The three major labels are not releasing enough product.

You’ll find this interesting:

“Netflix, Amazon Lead With 53% of Original Streaming Title Orders in First Quarter of 2024, Study Finds – The growth comes from increased investment in international territories, according to Ampere Analysis”: https://t.ly/GKdEC

Production at Netflix and Amazon is dramatically up, meanwhile, their competitors are hardly making anything at all. Look at the graph.

How are you supposed to win if you do not play?

The majors are operating on a dead paradigm. The same one that killed the movie studios. Make less product and have it theoretically appeal to everybody while marketing the hell out of it.

Meanwhile, the niches are triumphing.

In movies you’ve got moonshots. A lot of sequels. Despite the hosannas over this past weekend’s grosses, with the success of the latest Minions and Pixar movies, the road does not go on forever, at some point the public burns out on what you’ve been purveying, then you’re screwed.

Netflix gets bigger and its competitors keep falling further behind. If this were the labels, they’d rest on their laurels, but Netflix is doubling-down. It is not worried so much about this quarter’s profit, but profit down the line.

Now Lucian Grainge bought market share when Universal purchased EMI. But that was about history, that was about catalog, that was not about the future.

And that’s what the labels rely on, catalog, it’s nearly free money.

But they are hemorrhaging market share in the new music world. They’ve streamlined the operation, there is very little investment, today it’s about growth, not quarterly Wall Street numbers.

We live in an era of niches. And when it comes to new product, you must release a ton of it, because you never know what will resonate with the public.

There’s less and less of a reason to sign with a major label. It’s not interesting in building from the bottom, only from the top. It doesn’t want small projects, just like the movie studios. And look where that led them, their lunch was eaten by Netflix.

Now is the time for the majors to staff up, to release more product, to prepare for the future. Now it’s more like the sixties and the seventies, never mind eighties.

Both movies and music were warped by the blockbuster mentality. It started with “Jaws” and “Star Wars” in movies, and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and a bunch of diamond certifications in music thereafter.

But those days are through. As is MTV, which powered the success of so much of that product. Hell, Paramount Global was just sold at the equivalent of a fire sale price. Why? Because the business didn’t invest in the future, there was no vision, only maintenance. If you don’t have a plan for the future, you’re going to be eclipsed.

What exactly is the plan for the major labels?

More records in more genres. Period. That’s how you prepare for the future.

The labels have a misconception that they can hoover up any act that is successful in the independent sphere. But the price is too high. Acts no longer want to give up that action. It might be worth it if you’ve got a Spotify Top 50 hit, but most acts today fall outside that construct. Radio doesn’t help them and TV has become irrelevant. What is the label going to do for its money? It looks like a bad deal. And it’s only going to get worse. We’re at the tipping point now.

The labels believe we live in a pop world. But that would be ignoring the jet fuel of this business, the left field, the different, the alternative, which burgeoned in the late sixties and seventies on FM. Never in the history of the music business has it been less about hits, NEVER!

But the labels are still focusing on the hit business. Still locked into release schedules.

All bets are off today. It’s all about innovation, risk. Gaining traction with the public is a difficult, nearly impossible task. Which is why you must play more often, which is why Netflix and Amazon are making so much product.

The barriers to entry in the live business are substantial. Good luck competing with AEG or Live Nation. But Universal, Sony and Warner? Piece of cake. Of course they’ve got a financial advantage, the revenue thrown off from their catalogs, but concomitantly the cost of production and the barrier to entry has never been lower.

The labels don’t want to start something, they want to finish it. They don’t want to nurture from scratch, they want to glom on to the project. The first thing they’ll ask you is about your socials, isn’t it their job to build your career?

You have to build it, or buy those who build it. This is what happens in tech. Microsoft lost a step because it wasn’t innovative, it purchased its OS and then built upon it. It wasn’t until recently that the company has recovered.

As for Amazon… It’s well-documented that the company is driven by AWS, Amazon Web Services, and that has nothing to do with retail.

Apple buys less and believes in innovation. Will the juggernaut continue as Steve Jobs retreats further and further into the rearview mirror?

Music is the most nimble of art forms. But it’s become the most complacent, the most stable seen through the lens of the major label. Do we need another pop star, another rapper? Now is the time klezmer music can break through. And its audience might be limited, but when you combine it with folk, bluegrass, electronica and the rest of the niches you have a monolith. And one leg supports the edifice when another fails.

This is what happened in the ski business. If you own multiple ski resorts around the world, you can still succeed if weather is bad in one area. The successes make up for the losses. But you’ve got to prepare for this game. You’ve got to have vision.

There’s no vision in the major label world.