INDUSTRY 2023

RADIO PAY TO PLAY CONTINUES Billboard.

VINYL 2ND BIGGEST PHYSICAL FORMAT BY UK REVENUE 2022 BEHIND NINTENDO SWITCH AHEAD OF PLAYSTATION AND CD 

NME.

Vinyl will overtake CD revenue by 2023 (UK). NME.

FCPX TIPS

5 easy FX by Serge M (YT)

TIKTOK

I'll gather a few posts here as it's a big enough issue by itself.

PREVIEW CLIPS BUILDING MONSTER HITS

Guardian.

INSPIRING VIDEOS 1 METAL BALLADS

I'll simply add an occasional source of multiple videos worth looking at for creative inspiration, starting with this MetalSucks article that features some stunning visuals.

Only 1 in 50 record producers are female: EqualizeHer campaign

See Guardian interview with Linda Perry.

VINYL Jack Black calls for new plants as backlog grows

NME 

https://www.nme.com/news/music/jack-white-urges-major-labels-to-build-own-vinyl-pressing-plants-3182337

The 0.5m copies of Adele’s latest album pressed on LP highlight how the big 3 are hogging and clogging the global supply - just as often with reprints of back catalogue albums like David Bowie l, the Beatles and Fleetwood Mac.

So now White Stripes icon Jack Black, who runs his own label and record plant, has called on the big 3 to build new pressing plants.

Last year saw vinyl sales hit their highest since the 1990s, having seen huge growth for the 13th year in a row. Figures revealed that nearly one in five (18 per cent) of all albums purchased across 2020 were vinyl, with 4.8 million LPs being purchased. The new numbers are 10 per cent up on 2019’s figures.

BOOK 2005 Bloghouse dance was 1st online genre

 An early, maybe archetypal, example of a music movement spreading through UGC-enabling sites like MySpace and despite its Aussie roots globalising through the internet.

Guardian: “It was the first time that music was getting big on the internet instead of at the club, at the record shop or on the radio,” says Lina Abascal, the author of a new book, Never Be Alone Again: How Bloghouse United the Internet and the Dancefloor, which documents that brief but transformative moment.

… The new ability to distribute songs online meant homegrown music could easily be discovered abroad, without the financial backing of a big label: just upload the track and away you go. “Suddenly the distance between Paris and Sydney or LA and Melbourne was a click,” Abascal says. “That was a first-time thing.”

Eddie Maiden Marvel Merch Tie-in

Quite ingenious on both sides - offering an older market to Marvel and younger to Maiden! Loudersound.

TIK TOK ROCKS WITH BEATLES, FLEETWOOD MAC, INSANE CLOWN POSSE

The Beatles are consistently at the top end for physical album sales and streams over 50 years since they split - but were famously late to the streaming party, withholding permission from the likes of Spotify for years.

When they finally inked a deal with Spotify it (see also Taylor Swift and her row with Apple Music) marked the absolute mainstreaming of the platform. Their entry into TikTok marks the same for a platform that has already supercharged interest in the 70s Fleetwood Mac releases. See NME.

Another NME feature highlights the success of Insane Clown Posse on the platform.

VIDEO GAME CONCERTS AND MERCH Ariana Grande Fortnite gig

Marahmello and Lil Nas X have already shown the huge audiences and revenue this can attract...

Guardian.

RETROMANIA THE PHIL COLLINS EFFECT PCE

From The Times, an academic paper claiming artist critical credibility runs in 3 waves - very much linked to the age of media pundits - a decade of acclaim, a decade of derision, a decade+ of being reclaimed + rediscovered...

They claim in a paper that the PCE can be plotted in an N-shaped graph, with each phase lasting about ten years. In the case of Collins, 70, this tracks his ascent in popularity as a top solo artist in the Eighties, his fall from grace in the Britpop era before the period from 2001, when his work was “critically elevated to an even higher status than during its commercial peak”.

The researchers identify the PCE, a pattern of “cultural death followed by cultural resurrection”, as dependent on three groups over successive generations — fellow musicians, critics and fans. They said that it was fuelled, partly, by the natural contrarianism that encourages new generations to cast off the cultural baggage of their elders.

INDUSTRY 2021 The ongoing DDC tornado...

For a superb, in-depth analysis of many key industry issues I'd recommend this article from the medium site.

My previous multiply updated post, tracking 2018-19, carries a detailed breakdown of the key staging points from 1999 to today, including briefly huge markets that exploded into prominence then disappeared. I also did a further summary post! And there are MANY more posts you can browse via the tags...

This graph from medium's feature (1 of several there) is a great visual summary of the massive impact of digital disruption - which, remember, is especially linked to developments in online distribution.

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HOW STREAMING PAYMENTS REFLECT BIG 3'S 75% MARKET SHARE

https://boingboing.net/2021/09/26/how-a-math-trick-helped-one-band-made-500-more-in-streaming-music-royalties.html

LOVE ISLAND IS MAJOR HITMAKER

The ultra-trashy 'reality' show uses a lot of obscure musicians, part of its targeting of gen Z/Y, who often find their work appearing in the charts as a result. A combination of Shazaming tunes and the show's Spotify playlists supercharge the popularity of many of the songs/artists featured. Guardian.

K-POP FANS BUY ADS FOR THEIR HEROES...AMD FOOD CARTS

BBC reports on the K-Pop stans, who buy as space worldwide, not just in Korea - and make charity donations.

TRIVIUM MAKE MORE FROM TWITCH THAN ALL OTHER AUDIO SITES COMBINED!

Loudwire interviews Matt Healy on this crazy stat! Metalsucks lays out the key figures - $10k a month from 224k listeners. That works out x10 the revenue/payment rate of music streaming (vastly bigger audience...for same payment!).

MUSIC RIGHTS NEW MONOPOLIST: HIPGNOSIS 

DB ANALYSIS: Elberse did a very convincing job of destroying the credibility of the long tail theory in her Blockbusters book, showing that a small number of tentpole hits (in books, games, film, music) account for the vast bulk of sales. Since she wrote this the same has been observed of Spotify. However - that overlooks the revenue from back-catalogue music (and TV/film through multiple global channels) from radio, TV, film and games licensing ... not to mention advertising. So perhaps Malcolm Gladwell's concept has some meaning after all?

Guardian. 'The London-listed company, which earns royalties every time one of the 65,000 songs to which it owns the rights is played, said that revenues climbed 66% from $83m (£59m) to $138m in the year to the end of March.

Hipgnosis, which spent $1bn buying 84 new song catalogues last year, said the increase in streaming while the live music sector remained shut down fuelled a 50% increase in profits to $107m.'

UK MUSIC STARS LAUNCH CAMPAIGN FOR MUSIC STREAMING REGULATOR AND FAIR PAYMENTS

Guardian. 'It argues that streaming via services such as Spotify and Apple Music be legislated more like radio. “The law has not kept up with the pace of technological change and, as a result, performers and songwriters do not enjoy the same protections as they do in radio,” the letter states. “Today’s musicians receive very little income from their performances – most featured artists receive tiny fractions of a US cent per stream and session musicians receive nothing at all.”

ACDC PTOMO CAMPAIGN 4 QUADRANT BLITZ INCLUDES FORTNITE

I've seen chunks of this coming through my Google news feed, including the user icon that fans can share and tweak for social media (especially Facebook) user icons.

If that veers to the over-40s then their Fortnite tie-in steers sharply towards the under-25 demographic.

AC/DC Fortnite clip on their YT channel.

WEB 2.0 LOGO GENERATOR AC/DC get social Power Up

An easy enough idea for a student production to replicate (simulacra) with Photoshop...

Kerrang! on AC/DC logo generator.

SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGNS TikTok group using collaboration and interaction

The idea that actually communicating with, responding to, the audience isn't exactly new - but this group point out how many big brands switch off comments. They highlight how their collaboration, cross-promoting but also sharing monetising techniques, are key. From Entrepreneur e-zine.

CENSORSHIP

Another planned collective post.

Starting with...

THE BANDS BANNED FROM SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE

Featuring Sinead O'Connor and the pope, a Republican billionaire, wasted alt-rock legends and flag-ripping leftie icons and more: the SNL banned list, with video clips.

VR FUTURE Stormzy game, Weezer in Fortnite

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/sep/10/stormzys-game-face-grime-artist-goes-digital-for-latest-hit

SEXISM radio plays twice as many male artist tracks

Interesting breakdown by gender of what % of tracks are played on UK radio ...

51% male artists, 30% mixed gender and just 19% female artists.

The inequality was starker still behind the scenes: 80% of British songwriters on the surveyed tracks were male, 19% female and 1% non-binary. Only 3% of producers were female.

Read more here.

QUEERING and REISSUES Dexys sexy back catalogue

(I'll format later...)

Dexy's Midnight Runners were a major 80s chart band - Come on Eileen and Jackie Said being notable anthems. The BBC confused the soul legend of the latter with the obese Scottish darts player... (video)

When flamboyant singer Kevin Rowlands released a covers album with himself in lingerie on the cover, the hegemonic response; the dominant discourse was that he was having a breakdown. I remember reading and buying into that myself.*

Decades later and he's released a new video for a song from that album, Rag Doll. It's yet another example of how the industry seeks to exploit back catalogue as a major revenue source (minimal production costs even for remastered releases).

It's also a great example of queerness in music video. Don't confuse the word with the homophobic slur it was reclaimed from - QUEERING means to intentionally, playfully (can be challenging at the same time) blur established, hegemonic boundaries and identities; categories. So, Judith Butler's performativity of gender is a queer theory for example.

I imagine some of you will be squeamish at the video - it's not explicit, and has a nice pay-off at the end, as well as featuring a reflection on the massive shift in the position and acceptability of queer identify in pop culture from 1999 to today ; well worth a look.

This Grauniad article brought it to my attention. Male gaze concepts are also playfully deconstructed (deconstructionism like queer theory being a strand of postmodern theory). At least (nod to Stuart Hall!) that's MY reading! Lily Allen is an example of how a critique of one form of hegemonic power and dominant cultural discourse and representation can go wrong by blindly reflecting another...

Video.

*Of course, my skewed view was based on print magazine coverage. Yesterday saw the announcement that perhaps the last great, iconic music magazine, Q, has been killed by the pandemic blitz on media advertising revenue. For me, an absolute tragedy, albeit inevitable and predictable.

MERCH AC/DC album cover jigsaws

Neat idea really, and easily four quadrant.

SOCIAL MEDIA Blackout Tuesday and white privilege

A lengthy article from the Indie; well worth a read - I'd just had an infrequent look on FB, saw Gary Numan's posts with black squares, wondered what the hell this was about...then read this long article.

Two black women called for an ongoing protest against discriminatory practice; exploitation of and profiting from black artists - and their protest # got warped into a 1 day virtue-signalling fest ... by white liberals like Gary Numan.

The web 2.0 (and 3.0) concepts are frequently cited on this blog - including critics like John McMuria who point out how much the status quo dominate the revolutionary (plat)form - this is an excellent article to really understand how ideology comes into play with such an apparent outpouring of anti-racist solidarity that is essentially (unconsciously, an important point!) racist.

MASH-UPS Ithaca mash 65 years of rock music

Absolutely astonishing production by a UK lighting + music video studio, Ithaca (NOT the USA college) using a Facebook motif to cycle through 100s of great musicians (and Foos + Kings of Leon, but still).

YouTube.

SUMMER 2020 TASK 2 INDUSTRY RESEARCH

The following 2 posts are the main resource for this task/theme, 1 of the 3 basic research areas of the coursework (CIA - though with the added emphasis on media language and theory, this is more like MICA or TICA).

http://musividz.blogspot.lu/2016/04/industry-digital-streamed-past-physical.html

https://musividz.blogspot.com/2018/11/big-3-universal-boom-as-physical.html

The basic themes follow, but 1st some useful Ppts, which may be swapped out for updated versions over time:

Industry music bicep tbc from DB3igs

Merch metallica from DB3igs

MUSIC VIDEO HISTORY + PROTOTYPES
in a nutshell, read the Austerlitz book which is specifically on this point. There's an extensive history before MTV made them a default promo device, going back decades earlier than even the key archetype (The Beatles 1960s film A Hard Day's Night).

ANALOGUE FORMATS: RISE AND FALL 
show understanding of how the music industry has undergone changes before digitisation. Sheet music was the revenue driver a century ago, with gramophone records slower to become dominant. Vinyl became notably dominant with the rise of the teen as a distinct demographic with disposable income in the 1950s. Cassettes slowly rose as a rival from the 1960s, becoming the biggest format by the 70s/80s - especially when the Sony Walkman hit. Vinyl and tape sales slowly collapsed as CDs kickstarted the digital revolution in the 80s ... but have taken on hipster coolness and are ironically zeitgeisty - why?

DIGITAL MARKETS: CDs, CRAZY FROGS, PIRATES + NAPSTER, SPOTIFY... 
Carefully + specifically establish when + why the music industry's global revenues peaked, and why they began falling again ... until very recently they've finally began rising again. Consider the piracy issue, engaging with web 2.0 as you do. Explain how UGC eventually became a revenue-raising tool for the record labels. Look at the controversies over payment rates, and how radically they differ across platforms. Do a case study of 1 or more acts with music on multiple platforms (like my Bicep case study).

MODERN REVENUE DRIVERS: MERCH, TIX ETC 
While vinyl's high price means low sales do bring in useful revenue, look at how merch (analyse the range of items for some bands + how these usually reflect a wide audience IF they're for big or older/long-established acts like Metallica), live concerts (VIP tix etc), licensing (games, TV, film) + sponsorships now bring in most of artists' income.

BANNED IN THE USA: CENSORSHIP + REGULATION 
There is limited formal regulation, though the BBFC (UK) do have a voluntary system, and YouTube at least notionally apply an age-rating system - plus the parental advisory/explicit lyrics stickers in the US. Just like the film industry, the music biz has faced times of extreme governmental/political pressure fuelled by the press: the 80s metal/rap moral panic leading to hearings (and arrests for selling a 2 Live Crew record); the Dixie Chicks and Beatles record-burnings from different eras; the Gulf War radio blacklist of songs about war ... and peace; Elvis wiggling his hips; UK grime artists effectively banned by the police

OWNERSHIP: INDIES AND BIG 3 
Just how dominant are they? How can Indies compete? This is a very similar issue/debate to your AS film industry learning - online/social media + crowdfunding + self-distribution + self-marketing [AM's use of MySpace a great early archetype] are all important.

SUMMER 2020 CONVENTIONS TASK

I'll add notes + any documents in this post to make it easier to find than lengthy Teams threads, but the main hub post for your summer work is this post, which has been updated and tweaked across two years of use by A2 students: general conventions research guide post.

Here's a quick reminder of what that post breaks down ... in considerable detail!


...
There is flexibility built into this - you can present this as a number of individual case studies, addressing the yellow-highlighted points, + provide an overall summary through GC10. Or you can merge 1 or more theme. Or you can simply stick to the 10-post structure - so long as your analysis is detailed and spans multiple examples (a minimum of 10 mixed-genre general examples specifically referenced, each at least once in at least one category).

You would be advised to make some use of the very detailed post with a compilation of videos picked for specific useful features, each with further detail/analysis/pointers below, and in many cases additional separate posts too. That's this post, which, like the GCs guide, is included in the top links list for easy reference!

Before you access my notes, see if you think you can think of useful points from the clips in this compilation (the basis of that post):


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...

TIK TOK New media old attitudes as glam censorship uncovered

TikTok 'tried to filter out videos from ugly, poor or disabled users'.

TikTok’s moderators were instructed to exclude videos from the For You feed if they failed on any one of a number of categories, the documents show. Users with an “abnormal body shape (not limited to: dwarf, acromegaly),” who are “chubby … obese or too thin” or who have “ugly facial looks or facial deformities” should be removed, one document says, since “if the character’s appearance is not good, the video will be much less attractive, not worthing [sic] to be recommended to new users.”