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).

Not sayin’ it’s easy to solve, but their stubborn arrogance that the way things were are the way things should continue to be is what gives them a bad name and has caused us (people who love music and will happily spend on music) to lose faith in them. This is what causes people to make comments like, “Greedy fat bastards I hate them.” Kick, kick, kick. Beat. Dead. Horse.

Dude, I sound like Bob Lefsetz.

laurakaypea:

Couldn’t have said it better myself, Dan.  Record labels aren’t defunct - what labels do is still totally necessary, it’s just their business model that sucks, pouring money into building brands which other areas of the industry (merch, touring etc) then parasitically profit from, having made much smaller investment in the early stages.  And it’s not like anyone else is doing 360 that much more convincingly…LiveNation may be doing deals with huge established artists, but they’re not nurturing new bands or breaking artists yet.  And anyway, aren’t they considering outsourcing all the label elements of the 360 deal….to a major label?  Anyway…rant rant rant.

yodaniel:

emeline:

cachorra:

allisonweiss:

(via threedotdash)

This is a really interesting article. If the music industry would just grow up and use the internet for all it’s advantages, they’d do a lot better, I think. Shutting down Muxtape? What a terrible idea. I can’t tell you how many times I heard a sweet song on someone’s playlist and clicked the link to Amazon to buy it.

Perhaps the major labels are just scared of the fact that independent musicians might not need them anymore. If you do it right on the internet you can do DIY.

Go on then, do it right. Seriously, good luck if you can. Labels clearly have plenty of faults, but there’s a lot of boring-but-necessary stuff that’s a real pain to have to do independently, even outside the ‘stumping up a load of cash’ part. I guess it depends what the definition of an independent musician is, and how much of a living they want/ need to make from their work. DIY is totally possible, in that all of the required tools/ indie organisations are out there, but you still have to be (a) really smart to use them all to your advantage and (b) have plenty of smart people around you to help out, because it’s pretty time-consuming. And once you’ve assembled your crack team of smart individuals, all of whom take a cut… mighten you just as well be on a label?

ps was the RIAA who killed Muxtape, which isn’t quite the same as the labels, none of whom complained about it.