Zoë Keating: I want my big data

Zoë Keating at Pop!Tech 2009

Zoë Keating at Pop!Tech 2009 (Wikipedia)

The world of song royalties has always boggled me. Did you know that a “recording artist” (the singer and musician you actually hear) isn’t paid anything for “public performances” of a song on terrestrial radio (AM/FM), TV, or in bars and restaurants? The theory is that song plays help make songs popular, which then drives album sales, tour bookings, and merchandise, which earns the performer money. There’s certainly some truth to that. During the old “payola” scandals of the past, people were accused of taking money in return for more airplay, which tells you something about how valuable it is.

On the other hand, the “songwriter” (the one who wrote the lyrics and music) and the “publisher” (the record company) get paid on both public performances and on album sales. If you never understood why John and Paul were ultra-rich and George and Ringo were not much more than famous, look no further than this dynamic. George and Ringo were (mostly) just players in the band and didn’t get paid for airplay, whereas John and Paul wrote the music and earned money for everything the Beatles did.

The model has changed slightly in modern years. Internet and satellite radio aren’t considered “public performances,” according to the law, and so there is some money paid for performances in these venues. The money is still low and biased toward driving real revenue through album sales, however. But Internet “radio” changes the model completely. Whereas terrestrial radio could help drive a song and might give you broad geographic information about where a song was popular, the Internet can tell you exactly who is listening.

Recently, one composer and performer, Zoë Keating, a cellist, has called for access to the big data behind those Internet song plays. Zoë cares far less about the revenue earned through plays (and even shows you what she’s making). She knows that the real money is in the big data:




And that’s the real crux of the issue. If artists can connect with their fans, they’ll make more money. And the connections are in the data of who listened to what. Further, it’s in things like repetition numbers, ratings, favorites and “Likes” associated with each artist and song. The music world has always been about merchandising and marketing, but in the past it was done on a very coarse granular scale. The mega-stars got really rich and the rest of the artists labored in obscurity. But the Internet is providing access to artists who otherwise wouldn’t be able to get big recording contracts or mainstream terrestrial airplay. As Zoë says in her blog, “In short, I think I’m solving my obscurity problem, so now what?” Access to the data can allow Zoë and other artists to connect with those smaller but growing fanbases and merchandise them as much as possible.

It’s a different model, where the performance money is worth less than the data generated by it.

(via GigaOm)

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