Create, Produce, Consume

New Models for Understanding Music Business

David Bruenger

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780520972735
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music & Business

Create, Produce, Consume explores the cycle of musical experience for musicians, professionals, and budding entrepreneurs looking to break into the music industry. Building on the concepts of his previous book, Making Money, Making Music, David Bruenger provides readers with a basic framework for understanding the relationships between the artist and audience and the producer consumer by examining the methods underlying creation-production-reception and creation-consumption-compensation. Each chapter offers a different perspective on the processes and structures that lead listeners to discover, experience, and interact with music and musical artists. Through case studies ranging from Taylor Swift's refusal to allow her music to be streamed on Spotify to the rise of artists supported through sites like Patreon, Bruenger offers highly relevant real-world examples of industry practices that shape our encounters with music. Create, Produce, Consume is a critical tool for giving readers the agile knowledge necessary to adapt to a rapidly changing music industry. Graphs, tables, lists for additional reading, and questions for further discussion illustrate key concepts. Online resources for instructors and students will include sample syllabi, lists for expanded reading, and more.

1

Inception

Creation, Production, Reception

Music most often begins as an idea or a feeling in the mind or heart of one person. Understanding how or why is a mystery beyond the scope of this text. Here, we will take musical creation as a given and focus on what comes after: shared musical experience, what makes it happen, and the forms of value it can generate.

Musical experience depends upon someone making and someone else listening to music. Performance can be technologically mediated so that performer and listener don’t need to be in the same space at the same time. Or the performer and listener can be in the same room (or even be the same person). But for music to have wider impact, the minimum “equation” is one performer plus one listener equals a musical experience.

How music moves from an idea—creation—to the ears of listeners—reception—is where the production structures of music enterprise come into play. All forms of music production provide access to musical experience, regardless of venue or technological medium. Access to music and musicians is what brings music commerce, community, and culture to life. Consequently, managing access and the complex relationship between artist and audience is the essential mission of every music enterprise, regardless of where or when or in what genre it happens.

This chapter begins with an overview of the processes through which producers bring music, musical artists, and audiences together. This is followed by an introduction to fundamental concepts, analytical tools, and a methodology for new venture creation, all of which will be referenced throughout the remaining chapters.

PRODUCTION PROCESS: ACCESS, DISCOVERY, ENGAGEMENT

Because the inception of music is so often personal, the first challenge for anyone wanting to use it to create value is to make it possible for someone besides the creator to hear it. At the most fundamental level, this is a question of access.

For centuries, access to music meant that the listener had to be in the same space as the performer while the performance was happening. Late in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, technologies such as audio recording/playback and radio broadcasting made access possible even when artists and audiences were far apart or the acts of performing and listening were separated in time. A record played on the radio made it possible for a listener in Arizona to hear a performance recorded in Massachusetts, two years earlier.

New technologies that increased access to music—particularly those that made it more convenient or cheaper—changed listening and commercial consumption patterns. Musical styles previously limited to the players and listeners of a specific geographical region could be heard all over the country and, ultimately, the world. The scale of consumption changed as well: “handcrafted,” one-of-a-kind local performances could become mass-produced products for audiences of millions. As the musical experiences and social/economic opportunities of creators expanded, creative practices changed too.

In addition, by the mid-twentieth century, broadcast and recording technologies moved musical experiences, previously available only in public spaces, into private ones. Music in a vast array of styles, from all over the world, could be heard in the comfort and convenience of one’s own home via radio and records. The digital technologies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries intensified these effects. Today, it is no exaggeration to say that access to any music, anywhere, at any time is a reality across the industrialized world.

Incredibly, this near universal, on-demand access to music is available at minimal or no cost to listeners. Musical experience—from the listener’s perspective—has never been richer or more convenient. But at the same time, the emergence of this reception utopia has caused a major crisis for producers.

For music producers there has always been tension between facilitating access and controlling it. If music is too difficult to find, people won’t hear it, let alone purchase it. If access is too easy, people don’t need to pay and may even be able to function as “pirates,” creating and distributing illegal copies.

The point of access to music is always also the point of monetization, whether in the form of a ticket that lets you into a concert or the purchase of a recording. Even broadcast media like radio monetize access—by providing advertisers access to listeners who must listen to or watch ads in order to hear (have access to) music.

When a new technology, a changing social behavior, or a combination of the two changes access it also affects both control and monetization, to which producers must respond. This phenomenon is both cyclic and inevitable (see chapter 8 for a discussion of this cycle) and has happened many times.¹ But, fueled by the “compressive effects” of digital technologies, the conflict between access and control became unusually intense early in the twenty-first century.² In later chapters we will look at some of the winners and losers in these rapidly evolving frameworks for production and consumption.

In addition to unparalleled ease of access and an increasing difficulty monetizing it, the contemporary music business faces another issue. Since the early 2000s, it has been possible for anyone to reach a global audience with musical (really any digital) product via the Internet. The production, distribution, and promotion of such products, ranging from professionally done recordings of original songs to home-made lip synch videos, became possible at minimal cost via web-based media hosting platforms like YouTube, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp (as well as Zoella and KSI for Gen Z-ers), and networking utilities like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Musical.ly (for Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z, in roughly in that order of usage).³

The mechanisms of production, distribution, and promotion previously controlled by (and beneficial to) record labels and radio stations were democratized by the Internet. Much more music by many more creators and producers was available than ever before. The downside was that in removing the gatekeeping function of labels and networks, the curatorial function was removed as well. Everything becomes equally available online: good, bad, and ridiculous. The bandwidth is enormous but the signal-to-noise ratio is very poor. Because so much music is discoverable via the Web, for producers the question becomes one of how to ensure that listeners discover their music amid the millions of choices.

For most of the twentieth century, music discovery (how listeners find music) depended upon a coordination of radio play, retail record sales, and live shows, supplemented with print and broadcast media advertising and promotional appearances. Traditional discovery was part of a process that was relatively stable and well understood. As explained by Samuel Potts (Head of Radio, Columbia UK): “Previously, in the era of the traditional customer journey, we generated discovery for 8 to 12 weeks (allowing customers to discover new music by promoting through intermediaries such as TV, radio and press), and then the purchase or ‘consumption’ of music would come afterwards.”⁴

Today, discovery increasingly depends on Internet-based platforms that incorporate a social networking component. In one sense this is not new, in that “telling your friends” has always been a valuable tool to promote music. But, like other aspects of the multidirectional networking on the Internet, the speed, scale, and interactivity in the present environment are unprecedented. In addition, Internet-based “fame” is extremely transitory and may last hours, perhaps a day or so at best.

As a result, the question confronting producers today is not only one of driving traffic to a YouTube channel, for example, but also one of fostering listener engagement with the content there. It is not now—nor has it ever been—sufficient to lead listeners to find an artist. A listener must personally connect to the artist’s music and to the artist as a human being. This connection is the basis for longer-term relationships. Neither economic success nor cultural influence is achieved by way of “one and done” musical encounters. Successful management of the production process requires an integration of artist/music discovery and engagement, followed by consumption—ideally via multiple purchases of products and experiences—over time. As explored in later chapters, this process has been accelerated, compressed, demonetized/remonetized, and fundamentally altered in the digital era.

Developing a working understanding of the creation-production-reception cycle—and its potential to generate commercial consumption—depends upon knowledge of a wide range of historical and contemporary examples, as well as a degree of skill using concepts, theoretical frameworks, and analytical tools to analyze, compare, adapt, and apply them to emerging or entirely new musical ventures.

FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS

In this chapter we introduce three concepts and a brief overview of the theories from which they emerge: complex systems, stability/disruption cycles, and adaptive expertise. All are highly relevant to music enterprise across virtually all genres, eras, and locales. As such they are presented as foundational perspectives to which we will return a number of times throughout the text.

Complexity

The term “complex system” has a number of specific meanings that, depending upon context, can range from the casual—that how something works is “complicated”—to formal discipline-based meanings. These include, in mathematics, chaos ...