realtime

REALTIME:
A Pop Music Model for the Twenty-First Century

The Big Idea

Dinosaurs are roaming the land! They are the major record labels who once thrived on the sale of $20 compact discs that cost pennies to produce, and the artists that relied on huge marketing advances and an army of publicists to get their music heard.

They are struggling to survive in the wake of an apocalyptic meteor impact: the Internet’s exponential growth. Suddenly, music is available everywhere and few people want to pay for it. Record stores are closing their doors; labels are dropping all but the most popular artists. The pools of money that fueled the industry are drying up.

The first part of this essay takes a close look at this new landscape. The second part uses logic to describe the sort of small, furry creature we expect will emerge from the underbrush and eventually take over the world.

What Has Changed Since the Twentieth Century

The March of Progress Stomps Over the Music Industry

According to Nielsen SoundScan, compact disc sales have dropped by half since 2000. Fewer people are paying for music, so the music industry’s revenue stream is drying up. Why? It is the inevitable result of improved technology.

By embracing compact discs, the industry also embraced perfect duplication. Copied cassette tapes never sounded as good as the original, which limited the amount of copying one could do. Not so with CDs. Then MP3s arrived. Suddenly, music files on the computer were one-tenth their original size, making it practical to store them in bulk and transfer them over the Internet. Today, file sharing accounts for nearly half of all Internet traffic.

The industry is trying everything it can think of to stay afloat, but the writing is on the wall. Technology marches on and human nature is not about to change.

No Need for Shelf Space in the Mall

Increased bandwidth coupled with improved Web searching (Google) and open, widely accepted media distribution services (iTunes and podcasting, CD Baby, etc.) make it possible to self-distribute digital media.

No Need for Full Page Ads in Rolling Stone

Social networking sites (blogs, Facebook, LiveJournal, MySpace, etc.) make it possible for an artist to self-promote. They also enable viral marketing: friends sharing compelling content by word of mouth.

You Too Can Be a Pro

Recording technology has improved to the point where anyone who owns a computer can produce inexpensive recordings. With skill, an artist can make these recordings indistinguishable from those laboriously produced in expensive studios. As such, recording studios, the hefty budgets they entail, and the record labels that supply such budgets, are becoming less important to the process of creating and sharing music.

The Long Tail Is the Place to Be

The graph of artist popularity versus numbers of artists is growing a long tail, as defined by Wired magazine's Chris Anderson. A decreasing number of artists, those backed by the increasingly troubled and financially strapped music companies, are hugely popular (the green area in the graph). An increasing number of artists are relatively obscure (the yellow area). What is novel about this is that for the first time in history the obscure artists are collectively more popular than the top artists (the yellow area is greater than the green area). Soon, everyone will be in the band, and with few exceptions everyone will be in the long tail.

Music Is Ephemeral

Recorded music now transcends all physical media, including vinyl records, magnetic tape, and CDs. Music is available at a moment's notice day or night, and it may be downloaded from any Internet connection. Furthermore, the continued existence of physical media offends environmental sensitivities. As soon as the music is ripped to an iPod, the packaging is so much worthless clutter, wasted material ready for the landfill.

Albums: A Quaint Concept

Without physical media, the concept of the "album" no longer makes sense. Albums exist because long-playing vinyl records once existed. Labels forced artists to fill albums with 40 minutes of music separated into 20-minute sides, preferably subdivided into radio-friendly three-minute tracks. CDs extended the idea of an album, eliminating the sides and increasing the capacity to 74 minutes, but the industry still drove artists to produce music in readily marketable, CD-sized segments. Now that direct downloads have made physical CDs superfluous, there is no reason why an artist should be restricted to a 74-minute album. The album as an art form is giving way to continuous streams of loosely connected multimedia content.

The Mathematics of Disposability

Because there is more music than ever before competing for the same number of ears, it follows that music is more disposable than ever before. In general, a piece of recorded music can expect to get less attention, fewer repeated listens, than it would have gotten decades ago. This is becoming increasingly true.

Since attention spans are shorter than ever, artists have a smaller return on the investment they make in each piece of music. Why should an artist spend thousands of dollars and years of his life carefully crafting a perfect album when each year that goes by means fewer people will bother to hear it?

Let us define the craft ratio as the time spent creating a piece of music divided by the time one listener spends experiencing it. Music created and recorded in real time would have a craft ratio of one. For a typical band that releases an album every two years, the ratio is 17,000 to one. What implications does an enormous craft ratio have in a world of flagging attention and thinning budgets? All things being equal, it is a detriment. It represents more investment for less return.

Freshness Matters

Whether they realize it or not, modern bands are content providers that must compete with American Idol, Netflix, Facebook, and millions of secondhand Harry Potter novels for public attention. The surest way to lose that attention is to stop providing content: let the blog go stale, leave a lot of "Coming Soon!" pages on the band site, avoid social media, release something new every few years.

To succeed, a band must keep the content coming. Be prolific. Release a lot of music, but also release the making-of the music. Release everything. Get on Facebook, Blogger, and Twitter. Post equipment reviews. Make a series of clever YouTube videos featuring liquid nitrogen and thirty drunken monkeys fighting over a drum kit. Peddle a dull essay describing your revolutionary philosophy of making music.

Each bit of something the band creates is a morsel, a yummy, that can feed a potential fan’s need for immediate gratification. Give someone yummies and they are likely to come back for more. With luck and skill, a band can become a preferred yummy provider for tens, hundreds, or thousands of people. The key is to keep the yummies coming from every direction.

Not Just For Radio Anymore

Music is increasingly for more than direct listening. It appears in films, commercials, ring tones, video games, and multimedia art. Political causes, activist causes, and charities adopt it. Other art forms, like remixes, samples, and mash-ups, use it as grist. More music than ever is ambient in the Brian Eno sense: fully integrated into daily life and capable of being enjoyed at a variety of attention levels. Music that can fit as many of these categories as possible, and some categories not yet conceived, will be more successful.

Onward, Toward Unemployment!

Money is, for better or worse, becoming less a motivating factor for musicians. As the disposability of music increases, its perceived monetary value decreases. CDs that sold millions of copies in 1990 for $20 are now on iTunes for $10. Amazon has used copies for $1. Apple’s iTunes, with its 99-cent song downloads, has come closest to realizing the dream of seamless micropayments. But new artists are not about to quit their day jobs.

The industry is trying desperately to hang onto its profit margin. It is no longer enough for a band to produce a simple CD. A release must be a multimedia event, with packages offered to consumers at a variety of price points. For example, the free MP3 download, an inexpensive CD of same, a more expensive bonus edition on 180 gram virgin vinyl with a hardbound book of prints, and a "collector’s edition" featuring a pint of the artist’s blood. An army of suits is hard at work thinking up other, wilder business models in an effort to keep the money coming.

The fact is, creating music is increasingly art for art’s sake, ars gratia artis, as it was before Thomas Edison realized he could mass-produce phonograph recordings.

The Realtime Ideal

It follows from Part I that a band must do the following to adapt to the twenty-first century market. We call this the Realtime approach, as opposed to the Studiotime approach, the old way of overproducing an album’s worth of songs over a period of months or years. Realtime is a model of making and distributing music in the modern world.

A Realtime band:

• Has a strong Internet presence.
• Distributes itself on the Internet, without a label.
• Promotes itself without a label.
• Creates music at home, without expensive studios.
• Exists in and thrives in the long tail.
• Does not mass-produce physical media, like CDs.
• Does not restrict itself to albums and songs.
• Admits it is disposable and ephemeral, perhaps going so far as to release music as podcasts (a subscription model).
• Has a low craft ratio, which implies music released frequently.
• Continuously creates content in a variety of media.
• Creates music that lends itself to ready application in film, multimedia art, activist causes, mash-ups, and as ambient music.
• Is motivated by something other than money and deluded dreams of having a career in music.
• Does these things while having fun and reveling in the post-postmodernism of it all.

The Casual Distractions do these things.

We are not only producing gravity-defying music, we exemplify the Realtime approach and are promoting it. We believe Realtime is the punk of the twenty-first century; an antidote for ProTools, Auto-Tune, quantized beats, Photoshopped perfection, and endless digital studio tweaking; a return to creating entertainment that is immediate, relevant, and alive.