The Sound Age - Music industry Podcast

The horrific story of the next big thing in rock. Ian Watkins will be remembered as one of the most evil people in the history of music. 

A few years back I was looking to make a ticketing site that essentially scrapped booking fees, we got to the point where we had an investor working with us, but researching small venues we found out that Australia was uniquely different than the rest of the world. Almost every single small venue in Australia had EXCLUSIVE deals with 1 or 2 ticketing sites. This doesn't seem like a problem until you think what are tickets in 2022? In 2004 tickets were lining up in a newsagents waiting for the 6am ticket release and buying from a person behind a booth. Today it's an email with a qr code attached. But the booking fees have never changed. You still pay 10-15% or more on top of your $20 ticket for your local venue that holds 350 people. It makes sense for stadiums and festivals and major tours to use a ticketing site, but these days small clubs can very easily sell their own tickets, they can collect their customers data to form a mailing list, $3 per person doesn't sound like that much of an issue, but that's over $1000 every night in a club that holds 350 people. In the local music scene that's a lot of money. If venues sold their own tickets they could save the customers money or they could use that extra money to pay local bands $1000 more every night.

Where will spotify be in 10 years? because there’s not much business in hosting other companies music. The answer is right in front of us already. Spotify Originals - Just like Netflix Originals. Original content exclusive to Spotify commissioned by Spotify. Imagine instead of being paid 0.003c per stream, the artist gets paid $20M for the rights to the music. It that doesn’t happen though, streaming and music in general runs the risk of becoming just a tool to sell mobile phones.

The Charts are a measure of success for an artist, they are also a trophy for artists that last the span of the their career. So it's no surprise that labels and managers have concocted ways to manufacture chart positions. This episode I break down a few ways artists have schemed their way to the top and also how the problem was solved and then unsolved meaning we still live in a world where you can essentially buy a chart position. 

The early 2000s Boy band craze was single handedly created by one man. A man who also created the biggest Ponzi scheme in the history of the US ripping off many thousands of innocent people out of hundreds of millions of dollars. The pop stars on the walls of teenagers were all victims of a Con man.

Note: Listen on Spotify for the full version of the song I’m talking about in this podcast. The story of writing a 2:50 pop rock song, that was pieced together using ideas spread out over a decade, recorded in 2 different countries in 3 different studios. a song that was written, perfected and recorded without the band members ever seeing each other in person. This is the story of Reset.

It cost a fortune for a pro studio, it used to cost a small fortune for a pro home studio set up, able to record studio quality recordings. And then Steve Jobs and Apple released Garageband. These days Garageband is a fully functional recording studio. I would know, i released a song using Garageband and nobody even knew.

Deep Fake audio will continue to get better, at one point it will be indistinguishable from real artists. At that point what happens to music and musicians. What happens when labels decide to keep an artist alive after their death by using Music AI and Deep Fake technology to release music in the exact likeness of the deceased artist. If we can keep ACDC alive with new music every year for 1000 years, what will ACDC look and sound like? With every recreation it becomes less and less familiar until one day we live in a dystopian hell, devoid of actual music.

The story of the worst album ever made is strange. How can something so bad have actual loyal fans. And in the same context how can something recorded so perfectly such as Nickleback's albums be so hated by so many? Perhaps true beauty is found in imperfection. Perhaps music isn't meant to sound perfect. 

The creation of iTunes meant artists couldn't release more experimental tracks near the end of an album anymore, every song had to be a single. The creation of Spotify meant hit songwriters wrote songs in a way to keep the listener streaming for at least 30 seconds to collect the stat And then Til Tok happened and the art of songwriting is completely turned on its head. This episode is about the dumbing down of songwriting from the creativity in writing hooks, to the length of songs. Music is not what it used to be.