Music Ally

We’ll just print this quote unedited – it’s from an interview with BitTorrent co-founder Bram Cohen, on the oversupply of recorded music:

“Music has a bigger problem, it’s that people want to make it. It’s the peacocks tail. The reason guys make music is that they want to get laid. So men are usually willing to pay a lot of money in the hope of getting laid. Anything that helps you get laid with amazing regularity is something you would expect a tremendous oversupply of. So we have unbelievable amounts of music. People pay a lot to learn how to play music and it’s ridiculous to expect people to make money off it. Normally if you want to make money you do something no one wants to do.”

Does he have a point?

Former IFPI director of strategic research Keith Jopling thinks bands and managers should be wary of the hype machine (as opposed to The Hype Machine) when building a fanbase. While the annual ‘next best thing’ and ‘best thing of last year’ polls may seem a quick route to popularity, in a post on his Juggernaut Brew blog he points out some of the downsides.

“The exposure is great, but the potential for over-exposure and worse, backlash, seems a very real risk. Analysis of both albums made and sales from each album reveals ever- shortening life-cycles for modern day pop artists. Looking back to one year ago – the collective ‘buzz’ being generated around any number of new bands that included The Horrors, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Palladium – was almost claustrophobic.”

He also points out that if such a thing as the Long Tail exists, it’s “currently being well stocked with an ever-increasing volume of short career span artists, who were ‘this year’s big thing’ at the time but never got past album two in the end.” Jopling’s view is that managers and labels should resist the hype machine and focus on longer term development of their artists.

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Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory has been getting a bit of a kicking recently, with several studies – including one joint effort between the MCPS-PRS and mBlox that claimed that 80% of digital music inventory sold no copies at all during the period analysed.

eMusic has hit back, claiming that its sales data from 2008 supports the Long Tail theory. The company claims that around 75% of its tracks sold at least once during 2008. “eMusic is the Long Tail,” says European MD Madeleine Milne.

“Our customers buy music beyond the mainstream top 40 because we provide them with more context than any other major music retailer through Web 2.0 features, insightful editorial content, a passionate subscriber community and an easy-to-use and effective recommendation engine. And we reinforce the music discovery experience with subscription pricing that encourages experimentation.”

How to reconcile these two apparently contradictory claims? eMusic’s subscription model means users may be more willing to take a chance on new or obscure music. We’re going to ask the MCPS-PRS’ Will Page what his reaction is, and will provide an update then.

At Popkomm 2008 last week, 24/7’s Frank Taubert cast doubt on the viability of the so-called long tail of digital music, saying that two thirds of his firm’s catalogue had never been played. eMusic has come out swinging on that score, with European Madeleine Milne saying they’re doing pretty well out of the long tail.

“3/4 of eMusic’s entire four million track catalogue sells at least once every year, or to put it another way, we sell more than 50% of our catalogue at least once every quarter,” she says in a statement. “Music discovery on mobile devices may not be supporting long tail sales but the new digital music consumer is web savvy, and turns to social networks, blogs and the web to find out about new music.”

Click below to read her full statement.

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