Universal and Warner are public companies. Sony is too, but it’s part of a larger enterprise and it’s hard to parse out the financial details, and stockholders judge the overall performance of the conglomerate, not just the music division, but…<\/p>\n
Wall Street evaluates Universal and Sony and what they see is a huge expenditure on new music for very little return. All the money today is in catalog.<\/p>\n
Now let’s be clear, it’s not all deep catalog, sometimes the tracks are not that old, but the truth is new music keeps declining in market share. But the majors keep investing in it.<\/p>\n
Obviously they’re doing something wrong.<\/p>\n
And Wall Street is all about the numbers, they see the red ink and want to stanch it, they want to separate new from old, they want to be more like Primary Wave, which is only built on hits.<\/p>\n
But the three traditional majors are set in amber, they keep wanting to do it the same way. Albeit on a narrower basis.<\/p>\n
You see the majors are in the hit business. But not just any hit, but moonshots. They want something mega-successful, because of the opportunity cost. They don’t want bunts, they don’t even want singles, they want grand slams!<\/p>\n
Well, the way you do this is to find an act in a popular genre…<\/p>\n
This is the problem. Which doesn’t occur to those who only became aware in the last few decades. Sure, there was a pop hit business prior to the Beatles, but starting in the late sixties and into the seventies it was all about the outside, innovation, album rock. Never forget, “Stairway to Heaven” was never a single, and it’s the most popular rock song of all time, at least according to radio.<\/p>\n
Then again, radio is nearly meaningless in terms of breaking records today, but the labels are still fully staffed, working stations, should this line item be cut?<\/p>\n
If it’s not working in tech, you eliminate it. In tech it’s always about pushing the envelope, in music it’s about looking backwards, doing it the same way as always.<\/p>\n
So, in a pop world it’s all about the track as opposed to the album\/body of work\/career. And most of the classic acts took a while to develop, to gain traction. Yes had three albums before “Roundabout.” Joni Mitchell had three before “Blue.” This was the paradigm. Find someone with innate talent and nurture them.<\/p>\n
But today there’s no nurturing, never mind looking.<\/p>\n
Today labels are not looking for talent, they’re looking for success. Someone with more than a blip on the radar screen. Someone with followers… The label says they can blow up, amplify what the act has already achieved. But what underlies that success is irrelevant.<\/p>\n
And if you enter our system, i.e. the major label system, we’ll plug you in to writers and producers and mixers, we’ll make your music palatable to the masses, we’re experts.<\/p>\n
But this formula is the antithesis to what blew up this business. Which is left field auteurs doing it their way.<\/p>\n
So if the major labels want to stay in the new music business, they should have longer term plans. They should get ahead of the marketplace. They should sign acts that are unique, that have something to say, that are self-contained, that they can be nurtured and developed over a period of years.<\/p>\n
But that’s too heavy a lift, they want to do it the old way, their way.<\/p>\n
Which is why new music should be separated from old music. Literally split up into two companies. Unless the three majors totally rejigger music and artist development.<\/p>\n
Fire almost all of the radio staff. Yup, bite the bullet. Even if a track succeeds on radio… That’s no longer where the active listeners are. And it’s active listeners who sustain this business.<\/p>\n
Look for self-contained acts. Period. Don’t look for acts you can mold.<\/p>\n
And then you can do press, but really, it’s about capturing hearts and minds.<\/p>\n
HOW DO YOU DO THIS?<\/p>\n
Not the usual way. There’s no innovation. If an act is so good, do a pop-up. It’s about alternative marketing. If you’ve got something worth attention you popularize it on YouTube\/TikTok and Instagram Reels, all of which are free.<\/p>\n
You must take an holistic approach. The music is only part of it, there’s the act’s identity and how they connect with the public. Furthermore, what works more than ever is honesty and credibility, which is one of the reasons that hip-hop is fading in the marketplace. It owned honesty and credibility, it eclipsed rock which forfeited it, but now hip-hop has become a cartoon and the audience wants Noah Kahan.<\/p>\n
Flash is pass\u00e9. TMZ is pass\u00e9. Music is the other. If it’s competing for attention with the rest of media, it’s screwed.<\/p>\n
This only works if the acts do a 180. If they can say no instead of yes to so much…endorsements\/sponsorships and fashion and… The music must be paramount, the more the creator is seen as a regular person, the better. And in today’s marketplace, you must not have airs, you must not think you’re better than the hoi polloi. Also, momentary is not worth much. Too much of today’s music is memes. Which are literally here today and gone tomorrow. No, we need music that speaks truth and lasts.<\/p>\n
But what we’ve got is divas and wankers as the major labels drive their enterprises over a cliff and indies slowly gobble up market share.<\/p>\n
New music must be self-sustaining, and this requires huge cost cuts and reimagination of the model. Today you start very small and employ kindling to grow. It’s the antithesis of the MTV era, where if you got on the service you were known by seemingly everybody around the world. Today you can be a hit artist and not be known by the majority of the public, this is not going to change, this is now.<\/p>\n
Stop telling the public that they must love two-dimensional stars like Ariana Grande. And for all the people who love Taylor Swift, there’s a larger cadre who want nothing to do with her. But the industry keeps pounding these pop acts down the public’s throat, to the detriment of the overall industry.<\/p>\n
Think of records as statements, as exploratory work, building the story over time. Don’t think of records as instant hits. Most of what is instant is not worth remembering.<\/p>\n
So either the majordomos at the three majors wake up and make changes in new music, or their owners, the public, will break them up for value. Which would be better than the existing system. Because then new music companies, without catalog to sustain them, would be more nimble, cost-effecient and innovative.<\/p>\n
The Street is right. Universal’s stock will continue to be depressed until the new music problem is solved. And it won’t be by trying to convince investors that the company’s present strategy is correct, but by changing it.<\/p>\n
Over the last two decades, music has abdicated its cultural power to streaming television. That’s where the innovation is. That’s where you’re surprised. But not in music.<\/p>\n
There needs to be planning. Long term thinking. Investment in projects that will pay dividends for decades.<\/p>\n
Or Wall Street is going to break these companies up, deservedly so.<\/p>\n
<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Universal and Warner are public companies. Sony is too, but it’s part of a larger enterprise and it’s hard to parse out the financial details, and stockholders judge the overall performance of the conglomerate, not just the music division, but… Wall Street evaluates Universal and Sony and what they see is a huge expenditure on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business","category-the-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-64V","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23369","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=23369"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23369\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23370,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23369\/revisions\/23370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}