Notes and notes in the news

It’s been a strange few days in the space where music and money meet.

For starters, the wonderful Scarlet Mist website has had to suspend all activity. This noble enterprise that allowed genuine music fans to cut out the touts and buy and sell tickets at face value has been brought down by fraudsters. The scumbags.

And so the touts and the cheats continue to prosper, with hundreds, or even thousands of pre-teen girls crying into their pillows and/or stealing their parents’ credit cards because the One Direction ticket sale suddenly went from official tickets with a face value of under £30 to tickets for £800 per pair on eBay within minutes. I hate touts – please, please, please don’t encourage them.

Still in the pre-teen market, we learn that Justin Bieber’s earnings in the last tax year constituted 4% of the entire music industry’s revenue in Canada, making him the biggest earner in that arena. OK, that’s only 0.0003% of their total national economy – but it’s still an impressive $6,572 per hour, I belieb.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, there are hundreds of thousands of musicians hoping to make a living of some sort out of original music. A recent article suggests that they should be using certain pitching websites and looking as hard as they can for record deals, as if they remain unsigned there’s an estimated 0.00025% chance of being successful and earning £18,200 or more per year per band member. This of course doesn’t take perks into account, such as groupies, cheap warm beer and, er, sleeping in the back of a transit van.

Rock on, music fans.