Something caught my eye yesterday, an interesting juxtaposition with no judgment attached to it for now. I was reading one of those cookie cutter tech CEO interviews about streaming services / artist income / “future of profits, la, la, la”, and the guy predictably said something along the lines of, “It’s true that artists aren’t making as much money from streaming per se but they are getting marketing value out of it, and the latter translates into an increase in touring income”. Regardless of whether it’s true (which a discussion for another time… his argument is easy to rip apart but I don’t see much value in scholastic debates), I thought of something seemingly–but only seemingly–unrelated.
If you go to any non-music business seminar, confident blokes charging several thousand dollars to let you hear a wonderful mix of their wisdoms and their bullshit, will repeat again and again that any self-respecting business owner should aspire to create a business model that would allow him or her to make a profit without being physically present on location. Like the media products they sell at their seminars. They stress it time and time again: “Selling a media product or a system or a brand or a chain = good. Being paid for a finite unit of work = a cap on your income”. Leaving both the philosophical aspect of that statement and the evaluation of general usefulness of such seminars aside, a simple observation: Touring is a finite unit of work. A record is a media product that can potentially be sold infinitely. Make whatever you want of this juxtaposition, I just thought it was curious.
La, la.
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