This is a little stream of consciousness I wrote down upon waking up one morning a good eight months ago. Many things have changed since in the industry, but as I stumbled upon it tonight I thought I might as well post it. The metaphor still seems valid on some points to me. Thoughts?
I believe there will always be value in creation. What is constantly changing is the place along the line of the creative process where it sits and gets monetised. Conception? Production? Commercialisation? Derivatives? Patents & rights?
Applied to the music industry, it is like a planet with its satellites. The artist is the planet at the centre of the universe and the satellites revolving around it are the artist's differents outlets and revenue streams. Some satellites are well know to us: albums, live shows, publishing rights, synch rights, apps, merchandising etc... If you look at the existing satellites, some are bigger than others. Some satellites have not been discovered yet.. but the researchers on the artist planet are investing time and money to find them.
Problems start when a satellite gets so big that it convinces itself and researchers it is the real (new) centre of the universe and hence starts acting in a way that the population on the artist planet as well as all the smaller satellites believe they are doomed without it. It starts making unreasonable demands. Accentuates its leading position. The artist planet and the other satellites hand the big satellite the driving wheel.
Nearly the whole artist population actually left their planet at one point to go and live on the big satellite, moving all their stuff there. But the whole universe forgot that they could only live as long as the artist planet was healthy enough to continue feeding its satellites. Even the biggest one.
One day though, something went terribly wrong. Noone realised it at first but the big satellite created a monster that transformed into a meteor that came back to hit them hard. So hard that the big satellite started dying.
Panic across the universe. Apocalyptic prophecies. For too long, the universe was over-dependent on the biggest satellite. To the point when change was needed, they were all completely at loss as to what to do.
So everyone in the universe started running frantically around claiming they'd found the solution. They'd select some short-term criteria and based on that, decide which satellite was the best/healthiest for everyone to move there! It sounded great, but it was only moving the problem to a different place and not learning from their initial mistakes.
Satellites appear and die. They are necessary to the artist planet but with it, they also dwindle. The temptaion to consider a temporary state of affairs (and rapports de force) as permanent is understandably strong indeed and can work in the short term. But when change comes along, the cracks appear fast. This is what happened with albums, this is what started happen with live shows, ringtones, this is what could happen with publishing rights, apps, streaming etc...
Even if it is understandable, we tend to consider what was valid and worked for our parents' generation could also work for ours. But because of this generational habit and bias, we forget how vital it is that the centre of the universe stay the artist's planet. Like a radar control tower, artists can and should monitor what revenue streams/satellites they want/need to priviledge at a particular moment of their career to continue creating.
The day the frame of mind migrates to one of these satellites, the artist planet and the whole universe around it changes its axis as well as its approach to discovering new satellites for future survival...is this really a good thing?
Then again, things are changing faster than we know. I guess it's more of a case of each and everyone of us adapting to each artist's situation and keeping an open mind rather than fixating on finding the one business model for all. Time will tell...
