James Danderfer

I would love to buy a copy of your next CD….but wait…I have trouble monetizing my own music career! Please release when I have a good month selling out so that I can pick one up

I’m facing the same challenges you are and I’m sorry to say I can’t offer any solutions. The only bright spot for me (and it’s not much of one) is that the kind of straight-ahead jazz I mostly play is largely consumed by an older demographic who are more likely to buy actual CDs. My students pretty much never pay for music and will even balk at my demands that they spend 90 cents buying a track for study on i-tunes. They don’t understand why I don’t just burn them a copy off my computer. Occasionally I do, but I often feel bad about it, since some of these ‘old masters’ are people I actually know and trust me, after a lifetime of recording and playing ground breaking music, they are absolutely not enjoying a fat retirement on royalties.

Still, i wouldn’t pay too much attention to Shelly the Marketing Guy. I’m guessing that he TEACHES music marketing at Tulane, rather than actually making all or most of his income from it, which puts him in the same catagory as guys like me (and possibly you some day), guys who wanted a life in music that wasn’t tied to the vagaries of gigs-no-gigs or technological holocausts of revenue streams.

I’d suggest talking to people who actually make a living playing and recording jazz, not somebody with a university teaching job to fall back on.. There’s still a few of them out there. At Tulane, Nicholas Payton and Robert Glasper have recently spoken at great lenghth about these very issues, and the consensus between the two of them seems to be contrary to the “you can’t monetize music” set. Both those guys have major label contracts and generate good revenue playing on their own and others recordings.

And Guy, most of us selling CDs off the stage set prices a little lower than that. Hell, my stuff IN THE STORE at the Louisiana Music Factory tops out at $12.99. Any lower than that, I’m losing money. Do the math; James says he’s spending $9000 out of his own pocket to record and press 1000 copies of a CD, anything less than 9 bucks a copy he’s in the hole.

The whole “music is free’ paradigm seems unsustainable to me. Eventually you’re going to run out of people dumb enough to lose money recording music and sleep in the van and work for beer money playing it on the road.

If it costs that much to make CDs on your own, and you find it hard to sell them, that’s problematic. Do you need to go back to when labels only would produce and release CDs? You probably don’t want that. Maybe cut out mailing out all those freebies to the media. While it’s nice to get reviews, it probably doesn’t affect the bottom line the way cutting out all those mailing charges will.

Steve,

I’m not sure if that would fly, to tell you the truth. At this point, I’m looking at an entire generation (my students) who have more or less no experience at all of recorded music as a commodity. They’ll pay a cover to go to a ‘show,’ but recorded music is something they get free. Pretty hard to unring that bell.

For jazz musicians this isn’t nearly as big a catastrophe as for the pop industry, since jazz never was a big royalty generator anyway (there’s a reason P.J. Perry wrote and recorded at tune called “Royal Tease”). Still the medium tier guys, the Dexter Gordons, Hank Mobleys, Cedar Waltons etc. used to be able to count on an annual check at least big enough to pay their dry cleaning. Napster wiped that right out.

Guy, you of all people should know that reviews DO matter, both as a marketing tool and as an inclusion in things like MTAP grant apps etc. Pitching yourself at any major club or festival is a long shot without reviews. So I guess in that sense you could view CDs as a loss leader. The trouble is, most jazz musicians fly so low to the ground economically that it’s a really bad idea to have any area of your career lose money, since the other legs of the stool (concerts-clubs, clinics-teaching etc.) are not huge money makers either. But everything you do is tied to everything else, and it’s really hard to point to hard, causal effects with anything. Did that particular review GET me that particular festival gig etc? The processes involved are so opaque, it’s hard to tell. You just keep stroking, trying to produce as much quality music as you can, and market it any way you can think of.

I’m not denying there’s a massive paradigm shift going on, and I don’t claim to have a clue where it’s going. I just kind of bristle when I hear somebody say “oh, well you can’t monetize music anymore” because it strikes me as such a dumb concept. Almost all arts and entertainments are dealing with the same digitization issues, but for some reason the only ones these guys routinely suggest have to work for free from now on are musicians. Nobody’s telling James Cameron “oh, you can’t monetize motion pictures anymore.”

Now there’s certain types of pop music…people are going to be pissed at me for saying this but it’s true, there’s a lot of indie-rock stuff out there that functions on a low level of technique. You can pick up a guitar and be playing that stuff in a couple of years. And that’s fine, I’m not objecting to that or suggesting the stuff doesn’t have merit. But other musics, like jazz and classical things…you have to put in years and years and thousands of hours in the shed to do that. There HAS to be some kind of living in it or people won’t do it, not because they’re greedy but because they can’t. You can’t work 40 hours a week on a construction site and be Sonny Rollins. You can’t.

Ha… I could go on this conversation forever!

@john: The Film industry is also hurting. Movie attendance and revenues are down. Cameron tried something different (challenged the paradigm in the form of new technology) and it worked. Good for him!

TV is changing from ‘every week at 8′ to on demand. You can buy shows on iTunes or watch them for free online. Yes, it’s putting cable companies in a difficult place but they will have to adapt also.

I think that doing the same old thing because “that’s the way it should be” is going ultimately sink the industry. Look at the Napster story. Times changed, the industry didn’t adapt and is still recovering.

Jazz, with largely an older performer and audience, demographic is slow to change. Most jazz musicians are self managed and a) not trained or b) very good at managing themselves. They just want to play music, which is fine except they also need to get paid. For better or worse, that’s the way it is.

Call me new fangled but it irks me when people use examples from the 60′s and say that’s the way it should be now. Dexter made a good living. Jelly Roll, at times, made a great one. But it ain’t 1910 and musicians (jazz and otherwise) have to take a different approach to their careers.

@James: Ask yourself this: What is your single ultimate goal as a musician? Do you want to make money? Play live shows? Record original challenging music? Figure out what this is and have everything you do work towards this goal. Working towards this goal requires a much more complete plan than years ago when simply ‘playing jazz’ was enough.

End rant and start to sketching the new paradigm for the industry