Blame Chumbawamba.\u00c2\u00a0 And Smash Mouth.\u00c2\u00a0 If you bought their albums to get "Tubthumping" and "Walkin’ On The Sun" respectively you found out not only was there nothing close to as catchy on these overpriced discs, there wasn’t even anything that SOUNDED SIMILAR!<\/p>\n
The audience was about to cry uncle anyway.\u00c2\u00a0 What with the bloated albums of the CD era.\u00c2\u00a0 It was as if discs were gas tanks.\u00c2\u00a0 You had to FILL THEM!\u00c2\u00a0 Just in case of some emergency down the road…like you never got to make another record AGAIN!<\/p>\n
How out of touch is Christina Aguilera?\u00c2\u00a0 We don’t need two discs of shit from ANYBODY!\u00c2\u00a0 Certainly not somebody who hasn’t been recording for twenty years.\u00c2\u00a0 Really, try to penetrate a package like this.\u00c2\u00a0 The audience certainly is not.\u00c2\u00a0 Just ask all the Shania Twain fans who didn’t buy "Up!"\u00c2\u00a0 You buy these albums for the single.\u00c2\u00a0 And play them through MAYBE once.\u00c2\u00a0 And then you move on.\u00c2\u00a0 The only people who care are those IN the industry.<\/p>\n
It’s over.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s a new paradigm.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, you can hold on to selling full-length discs for a little while, but not long from now you’re not going to be able to GIVE THEM AWAY!<\/p>\n
You’re gonna see a single on iTunes, and that’s it.\u00c2\u00a0 And then maybe another three months later.\u00c2\u00a0 And then another three months after that.<\/p>\n
The labels are avoiding this like the plague.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re so wedded to the old model they can’t see reality for what it is, THE TRACK HAS BEEN DISENGAGED FROM THE ALBUM!\u00c2\u00a0 The label wants an album budget, producers, a full-length that they can charge in the neighborhood of ten dollars wholesale for.\u00c2\u00a0 No matter that no radio station goes deep and neither do the fans.\u00c2\u00a0 This is the way they’ve done it for thirty five years and DAMN THEM!<\/p>\n
And it gets worse.\u00c2\u00a0 You live and die by the single.\u00c2\u00a0 Just ask Christina Milian.\u00c2\u00a0 What kind of business model IS this.\u00c2\u00a0 Wherein you spend a fucking fortune and find out you’re done as quickly as a movie studio knows a film is a dud, THE DAY IT OPENS!<\/p>\n
Ron Fair says it’s a pop world.\u00c2\u00a0 God, I wouldn’t want to rely on the sales of pop artists.\u00c2\u00a0 Because after the single, nobody WANTS anything.\u00c2\u00a0 You’ve got to believe in the act to want more than the hit track, to delve into the "album" cuts.\u00c2\u00a0 Not that they should be sold as an album.\u00c2\u00a0 They should be dribbled out on a regular basis.\u00c2\u00a0 To satisfy the core audience, the believers, as opposed to trying to flog the same damn disc for three years all over the globe.<\/p>\n
Disaster is right around the corner.\u00c2\u00a0 Digital sales via the iTunes Music Store are not a panacea, but the END!\u00c2\u00a0 A conflation of revenue by such a percentage as to horrify Wall Street.\u00c2\u00a0 The CD dies and you sell a small fraction of the product you used to.\u00c2\u00a0 It begs for a different business model.\u00c2\u00a0 Something akin to HBO, wherein a customer can pay a monthly fee and take all he wants.\u00c2\u00a0 And it will come to this.\u00c2\u00a0 Because now it’s clear, this album\/disc model is a train running out of track, heading for a cliff.\u00c2\u00a0 At full steam no less.\u00c2\u00a0 Only those willing to reinvent the business will survive.\u00c2\u00a0 Don’t believe the RIAA hype.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s no pulling out of this slump for the majors.\u00c2\u00a0 This is the final hurrah.<\/p>\n
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Blame Chumbawamba.\u00c2\u00a0 And Smash Mouth.\u00c2\u00a0 If you bought their albums to get "Tubthumping" and "Walkin’ On The Sun" respectively you found out not only was there nothing close to as catchy on these overpriced discs, there wasn’t even anything that SOUNDED SIMILAR! The audience was about to cry uncle anyway.\u00c2\u00a0 What with the bloated albums […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","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-499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-83","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499","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=499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}