There’s nothing we do that an artists can’t do for themselves, but its nice to team up under the same banner and try to promote our collective scene together.

I totally agree with your statements about saving up for the things you want, and about sharing skills. Living half for oneself and half for others, as almost nobody says nowadays.

For me, the bottom line is that being a musician is a job – a fine and rare thing in which I get to do what I love and get paid – and so I have to be “tooled up” for that job. That includes web-type stuff, earning money in other ways so I can buy things, making a connection with people and asking them to help me spread my art.

Press, labels, et al. *might* help; but let’s face it, it’s not really a dark art. A lot of people in those areas just have favourites and cliques that they tend not to move out of. You might be on their list for a bit, as long as you do what they want or need.

But when the time comes that those people have no use for you, the only people left to help you are you and the people who like you. If you rely on those last two things in the first place, you’ll have saved yourself a lot of bother.

Win-win-win

Even in our isolated area, 174 artists took up the free offer. Some of the visual artists who applied it saw the price of their work double or triple over the three years. One or two musicians have gone on to study and are developing in interesting and successful ways.

The vast majority of participants spoke positively of what they had learned. But overall, less than half reported any increase in sales as a result.

It’s an interesting case study into whether artists will actually follow the new path. I think it says that even if relevant training is freely available, good, and comprehensive, applying it all solo might be too much for many artists. (and I’m talking about good, committed and experienced people currently making at least part of a living from their work.)

I guess Darwin suggests one eventual solution – but your conclusion about cooperatives /collectives / skill-pooling feels important (and rather nicer) in this context.

Im not a musician, but im fascinated by the industry. I invested in a band 3 years ago (http://news.bbc.co.uk/…/4724650.stm), not just for the music, and certainly not for any ROI, but for the unique experience of being part of group of people trying to get their music out there in a new way on their own terms. Like the ones they sell in WH Smiths, with Alamo, I had the opportunity to buy into the ultimate experience package for me.

I also felt the conditions were right back then to make a reasonable go of it, but i could never have imagined how technology would have progressed to make it as viable as it is today.

Aside from the physical music, I think thats what musicians have always been selling. Experiences. A gig is a unique experience.

Instead of thinking of your music as a product, I think musicians need to think music as conduit for the experiences they sell.

You just need to think like a fan and be more creative with the experiences you sell. Instead of paying a label guy to organise your tour, let your fans do it. What an experience that is for a fan. Imagine being tour manager for your favourite band. What an experience.

For the price of a 2 week holiday, 3 years later im still enjoying my ultimate experience, more than ever.

Division of labor has been the basic tenet of productivity from 19th century. With vinyl records you couldn’t own the production facilities even if you were a relatively known artist and the same goes for printing presses and so forth. So the division that existed then exists now, too – to some extent. You buy these services (still!) from organizations outside your company/band like labels have done for decades!

So we are talking about record labels as marketing machines and venture capitalists who are in the business of selling copies of music. Steve and many others have written extensively on this, let’s just say that on the web copies of information happen instantaneously so copy business is becoming pretty hard to monetize. There is one advantage to getting signed though. Record company people have extensive social networks on the whole music industry (at least here in Finland) and usually they are pretty convincing salesmen.

But the web does away with many marketing issues – if you let your music be available on the net. The music itself is the ad for the product and the thing you are actually marketing is…your band/you! And I don’t mean this in the egotistical sense. I mean in the way that now I can look at performances of – let’s say – Jeff Beck and be blown away by his music. Should he come to Finland I would be the first in line to get a ticket. He himself is obviously the perfect marketing for himself because I hear something that I truly like.

By thinking of your band as a company which has also an economic dimension and a responsibility to keep itself afloat makes a big difference. We have all heard about the excesses of musicians past but when we see a great company we don’t usually associate that company as being fiscally irresponsible nor do we think them as being poor/broke.

Think of Elvis Presley for a sec. If he had been even a bit more responsible in his fiscal matters he might have had 20 years (or more, Paul Anka from the same era is still doing gigs) more career. To me it seems that the only way to keep sanity with music as making a living is to think of music as firstly as a bloody great thing in itself and secondly as a chosen profession. Marketing is part of it, but not all. The labels made music as a profession easier for some in the past, but others found their careers stymied by ill-fitting marketing. If you are like a company responsible for your marketing then you can be very truthful about the product that you bring to the people. Hopefully that will mean longevity for your careers.

Actually it seems that this is a longwinded way to say that the values of beauty, truth and being good are always extremely desirable in the minds of many a people regardless of how those values are being brought to life (records or other means). We just need to work on these things more so that we can make decent earnings as musicians. All professions have had their share of work that is not directly the art – bookkeeping, taking care of facilities and other maintenance activities. You take care of your instruments, right? At that moment you are not playing…

Ok, I admit that being a business is a lot of study, too. Maybe that’s the hard part for musos. We think that because we practise the hell out of our instruments (or do we?) we don’t have time for anything else. But how about half an hour of basic business studies a day for how long it takes? Is that really horrible? It’s just practising…think about all the progressive rock groups today? They are pretty good at business, eh? And still playing music that is utterly meaningful for them.

The wastefulness of labels drops exponentially with the size of the label, and I’m sure that a label like Babel (see the comment here from Oliver) would be far more conscientious in its spending than, say, Universal or V2, given that Oli is spending his own money, and recoupable or not, the investment is his own.

In situations like that, it’s more a matter of working out what the important tasks are and how many of them we as artists are a) the best person for the job and b) capable of doing because the resultant costs of getting someone else in would make the project unsustainable.