This is not a new phenomenon as various technical advances have steadily biased the playing field going back more than one hundred years. Historically, the amount a performer could earn was limited by how much the market would bear in terms of ticket price and by the size of the venue. I'm not talking about the music marketplace prior to the French Revolution when most professional musicians were employed by the nobility who just competed among themselves for talent. After the Revolution, as the public market for music grew, patronized by the middle class, public concerts and publishing became lucrative sources of income. But musicians can only give a limited number of live concerts and prior to amplification, concert halls were limited in size to one or two thousand seats.A small number of superstars like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift is gobbling up an increasingly outsize share of concert-tour revenues, as music’s biggest acts dominate the business like never before.Sixty percent of all concert-ticket revenue world-wide went to the top 1% of performers ranked by revenue in 2017, according to an analysis by Alan Krueger, a Princeton University economist. That’s more than double the 26% that the top acts took home in 1982.Just 5% of artists took home nearly the entire pie: 85% of all live-music revenue, up from 62% about three decades earlier, according to Mr. Krueger’s research. “The middle has dropped out of music, as more consumers gravitate to a smaller number of superstars,”
Music publishing of works designed for domestic performance opened up a new revenue stream that lasted until the development of the photocopy machine. These days, music publishers are fairly poor!
The two technologies that really had an impact were first the development of recording technology and second the development of amplification. Up until the Second World War, these developments made an incremental difference, but after the war, and especially from the 60s on, the trends became huge. The Beatles were a big part of these developments. The huge number of records they sold freed them from the rigors of touring even as large amplifiers made it possible to play in large venues like Shea Stadium in New York which seated something like 55,000 people. That's a lot of tickets. But the royalties from record sales dwarfed even that and after August 1966 the Beatles gave no more scheduled live performances.
When the internet came along, for a brief moment it seemed as if was going to have an impact similar to the photocopy machine: suddenly the gatekeeper power of the record companies disappeared overnight as people could share, peer-to-peer, recordings with one another over the web. It didn't take long for the copyright holders to put a stop to that and now a few streaming services like iTunes and Spotify dominate that medium. Revenues for most performers are fairly small, however, so it is the live concert that is generating the most income.
I have a new CD of selections of my chamber music I would love to market somehow, but frankly, the whole commercial music scene is so perplexing, I'm not sure what I want to do!
UPDATE: Just realized that an appropriate envoi for this post would be this: the Beatles taking the state at Shea Stadium in 1965:
UPPERDATE: Wait, I have it figured out! T-shirts, that's the ticket! Music Salon t-shirts! With that logo:
this reminds me that of the roughly six cycles of preludes and fugues for solo guitar that have been composed only two of those have been published (Igor Rekhin's and Nikita Koshkin's). But neither of those cycles have been commercially recorded. The cycles of German Dzhaparidze and Jeremiah Lawson have been recorded but not necessarily in a way that would be considered conventional commercial releases and neither of those cycles has been published by a music publisher. The Gerard Drozd cycle and the Philip Quackenbush cycle aren't recorded or published that I'm aware of. So at the moment it looks like a cycle of preludes and fugues can get published or get recorded in the context of the contemporary music industry scenes but not both, or at least not very easily.
ReplyDeleteThere is the cycle for guitar duet by Castelnuovo-Tedesco, both published and recorded, but that is the only one I know of--and I think it was you that informed me about it!
ReplyDeleteyes the Castelnuovo-Tedesco cycle has been published and recorded ... although that's for guitar duo rather than solo. It is a wonderful cycle, though. The Lawson cycle has been recorded in its duet format rather than solo format as a concession to practical concerns about performance.
ReplyDeleteThe recording of the Tedesco by the Italian duo is pretty good (mind you, with a lot of string noise!) but I especially like the Sonatina canonica on the same CD. I recorded that piece with a Chilean guitarist for the CBC years and years ago.
ReplyDeleteI want a t-shirt, sure.
ReplyDeleteBelieve it or not, I have already designed one!
ReplyDelete