 Okay, so we'll get started today, just to sort of let you know how this happened today. What I came to the Berkman Center to do was to kind of function as an intermediary between a number of different worlds. So I'm a full-time touring musician and have been for a long time, but I also have a little foot in the activism world and a foot in the tech policy world and a foot here at the Berkman Center and trying to connect all these worlds around this idea of how to make a sustainable living for artists. One of the organizations that I've worked with for a long time is a group called the Future of Music Coalition, which was founded 10 plus years ago, and what we are is a national non-profit that advocates for musicians in the policy space essentially. I'm on the board and one of my fellow board members is our guest today, Kristen Thompson. If you listened to all things considered yesterday, there was a really nice kind of overview of a project that Future of Music is going public with right now, which is an artist revenue survey. Yesterday's NPR piece was a nice overview of it, but what Kristen and her co-survey director, Gene Cook, are doing are having different data releases around different ideas. We're lucky enough to have Kristen today premiering a data release about the teams that artists put together and how that is changing and interacting with the current music business. All I can say about Kristen is she's amazing and educator, activist, organizer, and presenter today. Thank you very much. Thanks so much. Erin covered a lot in this intro, so I'll dive in and Erin and I have had conversation recently about what to cover today because there is a lot of data in the Artist Revenue Streams project. As a preface for this, the reason that we did the Artist Revenue Streams project is that clearly everyone in this room knows that there's been this vast change in the musical landscape for artists in the past 10 to 12 years especially. There's so many new technologies and services available to artists to help them create and promote and distribute their music. There's assumptions made that this is clearly broken down barriers to the entry points, that access to the marketplace, but for us the question has been how have all these changes affected their ability to make a living? How have they affected their revenue streams? This is the point of the Artist Revenue Streams project. We have quite a few slides today, but a lot of them are just decoration because we have so much data and we wanted to sort of be able to present some of the stuff visually and so we'll run through quite a few, but please interrupt us at any time, please stop the conversation or whatever I'm saying to ask a question or a clarifying point because we really should have a dialogue about this instead of me just presenting. So the question that we're trying to discover through this project is how musicians are generating revenue based on their creative work. And it's funny to think about why we need to do this work because all of us are bombarded with data points every day and the music industry has for many years been kind of drowning in data. There's billboard charts and there's Nielsen data and there's SoundScan data, but this research isn't trying to understand, say, the label's leverage power or the social graph of artists or whatever, it's not about consumer spending or anything like that. It's about measuring individual musicians' earning capacity. And so it's a benchmarking effort too because this is kind of the first time we've ever tried to do something like this, especially across the genre and amongst all the disciplines for us that means composers, recording artists, performers, session musicians, teachers and people who make money off their brand. So it's about how much money they end up putting in their pocket and how it's changing over time. And really the only way you can figure this out is by asking musicians directly. So the methodology we've been using is a triple one. We've been doing in-person interviews. We did about 80 in the past year and a half and they cover everything from the composer who doesn't perform to the performer who doesn't compose and everybody in between, Nashville songwriters, hip-hop DJs, everything like that. We also did some financial case studies. Those are also available online, really interesting. We've done five so far and we probably have four or five more to go. And we did this big online survey last fall. And as you'll see through some data we can present today, there's a lot that you can learn from this survey. About over 5,300 musicians and composers completed the survey so we have a lot to work with. So we're just going to touch on some stuff today but there is a website that holds all of our results and a lot more about the methodology of the project. It's at money.futuremusic.org. One of the things that people sometimes know us for is this list of 42 revenue streams. We won't go through it in detail today but it is available on the website and it itemizes all of the possible revenue streams for US-based musicians based on those sort of contours of copyright law and business practice. And if anyone sees anything missing please let us know. So for today's talk Aaron and I thought we would sort of dive into one of the sort of romantic notions about how technology is impacting musicians' ability to make a living and that's whether musicians can do it all themselves. It is a true. Can a musician do it all themselves? Can they play all the roles? Can they do all the business transactions that you need to do in order to make everything work? And so we're going to refer to some data from our survey, from the Music Money for Music Survey but also our personal experience and as musicians and community members I pale in comparison to her guitar playing but I was part of her Christmas choir so anti-Christmas choir so before we weighed into sort of the survey data we wanted to give you a sense of the different roles that musicians play. Some of this might be really elementary for some of you who understand this one but we'll do it anyway. So think of music creators in three big buckets for today. We have people who are composers and songwriters or songwriters, people who are recording artists and people who are performers. So many musicians play all these roles simultaneously. So if I write my own songs and then I record those songs and then I play them live I'm doing all three. Aaron is that you? That's you. But as a reminder in this research we thought of these roles separately and we also interviewed and talked to and thought about session players separately and teachers separately because they all have slightly different access to revenue streams. So it's because US copyright law and the contours and the business practices treat these roles differently that we're going to talk about them a little bit separately today. Because there are revenue streams available to songwriters that are not available to recording artists. The one that sticks out we should probably mention is the public performance right which if your music gets played on the radio the composer earns a royalty but the person who performed it or the recording artist who sang it does not. So it's important to think of the distinctions. So what are these creator types need to propel their music career forward? In the most basic sense the composer needs somebody to help them license their compositions. The recording artist needs somebody to help them record and distribute that recorded music and the performer needs someone to help them organize and get paid to play shows. Let's look at each separately for a second. So the composer they write music they want compositions to be licensed for use. This means they need to make connections with recording artists that might perform their work, record labels, producers, TV, people that might license their work. This is frequently done by a publisher. So the publisher acts as a liaison, they shop the songs around, they help get them placed, they deal with licensing fees and negotiations and paperwork and compensation and for this work the publishing company gets 50% of the writer's share of licensing deals or compositions based on those royalty streams. Do you want to jump in and say anything about publishers right now, Erin? No, not just to add. We were talking about what does a publisher do, right? So they might, yes, get your song placed. And I was just thinking they get other singers to sing your songs, too, you know? Yeah, that's sort of the traditional role of a publisher. Hey, I have this composition. Maybe Madonna wants to sing it. I hope. Yeah, I hope so. So the question in the current landscape can composers and songwriters self-publish? Do you need a publisher? And of course, yes, you can self-publish. There's many, many artists that represent themselves in publishing. They choose to retain control or perhaps there's no publisher that wants to publish them. That's OK. But so what are the challenges of self-publishing? Someone has to be the point person if there's requests for your stuff to be licensed. Well, you guys probably just don't have the same amount of leverage as a publisher who can dedicate time to finding places for your stuff to be used. But if this is a choice, it's fine. You get to keep 100% of the publishing money that might come through that if you're self-published. So let's look at recording artists. So these are musicians who go into the studio and they record compositions or songs. Now these might be songs that they wrote or they might be songs that someone else wrote. You can see why talking about the role separately matters. But they end up with a sound recording that's songs that fix to tape or a hard drive. And how do they get them from the studio into the hands of fans? So traditionally, this has been the job of the record label. They take the sound recording and they manufacture it onto whatever media is popular at the moment. They have vinyl 8-track and 11-inch, like Jack White put out. And then they distribute it to retailers. For this, they get a hefty chunk of the wholesale price and 50% of any deals that are the licensing on the sound recording. But that's not all the record labels do. Traditionally, they have, in many instances, they're a source of cash to tour or record. They write big checks so that artists can get into nice studios and hire producers. Labels also give recording artists access to producers, to studios, booking agents, publicists. The record labels also have staff to deal with the boring stuff, like accounting and promo mailings. They also have PR muscle. They are able to get music played on commercial radio, which is incredibly influential. And they can get stuff reviewed in big records, big media publications. And if you're label-less, some of this stuff is really, really hard to do. It's really hard to get on commercial radio without a label. But also, hardly ever mentioned is legitimacy, because a label deal means that somebody thinks you're good enough to offer you a deal. And this is a green flag for other people in the music industry. It makes it easier to get a booking agent. It raises your profile. It makes it possible to get bigger shows, make more money with guarantees, and it gets you more prominent management, which are all tied into revenue. It's clear, as we'll see. But the trade-offs with signing label deals, some of them are very well understood or talked about a lot. You almost always have to transfer your copyrights to the record label. There may be upfront payments for you striking a deal with a label, for example, in advance. But oftentimes, you don't see any money after that, because it's hard to recoup and make money on the royalty side of things. Yeah? I just want to say something quick about the legitimate part. Like, I do think there's a growing idea that you don't need a label, and there is this idea that it's truly legit to be on your own. It's a story that's certainly happening. We can think of artists that that's true for. I actually still feel like in the general music industry, and especially in the ways that Kristen's talking about in terms of leveraging different roles and having multiple roles, and working with established parts of the music industry, it still matters. I don't want it to, but I think it still does. So the other thing worth mentioning is the loss of control. And we don't mean control in the biggest sense, but also just like you're often on someone else's schedule. And there's a lot more people that have to agree to something for it to happen. You're not completely in control of your sound recordings and what happens with them. So there's those trade-offs. Well, can the same question, can musicians record and release their own music? Yes, it happens all the time. And in fact, it's a lot easier now than even 10, 12 years ago. There are now music services like CD Baby and Tunecore Fledge Music that help artists really get through some of these sort of mechanical parts of things. It's very easy to get music into the big stores like iTunes or Amazon through these intermediaries that make it very affordable and really easy to do. The process, the sort of mechanical parts of it, making records and getting it very demystified now and quite simple for most musicians to participate in. But what are the trade-offs with doing it yourself? You have a long list of things you are responsible for. Promotion, manufacturing, physical and digital distribution if you choose to do physical. And so either that's yourself doing the work, or perhaps it's you have a manager. Perhaps you have to deal with distributors. You might have to hire a publicist. You might need a web designer. And there's this bottom thing. Someone has to pay for it. Luckily, this is another place where there's a lot more options. In prior years, if you didn't have a label, maybe you went and got a loan from somebody. But now there's a lot of alternative funding sources, Kickstarter, Pledge Music, other sort of crowd-funded options. You can strike some partnership deal with other labels. You could go for sponsorship. You could ask your parents. You could use credit cards. All of those things happen. And probably in bits and pieces too, right, Erin? Yeah, I've heard somebody talk about thinking about this funding question, which I'd like to return to at the end as something to talk more about as a venture capital question. It's also a good way to think about it. Yep. Is there? For example, a percentage of companies that exceed the up front payments, the lack of the outcome and the control of the outcome. Sure. So we'll just move on to our last little role profile performers. This one's the most clear cut. Probably the easiest to understand, just because the thing that performers need is just connections to venues and festivals and other places where they can perform. It sounds easy, but if anyone's tried to book a show here, it's let alone arrange a string of shows for a tour. It's not that easy. So usually performers in bands get a booking agent who helps them get shows. And the agent negotiates how much they get paid. And the ticket price and the size of the venue. And if the band is going out on tour, they try and string the show together so you're not driving 600 miles between shows. And for their work, they get about 10% to 15% of tour gross. Can bands book their own shows? Yes, they can. But the hard part is just the challenges are that you have to sort of fit your world into the booking, into the venue promoter's world, calling to arrange the dates on their office hours, making this work and sort of keeping track of all the details. But also you just lack the leverage that a booking agent has. A booking agent with a big roster can leverage certain bands against others. They also have green flags in the music world, like a very high-profile booking agent means you're just going to get more money because of who that person is. So these are all sort of all these people we've talked about, all these teammates and partners actually do have an impact on how much musicians make. So we've described the three essential teams. A composer or songwriter needs a publisher or some way to license their compositions. A recording artist needs a label or some way to distribute their music. A booking agent needs, I mean, a performer needs a booking agent or some way to arrange shows. But there's other roles that we haven't even talked about yet up top. Whatever role you play, or if you play all three, you might need a manager to keep track of everything. You might need an attorney to look at contracts to negotiate relationships and partnerships. You might need an accountant because all those details are quite overwhelming at times. If you are a recording artist or a performer, you might need a publicist at some point to help you promote a release or a tour. You might need somebody to help with web building, web design. You might need a graphic designer to help with album art. You might need a photographer. You might need a videographer. Then if you're a performer, there's even more people that might be involved. You probably have bandmates who are on tour with you. Whether they're part of a partnership or hired guns that you pay as session players. You might have a tour manager to help you keep things organized on tour. You might have a sound person. You might have a road crew. And if you're really big, you might have a bus driver. You might have a merch person. You might have a lighting director. There's a lot of people potentially involved in the sort of team framework. Yeah, but the promoter would never work for a particular artist. That's true. That's true. Sure. Yeah, so it's really hard for composers to make money on merchandise, but recording artists and performers, certainly, the merchandising side is enormous. Well, it can be big. But when we did our survey, there was like a range of two to 6% of all the sort of aggregated amount of money that all of our survey respondents said they made was only about between 2% and 6%, depending on what they played, was based on merchandise. Sure. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that Madonna's amount of money that comes from her brand is much bigger than your average artist, but it, again, is very contextual based on what you do. So let's look at a couple of case studies. One of them is the band. This is the band I was in in the 90s. So we were very do-it-yourself. We put out our own records, and we put out records of other bands we liked. We had a booking agent, which was critical. That was really important for us. And I don't think we could have booked our own shows after a certain point. We didn't have a manager. We didn't have a tour manager. We had an attorney when we needed one. We had an accountant for taxes. We never took road crew out. We always sort of moved our own gear. We always did our own merchandise. No webmaster, because we didn't have a website. And we used to publicist once in a while. We did have sort of an umbrella manufacturing and distribution deal with a bigger record label that had a Chicago office and a London office that helped us get stuff more globally released and distributed into more retailers, which was very helpful. But it was sort of a contract deal. We didn't find away any rights for that to happen. And then I thought Erin was willing to show what her team looks like. So maybe you can talk about that. Yeah. So I think it was interesting that Kristen mentioned pre-internet. I'm certainly post-internet. My first record came out in 1999. And I've always had a website. So for me, for publishing, my publishing has always felt too valuable for me. I have had a publishing offer, but it's never felt like enough money to me to give it away. But I do have an overseas publishing administrator. And basically what they do for a percentage of my royalties, they collect them. This is a longer, thornier question of why I'm not just paid what's owed to me by overseas companies. But in general, you aren't. And you do have to hire someone to go out and get that money for you. And they do it for a percentage. I do get some other auxiliary things from working with that person. I have the lawyer that I work with, attorney when necessary, comes through my overseas publishing administrator. And that's been completely valuable. And the lawyer that I work with works on contingency. So that's also kind of incredible. Record label, right now, I'm self. I have, as I said, with Indy, major label history. I'm at an interesting point right now. This talk is basically my life. And I have a record that's finished. I'm trying to figure out how to put it out right now. And so all of these questions that are coming up are real life questions for me. I have a booking agent. I would say they are possibly the piece of my team I cannot lose. As Christian was saying, I could do that work. But I think it's probably the hardest of all these things we're talking about for the artist to do themselves for a number of reasons. So manager, no. Self-managed right now. I have had that relationship in the past. It's been helpful. It's also a trade-off, like any of these other things we're talking about. So I've enjoyed being self-managed the last couple of years. Again, I'm at this point where I need to reconsider that. Accountant, yes. I have a full-time business manager who works for a small percentage of my tour gross. And I also would, that would be sort of next to booking agent someone that I couldn't lose, absolutely couldn't lose. I travel a ton. And my business manager actually makes sure that my credit cards get paid and my car insurance gets paid. It's not that I'm not capable of doing that. I do not want to feed this idea of artists not being capable of running their own life. I hate that trope. But it's very helpful for me. I have always had bandmates as Sidemen. I have never had an equitable partnership in bandmates. And I actually have preferred that for creative reasons. Actually, it's been really nice to, I play a lot of different kinds of music. And it's been really nice that as I go through different phases or different records to be able to bring in people that I've met, I've been able to bring in people who have different skill sets and have a kind of a band that can have a changing sound. And so just to clarify, that means you invite people to come on tour with you, and then they get paid a certain amount of money for that service. Yeah, and I usually do it by the week. But other artists will do it by the show. You can do it by the tour. People do that all the time. But in general, I'm going to have some players that I've worked with for probably five or six years off and on. And that seems to be in the overlaps. And then I might call someone that 10 years ago I did a gig with because I know they're good at this certain kind of music that I want to do. And it's the same thing for me in recording as well. Same thing when I pick people to come with me in the studio who aren't necessarily the people that are with me on the road. That's against the creative choice. No road crew, house sound person. I have at times combined the role of tour manager, sound person, road crew, merch. There's a sort of breed of crazy alien human who's willing to do all of that. And they fill a nice role for sort of a mid-level artist like myself. I, yes, publishes for record releases. I learned how to do my own website about 10 years ago because I was tired of how long it took for someone to change a tour date for me. And that's where it started. I learned basic HTML to be able to do that and have grown along with that. I also think for me, the choice of Webmaster as self is an artistic choice for me as well. I feel the way that I build my website and the way it runs is an expression and in a lot of ways an expression of who I am as an artist. And graphic designer for record releases and merch only. I do have one graphic designer I've worked with for a long time for almost everything for the past 10 years. And that's another important relationship for me in terms of having something consistent in the way that I present what I do to the world and that working relationship, the loyalty of it and the understanding of it is really important to me. Do you want to add in one more thing that you have? Your a la carte? Yes. OK, great. So also, we have all these roles and some of them I'm filling myself and some of them I can't. I have started working with a company called Buy the Pound Media. BJ is here. And BJ is, his company is one of a kind of a number of companies, sort of a new breed of company that are rising up to do, basically, with this a la carte artist services. So what I don't have time for, what I don't have a skill set for, I can sort of pick and choose from BJ's skill set and ask him to do certain things for me at certain times. And he works with a number of artists and it's different for every artist. But it's a really affordable, flexible solution for trying to solve these roles. Right, thanks. Does anyone have questions so far about the sort of set up of the roles and also even how Erin is currently organizing her life? Life. All right, well, that was sort of a long set up for just being able to show you some of the survey data about, because we did ask on the survey, who's on your team? And the list had about 18 different things on it. And as you'll see, there's quite a response. So just to give you a sense of the survey size, as we said, over 5,000 US-based musicians and composers completed the survey, which was a wonderful response rate. Genres, a lot of folks were in classical, but we had about 30 different genres represented. 40% of the respondents were basically spending their whole work week doing music. And for 42%, then they earned all of their personal annual income from music. Oh, there's a small strata at the lower level. But it was really nice to see such a high percentage of survey respondents making all their money from their craft. So how was the response, Charlie? It was a widely distributed online survey. In fact, Charlie was part of our effort to market it to as many musicians as possible. We used a variety of ways. We reached out through professional organizations that had memberships. We reached out through informal networks, blogs, earned media. What else? Social media. It was, yeah. Sure, we can cut the data in many ways and say what the characteristics are of folks that are in the 42%. I don't have it in front of me, but yeah, sure. We have a lot of different ways we can parse the data, because we asked very specifically about how much time you spend, what genres, how educated are you. So we'll see some of them, but we can actually fill in the gaps, too. The average personal gross income for our survey respondents was about $55,000. But we also were able to calculate how much money they made on music, because $55,000 might include stock returns and other jobs, because we just asked them, what's your personal gross income? This one was a calculation of their personal gross income multiplied by their percent of income they said they made from music. And so it was about $34,000, which is slightly lower than the per capita income that the Bureau of Labor Statistics offers. But this is just to give you a sense of the respondents from the survey. They were a highly educated group. 80% had a college degree or greater. And even more interesting, 61% had a music degree. That means they went to a conservatory or a music industry school. So that's a really high number. So we also asked them about, or we sort of tried to figure out how many roles they were playing. And maybe roles isn't the right word here. But this chart shows how much we asked them to allocate their money for a given year into eight buckets. Instead like, OK, this has to add up to 100%. How much money would you put in the composition bucket, in the performance bucket, in the session work bucket, in the teaching bucket? And everyone has their own mixture. But what this shows that, for the most part, more than half respondents are playing at least two roles. They're being a composer and a performer. Or they're a composer and a teacher. Or a teacher and a session musician. So you can see that it's really difficult, or it's not difficult. For our survey respondents, it's more likely they're playing more than one role. But for those 983 that are said, 100% of my money came from one role. So what are they doing? The largest number of them are making their money from live performance. So 100% of my money last year came from live performance. For 200 of them, 100% of their money came from being a salaried player. And other is a category we had so many other revenue streams we had to ask about. So other could have been, maybe they made all their money from AFM Special Payments Fund. Like, there's a lot of very specific revenue streams that are totally fine for certain types of artists to access. It's just that it was difficult to ask a general survey population about them. So that's just about the number of roles people are playing. So who are the team members of our survey respondents? We'll start with all 5371, the people everybody responded. As a note, we asked not just who's on your team, but what's the relationship? So one relationship is it a paid or contracted relationship? The second one is, is it an equity-slash-partnership relationship? Do you have some sort of relationship like that? The third is, is it volunteer pro bono? And the fourth is not applicable. And we made sure we asked not applicable for almost every question, because we know that we can't make assumptions about whether this applies to most musicians or not. And it's clear that not applicable is an important data point. So we can talk about that, too. But I think the interesting part about this chart is not what's first and what's last. But the number of things on it. I think about 17 or 18 potential team members. And it was also an open-ended question that we had more at the bottom. Other people, I'm trying to remember some of the responses people gave us. Merchandiser, there were some others that popped up that we hadn't thought of that were important to some people. But interesting that the not applicable one, just to sort of tease that out a bit. I mean, think about, why would a, I don't know, a booking agent not be applicable to somebody? Well, if you're an orchestra performer, you don't need a booking agent, yeah? Are you saying that 80% or whatever, affirmatively said not applicable, as opposed to just leaving it blank? Yes, they said not applicable. So they don't have a booking agent, whether they're paid, volunteer, whatever. That's right. Yeah, 80% of the people said, I don't have a booking agent. But thinking about the folks who took this survey, you might be in an orchestra, and you don't need a booking agent. You might be a session player. You're not responsible for booking the shows. You might be a teacher. You might be a composer. You're not performing. So there's a lot of different reasons that not applicable is an important measure. So just to keep in mind that the US music community is large and diverse and specialized. And there's many instances where what is applicable is very specific to the roles and the genres that people work in. So let's look more at the team data. We're able to cut it like we have four different present presentations of it. One of them is it's the same data. I just picked the top six to make it readable. And these are what we call full-time musicians. And for us, this definition is if the survey respondent was making more than 90% of their money from music and spending more than 36 hours a week doing music, that's our definition of full-time musician. So the dark purple bars, the full timers, or the full timers and the light purple bars are the not full timers, the people who are spending less than 36 hours and making less than 90% of their money. So the big differences that I see visually are the full-time musicians are more likely to have an accountant and an attorney, a paid accountant and a paid attorney. So that might be a chicken and egg thing, like perhaps you're a full-time musician, well, chicken and egg. Because you're a full-time musician, you might need an accountant and attorney, versus the other version, which I can't even articulate. Do you make more money because you have an attorney? Or do you need an attorney because you're making more money? That's right. And I don't know what the answer is to that, from this stuff. As I mentioned, a lot of our survey respondents were highly educated. And interestingly, the musicians with a music degree, which is the dark blue or the sort of normal blue bar, are well, let's say the greenish bar is not people who didn't have a music degree. And they're more likely to rely on partnerships and equity stakes and volunteers and bandmates, for sure. So there's an interesting difference there about the difference between the folks who have conservatory degrees and who don't. I think that the conservatory folks are in roles where they perhaps don't need a whole lot of team members. I think there's sort of prerequisites for some folks. If you have a conservatory degree, or no, let's just say it this way, to be a sort of professional orchestra player, you almost always have to have a conservatory degree. So I think there's some people who end up in that role so the conservatory degree implies that they might be doing some of these things that don't need a whole lot of team. Yeah, or the people that have conservatory degrees, yeah. Because a lot of people are conservatory, but they're jazzed, too, so. Yeah, high earners. These are people who are making $100,000 or more from music that answered the survey. So for them, I think the distinction's really clear. They're twice as likely to have a paid accountant, an attorney, a webmaster, a booking agent, and much more likely to have a graphic designer. So you can see it's, again, chicken and egg. Do they have these people working for them because they're making money? Or are they making money because these people are working for them? And it's hard to tease it out beyond this. But from what Erin was saying from her role, her sort of current team data, some of this stuff becomes essential, doesn't it? Yeah, I mean, what I would say about that chicken and egg question that's sort of coming up about these roles is that what I see is that for musicians, my point is we do as much as we can to our overcapacity. And then we do some more. And then we ask someone to help. And that seems to me to be the sort of path towards getting these roles. But I agree with Kristen. I would like to find some way to tease out that relationship. And it comes back to me. It comes back to this funding piece, which is like, where do you get the money to invest in an attorney if you're not making enough money to have one? Mm-hmm. Is it mostly economic considerations that make you push yourself to do roles that you don't feel comfortable with? For me, it's mostly economic consideration. I mean, some of it is creative, as I was mentioning in some of those other roles. Like, I might choose to have salaried band members for a different creative choice. But for me, mostly, it's economic consideration. Mm-hmm. It seems to me like any band starts up. Yeah, I think it's true-ish. But as long as we don't remember that there's a lot of folks beyond the sort of indie rock band framework. But also, I mean, since you've been at this more than 10 years, things change, too. I mean, yeah, when I started out, I actually had more team members than I do now. Different times in my career I have had different business structures. I guess what I was thinking is, like, before you can get, like, the old-school music thing, to get interest from a label, you wanted to be able to demonstrate that you could sell records and do all that stuff, so you had to build a fan base in the first place, so you had to start the business in the first place. So that's my understanding of it. Well, maybe not for the Jackson 5, though. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, there's that other piece of it where someone sees, like, a potential that hasn't been realized yet and is able to use these roles to help fulfill that potential. Go ahead. You were saying that at least one of the principle limiting factors is time, just as you say you do as much as you can, then you try more, and then you find health. Is there also the two other categories that occur to me, and I would be interested in hearing your notion of how much of it is there, is one is expertise. I mean, that obviously counts some lawyers, and that's what makes these purport to have additional expertise that may be hard to come to. And secondly, how much of it is connections? Because, again, one of the roles when intermediary in this is that they're full-time building connections rather than full-time doing creative stuff. So I'm wondering how much of those to play into your need to expand. Yeah, I would say they're both really big limiting factors. So we have a fun slide later about expertise in terms of what you need to know how to do that we'll get to. In fact, it's right here, which is we can, we have these other definitions we've made about expertise. Our old guard people are people who have 20 years of experience or more in the music industry and spend all their time and make all their money doing this. But we also have a middle ground, the established people. They are also spending all their time doing music, but they have six to 20 years of experience. And then the emerging artists are making all their money doing this, but they've only had five years of experience. And so it's funny, the old guard folks need, the old folks need accounting and branding help and web presence help, but the emerging artists need a booking agent and a sound person. Like they're sort of out there engaging, trying to get shows. I think the sound person sort of falls. I think some of that also reflects the limits of our bodies. There's like, as you become an older musician, like you really literally cannot, I mean, if you have a large team, team members, we see people in their seventies who are road dogs all the time, but they have an enormous support staff. So I think that also is reflected in that because as you get older, if you do not have the support staff, you do need to find other ways to make money that are not about dragging yourself around the country in a van. And there's also, I mean, the thing about web presence and stuff, I think some of the younger artists are probably just accustomed to figuring out Facebook or tweeting or Tumblr, like you just grow up with it, so. Yeah, yep, yep. So the last three slides of this run are sort of about what is the, how do team members impact earning capacity? So just to sort of explain this slide, we asked all, remember we asked all the respondents to allocate their money amongst different buckets. And so how much of your money came in the last 12 months came from licensing your compositions? And for the entire survey population, it was 6% of their money came from compositions. But if we ask the people who have a publisher, wow, they make three times as much money on compositions than the person who doesn't have a publisher. The same goes, there's just higher percentages of income from compositions if you have an attorney or a label or an accountant. Again, chicken and egg, we're not sure, but I think the publisher role does make a difference in how much money people make from compositions if that's a part of their revenue stream. We also asked about the income from sound recordings, so the recorded music side. For our general survey population, it was about 6% of their money came from sound recordings. But if you have a label, that's more than double, 13%. And if you have a webmaster, that's 13% too. But Erin and I were talking about this too, like yes, if you have a good solid webmaster, web strategy, you can do a lot with sound recordings, selling them online and having a top spin account or having a band camp page. There's a lot of stuff you can do to make money on sound recordings, right? Is there control in this? I mean, can the label and the webmaster categories of musicians, are they overlapping? Yes, they are overlapping. We can take a weekend, separate them out. Yeah. But we did have people, you could only answer one item per line, but you could have as many team members as you wanted to. Yes, I have them all, yeah. And finally, income from live performance, not as drastic or dramatic from all of our respondents, it was about 28% of their income, which is the biggest pie slice, by the way. But if you have a booking agent, that number goes up a lot. That makes sense, right? Well, we didn't ask on this team question, but we have different data about what's your label relationship? But I didn't calculate it for this part. Yeah, but we did ask, what's your label relationship? Separately. Not here. Yeah, it's sort of a different bucket. Sorry, it's a big survey. Right, so live performance, not as drastic, but a booking agent makes a difference. Can I say something quick about this? Yeah. So that number, 28%, or even 43%, I think there's again, like this quets thought about sort of the new music world, like it's okay if people don't buy records, people make most of their money from playing. 43 is not most of your money. It's a piece of the pie, the largest of the pieces, but it is not this sort of like, don't worry about it, size piece. It's also important that for many artists that they don't perform, so you have to, there's no one size fits all solution here, there's artists that just don't perform, that we can't forget about them. So this is a funny slide just to, this is your new job description. And it's too bad that you can't see at the bottom, it says, and all you wanted was some sex. So, yeah, there's all sorts of technologies and services out there that can facilitate artists doing it themselves, but this might be the list of things that you end up doing. Just a couple of takeaways. So, you know, I think it's fair to say technologies have empowered music creators in many ways, but they've created efficiencies, they've made it possible for artists to break through barriers into the marketplace, but it creates new work. There's a lot of new things people and artists are doing now. Musicians need and benefit from various teammates, depending on the roles they play and the genres they work in, but the dynamics and the relationships are changing. And I think Erin is like a case study in this and how things have changed drastically for the over the past 10 to 12 years. And, you know, today's, we don't, we just focus on this team data for today, but we have a lot of other data on our website. We have these case studies that look at the specific incomes, income and expenses for a handful of different musicians. And then we've had, we've already released about eight or 10 different data points and then we have some more coming up. But yeah, I mean, this, if people have questions about the work or about the team data or thoughts about this, especially, I know that Erin, you want to talk about funding because that dynamic has changed drastically. Yeah, I mean, that's my, that's sort of my, well, a couple things. Let me first of all, thank you. Well, one thing I thought, looking through this and I've seen it before and we've talked about it a lot, but one thing I was interested in is sort of the digital divide where it comes up in this survey because the most of the survey data is from an online survey, but it's great that you guys also have these sort of non offline, these offline experiences of talking to musicians. So I just wanted to like put that out on the floor, like, especially when we got to the sort of, who are the people in this survey? And so I think that's an important part to remember is what, you know, what there's playing musicians that do not have as much access to the online world and their concerns are something I think we should also be thinking about. And then yeah, so to come back to this funny thing, which I think through the course of the presentation I may have said a lot of the things that I was thinking of saying about it, but it seems to me one of the biggest questions because what happens is I think for most musicians and I'd love to see this compared to other types of businesses, but like we don't have a margin. Like there's nothing really. Like you really, it's very tight. It's very, very tight. Even if you are doing it really well and being really smart about it and being really conservative, there's still not a lot of extra money floating around. And with the piece of, as Kristen was saying, there's some of these sort of advances that come from labels or publishers are drying up and it's leaving this big hole for us to find out where is that capital gonna come from? And I'm glad that you mentioned credit cards. So many people, that is their solution. That is the only solution. It's really hard to get any other kind of loan for being a musician. So credit cards and we all know like terrible rates of credit cards and that's what an awful cycle that is. But it's kind of the only thing available in some ways. But some other things are starting up. You can ask your family, but then look at who that excludes, right? A lot of folks that don't come from families with wealth. And so are they able to be artists? And should that be a limiting factor to who gets to participate in these systems? We have things like what J.C.R. does with pledge music. There's other platforms that do similar things that are rising to try to fill this. And then sponsorship, Kristen mentioned, which I didn't even thought about. There's a lot of bands that are, the first one that comes off the top of my head is okay, Go, their band that has gotten sponsorship from non-musical companies for their sort of videos that they do. They had a video on the Super Bowl that came from Ford, paid for it. They also did a state farm sponsored commercial. They also did a Land Rover one, I think. They've sort of filled that gap that comes up with money from other places. Now they say that that money has come with a very few strings, which is great. I don't know if that's always the case. So those are sort of my things to push onto the floor, but, Chris. Well, great presentation. And I guess I was thinking about the do-it-yourself piece of it. We're in the shadow of Harvard Law School. When people here who are lawyers are familiar with legal problems hear somebody doing a lot of it on their own, does it make people worry? Do you worry that five years from now, if you want to reissue material, you may not have the contracts in the right order. Everything might not be all buttoned down. If you want to license something, do you have all the rights that are copyright questions? I mean, it seems to me there's an exposure here. I can understand the necessity for having to do it on your own, but does it worry people in the room that the artists are exposing themselves to a lot of potential problems? Yep. But the highway is living with people who signed that deal. I mean, it's a corrupt, I mean, what should I think? Everyone, this is Walden McDonough, so music lawyer and also on the board of Future Music Coalition. You two, like, I mean, the classic stories, you two signed like the worst deal of all time, and when they hit critical mass, they had the leverage to renegotiate it, but I worked for a pretty prominent lawyer in the business and I used to say, well, you know, what do you even do with these people who signed bad deals and said the only thing that you do would become very successful, that they have the leverage to renegotiate, but unfortunately, I'm working with a band right now that's a very prominent, Midwest punk band that has a brutal deal, but they're not at the level where they can command the leverage, so that's, you're absolutely correct. I mean, people cheat themselves out of the future by signing bad deals, don't even read the representation. Yeah, and even on a more basic level, in the 1990s, I ran an independent record label. We put out our own records, but we also put out records for bands we like, and so we had about 75 releases in eight years. The thing that I wish we had had at that point was just a basic band agreement. So how much does, what percentage does each person get in the band, and who do I send the money to? I mean, it's really basic, but for now, 15 years later, I have still a trouble figuring out who gets the money, that we get these sort of small payments from iTunes and stuff from the catalog being available. There's like just basic sort of historical arcs on some of this stuff that have to do with contracts and very basic legal agreements that I wish we had. And it's hard, cause we were totally DIY, and I think the thing that we didn't wanna do was create a mistrust, like why would we be asking them to sign a contract? We were in Washington DC in the shadow, not of Harvard, but of Discord records. And that was, they were our flagship label and we wanted to act like Discord, which never signs contracts. So, but it's not because we want our bands off, but now I wish we did just, cause I wish I had some instructions. Yeah, Oliver? I've also have been an entertainment player in the music business a bit. And I would say that your question has got many different players in it. For instance, there are some very good form books out there, the classic, this business of music is out there, it's got a whole set of forms in the back, they may not be the most up-to-date things going, but if you educate yourself about it, certainly the dealings within and around the band and getting rights at that kind of level is something you probably can manage on your own would be my expectation. You better because at least starting out you're not likely to be able to afford more high price. I think you're hearing also though, when you're dealing with other professionals in the industry, like the record companies, the publishing companies, that's where there are frequently some of the landmines that are just hidden there. And as you say, you can sign yourself away for a bad recording deal that suddenly you're stuck with for the next 10 years unless you can get very famous and renegotiate. So, there are different spots for this and my own recommendation would be, you can, if you take the time to self-educate, be reasonably good at the kind of entry level stuff. What you don't wanna do is to sign anything that's multiple years or that kind of thing without an experienced guide into it because that you can get in trouble. Yeah, I think that, and I also think it speaks to, I mean something that comes up for me looking at all this stuff and especially the slide about and all you wanna with sex, like that list of things, I do marvel at over the years I've been doing this, how I've become like semi-expert in a number of different things. Like I can talk to you about different types of paper and four color printing processes because I've printed 10 CDs in my lifetime or I can talk to you about how to make a great t-shirt and how many screens you need and let's price it out. You know what I mean? And I actually think that that's really valuable and I think for every artist there's probably like a tipping point that's very personal in terms of how much of that you wanna know. But I would encourage all artists to please try to know something. And again, that goes back to this other piece that I mentioned before, the sort of this trope that like the artist is this idiot that can't fry an egg. But I mean it's like, if you can play the saxophone at a world-class level, you can understand basic contract law. I would add just this is a contract certainly for the composers and the songwriters, like the intellectual property component is critical. And I know it's about revenue but did you ask if they were having fun? We asked about time allocation. A really interesting question was if money was not an issue, what would you be doing more of? And the top answer was I'd be spending more time in the studio recording. And the one at the very bottom, fundraising. Yeah. Totally. Totally. Yeah. But we should, we'll have to post the time allocation stuff soon. Maybe this week. It's really interesting, just like interesting stuff. You've done it. Is there a question you wished you would have asked that you didn't know? Ah, you know, I don't know yet. I'm still kind of waiting through all the data to figure out what we've learned. So I don't know yet. I saw Harris for a second and then we'll do Matt after that. Yeah, I really appreciate the methodology of this presentation that you've segmented different source of revenues that in terms of this field musician that people make. And I'm wondering during your process research, have you ever found that maybe certain people earn much more money than you expected and why is that? Or a certain kind of people make less money than you expected and why is that? It mostly came up in the interviews and it's sort of, it's hard to quantify. But when we were doing interviews, we used a snowball sample method. So we had sort of individual, we had individuals that we started with. So we wanted to find a musician type. Like we want to talk to a national songwriter and we would find one. And then we'd use a snowball sample to find, we'd ask that person for peer referrals. And so as we move beyond our sort of initial list of interested, interesting people, we started knowing fewer and fewer, like way fewer people. And it was fascinating to talk to some artists who I'd never heard of before who were doing totally fine, making a full-time career at music who had never heard of before but also were making quite a bit of money. And the things that surprised me, I was talking to a platinum rock band who I knew by name but didn't know personally, but I was surprised at how much money came from sponsorships as opposed to just straight up tour guarantees. But that's all, it's interesting when you talk to people you can also tease out a bit the income versus expenses side because for the most part, you can ask about gross income, the inputs, but it's difficult to ask about the expense side just because it varies so much. We did on the survey ask people to sort of, hey, what's gotten more expensive on the touring side like gas, travel, session players, staff. But it was hard to ask about expenses on other stuff because oftentimes artists aren't paying for them or it's just too variable. You also have this whole revenue picture where it's like you might make, there's this term we were talking about this morning that I don't know if you guys know or not, it's something called mailbox money and it's basically like every artist's dream, right? It's the money that just shows up for something that you didn't have to put effort into. So that's like royalties or sync license, that kind of thing. And so that money, you might have another bucket that is like so far in the red that your mailbox money covers that bucket. So like it becomes this like bigger piece in terms of like where any margin or profit is coming from. Yep, we had Matt after. If you look at the case study that makes it very, it's very clear like a jazz band leader is making quite a bit of money from live performance but the more they make with live performance, the greater the expenses get. It's very clear that it's hard to make like sort of use efficiencies that touring just costs money. Yeah, go ahead. So another question about sort of the quality maybe the kind of the fun of the life and maybe it's a bit of a chicken and egg question as well, but the musical community, how does that, do you see in these data any way of coming to grips with how the technological engagement changes the way in which you find musicians to play, to tour with or to play sessions with? I mean, is that still kind of a survival of the word of mouth of gigging musicians or when it comes to putting the street team together or merchandising, what's, are people, is the technology having an impact across the board from like session musicians and orchestra members to independent musicians or is there a lot of variability in the ways in which people are using these tools to build their communities? Well, we did ask people like how are you using technology and the things that they say it helps them engage with fans and also it helps them collaborate with others. So I was actually a little surprised to collaborate with others as high as it was on the list. It wasn't just about the pure sort of economic, hey, I'm still on music or I've got a zillion Twitter friends. It's like I can collaborate and so technology has sort of a more meta effect as well. It came up in the interviews too. Like people talked about it's democratizing power and so it was more than just, hey, I can get my stuff up on iTunes. Yeah. I would second that and say, especially the first thing that you came up when you were asking your question was this new record that I've made has, it's got like 16 people on it and it was made at nine different studios and I wasn't there for a lot of it. You know what I mean? I did a lot of like sending someone in MP3, having them sing along to it and having them send me back the full high quality files and that, you know, then you also like, not to get into another set of weeds but you've got these like, I use like services that allow me to move big files across the internet and it's made it in completely possible for me to have this friend who was on the road, I needed her to sing on the record so she stopped at my friend's place in Nashville and did this thing on a Sunday morning and then later that day my friend in Oakland to also doing the same song who was able to do it so technology is like big time for that in terms of collaboration. The other thing I'll say about the street team, you mentioned street team, I find that interaction, the last time I really tried it which was probably about four or five years ago to be like pretty unreliable. Like, well I'm gonna balance out with another story but at one point, you know, you could email me and say I wanna help with merch for the show or I wanna put posters up and I would say like three out of five people never showed up or didn't do what they said they were gonna do. Now the other hand, I used social networks to crowdsource choruses for a tour that I did in December. This is what Kristen was talking about at the United Anti-Holiday Tour and I had cranky carolers and they were crowdsourced from Twitter and Facebook. I just a couple weeks beforehand said like, came coming to Philly and if you're willing to wear a bad holiday sweater I'm gonna give you a copy of the album and a handmade hymenal and love for you to come on stage and sing. And it was an incredible experience actually. I met some really fantastic people and had very, very few dropout. Basically everyone who said they would come came and I think the night you did it there was maybe like 15 people in the chorus. Most cities had between like 10 and 15 people. So that's an opposite story to that. This, it's, we're at 1240 right now so we'll do this question and then we have one more back here. And then we got one more. Okay, perfect. It's really fast. All right, okay. But it's probably moved. By any chance did you ask people if they weren't happy? We didn't ask sort of a satisfaction. We just asked about time allocation. That's, yeah. So we don't know whether making more money or less money or independent label or all that. What effect on satisfaction? No, didn't, sorry. That's a good, that's a great point though. Yeah. Too focused on the money aspect. I'm sorry. What is happy? Yeah. Mike, I think we need more. But what is the role of recording studios? How much does it cost to access recording studios? What does that mean in terms of the team? But also, what does that mean for both online and offline distribution though? You've mentioned before, Erin, that online distribution is not the same as India. It's not a really high impact that we're trying to improve. So I'm sensing that in the contemporary team there's a lot of interest in offline distribution from DIY, you know, innovative forms. And so, is that a response to the online mode? And then also, how does that impact how things get recorded? Mm-hmm. That's a great point. I mean, you have more experience with the recording. Well, yeah. Well, I'll say a couple of things. Some online stuff works really great and you get paid well for, and some you don't. And I think there is an important distinction in terms of that. Like, certainly there's some services that pay well and some that don't. And you can't make a generalization to say that it is totally great because if everyone knows a sort of like Spotify problem, which is that they basically don't pay. And on the fan side, fan-facing side of that is, oh, this is amazing service. And on the musician side, it's more complicated. But I think your question about the, how does the online and the offline interact in that way? I certainly think that there's a sort of offline like response, like sort of blooming. I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is the sort of, will we hear about the resurgence of vinyl, sort of like way that people are talking about a physical object that they want to experience from a performer and vinyl is a nice one that's happening right now. And then about the recording studios, I would say it's similar to what we've seen in these other businesses that are part of this, right? You can do it yourself, there's some trade-offs and some of the larger recording studios still survive and there's certain things that can be done there that can't be done in other places and you sort of have to, you have this range of options but you make a decision based on maybe your creative needs or your economic situation. I can speak a little bit to that relationship and how recording studios are evolving in the sense of getting involved in helping artists with revenue streams that they might not have before with the relationship that we're developing kind of in the backyard here in Somerville with Q division is that particular engineers or studio managers obviously have projects that they're concerned about getting paid for but they also love from a creative standpoint and they're getting involved to the extent of helping create additional content and providing services for crowd-sourced campaigns or direct-to-fan campaigns that can enrich the experience for the fan and still deliver more money to the artists themselves which obviously means they get paid. Everybody, thanks once again to Kristen Thompson. Thank you. The talk is going to be archived if you want to go back and you have more questions. Kristen and I are easily found and money.futureofmusic.org. So thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. Thanks, job.