Gigbloggy

Consider the businesses building upon (services for) independent artists: The addressable market for artist services seems like it’s going to hit a plateau at 500,000 artists @ $100 annual (average) per artist for a total of $50,000,000 in annual revenue, split between 2 or 3 large competitors and 3 to 5 smaller players. Even if you double this number, it’s not a huge business unless you combine consumer-facing propositions with artist services and/or consolidate these companies.

Bruce Warila, serial music entrepreneur and activist who’s works we have already talked about in this here blog, has written a three page white sheet on the state of investment in the music business. You can read it here.

As always, Bruce’s pragmatic and analytical approach to writing about the music industry’s current affairs is a very refreshing and interesting one. In his three-page study he illustrates where efforts can be brought to the music-business chain in order to have serious impact of how the recording industry functions as a whole.

It’s all common sense really. The graph on the left here illustrates what artists must go through to “succeed in music”. This scheme has existed for decades, and through his reflexions, Bruce highlights the fact that all new music services that have arisen these past years, whether they be web-based or not, have not been able to alter this chain, but rather have played an important role in ameliorating and condensing certain of its links. He believes that there are four essential links (the ones with the orange background) that deserve particular attention for there to be a substantial improvement in how the recording industry operates, and that even if “occasionally an artist or songwriter jumps several steps via some stunt or self-obtained mass-market exposure slot, but this is getting harder and harder to do now that labels and publishers are doing the same stunts and pushing for the same slots”.

Bruce then follows through his reasoning by describing what he calls the “pain cycle” (those four orange-colored steps), and what investment opportunities are viable in today’s day and age to ease that “pain”.

Again, I found this read to be most interesting and brainstorm-driven. Check it out here: Investing Music Industry 2009.

If some of you are music entrepreneurs, I also encourage you to go to Bruce’s website at www.ricewall.com. He is currently looking to partner in business opportunities.

Thanks to Hypebot for putting me on to this!

Woof