Rick Cox and I correspond quite often. We're discussing preparations for the tour in September. Anita Pócsová has already booked the tickets. Arnaud Mercier, the sound engineer, is coming with us. Rick thinks of him as a member of his family and wants to see him maybe one last time in Europe on tour. Arnaud was Jon Hassell's sound engineer. He and Rick spent a lot of time together from 1999 - 2017.
I had to buy a new MacBook. It doesn't suit me at all now, but my old one already had a problem with Guitar rig 6. It's better for video editing too. I've started doing those short Reells. It's not the format for me. My music is very intimate. I'm not a hammer shredder. It suits me even when I'm not very lit at my gigs. I like the cinema atmosphere. Plus there are a million of those videos a day. As Marco Minnemann said, "most of them wouldn't play a concert and would never compose their own song."
Poland, Germany, Belgium, England, Switzerland and Italy would be the best countries to pay. For 5000 euros per country we would get an interview, a banner in the print version of the magazine and a review. Plus a couple of press releases. This money would never be returned, of course. Adrian Belew of King Crimson mentioned in an interview that he would get $50k from 9,000,000 streams. That's exactly how much it costs him to produce an album that he records all by himself. The only thing he has left to survive on is concerts and CD sales at concerts.
Adrian Belew on the state of the music industry.
What’s your perspective on the current state of the music industry?
The music business screwed every one of us artists by the way they let our music be given away for free. They didn't fight it when the streaming companies started driving things. They didn't even try. It is about as unfair as it gets. I know listeners love Spotify, because they get all this music for free. That’s great for them, but remember, you’re cheating me and every other musician on there. I’ve barely got a penny from them, but the streaming companies are making billions of dollars. They’re never going to share that money with the artists, who enable them to exist.
Let's be clear here. To legally say you're paying someone, there is a figure that you have to legally give them and that’s what they do. It's the lowest figure you could possibly give us, as artists—something like .0006 of a penny per stream. That’s what they decided our music is worth. So, they give us .0006 of a penny, which is really nothing. It would take something like 9 million streams to make $50,000. I spend that every time I make a record.
So, I have to do things my own way. What choice do I have? The music business is a total disaster for everyone, except the huge artists who make money playing giant concerts and generate billions of streams. Some of my music is on streaming, including Elevator, because it’s the reality we live in, but I make money by going out and playing concerts, and selling CDs.
I make my CDs myself. Beyond my own time, the costs involved are the engineer, artwork, and printing the CDs. In that way, I can make more money selling directly than when I worked with a record label. But I’m in this situation, not because I wanted it that way, but because the industry made it that way. I don’t want to be my own record label. I’d rather be writing new songs, but the business forced this path on me. The business really let everybody down and it’s a real shame.
Full interview here: https://www.innerviews.org/inner/adrian-belew
Promo for my next album
So our 30 000 euro deposit in the promo could be responded by festivals or well-known clubs, but we would never collect 30 000 euro extra from concerts (so that the promo would come back to us).
I once happened to send a CD to England called Sculpting in Time, which also features Arve Henriksen. The journalist Sid Smith wrote me back saying he liked the album and would try to get a review published in the print version of PROG MAG magazine. Later he wrote me that the editor told him to write about Arve's solo album because Arve's publisher has a deal with the magazine...
Without promos, we're all left with social media, and on those, it's about nothing. It's a space for catching likes and views. It gives people a sense of fame and purpose in life... It's digital smog. I'm always yelling at my son not to watch storks and reels. Let him talk or watch a movie with me instead.
We do have "opinion" papers that write about culture. I feel, as Ray Daniels writes below, that we need to send "motivation" to the Fed-Exes there as well.
How Rihanna does promo
I'm completing how Rihanna does HIT. How much does it cost and how much goes on the promo.
Writes music marketer Ray Daniels:
So, our rough tally to create one pop song comes to:
The cost of the writing camp, plus fees for the songwriter, producer, vocal producer and the mix comes to $78,000.
But it's not a hit until everybody hears it. How much does that cost?
About $1 million, according to Daniels, Riddick and other industry insiders.
"The reason it costs so much," Daniels says, "is because I need everything to click at once. You want them to turn on the radio and hear Rihanna, turn on BET and see Rihanna, walk down the street and see a poster of Rihanna, look on Billboard, the iTunes chart, I want you to see Rihanna first. All of that costs."
That's what a hit song is: It's everywhere you look. To get it there, the label pays.
Every song is different. Some songs have a momentum all their own, some songs just break out out of the blue. But the record industry depends on hits for sales. Having hits is the business plan. The majority of songs that are hits — that chart high, that sell big, that blast out of cars in the summertime-- cost a million bucks to get them heard and played and bought.
Daniels breaks down the expenses roughly into thirds: a third for marketing, a third to fly the artist everywhere, and a third for radio.
"Marketing and radio are totally different," he says. "Marketing is street teams, commercials and ads."
Radio is?
"Radio you're talking about . . ." he pauses. "Treating the radio guys nice."
'Treating the radio guys nice' is a very fuzzy cost. It can mean taking the program directors of major market stations to nice dinners. It can mean flying your artist in to do a free show at a station in order to generate more spots on a radio playlist.
Former program director Paul Porter, who co-founded the media watchdog group Industry Ears, says it's not that record labels pay outright for a song. They pay to establish relationships so that when they are pushing a record, they will come first.
Porter says shortly after he started working as a programmer for BET about 10 years ago, he received $40,000.00 in hundred-dollar bills in a Fed-Ex envelope.
Current program directors told me this isn't happening anymore. They say their playlists are made through market research on what their listeners want to hear.
In any case, to return to our approximate tally: After $78,000 to make the song, and another $1 million to roll it out, Rihanna's "Man Down" gets added to radio playlists across the country, gets a banner ad on iTunes ... and may still not be a hit.
As it happens, "Man Down" has not sold that well, and radio play has been minimal.
But Def Jam makes up the shortfall by releasing other singles. And only then-- if the label recoups what it spent on the album — will Rihanna herself get paid.
Full interview here: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/07/05/137530847/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-hit-song?t=1661149603921