Synesthesiac get it’s first review over at icareifyoulisten.com! It’s a fantastic review – thank you to I Care If You Listen and Justin Rito for writing it!
Read it here – http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2015/04/anthony-joseph-lanman-synesthesiac/
The album is still for sale over at Bandcamp.Com!
Congrats on the review. I lreally enjoy your compositions, and I am very interested in your thoughts on the music biz. I find myself listening to Spotify more and more and I wonder about your thoughts on their biz model. Can an independant artist make money on Spotify royalties? Is Spotify better than nothing? Better than Napster was? Better than iTunes? Better than the old model where a cartel charged everyone $17 for CDs and as a result we were all exposed to much mess music than we are today? Where are people talking about this kind of thing on the www?
Thanks for the comment, Dan! Many of my views about your questions regarding the music biz are in this blog I wrote about a year ago – http://anthonyjosephlanman.com/?p=1214 – but to answer your questions – independent artists cannot make a living from Spotify. Major artists cannot make a living from Spotify. Spotify pays 1/100th of a penny for every stream. Even at over a million, this is not something anyone could live on. The consumer is much better off now than they were back in the day, but the artists are much worse off.
I believe that people need to make a point of purchasing physical media from artists that they like. CDs, LPs, cassettes, whatever, whenever it is offered. You get higher quality music, you get booklets full of information about the music and the artists, and you get a physical object that you can keep for years to come – with no worries about losing it to a hard drive crash 🙂 Many times you get cool art. There are many pluses. But the biggest windfall would be that independent artists COULD make a living through this – through selling on sites like CD Baby and Bandcamp for example.
Spotify, Apple, Napster – these are just the most recent incarnations of the old “cartels” you mentioned. They make bank, while the artist suffers.
So yeah I meant for that comment to be on your “Napster 14 years later” post but was on vacation and on my mobile and I fat-fingered it.
I hear you on the “important to support music” thing — and I personally buy it. I went ahead and bought the FLAC files for Synesthesiac. But the truth is I’m not really sure I can tell the difference in terms of audio quality (would like to think I can and occasionally tell myself I can). I also am just not into the physical media thing. I work in the technology industry and I appreciate what tech has done for the consumer — choice, breadth, exposure to new sounds and such.
Napster didn’t make bank in terms of revenue — agreed that Apple does and Spotify soon will. What I want to know if there is a business model that doesn’t require charity though. I want music to flourish and I don’t want it to flourish only for a few as I think it did in the 80s. Appealing to individuals, on an individual level, as you have to me, can’t work in the long run. I want to hear great music, but I don’t want great liner notes or art work. So I kinda feel like Spotify is my only option for now, bad as it is. And I do think the Spotify model is better than the Napster model, which really was just pure stealing, right?
BTW I’ve heard differing things now on royalties for artists. You say 1/100 of a penny for every stream, seemed someone (Bret Williams?) recently said 1 penny per stream? Has it changed? Or is it different for artist vs. composer vs. both?
Well, thanks for buying the FLAC files – I appreciate that! Yeah – I’ve heard that “which sounds better” argument for many years, and let’s face it – unless you’re an audio engineer, it all sounds good – regardless of whether it’s mp3, or FLAC or vinyl or CD – it all sounds good.
I think people just have to make a jump to realizing that the reason to buy music in this day and age is to support artists that you like. Because in this day and age, you really don’t HAVE to buy music. You can find it somewhere for nothing. And if the artist is offering it for nothing, then that’s fine. But, if the artist is not offering free downloads, they need to make money from their work just like everyone else.
Spotify is 1/100th of a penny – Bret was mistaken 🙂 It’s the same for all artists.
So I think it comes to a change in consumer perception. Before, artists could make money from their labels, or touring, etc. I guess in the beginning, people didn’t worry about downloading too much because they figured that the artists would be taken care of through other means. That has all changed, but the overall attitude toward downloading and paying for music has not. That’s the biggest problem for artists. I’m not sure how to change that other than starting campaigns to change people’s mind’s about the whole thing. It’s a tough issue to resolve.