Maybe we do.<\/p>\n
The hoopla surrounding the sales of AC\/DC’s "Black Ice" at Wal-Mart has superseded the scary underlying fact.\u00c2\u00a0 That even including digital downloads, album sales last week were down 25% from the equivalent week in 2007.\u00c2\u00a0 And 2007 SUCKED!<\/p>\n
If the major labels didn’t have the power known as their catalogs, we’d have a different music business today.\u00c2\u00a0 They’ve been using this asset, along with their publishing companies, to generate leverage and collect revenue, insisting time and again that they’re just about to turn the corner.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d love a referendum, I’d love to vote Doug Morris out.\u00c2\u00a0 Because he and his consigliere Zach Horowitz are holding back the future of the music business.<\/p>\n
How about a competition between Doug Morris and Steve Jobs.\u00c2\u00a0 Let the public vote.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s winner take all.\u00c2\u00a0 If Doug wins, he gets the iTunes Store.\u00c2\u00a0 He can bundle tracks as albums, raise the price, he gets free reign.\u00c2\u00a0 And if Steve is victorious, he gets to purvey Universal music however he sees fit.\u00c2\u00a0 And as goes Universal, so goes the music business.<\/p>\n
The labels don’t have Hilary Rosen to protect them anymore.\u00c2\u00a0 She was paid beaucoup bucks to take the heat.\u00c2\u00a0 But when she was finally gone, scooting off to punditland, she said the labels’ failure to license Napster was their downfall.\u00c2\u00a0 And to this day the labels refuse to license P2P in the U.S.A.\u00c2\u00a0 And Mitch Bainwol cannot protect the arrows of the public shooting straight for the heads of the labels.<\/p>\n
To the degree the public still cares.\u00c2\u00a0 Jimmy Iovine may no longer go on record, doing his best to fly under the radar, but Nine Inch Nails leaving Interscope is a bigger story than any band the label has "broken".\u00c2\u00a0 All the money’s in live because the labels won’t authorize sales in a form that the public desires.\u00c2\u00a0 A lot for a little.<\/p>\n
It’s like the labels are landlines holding out against cellular.\u00c2\u00a0 Losing connections along the way.\u00c2\u00a0 With the public desiring mobility, the labels are selling physical discs, trumpeting their superiority, which is akin to stating that sex can only be had in the bedroom. Whereas where you do it, sometimes even in the great outdoors and office buildings, is frequently the special sauce that makes coitus exciting.<\/p>\n
In the seventies, to work at a label was the ultimate goal, and you sometimes got there through the farm team known as retail.\u00c2\u00a0 And a job at a record store was only marginally easier to get than one at Warner Brothers.\u00c2\u00a0 But today everybody under the age of thirty has been laid off at the label, or is working for bupkes with no upward mobility.\u00c2\u00a0 And Tower Records has closed and the geek at Best Buy knows less about CDs than you do about LCDs, and you’re not even working there.<\/p>\n
If America can elect a black President, we can have a nation where music files are easily acquired, sans copy protection, and easily transferred.\u00c2\u00a0 Don’t say "No way", instead cheer YES WE CAN!<\/p>\n
The record business is mired in a quagmire as sticky and without future as Iraq.\u00c2\u00a0 And its recipe for success is to double down, the equivalent of a surge.\u00c2\u00a0 Suing more people.<\/p>\n
But suing people didn’t work in the first place.\u00c2\u00a0 The army wasn’t big enough.\u00c2\u00a0 The insurgents would not let go.<\/p>\n
This war against consumers is unwinnable.\u00c2\u00a0 And it’s ruining the business’ economics.\u00c2\u00a0 The only people who won’t admit this are those with the power, trying so desperately to hold on to it.<\/p>\n
But holding on to the old ways, aligning with despised power, got the Republicans neutralized in Congress, going from the majority to the minority.\u00c2\u00a0 And caused them to lose the Presidency.<\/p>\n
John McCain tried to throw the long ball.\u00c2\u00a0 He signed Sarah Palin.\u00c2\u00a0 Just like the labels made a deal with MySpace.\u00c2\u00a0 But just like Sarah was the wrong female, MySpace is the wrong social networking site.\u00c2\u00a0 And Sarah may be a female, but she was not the woman the female electorate was clamoring for.\u00c2\u00a0 Women wanted Hillary.\u00c2\u00a0 They wanted intelligence and experience.\u00c2\u00a0 Someone who’d fought her battles not by her looks, or through flirting, but hard work.\u00c2\u00a0 To the degree MySpace is shiny, it’s definitely not what the public wants.<\/p>\n
Nor is the music being purveyed.\u00c2\u00a0 All those simpleton Top Forty hits?\u00c2\u00a0 If not being tuned out in droves, all that’s selling is the track. Labels lamenting single track sales on iTunes is like the Republicans decrying early voting.\u00c2\u00a0 The tide has turned.\u00c2\u00a0 Change has come.<\/p>\n
Power is being bled by the old powers at the labels as we speak.\u00c2\u00a0 Bookers no longer focus on SoundScan, but ticket sales.\u00c2\u00a0 They don’t care if there’s a record on the chart, just whether fannies will fill the seats.\u00c2\u00a0 And the best way to get people to pay is to have a career act, that doesn’t focus on extravaganzas, scorched earth publicity campaigns, but their long term viability.\u00c2\u00a0 People want to believe in acts, but the labels keep selling singles.<\/p>\n
It will take a while for new behemoths to rise.\u00c2\u00a0 Developing and selling music.\u00c2\u00a0 But one thing’s for sure, the day of the major label dinosaur chairman is dead.\u00c2\u00a0 Overpaid as his staff gets laid off.\u00c2\u00a0 Selling what most people cannot relate to or don’t want ninety days after its peak.\u00c2\u00a0 New executives will put their heads to the ground, listen to the audience and build a new coalition between acts and the public.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s where the nexus is.\u00c2\u00a0 Contrary to the majors labels’ belief that it’s between them and radio.<\/p>\n
Radio is dying.\u00c2\u00a0 Barack Obama’s campaign would not have been victorious without the Web.\u00c2\u00a0 Obama used the Internet both to get his message out and raise funds.\u00c2\u00a0 Knowing that a little from a lot is better than a lot from a little.\u00c2\u00a0 Anybody who hopes to thrive in the recorded music sphere in the future needs to learn these lessons.\u00c2\u00a0 YouTube is your friend.\u00c2\u00a0 As are blogs and iTunes.\u00c2\u00a0 You don’t battle the masses, spread into nooks and crannies, you entice them, you bring them in.\u00c2\u00a0 Music should not be free, but a fair and equitable sales proposition must be proffered.<\/p>\n
We need unity in the music world.\u00c2\u00a0 We don’t have it today.\u00c2\u00a0 And we must blame the old white men, wedded to antique business models which haven’t worked in the twenty first century.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a new dawn.\u00c2\u00a0 Only when we all come together will our great national nightmare of declining revenues at record labels and traders’ lives being ruined by lawsuits end.\u00c2\u00a0 We need leadership.\u00c2\u00a0 Right now we’ve got none.\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s coming.\u00c2\u00a0 Because the public DEMANDS it!<\/p>\n
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Maybe we do. The hoopla surrounding the sales of AC\/DC’s "Black Ice" at Wal-Mart has superseded the scary underlying fact.\u00c2\u00a0 That even including digital downloads, album sales last week were down 25% from the equivalent week in 2007.\u00c2\u00a0 And 2007 SUCKED! If the major labels didn’t have the power known as their catalogs, we’d have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-mN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1413\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}