• NYT: How Much Is an Album Worth in 2020: $3.49? $77? $1,000? Maybe $0

    From Frank Forman@21:1/5 to All on Sun Aug 30 00:49:33 2020
    XPost: rec.music.classical.recordings

    NYT: How Much Is an Album Worth in 2020: $3.49? $77? $1,000? Maybe $0 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/arts/music/albums-price.html

    By Jon Caramanica

    Over the last couple of years, Rory Ferreira, a.k.a. the avant-garde
    hip-hop artist R.A.P. Ferreira, noticed that on Discogs, an online
    record marketplace that specializes in resales, the physical
    versions of his albums were trading for several times their original
    price.

    So when planning the vinyl release of his latest album, "Purple
    Moonlight Pages," he decided to charge accordingly.

    "I'm not going to knock anyone's hustle. I just need to make sure
    mine is calibrated accordingly, too," he said in a phone interview
    last month.

    In July, he offered the "Purple Moonlight Pages" vinyl for $77, an
    unusually high price, even for a double LP. Although the album had
    been available on streaming services for months, he sold all 1,500
    copies available on his website. And on Instagram, he began replying
    to feedback about the cost, both positive and negative. To one
    exasperated fan, he wrote, "look we get it. you don't value yourself
    or what you make. the rest of us not on that. kick rocks now."

    Charging $77 for an album might be a reach even in the best of
    times, but it's especially ambitious in the current music business
    climate, where the album itself has become increasingly devalued.
    The growth of subscription streaming services like Spotify and Apple
    Music has, in under a decade, almost completely detached albums and
    songs from a specific dollar value.

    So what, if anything, is an album truly worth in 2020? Depends on
    the business model.

    "I do think music has value, but the value is not on the monetary
    side," said Steve Carless, Nipsey Hussle's business partner and
    co-manager. "Technology has deteriorated that." Thanks to the
    abstraction of the artist from the music on streaming services, and
    the rise of social media and the intimacy it creates between stars
    and fans, physical music is no longer the primary way artists
    capture their followers' attention and dollars.

    "Music has now become the vehicle," Carless added. "Before it was
    what was at the end of the equation. Now it's at the beginning of
    the equation."

    In short: For the most popular artists, the album itself is just one
    small part of a multiplatform business, and nowhere near the most
    profitable one. While they still do a healthy business in physical
    sales, and sometimes find ways to squeeze additional profits from it
    -- Taylor Swift recently offered eight different deluxe editions of
    her new album, "Folklore" -- generally the album is the thing that
    sets the table for far more ambitious revenue streams: merchandise,
    touring, licensing and more.

    That's at one extreme. At the other are small artists or labels with
    devoted fan bases, for whom the album remains at the center of the
    financial conversation, and still a lucrative proposition on its
    own.

    All of which is to say that it's harder than ever to determine, in a
    pure sense, the value of an album. Unlike in the CD or LP eras, when
    the market prices for records were essentially consistent, now the
    album is valued on a sliding scale -- for most people, using
    streaming services, access to an album is (or feels) free; the most
    dedicated, however, will put their money where their fandom is.

    This has wreaked havoc on record label business models, and also on
    the Billboard charts. In order to encourage immediate sales, artists
    looking for an opening week No. 1 began bundling albums with other, higher-priced items. Nowadays, an artist's album release can often
    look more like the opening of a clothing store.

    Billboard's latest attempt to rein in bundling goes into effect in
    October, with a mandate that music must be promoted as an explicit
    add-on purchase to tickets or merch, with the cost disclosed to the
    consumer.

    It's another adjustment meant to keep the album chart as purely
    about music as possible (even as the very idea of an "album" as a
    formally aggregated work of art is now in crisis, following the rise
    of playlisting and the increasingly prevalent drip-drip approach to
    releasing new music). But with the business of being a popular
    musician increasingly weighted toward non-album revenue streams, the
    chart's entire meaning has become fuzzy.

    As before, an album needs to cost at least $3.49 to count on the
    charts, a number arrived at in 2011, when digital album sales were
    more of a threat than album streaming. Compared to a T-shirt or
    hoodie that costs $50, or a concert ticket that might cost a few
    times that, that price of the album is incidental -- the monetary
    value of the fandom is captured by something other than the music.
    But this is a recent development. Before the streaming era, artists
    were attempting to extract maximum value from the album itself.

    Perhaps the highest-profile example is the Wu-Tang Clan album "Once
    Upon a Time in Shaolin." The group made one copy of it available,
    and it sold at auction in 2015 for $2 million to the since-disgraced pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli, who surrendered it to
    federal authorities in 2018.

    Part of the inspiration for the Wu-Tang auction was the release of
    Hussle's 2013 mixtape, "Crenshaw." Hussle, perhaps the first artist
    in the modern era to propose a premium pricing model for a dying
    medium, offered physical copies of "Crenshaw," for $100, using the
    slogan "Proud2Pay." (The mixtape was available for free online.) He
    sold out 1,000 copies. To demonstrate that the "Crenshaw" release
    wasn't a fluke, he upped the ante with his next release, "Mailbox
    Money," offering 100 copies at $1,000; all of them sold out too.

    Hussle understood that the physical album was no longer a music
    delivery system, but a proxy for fan enthusiasm, a merch totem of
    its own. This was an especially key development in an era when
    physical sales were in decline and streaming services with their own
    economic interests were on the verge of inserting themselves as
    crucial middlemen between artists and fans.

    Carless described Hussle's intent as "Let's stop looking at the
    majority, focus on the minority" -- courting those listeners who
    were passionate and resourced enough to pay. The CD itself, numbered
    and signed, became "an important keepsake," Carless said, and it
    came with certain fan privileges -- a phone number they could use to
    reach Hussle, a private concert. (Hussle released "Crenshaw" the
    same year Patreon, which proposed a similar tiered model of
    financial relationship between artist and fan, opened for business.)

    Perhaps more crucially, Hussle's unconventional pricing model was
    also profitable at the album level. Generally speaking, a tiny
    sliver of top streaming pop stars can earn back the expenses of
    making an album purely on stream revenue. For the vast majority of
    artists, that's an out-of-reach goal.

    One group that still makes money off its music? The rap duo Run the
    Jewels. "I definitely know artists at both ends of the spectrum who
    look at it as a loss leader, but Run the Jewels just doesn't happen
    to look at it that way," said Amaechi Uzoigwe, the group's manager,
    who added that each of the duo's albums has been profitable -- via
    streaming and physical sales -- even though they give away downloads
    for free.

    What this underscores is something Hussle knew, and something
    Radiohead figured out more than a decade ago: There are tiers of
    fans. Some -- most, actually -- will pay nothing for music. But the
    few who are willing to pay can more than offset them. In 2007,
    Radiohead released its seventh album, "In Rainbows," via a
    pay-what-you-wish download, and in various physical formats; three
    million people paid for a copy.

    On the online record marketplace Bandcamp, around 80,000 albums are
    sold per day. Half of them are digital: the average price for those
    albums -- many of which are pay-what-you-wish -- is $9, though
    according to Joshua Kim, chief operating officer of Bandcamp, some
    fans will voluntarily pay several times that; in one case, a fan
    paid $1,000 for an album.

    Kim said that the fastest growing part of Bandcamp's business is
    physical sales, particularly vinyl. "We view Bandcamp as a place
    where music is valued as art," he said. "Physical formats are
    probably the most concrete expression of that." He likened consumers
    willing to pay a premium for music they can otherwise get for free
    to those who shop for organic food or ethically sourced clothing,
    finding value in "compensating artists fairly."

    That perspective is consistent with what Ferreira has seen in his
    fan base. He noticed at shows that some fans bought copies of albums
    they already owned -- "talismans," he called them -- as a show of
    financial and creative support: "I'm a poor guy from poor people
    from a poor place," he said. "Thinking that somebody might own
    several copies of one project just because they wanted you to keep
    going was totally foreign to me."

    In the living room of his home in Nashville last month, Ferreira
    laid out hundreds of record mailers and all the copies of "Purple
    Moonlight Pages," and planned for several days of work -- he is a
    business of one.

    Despite the pushback he received from some fans, Ferreira doesn't
    view his $77 vinyl as a premium product. He said that he values
    these newest songs, which were more expensive for him to make and
    reflect greater maturity as an artist, more highly than his older
    songs, and felt that should be reflected in the price. "The music is
    the premium product," he said. "It's just that there are some people
    who are at a place in their life where it's kind of nice to be able
    to style out and buy something nice that you believe in."

    For those people, he was excited about the process of individually
    packing up his albums and shipping them out. It was a way to keep
    his focus on the music, and its true value. "I don't want to sell a
    lot of T-shirts," he said. "I did not start rapping because I like
    folding T-shirts."

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Frank Berger@21:1/5 to Frank Forman on Sat Aug 29 21:18:11 2020
    XPost: rec.music.classical.recordings

    On 8/29/2020 8:49 PM, Frank Forman wrote:
    NYT: How Much Is an Album Worth in 2020: $3.49? $77? $1,000?
    Maybe $0
    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/arts/music/albums-price.html

    By Jon Caramanica

    Over the last couple of years, Rory Ferreira, a.k.a. the
    avant-garde
    hip-hop artist R.A.P. Ferreira, noticed that on Discogs, an
    online
    record marketplace that specializes in resales, the physical
    versions of his albums were trading for several times their
    original
    price.

    So when planning the vinyl release of his latest album, "Purple
    Moonlight Pages," he decided to charge accordingly.

    "I'm not going to knock anyone's hustle. I just need to make
    sure
    mine is calibrated accordingly, too," he said in a phone
    interview
    last month.

    In July, he offered the "Purple Moonlight Pages" vinyl for
    $77, an
    unusually high price, even for a double LP. Although the
    album had
    been available on streaming services for months, he sold all
    1,500
    copies available on his website. And on Instagram, he began
    replying
    to feedback about the cost, both positive and negative. To one
    exasperated fan, he wrote, "look we get it. you don't value
    yourself
    or what you make. the rest of us not on that. kick rocks now."

    Charging $77 for an album might be a reach even in the best of
    times, but it's especially ambitious in the current music
    business
    climate, where the album itself has become increasingly
    devalued.
    The growth of subscription streaming services like Spotify
    and Apple
    Music has, in under a decade, almost completely detached
    albums and
    songs from a specific dollar value.

    So what, if anything, is an album truly worth in 2020?
    Depends on
    the business model.

    "I do think music has value, but the value is not on the
    monetary
    side," said Steve Carless, Nipsey Hussle's business partner and
    co-manager. "Technology has deteriorated that." Thanks to the
    abstraction of the artist from the music on streaming
    services, and
    the rise of social media and the intimacy it creates between
    stars
    and fans, physical music is no longer the primary way artists
    capture their followers' attention and dollars.

    "Music has now become the vehicle," Carless added. "Before
    it was
    what was at the end of the equation. Now it's at the
    beginning of
    the equation."

    In short: For the most popular artists, the album itself is
    just one
    small part of a multiplatform business, and nowhere near the
    most
    profitable one. While they still do a healthy business in
    physical
    sales, and sometimes find ways to squeeze additional profits
    from it
    -- Taylor Swift recently offered eight different deluxe
    editions of
    her new album, "Folklore" -- generally the album is the
    thing that
    sets the table for far more ambitious revenue streams:
    merchandise,
    touring, licensing and more.

    That's at one extreme. At the other are small artists or
    labels with
    devoted fan bases, for whom the album remains at the center
    of the
    financial conversation, and still a lucrative proposition on
    its
    own.

    All of which is to say that it's harder than ever to
    determine, in a
    pure sense, the value of an album. Unlike in the CD or LP
    eras, when
    the market prices for records were essentially consistent,
    now the
    album is valued on a sliding scale -- for most people, using
    streaming services, access to an album is (or feels) free;
    the most
    dedicated, however, will put their money where their fandom is.

    This has wreaked havoc on record label business models, and
    also on
    the Billboard charts. In order to encourage immediate sales,
    artists
    looking for an opening week No. 1 began bundling albums with
    other,
    higher-priced items. Nowadays, an artist's album release can
    often
    look more like the opening of a clothing store.

    Billboard's latest attempt to rein in bundling goes into
    effect in
    October, with a mandate that music must be promoted as an
    explicit
    add-on purchase to tickets or merch, with the cost disclosed
    to the
    consumer.

    It's another adjustment meant to keep the album chart as purely
    about music as possible (even as the very idea of an "album"
    as a
    formally aggregated work of art is now in crisis, following
    the rise
    of playlisting and the increasingly prevalent drip-drip
    approach to
    releasing new music). But with the business of being a popular
    musician increasingly weighted toward non-album revenue
    streams, the
    chart's entire meaning has become fuzzy.

    As before, an album needs to cost at least $3.49 to count on
    the
    charts, a number arrived at in 2011, when digital album
    sales were
    more of a threat than album streaming. Compared to a T-shirt or
    hoodie that costs $50, or a concert ticket that might cost a
    few
    times that, that price of the album is incidental -- the
    monetary
    value of the fandom is captured by something other than the
    music.
    But this is a recent development. Before the streaming era,
    artists
    were attempting to extract maximum value from the album itself.

    Perhaps the highest-profile example is the Wu-Tang Clan
    album "Once
    Upon a Time in Shaolin." The group made one copy of it
    available,
    and it sold at auction in 2015 for $2 million to the
    since-disgraced
    pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli, who surrendered it to
    federal authorities in 2018.

    Part of the inspiration for the Wu-Tang auction was the
    release of
    Hussle's 2013 mixtape, "Crenshaw." Hussle, perhaps the first
    artist
    in the modern era to propose a premium pricing model for a
    dying
    medium, offered physical copies of "Crenshaw," for $100,
    using the
    slogan "Proud2Pay." (The mixtape was available for free
    online.) He
    sold out 1,000 copies. To demonstrate that the "Crenshaw"
    release
    wasn't a fluke, he upped the ante with his next release,
    "Mailbox
    Money," offering 100 copies at $1,000; all of them sold out
    too.

    Hussle understood that the physical album was no longer a music
    delivery system, but a proxy for fan enthusiasm, a merch
    totem of
    its own. This was an especially key development in an era when
    physical sales were in decline and streaming services with
    their own
    economic interests were on the verge of inserting themselves as
    crucial middlemen between artists and fans.

    Carless described Hussle's intent as "Let's stop looking at the
    majority, focus on the minority" -- courting those listeners
    who
    were passionate and resourced enough to pay. The CD itself,
    numbered
    and signed, became "an important keepsake," Carless said,
    and it
    came with certain fan privileges -- a phone number they
    could use to
    reach Hussle, a private concert. (Hussle released "Crenshaw"
    the
    same year Patreon, which proposed a similar tiered model of
    financial relationship between artist and fan, opened for
    business.)

    Perhaps more crucially, Hussle's unconventional pricing
    model was
    also profitable at the album level. Generally speaking, a tiny
    sliver of top streaming pop stars can earn back the expenses of
    making an album purely on stream revenue. For the vast
    majority of
    artists, that's an out-of-reach goal.

    One group that still makes money off its music? The rap duo
    Run the
    Jewels. "I definitely know artists at both ends of the
    spectrum who
    look at it as a loss leader, but Run the Jewels just doesn't
    happen
    to look at it that way," said Amaechi Uzoigwe, the group's
    manager,
    who added that each of the duo's albums has been profitable
    -- via
    streaming and physical sales -- even though they give away
    downloads
    for free.

    What this underscores is something Hussle knew, and something
    Radiohead figured out more than a decade ago: There are
    tiers of
    fans. Some -- most, actually -- will pay nothing for music.
    But the
    few who are willing to pay can more than offset them. In 2007,
    Radiohead released its seventh album, "In Rainbows," via a
    pay-what-you-wish download, and in various physical formats;
    three
    million people paid for a copy.

    On the online record marketplace Bandcamp, around 80,000
    albums are
    sold per day. Half of them are digital: the average price
    for those
    albums -- many of which are pay-what-you-wish -- is $9, though
    according to Joshua Kim, chief operating officer of
    Bandcamp, some
    fans will voluntarily pay several times that; in one case, a
    fan
    paid $1,000 for an album.

    Kim said that the fastest growing part of Bandcamp's
    business is
    physical sales, particularly vinyl. "We view Bandcamp as a
    place
    where music is valued as art," he said. "Physical formats are
    probably the most concrete expression of that." He likened
    consumers
    willing to pay a premium for music they can otherwise get
    for free
    to those who shop for organic food or ethically sourced
    clothing,
    finding value in "compensating artists fairly."

    That perspective is consistent with what Ferreira has seen
    in his
    fan base. He noticed at shows that some fans bought copies
    of albums
    they already owned -- "talismans," he called them -- as a
    show of
    financial and creative support: "I'm a poor guy from poor
    people
    from a poor place," he said. "Thinking that somebody might own
    several copies of one project just because they wanted you
    to keep
    going was totally foreign to me."

    In the living room of his home in Nashville last month,
    Ferreira
    laid out hundreds of record mailers and all the copies of
    "Purple
    Moonlight Pages," and planned for several days of work -- he
    is a
    business of one.

    Despite the pushback he received from some fans, Ferreira
    doesn't
    view his $77 vinyl as a premium product. He said that he values
    these newest songs, which were more expensive for him to
    make and
    reflect greater maturity as an artist, more highly than his
    older
    songs, and felt that should be reflected in the price. "The
    music is
    the premium product," he said. "It's just that there are
    some people
    who are at a place in their life where it's kind of nice to
    be able
    to style out and buy something nice that you believe in."

    For those people, he was excited about the process of
    individually
    packing up his albums and shipping them out. It was a way to
    keep
    his focus on the music, and its true value. "I don't want to
    sell a
    lot of T-shirts," he said. "I did not start rapping because
    I like
    folding T-shirts."

    What a bunch of useless, confused thinking. Really there is
    no thinking involved here at all. There is no such thing as
    inherent value. The value of a musical work, a CD or a loaf
    of bread is determined by the interplay of supply and
    demand. A product supplied by a monopolist will sell for
    more (and less of it) than if provided by many firms in
    competition, but supply and demmand still applies. Sellers
    charge what they perceive "the market will bear," which
    means they trade off charging higher prices against loss of
    sales. Buyers try to pay as little as they can to acquire
    something. Theses are immutable characteristics of human
    behavior. Are there ecxeptions? Sure. There are crazy
    people, there are altruists; but this is how the world and
    markets work. If you don't think a CD is "worth" what
    someone charges for it, you don't buy it. If someone else
    does, are they wrong? Screed almost over. There is no such
    thing as inherent value.

    Also how could things selling on Discogs or Ebay, Amazon
    Marketplace for more than their original price surprise
    anyone who doesn't live in a cave? How could people not
    know that scarce things often sell for a lot of money?

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)