The new model is the old model …
… according to this article
in the New Yorker (James Surowiecki), speaking of viable business models for musicians:
The music industry may be in crisis, what with illegal file-sharing, stagnant CD sales, and the decline of commercial rock radio, but the touring business is as sturdy as ever. In some ways, it is healthier than some of the mediums (radio, recorded music) that at one point or another were supposed to render it obsolete.
Note that
Most musicians, from a business perspective, at least, would wish it otherwise. Selling CDs is, as economists say, scalable: you make one recording, and you can sell it to an unlimited number of people for an unlimited amount of time, at very little cost. A tour, on the other hand, is work.
Nevertheless, touring has advantages:
[…] musicians get a much higher percentage of the money from concerts and merchandise than they do from the sale of their CDs.
The key sentence is this one:
[…] the fortunes of musicians and the fortunes of music labels have less and less to do with each other. [It is a] shift from “the music business” to “the musician business.” In the musician business, the assets that once made the major labels so important—promotion, distribution, shelf space—matter less than the assets that belong to the artists, such as their ability to perform live. As technology has grown more sophisticated, the ways in which artists make money have grown more old-fashioned. The value of songs falls, and the value of seeing an artist sing them rises, because that experience can’t really be reproduced.
marking a dent in the future of music business and its business models …
read more at the The New Yorker …
