One
on One with Paul Allen:
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Stephen Smith, a graduate from Middle Tennessee State University and a recent intern at the Songwriters Guild of America, sat down with his former professor Paul Allen to pick his brain on state of the music industry and how the current changes are affecting songwriters and the future of the business. |
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Stephen
Smith:
Your background is quite varied and extensive, which includes being
an executive producer for scores of stage productions for major
country acts such as Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson and Vince Gill,
work in political management, radio and television programming and
management, radio ownership and broadcasting work for the US Armed
Forces radio. What’s the most dramatic change that you have witnessed
in the music industry between the start of your career and today?
Paul Allen: Wow! There is so much drama in the music industry these days it is hard to pick out the most dramatic. But in the 40 years I have been involved in the music industry, probably the single most important change that has driven our industry, music business, is turning the sound of a violin into digits. It’s been a number of different ways to memorialize music, capture, reproduce it and turn it into commerce, but when the CD became the median by which music is being sold it was wonderful at first. It sounded so crisp and clear. It was perfect; absolutely perfect. In some cases, perhaps, too perfect, but it was a wonderful thing. But as the years went on we are seeing now what’s happening and seeing the change, and in certain ways the erosion in some aspects of the music business as we used to know it. Just changing music from analog to where it is digital has made a huge impact and continues to have a huge impact on everyone, especially songwriters. Those who are commercial songwriters, who get their music on the radio, make a lot of money because of the royalties paid by the PROs for hit songs. A hit country song for example, even though country as a genre is like about 10 percent of what all pop music is out there—it’s just sort of a blip—makes a lot of money. But if you get a number one song in country from a sales stand point the songwriters and the publishers are going to split probably 40 or 45 thousand dollars. If you have a number one song that is on an album, the performance royalties coming from a project like that can be almost a million dollars split between the songwriters. So there are huge amounts of money still out there for songwriters. But what we see is the erosion. And what every songwriter understands is that the erosion comes in the sales of recorded music, because it is being stolen now to the tune of billions of songs a month which are swapped through peer to peer. So, it was a wonderful thing when it came out as digits, but it is also forcing our industry to step back and take a deep breath and try to revise how we are doing business and earning money from what we do. Stephen Smith: You have an article on your website entitled “The New Business Model for Record Labels” in which you address the fact that the value of recorded music continues to fall due to illegal downloading and peer to peer file sharing, as you just touched upon. As record labels are trying to compensate by signing deals with artists that include a piece of the touring, merchandise sales, etc., how do you think songwriters (and artists) can survive in the new changing era with so many illegal downloads and less of an income from songs? Paul Allen: Well, there is certainly less income from mechanical royalties, certainly, because illegal downloading is just hurting everybody--the artist, the labels, and songwriters themselves. But, what I think is a real positive, it’s not as positive as I would like on the behalf of the songwriters, but what is positive are the changes to where digital uses of copyrighted songs are now being compensated. If you’re online, if you’re on satellite radio, songwriters are compensated whereas before, digitized songs on the web and other digital outlets weren’t compensated. It was a strain to convince anyone that that was necessary. So, yes, there is a down turn, but I go back to the point that having a good strong commercial catalog and being okay with having it on regular commercial radio is not selling out. Commercial radio has all different kinds of music. That’s where the millions are at to be made. A couple of myths that I talk to my students about is the myth that commercial radio is going to go away and it will no longer have any relevance. Commercial radio pays hundreds of millions of dollars a year to songwriters to be able to use their music on the air. It is the single largest source of income for a songwriter. During the average week, people who are twelve years old and older listen to about 18 hours of traditional commercial radio. That’s down about 45 minutes from about five years ago. So, commercial radio is not going away, it’s still has a very important role to play. Now there are talks and discussions about the long tail--where there used to be hits along the front end of the curve and the tale just ended; and now there are fewer hits and the tail just gets longer and longer. It was a theory that was proposed by Wired Magazine. As it turns out, STILL the hits are all crowded towards the front of the curve. One of the myths that I talk about is that the major labels are going to die. They are not going to die. If you look at all the songs that are on the top two hundred on Billboard, the top albums that are being sold, 80 percent of those albums are still being sold by the four major labels. It’s true that 70 percent of all that stuff is masters owned by the label, but you add in the ones that are least mastered, still 80 percent of the music is coming from the major labels. So in some ways our business has changed over the years, it has, but in a lot of ways it still remains the same. Stephen Smith: Given the changes within the music industry, what do you think will be the next big thing for music, songwriters and/or the industry? Paul Allen: The next big thing…and this is just putting on my thinking cap to look forward…is considering how long the mp3 has been around. It has been around quite a while. It’s been tossed around a lot, it’s been discussed, it’s been cussed, continually on a daily bases. The iPod has been around for five or six years now and normally the median that has been used to consume music changes relatively frequently. I mean, it’s nothing that stays tightly forever. Given the age of the iPod and the age of the mp3, as we look forward the next two or three years based on things I've heard in meetings I have been in, there is going to be some new median that is going to come along. The question is how is that going to impact the industry? Until we know what that something is or how it is going to come about, until we know that it is going to become difficult to view by just knowing that is going to happen and when it’s going to be we don't know. But when it does happen, that’s when we're all going to have to scramble and we, you, are going to have to take the things you've learned in your education and experience, Stephen, and be able to say, “Here's an idea and I think it’s going to work for us.” Stephen Smith: You are the author of the top-ranked and hands-on book, Artist Management for the Music Business, as well as the contributing author to the new industry guide From Demo To Delivery, and co-author of the recording industry book entitled Record Label Marketing. What inspired you to write these books and what value do you think they bring to people within the industry today? Paul Allen: In the case of the Record Label Marketing book and the Artist Management book, the reason I wrote both of those books is because those were courses I was teaching here at MTSU. What I learned was that the books that were available were either outdated or no one had taken the time to write the book that I wanted to have with the information that I wanted my students to take away from the course. So, two of my colleagues here at MTSU and I co-authored the Record Label Marketing book because they had been using copies of things and articles from here and there, and that would end up being what we gave our students at the beginning of the semester. We’d give them a stack of articles. So, because there wasn’t a book, we wrote one. As it turns out that book is now used by twenty-five to thirty major universities. In the case of the Artist Management book, for my top career I have been involved in management one way or another, whether it was others’ careers or politics or business organization or whatever. I've always managed something throughout my career. The artist management guides that were out there were mostly do it yourself guides for people--how you manage your band--and there are probably hundreds of books out there like that. But, there was no book that teaches someone who wants a career in artist management that teaches how to launch a career as an artist manager, to manage their own career, and then to manage the career of others, which is what this is. So I put the book together and drew from my experiences in managing, which means I made some mistakes along the way and if you read that book hopefully you won't make the same mistakes. But, I also put in there, in the Artist Management book for example, some information to keep you from being frustrated if you’re going to be in our business, such as to be able to understand the sources of power in the music business, to understand some of the routes in the music business, and to understand that most of what goes on is not personal to you or to anybody else but has to do with your relevance. For example, if you’re a songwriter who works in Nashville and you’ve written Hip Hop music, it’s probably going to be a challenge to find a niche where you can network with people to do just that because of the nature of the songwriting movement in Nashville. So, a Hip Hop songwriter in Nashville is not going to be terribly relevant to what goes on in the traditional business field. Not to say it’s not good music, but it is probably somewhere else that it could be. So, when you’re rejected by your music it’s not personal, it’s just your relevance to somebody who wants to take one of those songs and make some money from them. So I wrote the book because the only other book that was out there close to it made frequent references to cassette tape demos and that kind of tells me that I need to write the book. So I wrote both of them and am still pleased with the result. I hope people are taking things from them because as an author of books like this you don't make a lot of money, but what you do is you put together things that you think people need to know to help encourage their success and I hope both of the books where needed. Stephen Smith: I thought they were great books and I took your class, of course. I definitely took something away from it. Paul Allen: And that’s good Stephen Smith: When we started coordinating this interview, you said that you were updating the Record Label Marketing book. Tell us about this new book project and when it will be available. Paul Allen: When we first wrote Record Label Marketing it was designed to show how to take a shiny CD that comes from stereo mastering--nice shiny nothing on both sides-- all the way over to where it actually becomes a $12 CD at Wal-Mart and what goes on there in between. And when we first wrote the book, it was published at the end of 2005 and the spring of 2006 was when MySpace, YouTube, and all of a sudden these things come out of the wood works, and we didn’t have them in our book cause that is how quickly our business changes. So, that gives you an example over the last three years, a lot of things has changed and we went back and re-wrote the book this past winter. I would say 60 to 75 percent of what we put in there that relate to current aspects of music business had to be re-written just to be added too. But it will be out in its new form sometime in July and available for use by universities again this fall and to anybody who wants to know about the process of how labels market their music, it’s right there in that book. Stephen Smith: Thank you for letting us interview you. We appreciate it. I’ve asked all my questions, but do you have any last words that you would like to share? Paul Allen: The last thing I would leave with you and leave with those who would read or watch this piece is, whether you are going to be an artist, or a songwriter, whether you’re going to be a manager, whether you’re going to be a publisher, whether you’re going to work in a studio—whatever your goal—is to map out a plan for yourself. I can’t underscore planning enough in any of the stuff I teach or any advice I give anybody. Put together a plan. If you don’t, you’re going to find yourself wondering around and you’re not going to know where you need to be; you’re never going to know if your there if you don’t have a plan. So make a three year plan. Find out what your goal is and put together those steps that you need to take. And look at that plan and modify that plan as you need to, because planning is something a lot of people don’t do. It’s not a lot of fun because it takes time away from the other things you want to do, but a well thought out plan will be one of the keys to assuring that you get to where you want to go ultimately in your career. Paul
Allen’s Bio: |
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