Here’s a little secret: 29 Streams was a test balloon related to some hard thinking that we’ve been doing at FMC for the past few years. 

 

Clearly, there have been changes in the music distribution landscape in the past decade. Many observers have characterized these structural changes to the music business as positive improvements for musicians, particularly when compared with the music industry of yore. While it’s true that musicians’ access to the marketplace has greatly improved, there has been no systematic attempt to understand if and how artists’ ability to generate revenue based on their creative work has changed in this new environment.

 

We wanted to go beyond speculation and try to figure out how musicians in many genres are making a living in today’s marketplace. 

 

This is why we have launched an Artist Revenue Streams (ARS) project, a multi-method research initiative to assess if and how musicians’ revenue streams are changing in this new music landscape. 

 

 

We are not alone in our interest in this topic. Indeed, some social researchers, academics and organizations have published interesting studies that have analyzed the earning power and social capital of some segments of the US music community, or how much musicians have earned from some specific streams. However, there has been no comprehensive effort to directly ask a wide range of musicians — from many different genres and locations, and representing an array of career arcs — how their revenue streams are changing across the board, if at all. FMC proposes a multi-stage research project to undertake this crucial work.

 

 

In the first stage of this project, FMC is conducting in-person interviews with a small but diverse set of musicians and composers to collect information about the ways that you are currently generating income from your music, performances or brand, and whether this has changed over the past ten years.  We have already completed about 18 interviews, with more on our calendars. If you’re interested in participating, click here to take a 14-question qualifying survey so we can learn more about your role as a musician. 

 

FMC is also reviewing individual financial data from some of the musicians that we interview, with an understanding that any financial information is anonymous and not identifiable with any particular artist, band or label. While the in-person interviews will provide us with a rich set of information, actual financial data – Quicken/Quickbook reports, accounting and royalty statements – can help us to quantify the amount of revenue generated in different categories, and changes from year to year.

In third phase, we will work with partners to launch a wide-scale online survey, where we hope thousands of US-based musicians will answer questions about their relevant revenue streams. We expect that component to go live in fall 2011.

 

 

We’re interested in speaking with all types of musicians, composers and songwriters. The only prerequisites are:

 

If you’re interested in participating, click here to take a 14-question qualifying survey so we can learn more about your role as a musician. For more information, check out this handy page we built for the project.