The Sound Age - Music industry Podcast Wrecking Crew Touring

The horrific story of the next big thing in rock. Ian Watkins will be remembered as one of the most evil people in the history of music. 

A few years back I was looking to make a ticketing site that essentially scrapped booking fees, we got to the point where we had an investor working with us, but researching small venues we found out that Australia was uniquely different than the rest of the world. Almost every single small venue in Australia had EXCLUSIVE deals with 1 or 2 ticketing sites. This doesn't seem like a problem until you think what are tickets in 2022? In 2004 tickets were lining up in a newsagents waiting for the 6am ticket release and buying from a person behind a booth. Today it's an email with a qr code attached. But the booking fees have never changed. You still pay 10-15% or more on top of your $20 ticket for your local venue that holds 350 people.

It makes sense for stadiums and festivals and major tours to use a ticketing site, but these days small clubs can very easily sell their own tickets, they can collect their customers data to form a mailing list, $3 per person doesn't sound like that much of an issue, but that's over $1000 every night in a club that holds 350 people. In the local music scene that's a lot of money. If venues sold their own tickets they could save the customers money or they could use that extra money to pay local bands $1000 more every night.

Where will spotify be in 10 years? because there’s not much business in hosting other companies music. The answer is right in front of us already. Spotify Originals - Just like Netflix Originals. Original content exclusive to Spotify commissioned by Spotify. Imagine instead of being paid 0.003c per stream, the artist gets paid $20M for the rights to the music. It that doesn’t happen though, streaming and music in general runs the risk of becoming just a tool to sell mobile phones.

The Charts are a measure of success for an artist, they are also a trophy for artists that last the span of the their career. So it's no surprise that labels and managers have concocted ways to manufacture chart positions. This episode I break down a few ways artists have schemed their way to the top and also how the problem was solved and then unsolved meaning we still live in a world where you can essentially buy a chart position. 

What happens when a TV trivia show mentions the similarity of a children's song and one of Australia's biggest hits 27 years after it's release. The owners of the copyright who never even realised the similarity go on a rampage to extract whatever money they can from the artists. The result, $4.5 million in damages and court costs and the downward spiral and eventual death of the musician at the centre of the court case. It highlights a glaring problem with Copyright law. If the motives and timeframe for copyright infringement is not considered in the case, then as more songs are sold to private investors, labels and publishers through NFT's and other means, there will be an increase in petty little copyright claims. After all these private investors are removed from the art of making music, they are in the art of making money.

The early 2000s Boy band craze was single handedly created by one man. A man who also created the biggest Ponzi scheme in the history of the US ripping off many thousands of innocent people out of hundreds of millions of dollars. The pop stars on the walls of teenagers were all victims of a Con man.