*sigh*, the music industry

A twit (I forget which one I have so many; distractions!) pointed me towards the announcement of Sell-A-Band receiving a new round of funding.

Since one of my current projects is 音レボ (Otorevo), which despite the struggles is growing organically, I eagerly read through the comments. Two in particular that made me think:

commenter 1:

the problem with it is that when you’re a newcomer, chances that your music will be heard is close to zero. their UI is not helping displaying new entries, but instead the popular bands (the one people already invested in, sometimes over 6 months course). last time i logged in there was 11,000 bands. only a few are listened to, and from that, they signed only 18 bands. Less than 1 million dollars in a year. sorry guys, but the model will fail.

When I shared the Sell-A-Band website with a friend a few months ago, we made a similar observation – the contributions curve seems to follow an exponential decline, or a “blockbuster model” if you will.

But the comment, though obvious, that really struck me was this one:

commenter 2:

Agree w/previous. 18 albums in 1.5 years, strange convoluted trickledown biz model that divides a small (currently 18 piece) pie into even smaller pieces. On top of this enough current (amie st) and unsuccessful (weedshare) models trying to get a piece of the market for music that no one’s heard of.

On top of this, enough vc money invested to make anyone feel bloated. Most new unnoticed music gains traction, contracts and sales these days from these kinds of avenues:

1.Myspace etc.

2.YouTube

3.The Blogosphere

4.music recc engines

5. Discovery in an iTunes ad.

The commonality is that none rely primarily on music sales for revenue. Small startups offering a widely available commodity, regardless of the sales gimmick, don’t have alot of chance…

Selling music is not enough. Discuss.

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Posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 6:45 pm and filed under Internet, Japan, biznomics, entrepreneurship. Subscribe to RSS 2.0. Leave a comment or trackback.

One Response to “*sigh*, the music industry”

  1. Ethan Bauley
    April 12th, 2008 at 2:50 am

    Hi Matt! I surfed here via Umair’s twitter feed…

    Great post, I agree that the OurStage model has a lot of problems, principally that the success of it dependent on lots of people listening to shitty music on purpose. Have you used it? It’s awful!

    I’m a trained professional musician, and I think the path for creating more and better music is “Y Combinator for artists”. Discuss.

    ;-)

    I’m also a huge fan of Umair’s, I’d be curious to hear even more about the experience of bringing him to Sony.

    Still rocking the 12″ G4,

    Ethan

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