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WHEN YOU THINK about ‘making it’ in the music industry, you might think that the only way to do it is the traditional way: sign to a label, and get them to help you move upwards.
Over the decades there have always been bands who have rejected this method. And now the digital era means that groups can challenge things even further.
Last year, Steve Wall said that he made just 97p in a month from plays of Brewing Up A Storm on YouTube. So how can musicians make money in a changed industry?
Deadbots
Paul Kelly and Nina Knezevic, who call themselves Deadbots, are an Irish-Canadian band based in Dublin. For their latest release, they’ve eschewed labels and streaming services in order to release the music on their own website.
The pair met through friends when Kelly was living in Vancouver, where Knezevic is from. Although Kelly DJed across Europe and Knezevic had been writing poems and songs since she was a child, it wasn’t until they met each other that it all clicked.
“Literally the day we met, we knew we wanted to make music together,” says Knezevic.
After Kelly returned to Ireland, Knezevic followed him fourth months later. The pair met in 2005 and were married in 2011.
They began making music together almost instantly, and thought that they should do what you’re “supposed” to do when you’re in a band: sign to a label.
But they discovered that signing to a label did not mean that they were heading down a path that suited them.
During her time co-hosting a show on Near FM with DJ Aoife Nic Canna, Knezevic learned a lot about other bands’ experiences. These showed her the sorts of pitfalls that exist for bands in Ireland.
“In there I would see different people and people that didn’t have jobs, they were [full-time] musicians,” says Knezevic. Though she admired them, she discovered that these musicians could often struggle to pay rent.
That made Deadbots think about putting their jobs first:
We didn’t want it to be a struggle – that the creativity is putting pressure on it. We didn’t want to have to gig to pay our rent.
When they got involved in the label world, they discovered that they were often not very happy with the result.
“We had situations where, for example, little things like we would create a song and the process was amazing and we put our heart and soul into it. It would end up in a TV show and we wouldn’t have heard about it,” says Knezevic.
It was also the little things, “like getting a cheque in the mail for 10c”, or taking half an hour to sign up to a website about payment, only to be told they’d earned “0.001 of a cent”.
The payback bands have to make to labels “didn’t make sense to us”, the pair say.
The band had intended to set up their own label, but found it added more steps to be put in place before their music got to listeners. So they simply didn’t bother with one.
A few times, they found that labels were disappointed in music they made, says Kelly – and this made the band think. It took them nearly a decade to approach things the way they do now, and it comes as the internet allows anyone to run their own business from their own home.
“The timing was perfect,” says Knezevic.
All these different platforms where you can network and talk. It was perfect timing and everything has fallen into place for everyone to do it. Go out and do it yourself be a businessman be a businesswoman. Be the business for your music.
‘You are filling material in their schedule’
Now, the band release their music on the site deadbotsmusic.com, and the money from sales (a single costs €1.50) goes straight to their email through PayPal (using this system also means they were able to email the first five fans who bought the single). They have, however, sought the services of a PR agent to help them get the word out there.
“The label is not investing in you at all – they are giving you a loan for whatever tier of PR they decided your release is on,” says Kelly. “If you get signed to a big label, if you sign an EP to a label, you think ‘oh my god, this is it, this is amazing’. They’ve got 10, 15 other artists they have invested in that they need to push before they even think about you. So you quickly start to realise that – I’m not saying this is the case for everybody – you are filling material in their release schedule.”
“We are not bitter or anything like that – we learned from our mistakes,” he adds. “You achieve so much more satisfaction doing it this way than the might of a label or what you perceive to be a mighty label.”
The band retain ownership of their songs, which means that if they get involved in sync deals (synchronisation deals, where the music is bought to be used during TV or film broadcasts or ads), the money goes to the band. It isn’t split with a label.
They’ve had songs licensed by Smirnoff and Harvey Norman – and say that with their upcoming album, they have more potential for deals.
They see their music like a boomerang, says Knezevic: they send it out into the world and get something back.
They are wary of ’360 deals’, in which a label provides financial support to an artist, but that artist must in return give the label a cut from their revenue streams (which can mean sales, gigs and music publishing, for starters).
Knezevic says that she’d met bands who had signed such deals – only to have the label “sending you example songs – ‘can you make something like this, this is what we are needing’”.
Social media promotion
What is key for Deadbots is that they can promote themselves and their music online through social media sites, like Instagram.
“You hear about all these massive artists trying to engage with their fans, and self-releasing is the perfect chance to do that,” says Kelly.
Knezevic describes how they can use hashtags on their instagram videos or images, for example, to attract new fans. They also want their website to sell more than music or t-shirts.
“It’s the era of self promotion and content is king,” says Knezevic. “There is so much content – make the content, make the videos, and people will find you.”
Kelly says that what they’re doing isn’t anything radically new – bands have long been using sites like Bandcamp to sell their music.
But with the larger platforms, the amount of money the artist makes can be a very small percentage. With Spotify, for example, in January 2017 for an artist to earn $100 from ad-supporter streams a song would have to be played 740,302 times, according to Digital Music News.
“If you were to buy a product off anyone else it would be absurd to think that someone gets 99% of the money you should be earning,” says Kelly.
The pair want to encourage people to look “outside those obvious platforms” that they stream music from, and “go and discover music again the way they did before the internet”.
“We’re trying to get people to broaden horizons a little bit when it comes to searching for new music,” says Kelly.
Just because they’re not on the usual platforms doesn’t mean they’re being ignored, either – they’ve been played by Kelly Ann Byrne on Today FM and John Barker on 98FM.
Are they disrupting the music industry?
“It’s not even disrupting – it’s just easier, more simple, more straightforward, more organic, and more satisfying,” says Knezevic.
When we thought about doing it the best way possible that’s how organic it became: ‘All we need is this.’
Kelly believes that musicians will drive change. “The industry will have to change or a new industry will have to be created because of how people approach releasing their music and reaching fans.”
Knezevic recounts how 10 years ago the band signed to a label, and her father said: “I’m happy for you, but would you not just put it out yourself?”
At the time, she thought: “Who’s going to listen, who’s going to care? What is he talking about?” Now, she realises he was right.
“It’s basically putting the output of the artist back into the artist’s hand,” says Kelly of their approach.
That’s what we’re encouraging other artists to do. It’s not just about what we’re doing. We’d really love to see a growth in a similar method of people reaching their fans and music and looking after their PR and image.
Love Unlimited by Deadbots is out now.
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Is this a sponsored article?
@Gary Tuohy: It says it’s supported by Schweppes.
A beverage brand that is sold around the world. It includes a variety of lemonade, carbonated waters and ginger ales.
I personally recommend this beverage. ‘Schweppes’, probably the best beverage in the world.
@Gary Tuohy: Hey man. Not sure! Nice to be asked for the interview though. Cheers for giving it some of your eye time ☺️
Musicians once sang for enjoyment. Then they sang for payment. Then they teamed with the music replicators and distributors who could take sell one performance thousands of times which made many people embarrassingly rich and gave others a living.
They could charge well because the general public had no other way to hear a pristine performance than to pay the “industry”
Then came cheap non-decaying digital replication and the internet ( paid for by the end user through hardware purchase and broadband subscription btw) which enabled them to share and replicate a performance themselves.
It’s not the making of the music that made musicians rich – it was a monopoly of the replication and distribution channels
That game is now up. Time to go back to performing for payment – or enjoyment..
@Nydon: Hey. Agree in that it’s always been about the enjoyment of making music together for us and a big thing for us was to not feel any creative pressure making music for money to survive …thankfully too as we are in the era of free streaming illegal downloads etc. We never wanted that feeling or pressure. That’s why we both still have job jobs. Anything else we make from music music is extra extra ✌️Makes this whole new process of getting our music out there even more enjoyable, no pressure regardless …and it’s been a success so far comparatively ….and look we’re in the journal! Yay! Now to sleep soon…we both have to work tomorrow! Good night ! N & P
@Deadbots:
I hope you can and will make enough out of performing live to have a good life and income. But I’m afraid recording and mass distribution may in future be only a way to advertise what you can do live.
If you can get your biggest fans to become patrons and subsidise some of that advertising cost by paying for downloads then all the better – but I think it’s back to the days of the wandering minstrels singing for their supper :-(
@Nydon: I’m afraid you’re take on the history of musicians/composers and the music industry is overly simplistic and rather disrespectful. The major ground shift that changed the industry for the worse was that people saw the internet technology as a way of sharing and getting music for free and the recording companies didn’t know how to cope with that level of copyright theft. Their way out was to allow Spotify access to their artists at relatively low cost by reducing the artists share to virtually nothing. I’m not sure what you do for a living but if your job was suddenly dropped to a fraction of minimum wage but you were expected to continue to work the same amount because “you enjoy doing it, don’t you”, maybe then you would understand of the damage Spotify and such services do.
@Nydon: Or they can write a mega hit tune or tour relentlessly for 40 hrs a week and sell merch etc
I hear Brewing Up A Storm often on the radio. Should there not be an income stream from IMRO seeing how they charge every little corner shop that has a radio on?
@Squiddley Diddley: Sorry just realised that song was mentioned as an example.
how much did they get for radio play?
@steve white: Hear ya. We don’t plan on income from radio play. Or even sales really. It’s all in the syncing these days. That’s why we want to own our tracks 100% and have our own cyber house for them. Night :)
Crap Bands don’t make any money shocker
@Stevie Doran: Yo! The song we got a payment check for 10 cents for was the same song being given away on so many free download sites the labels profits were being affected. But even still free downloads help get ur music heard n out there. Months later that song was used for a tv show, video game and Milan fashion week. #payday but we didn’t get all the pay cause we gave away too much of our publishing rights.
Now we own all our own music.
Most money to be made these days for bands at our level is in syncing & we’ve already synced 3 songs off the upcoming album it’s not even out yet, and yeppers, that money went straight to us.
You don’t have to like our music. Not everyone will. But want to push message for others to maintain their ownership cause when syncs come calling, hello
Still getting 97p is actually good money for work done 30 years ago.
Joking aside it’s never been better for up and coming musicians. A decade ago some guy in a suit decided whether or not you’d have a career and more often than not went with the safe bet and offered washed up “superstars” millions rather than spreading it around to new talent. Some musicians lament the fact that if it had been ten years earlier they’d have made a fortune but they’re ignoring the fact that they might not have even been heard.
have your say