Now that the degrees of awful in this year’s summer jams have been addressed, we bring you to Max’s second beef with the music industry.
Part 2
Over-Saturation
One of the blessings, but also curses, of today’s modern age is the ease of accessibility for anyone to become a creative professional. Music has become the poster child of this problem with applications like GarageBand and a slew of bootlegged plugins that allow anyone to record or produce their own music in a somewhat “professional” manner. While spreading the ability to create to the masses is a beautiful thing indeed, it has also made it a lot harder for music of any actual substance and professionalism to be discovered and monetized. Now we have people in A&R departments sorting through exponentially more submissions because a 14 year-old girl in Canada with a laptop microphone wants to launch her rap career. This epidemic has affected all genres and facets of the music industry. Take these numbers from Juno Download in the EDM department for the week of Feb. 9, 2013: In only a period of 7 days the number of tracks released within only 6 sub-genres of EDM was 7,347 tracks. That only covers a mere 6 sub-genres out of Juno Download‘s dozens and dozens of sub-genres. That means we can expect that Juno is releasing upwards of 15K tracks a week across the board (and that is a modest guess).
This over-saturation also affects the abilities of bands to get discovered. If you live in Los Angeles, you know someone who is in a band. Actually, you probably are in a band yourself. Unfortunately you’ve played all the good venues a couple time by now and your friends are sick of going out to spend 10 dollars to drink with you while you perform the same 6 songs you wrote a year ago. But maybe there is a saving grace within the licensing world — you’ve probably also gotten yourself a deal with a licensing company. Unfortunately, that world is incredibly saturated as well. I’ve read 2 contracts this week alone for friends of mine who now have representation for licensing. Having a licensing company now is the same thing as having a Facebook page — every band has one. That’s because licensing is still one of the last places where there is any hope to make some money out there…which brings me to my next point…
Stay tuned for the conclusion!
– Max Cameron