Introduction
You don’t have to have a career in the music business to know that the industry climate is changing rapidly and drastically. The Internet has forever changed the ways in which artists create and disseminate their music. As a result the business models that held strong for practically all of last century no longer apply. Not too long ago, the objective of every daydreaming, shaggy-haired garage band was to sign a contract with a record label—my how the times have changed.
In the days of yore, you’d purchase instruments from the local music shop, gig at local venues, buy time at a recording studio to get a demo recorded, work the local radio ladder to get noticed by the industry, sign a record contract, then get your singles played nationally, and get your album in record stores.
These days the mom and pop music stores are gone, so are most of the locally owned live music venues. You can record in your parents’ basement, and you can post your music on your myspace. With social networking, bands like the Arctic Monkeys were able to bypass the radio ladder altogether. You can put your music on iTunes and CD Baby for free and promote it at the grassroots level. Suddenly a record label’s ability to get your CD into every Wal-mart in America becomes less appealing. Some artists can have fruitful careers without ever seriously touring or having radio play of any sort.
Every step along the way has changed: from the source of the materials to produce a record to the methods of getting noticed by the industry, from getting the attention of the consumer to the demographics of the consumers themselves. Along the way, the resources have been democratized to such an extent that in many ways the monolithic labels of old are not necessary to accomplish the task.
These days the vast majority of stories regarding record labels are none too positive. Labels are portrayed (and many times portray themselves) as obsolete behemoths desperately clinging to a Golden Age ideology that has long since become irrelevant. They sue their own customers, alienate artists, wage their battles in Washington and in the courts, and despite ever decreasing clout still have the gall to think they own all the cards in the deck.
However, there is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Record labels have provided a whole host of services to artists and many of them are as relevant today as they were 50 years ago. Simply because the average person now has access to some tools and can attempt to make his own career without the help of some larger entity, it doesn’t mean that labels wouldn’t be better suited to do it with their deep(er) pockets and entrenched connections. Who wouldn’t want the input of an expert who has been around the block a time or two?
In many ways, record labels aren’t as irrelevant as they are popularly depicted. Perhaps all they need is a little update in their philosophy. In this series, I hope to enumerate the specific services that record labels provide, the way current technologies have impacted those services, and perhaps find some middle ground for future development in the industry.
