I Smell Bailout!
By Mitch Berg
I’ve never cared much for Radiohead – but you gotta hand it to lead mope Thom Yorke; he nailed that whole “end of an era” thing long before anyone else:
Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke is warning the music industry is on the brink of collapse, insisting young musicians should resist signing record deals because the major labels will “completely fold” within months.
The British rockers broke away from their longtime label, EMI, in 2007 and went on to embrace the new digital era with the release their seventh album, In Rainbows, which they offered up over the internet and allowed fans to choose the price.
These days music is pretty much a give-away; the money is in the touring and live appearances – the things that can’t be put up on BitTorrent.
That’s why in some ways it’s better never to have been signed in the first place. Getting signed meant getting an “advance” from the record company. The advance had to pay for recording, videos and touring, and had to be paid back out of touring revenues and royalties…
…if any.
And if you were one of the 90-odd percent of bands whose albums never got airplay or significant sales, and whose live touring careers never took off, that meant you were in debt from the beginning of your “career” which, if you were one of those 90-odd percent of bands that never took off, was going to be short; labels in the seventies would drop artists that didn’t turn a profit after two albums; by the nineties, one album was all a new artist got.
In the meantime, many artists that never got signed to “the big time” but stuck with touring and built thriving local and regional followings – including recording and selling their own CDs – are doing fairly well. Sometimes really well.
And they’re the lucky ones:
Yorke has now issued a warning to upcoming artists, urging them not to sign traditional record deals because they would be tying themselves to “the sinking ship”…He says, “It will be only a matter of time – months rather than years – before the music business establishment completely folds. (It will be) no great loss to the world.”
Expect the Federal Trade Commission to advocate socializing the music industry any day now.
June 10th, 2010 at 9:00 am
What, we don’t have a Music Czar?
June 10th, 2010 at 9:06 am
No, but the Commissar’s in town, uh-oh.
June 10th, 2010 at 9:33 am
Hi there, howdy doody
I’m your union man you can call me Rudy
Anya boys not paid up on your cards?
You know I’m pleased to greet ya
Been tryin all day to meet ya
The union’s here to help every one a you rock n roll stars…
(hattip – FZ)
June 10th, 2010 at 11:46 am
Interesting parallel to what’s going on in book publishing. The mainstream publishing houses are stuck in a 1970s business model and they are floundering. It’s almost impossible for new authors to get published unless someone things they have written a blockbuster a la John Grisham, Stephanie Meyer or JK Rowling. Unpublished authors are discovering they can publish electronically and sell books at low cost. The marketing is the problem, but the overhead is low. Self publishing is suddenly not being ridiculed as much as before. Literary agents are going to find themselves hunting for clients instead of the reverse.
June 10th, 2010 at 12:01 pm
Good points, golfdoc.
I’ve even dipped my toe into such online experiments as http://www.iwriteit.com. Lots more options out there today than simply getting rejected repeatedly by agents and publishing houses.
June 10th, 2010 at 12:20 pm
Good point about the publishing biz, golfdoc. A lot of the fixed-cost barriers to publishing are gone with the ether. It helps to have a brawny marketing department behind one’s book but that kind of firepower is typically used for established names. On-line communities and word of mouth are collapsing the connection between publishers and readers.
Ahem. Speaking of which, my daughter is serializing her first novel on my blog and offering the whole thing on PDF for free (though chocolate is gladly accepted). I’m not as brawny as I used to be, but I’m pretty much her marketing dept. So, if anyone’s interested in a witty urban fantasy at an affordable price, check out Shadow of the Reapers at http://thenightwriterblog.com/shadow-of-the-reapers/.
June 10th, 2010 at 3:21 pm
You should see what’s happening in the textbook biz. They’re so desperate for income they’re coming out with “new editions” about every 2 years to try and kill the used books and shared PDFs. But the price of textbooks is pretty insane ($225 for the one I was pitched just recently) and a lot of folks are going to eBay and buying the cheap $30 softcover from India instead. I know that’s what I hint when students complain about the price of books.
I’ll miss publishers when they go under. Record companies, not so much — I had relatives who had to deal with them.
June 10th, 2010 at 9:43 pm
i heard the same advice a couple of years ago in an interview with “The Gourds”, an alt country band out of Austin, and they said they did all their own recording and production on their cd’s for years before they got national distribution. One said that they controlled the means of production, and had a greater share of the reward.