--- Dan Lewis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: "At dinner last night.... [T]hey get contracts commensurate to this level."
I agree with you almost entirely. While a guaranteed record contract for the winning 'Idol' surely has some value, for example, it's probably not as much of a boost as getting to the finals, like you wrote. But for music stars record companies can create their own hype. Suppose I own the Scipio Recording Concern, marketing to lovers of pop music and military history, I could have had a casting call and found some marketable people who I could have then injected into the market with the appropriate media blitz. In baseball there are only so many available short-stop positions, but for music the field is very wide**. Now consider Vanilla Ice. This guy had only one hit, yet a VH-1 documentary revealed that he has a small fleet of expensive sports cars and an impressive mansion to boot. That's alot of bread. As owner of SRC I would say, "Hey, let's get more people into the pop-rap market," and flood the market until SRC's profits from pop-rap artists are just equal to the cost of my media blitz to enter a new artist into the market. It seems to me that that optimum point should be well in excess of what is currently on the market. Hence Normandie Shields exclusion from the market. It seems like I, as head of SRC, should be flooding the market until there are so many artists that each doesn't make a king's ransom. Real record companies don't do that. Why not? I think I've assumed an answer to my initial question by asking why record companies don't put more singers/musicians on the market. Maybe it's not up to them. **It could be constrained, for example by the amount of available air time on radio stations--thus limiting the market size. I feel like I'm being stubborn by refusing to accept possible answers. That's not my intent. Best regards, jsh ===== "...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong." -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes http://finance.yahoo.com
