It’s a term thrown around a lot these days ‘Music Production Democratisation’, but is it real and if it is, who benefits?

Scholarly articles have been written on it, the term is used in magazine articles, blog posts, and it has been used on our very own podcast, it’s the term Music Production Democratisation. We often think of the word democracy from a socio-political standpoint, defined by one dictionary as “the introduction of a democratic system or democratic principles.”

However a second meaning is now applied to it which changes it somewhat; “the action of making something accessible to everyone.”

If we take this second definition at face value then it could be said that in terms of music technology we have made music production tools available to everyone. Once recording an album required a studio, which meant either you had personal wealth and deep pockets, or you had a record deal and an advance to pay the ten or hundreds of thousands of pounds to make the record. Then in the early 1980s things began to change with the home recording revolution and the introduction of things like the Portastudio, MIDI synths and sequencers. Suddenly what was once only available to a few was now in the hands of the mere mortal happy enough to spend a few thousand pounds. But at this point although you could make the tracks, you really still needed a record deal, or at least a distribution deal to get your music in front of the masses and sell it. You also needed a way into broadcast media, namely radio and TV and that was also largely controlled by the record labels. Home-made outliers were rare, if not unknown, so a few controlled the entire chain of getting an idea out to the wider world.

The computer and the internet changed that. Now you can record, mix, and master a high quality recording on a laptop, upload it to a distribution service and have it on every streaming platform on the planet in a matter of days, if not hours. You can build a website, set up a merchandise shop, create a blog, have an email list and be in charge of your own destiny.

It sounds wonderful doesn’t it? What’s not to like about these halcyon days compared to the bad old days of record labels?

Fairness And Equality

Let’s come back to the term democratisation. As it has found it roots in the word democracy, it’s often easy to ascribe far more to the term when used about music production than one should. For example, what many people infer when using the term is that now the music production industry is fair and equal. They suggest that all these new advances make it more possible to succeed and put everyone on a level playing field. A lot of people stake their careers on this idea, hoping to make a decent living from making music and investing everything they have in terms of money and time to make it happen. After all, now there’s no big bad record label stopping us from doing it, is there?

A question. You are given a challenge to go in a room. Inside the room there are 100 sealed boxes, one of which contains £1000. If you find the right box in one minute you get to keep the money. Do you think you could find it? There’s a high probabilty you could. Now, how about the room has not 100 boxes, or a 1000, not even 10,000, but 100,000 boxes for you to try and find the £1000 in one minute, how do you rate your chances now? Slim to impossible.

100,000 boxes is absurd, no one stands a chance! According to Variety that’s how many new songs are released EVERY DAY; “Music Streaming Hits Major Milestone as 100,000 Songs are Uploaded Daily to Spotify and Other DSPs’ this “100,000 daily figure was cited by the CEOs for both Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group” in October 2022.

Here’s an eye watering number;

“First of all, check this: There are 67.1 million audio tracks sitting on music streaming services today that, in the 2022 calendar year, attracted 10 or fewer streams apiece, globally.

That 67.1 million figure represents just under half (42%) of the entire catalog of tracks available on worldwide music streaming services as you read this (based on ISRCs).”

Now the really bad news from those numbers;

“Nearly a quarter (24%) of the 158 million audio tracks on music streaming services monitored by Luminate in 2022 attracted ZERO plays that year.”

Source: Music Business Worldwide

These numbers demonstrate that accessiblity isn’t the same as probability. We might have all the technology to create and distribute music, but our chance of getting heard, which is what we are led to believe is going to happen in this new musical utopia, is ‘slim to impossible.’ Not odds any of us would want to take in other walks of life. How many survive a parachute jump? Safely complete a passenger flight? Beat an illness? Who would want to take odds based on the same numbers?

But we’ve been led to believe that we now have a greater chance, or at least an equal chance than we did when the record label dinosuars roamed the earth.

This from Mashable;

“Streaming services are now paying out big money to the music industry’s gatekeepers.

According to a new report by industry news outlet Music Business Worldwide, the three major music labels made $6.93 billion combined from streaming in 2018. The publication poured through recent investor filings from Universal Music Group’s parent company Vivendi, Sony, and Warner and found that the companies are totaling $19 million in daily streaming revenue.

Broken down even further, the trio of labels generate nearly $800,000 per hour just from music streaming services.

As Rolling Stone points out, when looking at the combined revenue for the three labels across all formats and commercial endeavors -- $13.14 billion -- streaming revenue accounts for more than half of that. That’s more than a 10 percent jump when compared to how much streaming revenue accounted for in 2017.

Universal (UMG) saw its streaming revenue jump the most with an increase of $864 million a year, or $2.4 million a day, when compared to the year prior. UMG’s 2018 streaming revenue is almost double what it made in 2016. The labels most popular artists include Drake, Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, Post Malone, and The Beatles.

The music industry generates tens of billions of dollars every year. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, streaming now makes up for a whopping 75 percent of its revenue.

However, this newfound music-streaming wealth is not being shared fairly among artists.

Streaming giants like Spotify and Apple Music notoriously pay out only a fraction of a penny per play. Music labels take as much as 80 percent of those earnings as part of traditional record deals. Bigger stars who negotiate a more favorable royalty split still usually share around 50 percent of music revenue.

Music legends and pop superstars have even complained of how little they make from music streaming.”

Do these numbers feel anything like a democratic system? In some ways they simply demonstrate how closely the music making democracy tracks with political democracy. Even in the most advanced modern democracies, fairness and equality are rarely seen. Power and wealth reside largely in the hands of a small minority, not in the many.

Who Is Making Money?

So who is making money from this new world order?

As we’ve already pointed out, one segment benefitting from this is the record labels. Secondly, the big earners, here’s the top ten earners of 2021 if you want to know, their earnings are in the hundreds of millions.

One thing connects all of them, they are all signed to labels and well known artists. Of course there was a point when they were unknown and making demos in their home studios, no one would argue that. However at some point a label got involved and propelled them from making some money to making mega-bucks.

Hang on a minute… you might be thinking, so the people making real money now are the labels and their signed artists? Correct, and if this feels strangely like the bad old days, that’s because it is. There are outliers, but the whole model is sold on the notion that that everyone can make real money, not a monority - does that sound like democratisation to you?

Now the worst part is that many people are led to believe they have a greater chance than ever before. The numbers tell a different story. That number again, 158 million audio tracks not played once.

Let’s look at album releases. Here’s all the album releases for one half of 2022 according to Wikipedia, remember this doesn’t account for under-the-radar releases.

Now here’s the list for all of 1982, around the start of the home recording revolution. As you can see there are far fewer albums.

Going back to the boxes illustration, we’ve gone from a bedroom full of boxes to an Amazon warehouse. Your chances of getting heard are getting slimmer by the day.

It would be remiss of us running a blog like this to not point out that another sector making money from this are the equipment manufacturers. Everything from computer hardware, musical instruments to software, are all making money in this sector. This is why we’ve seen an influx of investors trying to make money from this part of the industry, selling dreams with marketing tropes like “There’s an artist in every fan!” That gem is currently Soundcloud’s marketing push, where one begins to deconstruct the stupidity of that claim is an article in itself, suffice to say, not everyone at a gig is desperate to be the next music sensation. It may not be the Roy family from Sucession, but we don’t think any of those pouring big money into music creation and associated technology are doing it for the greater good. In some cases their involvement is showing to have made things worse, not better for those buying the products and services. In tech terms, it’s the corner shop developers and manufacturers who show the greatest empathy to the music production community.

We’re All Doomed!

If you’ve made it through this article so far you may be thinking that it’s time to sell your stuff, give up and go get a real job! Not at all.

There was plenty of grass roots music being created in the ‘bad old days' of music production, this was in the time when the chance of getting a recording made and a single or album released was as likely as winning the lottery. However, for many of us the primary motivation isn’t the money, or even the success, it’s the love of music. This is perhaps why many of us have largely ignored the notion of getting a break and making it - whatever those things mean.

Pre-streaming, there was an entire generation of us who recorded at home, spent around £1000 pressing a thousand CDs and then sold them at the back of gigs. We probably made more than most ever make out of streaming. We loved the gigs, we cherished the rare moments of radio play, we enjoyed the camaraderie of being part of a band, of piling into a van with the sound and lighting team and bringing our brand of music to towns and cities we had never heard of before or spoken about since. We made a few thousand pounds on the way too.

Do you have a chance of being the next Taylor Swift or Drake? Possibly, but it’s no more or less likely than it’s ever been. Technology has changed a lot, one thing it hasn’t done is improve your chances.

We need to take care when using the term ‘Music Production Democratisation’ as it infers attributes to this industry that still don’t exist. It’s still a wonderful industry to work in, as long as we go in with our eyes wide open and don’t believe the hype from those who are making the big money from it.