anomie life

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking about the state of the music industry lately. Because of the rise of the internet the music industry is going through a gigantic change. iTunes, putting songs online, is just the first step for the music industry. Right now iTunes is mostly just a bunch of mp4’s of the major label’s music from their CD’s. The main reason you would be a track off of iTunes is just for convenience (a.k.a. you’re too lazy to go down to a Coconuts and buy the CD).

I think the future of the music industry can go two different ways, depending on how the major labels react to the change in technology. If the labels continue to oppose the change in the industry I think they’ll quickly be bypassed by the artists and replaced with organizations that only do specific functions like marketing, radio promotion, distribution, and tour production.

Or I think the labels can transform themselves into primarily a marketing and venture capital organization. The thing is that it’s become quite affordable to record an album. You can get very high-quality equipment for very low prices (now I sound like a car dealer).
Right now from my reading and observation I see the whole big label music industry as really, really bloated. It takes a huge success to ever recoup the amount of costs incurred by major label backing. Yea, in case you didn’t know it, when you sign a record contract they might give you a bunch of money (an advance) and they might let you record a huge music video. But pretty much all of your album profits are going to go to the label to pay back for ALL of those things.
So pretty much you’re just getting an interest free loan.

That’s why labels don’t sign a bunch of bands. Its a huge investment and risk. If they cut some of the bloat out they can afford to back more bands.

And back to the digital music thing, with the internet you can distribute your songs yourself on your own band’s website and make money. Then you don’t have to give iTunes a cut and you can even sell it DRM-free.

I envision a future in music where there are thousands of bands that are having fun doing what they love to do and making enough money to keep the dream going. Maybe there will be a few less “rock stars”, but a lot more variety. If you can make the cost of making an album go down then you can sell the album for less and that leaves people with more money to by other cd’s.

And then the radio…. well, I could write a whole other post on where I think the radio is going.