Before I go into some thoughts on how this impacts Jazz music (or at least my take and ideas), some quotes.

Some technical details...

"They all now charge $9 or $10 a month for customers to listen to a pool of about 250,000 songs online, using a technology called streaming. And they charge about 99 cents to download a song and copy it onto a CD, where it can be played in a car or on a home stereo, or converted to a computer file format like MP3 to be shared with others (legally or not).

Other variations have also evolved. AOL's service, and others, include an unlimited number of what are known as tethered downloads, where songs can be copied onto a computer and played offline, for example, by a traveling laptop user. (The tethering means a subscriber can listen to the downloads on no more than two computers, and cannot copy the files to other devices or send them to other people.) And others offer variations on Internet radio, where users can pick genres or even specific artists to listen to online.

A basic wholesale price structure is coming together that online services can use to create product offerings. For example, a download of a song, with a suggested retail price of 99 cents, has a wholesale cost of about 65 cents from the labels, according to music executives.

The streaming services and tethered downloads have a more complicated price structure. Basically, the services pay between two-tenths of a cent and a penny to the label every time a user listens to a song. But there are monthly guarantees to the labels that together make the minimum monthly cost for music licenses to offer an unlimited streaming service about $5, according to music executives."

And the interesting things is where is the money going to be made,

"It is unclear so far whether the dominant digital business model will be selling downloads or renting access to a full catalog. It is clear that consumers are more interested in buying one song at a time than entire albums, an audience preference that is likely to mean major changes for the way the recording industry produces music."

Hold on a minute. Where is the artist in this whole thing? Not once does the article or any of the industry folks mention the how the artist is going to benefit from this. From the hip, I think the reason it's not mentioned is because The Artist Is Going To Be Making The Money!

With the advent of personal digital recording, websites, weblogs, and Google, artists are easily going to be the main source for their own music. They are going to write a song, record a song, and post it for sale (to streamers wanting to have eyeballs on their INet radio sites and to listeners wanting to burn it on all of their devices). They will write about it on their weblogs and you'll see it on Google (or Daypop or AllTheWeb).

It's a good thing that the biggies have started to come around, but all they are going to be selling in the future is that big old catalog. New music won't be coming through them. Unless they plan on working with musicians to enable a musician's self-produced, self-recorded, and self-marketed (and don't be scared music makers, this ain't that hard with websites and weblogs) music to be distributed via INet-means. They will need to become clearing houses for links. Links to artists websites where they are selling their individual songs. And Jazz artists are going to benefit a great deal.

Jazz artists will be able to record each performance and sell each individual song from each performance. Each Jazz performance is a unique one that will be a must have for Jazz fans. How many times have you seen a show and you were just knocked out by the version of "Johnny Come Lately" (particularly the one by Steve Lacy and Mal Waldron many years ago in Carlsbad, CA)? Go to the artists site the next day and download it. AND purchase the right to stream it from your own little website for folks that know you've got good taste in music and choose cool tunes. Jazz musicians play a lot and are making new music each time they play (at least the good ones are!)...each performance is something that someone is going to want.

Another impact on this is going to be how artists write music. And how artists play music. The successful artists will be the ones that get people to buy more than one song. They don't have to buy them all at the same time, but connections will need to be made between songs. Serialization. As in Serialized Novels. Come up with a concept. Write the first chapter (first song). Sell it. People dig it and want to know what the next chapter (song) in the story sounds like. Sell installment II. Build interest in the set. And again, this will be good for Jazz artists, especially the ones that are exploring new ways of playing and writing and not just re-interpreting standards. Buy all three movements of the suite! Even standard players will benefit because usually there is a theme to a recording of standards, like "Jazzy Joe Plays The Cole Porter Songbook".

I'm trying to figure out how I can get in and help artists get their individual songs on the net for sale right along side the songs that are being cookie-cut by the big guys. Hopefully the big guys will see that the way they can make money is by helping any musician with the ability to make music get it up on the web to sell and inside of people's ears to hear.

Enough rambling from one lowly Jazz listener. Probably not very coherent either, but maybe some of those Jazz Journalists over there can help me clarify this or let me know where I'm totally off my rocker. I know I'm off my rocker even to just attempt to see what the future will bring, but when you gotta say something you just gotta say it.
1:30:01 PM    comment []  Google It!