Music

While LNM Consulting is not a business that has forays into the music world, I personally have always been a huge fan of music, a musician and friend of many musicians, composers, singers, song-writers... and even drummers.

I have recently been reading some articles that refer to issues with musicians not getting a fair deal from record companies, but this is in response to the record companies getting a raw deal from the consumers, who have a 4:1 ratio of pirates to purchasers. That is not good. It means that artists, who previously went on tour in order to garner more album sales, from which they would make their "real money" now need to resort to innovating different ways of making money.

Fan rules:
1. Don't charge me more than another similar artist for your album.
2. Don't charge me more than another similar artist for your concert.
3. Don't charge me moth than another similar artist for your t-shirt.

It turns out that unless you're Coldplay or Cliff Richard, or rub shoulders with either, you have no entitlement to put a high price on any of your works. Mechanical royalties pay for everything so that real songwriters get their due, right? Yes, the songwriter gets their due, and their artistic expression gets applied. But what about the engineer's viability in the studio? What about the families of the drummer, or the triangle player or the session flugelhorn player? Do they not deserve to be compensated for the time that Mum or Dad was out of the house?

I live by the idea that if you're good at something, you should be valued for it. In this world of commerce, this value is shown by paying money.

I'm probably going to get into trouble for saying this, but if you don't feel you want to pay iTunes or a CD shop for your album, be responsible and at least cut a cheque to the artist. Read the sleeve (if you bothered to even download it) and have a look at all of the people inside of it. How about you write each of them a cheque too, each posted care of the headline artist. I'm sure that if we develop a culture that acknowledges every individual contributor for their efforts, we will start to turn around the entitlement mentality of this community and start to see more flourishing artists blossom. The may never be another Beatles or Michael Jackson, but you can bet for sure that there can't be with people stealing music.

I played at a gig at the Esplanade Hotel in St Kilda, Victoria in 2007 and was preceded by a weathered, yet young and naive singer/guitarist/songwriter whose repertoire was, to me, less than impressive (notably also, to the establishment, as they discontinued his set early). For all of his lack of talent and stage presence, I would not have remembered him, drowned out amongst the hundreds of other acts that have been of similarly unimpressive composure, however this man I do remember. Very well. He said something that stuck a chord with me in a foul way that I will share. He said "Don't pay for music. You can't charge for sound." as his parting shot, while leaving the stage. This evoked thoughts in my head that informed me just of the depth of his naivety. He truly believed the convicted words pouring from his mouth, but I don't think he realised the implications of that. While I would struggle to put dollars towards purchasing music that he contributed, given its purgatorial squalor, I can't fathom robbing artists who inspire me of their due. When you further consider that the average charting album (which in itself is a gamble by the record label to the typical tune of 100k-200k) employs the talents of, on average, 15-20 people for about 6 months or so, each individual intermittently.

In effect, to "stick it to the man", this young man's telling these artists that they should go and work day jobs, more than likely for "the man", while giving up their time in studios for free with a songwriter who writes music and performs it for free and has it recorded by an engineer for free, and it's then mixed and mastered for free and then hosted and shared via torrents on some other person's computer for free, just so that he can justify his own indiscretionary downloads of artists toil and labour.

Like it or not, Phil Spector's version of "Let It Be" is just as valuable a purchase as Paul McCartney's tweeked "Let It Be... Stripped" is (possibly moreso, if you, like me, were too a fan of their rendition of "Maggie May").

Pay for your music. Even if you send a check straight to the artist and the contributors. It's just the right thing to do.