For people who are interested in having music jobs after attending music schools, whether it might be on the creative end as a musician, engineer, or sound editor, or on the business end as a marketer, promoter, or producer, it’s essential to be aware of how much the industry has changed in just the last ten years. It’s important to remember that although you have a number one hit on the charts, you cannot say that you’re already a success.
Musicians still generated a large percentage of their revenue from the hard-copy sales of their music, and with the same amount as they had for more than five decades early in this millennium. This meant that touring and playing concerts were the essence of promoting a new record. While ticket sales for concerts did signify a minor revenue stream for the artists themselves, both they as well as the record companies labels saw the bulk of their income from record sales. However, with the popularity of the Internet and the availability of purchasing recorded music at reduced prices (or for nothing at all, if one is willing to violate a few barely-enforced copyright protection laws), every aspect of music jobs has undergone a significant change.
For the musicians themselves, they can expect to earn the lion’s share of their revenue through performances, with sales of CDs, iTunes purchases, and ring-tone downloads representing only a fraction of their income. As a result, the record companies themselves now take an immense interest in obtaining some percentage of the revenue from concert tickets, t-shirt sales, and other ancillary markets related to live performance.
Indeed, today, the music industry has become more concerned about looking for fans who would love to hear it live – and pay for it – rather than getting them to purchase recorded albums. The shift has been so dramatic that roughly all independent record stores have gone bankrupt, supplanted by mega-sized institutions like Wal-Mart and Target that not only offer CDs, but also just about everything else a customer might want. Even at these huge corporations, sales of CD’s are at an almost all-time low. The bottomline: recording music isn’t anymore as profitable as it was before.
Thus, music jobs (e.g. sound engineer, sound editor) will be harder to come by since the music scene is on the hots for marketers and tour promoters. If one wants to find the most lucrative line of work in the so-called “recording” industry, one shall most probably find the best music jobs in these fields after formal training in one of the many music schools.
Tags: music internships, music schools, music studio, recording studio