Musings on the State of Agency within the Art and Music Industry How Adam Green, Hanson, Imogean Heap and Your Little Sister Will Save Art and Music
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While waiting tables at a NYC restaurant, in my last year at NYU, I passionately pursued my music career. I played countless industry showcases, sent out hundreds of demos, and did everything in my power to get my music into the hands of people who could help advance my career. This was NYC in the late 90's, when you could still smoke in bars, and it was through a cloud of sweet smelling cigar smoke, that I overheard a woman discussing her record label, during the CMJ Music Marathon, which took place just around the corner from where I worked. I was Immediately drawn to this conversation, and in typical self-promotional prowess, I jumped at the opportunity to introduce myself, and present a demo, that I just so happened to have on me at the time (i actually kept a box of demos hidden away at the restaurant, much to the chagrine of a few of my employers).
The woman, Susan Ferris who owned a record label, and Talent Management company (Long Live Crime Records and Bohemia Entertainment Group) had such warm confidence in her presence, and her willingness to a) give me the time of day, long enough so I could "pitch" my band, and hand over a demo c.d, and b) take a major risk, which she did later that month, when based on said demo-c.d, she flew to London to check out my band live, and then proceeded to offer us a life-changing record deal. These things forever changed my life. These moments are rare, fleeting answers to prayers that most artists know all too well, as they typically fall on deaf ears, or worse, are answered by the type of "agent" who actually can't deliver useful agency.
Attention, Risk, and Sweet Success
For Susan Ferris, and any successful and effective Talent Managaer/Agent these two skills, the ability to offer up just the right amount of attention, to ensure that they are always able to spot new talent, wherever it may show up, and the ability to take calculated risks, in deciding when and with whom to invest additional time, money, and much deeper attention, this is the winning combination which has become increasingly rare and ever-more valuable as the marketplace becomes saturated with new "talent" and with a new class of agent who relies on a variety of new tools and services, platforms and applications, to whip-up the promise of 21st Century Agency.
Nothing New Under The Sun
There are dozens of new tools and applications, many of which are quite useful, some which border on indispensable, in providing agency to artists. It is still an ability to conjure a series of unseen forces, and a subtle ability to balance between Limited Attention and Resources, and a net-positive accrual of Risk vs.Reward by way of outcomes, which sets the stage for the rare beauty of an awesome agent.
Early Days For Artifact Level-Ups
It's early days for us content producers to actually be fairly rewarded for our work. The typical experience of many artists is one that deals with many middle agents grabbing their cut first, often without clear records, and little accountability. The accountability found within a Major Label record deal, as it pertains to tracking royalties, across a growing number of "performance" channels, streaming services, etc, is lacking in most every aspect.Getting paid is hard enough when dealing in large-sum licensing and royalty agreements connected to placements in movies and t.v. Tracking payments which are 1/100th the size, and doing so across dozens of new streaming services is an entirely different experience. It's so easy to give up on entire revenue streams, as "they are only pennies" in the moment, and there is only so much energy in a day. There has to be a better way!
In general, middle agents are supposed to be good, and are often essential to the success of the artists they represent. They help spread the word, build the buzz, develop traction in the wild, they call in favors, open doors, bundle together their many clients to provide unique opportunities. These agents apply their craft in a way that rises the tide for all boats in their harbor. They are Gallerists, Curators, Indy Record Labels such as Long Live Crime Records and Rock 'n Renew Records Sub-Pop without the guidance of experienced and talented artist management, groups such as The Bohemia Group or the famous Red Light Management or NYC's own Wizkid Management, part of the C3 Presents family, artists/bands have far-too much on their plate to focus on the writing, producing and performing of music. I still have a hard time imagining Jimi Hendrix spending hours online, promoting his tour dates and album release across a dozen social media channels......There will always be a need for talented agents to conjure the forces which culminate in an artists success. Success is also fleeting, and expensive to maintain. Artists succeed based on their talent and drive, and the support of a team of dedicated professionals who understand strategy, and know how to create an authentic brand around the artist, one that can be maintained over time, through the natural ebb and flow of a typically volatile career path.
A Quick Working Definition: Talent Agents, i.e, Those who provide agency and support for artists, through the careful application of multiple skills, and a dynamic network of contacts, across multiple industries, are a rare breed
I'm not talking about the "manager" of your friends band, who is the first to be hammered at the open bar, handing out flyers for the next show while hitting on the fans. I'm not talking about the "talent scouts" that work for so-and-so-entertainment, the company with the management.freewebsitebuilder.com domain.
Management/Agency is all about Communication, and Creative Strategy, as it relates to People
Management/Good Agency is not Software, not Algorithms, not Zero-Marginal Cost Technology. These things help, they help a lot. The introduction of ubiquitous Cloud-Based Communication Networks, Always-On Social Platforms, Friend-Of-A-Friend Viral Marketing applications, these things have totally shifted the landscape, and allow for much greater exponential effects to take place. These tools still require the effective organization of people, strategy and messaging, in order to consistently deliver valuable results
Spotify and The Race To The Bottom
Some of the advancements in technology have been so succseful that they've created entire new segments of middle agents, the Spotify-type entities are not Artist Representatives, Managers, Agents, they are not even Record Companies...They are software businesses, often with many millions of dollars in investment (sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars) by Venture Capital firms who are strictly concerned with increasing shareholder value. The artists are note the shareholders. They just make music and stuff, and they love "exposure".
The promise of Spotify, Pandora, etc, was initially based on the unique abilities of these services to offer internet-scale distribution of content, at the edge of high-quality, and reliability, and in context of a payment structure driven by advertising revenue, a freemium model such that the user is able to listen "For Free", with the occasional advertisement or by way of a subscription fee which still delivers so much content for the price, as to be a no-brainer for the user. Under $10 a month, and I get every song in the world, on-demand, on any device, where do I sign up?
The problem with this model, is that the software providers built in a lifetime fee for themselves, and their shareholders, for coming up with the original idea, while technology has rapidly shifted to Open Source architecture which has gradually empowered the general public to create their own decentralized and distributed version of Spotify or Pandora, without the constant pressure to deliver profitable returns to investors.
Natural Systems Limit Growth To Benefit The Collective
The economic model for these streaming services is tied to the legacy idea that all businesses should be able to grow in perpitude, without regard for resource limits. The business model for these software solutions is pretty much the same as it was for Zipper Manufacturers in 1945.
"If you’re hoping to be a public company, you should be growing significantly faster (by percentage) the smaller you are. The median company with revenues between $0 and $25 million grew at a whopping 133 percent. As these companies scaled to the $150 million to $500 million revenue range, they grew at a more modest rate of 38 percent per year.
Additionally, the companies with the most successful IPOs (Tableau, Workday, Splunk, ServiceNow, Marketo*, LinkedIn, etc.) achieved growth rates at or above the median benchmarks in each of the years we examined before the IPO. As expected, the median revenue multiple at IPO for these companies was significantly higher at 7.3x. Conversely, the median revenue multiple for companies with growth rates below the median benchmarks in each of the years was only 3.8x.
Stay above 20 percent growth
Companies are only able to go public if they are growing quickly. Out of the 70 IPOs that we tracked in our analysis, 69 of them were growing faster than 20 percent in the year of their IPO, and 54 of them were growing faster than 30 percent." - From a Wired Magazine article entitled, How Fast Should You Be Growing
When this astronomical growth engine idea is built on "Profit" whereby such profit excludes the content creators, the people who make the thing that is 100% central to the business model, by design, the model quickly cracks. As these technologies become Zero-Resource Cost technologies, they are readily replicated by a motivated Open Source community of developers and artists. When artists unite with their fans, and decide to fix this broken system, the speed at which the system changes will be as fast as you can say "Hey i'm no longer on Friendster, hit me up on Myspace, rather, Facebook, i mean.....Synereo.....oh yeah, "I'm doing my "social" stuff on the network that pays me for my attention, instead of spying on me, and making money off of my content".
**Say What?!# ** Tell It To Me In Plain English Dude!
It is a considerable undertaking to effectively and successfully disrupt an industry as chaotic and dysfunctional as the Music Industry. Fortunately, the music business has it's share of risk takers, innovators, and visionaries, who are equipped for the task, and as I noted earlier, the appearance of revolutionary technology on the scene does not offer up any silver bullets or one-stop shopping as the reality yields increasingly unique hybrid solutions which are as unique as the artists who dream them up.
Creative hybrid business offerings are best implemented as P2P deals between artists and fans
Hanson, Adam Green, Radiohead, Bjork and many other artists have taken it upon themselves to challenge conventional methods in order to pursue ever widening definitions of what a successful record or tour even looks like anymore. As bands turn to increasingly D.I.Y and Crowd-funded methods of creating their art.
Check out Hanson's innovative entry into craft-beer:
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"Our first love is music, and with over twenty years as musicians and entrepreneurs in our band HANSON, we are integrating a bit of that craft into each beer sold by giving away a free song with every bottle.
We also believe that everything you do can be an engine for good to help those in need, so a percentage of the proceeds from all of our beers contribute funds to provide clean water to communities in need."- The Hanson Brothers
MmmHops which also includes their own curated summer beer-themed music festival.
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Let the inspiration move you as you consider the liminal journey Adam Green recently took with his friend Macauly Culkin; Culkin appears in Green’s new movie, Adam Green’s Aladdin (an adaptation of the tale), out this month (he’s releasing a new album alongside it), which Green has been working on for the past four years. He also wrote and directed the film, and stars as the titular character: In his version, Aladdin is a hapless musician who’s lost his groove before happening upon a magic lamp that 3-D-prints ecstasy tablets, long pointy boots, a bird inside of someone’s brain, and an asparagus chair. It’s a bizarre, mostly nonsensical movie that is likely to give viewers a contact high. “I almost wanted it to feel like a foreign film,” Green says. “I wanted to come into your soul with rubber gloves and do some weird surgical procedure on it, shift some shit around; you’re not going to notice it happen, but hopefully you’ll feel different after.” And he actually sort of accomplishes this, mostly thanks to the incredible cartoonish sets, props, and costumes he labored over that recall an ’80s-era Nintendo game.
Green built 30 sets out of papier-mâché from found telephone books, and filmed the movie in a Red Hook warehouse the summer before last. The project was funded in part by a $50,000 Kickstarter campaign. “Most people did the movie for basically no money, but I was buying like two tons of cardboard, hundreds of cans of paint, and it just adds up. We were taking out loans. Plus, I was just about to become a dad. It was the most irresponsible thing that’s ever happened.” (Culkin plays an Occupy-style protester who ultimately gets decapitated.) The end result has been a smashing success as Green has bundled the movie together with his live show, and has toured to sold-out theaters around the world.
These success stories are truly inspiring! Now, imagine the bonus which will follow, once the music industry figures out how to return to a logical model for distributing and licensing the actual music, in a way which optimizes profit for the artists, and their agents, first and foremost.
Thank goodness, visionaries such as Benji Rogers of Pledge Music and Imogean Heap have advanced this conversation to bring us to a boiling point, as technology catches up to reality in order to set the stage for a 3rd act for the music industry. It's not a coincidence that the P2P technology behind Blockchain solutions is very closely related to the P2P Filesharing technology of Napster, which was the original powderkeg/achilles heal and ultimately lead to the death of the "record" industry, giving way to the broader birth of a more holistic "music industry" inclusive of all artifacts and business activities related to music.
Benji Rogers elaborates on what is required to move forward:
"We, the music industry, should create and own our own fair trade music format. Like the MP3 or the WAV that came before it, but in this case a format that cannot be separated from its rights and still be played. I called this a .bc or dotblockchain codec. Within this codec would be the building blocks of a unified data set.
Anytime an artist or rights holder is ready to make their works available to the world, they would create a .bc file rather than a standard WAV or MP3. This would mean that all of the data needed to figure out who to pay, who owned what, and when it was created would literally be contained and/or referenced within the file itself. Once this step was completed all of this information would then be written into the blockchain and made available for all.
So we would, with a unified and fair trade data standard, create a Global Distributed Database of Musical Rights every time a song is encoded. This would mean that we—the artists, labels, publishers and musicians who created these works—would serve them to the world in the fairly-traded way of our choosing. Further to this, I proposed that VR, 360 Video and AR (Augmented Reality) would be the Trojan horse to drive both momentum and adoption.
Since writing this, we (and I’ll get to who that is later) have not only seen that this is all technically possible, but that we may even be close to an MVP that could get this whole thing kicked off. Below is an update to my initial concept based on meetings and feedback from all sectors of the industries involved." -Benji Rogers from a 2 part blog post.
Social Innovation Experiments Will Launch 1000 Ships
As projects like Steemit come online, we begin to see the potential unfold in the actual user-experience. Later this year, when Synereo releases the Smart Social Contract Language and Social Network framework, built by mathemagician Lucius Gregory Meredith and Synereo CEO Dor Konforty, using Scala, embedded with the magical compositional qualities found in Rho-Calculus&Pi-Calculus, this is when we will see that something called "Correct-By-Design" starts to make sense when considering the architecture of internet-scale file distribution , financial transactions and social communications. The importance of a correct-by-design Smart Social Contract becomes clear when dealing with any number of basic social contracts which are otherwise entered into by way of the legacy systems so desperately in need of repair.
Not All Blockchains Are Created Equally....It's Gotta Have Scalability
Blockchain's are not in-fact magical. Some blockchain frameworks work really well for one type of transaction, not so much for another. Some Blockchains don't scale well, some don't play well with others. Bitcoin paved the way, Ethereum turned the road into a Hyper-Loop, and gave the drivers their own language, the ability to create whole universes of value, and this gives way to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, and other experiments as we all court the beautiful idea of the "killer apps" to come. As we return to the ethos of the original internet, the promise of interconnectedness, interoperabiility, the idea that we are a global village, and that we have manufactured economies of lack, while living in a world tuned for abundance, these things become reality, one experiment at a time.
It's so interesting, working with Synereo, to see many of the O.G (original gangster) players who built the internet 1.0, return to the conversation, gifting their knowledge steeped with the frustrations which are the result of too many commercially driven architecture decisions. This is our moment to act out a Buckminster Fuller ideal to enhance human intelligence and the ability for humans to make wiser decisions. “What you're trying to do is make a human-machine symbiote, where the humans understand more about the network of interactions because of the computers, and the computers are able to understand more about how humans work, and therefore, work better with them,”- Sandy Pentland "[Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter]"(http://socialphysics.media.mit.edu/book/),
Such complex solutions will not come overnight, and will not appear without some turbulence, as these solutions, while better for humanity and overall more effective and optimized in every logical way, still will cause the disruption and eventual elimination of many legacy systems which are suddenly made irrelevant.
This is why artists and their agents are so well equipped to begin helping us all with this process, by way of experimentation, and creative play, and only through inspiration, and education will we find the common ground required to align the human factors with the technical solutions.
***Here are two of my own experiments in blockchain distribution, because it's all about the trial and error!
"Star Twin" is an original piece of art I created using Processing.org sketches which pull data from an Arduino Yun, monitoring the local conditions of my watershed, on the Norwalk River. in Connecticut.
The rising and falling of the tide transforms into the faces of the "Star Twin", using actual data. Download the hi-res PDF for free , and share this post, and upvote, and wave your magik influencer wand, to grant me some magik-internet-money.
My name is Jonny Dubowsky. I create art, music and interactive sculpture installations designed to restore our planets health.
Let's play a social game! I am giving away a free song-
It's called "I'm No Good By Myself"
I filmed a music video for it with the puppeteers from Team America, and we built a giant 60 foot working turntable_
Check out the video:
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Your rewards you give to me via Steemit, will go to Community Garden and Social Innovation Projects with the non-profit Rock 'n Renew's summer Social Innovation Lab at NYU's ITP.
I'm currently exploring shared solutions that foster collaborative engineering practices, Sustainability Design Practices, multi-disciplinary dialogue, cross-sector partnerships and entrepreneurial innovation serving the public good. I'm a Blockchain alchemist, permaculture designer, Creative Strategist, and look forward to sharing new decentralized tools using Ethereum, Bitcoin and Synereo technology along with IOT and Embedded Systems. I also tour with my band Jonny Lives! (www.jonnylives.com) Susan Ferris' risk taking paid off in the end, but not without many ups and downs; as I have had many successful opportunities throughout these past 10+ years including appearances on Late Night With Conan O'Brian, The Today Show, Good Morning America, and nearly every major radio station in the U.S, and toured/opened up for Stevie Wonder, Everclear, Meatloaf, Debbie Harry, Modest Mouse, Keith Urban, The Kaiser Chiefs, The Strokes, The Killers, and many other bands. Music that i've written and recorded has been featured in many major motion pictures including Van Wilder II: The Rise Of Taj, The Rocker, Deal w/ Burt Reynolds, and on various T.v shows and commercials.