Indie Music – Spiked Roles.
The recent spike in total ticket sales has likely been greatly aided by festivals, whose larger scale venues and multiple artists allow them to both expand their audience and charge a higher price. As discussed in my blog Indie Music – The Shift in Concert Sector, this could also potentially be attributed to the rise of large, sold-out festivals, which bring in enormous amounts of revenue that few, if any, individual acts could earn in one show. The rising, often independent, indie bands who perform at festivals, though, gain valuable exposure that might serve to boost recent bottom-up development and benefit from the entire process.
An alternative way to explore the differing trends within concerts and recorded music would be to compare revenues of industry leaders. Live Nation Entertainment is the largest ticketing and events promotion company in the world with over 10 million tickets sold in the first half of 2012 alone. Warner Music Group is the largest U.S. owned music retailer, and third largest in the world, and has worked to reinvent its business strategy in light of record sale woes. A simple representation can, of course, not conclusively represent these two industries, or even companies, but does offer interesting anecdotal juxtaposition in terms of the growth in popularity of concerts and coinciding struggles of record labels for indie music. In addition, Live Nation, whose revenues surpassed 5 billion dollars in 2011, may better represent those acts not included in the top 100 data since they work with events of all sizes.
Tip: in my blog How Can an Indie Artist Become Popular, I have discussed some helpful tips for indie musicians to use. Give more than is expected of you at a gig or a concert. Never hesitate in repeating a performance, if the audience wishes so. Make them feel satisfied when they are leaving, and there is a high chance that they will want to come back for the next show. Add some humor to keep the audience engaged. Louder the audience gets, higher is the chance of the organizer wanting to call you again.
The illustrations included in this study suggest that impacts of the Internet, although not as directly, likely played a role in the resurgence of the concert industry. Not only have revenues from live music risen significantly, but the general composition of the live music business seems to have shifted slightly away from the top 100 with a larger number of small performances possibly contributing to the general upward trend during this century. The re-emergence of music festivals as a popular, and profitable, strategy for live entertainment companies also may both reflect impacts of the Internet and contribute to the shift in composition. Due to the limiting nature of the data I was able to obtain, though, the information provided in this section can only be considered preliminary at best. Further empirical study is certainly warranted regarding live performance, a potentially essential expanding market.
Conclusively, while David Bowie’s 2002 predictions that this study is based on, may have seemed extreme at the time, the results and analysis of this study suggest that they may in fact be coming to fruition. The landscape of the indie music industry continues to transform, from both an economic and social perspective, largely due to the rise of the Internet and related technological advances. Although sales displacement due to illegal file sharing was likely a key contributor to the drastic drop in record sales of indies music in the early 2000s, the impact of the Internet now represents a much broader change presenting the music industry with a set of unique challenges, and opportunities.
Further I am going to write about the role of internet in changing the extended oligopoly enjoyed by record labels in the indie music industry. Please share your experiences and I will add them to my future blogs.. Please share your experiences and I will add them to my future blogs.
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