On 22 Mar 2007, at 09:37, robin wrote:
There is no secret to this biz. Records are not selling like
they used too.
We have a culture coming up that don't believe they should pay for
anything, that's the problem.
Y'know you might be right here. The big question is how will that
pan out in the long run?
This is what's so interesting, no-one really knows and all the majors
really missed the boat on this one. So for the first time ever, it's
kinda in the hands of the people. The cat was let out of the bag when
blank CD's where made available and now there is no media required
they really don't know what to do. We went to Midem this year and
they all majors sounded very, very lost.
The music culture as we know it has changed so much, everything is on
tap and instant demand these days - so old methods don't and won't
work. For example, people don't buy full releases from Beatport but
they do on iTunes - the thing for labels to do is hit as many of
these sites as they can and make 20 x £50 rather than sticking with
the big five downloads sites. By the same token it's important that
we support the smaller "mom and pop" download sites where we can.
There's a massive youth culture built around "borging" and "toothing"
who don't buy anything at all, they just copy everything and don't
talk about music like we do, they reduce it to how many gigs they have.
One of the most interesting ideas is Snocap, which will allow artists/
labels to sell their own tracks by supplying code and an admin page
for yearly fee. I'm surprised that someone like Beatport hasn't
picked up this yet.
Another issue is how "dance" music is presented to the public, listen
to Pete Tong or watch MTV Dance, it's sickening and not
representative of the scene at all, it's hardly surprising that
people never get past what they present...
It's not like electronic dance music lends itself quite as well to
live performance as rock where you can recoup some costs by gigging
and use the "free" downloads as publicity.
This is probably more true in the US, where the "accepted" format of
bands has been the norm for years, again I think UR did a great job
of challenging it by put a band together to do there stuff live, you
can't knock them for trying. Most bands don't make money on gigs
anyway, they make the money off the merchandise or by having the
support bands paying to play.
Ring tones do seem to be the exception (someone's buying them
right?), maybe it's just a case of presentation.
I've never really understood why someone would pay £1.50 for 30
seconds of music but it's a multi-million pound business so someone
clearly does purchase them, Bleep tried it and it didn't work as
there's no interest in it for the music we make.
All questions we should be asking if we have anything to do with
putting records out right now if you ask me...
/Rant Off
m
robin...
