Recently he posted a six part series on the state of music publishing and describing a vision of what the future might hold. It’s a very interesting read, and I hope you can find some time (perhaps in a few weeks!), to sit down and read all of his posts.
As a conductor, I have a few frustrations. I am constantly amazed at the number of new compositions for choir pumped out each year. Many, dare I say most, are not the best quality. This volume of low quality music makes finding new music terribly difficult. In the olden days (like 50 years ago), there wasn’t enough music. Just finding anything you hadn’t heard of often involved trips to Europe, or a great publisher, or a really good music library. Someone told me once that there are a few thousand new band titles every year, and there are something like ten to fifteen thousand new choral titles each year. I have no idea if those numbers are accurate, but if they are even close, that’s scary.
And to make it worse, it is these sub par compositions, rather than the higher quality pieces, are often the ones that pay the bills for publishers, distributers, and many composers and arrangers. People buy this music. I’m not sure if there’s anything to do about it, but it makes life hard, especially for the young conductor or music teacher, to find good rep.
I have other quibbles that in the grand scheme of things are minor. They mostly involve thus use of current technology. There’s no reason anymore that I cannot be able to view a pdf of a complete score. It’s easy, cheap, and provides tons of value. I do not care for minimum orders (typically 16-24), especially when the publishers with minimum orders are also usually not allowing me to view the complete score online. I fail to see why I can’t order and print on demand. Lots of independent folks are doing it, and it really should be possible for everyone. Pay for 50 copies at 10:00 am, run them to printing services, and sing through it at noon.
But the one that always blows me away is that typical composers do not retain the rights to their own music, and they often get in the neighborhood of 10% of the sale price of their pieces. My numbers may not be 100% accurate, but they are close. It makes me sad for composers.
Paul dissects these issues in more detail (and much more eloquently and accurately), and outlines some of the future thinking that is going around this important issue. Enjoy, and remember: the end is near!
Cyndi Hunt says
Paul Carey says
Julia Laylander says
What you and Paul have communicated exactly mirrors what has been happening in the book publishing industry. With the rise of electronic publication and distribution possibilities, the traditional publishing model is no longer remotely fair to authors (if it ever truly was) in terms of a reasonable financial return on the authors’ investment of time and energy, as well as in terms of who owns the copyright to creative works and controls how long they stay in print. The opportunity to self-publish books (made possible by Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, Smashwords, Draft2Digital, and others) becomes an appealing option—and then the author realizes that the effort involved in creating a high-quality, desirable work pales in comparison with the energy (and time and money) needed to successfully market that work. Authors (and composers) wish to spend their time in creating, not marketing.
There appears to be an ever-widening gulf between the producers (ever-increasing in numbers) and the consumers (fairly stable numbers) of creative works. Not only is the market already massively oversaturated with musical compositions as well as books, many of which are now self-published, the question of quality control (or lack thereof) looms ever larger. Although an avid reader, I do not have the time or energy to wade through the millions of self-published e-books to try to find any gems that may be buried in the rapidly swelling garbage heap. In addition, even if there were some magic “find the good books fast” app that I could use, that would still not give me more time in which to read that which I have found, nor would it give me any more money with which to purchase the newly found gems. And given my normal reading pace of a book or two per week, with the estimated amount of time I have left in life I still will not be able to read all of the good books I wish to read that have already been published, much less those that will be published in the future—even if I could access them all through a public library for free. [Replace “reader” with “choir” and the same intractable problems apply.]
And so for those reasons and many more, the self-publishing option that originally seemed so appealing and immensely more fair has lost much of its glitter, while the world of traditional publishing (for music and books) still slams its doors in the faces of all those who create and submit works which are (a) not seen as being instant best sellers, and (b) don’t fit their traditional mold (even if most of us would judge many of those works superb), and pays a pittance to the creators of works they do accept. And so it goes…