“The Author” repeats some stats on the brave new world of digital music, in the context of the excitement among writers about the alleged but hypothetical fortunes to be made from e-books.
An American site (www.informationisbeautiful.net) calculated how many downloads etc a musician had to sell to earn the “US minimum monthly wage”. This is how it runs:
Self-pressed CDs … 143
iTunes album downloads … 1,229
iTunes track downloads … 12,339
Then it points out that now music is often streamed rather than downloaded. To earn the minimum monthly wage from last.fm a track would need to be played 1,546,667 times in a month.
On Spotify, a track would have to be played 4,549,020 times.
As Bob Dylan sang with The Band at the Isle of Wight Festival, “Who’s gonna throw that minstrel boy a coin?”
Not digital media, that’s for sure!
Peter Viney's Blog 
Dunc commented (but it got under “video availability” and should be here:
Concerts are how musicians have to make their money, but what about older musicians. In Scotland, I feel that my age group – (late fifties) – are not really catered for. We get the ‘big’ concerts – McCartney at Hampden or Crosby, Stills, Nash at SECC, but little below this level. A lot of older musicians must now find it hard to make a living. Also illegal downloading must make its toll on their earnings. I want to go to more concerts, but am not catered for.
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Those are horrifying figures = for ‘non-mainstream’ musicians, it’s a ‘goddamn impossible way of life’. Your Dylans, Lady Gaga’s, Stones, et cetera will still do well, although as Dunc says above, it’s touring where the money is…
And this of course makes it hard for experimentation and ‘new’. Wehn you consider the Everly Brothers have really only sung the same 14 songs for the last 40 years, it gets really depressing. let alone the Eagles. or the Stones.
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Well, the Everly Brothers have sung the same songs very well. They also do short versions, packing a lot of songs into an evening. They added just the one back on the 1980s reunion tour, Wings of A Nightingale, written for them by Paul McCartney. But it’s the perennial problem, there is such a long list that people really want to hear. At least twenty “essential” titles could be reeled off at speed by any Everlys fan.
All audiences bay with delight when the old favourites come up, and sit firmly on their hands whenever artists do anything “from my latest album” because few of them have even heard the latest album. Conversely, if a band does well, the CD table in the lobby does good business, and is probably the best outlet for “the latest album” there is.
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When we go to see an artist, certain songs are the ‘soundtrack of our life’ as I think Roger McGuinn has called them. We want to hear them. I thought the last big band Van Morrison concert in Glasgow was great and so did the audience. There were several reasons for the success – Van enjoying himself, a big band, great musicianship, good backing singers (the importance of which Peter has previously pointed out) and songs that the audience wanted to hear.
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On Van Morrison, I’ve just started the new Greil Marcus book. I don’t think I’m going to like it. The writing is pretentious, appallingly so, and one sentence in the first few pages covers twelve lines. Hasn’t he heard of punctuation? He also dismisses the eighties and nineties. In particular he trashes Beautiful Vision, one of the most popular albums of all with fans.
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Greil Marcus is an insufferable tw@t! Maybe not personally, but his writing is like salt lovingly rubbed into an open wound. I much prefer Charles Shaar Murray, who, while beloved of his own opinions, can at least articulate them. I have never got over his ‘commentary’ of ‘The Last Waltz’, in which he expresses surprise that ‘The Canterbury Tales’ was read out. In a film about touring musicians on the road….
His Dylan stuff is just appalling….
And Peter – you’re right, of course, about the Everly’s…
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