All entries for Monday 28 January 2008

Bypassing publishers

Writing about web page http://www.nin.com/

I stumbled over some interesting music industry happenings recently. I say stumbled: Saul Williams is coming to the UK in February, to do an event for the London Word Festival, run by Tom Chivers of penned in the margins, who I've worked with on podcasting; and I'm a MASSIVE Nine Inch Nails fan. I put two and two together (i.e. I read the websites) and this is the story: 

Saul Williams' latest album is produced by Trent Reznor, who decided, having had trouble releasing the album through a major label, to make the album downloadable for free online. The results: 

"As of 1/2/08,
154,449 people chose to download Saul’s new record.
28,322 of those people chose to pay $5 for it, meaning:
18.3% chose to pay.

[...]

"If 33,897 people went out and bought Saul’s last record 3 years ago (when more people bought CDs) and over 150K - five times as many - sought out this new record, that’s great - right?"

[NB. These figures from this blogpost - go here for the full blog.]

The first 100k downloads were completely free, with an option to pay $5; since then the album's been available for $5. So a drop in about 5000 of actual sales, but a 500% audience boost, roughly.

What's really interesting is the cost of production and marketing. Trent's latest post points at an Observer article by Simon Napier Bell, on the topic of industry giants and how they screw the artists:

"Imagine the outcry if people working in a factory were told that the cost of the products they were making would be deducted from their wages, which anyway would only be paid if the company managed to sell the products. Or that they would have to work for the company for a minimum of 10 years and, at the company's discretion, could be transferred to any other company at any time."

Most notable fact is the 10,000% mark up on raw product to retail price. That profit mostly goes on rent, employee's salaries and into the pocket of the label, not the artist. Remove that and the relatively insignificant cost of hard copy CDs, etc. and you're left with just the artist's time and the producer's time and then the relatively magical concept of the art's intrinsic value (i.e. how much did you enjoy it?).

Compare to Radiohead's latest, In Rainbows. Originally available free, with an honesty box, which reportedly saw devout fans throwing £70 or more into the band's pockets. Now only available from the band's official merchandise website, for £40. Ouch. Ditto Saul Williams' Niggy Tardust, which uses Paypal to process credit card payments. (Waste appears to have its own system, but I couldn't be bothered to register. Maybe when I feel rich enough to buy the album.)

I've had a couple of chats with China Miéville about a similar line being taken in book publishing. Cut out the conglomerate vampires because soon digital reading tech is going to be as good and widespread as ipods. So how to control it, if it takes off?

Readers are swamped with text these days, they're up to the eyeballs in reading material (of a different sort to literature though? I add ponderously) on screen, off the 'net. So there's no question about whether it's going to grow, as far as I'm concerned. I've a friend who came back from Japan recently with a (Chinese-) modded Nintendo DS that allowed him to download ebooks to it from the internet, load up any text, whatever he wanted - correction, whatever he can get hold of, which, increasingly, means everything.

The future is here already, according to China (M, not the country), we just don't have it shipping free with new home entertainment systems yet. According to some people this and digital print in general mean (these are paraphrases):

• The death of the book in the next five years (China)
• A shift towards localised networks, devolution of readerships (Rupert Loydell, Stride)
• An interesting fad, that marketing departments need to be aware of and part of (Stephen Page, CEO Faber & Faber)
• Something that will create a new playing field for the publishing industry (Alexandra Pringle, Bloomsbury Editor, I think said something like this at her recent Warwick visit, as did various other small press people I've chatted to)
• A way to screw artists of their royalties (this comes more from music and television giants, like David Geffen, who set up that anti-piracy squad several years ago targeting mp3 websites)
• A way to screw conglomerate publishers (Steven King & Trent Reznor, though I might be over-interpreting them both)

China suggested that writers will eventually find themselves working directly in partnership with freelance editors, and releasing their books online, possibly with the kind of honesty-box donations that you get on Trent's site.

[Or the one that featured for a while on Stephen King's page, when he serialised The Plant online. The figures I saw published on King's website at the time showed him to have a net profit after the first one or two installments of about £75,000. The article linked above suggests total profits of nearly half a million dollars and that the project was abandoned supposedly because of a slump in people paying for the downloads. Nice work, if you can get it.]

But these processes are subject to one important point: artists with established fan bases can get away with it, but how do you draw new audiences on the net? What will new artists do when they only have a range to 100s or, if they're lucky, thousands of readers? OK, OK, Arctic Monkeys, I hear you say. (But don't say Lily Allen at me, she's connected.)

At the end of the day, being a good writer doesn't make you a good editor; being a good editor doesn't make you a good promoter; the business of publishing art is set up to work with skilled individuals and the idea that a writer is nothing without their readers is a strong one (but not one, in my book, that justifies pitiful royalties and contracts that hold artists over barrels marked 'profit'). At the end of the day, the book still needs to be written, then edited, then promoted. So writers who need editors who need marketers will find themselves working with an increasingly fragmented, independent array of individuals with various skills (accountants, PR people, editors, sub-editors, typesetters) so let's, for the sake of convenience, call this collective a publishing house.

And oh, right, we're back to square one, but with a chance to rewrite the history books. More tea, Comrade Lenin?

So, for me, there's some weight to Stephen Page's idea that the internet's effect on publishing is essentially a marketing problem, in need of marketing solutions. Publishers who don't keep up will look like dinosaurs, and lose face. Publishers who do keep up will be doing the same work as before (providing a collective, professional service) but in a new environment, alongside the existing one, until that, supposedly, dies out. If at all.

Piracy itself won't have that much of an impact on anything except the scale of operations - though the new model of publishing huge quantities of writers and texts that each sell in small quantities (cf. Salt, Shearsman, and, godhelpme, lulu) marks a change that will be much more noticeable at the lower end of the industry's turnover scale. The giants already have massive back catalogues, rights to recent classics and estates, that they won't have to worry too much. Their staff will though.

The main problem is that we're in a transition phase and, as usual, the industry is using it as an excuse to separate the wheat from the chaff in the usual fashion: through blinkered, unimaginative capitalism-tinted goggles. Similarly, you get the kind of shameless exploitation of artists that leads to protest (cf. Writers' Guild of America). Even the BBC is guilty of it, e.g. through early screenings of second episodes online and marketing sampler series to mobile phones. They've asked writers to 'go with it' for the sake of marketing experimentation, but bottom line here is that the broadcaster/publisher is getting coverage at no expense, from someone else's artistic product.

Sure, you could whine till the cows come home, only you can't afford any cows, or a field, because you've got no money. The obvious response is to go and do something it about it. Or go into banking.

George Ttoouli : 28 Jan 2008 09:00 |  Tags: China Mieville Digital Publishing Piracy Publishing Saul Williams Society Of Authors Trent Reznor Vampires |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem