If your job does not involve curing cancer, you shouldn’t take yourself seriously. And if your job is curing cancer; immediately, stop reading my ramblings and go back to your medical journals and start crackin’ cuz people keep dyin’ and that can’t be good for your business. A lot of rockstars and wannabe rockstars take themselves and their music WAY too seriously. They forget that the music industry is a business and with any business you need the right Marketing channels and the right Public Relations messages to reach the public and build fans. Fact is, you can have the greatest music in the world, but unless you have the ability to reach enough people to buy your music (either online or offline) in enough volume or attend your concerts, you are not really a rockstar, you are just a struggling musician or band. Seems like ever since the Metallica/Napster debacle, everyone in the industry is up in arms over music piracy and sharing sites. The torrent search engine Pirate Bay was even sued by the collective legal fire power of Warner Brothers, MGM, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox Films, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI. But my contention is that rockstars/popstars like Lilly Allen and the rest of the industry executives who complain about piracy and sharing sites need to start wearing helmets because they very may well be retarded.
Alright, we get it – nobody in the film and music industry is really very comfortable with the freemium, sharing, free love attitude of the internet. And, who can blame them, when you spend millions on production and marketing to get your product into the hands of the buying consumer, it’s reasonable to take offense to some yahoo stealing WiFi from their neighbor uploading mp3s of the latest Lady GaGa track. But here’s the rub – the bulk of a musician’s money is really made from concert sales. Labels front a lot of money to musicians for studio time, production, marketing, radio time etc that they expect to see back on their balance sheet, so the musician makes a very small percentage of an album sale. Where the artist cleans up is in concert. Typically, the venue does most of the marketing and the artist walks away with a good deal of proceeds. Any community college grad can do the math on this one. Album/iTune sales are just part of the marketing and where the label, that invested good money in the musician expects to see their investment pay off. I’m sure CD manufacturers don’t want to hear this but, today, we all want music on our iPhone’s and iPods not on our CD player. And the production of the CDs and the album art and all the other stuff that goes along with that is very costly. This is where the industry needs to change and recognize its potential to be much more profitable and more importantly vet its talent better through free music and crowdsourcing.
Ouch. I said the latest buzz word, crowd sourcing. I feel dirty. But, it’s true. If Warner, EMI and Universal produced the music, created a music solution to Hulu.com that partnered with Billboard.com they could effectively control the online market and use the power of iLike, Revernation, Blip and Last as their free to low cost marketing channels to push listeners to iTunes for sales and ticketmaster and livenation for concert tickets. If they just used their noodles a bit, they could let the fans choose the music they liked best, use radio more effectively based on the crowd sourcing metrics and spend their investment dollars more wisely on the right artists the fans WAN and the entire process of grooming musicians and taking chances on new artists would be less expensive and the ROI far greater because the risk would be lower.
Some artists really do get it. Radiohead released an album entirely free to the Internet and Grammy Winner, Joss Stone flat out blasted Lilly Allen in an interview for dumping on music piracy with this quotable gem:
“She [Lily Allen] needs to sell records because she’s not a singer, and that’s not an offense to her because I think that she knows that too,” says Stone.
“…when musicians are really making real music people come to the show and that’s what we make our money from, from playing live. And I think it’s probably harder for an artist like Lily and many other pop acts. It’s really about the track and about their personality and their celebrity and that’s how they make their money is selling those records.”
Stone says that Lily cannot win a fight against music piracy, and for that matter, neither can anyone else.
“So let’s just accept it and let’s see it as something that can be beautiful and it might change music for the better,” she says pragmatically. “It might sort the weeds from the flowers.”
The industry and artists themselves need to start embracing the idea of music sharing and free tunes and start using them to their advantage. It would be genius to harness the power of crowdsourcing in music to build a better set list for a concert, market a new album with strategic track releases and even lower the cost of radio play getting DJs in on the action. Think about it – if the fans chose the tracks they like best online, you could best select the tracks you want to invest radio dollars in so you could have instant Billboard hits and the whole process of artist, track and album marketing would be less risky and return more money for everyone!
The Beatles USB Release: Meet the Beatles on USB, EMI Sues Distributors ( this USB release of Beatles songs, possibly one of the most retarded record industry decisions made in recent history – someone quick, get EMI a helmet and a small bus!)
Resource: Pirate Bay Loses A Lawsuit; Entertainment Industry Loses An Opportunity
Resource: Grammy Winner: If You’re A Good Musician, You Have Nothing To Fear With Piracy
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