Get Rich Quick Schemes
I’m constantly bombarded with e-mails from entrepreneurs promoting their new business ideas. They’re almost always a newfangled label.
It’s no longer about the label. It’s about the talent.
Used to be you needed money. To navigate the waters of distribution and marketing. But although those can now help, they’re an ever-decreasing part of the pie. Oh, you need distribution, and something that qualifies as marketing, but it doesn’t require big bucks, and oftentimes no bucks at all. So I can’t understand why all these wannabe businessmen are creating new models/edifices that no artist needs to utilize/inhabit.
The hardest thing to do in this business is to find talent. Which is why the major labels have to a great degree stopped doing this. The same way the movie studios have been remaking TV shows and putting out endless sequels. There’s a desire to eliminate risk. So, in music, you have a handful of behind the scenes producers/beatmakers and it’s only the faces that change. They only have to be pretty, for anybody can sing with the new technology/auto-tune. The Neptunes, Scott Storch, Timbaland…it’s all about BEHIND THE SCENES today. Cranking out the formula.
As for non-hip-hop music. Well, where’s the marketing avenue? Too tough to market and sell, the majors have given up on breaking ground. If you’ve got a record that sounds nothing like what’s on the radio, believe me, the major doesn’t want it.
So, you wannabe majors… What are you bringing to the party? You’ve got no power at radio. And certainly not at retail. One Tower bankruptcy would wipe out your entire equity.
No, the focus has to be completely the opposite in the new world. It’s got to start with the TALENT, find someone great and then navigate the waters alongside them. Don’t create a model and wait for the talent to come to you. Hell, if your act is good, doors will open like crazy. Hell, isn’t that how Coran Capshaw built the Dave Matthews Band?
And if the DMB started out now, it wouldn’t have a major label. Hell, videos financed by RCA helped the DMB, but now MTV doesn’t air any videos. And, you can get paid at the iTunes Music Store and so much of your revenue comes from touring.
There’s going to be a new distribution model on the Net. One within which more people will have more music at a lower price. But the company landscape will be positively cottage industry. Oh, there will be aggregators in the future, but they will be more akin to the aforementioned Coran Capshaw and other managers like Irving Azoff than major label execs. It’s not about an adversarial relationship, it’s about having someone on your TEAM!
