Music
CNET on music: Right advice, wrong lessons
Greg Sandoval over at CNET has a piece up about Radiohead and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and their experiments with “pay what you want” record releases. Greg is the guy who wrote the recent story in which Trent said he wasn’t that impressed by the response to his album (Reznor also mentioned the idea of an Internet tax to compensate artists for downloading, which I said was a dumb idea).
Sandoval’s headline says that artists shouldn’t miss the lessons that Radiohead and Reznor offer. And what are those lessons? Apparently, they are that musicians aren’t business people, and that “the music business is probably better left in the hands of businessmen.” The CNET writer goes on to point out that most musical acts fail — EMI says that only 5 per cent of its artists become profitable, apparently — and therefore artists still need the record labels to handle the business.
With all due respect to Greg, I think “the music business is better left in the hands of businessmen” is probably the worst advice I’ve heard in a long time. Do artists like Reznor or Radiohead need people with some financial acumen, or staffers who can handle the details of marketing, packaging, etc.? Of course they do. But it’s a long way from that to saying they should just remain shackled to the traditional record labels.
As for the line about only 5 per cent of EMI’s acts being profitable, that’s hardly surprising. For one thing, many of the label’s acts are unadulterated crap, which even millions spent on marketing and hype cannot spin into gold; and for another thing, the overhead of a traditional label like EMI is astronomical — for all the mid-level managers and their salaries and bonuses (never contingent on actual sales, of course). That’s presumably why the new owner is slashing and burning.
So pay attention to the lessons of Reznor and Radiohead, yes — it will be work to sell your own material, to market it and to profit from it. It’s not a licence to print money. But at least you can be in control of your own destiny to some extent.
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""The thing we have been trying to find is a model that will give the artists who cannot support the full functions of a label some income."
That sounds to me like he's looking at breaking up the functions of a record company into different packages, allowing artists to choose which functions they want. So, for example, an artist could engage a record company to do its PR and marketing work, while not relying on it for sales or distribution - effectively making the artist a client rather than part of a roster.
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think that approach actually might have a lot of potential. Then the
record company becomes a kind of service provider, rather than the
be-all-and-do-all provider of everything from marketing to hookers and
coke. That could be a very interesting model.
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I'd point out that the subtext is that labels should give the bands more of the revenues. Wishing it will never make it so. I commented on this on my blog, linking to this article.
So Radiohead tried out a different model. They wanted a different, and perhaps better alternative. They sure seemed successful.
Odds will always be stacked badly if your business model is 90% for you and 10% for me. Volume is a b***h if you are an obscure band with a small fan base.
Apologies for the link: http://pwnership.com/your-band-can-live-off-of-...
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No need to apologize for the link -- that's a good post.
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It's time that labels are more discerning in what they want to achieve in a focused manner and also in terms of marketing, be more focused on niches and the Long Tail instead of a scattergun approach
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Radiohead and Trent neither are saints and yeah I think Trent is the Net savvier of the two. In RH's case I think they were just throwing crap against the wall and see what would stick more than trying to be revolutionary. What they probably didn't expect was they'd do better with web pirates and tight-wads(I know being redundant here) coughing up some money which when aggregated will probably pile up higher than cd release. besides who wants stupid cd now that it's not fresh anymore and it's all been jacked into people's IPods for months.
Trent-no dummy but not a businessman either. The rock star model is dead. These people are an anomaly from previous scarcity proprietary walled model. Not gonna see many of them in a few more years so enjoy it while you can.
See also recent posts by Mark Cuban on some ideas and also Lefsetz on RH's true colors.
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