Sound is for Sale - Entrepreneureal Opportunity for the 21st Century Musician - Charles Kim

Sound is for Sale:

Entrepreneurial Opportunity for the 21st Century Musician

Charles Kim Teachers College, Columbia University cck2135@tc.columbia.edu

We live, we play, we record, we share, and then we feel together. Such is the general order of music production, and hence the very logic upon which the music industry is built - here “music industry” as “…detaching the process of making and selling music from such activities as, for example, concert promotion or music publishing.”1 Yet such simplicity is frustratingly difficult to navigate, especially for an artist seeking to build a career. The music industry and its sale of recorded products, at least from a historical perspective, is fairly nascent when compared to the broad timeline of music as social experience. We are barely past the centennial of sound chiseling onto mechanical plates, while facing the exciting-yet-daunting task of transitioning our analog past into the digital ether - not simply as the products of expression, but also our very mindsets that structure such processes.

To understand the digital present, and thus its entrepreneurial opportunities, it can be helpful to examine the revolution that is information technology. Analog-to-digital conversion is the shift from sound as physical (namely, the movement of compressed air into material archival) to sound as I/O (the inputs and outputs that enable travel and communication between computers). This seemingly subtle shift has effectively turned music into information, enabling radically efficient sharing, technological mobility, and instantaneous connectivity. For the 21st century musician, this means that every part of a song is for sale.

For the purposes of this article, I am limiting its scope to the entrepreneurial opportunities for the 21st century popular musician - here, read as one who combines the rich history of musical convention with the possibilities of contemporary music technologies, ultimately serving rapidly growing niche consumer communities. What is fascinatingly unique about the modern musical predicament is its access to a vast repository of recorded music. Such pre-recorded and readily available music, today in the information age, exists as media in a social space. Thus what was popularized as “sampling” by Hip-Hop, where media is selected and remixed to create new music, has now extended to any sound that populates the information network of our social connections. From another perspective, recorded music has offered us a new form of listening, one that invites an active reframing of sound as creative utility. In the words of the pioneering composer/ theorist Pierre Schaeffer, whose tape recording/looping techniques paved the way for the Beatles’ iconic use of tape-looping in the 1960s, “It is also, first and foremost (for research purposes), a machine for observing sounds, for ‘decontextualizing’ them, for rediscovering traditional objects, listening again to traditional music with a different ear, an ear that, if not new, is at least as deconditioned as possible.”2 Sixty years later, this deconditioning has generated a global marketplace for sounds, loops, and what Schaeffer would call “concrete musical ideas” - samples, in other words.

There are varying components to what a sound or sample can be. It can be as simple as an acoustic kick drum, processed with subharmonic frequencies to sway dance floor subwoofers, or it can be as complex as a pastiche of symphonic chords and orchestral melodies, designed to inspire compositions and lyrics that communicate towards an intended audience. Mastery, aside from the economics of demand, is the musician’s ability to serve the composition of songs in multiple genres, localities, and aesthetic tastes. It is algorithmic, namely in its unique goal of achieving scale. As we have already witnessed with Tupac Shakur’s “California Love” use of Roger Troutman’s music, a singular sound can be heard on multiple records, but today bypassing licensing via royalty-free business models. The creative reframing of pre-recorded media, however, has been wrought with frustration: licensing denials, legal battles, and perhaps even accusations of creative theft. But there is a silver lining. These chasms, having grown through the 90s and early 2000s, have created space for a new market made efficiently available via the internet. In other words, musicians can access new revenue streams via royalty-free sampling marketplaces that function on paid subscriptions.

This peculiar type of market offers a valuable perspective on creativity - that the selection of and connection between sounds is a value-add to production as musical activity. A sound, a note, or even a single percussive strike, while with its own merits of intrigue, is generally uninteresting in isolation. When such sounds are juxtaposed/ combined/sequenced, the relational connections between sounds create harmony - a fascinating unveiling of creativity within the user. This is perhaps the deconditioning Schaeffer speaks of, that a modern listening of “what-was” postures itself in a creative imagining of “what-could.” It also disrupts the proximal and temporal nature of audio recording: a sound can be created anywhere, at anytime, and synthesized to generate any style. The user, or the musician/producer, is able to take such media and recondition it into a genuinely new idea. Given the mobility of recording and production technologies decentralizing the commercial music studio, musicians can simply create their own sounds, loops, and even fully-composed songs to sell at scale. In bypassing the royalty-based licensing industry altogether, a

single sound can be bought repeatedly, often, and even collaboratively. This begs a question, however: if the supply is decentralized, what demand is it serving?

According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), streaming occupied 83% of U.S. Music Industry Revenues of $12.2 billion in 2020, a $3 billion increase from 2018.3 From a wider perspective, the global recording industry grew from a stark $14 billion in 2014 to $20 billion in 2019, returning to its boasted 2004 numbers.4 With the growth of content output, the entire music industry is estimated to increase from $62 billion in 2017 to $131 billion in 2030 – approximately doubling in revenue size.5 Driving this growth are Millennials and Generation Z - of which the 21st century musicians find its inaugural class, spending an estimated $163 billion.6 With a revenue share of over 60%, the rising demand for audio content parallels the increasingly ubiquitous integration of technology into everyday life: “…listening to songs while commuting to work, exercising, or doing household chores. Moreover, the rising number of commercial end-users, such as restaurants, cafés, pubs, and gymnasiums, using audio streaming platforms to play songs in their commercial spaces is anticipated to drive the segment.”7 In other words, what was once centralized in radio and physical mediums like CDs and vinyl is today decentralized wherever one has access to the internet, with greater mobility, ease, and market penetration than ever before. Further, the emergence of “social music” has doubled-down on the consumer’s ability to actively curate - according to their own tastes or with assistance from playlisting algorithms - their auditory environment. This growing consumer market, thus, requires an entrepreneurial class that can provide sonic tools, or musical sounds, to the content creators that generate new songs, podcasts, and videos.

To understand music as information, one must examine this notion of the “social music marketplace,” namely that music exists as information to be curated, interacted with, and shared at scale. Spotify, though the giant in the space, is but an example of the movement en masse. While Spotify provides a user-friendly interface for consumers to digest content, music creator platforms like Splice (the leading global marketplace for sounds, loops, and samples) and BeatStars (the #1 site for licensing loop-based compositions) provide musicians a path to monetize short, yet exhaustive, libraries of musical concepts. Such services provide an efficient and highly lucrative way for musicians to both sell and purchase samples a la carte for the streaming market, as well as the traditional avenues of media like labels, radio, television, and beyond. It is worth noting that such platforms ought not to be viewed as opposed to conventional industry, rather as an auxiliary that provides multiple streams of income for musicians. As a music educator, it is my hope that while we dutifully prepare sound minds versed in the vernacular of musical past, we simultaneously equip our students with an entrepreneurial compass to navigate the digital present, envisioning paths to move musical culture forward through the digital age.

I must be clear: digital music, especially that of the often polarizing category of popular music, is not the only form of music worth analyzing from a business perspective, but rather that it is what I have come to cherish. I have spent the last decade producing Billboard-charting songs and designing community-based music technology programs in Boston, Los Angeles, NYC, and Seoul. Around the world, from bedroom studios to Hollywood production centers, I have had the privilege of hearing your favorite songs and film cues created on nothing more than laptops, mostly by youth from communities of color. So I am especially fascinated by the design of music ecosystems centered on technology, equity, and business opportunity - in essence, building new industries. Technology, however, does not merely imply the trendiest tools and processes, rather it points to the underlying base from which music, its instruments, and distribution pipelines are created. Perhaps it can be helpful to remember that the violin is the product of the advanced woodworking manufacturing processes of its time, and that the microphone is the product of electrical technologies pioneering in the early half of the 20th century. Music, in short, is adaptive and expressive of the technologies available. Thus today, we must understand the ways in which information technologies are expanding our preconceived limitations of music-making - and of course, the ripe opportunities for artists to build independent careers.

1John Williamson and Martin Cloonan. “Rethinking the Music Industry”, Popular Music 26, no.2 (2007): 306. 2Pierre Schaffer. Treatise on Musical Objects (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 16. 3“Year-End 2020 RIAA Revenue Statistics,” Recording Industry Association of America, accessed July 30, 2021, https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/ uploads/2021/02/2020-Year-End-Music-Industry-Revenue-Report.pdf 4“The State of the Music Industry in 2020,” Jimmy Stone, accessed July 30, 2021, https://www.toptal.com/finance/ 4 market-research-analysts/state-of-music-industry 5Ibid. 6“Music in Air: Streaming Turns Up the Beat for the Music Industry,” Goldman Sachs, accessed July 30, 2021, https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/pages/infographics/music-streaming/ 7“Music Streaming Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Service (Ondemand Streaming, Live Streaming), By Platform, By Content Type, By End Use, By Region, And Segment Forecasts, 2020 - 2027,” Grand View Research, accessed July 30, 2021, https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/ music-streaming-market

Bibliography

Friedlander, Joshua P. “Year-End 2020 RIAA Revenue Statistics.” Accessed July 30, 2021. https:// www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2020-Year-EndMusic-Industry-Revenue-Report.pdf. Goldman Sachs. “Music in Air: Streaming Turns Up the Beat for the Music Industry.” Accessed July 30, 2021. https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/pages/ infographics/music-streaming. Grand View Research. “Music Streaming Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Service (On-demand Streaming, Live Streaming), By Platform, By Content Type, By End Use, By Region, And Segment Forecasts, 2020 - 2027.” Accessed July 30, 2021. https:// www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/ music-streaming-market Schaffer, Pierre. Treatise on Musical Objects. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017.

Stone, Jimmy. “The State of the Music Industry in 2020.” Accessed July 30, 2021. https:// www.toptal.com/finance/market-research-analysts/state-of-musicindustry. Williamson, John and Cloonan, Martin. “Rethinking the Music Industry.” Popular Music 26, no.2 (2007): 305-322.