This is fascinating! but i still don't get it... the whole narrative with Electronic music is that artists get robbed by labels and make like 5 cents on every dollar the label makes. The money is in the gigs - IF you can draw enough crowd.

Why doesn't that apply to the chillout\ambient world?

Also, anyone remember that TA member "Owsey" who used to post his "amateur" tracks here? that cat gets mad views on youtube now, i wonder if he's making an honest living out of it right now or if he kept his day job. His productions were really good, i'm rooting for him.

Last edited by Viber on Mar-08-2018 at 00:16

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Originally posted by SYSTEM-J Some of the artists in that genre are remarkably prolific as well. They can put out five albums every year.

That reminds me - I bought this really cheap 3 disc chillout/new wave compilation some years back, and on the cover it had all tracks made by different artists. Then I looked at the credits, and most (if not all) of the tracks were made by the same two people.

The amount of tracks some of these people pump out is mind boggling.

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quote:

Originally posted by Viber This is fascinating! but i still don't get it... the whole narrative with Electronic music is that they get robbed by labels and make like 5 cents on every dollar the label makes. The money is in the gigs - IF you can draw enough crowd. Why doesn't that apply to the chillout\ambient world?

As I alluded to before, there are a lot more places in the world where you'll hear banal chill-out music than there are night clubs. And these places will loop the music all day long. In the past that would certainly have meant a lot of CDs sold with these tracks licensed to them. I've seen those Buddha Bar CDs for sale in retail outlets where you can buy garden furniture and desk lamps (and it looks like Blank & Jones have featured on them a few times down the years). These days it's more likely to be streams, but the same principle applies.

As for proper ambient music... the dedicated fans like to buy the physical records. Those are proper listening albums, usually enjoyed by serious music heads. People will buy limited edition vinyls with high unit prices. If you can get to be a well-known name in that field, I would hazard it's solid sales of about 5,000-30,000 physical copies per album. Not enough to make people rich, but enough to do it full time.

ASC is that kind of cult producer who mainly makes ambient/listening music, and he's publicly said he tries to earn a living from physical sales. He's not a famous name and doesn't have high listening stats on the likes of Spotify (apparently he has just 4,914 monthly listeners), but he sells physical records.

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I always kind of lumped these two in the same category as guys like ATB- somewhere in between trance and pop dance. Never cared for their work in either department, but every now and then they managed to hit a chillout single out of the park:

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Originally posted by SYSTEM-J That said, even in the respectable ambient world, there's potentially more money to be made from physical releases than the majority of club fodder. You only have to look at the Discogs frenzy over every limited print run on labels like Silent Season.

Or the Art of Chill series, on Platipus. Copies of the second volume are commanding outrageous prices on the secondary market (and the third and fourth are also heavily priced up).

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Last edited by Paradox Lost on Mar-08-2018 at 11:53

I know it's a remix, but this was always my fav when it came to anything blank & jones: