At age 25, Jim makes $100,000 a year. He’s constantly traveling for business. He has a large home in which he often doesn’t visit some rooms for months at a time. He eats out every single night. He drives a leased Lexus, which he updates every few years at the end of the lease. He buys a whole new wardrobe every six months, taking the leftovers to Goodwill. He spends everything he brings in.
At age 25, Bill makes $35,000 a year. He lives in a smaller home and doesn’t travel much. He makes most of his own meals at home. He drives a Toyota Corolla, which he owns free and clear. He wears clothes until they’re worn, then shops at Goodwill for replacements, often picking up Jim’s barely-worn clothes. At the end of the year, he usually has about $5,000 of his income left over, which he sticks into his stock investments which earn 8% a year.
In ten years, Jim’s net worth hasn’t grown a cent. In those same ten years, Bill has $72,000 in the bank.
At the twenty year mark, Jim’s net worth still hasn’t grown a cent. In those same twenty years, Bill has built up $228,098 in the bank.
At the thirty year mark, Jim’s still breaking even. Bill, on the other hand, has $566,416 in the bank.
At age sixty five, Jim hasn’t accumulated a cent and will be working for the man for the rest of his life. At the same age, Bill has $1.3 million in the bank and can do whatever he wants for the rest of his life – and probably already started doing that a few years earlier.
It doesn’t matter how much you earn. It matters how much you save.
When I was twenty five, my net worth was negative and heading south rapidly. I spent more than I earned and I didn’t really worry about the consequences of it. I figured if I had the money – or the credit – I certainly ought to spend it in whatever way made my life more enjoyable right now.
I’m now thirty one. My net worth is still negative (although it would be positive if I counted the value of my home towards it, which I do not), but it grows every month in a positive direction and will soon become positive even without the house value.
One might immediately think that I must have made my life less enjoyable to make that change. Actually, my life is more enjoyable now.
I have a better grasp on the things that actually make me happy and I don’t waste my money on things that don’t.
I’m not chained to a desk and a career, fearing the pink slip – I set my own career rules and goals.
I’m not afraid of getting the mail any more and I don’t wake up at night worried about how I’m possibly going to make ends meet or pay all of this off in the future.
Perhaps best of all, my financial position is improving every single month and I no longer see the long-term future as some kind of musty cloud that will “work itself out.” I know it’s getting better and I know that, if I continue on this path, I’ll be able to easily have some of the big things I actually want in life, like a beautiful house in the country with some wooded land in the back.
My life now is something I’ll happily trade having a shiny new Lexus and an iPhone and a set of high-end golf clubs and eating out every night for. In exchange, I’m not worried about the future and I have career and personal freedom I would never otherwise have.
Wealth has little to do with how much you earn. It’s how you spend – or save – it.
Enthusiasts of frequent-flier mileage have all kinds of crazy strategies for racking up credits, but few have been as quick and easy as turning coins into miles.
At least several hundred mile-junkies discovered that a free shipping offer on presidential and Native American $1 coins, sold at face value by the U.S. Mint, amounted to printing free frequent-flier miles. Mileage lovers ordered more than $1 million in coins until the Mint started identifying them and cutting them off.
Coin buyers charged the purchases, sold in boxes of 250 coins, to a credit card that offers frequent-flier mile awards, then took the shipments straight to the bank. They then used the coins they deposited to pay their credit-card bills. Their only cost: the car trip to make the deposit.
Richard Baum, a software-company consultant who lives in New Jersey, ordered 15,000 coins. "I never unrolled them," he says. "The UPS guy put them directly in my trunk."
Patricia Hansen, a San Diego retiree who loves to travel, ordered $10,000 in coins from the Mint. "My husband took them to the bank," Ms. Hansen says, and she earned 10,000 miles toward free or upgraded travel.
That's small change compared with what some mile collectors did. The coin program was a popular play on FlyerTalk.com, an online community where frequent travelers and mileage mavens share travel tips and profitable mileage plays. One FlyerTalker, identified by his online moniker, Mr. Pickles, claims to have bought $800,000 in coins. He posted pictures of the loot on FlyerTalk.
He says his largest single deposit was $70,000 in $1 coins. He used several banks and numerous credit cards. He earned enough miles to put him over two million total at AMR Corp.'s American Airlines, giving him lifetime platinum-elite status -- early availability of upgrades for life and other perks on American and its partners around the world. He also pumped miles into his account at UAL Corp.'s United Airlines and points into his Starwood Preferred Guest program account.
A spokesman for the Mint says it has no record of anyone purchasing that many coins, but orders could have been shipped to different names and addresses.
Another FlyerTalk member used the coin program to help earn a free two-week trip to Tahiti that he took with his wife at the end of October. He worked hotel, airline and credit-card programs carefully to pull together the rewards he wanted.
The allure of frequent-flier miles, which were introduced by American in 1981, was that they offered something for nothing. The miles rewarded loyalty and proved to be an extremely powerful marketing tool.
Now, airlines have turned miles into more than a competitive device; they have become a currency that airlines can sell, usually at less than a penny a mile, to other merchants to generate revenue. More miles are put into circulation by companies -- including credit-card issuers, hotels, mortgage servicers, and florists -- than are given to travelers for flights.
The mile is such a cherished commodity that airlines have even bolstered their balance sheets by preselling billions of miles. Citigroup Inc., which gives away American AAdvantage miles to credit-card customers, agreed to lend American $1 billion in September. The loan is to be repaid between 2012 and 2016 -- not in cash but in miles.
Pushing miles into everyday commerce has created unique opportunities for mileage addicts. For many, chasing miles is a way to vastly improve their travel. Accumulate enough miles to land elite status, and you get early boarding, better seat selection, access to upgrades, premium check-in and security lines, and sometimes use of fancy airport lounges on international trips. It goes far beyond just tallying miles for free tickets.
FlyerTalk
Some fliers have been taking advantage of a free-shipping offer from the U.S. Mint to rack up frequent-flier miles by buying dollar coins.
Landing those free tickets has gotten more expensive in recent years as airlines have pushed the number of miles required for many trips higher and as they have added fees and co-payments to some awards. Consumers are often frustrated as well by difficulty in getting the trips they want on the dates they want since airlines restrict availability of award seats. But the airline mile remains a potent perk that consumers chase around the world.
Even with all the offers that are available, the deal the Mint offers -- free miles without spending any dollars -- is unique. The Mint says the dollar-coin free-shipping offer began in June 2008. About $130 million in coins have been issued to 40,000 buyers, mostly coin collectors, community banks and small businesses such as vending-machine companies and car washes.
The Mint says it costs, on average, about $3 to ship each 250-coin box. So $10,000 in coins would be 40 boxes, or $120 in shipping. As for credit-card costs to the government, a Treasury Department agency handles all government credit-card transactions and negotiates costs. No particular credit-card expense is charged to the Mint, a spokesman says.
In late August and September, officials noticed a sharp uptick in "large repetitive orders" from a group of individuals, Mint spokesman Tom Jurkowsky says. At about the same time, the Mint received reports from banks around the country that coins were being deposited that were still in their U.S. Mint boxes, he says.
Officials found Internet chat rooms where the coins-for-miles scheme was detailed. Letters were sent to customers asking whether their intended use complied with the program's purpose. Customers who didn't respond were blocked from the program, Mr. Jurkowsky says. Fewer than 400 buyers were blocked, he says.
"Is this illegal? No. Is it the right thing to do? No, it's not what the program is intended to do," Mr. Jurkowsky says.
Dollar coins save the country money because they can last 30 years or more and can be recycled, the Mint says. A paper dollar in circulation lasts only about 21 months, says the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing. The free-shipping program is meant to put more coins into day-to-day use.
The Mint has added a warning to its Web site that credit-card companies could consider the purchases cash-equivalent transactions not eligible for miles, and Mint officials plan to contact credit-card issuers "to try to implement a solution," he says.
Mileage fanatics say merchants and hotel programs can be an excellent way to supplement frequent-flier accounts.
Hyatt Hotels Corp. currently offers its Gold Passport program members a free night for every two nights at one of the chain's properties through Jan. 31. The free nights come with no blackout dates but have to be used by March 31. Charles Witt, a facilities planner in Washington, D.C., stopped by a suburban Hyatt Place hotel on his way home from work several times this fall, swiped his credit card to buy a $50 room and went home, never opening the door to the hotel room.
For every $100 he spent, he got a free night at any Hyatt. He booked three free nights at the Grand Hyatt in Tokyo over New Year's -- rooms that would have cost him $600 a night.
"Once you start on this road, it's very hard to get off," says Mr. Witt.
Hyatt says the promotion is meant to engender loyalty, and most customers use it more traditionally, collecting free nights for regular stays. But the company welcomes people so passionate about its hotels that they'll go to elaborate lengths to stay at Hyatt.
"We don't discourage that," says Jeff Zidell, vice president of Hyatt's Gold Passport program. "There are those extremists in whatever business you're in who do what they can to get the most out of it."
Write to Scott McCartney at middleseat@wsj.com
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A1
Dinky pocketbooks with WebKit transforms
I'm a big fan of stuff written on paper. My computer is covered in useful post-it notes, and I do a lot of planning on paper at the start of every client-side build.
On my desk at work is a piece of paper written in felt tip that I pass around to my co-workers on occasion. It's a reference document for how we check projects out of subversion, upload to live and some basic terminal commands for people who are unfamiliar in that environment.
This was a great opportunity to break out my favourite paper folding technique, where an A4 page becomes an 8 page booklet. I first learnt about this from a Christmas card I received a few years ago from some very inventive friends.
Brian Suda happened to be in the office that day and pointed me to a cool Flash interface for creating these, pocketmod.com. He also suggested that it would be possible to build these using just HTML and CSS with CSS3 transforms, currently supported by Safari and WebKit.
Inspired, I did exactly that.
Here's the demo.html (no transforms, so I can easily preview the pages) - the transforms are applied by the print stylesheet, so hit "print preview" to see them. Alternatively, visit demo.html?print to preview the print stylesheet directly in your browser.
Just in case you aren't running Webkit or Safari, here's what the print output looks like:
Each "page" has a set width and height (241x370 px) and is absolutely positioned, but the real magic happens with the CSS3 transforms in the print stylesheet:
/* rotated left */
#page1, #page8, #page7, #page6 {
-webkit-transform: translate(64.5px, -64.5px) rotate(-90deg);
}
/* rotated right */
#page2, #page3, #page4, #page5 {
-webkit-transform: translate(-64.5px, -64.5px) rotate(90deg);
}
It's not enough just to rotate 90 or -90 degrees. This works fine if you are rotating something that is square because the rotation happens around the centre point. I wanted to rotate the rectangles around the corner to ensure they fitted snugly inside their parent container. The solution was to shift the position using a translate() transform. I could have done this with position: relative, but I opted for a transform since I was already using -webkit-transform for the rotation. 64.5px is worked out as (height - width) / 2.
You can fill each page with whatever you like, but make sure it fits or it will be clipped by the overflow: hidden applied to the page. The only required markup is as follows:
<div id="book">
<div id="page1" class="page"></div>
<div id="page2" class="page"></div>
<div id="page3" class="page"></div>
<div id="page4" class="page"></div>
<div id="page5" class="page"></div>
<div id="page6" class="page"></div>
<div id="page7" class="page"></div>
<div id="page8" class="page"></div>
</div>
I surround textual content with a <div class="inner"> to apply sensible padding without affecting the width of the page.
There are currently two special page types. An empty page with lines (suitable for hand-written notes) is achieved by applying a class of lines:
<div id="page5" class="page lines"></div>
The second special page uses the Google Static Maps API. The API takes a bunch of name value pairs, which I decided to represent using a definition list. On load, pages with the class gmap are scanned for definition lists, which are then hidden and replaced by an image constructed from the definition terms.
<div id="page4" class="page gmap">
<dl>
<dt>center</dt>
<dd>50.8197155,-0.1365716</dd>
<dt>key</dt>
<dd>insert your Google Maps API key here (get one here)</dd>
<dt>zoom</dt>
<dd>13</dd>
</dl>
</div>
I use Simon's www.getlatlon.com to find the correct values.
Aside from these special pages, I've included styles for the HTML usual suspects - lists, tables, headings, pre etc. To make a todo list, simply apply a class of todo to a <ul> or an <ol>. To make a blank todo list, just use blank list items.
Once you've constructed and printed your dinky booklet masterpiece, you'll need to fold it. Here's a nifty video from pocketmod.com showing how:
I've published the code on GitHub, so please feel free try it out yourself or fork it and have a play. Let me know what you think.
Simplest jQuery Slideshow
A friend was looking at doing a simple slideshow. The requirements were very straightforward:
- No animation controls. eg: play, stop.
- Images should cross-fade.
Her instinct was to find an existing jQuery plug-in and revise it to work to her needs. That would seem simple enough but if you do a search for jQuery slideshows, you'll find that there are plenty of them and they are filled with plenty of functionality.
Using an existing plug-in wasn't very practical and hard to work with. I had even recommended a script that I, myself, had written but she quickly realized it didn't meet the requirements.
I put my thinking cap on and decided to write a script from scratch. "Under 20 lines," I exclaimed! In the end, it turned out much simpler than even I predicted.
(If you're a TL;DR kinda person, check out the demo.)
HTML and CSS
The HTML was very straightforward: a DIV with some IMGs in it.
<div class="fadein"> <img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2610/4148988872_990b6da667.jpg"> <img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2597/4121218611_040cd7b3f2.jpg"> <img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2531/4121218751_ac8bf49d5d.jpg"></div>
In thinking about the CSS, I decided to just lock all the images into the same place using absolute positioning.
.fadein { position:relative; width:500px; height:332px; }.fadein img { position:absolute; left:0; top:0; }
jQuery Slideshow
Now to think about the slideshow. First, I knew that I'd want to hide all the images except the first one.
$('.fadein img:gt(0)').hide();
You have to remember that the image index starts at 0. That means that we want all images after the first one to be hidden.
Next, I need a setInterval to iterate through the images every few seconds.
setInterval(function(){ },3000);
From here, I started writing this out piece by piece to get what I wanted. I needed the first image to fade out.
$('.fadein :first-child').fadeOut()
After that, I need the next image to fade in.
Then I needed to take the first image and throw it onto the end of the stack.
.end().appendTo('.fadein')
The end() resets jQuery's internal reference back to the original selection. That way, it's the :first-child that I'm appending to the end of the .fadein element and not the next('img').
That's it?
Well, yes. That's it.
$(function(){
$('.fadein img:gt(0)').hide();
setInterval(function(){
$('.fadein :first-child').fadeOut()
.next('img').fadeIn()
.end().appendTo('.fadein');},
3000);
});
Check out the demonstration page to this this little script in action.
Is there an even simpler way to do this? (Some ideas that I haven't tried: Is specifying img in next() necessary? Could I have used eq(0) instead of :first-child to save a couple bytes?)
In Ray Bradbury’s book, The Illustrated Man, the man of the title is covered with moving, shifting tattoos. If you look at them, they will tell you a story.
New LED tattoos from the University of Pennsylvania could make the Illustrated Man real (minus the creepy stories, of course). Researchers there are developing silk and silicon implantable devices which sit under the skin like a tattoo. Already implanted into mice, these tattoos could carry LEDs, turning the wearer’s skin into a screen.
The silk substrate onto which the chips are mounted eventually dissolve away inside the body, leaving just the electronics behind. The silicon chips are around the length of a small grain of rice — about one millimeter, and just 250 nanometers thick, and the sheet of silk will keep them in place, moulding to the shape of the skin when saline is added.
These displays could be hooked up to any kind of electronic device, also inside the body. Medical uses are being explored, from blood-sugar sensors that show their readouts on the skin itself to neurodevices that tie into the body’s nervous system — hooking chip to particular nerves to control a prosthetic hand, for example.
Chips are already used inside bodies, most notably the tiny RFID tags injected into pets. But the flexible nature of these “tattooed” circuits means they can move elastically with the body, sitting in places that a rigid circuit board couldn’t. The first displays are sure to be primitive but likely very useful for the patients that receive them — you won’t be getting the full-color, hi-res images that come with ink, but functional displays. This doesn’t mean that the commercial and artistic possibilities are being ignored.
[...]
We, of course, are considering the geekier side of this tech. GPS, with a map readout on the back of the wrist would certainly be useful, as would chips that cover your eyeballs and can darken down when the sun is shining too bright.
And a full-body display will eventually be used for advertising. Combine this with bioluminescent ink, for example, and you could turn yourself into a small, walking version of Times Square. At least, unlike a real tattoo, you can switch this one off.
In fact, if you start to imagine the possible uses, they seems almost endless. Just like the stories that play across the body of the Illustrated Man.
Tattoo You [H+ Magazine]
Implantable Silicon-Silk Electronics [Technology Review]
Photo of real tattoo: Spacemanbobby/Flickr
When people ask me what I do all day I have a hard time summing it up. I design, I edit, I think, I review, I suggest, I teach. Some things I mess up, some things I fix up.
But what I really do most of the time is trim, tuck, iron, cut, press, and fit. I’m a software tailor.
And I’m starting to think that’s my perfect role. My team is incredible. I don’t need to tell them what to do. If there was a fantasy software league, I wouldn’t trade my team for anyone.
But there are times during the development and design process where the things we make just don’t fit as well as they could. That sentence could be slimmed down. That design element could be trimmed off. We could cut a step out of that process. And the overall experience could use a good press to iron out any stubborn wrinkles.
So while a tailor can make bespoke clothes, most of the time they’re fitting clothes other people made. And most of the time that’s exactly what I’m doing — fitting software my team made.
Some people may call this process editing, but I think it’s more akin to tailoring. So that’s how I’m going to explain my job from now on.
I’m a software tailor.
You won't find a law that says a workspace has to be in a gray fabric-covered box or a white-walled room. Today's workspace proves that with the beautiful, airy openness of childhood tree house.
One industrious Lifehacker reader decided his backyard, and his workflow, could use a tree-house-like escape. Built on a small addition and incorporating a beautiful tree, it's a sweet little getaway with everything—ample sunshine, a comfy and compact workstation tucked under the loft stairs, and a great look.
Our home is a small one for the Oakland / Piedmont hills. My wife, an artist and myself are avid readers - even with a transition to ebooks for myself years ago, our collection is outgrowing our home! She needed more work space, and we needed a playspace for our son. These rooms are perched up the hill behind our house, creating a serene meditative atmosphere, while allowing brief respite from home life to conquer an ever changing workload. They are reconfigurable to a significant degree, serving also as reading/theater rooms, emergency guest shelter, yoga / art studio or audio lab.
I've always loved the challenge of organizing and making use of small spaces. Extensive travel to Japan, as well as years of living in Manhattan served as influences for these minimalist, yet storage-rich structures. The cabinets and pantries are all from the IKEA kitchen series. The electrical run went a bit crazy, but I'm pleased with the result. The carbon footprint is reduced by a solar array on the roof of the main house. The "offices" are both hard wired to the home's main server array.
As we have just completed the project after 7 long months, I'm excited as to what the Treehaus' future holds...
Check out a the photos below to take a tour of the Treehaus:
If you enjoyed looking at the Treehaus workspace, you'll definitely want to check out another workspace we've featured with an outdoors and tree-house vibe, The Office on the Forest's Edge.
If you have a workspace of your own to show off, throw the pictures on your Flickr account and add it to the Lifehacker Workspace Show and Tell Pool. Include some details about your setup and why it works for you, and you just might see it featured on the front page of Lifehacker.
Send an email to Jason Fitzpatrick, the author of this post, at jason@lifehacker.com.
I love this. And I want one.
Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing?
This is the graph the record industry doesn’t want you to see.
It shows the fate of the three main pillars of music industry revenue - recorded music, live music, and PRS revenues (royalties collected on behalf of artists when their music is played in public) over the last 5 years.
We’ve broken each category into two sub-categories so that, for any chunk of revenue - recorded music sales, for instance - you can see the percentage that goes to the artist, and the percentage that goes elsewhere. (In the case of recorded music, the lion’s share of revenue goes to the record label; in the case of live, the promoter takes a cut etc.)
Hopefully, this analysis - and there’s more on the nuts and bolts of our method below - sheds some factual light on the claims and counter-claims that are paranoically sweeping across the music industry establishment, not least that put forward by the singer Lily Allen in this paper recently - and the BPI - that artists are losing out as a result of the fall in sales of recorded of music.
The most immediate revelation, of course, is that at some point next year revenues from gigs payable to artists will for the first time overtake revenues accrued by labels from sales of recorded music.
Why live revenues have grown so stridently is beyond the scope of this article, but our data - compiled from a PRS for Music report and the BPI - make two things clear: one, that the growth in live revenue shows no signs of slowing and two, that live is by far and away the most lucrative section of industry revenue for artists themselves, because they retain such a big percentage of the money from ticket sales.
(It’s often claimed that live revenues are only/mostly benefitting so-called ‘heritage acts’. Unfortunately, the data doesn’t shed any light on this because live revenues are not broken down by type of act, gig size or ticket price.)
An even more striking thing, perhaps, emerges in this second graph, namely that revenues accrued by artists themselves have in fact risen over the past 5 years, despite the fall in record sales. (All the blue bars in the chart above represent revenues that go directly to artists. As you can see, the ‘blue total’ has risen noticeably.) This is mostly because of live revenues, but also because of the growing amount collected by the PRS on behalf of artists, which accounts for a much bigger chunk of industry revenues than most people realise.
(PRS revenues in fact break down into 4 categories - Broadcast and Online, Public Performance, Mechanical, International. You can explore this in more detail in this spreadsheet, which contains all our data.)
It’s interesting too that, overall, industry revenues have grown in the period - though admittedly not by much - which arguably adds strength to the notion that, when the BPI releases its annual report claiming how much ‘the music industry’ has suffered from the growth in illegal file-sharing, what it perhaps should be saying is how much the record labels have suffered.
For other people in the industry, not least artists, the future arguably holds more promise.
A couple of notes about our methods: the data, as pointed out, comes from the PRS and the BPI. We are grateful to the PRS in particular for helping us with a model to work out what percentage of a particular chunk of industry revenue was likely to be returned to artists. In the case of recorded music, we used an average 90/10 per cent split between labels/artists. In the case of live we used a 90/10 split between artists/promoters.
We hit one major snag. The PRS report gives a figure for annual live music revenues but it does not indicate what percentage of that goes to venues. (Before doing the split for live music revenues between artist and promoter, you first need to take out the percentage that goes to the venue.) We asked several big concert promoters and venue managers - AEG Europe, Carling Academy, and the PRS itself - what percentage of gig revenue one could reasonably assume, on average, went to the venue, and none would make an estimate. The closest we came to an answer was a remark from a senior industry source said ‘only a small percentage of live goes to venues’. That’s the best we had to work with.
We’ve therefore done the above calculations on the assumption that 10 per cent of live revenues go to the venue, but in these two graphs, we show how the situation would change if that figure rose to 20 per cent.
We would welcome any feedback on a more accurate figure to use for the venue’s share of live revenues, and any more general feedback on our methods.
13 Responses to “Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing?”
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Un beau graphique… - November 13, 2009
[...] http://labs.timesonline.co.uk/blog/2009/11/12/do-music-artists-do-better-in-a-world-with-illegal-fil... [...]
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Music Artists Making More Money Than Ever? - November 13, 2009
[...] The graph the record industry doesn’t want you to see (via We Make Money Not Art) Share and Enjoy: [...]
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Matteo Pompoli (mpompoli) 's status on Friday, 13-Nov-09 13:36:15 UTC - Identi.ca - November 13, 2009
[...] http://labs.timesonline.co.uk/blog/2009/11/12/do-music-artists-do-better-in-a-world-with-illegal-fi... a few seconds ago from xmpp [...]
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 Nolan - November 13, 2009
Very interesting piece. It seems that people have a set budget constraint (that’s growing YOY) for music, and when the parts of it that can be captured in a file-format fall in price, it simply diverts that savings into other forms of music spending.
Keep up the good work!
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 Chris Cooke, Business Editor, CMU - November 13, 2009
While your stats look basically sound, just two points to make.
1. The main reason why record companies take a much bigger cut of record sales than gig promoters take from live revenues is because it is the record companies who traditionally make the initial investment in new talent - allowing new bands to give up the day job, funding the development and recording of their music, and marketing the bands.
While gig promoters do take some financial risk when they sign up to promote a band’s tour, it is generally nothing like the risk a record company takes. And both artist and promoter benefits greatly from the marketing activity entirely funded by the record company.
2. While the live sector is doing very well, it is worth looking at where the serious money is being made - you’ll find it is the likes of Madonna, Paul McCartney, Elton John, Bon Jovi, The Rolling Stones etc who both generate the most live revenues and who command the serious fees. Grass roots musicians often barely cover their costs when they play live.
Therefore telling new musicians that they no longer need a record deal, and should just give away their recordings and rely on their live revenue isn’t very helpful. Most bands need someone to write them a large(ish) cheque in order to properly launch their careers, and whoever writes that cheque will want a sizable cut of their future revenues.
The recordings-to-live trend you outline has been obvious for over a decade, and the record companies really should have faced up to the fact they were securing their investments on the declining revenue stream ten years ago. Then they should have diversified their operations, rather then relying on DRM and litigation to stem the decline of record sales.
But what I would say is that if the trends you outline continue, those who invest in music will start to secure their investment on live revenues, so the percentage of that money going to artists will decline.
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Morten Josefsen (mgjosefsen) 's status on Friday, 13-Nov-09 14:50:32 UTC - Identi.ca - November 13, 2009
[...] http://labs.timesonline.co.uk/blog/2009/11/12/do-music-artists-do-better-in-a-world-with-illegal-fi... about a minute ago from seesmic [...]
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 Mat M - November 13, 2009
This is fantastic. However, my one challenge would be that these figures include heritage artists who have benefited from having their profile raised by multi-million £ record company marketing campaign to get their profile where it is today.
It’s just a suggestion, but my view is that you’d need to look at artists who began after X date to really assess the situation.
Cracking stuff though.
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 Kevin Parks - November 13, 2009
Very intereseting analysis, but I question the use of PRS revenues, which go to songwriters and publishers, as opposed to PPL revenues, which go to recording artists.
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 Henrik Holst - November 13, 2009
>Most bands need someone to write them a large(ish) cheque in order to properly launch their careers, and whoever writes that cheque will want a sizable cut of their future revenues.
And you mean that recordlabels do that? AFAIK new bands live like slaves until their records sell beyond the recording costs which they owe to the recordlabel or until the contract is up and they can jump ship. No wonder every sucessfull artist starts their own label…
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 since - November 13, 2009
the above post is correct…publishers receive 50% of PRS money taken in. though sometimes the artist can act as their own publisher, most of the time it is a third party.
also, a good portion of PRS revenues are derived from use of licensed music in television, advertising, and film. this licensing is done in lieu of paying a composer to create original music. so, when looking at the industry as whole, the PRS revenues are increasing at the expense of paid composers who would have received a larger sum for their work.
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 Vic - November 13, 2009
Do the recording industry figures include music DVD sales I wonder? If not, how much do they contribute? All the industry figures I have seen quoted seem to be CD/download sales.
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Chris Cooke, Business Editor, CMU - November 13, 2009
To clarify my point to Henrik Holst
When I say write a large cheque, I mean pay for studio time, mastering of tracks, marketing and PR, and, if you do a CD release, the cost of pressing and distributing the disks. This is what the label covers the costs of - in addition to paying the band a lump cash sum, which, as you say, can be negligible depending on the deal.
Whatever route an artist takes, most need investment from somewhere to get started, and whoever makes the investment will want to secure it on some future revenue stream.
Until recently successful artists setting up their own labels still required a lot of upfront cash, which is why most did so in partnership with an existing major record company. It’s true that as it becomes easier and cheaper for big acts to reach their fans, it is increasingly viable for those acts to go it completely alone (normally with the support of their managers). Which is cool (Trent Reznor is sort of writing the text book on such things). Though even those acts are really cashing in on initial marketing work funded by a traditional record company.
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Henrik Holst - November 13, 2009
I think that we are close to (if not right on) the same page Chris.
Of course you are correct in that labels provide:
1. studio
2. mastering
3. marketing & PR
4. pressing and distributing CDs
What file-sharing to some extent “promises” is to remove the costs from #3 and #4. Which honestly is not always the 100% truth. For example #3 can be managed with “bad” music sucessfully by a label, and probably not at all by the community.
#2 is something that various “golden ears” groups have been fighting to stop for quite some time. Mastering in many cases means compress the audio so you get highest possible volume and completely removing volume differences in the tracks leaving a track without any form of dynamic.
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