI Music Publishing, valuing the company at $4.75 billion. EMI, at the time, held a catalogue of around 2 million songs. The full value of the company was solely based on the songwriters it represented. And Sony’s increasing profits also came from a streaming economy that flourished on the back of those same songwriters. And yet, those songwriters didn’t see any direct returns on these deals.

So what’s next in the paradigm shift?

So far, we’ve learned that even a forward-thinking partnership like Chance the Rapper and Pat the Manager still held its roots in old-school handshake deals. And we all know that the current streaming boom isn’t the best in terms of generating revenue for the average musician. Moreover, as catalogue music grows in stature, where does this leave new music? Or, what does a shift away from albums, and even singles, towards creation and personality mean for those flows of money?

I’ve written previously how it’s important that we have new entities and start-ups fighting to make sure that we don’t end up with unassigned royalties. In contrast, I’ve also written about how Web3 envisions a world without copyright. In that piece, I ended with a note on how that vision is still potentially decades away (there’s a great article by Dan Fowler [paywall] for Water and Music that also goes into this). In the meantime, we do well to heed Bas’ call to provide a social context to the current NFT phase of Web3 development.

So what’s next? Riding the waves as they come and experimenting with these new modes of growth. Make sure to focus on good growth, growth that enhances your ideals and the music involved. Instead of looking for a manager, experiment with a DAO structure. Instead of sharing 15% or giving away your copyright to a label or publisher, see how you can share, or fractionalize, ownership. One thing to learn from the artist-manager relationship is that to grow together a complete alignment of interests is necessary. That still counts in Web3 modes of working together: any upside is created together, whether it’s creative or monetary. Music’s paradigm shift is communal.

What you should learn about the music business

The business of music changes at a frightening pace. At the same time, we’re stuck with archaic methods of copyright. Being a musician today means balancing keeping abreast of new modes of distribution while chasing royalties. Crucially, the question of where your music sits in the broader soundscape and where you can find your audiences are more pertinent than ever.

Daniel Ek told investors in July 2020 that musicians should release more music, more regularly. This is the crux of streaming: musicians should be creators who churn out content to stay relevant to algorithms. What does it mean to embrace the creator economy as a musician? How can you play the game instead of being played by agents, labels, streaming services, etc.? And what do you need to do this?

The basics

Barry Zhou via Unsplash

The bible in the music business, and music business-related courses, is still Don Passman‘s All you need to know about the music business. The book tells you about what kind of people you need around you as a musician, record deals, copyrights, publishing, touring, merch. From there we get to issues of financing, PR, and marketing. There’s other books, for sure, but Passman’s is the one most people fall back on. And while he has done well to keep on top of new developments, there are elements in the reality of a musician’s every day life that aren’t captured in the book. Let’s run through the basics before turning to those new challenges.

To sign or not to sign, that is/was the first question

In the current landscape, most artists still face this question first: do I want to aim to sign with a major record label? Do I aim for an independent label or do I go DIY? There’s advantages and disadvantages to each one:

  • Major label deal means lots of support, global links, experienced people, and the potential to piggyback off of a bigger artist’s success. It also means losing some control over your work and signing away of your rights. You can also be seen as collateral for another artist instead of your own person with a creative vision.
  • Signing to an independent – in as far they still properly exist – gives you an international network geared specifically towards artists. Moreover, you won’t get lost in a large roster of others. There can, however, be a lack of financial leverage and knowledge outside of the bigger global markets.
  • Going DIY means having full control of your creative vision, your rights, and being in control of your communications. It also means you require your own capital, your own network, and a willingness to put in work you might rather spend making music.

Copyrights

Copyright is about ownership, but also about having the right to copy, perform, play, broadcast, and adapt a work of music. Copyright is valuable and always a partnership between various people involved in writing a song: usually 50/50 between music and lyrics. It’s important to note that for copyright to come into play a recording is necessary. Which leads into the issue of the master rights. Whoever owns those rights gets to decide how to exploit the recording. It used to be the case that whoever paid for a recording would own the master rights. This is, for example, why the archives of public broadcasters are so valuable: they paid for the recording and thus claim the master rights allowing them to put it on TV, YouTube, etc.

Touring

A painful topic while we’re still riding pandemic waves, but still very important. Touring can make for good income. Yet, how do you organise it well? First off, find the right people to book and manage your tour. Then, think about how to market yourself and how to take advantage of the marketing of the venues where you will play. Furthermore, think about ticketing and what you can do with dynamic pricing structures and VIP ticketing. Once you get a larger fanbase it also become an option to approach sponsors for your tours.

Financing

It’s important to know how money flows through the music industry. Moreover, it’s important to know who makes that money and how they do that. Traditionally, this involved record and publishing deals – with advances – touring, merchandise, royalties derives from CMOs, record sales and potential royalties of those. Of course, there’s also the potential to get on soundtracks or get into synch deals. Finally, there’s the option to go direct through crowdfunding, subscriptions, and donations.

Marketing

Any good marketing plan starts with asking why you do what you do and from there explaining why others should care about that too. Getting your marketing plan together can involve a PEST (political, economical, social, and technology) analysis of your potential demographic. You can also do a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of your product – your music. From there, you can start to determine your market, your audience, which channels to use, and which tools to implement. Before you start anything, make sure you do a projection of the results you want. And ask important questions like ‘when will I make a profit?’

The everyday life challenges of right now

Gautam Arora via Unsplash

While those basics are necessary, it’s also important to keep up with new opportunities and changing technologies. Especially as and when they challenge the basic structures as described above. It’s easy to feel caught within a wide web of channels to engage with, algorithms to perform in, playlists to get put on, and audiences to speak to. However, it’s also possible to focus on specific tools, platforms, and technologies and build community.

Who are your audience(s)?

I’m purposefully ambiguous about the plural in the header for this section. You will have more than one audience, but it’s also important to start small. If you can find your niche that will give you a solid base to build out from. The reason I want to talk about audiences in plural is because even a niche will have multiple different audiences. A useful thought experiment, which I take from Jack Abraham, is to try and write down up to 100 different audiences for your music.

Tools & Platforms

There are many, many tools out there today to create and release music. So much, so that the number of creators that are self-releasing is growing fast.

MIDiA Research, Creator Tools (2020)

On the one hand, it’s wonderful to have the tools available to quickly release your music to any and all streaming providers. On the other hand, it’s impossible to do that and stand out from the crowd of 60,000 daily uploaded tracks. At which point it becomes interesting to look at other available tools, especially if you’ve started carving out your niche audience. You can, for example, monetize that audience directly through a subscription model. Or, you can consider what you should make to best speak to your niche audience. It might be the case that simply making and releasing music isn’t the best way to go about that. Instead, video might work better for you. Take livestreaming, which can be done in a concert form, but also in the form of a more narrative arc where you take your audience into your creative process.

Experiment

Once you start to think about your audiences and the great variety of tools and platforms available to build and speak to your community, it’s important to experiment. Not only should artists now act like entrepreneurs, they would do well to think like product managers too. Thinking about go-to-market strategies isn’t a bad thing, to give one example. For so long, the focus for musicians has been to create an album and release one or more singles in the run up to the album’s release. Nowadays, you might be better off giving concerts with your work-in-progress, or simply livestreaming your studio work. Whatever it is, you won’t find out if you don’t experiment. And whoever your community is, that first niche you tie to yourself or your band those are the ones you have to keep involving in feedback loops throughout your experiments.

A course to tackle the everyday

To try and work through the challenges of the everyday realities of musicians – and perhaps agents and label owners as well – I’m working on a short cohort-based-course with the aforementioned Jack Abraham. The course will first of all provide a global community of learners and practitioners. Secondly, it provides a problem-motivated and practical way to learn about what’s going on in the music industry today. It brings the most recent developments into the (virtual) classroom. Third, it gives people the tools to play the game instead of being played by the game. If you’re interested in this course, feel free to talk to me directly or help us about by taking a short, 5-question survey.