How [people love to kick] the Music Business
No one doubts the label provides useful services to the artists, but the way they doggedly insist on making money from recorded music despite all technological evidence that production and distribution costs nothing. It’s the way they true to sue their way out of a hole rather than find out how to make money from it. And in the process, shutting down services fans love and that actually help promote the very bands that would otherwise extinguish in obscurity (Pandora, Muxtape, whatever else).
Sorry, but there are 2 insane sentences there.
“Doggedly insist on making money from recorded music”. You mean the only part that record companies actually own, and ergo the only part they have any ability to earn from. Have you tried asking a booking agent/ promotor for some of the live income?
“production and distribution costs nothing”. Mmkay. So employing enough people to handle all of the correct metadata for all of the digital deliveries to all of the different digital retailers, across a ton of different territories, all with slightly different processes, costs nothing. As does fixing the inevitable problems/ lost data/ corrupted transfers that occur.
And then, building systems to handle 12 different royalty breakdowns for the 12 different songs now sold separately on an album (where previously there was 1 breakdown for each purchase of the complete lp), and employing the additional man/ladypower to process all of those transactions, that all costs nothing too.
And studios, once they all got a copy of garageband, they dropped their prices to almost zero.
If you’re running 1 band, maybe the production/ distribution argument is true. Maybe. Any more than that and it’s not.
There are totally some bands who’d be better off never signing a deal, particularly with a major. But c’mon, no label is seriously trying to claw their way back to a time when CDs were a money printing machine. That was a dumb, lucky era and seriously, only a handful of people still cling to it. And they’re all consultants.
ps I do realise I may just be rising to bait here. But still…
