Category Archives: Blog

What’s Right with the Music Business

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Jumpstarter, kickstarter, trouble-starter. Jonathan Sexton is an instigator – the kind that makes you get off your ass and go do something. Jonathan is the CEO and co-founder of Bandposters (a Back Porch Group portfolio company), and co-founder of Nashville startup Artist Growth.

Conversations about the music business these days typically carry a “doomsday” tone, and for good reason. Recorded music sales are a fraction of what they used to be, resulting in less income for all involved. Songwriters aren’t getting as many cuts. It’s harder than ever to be a self-supporting touring artist. Ticket prices are skyrocketing as scalpers now get the best seats. There is so much noise and are so many artists all fighting for the ears of the masses. Radio is consolidated. The list goes on… maybe I should just stop writing.

But I won’t. I’m also not going to jump on the bandwagon of how it’s the best time ever to be in the music business, although optimism is generally my default position.

Over the coming weeks I intend to publicly explore what I’ve been privately curious about for years: What’s right with the business? Where are people winning? And what can we learn from that?

This isn’t a comprehensive list, but a few things I’ve noticed so far. More to come, and I want to hear and learn more about anyone who’s winning or is at least perceived to be. (That means email me your stories).

Songs: Great songs are winning. If your songs aren’t great, you’re screwed. Now that we are back in a singles economy, you need that one song people love. It’s what scaffolds potential fans into all your other songs. I liked the song “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, then listened to the rest of the album. “Thrift Shop” is now my least favorite track on the record. I’m now a fan, but the single was the bait.

Crowdfunding: I’m actually tired of hearing about how great crowdfunding is, but I’m more tired of apathetic artists being uncomfortable accepting the gift of life (in the form of money) from their fans that love them so much they just want to help. Crowdfunding is here to stay. Have you seen Songkick’s new Detour platform? It’s awesome. It’s a win.

NoiseTrade: NoiseTrade lets you trade tunes for emails of people who like your music. Give away music, get new fans. It’s perfect. I have a manager friend who spent $600 on a NoiseTrade campaign, then from the emails harvested, raised over $2k on a PledgeMusic campaign – that’s over a 3x return. I can’t guarantee everyone has the same success, but that’s a win.

Bonnaroo: Or really big music festivals in general. They are killing it. Yes, they have big backers, but the point here is that every year 100,000 screaming fans show up to a Tennessee farm because they love music. As hard as it is to get on the bill, if you can pull it off, it’s a massive opportunity that can catapult your career (trust me). It’s a win for music.

YouTube: YouTube can be monetized. People are making money with music on YouTube. It takes a lot of work, and you need someone with decent video editing skills, but assuming you can lock that down YouTube is mostly a music platform (over 60%). It pays better than Spotify, and allows you to release content, songs, art, interviews, anything, on your timeline; no distribution window.

What else is working? There are many more, I’m sure, and I intend to find out. The more we can focus on what’s working rather than what’s not, the quicker we can continue to evolve this business into something more viable.

Because “It ain’t what it used to be” isn’t getting us anywhere.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/34067077@N00/5224887391/

4 Reasons Amazon’s Self-Destruction is an Overblown Fallacy

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Today Salon ran an article outlining how Amazon’s relentless push to drive brick and mortar bookstores out of business will ultimately be its own demise. The argument here seems to be two main points: first, that physical bookstores, especially mom and pop shops, provide a valuable resource to book buyers in the form of browsing and book discovery; and second, that the folding of major booksellers like Barnes and Noble and Borders results in a domino effect, putting out of business the book publishers, and therefore nailing Amazon’s coffin – no book publishers means no books to sell.

This argument couldn’t possibly be more wrong. Here are four important reasons why:

1. Discovery is not a strictly physical activity.

The article states quite clearly, and without evidence or citation, that “physical stores outpace virtual ones by 3-to-1 in introducing books to buyers.” While I believe that browsing in physical stores is a fun activity, and I’ve purchased many a book by randomly selecting it off a shelf, I find the physical browsing process to be archaic at best. Amazon provides me with reviews (thousands of them), best seller lists, recommendations (flawed as they may be), similar book links, browsing by author/publisher/series/etc., and one-click purchasing. Coupled with Amazon Prime, I’m not sure it gets much better.

Barnes and Noble offers me a shelf full of new releases (pushed on them by publishers), perhaps one shelf of staff picks (do you know your local B&N employees names?), and a whole lot of disorganized inventory spread over a gigantic store (most of which I’m not interested in anyhow).

Then there’s this issue of “showrooming,” wherein book buyers visit brick and mortar stores with the sole intention of browsing before they make their purchase at Amazon. I’ve done this many times myself. And you know why? Because I was there. I just happened to be near a Barnes and Noble, and I stopped in to play with the books (yeah, its like a toy store for me, what can I say I really like books).

I’d venture to guess that 3-to-1 statistic is bunk. I may not represent the majority of book buyers, but I discover books online – through friends, through Amazon, through GoodReads, through blogs, and through the New York Times (no, not the print version).

2. Pushing publishers out of business is exactly what Amazon wants.

Let’s just put this out there: the maker of the number one e-reader in the world also happens to be the biggest book seller in the world. And do you know why? Because they don’t just control the means of distribution, they are the means of distribution.

Amazon doesn’t need book publishers, they need books. And now that any copyright holder can self-publish directly through Amazon, why on earth would Amazon care if publishers went out of business?

Marketing? Promotions? Book tours? Have you seen a publisher advance lately? Also book tours don’t make a whole lot of sense if there’s no physical book stores anyhow.

3. Amazon could just open their own stores, if it made any sense financially (and it doesn’t).

Apple did it. Apple stores account for a significant portion of their sales. But that’s the difference between them and Amazon – a physical Amazon bookstore wouldn’t result in any meaningful income for Amazon. Apple can do it because their products are extremely high margin, and the stores serve more as support centers than salesrooms.

The reason physical bookstores are going out of business isn’t that people don’t like or buy books, its that the cost of running physical bookstores makes books prohibitively expensive for the consumer. Pricing wins almost every time. Amazon isn’t about to offer up their product at a higher price point. That doesn’t make sense at all.

4. Amazon doesn’t sell books.

Can we all finally agree on this fact? Amazon isn’t in the book business. They’re not in the music business either.

I’m saying it again: They don’t make money on books.

Books, music, movies, these things are loss leaders for Amazon, the cheap items they use to entice you to buy televisions and cell phones and computers and appliances and the thousands of other high margin products that Amazon sells.

Amazon was in the book business once upon a time (I’ve known several Amazon employees, mostly web developers, who used to tell people “I work at a bookstore”). But they’re not anymore. They’re in the technology business. They’re in the logistics business. They’re in the customer service business. They don’t really care if you buy physical books.

And they never will.

Going Digital or: How I learned to stop worrying and downsize my book collection

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My wife says to me, “We need to start thinking about what we can get rid of so the next time we move we don’t have so much junk. Like your books for example…”

I immediately take this as a threat.

It’s not a threat, of course. And I’ll just be honest here, I’ve often thought about what it might mean to become truly digital with my books, how I might feel if my beloved paper tomes were to be sent to the proverbial farm. And while every instinct in my body tells me that hoarding is good and makes me complete inside, the brutal reality of owning books is that owning books kind of sucks.

I love looking at my books. When I lived in a smaller apartment, I had a bookshelf next to my bed. Lying awake at night, I would stare at the bindings, memorizing the titles and authors and the colors on the cover and mentally figuring out what order they should be in.

But it’s a fetish. A mine-all-mine mentality that leads to more more more more more. They’re a pain to deal with. Dusting and lugging around from home to home and recategorizing and all that nonsense. Not to mention they take up a lot of space. And while that’s great for the appearance of my bookshelf, my bookshelf is bad for the brain and the soul.

Let’s be clear here: books are fucking great. I love my books, and my records, and my comics, and they bring me enormous joy. But the actual physical manifestations of those books don’t have very much meaning when I really start to think about it. Almost every book on this shelf is available in a digital format. Very few of these books have sentimental value (although I can probably tell you where, when, and for how much I purchased each one of them). And I love the smell of a book, the way it feels in my hand, but it’s not the books I have a problem with, it’s ownership.

I’ve gone digital in almost every other facet of my life. I stopped buying music on CD in 2002. Back then I went to piracy, mostly out of necessity. But I’ve been a happy streaming music buyer for many years now, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. I have a great vinyl collection that I will almost certainly never get rid of, but my vinyl, like some of my books, has sentimental value. I don’t buy much vinyl anymore anyhow.

I haven’t read a newspaper with ink since my ill-fated experiment with the New York Times last year, and in that case I only bought the physical paper so I could read it digitally.

Movies and television are an entirely digital experience for me now. I cut my cable a year ago and haven’t looked back. I stream movies and television shows via any number of services. The only cheating I do is renting discs from Redbox, but I almost never buy Blu-rays or DVDs.

If I could figure out a good way to digitize every piece of paper in my house I probably would. Sadly we’re not yet at a place where things like passports and birth certificates have usable digital corollaries. Then again, I suppose it’s fun to know that I might be one of the last people to own one of these curious paper relics.

My comic collection is going to be difficult (er, expensive) to reproduce digitally. And besides that I think my kids might someday enjoy having them. (Maybe not. They’ll almost certainly do the majority of their reading on a device of some sort.)

My books have been hangers-on for a while now. But I think it’s time to clear out space on these shelves for something new. I won’t get rid of everything. Just most.

I think ownership just isn’t my thing anymore. I like having stuff as much as the next guy, but I also like feeling light. I like the freedom it affords, the convenience, and the knowledge that I can still pull up any one of these delightful stories and theses at the touch of a button.

I’ll probably regret writing this, or even thinking it.

How to catch a band… and other shiny objects

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As of January of 2013 I have been involved in the music business for 33 years. That’s a long time. I have been fortunate to work in small companies like Ronnie Milsap’s publishing company in the eighties and, on the other end of the spectrum, Disney for a very, very long time. I have worked with unknowns and superstars. I’ve worked in pop, rock, country, and Christian. I have worked on my share of extreme flops and a few notable successes. I’m a regular working music guy, nothing fancy or glamorous. I was in the trenches. I had to show a profit. I had to do presentations to finance people. I had to do balance sheets and ROIs.

What I learned from all the time and experience is singular: it’s never about the money. I hate to hear songwriters and artists say, “Well, it’s called the music business.” For God’s sake, you guys aren’t middle management at Sony! You’re artists!

Why did most of the memorable music stop being made in the 90s? Because we changed something.

We changed the way you got CASH.

We made a radical change from royalties to advances. Music attorneys had spent years trying to make a living on hourly charges to five alcoholics that lived in a van off Sunset (the band). The collection process was dicey at best. So they (the lawyers) went to their cousins and brothers-in-law at the labels (the weasels) and started the process of front-loading record deals. If they did this they could get 5% of the six- to seven-figure advance upfront. It was genius for the lawyers and easy for the A&R guys. By the end of the era, a standard “bidding war” record deal was $1MM and a band pub deal was over $300K.

This filled Los Angeles with flashy sports cars and cocaine, but created a financial meltdown for hundreds of new business startups (the band), who were now saddled with $1.3 million in debt before they had recorded a note. We had moved the payoff from after accomplishment to before accomplishment and the implications are still being felt today (not unlike the internet bubble, but that’s my next post).

Until this thing got out of hand, we would give advances that were roughly based on how much you needed to quit waiting tables. By the time I was head of creative at Disney, all deals were based on who gave you the biggest advance, and only lip service was paid to the idea of working with the person who was most passionate about your music.

I will be writing further about advances until I’m blocked by the NSA (or the NSAI), but I think we may have had it right before advances were considered your artistic entitlement.

Speaking of artistic entitlement, here’s today’s quiz:  What do I mean when I talk about “the flashlight?”

Stretch VW Bus

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Pointless

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Jumpstarter, kickstarter, trouble-starter. Jonathan Sexton is an instigator – the kind that makes you get off your ass and go do something. Jonathan is the CEO and co-founder of Bandposte.rs (a Back Porch Group portfolio company), and co-founder of Nashville startup Artist Growth.


When was the last time you had a pointless conversation? By pointless, I mean without the 100% certainty that what you’re doing is productive. It’s so easy to get weighed down by the need to be efficient, to focus, to complete as many tasks as possible in one day that have direct impact on one’s top priorities.

This warrior ethos is incredibly necessary to surviving in business, or really in accomplishing anything. But I’ve noticed lately it’s getting way overdone. The point of existing is not to mark off as many to-dos as possible between life and death. That chokes all the magic out of life, like squeezing your favorite kitten to death with a hug.

Recently I was talking to a friend about how hard I try to force all my goals into each day, imposing my will on the day, and he said to me “there is a unique tension between providence and personal responsibility.” I like the word “tension” over the word balance. Balance is static, but a true scale is almost never balanced. There is always tension. Obviously, I am not advocating laziness, but rather pointing to the paramount importance of creating space for magic to happen.

Perhaps something unique I can offer as an artist-entrepreneur is this: when I sit down to write a song, I’m often in the middle of something else. Most times I can come up with 100 reasons not sit down, get out the pen and paper, blow off everything else in my life for an hour or two, and often its too much to bear. I cave. However, when I sit down and risk 2 hours to complete a song, I never regret it.

Translating this to generating business ideas or new product design is no different. There are always more leads and sales to chase down, more emails to send, more documents to complete, more meetings.

Sometimes, all that needs to wait.

You run into a friend, chase down a wormhole with your business partner, you take a meeting with a new contact with no clear objective. This is when you plant the seeds that take root into your dreams and goals, toward living a life you love. This is the true promise of entrepreneurship: freedom.

Financial freedom? Yeah of course, but its more than that. If we all stop trying to get rich and start just making cool stuff, and working on projects that we care about or have a deep curiosity for, the success will come.

So stop wasting time trying to be efficient all day, and create some space for the unplanned to happen.

5 Perfectly Good Reasons Why Apple’s iRadio Is A Non-starter (And One Counterargument)

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1. Pandora

2. Spotify Radio (powered by Echonest)

3. Rdio radio stations (also powered by Echonest)

4. Songza

5. Slacker (wait is this a non-starter too? should I have listed Grooveshark?)

 

Counterargument

1. 600,000 new iPhones activated EVERY SINGLE DAY. (And I didn’t even mention iPad activations…)

 

Don’t get me wrong, I think Apple has a serious uphill battle. Pandora has a massive first mover advantage, Android users are left completely out of the picture (not that Apple cares), and don’t even get me started on the massive failing of Apple to get into the on-demand streaming game. But seriously, I think this will be an interesting fight to watch. As I’ve stated previously, the key to winning in this world is providing value.

Also, on a completely personal note, I’d like to point out that I almost never use Pandora, sticking exclusively to Rdio (for on-demand) and Songza (for radio-style). Furthermore, I believe that Pandora is horribly flawed from a music discovery standpoint, and I’m hoping that iRadio somehow bests it in that category. I’m not really holding my breath.

One Fell Swoop: A single feature does not a great piece of software make

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I use Mailbox. It’s amazing. It keeps my inbox free and clear, and it rewards me with a pretty picture every time I get to inbox zero. It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s clean. I swipeswipeswipe all day long, resting easy knowing that those important emails will come back to me when I have time to answer them, and the rest disappear into my archive. There’s really only one problem with it: it’s not the native Gmail app.

I really want to love the native Gmail iOS app, but I just can’t. It’s missing some features that Mailbox has in spades, most notably a unified inbox and the ability to snooze emails to return to the inbox later for action.

But let’s be very clear about this, those features truly are the only good reason to use Mailbox over Gmail.

Which is to say that there are entire swaths of software companies out there that would literally go out of business if the major players – the Apples and Googles and Microsofts of the world – were to add a single feature to their own software. Hell, Gmail is probably going to put Sanebox out of business this week.

I’m not the first to say this, of course. Since Mailbox came out, it’s been criticized as not being an app, but only a feature (and let’s not forget the debacle over Mailbox’s launch strategy). But it got me to thinking about all kinds of other apps – and non-software examples too – that I use and love, but that I would probably stop using tomorrow if their major counterparts were to only add that single key feature.

Haikudeck
A beautiful alternative to Keynote and Powerpoint, albeit limited in its functionality, I love the ability to search for images and auto-insert into my deck. Apple or Microsoft could add this in a heartbeat, and Haikudeck would be gone.

Uber
You never knew how good a taxi ride could be until you got into an Ubercab. Only one problem: most taxi companies, especially in big cities, could put them out of business by making one kickass app for dispatching and frictionless payments.

Fantastical
It’s my go-to calendar on my Mac for its mouse-free natural language appointment entry. Google Calendar got halfway there – the quick add feature is decent – but they’d only have to take it a step further to make Fantastical obsolete.

Google Hangouts
Admittedly this is a stretch, but the one killer feature I use here is cross-platform, multi-user video conferencing, especially mobile to computer. Skype already does this too, though multi-user requires a pro account. But Apple’s FaceTime comes up seriously short, especially if I want to talk to my Android-using parents. Building a FaceTime Android app isn’t as easy as flipping a switch, but it also isn’t out of the realm of possibility.

 

Most of these are David and Goliath stories, the little disruptor taking on the big established companies, and putting up a damn good fight because they’re packing a sling. But if Goliath had a sling (and let’s face it, it’s not that hard to make a sling), he’d crush David into a million little pieces.

The Music Industry Has a Debt Problem

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Are the majors in financial trouble? That depends on your definition of “trouble,” but let's leave that for another day. I'm referring to a different kind of debt.

Technical debt

Ward Cunningham originally developed the concept of technical debt in 1992 to describe the inevitable fallout from making poor choices or inadequate investment in software architecture and code. These days, it's taken on a somewhat looser definition, but the essence remains: if you don't invest in understanding and building the technology necessary to deliver on your business's promises, you'll pay. Often dearly.

This brings us back to the music industry.

Music and tech – forever intertwined

Making any argument against the music business' future dependence on technology is a fool's errand. Software is eating the world, and the entertainment business was it's appetizer. At the same time, those saying the majors should simply lay down and cede control to Silicon Valley are equally misguided.

The future of music is a two-party system: artists and fans. Technology is the medium by which we may find ways to reach common goals. The rest – doing the business of music – is up for grabs.

What once was manufactured is now distributed

Using technology they don't own and few deeply understand, the means of distribution have shifted out of the majors' control. This much we know. As rights-holders, they still have a great deal of power, but so does a kid with the keys to his dad's Mustang. Both will end up in a ditch if they can't see the road.

How many streams does it take to equal one download? What is the sound of one hand clapping? In both cases, answers vary greatly, and clinging to an answer means we miss what really matters: the opportunity for transformation.

As Google's Tim Quirk (a recording artist himself) recently admonished, “don't fetishize the past.” Rather than retrofit the glory days to work in a digital world, show me the majors' bold experiments. Where is the transformation?

It's time to declare bankruptcy

Digitalmusic.org and a handful of smaller groups are hard at work tackling tough issues, but real change requires significantly more effort and openness from stakeholders. In the industry's centers of gravity, NYC, LA and – perhaps most notably – here in Nashville, it's business as usual. I've attended the last two Music Startup Academy events in Nashville, and I saw the majors deliver the same slides to startups both times. They went a little something like this: kneel before the king. This is not how you kick-start innovation.

Sure, there are experiments being run on the lower floors of the major labels and publishers and PROs, but it's slow, incremental change. It's too little too late. What's needed is a clean slate.

Platforms and partnerships

What do I think is the way forward for the majors?

  1. Re-imagine how rights-holders offer and license content as a platform.

    Create and publish APIs. Try different consumption and pricing models. Create clear rules and accept all comers (e.g. startups) who want to build on your platform. Experiment, learn, iterate. Invest heavily in new technology, not just to protect, but to grow.

  2. Learn to become true partners, both to artists and to those who connect them with their fans in meaningful, sustainable ways.

    Partnership means sharing risk and reward in the joint pursuit of a greater goal than one could achieve alone. It's not feel-good talk. It's just smart business, particularly when you've failed repeatedly to reach the goal on your own.

These transformations require deep cultural shifts and are challenging to digest and turn into action. But they beat the alternative.

Playing Golf

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I say to my wife, “When I was young, my mom sent me to take golf classes. She insisted that golfing was a necessary skill for success – that I would surely be closing big business deals on the golf course someday.”

And she says, “That’s because your mom had a very different concept of success.”

It’s true. My mom certainly didn’t think my success would look like it does. Hell, I didn’t think my life would look the way it does.

I don’t play golf, and probably never will, but I took those lessons diligently, learned to swing a club. Today I don’t see success as a deal closed on a golf course. Today success is a company, my company, and tomorrow it might be different, but right now, today, I’m an entrepreneur, and this is my success.

Visions of success

In business, we measure success in dollars, in technology, and in influence. We measure in customers, in traffic, in monthly average users. We measure in people. We measure in deals, in connections.

Artists measure in change. In fans. In ticket sales, and record sales, and merch sales, and streams and views and Likes. In platinum records. In fame, or lack thereof.

This is not a vision for success, only a measurement.

Maybe your success is a flashlight, leading you through the dark to the stage. Maybe success is a trendy loft office space in Manhattan. Maybe it’s an arena full of screaming teenagers. Maybe it’s a lake home and a portfolio of diversified investments. Maybe it’s a Nobel Prize, or a maybe it’s a Grammy. Maybe it’s just a paycheck every week and a roof over your head.

It’s these ideas of success, these premonitions and visualizations and conceptions of an idealized life we strive for and chase and claw and scratch our ways toward.

What does your success look like?

Hey YouTube, I think you love me more than I love you.

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Jumpstarter, kickstarter, trouble-starter. Jonathan Sexton is an instigator – the kind that makes you get off your ass and go do something. Jonathan is the CEO and co-founder of Bandposte.rs (a Back Porch Group portfolio company), and co-founder of Nashville startup Artist Growth. Here we welcome his first guest post to our blog.

Google recently made a daytrip to Ground Zero of the music business (ahem…Nashville), to teach and learn about the impact YouTube is having on the music business. It was a great day for Nashville, but the entire experience left me with the feeling that there are miles to go before YouTube/Music Business relationship status reads something other than: “It’s complicated”.

There is no denying the gravity of Google’s role in music and I do agree with the statement heard over and over again at the recent Google for Creators event in Nashville, that “music and tech are now forever intertwined.” I can get behind any tool that is a) “free” b) actually works and c) can be monetized. YouTube meets all the criteria with flying colors, yet, there are still doubts among many artists that YouTube is the proverbial “Savior of the Music Business”.

1) It’s not you, it’s me.

Sheryl Crow hit the stage at G4C and introduced her new song like this: “I’m going to play you guys some new content. That’s what its call now right? Not music or art?”

Clever banter? Yes. In jest? Not a chance. Dave Grohl also made a recent statement that artists need to make music and not worry about TV and the internet. I don’t 100% agree, but it highlights the issue that YouTube has a user experience/customer development problem.

It’s an old rule in business not to mistake what you have with what people need. This goes for any business, music or not. Most music artists don’t view YouTube as a “go-to” creative outlet. Its another hoop to jump through like Twitter and Facebook, but harder to use. If this isn’t addressed, YouTube will fail. Not as a business (obviously), but they will fail at winning the hearts of musicians and creators all over the world.

Matt Kearney said at G4C, “it’s the highlight of my life to be playing the Nashville Google er..um..YouTube event, now I know I’ve made it.” Spoiler Alert: He wasn’t serious. As the Tech folks stood around being enamoured by rockstars, the rockstars couldn’t seem to figure out if everyone is on the same team or not, which made one thing clear: Musicians don’t love Techies as much as Techies love Musicians.

2) Maybe if you weren’t so high maintenance

Artists making tons of video content and leveraging their YouTube audience into piles of money are a different kind of artist than Sheryl Crow and Matt Kearney. For artists like these, the truth is simple. “You can make a lot of money with your music on YouTube, if you’ll just change everything.” I, personally, am invested in the journey to 10,000 hours of video editing. But, I also have a software background and 2 startups under my belt. Will anyone else be? And if not, are they forever damned to the rubble of the past, laid to rest somewhere between Minidisc players and Laserdiscs?

This maybe a dealbreaker for an artists without a videographer on staff. Yes, anyone can film songs in the bedroom and post them,and should, but unless the content is “Double Rainbow” funny, the video production quality DOES matter. It’s not the only thing that matters (content is king), but it matters. OK Go didn’t film on iPhones. Beyond that its not just about production, its about being efficient enough with YT to actually be able to finish.

3) Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Spend the time and money now learning how to edit video, participate daily in the YouTube community, and one day when you get to 50k views you can start getting paid. It often seems like the payday is too far away to start – unachievable. The newly announced subscription revenues channels may end up being the silver bullet here, especially if they end up being “Pay what you like”, but only time will tell. I’m trying to learn slide guitar and video editing at the same time, starting a new company, touring, coaching little league, and sometimes I like to sleep.

My biggest challenge is finding time to start something else new. Learning YouTube efficiently is like starting piano lessons at the age of 30, but with a lot more buttons.

If YouTube is to be the great hope of the music business, I’m all for it, but continuing to find ways to make artists feel empowered, valued, and creative would go a long way in their quest NOT to be remembered as the company who simply killed the music business. Then again, musicians still may end up blowing you off.