Thatcher's rants and musings

Time 2021-05-15 19:16:47

Web Name: Thatcher's rants and musings

WebSite: http://tulrich.com

ID:176840

Keywords:

rants,Thatcher,musings,

Description:

Welcome to my home page. I live in Brooklyn, NY and Oak Bluffs, MA;I'm dad to Hazel and Rowan and partner to Lulu. I work as aprogrammer; I once had a dog, and she had aweb site too. Digital recording on PC's (including Macs) is built on a lie. The lieis that computers software are reliably fast enough to preventdropouts when recording. I wrote the DropoutSpy plugin to help deal with this situation. I wrote up notes on how tocapture impulse responses of real rooms, for use in rolling your ownroom reverb effects. I just read theRIAArevenue report for 2016 and it's great news. Revenue from streamingcontinues to grow fast and is up to $3.9B/year, now 51% of theU.S. music industry's income. Also important: $ fromsubscription-based streaming (e.g. Spotify Premium) doubled lastyear. Other things to note: paid downloads are falling off a cliff,same with physical media, except vinyl which was up slightly. Why is this good news? 1. As a fan, I absolutely love on-demand streaming. I can instantlylisten to practically any piece of music ever recorded. Enough peopleare on board now to ensure that the model will survive. 2. Very low cost overhead. After recording production, my minimumcost as an indie artist for full distribution is $20/year for adistrokid account, and I get paid startingwith the very first stream. 3. Even playing field: megastars, legacy catalog, emerging artists,niche genres are all on the same playing field; nobody is"subsidizing" anyone else, other than we're all collectivelysubsidizing music in general. 4. The streaming numbers are finally large enough so that it's viablefor moderately popular songwriters, musicians, engineers etc to make aliving without physical media or paid downloads. 5. (Potentially) much more transparency and control for artists. Tothe extent that artists own their recordings, they are in the driversseat in terms of hiring people to help them, scheduling releases etcand they see the effects directly instead of being filtered throughlabels. The historical industry based on physical media and radio resulted ina bottleneck, so that even very dedicated fans with money to spend andeclectic tastes ended up listening to the same stuff a lot; meanwhilea few massively popular artists got fabulously wealthy, labels actedas gatekeepers and financiers, and anyone in the margins just kind ofscraped by or worse. In this new world, even very small artists can get their slice,proportional to actual listens, and the label tax goes away. Fun game with Spotify: pull up an artist, look at the number of playsfor their top 5 "Popular songs", and estimate their Spotify earnings:dollars equals play count divided by 200. (The going rate for onestream is approximately half a cent.) Sinkhole: ~16,000 plays (in reality DistroKid has paid us about $23.24 from Spotify on 4814 plays; we only directly own 2 out of our 4 albums and maybe there is some reporting lag? I guess somebody owes us $50). Tuffy: too small to measure (in reality, around $5.11 on 1,011 plays). Caveats: this UNDERestimates by only counting the top 5 songs. Artistsalso get paid noticable amounts of money from other services likeAmazon, iTunes and Youtube. It also doesn't count songwritingroyalties, separate topic. This OVERestimates earnings in cases wherelabels or distributors are taking a cut. Comments on Facebook

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