Gervais is saying that it’s possible to make money by promoting music, however nobody can make money inside the art of music itself.
Gervais brings up another point in his article. He states that com-pared to other careers, “music isn’t a true profession in the full sense of the word.” Gervais says that job titles such as surgeon, firefighter and electrician (and virtually every other job title) re-quires some type of regulations and objective standards, while these standards would only hurt the art of music.
Another huge factor as to why musicians aren’t making much money selling their music is piracy. An article written by Jordie McKenzie in 2009 (full article) goes into further detail about the correlation between sales and illegal downloading activity in Australia, but one main statistic in this report catches the eye. It’s been estimated that over one billion songs are illegally down-loaded each week (in 2009). It would be no surprise if this sta-tistic has increased since the writing of this article, which means that the music industry has been severely hit by this form of obtaining songs. Due to websites such as Pirate Bay and peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing software
like BitTorrent, album sales (both physical and digital) have dropped, which in turn decreases a musician’s pay. This can be a great problem to new and under-ground musicians in situations where every dollar counts.
There are a few ways to combat the problems listed above. One way is to increase the percentage of pay a musician receives when signed to a record label, especially when it comes to streaming ser-vices like Pandora or Spotify. Streaming has become the most popular way to listen to music, but artists only get to keep a sliver of the royalties that come from these services. In fact, Mike Masnick posted an article on Techdirt showing the pre-tax and post-tax payout for artists and record labels, with the labels keeping 45. 6% and artists 6.8% pre-tax. After tax, the label keeps 73.1% of the royalties while the artist only scrounges up 10.9% (with the rest handed to publishers and songwriters, respectively). An underground musician signed to a label would benefit greatly if these percentages could be bumped up in the artist’s favor.
Another method that could be taken into practice is greater and more detailed monitoring of online sales and activity, espe-cially with P2P file-sharing. This