As a sometimes musician, I really want someone to get a little more creative about the future of the music industry than just "make all of your money from live concerts." If the only musicians that can make money from recordings are ones who are so widely known and liked that people stealing their music online is irrelevant, the gap between "unknown" and "world famous" is basically impossible to cross.
I've been curious about this... do cafe/restaurants play a type of commercial satellite or digital radio intended to be played in stores? Or do they license the music themselves?
Those publishing organizations. If you're not a songwriter and/or don't own at least part of your publishing, you don't get royalties that way. A lot of major label artists don't write their own songs and it's not just the pop/r&b singers. A lot of rock bands hire songwriters as well. Overall, the entire industry is shady and the majors are grasping for the last bit of CD revenue that they can find.
You're going to see a lot more 360 deals like the one Jay-Z just did, although they'll be doing them for much smaller amounts from much smaller artists and they will be TERRIBLE deals for the artists. Jay-Z got so much because he has the power, influence, and track record to justify it. The majors want to own the entire vertical but won't create any sort of deal that is going to be fair for new projects.
pandora pays royalties to soundexchange, the same way internet radio does. they in theory pay artists. although, i'd be interested in hearing how many artists actually get paid by sx and how much.
I'd say as things change, volume will be a big issue. At the moment, an artist might bring out a new album each year. Which is kinda lazy. They make an album, and that makes them millions.
How about they knuckle down and bring out a new album each month?
Well, for one, the argument was based on Amazon sales numbers that have since been discredited. For another, even if it applied to books, that doesn't mean that it would apply to everything. It's quite possible that a few things (like books) have been limited largely by real world constraints and were waiting for someone like Amazon to come by and free them from the 80/20 rule, but that most things were not.
People bandy about "the long tail" as if it's some sort of conclusive proof that conventional economics is in the process of being shaken up by these new distribution methods, when in reality that's just conjecture and doesn't yet seem to be the case.
I'm a percussionist mostly. I've played basically every genre, though I'm tending towards jazz lately.
I've been chewing on a long response for you here, but I think I'll save it for my blog. Instead, the short one: Touring only works at the superstar end of the scale, while recorded music revenue scales with the popularity of the artist. If the price of recorded music falls to zero, the labels don't have so much incentive to sign groups that aren't already at the touring-huge scale, since they're guaranteed to lose money on them...
Also, if just giving away your music made you popular, MTV Cribs would feature a lot more unsigned artists than it does now (namely, zero). Since labels are the only ones in the music industry with the money to do the marketing that's essentially a prerequisite to getting huge, it's in the best interest of the artists for the labels to have the freedom to sign groups that are promising, but not yet big. That freedom comes from CD sales.
