Tag: Midem

  • Interview with Juan Atkins: “I wish people would be more open-minded!”

    midemblog by James Martin

    Atkins began by commenting on the evolution of electronic music since his genre-defining “Clear” (made as Cybotron in 1983) and the EDM sound championed today by artists like Skrillex. “I would never speak negatively about someone who has been successful at electronic music,” said Atkins. “I wish that he could probably be a little bit more funky; but I’m not going to be mad at the guy!”

    He does, however, “wish people would be more open-minded, to things like what I do. It’s not enough to say ‘he’s the creator of techno’; I still don’t fit that marketing model, so they don’t really get it.”

    That said, “I’m totally happy with where I am“, conceded Atkins. “Because if I had a major hit, it would probably have to be diluted to fit that model. And I’m not into diluting my music.”

    Neither, added Atkins, is the new generation of “kids” he mentioned in his keynote, which now prefers to buy drum machines rather than guitars. “The stuff they’re coming up with is not a conventional sound. Yet the marketers want it to stay conventional, because that’s what made all their money.”

    He also commented that “not enough people know” that electronic music is it is today would probably not exist without him. We do! “Well that’s cool, I’m glad you know,” said Atkins!

     

    Juan Atkins is the founder of Metroplex Records. Watch his Midem keynote below!

     

     

     

  • YouTube reveals $1bn music payouts, but some labels still unhappy

    YouTube reveals $1bn music payouts, but some labels still unhappy

    'We’ve paid out to the music industry over the last several years over a billion dollars,' said YouTube's Tom Pickett.
    Google’s Video service may be ‘all-in on music’, but rightsholder unrest at its parent company persists
    ‘We’ve paid out to the music industry over the last several years over a billion dollars,’ said YouTube’s Tom Pickett.

    A recent piece of research by VideoInk and video analytics firm Tubular Labs claimed that music videos account for 38.4% of all views on YouTube, reinforcing the Google subsidiary’s position as the world’s biggest streaming music service.

    “We’ve paid out to the music industry over the last several years over a billion dollars,” said vice president of YouTube content Tom Pickett during a panel session at the Midem music industry show in Cannes this week, during which he also stressed that “we are all-in on music”.

    Not everyone is convinced. A key theme of this year’s Midem has been continued resentment towards YouTube and its parent company from musicians, independent labels and industry bodies alike. Pickett was heckled during his panel session, and the conference also saw regular anti-Google outbursts from speakers.

    “Google are not music people, and that scares me,” said Colin Daniels of Australian independent music firm Inertia, which helped solo artist Passenger break big last year.

    “I am concerned with YouTube entering the market because for YouTube everything is about dominance, and dominance is connected to destruction,” said Horst Weidenmueller of well-respected indie firm !K7. “I would rather prefer perhaps Google not being in music.”

    Friction between Google/YouTube and the music industry is not a new trend, and there are many ways the two sides are working together, from YouTube helping labels to identify user-generated videos using their tracks and make money from them, through to the Google Play music subscription service.

    Even British industry body the BPI, which has been a regular critic of Google over the high rankings for piracy sites on its search engine, has launched its own YouTube channel called Transmitter to promote British artists’ music – illustrating the perception of Google as both copyright foe and distribution friend for music companies.

    Still, the foe camp have been increasingly prominent at the Midem conference this week, questioning Google and YouTube’s commitment to music, and wondering why the money it pays out to labels and publishers (who then pass it on to artists) isn’t even higher.

    BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor drew attention to this while on-stage with YouTube’s Pickett, comparing YouTube unflatteringly to streaming music services like Spotify and Deezer, which mix advertising-funded free streaming with premium subscription tiers.

    “I think YouTube has lacked that, and that has been a problem for the industry,” said Taylor. “When I looked at the billions of streams there were in music videos, and the pounds and pence coming in to the industry from that, it was a very small number.”

    The streaming rivals are fuelling this debate. Deezer’s chief executive Axel Dauchez called YouTube “the most important legal pirate” during another Midem panel session, while Spotify recently contrasted its own average payout of $6,000 – $8,400 per million streams to the $3,000 per million streams paid out on average by a “video streaming service”. While unnamed, the reference to YouTube was clear.

    YouTube has its defenders in the music industry too, some of whom spoke out at Midem. “It’s a top-five revenue source now at most of the labels, and it’s going up. It’s not perfect, but they’re moving in the right direction,” said Tom Silverman from independent label Tommy Boy.

    Meanwhile, some of the multi-channel networks (MCNs) helping musicians make more money from YouTube suggested that increasing payouts requires making cleverer use of Google’s service, rather than simply demanding higher per-stream rates.

    “It’s no longer an album cycle, it’s a 12-month content cycle. For every piece of content you release, there should be 6-8 other pieces of content to support that,” said Brandon Martinez, chief executive of music MCN INDMusic, which helped indie label Mad Decent capitalise on last year’s viral YouTube success of Baauer’s Harlem Shake track.

    Jordan Berliant, of The Collective Music Group, was more blunt in his appraisal of why some labels complain about YouTube. “It’s not a place to make money right now, but it’s not primarily because of YouTube or Google in my mind, it’s because the people representing the content primarily don’t understand the marketplace.”

    Some of those people’s concerns about YouTube tie in to their wider arguments with Google over its copyright policies, though. During Pickett’s panel session, one audience member demanded to know what YouTube is doing about ‘stream-ripping’ services that enable people to convert videos into MP3 downloads. He was backed up by BPI boss Taylor.

    “We’ve been asking YouTube to deal with these stream-ripping applications for many years. YouTube is supposed to be an ad-funded streaming service, not a free download service,” said Taylor, comparing these talks with the BPI’s separate efforts to persuade Google to downgrade piracy sites in its search engine. “We can’t understand why it’s taken so long for Google and YouTube to do something about this.”

  • Interview: Billy Bragg on Spotify ‘talking playlists’, YouTube and artists’ rights

    Interview: Billy Bragg on Spotify ‘talking playlists’, YouTube and artists’ rights

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    The latest curator on Spotify is Billy Bragg, who announced plans this morning for a series of ‘talking playlist’ radio shows distributed through the streaming music service.

    The first goes live tomorrow: a collection of 14 tracks and Bragg’s spoken-word explanations of what they are and why he picked them, with new shows to follow at monthly intervals.

    Talking to Music Ally, Bragg said the project initially came from discussions around putting out his new album on Cooking Vinyl, when the label’s digital team suggested he make some Spotify playlists of his favourite tracks.

    “I thought ‘bugger me, this seems like another load of work’, it’s like doing bloody homework!” says Bragg. But as he put together half a dozen playlists, it made him want to get to grips with the streaming service a bit more.

    “I hate technology coming along that I’m on that I don’t understand. I remember when my first DVD came out, and I didn’t even have a DVD player at the time. So I started engaging with Spotify a little bit, and thinking that while it’s a great way to access music, you don’t get much other than just the music,” he says.

    I’m someone who likes to know a little bit more: who wrote the songs, when the song was made… Maybe I’m an old geezer in wanting that context!

    Bragg tells the tale of digging out some old boogie-woogie records from his basement recently – the fruits of being in the right place at the right time in an East Ham junk shop a few years ago, with artists like Cow Cow Davenport and Louisiana Red – and then discovering that they were all on Spotify.

    “This to me is really really interesting. There seems to be a lot of this music on Spotify, so I think there’s a space in the streaming universe for someone to use this resource to introduce younger listeners into this great old music,” he says.

    Bragg’s ex-manager, Pete Jenner, had apparently been suggesting for a while that he make his own radio show to distribute online, playing some of these tracks. “We got a little bit foxed about how to get the rights and how to pay the artists,” he says. “Until Spotify came along, I wasn’t able to work out how to do it. But then we thought if I could just record MP3s into GarageBand on my desktop, and send them to Spotify, they could ingest them in, string them together and make them into a radio playlist.”

    This idea has been tried before, although it didn’t quite take off at the time. UK-based music distributor Kudos Recordslaunched a service called Playdio in 2010, intermingling songs with DJ’s spoken-word intros in Spotify playlists. It’s surprising that nobody else has had a crack at the idea until now.

    Bragg will earn royalties from the spoken-word tracks – an interesting business model for curators on streaming services – but says the talking is about much more than money.

    “It’s the context of the songs, and why I appreciated them. I always like to hear DJs enthusing on the radio for the same reason: that’s a service you get off 6Music with someone like John Cooper Clarke, who was DJing at the weekend. His enthusiasm sparks my enthusiasm,” he says.

    The digitisation of music has made music much more accessible, but what we’ve lost a bit is the filters, like John Peel. The great thing about him was you’d listen in, and half of it was godawful, but half of it was amazing and would change your life. That’s what’s needed on streaming services.”

    Bragg has already recorded his first few Spotify shows, which he says will include a mixture of old gems and contemporary songs that have caught his interest.

    “Some of it you just bump into. Like Junior Parker, who recorded Mystery Train before Elvis Presley. In the 1970s, he did this really weird strung-out soul version of The Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows, which is really weird – almost like ‘Marvin Gaye Sings The Beatles’,” he says. “The idea that Junior Parker, who had this rocking R&B career and then went on to do this… that’s the sort of thing I’m trying to do.”

    It shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s followed Bragg’s career that he’s very keen on the fact that artists (or their descendants, of course) get paid for the plays on his new show. Given the backdrop of a year or more of some artists criticising Spotify – and streaming in general – for its impact on musicians’ income, it’s a subject worth discussing.

    “To me, it’s a very important thing. It’s becoming harder to make a living through selling records, but as other means of income for artists start to come online, we should be engaging with them rather than trying to hold them back,” says Bragg, although he makes it clear he’s not criticising any specific artists for their views.

    “I’ve read a lot of the reports of artists who have spoken in opposition to Spotify, and I can’t really find much objection other than that they don’t seem to like streaming. To me, that doesn’t make sense: it’s not down to us to like it or not. If people are finding that a convenient way to listen to music, and if there is potential for artists to get paid, I think we should be engaging with that rather than turning our back on it.”

    Bragg has already spoken out in Spotify’s defence in recent months, suggesting in November that artists should be asking their labels pointed questions about their streaming payouts, rather than attacking the services.

    “If there are low rates of remuneration on Spotify – and they are low compared to what we got from selling records – if we are going to talk about those things, let’s be frank about where the problem lies. Let’s not attack the platform: they’re making a lot of money, but they’re paying out a lot of money too,” he says.

    “It’s where the money is going to: the people who are collectively referred to as the rightsholders. If artists are rightly going to talk about the lack of money that’s getting to artists from digital – and it’s not just about streaming, it’s about all digital income – then we need to talk about how we speak to the rightsholders and get a fair deal.”

    For Bragg, the debate needs to move on from simply dividing musicians by whether they’re pro or anti Spotify. “There is money to be made there: alright, maybe not the millions that some artists made in the 20th century, but it’s still the difference between sucking up a shitty day job and being able to make a living as a musician,” he says.

    “That’s why I’m angry about this thing. I’m not trying to pick a fight with other artists over Spotify. I’m saying to young artists ‘don’t sign your rights away’. I see some things that artists write – particularly artists who made really good money in the old days – that sound a bit ‘poor pitiful me!’. Our real concern should be young artists coming in, and how they’re going to make a living. Streaming can play a part in that. We should be saying to the rightsholders that we need a new business model that supports artists.”

    Bragg praises the growing number of independent labels who’ve spoken out about their policies of splitting digital revenues 50/50 with artists, while the label his new album is coming out on – Cooking Vinyl – has been one of the trailblazers in the area of ‘artist service’ deals, where artists retain their rights.

    “I always advise artists to retain their rights,” he says. “We live longer, and our careers run longer: I own my rights, and there’s every chance of me being able to continue doing this in my 60s and 70s as a result. I’m still making a living, and that suggests you can keep a career going!”

    The interview draws to a close with a discussion of YouTube – which caught a lot of flak at the recent Midem industry conference from artists and labels alike – and how it compares to Spotify and other streaming audio services from an artist’s perspective.

    If we’re going to speak out about the paucity of payment from streaming services, if we’re pissed off at Spotify, we should be marching to YouTube Central with flaming pitchforks! Not to mention the acquiescence of the industry, which I feel is really disturbing,” said Bragg earlier in the conversation. Later, I tell him about YouTube execs getting heckled during Midem sessions, and ask him to expand on his views.

    “I’d rather the industry was heckling YouTube than picking on kids downloading my music. If the shift is that the industry’s anger has moved from kids enjoying music to multi-national corporations making billions of dollars, I’m 100% behind that. That’s where the problem is,” he says.

    “Somebody’s making a lot of money out of distributing music. Our problem is that the deals rightsholders will subsequently do with those corporations like YouTube will undoubtedly be covered with non-disclosure agreements, and we are unable to see what the deals are, how they’re benefitting.”

    He continues: “In the old days, the industry was scrabbling around trying to stop kids downloading stuff because they were losing money. Now they’re still losing money, but YouTube are making money, so their attention is bound to go that way. Let’s hope that in the whole process, artists have enough opportunities to put their voice in, so we can get a fair deal from rightsholders.”

    originally posted at musically.com