Music Ally

Next up at Music 4.5, a session on the live industry. Kicking off with Joe Porn from Music Glue, who’s talking about some of the artists his company works with on live promotions. Music Glue is a tech company that offers its platforms for artists to sell (or give away) downloads, and sell tickets.

“In the past, bands would sign a deal, look to put records out, and the live side of things was basically pushing you to going to record shops,” he says. “Things have changed massively now. The majority of music is digital… A lot of labels and bands are looking to the live industry for making money.”

And even consumers have changed – 16 year-olds nowadays have never bought a CD, says Porn – they might have bought something on iTunes, but they’re probably getting stuff on P2P sites. “But those kids that are not spending money on recorded music still have money, and are still willing to spend it on artists that they like.”

Which is where live comes in.

Music Glue works with a couple of emo bands who’ve done around 20,000 track downloads each, but “probably won’t get a deal” – they make £300 a night on merchandise when they play gigs though. So “getting a record deal is no longer the holy grail for most artists” – they want to get a decent agent to help them get out and play shows instead.

He points out that to get signed nowadays, artists have to have a viable business already – they’ve sold x amount of digital tracks, played a couple of tours, maybe got a sponsorship deal.

“What we say to the bands we work with is you need to look at yourself as a business, and what you have to sell,” says Porn. So there’s music, merchandise and tickets. “A lot are really starting to focus in on that part of the business” [tickets and selling merchandise at those gigs].

One of Music Glue’s key services to bands is helping them give away downloads, in return for which they collect email addresses and locations of those fans – the data from the latter helps them decide where to play gigs. “To try and be a bit more strategic in regards to where you’re playing” as he puts it.

He also says bands are being more creative in how and where they play. There’s a venue called The Enterprise in Camden that costs £60 to hire plus £60 for the sound man, so bands are hiring the whole venue themselves. Thus, they only have to get 30 people to buy tickets to cover the costs – with everything else being profit. “For an unsigned band, that’s a decent payday,” he says. “And they have the email addresses of those fans.”

Lastly, he says Music Glue have been working with a band called The Joy Formiddable, who are entirely self-funded, and have done tens of thousands of downloads for free. “Now we did a few shows with them last year where they sold out venues themselves,” says Porn. So it’s an example of a band being “very much in control of what’s going on” – they can contact fans directly, and promote their own shows.

Tags: Music 4.5

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 3:24 pm and is filed under Digital Music News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.