- Your problem is that you make shit. A lot of shit. Cheap shit. And no one cares about you or your cheap shit. And an increasingly aware, connected, and mutable audience is onto your cheap shit. They don’t want your cheap shit. They want the good shit. And they will go to find it somewhere. Hell, they’ll even pay for it.
Yeah, the PandoSnarks linked to this earlier as part of their "rah rah we charge a membership fee" circlejerk. The thing Topolsky and everyone else misses is that journalists are used to making a shit-ton of money compared to the four bucks per post that supports the rest of the market. Writers are lucky to make half that, since everyone else does it for free. The "they'll even pay for it" is wishful thinking. They've been steadfastly not paying for it since the dawn of the carrier tone. The fact of the matter is, money comes from paywalls and the number of readers willing to climb one is tiny.
And then guys like me, when they see a paywall, black list the site and won't link to them any more. After the shit that Forbes pulled, I'll never visit another Forbes' link again. And that is for a site where I ike the content. Youtube is rolling out 6 second bumper ads that cannot be skipped, which is going to feed more people into adblockers more than anything else. It's a shitshow from top to bottom and I have no ideas how to make it better.
And neither does anybody else, and that's why there's a new article like this every six months. The Next Great Thing is always "better content" as if the self-loathing realization that the majority of what's available is excrement will somehow inspire them to ignore the fact that the high ground has been ceded to the deep pockets. Pandora paid Pharrell $2700 for "Happy." I don't listen to the radio but that fuckin' song was unavoidable. Pandora? $60 per million streams. Spotify? $400 per million. Youtube? Well, you get about a thousand for the second million. That's barely better than songwriters make on the radio. Look how outraged we all were three years ago when artists thought they were making ten times that: But the real bitch? performers never got paid for radio play, just writers. Performers got paid for sales. And sales no longer exist.The artist website goes into further breakdowns of the numbers. For instance, it says a “niche indie album” resulted in $3,300 in Spotify payouts in July, while a “global hit album” led to $425,000 in payouts. It notes that Spotify pays out $6,000 to $8,400 per million listens, compared with $3,000 for a “video streaming service” such as YouTube and $1,300 to $1,500 for a “radio streaming service” such as Pandora.
This is why those bands tour, and tour and tour. And why the Motown guys had to tour and do live shows in casinos until they dropped dead. When I learned that the bands got screwed over then screwed again on the record deals I made it a point to go see live shows and buy stuff at the venue so at least some of my cash was going to the people whom I was interested in. Even if you managed to sell 10,000 albums/CD's all that cash went to pay the label, and you still got nothing. as a mixer, you probably made more on the albums than some of the bands you worked for. Because these guys are scared. Maybe they are the true believers too deep in the weeds to see a way out and are crying for someone, ANYONE, to save them. Maybe they are the guys with a bit of a good idea, but lose the audience and fade into the aether. But the point is, IMO, there is someone out there with zero baggage looking at the media, the internet, audiences, funding and is going to put it all together. I had to explain virtual machines to a new guy today and realized how lucky he is to not have my baggage of 20 plus years of IT work. He gets the point instantly without having to translate to physical computer lingo to understand what I am talking about. Same thing with the people growing up now or even those in college. And when they pull off the shift, guys like you and I are going to go "Why didn't I think of that?"But the real bitch? performers never got paid for radio play, just writers. Performers got paid for sales.
And neither does anybody else, and that's why there's a new article like this every six months.
Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone. So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn't. - Mick Jagger, who made millions on a Verve songBut I have a take on that - people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn't make any money out of records because record companies wouldn't pay you! They didn't pay anyone!
Perfect timing on that read, I've been working on setting up accounts with the PROs for a couple of stations. It's a double-edged sword, you stay this way and the artists make nothing, you go the other way and a lot of stations will cease to exist. As for the streaming services, well, that's a whole different story.
That's the same problem everyone has though, right? I mean, when I hear these debates the action item at the end is that people should "fix it" assuming a) someone knows how and b) if a person does know how they could apply their knowledge to an entire industry. I imagine a large content producing organization like, say, the New York Times will develop their sponsored content to mimic the magazine ads of the 70's, which sold products through engaging articles. If that's successful I also imagine NYT will take their display ads in house and post them from the same server as their content images making it hard for an ad blocker to block. That's what I would do anyway.It's a shitshow from top to bottom and I have no ideas how to make it better.
Yeah, I think that chart is just indicative of the ineffectiveness of display ads. But, NYT was just an example. Sponsored content, overt or otherwise, is already what's keeping the lights on at places that don't use paywalls and I think folks will pursue that.
The chart is indicative of the clobbering newspapers took when people stopped paying 35 cents to read them. Fundamentally, the world in which reproduction costs are zero is very different than the one where reproduction costs are dependent on economies of scale.