Focus on awareness, not sales.

Forget the Pirate Bay trial, forget P2P piracy and cease and desist letters.  They are now the sideshow.  We’re moving from ownership to streaming.  Spotify is king here, but it’s not the only one.  There’s MySpace, there’s iMeem and the pay granddaddies, Rhapsody and Napster.  Streaming is better than ownership.  All of the foregoing are licensed by the major labels and numerous other rights holders.  Can these outlets generate enough capital for the rights holders to garner the revenues of yore?  Doubtful.  iMeem is on the ropes right now.  But that’s irrelevant.  Bottom line, people are becoming accustomed to being able to access everything whenever they want.  The old model of buying individual items will not evaporate overnight, but it will start to fade, just like the CD, which was the last physical vestige of this paradigm.

But, philosophy aside, sales just suck.  In eight weeks, Bruce Springsteen has sold 483,803 albums.  An absolutely horrible figure.  Bruce is fine, he’s got a guaranteed contract.  The man who made this deal, Andy Lack?  He was neutered and then left the company.  Sony is holding the bag, it’s Sony’s problem that they’re upside down on Bruce’s new album.  Nothing seems to make a difference, the Super Bowl, all that press, people just don’t want Bruce.

But he can sell a bunch of tickets.

U2 is doing better than Bruce.  They’ve got a cume of 693,310.  But this last week, their third on the chart, showed another 42% drop, they sold 76,317 albums.  Not exactly chicken feed, but there’s no way they get to ten million, there’s no way the label takes everybody out to CUT and orders thousand dollar bottles of wine on this revenue.

Kelly Clarkson is still number one, but she only sold 90,393 albums, after selling 254,671 last week.  Her sales are declining.  Everybody’s sales are declining.  To look to music sales to make your income is to be absolutely horrified.  They’re going in the wrong direction.

We can delineate why, but you know, it’s not a secret.  You can get the stuff free and you’re not beholden to just a few acts.  No one can dominate.  It’s every man for himself.  Green Day is debuting their new video on MTV.  Do labels still make videos?  Does MTV still play them?  Isn’t that like saying they still make Beanie Babies, or Hula-Hoops?  Videos are a passe fad, late twenty first century relics, now it’s about the music once again.  And the trappings are not enough to sell the music.  Otherwise, Scarlett Johansson’s album wouldn’t have stiffed.  Running a record label is bad business, which is why companies want 360 deals.  But the label is no longer the dominant player, the focus is now on the act itself.  How does the act itself break through?

I’m not saying the act, the musicians themselves, have to do all the work, but they’re no longer slaves on the plantation, they’ve got to take their destinies into their own hands.  Rather than look for a fat cat to dump a bunch of money on them, they’ve got to start from the ground up, by themselves, no one’s got that kind of money anymore, you’ve got to start with AWARENESS!

Don’t see it as free music.  That’s referencing the old game, where music sales were the main source of revenue.  That hasn’t been true in years.  Most acts make the lion’s share of their money on the road.  How are you going to get people to come to see you?

Sure, radio still has some power, and television too, but they’re waning in influence.  You reach fewer and fewer people, many of whom don’t care.  And if you’re trying to get them to buy your record to check you out, you obviously don’t surf the Net, because everything is available free, to hear online!

Think about this.  You used to have to purchase the record to know what you were getting.  Now you can test drive everything first.  But why bother to buy after test driving?  If the dealer lets you keep the car every day, why bother to own it?  That’s what streaming is.  Granted, now you can only stream efficiently on the lot, in front of your computer, but that’s going to change, as 3G wireless penetration expands, as 4G makes its debut.  You’ll be able to stream your music anywhere.  And then the game will change.  It’s how are you going to get someone to LISTEN to your music?

After a label sold a CD, it didn’t care if the buyer played it.  The label didn’t care if the buyer threw the damn thing away.  But in the future, it’s going to matter exactly how many times someone plays your tracks.  THAT’S how you’re going to get paid!  It’s not about a good come-on, it’s about ultimate delivery!

How can you get someone to spin your tracks so much, so many of them, that they’ll bond with you and not only want to come see you perform, but buy your merch.  Online streaming payment is now low, if it grows dramatically, it will be slowly.  Piracy will not be the problem, but overall revenues will.  So see the game not as getting someone to pony up the bucks for your tracks, but to listen to them!

In this transition period, let everybody stream all of your music, whether it be from a third party site or your own.  It’s your only hope of breaking through the clutter.  Sure, you can sell your music too.  Some people still want to own it, others want a souvenir.  But don’t get hung up on recorded music as revenue stream.  True revenue comes way down the line, when you’ve established a body of work and a fan base.

Are you getting this?  It doesn’t pay to be a one hit wonder.  All that money the label spends?  It reaches so very few people, only a fraction of whom want to own, and a tiny slice of whom want to see the act live, usually once.

You lamented the decline of artist development at the label?  Don’t worry, artist development has come back!  It doesn’t pay to jam.

Don’t worry about driving your SoundScan numbers, worry about getting people to listen.  It’s not about money, but time.  How can you convince someone to burn three or four minutes of their time checking you out.  That’s why you’ve got to be really good, because with so many options, both musical and other entertainment varieties, people make decisions very quickly.  Good isn’t good enough.  Your track has to be GREAT!  Otherwise, people will click over to something else, their time is too valuable.  Don’t ask for patience, deliver something so appealing that people will be drawn to it, and will tell everybody they know all about it.

And people are looking for great things.  And one person can start a conflagration.  One unpaid fan will tell everybody how great you are, if you truly are that amazing.  They won’t want compensation, they won’t sign up for a street team, they’ll do it because their lives have been enriched.

That’s the game.  How can you make the life of the listener better.  Not how can you extract dollars from his wallet.

The major labels have been preaching their model, speaking of their woes to an ignorant mainstream media for a decade.  All the while, the game was changing, off the radar.  The tipping point has been reached.  The major labels have lost so much of their power, they’re never going to regain it.  It’s about a bond directly between the artist and fan.  The fan pays you, not the label, not the bribe-able gatekeeper.  Be nice to the fan.  Make it easy for him to check you out.  Deliver something that will get him through the night.  And the day after.