The Sound Age - Music industry Podcast

The horrific story of the next big thing in rock. Ian Watkins will be remembered as one of the most evil people in the history of music. 

A few years back I was looking to make a ticketing site that essentially scrapped booking fees, we got to the point where we had an investor working with us, but researching small venues we found out that Australia was uniquely different than the rest of the world. Almost every single small venue in Australia had EXCLUSIVE deals with 1 or 2 ticketing sites. This doesn't seem like a problem until you think what are tickets in 2022? In 2004 tickets were lining up in a newsagents waiting for the 6am ticket release and buying from a person behind a booth. Today it's an email with a qr code attached. But the booking fees have never changed. You still pay 10-15% or more on top of your $20 ticket for your local venue that holds 350 people.

It makes sense for stadiums and festivals and major tours to use a ticketing site, but these days small clubs can very easily sell their own tickets, they can collect their customers data to form a mailing list, $3 per person doesn't sound like that much of an issue, but that's over $1000 every night in a club that holds 350 people. In the local music scene that's a lot of money. If venues sold their own tickets they could save the customers money or they could use that extra money to pay local bands $1000 more every night.

The Charts are a measure of success for an artist, they are also a trophy for artists that last the span of the their career. So it's no surprise that labels and managers have concocted ways to manufacture chart positions. This episode I break down a few ways artists have schemed their way to the top and also how the problem was solved and then unsolved meaning we still live in a world where you can essentially buy a chart position. 

What happens when a TV trivia show mentions the similarity of a children's song and one of Australia's biggest hits 27 years after it's release. The owners of the copyright who never even realised the similarity go on a rampage to extract whatever money they can from the artists. The result, $4.5 million in damages and court costs and the downward spiral and eventual death of the musician at the centre of the court case. It highlights a glaring problem with Copyright law. If the motives and timeframe for copyright infringement is not considered in the case, then as more songs are sold to private investors, labels and publishers through NFT's and other means, there will be an increase in petty little copyright claims. After all these private investors are removed from the art of making music, they are in the art of making money.

Deep Fake audio will continue to get better, at one point it will be indistinguishable from real artists. At that point what happens to music and musicians. What happens when labels decide to keep an artist alive after their death by using Music AI and Deep Fake technology to release music in the exact likeness of the deceased artist. If we can keep ACDC alive with new music every year for 1000 years, what will ACDC look and sound like? With every recreation it becomes less and less familiar until one day we live in a dystopian hell, devoid of actual music.