Imogen Heap is a rare artist who finds herself almost universally respected within the industry. Now that she’s picked up an Ivor for International Achievement, her credibility has risen even further and when she says something about the state of the industry, people tend to take her seriously. So when Heap tweeted this week that she’s finding it pretty much impossible to break even when touring, it caught a lot of people’s attention. The Guardian’s Charles Arthur picked up on it, and wrote a pretty interesting analysis of what’s Heap’s news means for perceived ‘facts’ about the new music industry model.
We’ve long been frustrated by the oft-repeated line that ‘artists need not worry about falling record sales because they can make up for the lost income from their live earnings’. This concept has always been deeply flawed for the vast majority of artists, yet it gets repeated again and again (most often by those who want to justify illegal file-sharing). The live industry as a whole may have enjoyed significant growth in recent years, but it’s a lazy and inaccurate assumption to presume that this also means that live income has risen by similar margins for artists.
It’s long been the case that artists on the first rungs of their career ladder will probably not make any significant profits from touring. For these acts live work is about building an audience and getting their music known. This has always been such a crucial aspect of developing a music career that labels did not mind stumping up major sums in tour support in order to help get their artists known and loved. As recorded revenues have declined however, some people have looked at the growth in live revenues and made this ridiculous leap of faith which says that live income will balance everything out. It may be so for well-established ‘heritage’ acts, but they’re the only artists making a profit. This concept that live was the new industry saviour was also given wings by some record companies’ insistence on 360˚ deals for new acts. This itself led to an impression that live (and of course merch) were the key new revenue streams.
It’s sobering indeed to learn that even artists like Heap are struggling to make touring pay. She has a large and particularly devoted fanbase. Granted, she might not be frugal when it comes to production costs, but she cares deeply about putting on a great and memorable show. The fact that she cannot make it pay points to several sicknesses within the industry. The most obvious one is that artists playing anything other than small venues face crippling costs from the gatekeepers of live: venues, promoters and ticketing agencies in particular. Interestingly, Heap went on record to say that this issue isn’t unique to the Live Nation-dominated USA, but an international problem. With Live Nation winning regulatory approval for its merger with Ticketmaster, we can’t imagine things are going to get anything other than worse.
What interests us most about Heap’s comments however is her acknowledgement that record sales are still vitally important for her as an artist. She clearly does not fall into the ‘control the internet’ anti file-sharing lobby, but her career still depends on selling recorded music. She may not reject all forms of file-sharing, but that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t like to also sell some records. Hopefully lazy commentators can now accept for once and for all that recorded music is still vitally important, not just for labels, but for artists. And hopefully we can also now put an end to the absurd notion that rampant file sharing doesn’t matter because artists can make money from live.
We find it amusing that within 24 hours of Imogen Heap’s comments, another artist – Sia – commented to the BBC that all file-sharing does is ‘make record labels feel scared’, that it allows her to plan her live work, adding that she has "never made any money out of record sales anyway". None of this actually undermines our points. In Sia’s case she hasn’t actually sold a great many records and her highest-profile album was through a major label. We assume that she was significantly unrecouped so we’re not the least bit surprised that she didn’t make any money from record sales. It doesn’t follow that that it’s impossible to make money from record sales, it’s just that she didn’t. Sadly the BBC made a headline of her ‘I've never made any money out of record sales’ comment. We wonder whether Sia is happy with the subsequent piece which reads like a defence of the file sharing is good, live equals money and record companies are stupid viewpoint. We know better.
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