I am a big fan of XM Radio. Or SiriusXM. Or Whatever it's called. Siriusly.
You have to be when you are an American Oil and Gas Producer. Tuning in and out of local radio stations during your regular 200 mile drives is a pain the ass. For those of us that spend plenty of time in the American Outback, otherwise known as "The Land OUTSIDE Major Metropolitan Areas", XMSirius, like Wal Mart, is a Godsend.
In any case, I created my theory of Hit Songwriting listening to hours of XMSirius and pondering the world while driving mile after lonesome mile of the proverbial highways and byways of west, east, and south Texas. I am now making my extensive wisdom available to anyone that Googles this. Free of charge. Worth every penny you paid.
First, let me lay out my general thesis. The basic business dynamic of Music is over, and we are transitioning into something brand new. This isn't a particularly striking or new insight, especially from a middle aged fat white oilman. We have skinny curly headed genii like Malcolm Gladewell that tell us the same thing.
The old model, where "artists" signed with record companies to record, manufacture, and distribute the albums in return for a signing bonus (usually recoverable from the sales royalty) and a royalty on sales amounting to a few percent, not unlike the oil and gas operator and land owner dynamic, except that musicians actually have to do something other than sign a contract, and musicians get a lot less in general for their intellectual property as a percentage than royalty owners get for their mineral property.
The record company then works with the radio stations to create demand for their product. That radio was the great hand of Allah in defining who would be a star or not is reflected in the fact that radio stations haven't ever had to pay royalties on songs played. In fact, they have a sordid history of having been paid to play songs!
The result was a small number of stars who then made a ton of money, selling out venues everywhere because the system was set up to create "big wells" so to speak. Small wells weren't worth the operating costs. Kind of like Saudi Arabia.
The internet and various digital technologies changed this dynamic fundamentally and altogether. No longer did it cost an arm and a leg to record, because you could buy for a few hundred bucks the kind of digital equipment that used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. You also didn't have to manufacture anything for each seperate copy of the music to stored on like an album, or tape or CD. You also didn't have to figure out how to transport all of this crap to thousands of stores all over the country. Lastly, radio isn't the only game in town in defining what is good or bad or driving taste. All this has been "democratized" for lack of a better word. Any grade schooler can now do what a record company used to do, which means that at least SOME bands can do it as well.
The best oilfield analogy to this would be to think what would happen if it only cost $500 dollars to drill and test a well, and only another $500 to complete it? Although operators might get excited at first, this little change would mark their demise, since the tools and capability to directly produce hydrocarbons would be placed in the hands of the mineral owners directly.
So what does the future hold for musicians and bands?
You will have to wait for my next post! And yeah, I haven't given away my secret to songwriting yet either. But don't worry. It's coming....
NEXT: How to be a BIG MUSIC STAR in the future.
Caught this blog on this page - can't wait to read the rest. Are you secretly famous!? :-)
Posted by: Debt Advice | November 26, 2009 at 03:29 AM
Oh yeah...he's secretly infamous!
Nice touch with the "smiley". I wasn't sure they were allowed.
Happy Thanksgiving everybody.
Posted by: Crash N. Burn | November 26, 2009 at 08:27 AM