What happens when the labels stop paying an advance?<\/p>\n
You know that’s gonna happen.\u00c2\u00a0 With such limited revenue from recorded music, no one’s going to pay you a fortune to make it.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s no incentive.\u00c2\u00a0 Live Nation might pay you a fortune to TOUR, but who, in their right mind, is going to pay you a few hundred k when the only thing selling is singles?\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, not one album released this year has yet gone PLATINUM!\u00c2\u00a0 Do you expect Universal to be ponying up millions of dollars in the future?<\/p>\n
Don’t be surprised if the major labels morph into management companies.\u00c2\u00a0 In a way, they already have.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s what a 360 deal is.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s what the manager has ALWAYS had, a share in all revenue streams.\u00c2\u00a0 You only get paid if there’s success.\u00c2\u00a0 Are the majors going to follow this paradigm?<\/p>\n
Of course, there could be a bidding war, generating large advances, but Live Nation\/Ticketmaster is always going to win that one.\u00c2\u00a0 Until the majors merge with a touring company, they’re fucked, they just don’t have enough to offer, their costs are too high, their margins too thin.\u00c2\u00a0 If I were a major, I’d be calling Jerry and Arny, maybe even Seth right now.\u00c2\u00a0 After calling Phil Anschutz, of course.\u00c2\u00a0 In order to survive, labels have to play in the touring arena.<\/p>\n
But the foregoing is all about money.\u00c2\u00a0 Don’t you realize that’s what the album was about, money?\u00c2\u00a0 That’s how you got paid, by delivering an album.\u00c2\u00a0 Of course the public didn’t know this, but this was the game for eons.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, the Beatles made a STATEMENT with "Sgt. Pepper", but Capitol was more interested in the revenue.\u00c2\u00a0 Selling 33’s was much more profitable than selling 45’s.\u00c2\u00a0 And the high-priced\/low royalty CD was even more of a moneymaker than the LP record.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s how we got here.\u00c2\u00a0 Pure greed, not artistry.<\/p>\n
If you want to record a full-length statement, be my guest.\u00c2\u00a0 I see nothing wrong with that.\u00c2\u00a0 But are you really interested in laying down ten tracks on wax if you’re not going to trigger a payment?<\/p>\n
Please don’t be blinded by history.\u00c2\u00a0 If your goal is to make money, and seemingly everybody e-mailing me is focused on bucks, how are you going to make money in the future?\u00c2\u00a0 I’ll tell you.\u00c2\u00a0 The public is your bank.\u00c2\u00a0 And people don’t pay solely for recorded music, they may not pay for recorded music at all.\u00c2\u00a0 How are you going to get paid?<\/p>\n
By building an audience.<\/p>\n
An album’s worth of material usually does not build an audience.\u00c2\u00a0 A TRACK builds an audience.\u00c2\u00a0 If you’re a career artist, people will want more tracks.\u00c2\u00a0 But only if they’re good.<\/p>\n
So the focus is no longer on cutting ten songs, but cutting GOOD songs!\u00c2\u00a0 There’s an unlimited audience for GREAT songs.\u00c2\u00a0 Still, how do you nurture your audience?<\/p>\n
Playing every night in a single town is not going to build heat.\u00c2\u00a0 You’ve got to go away for a while to increase demand.\u00c2\u00a0 But you can’t go away for TOO LONG or you’ll be forgotten.\u00c2\u00a0 Same deal with music.\u00c2\u00a0 How do you deliver enough to keep people interested, but not too much to overload them?<\/p>\n
DON’T tell me how much you love albums.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s like labels saying no one will ever download music from the Internet.\u00c2\u00a0 The album is history, you just don’t know it yet.\u00c2\u00a0 STATEMENTS are not history, but are you really making a statement?<\/p>\n
Innovate in the new sphere.<\/p>\n
If U2 weren’t getting paid by Universal upon delivery of an album, they’d be better off releasing tracks in fits and starts.\u00c2\u00a0 You get continuous publicity.\u00c2\u00a0 AND, the way they just did it didn’t work, the album’s sales are small.\u00c2\u00a0 Imagine going on Letterman EVERY MONTH, not for a week straight.\u00c2\u00a0 BUILDING, instead of blowing your wad.<\/p>\n
Imagine rewarding a fan who buys all ten tracks over the course of months.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe buying all ten delivers a code that allows you to purchase guaranteed good seats at the pre-sale.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe there’s a quiz regarding the content that allows people to qualify.<\/p>\n
Maybe when you do that commercial endorsement, the reward is someone can go to the company’s Website and download YOUR NEW SONG!\u00c2\u00a0 The insta-collection of ten tracks is no longer the starting point, rather you dole out your tracks in drips and drabs, making each release a minor marketing event, that keeps people interested, that keeps them going to the show.<\/p>\n
If you’re a star, maybe you announce that you’re going to play the new track at the top of every show.\u00c2\u00a0 And maybe then not again for a YEAR!\u00c2\u00a0 So you’ve got to download to be familiar, and come if you want to hear it live.\u00c2\u00a0 Don’t you see?\u00c2\u00a0 Giving up the album delivers FREEDOM!<\/p>\n
No one says a fan can’t create a playlist of ten tracks that he plays ad infinitum.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe the fan creates the album, and posts it to your Website, delineating why he picked this running order, imploring you to play these tracks in this order live.\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, if the album were such a defined success, how come almost no act plays their latest opus straight through at a gig?\u00c2\u00a0 BECAUSE ALMOST NO ONE CARES!<\/p>\n
People don’t know the music.\u00c2\u00a0 They want to hear some old stuff too.\u00c2\u00a0 Just like you do when you make an iTunes playlist.\u00c2\u00a0 You mix it up.\u00c2\u00a0 Why shouldn’t the artist mix it up?<\/p>\n
As for Record Store Day…\u00c2\u00a0 How laughable is that.\u00c2\u00a0 If you’re salivating over this, you’re living in 1990, and hoping we go back to 1970. Record stores are dead.\u00c2\u00a0 As dead as your Apple II.\u00c2\u00a0 Some will survive, as dealers in antiquities and tchotchkes, but essentially everyone will buy online.<\/p>\n
Point being, how can you lambaste Doug Morris for missing the digital revolution when you too are stuck in the past?<\/p>\n
People only want to hear good music.\u00c2\u00a0 On demand.\u00c2\u00a0 This has decimated radio.\u00c2\u00a0 But the album went first.\u00c2\u00a0 We’re just feeling the full effect now.\u00c2\u00a0 And it’s only going to get worse.<\/p>\n
Newspapers saw a crisis coming.\u00c2\u00a0 But they figured it was always in the future.\u00c2\u00a0 That crisis is now.\u00c2\u00a0 Newspapers will probably not survive.\u00c2\u00a0 I get three a day.\u00c2\u00a0 But I know the paradigm is history.\u00c2\u00a0 I lament the loss, but look forward to the future, wherein more people report upon more stories in a constant 24 hour news cycle.<\/p>\n
You too should look to the future.\u00c2\u00a0 Not one in which you deliver product to get paid by a middleman, but one in which you and your handlers are all in it together, and you build an audience fan by fan, which lasts.\u00c2\u00a0 Toyotas were a joke in 1970.\u00c2\u00a0 Now GM is a joke.\u00c2\u00a0 Toyota built its brand based on reliability, word of which was spread slowly from mouth to mouth.\u00c2\u00a0 Toyota took decades to surpass GM as the largest automobile company in the world,\u00c2\u00a0 but GM will never regain the crown.<\/p>\n
So don’t tell me about ancient paradigms.\u00c2\u00a0 Please look to the future.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s coming.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s about great.\u00c2\u00a0 Fans want more music by the acts they adore.\u00c2\u00a0 Release all the live stuff, all the alternative versions.\u00c2\u00a0 They don’t taint the original, they allow fans to burrow deeper, the revealing of all your warts burnishes your image!<\/p>\n
We live in an information society.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s what your fans want, information.\u00c2\u00a0 They don’t want a CD dropped every few years with canned hype, they want continuous info.\u00c2\u00a0 Don’t get locked into the album syndrome.\u00c2\u00a0 You’re missing the future.<\/p>\n
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What happens when the labels stop paying an advance? You know that’s gonna happen.\u00c2\u00a0 With such limited revenue from recorded music, no one’s going to pay you a fortune to make it.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s no incentive.\u00c2\u00a0 Live Nation might pay you a fortune to TOUR, but who, in their right mind, is going to pay you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"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-1847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-tN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1847","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1847\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}