Tom Silverman: What's Wrong with the Music Business
Tom Sliverman of Tommy Boy Records - and old acquaintance of mine from my days in NYC - has a very interesting idea about how to change the adversarial relationship between labels and artists: Have record deals work in the form of LLC entities. There is also a lot of depressing stuff if you think the internet is a good way to develop music sales, but you should read the whole thing if you intend to make a career out of music.
The LLC idea isn't for those of us so far out of the commercial main stream though.
Oh well.
The LLC idea isn't for those of us so far out of the commercial main stream though.
Oh well.
posted by Hucbald at 10:27 PM
2 Comments:
While the LLC idea is ok, what is missing here is the big picture. The idea that all the "hobbyists" out there selling very small numbers are just junk is nonsense. Music has so many elements and judging quality is not much of an objective science. The truth is, big breakthrough artists making major profits is just going to be a thing of the past. There's so much talent and creativity in the world and recording and distributing is now nearly cost-free. Result is that the world gets ridiculous quantity of all sorts of new music and this business/profit model of any variety will be mostly irrelevant. And that's not a bad thing for society in general.
Well, I've spoken with Tom before, and he's into music, but as a businessman. So I don't mind being statistical noise in his book, because I know he has his own limitations of perspective.
As for stars, there will be stars always, and who knows what the next technological innovation will be that will further enable that? I don't, but I do know people love music heroes, and so there will always be music stars of some sort or other.
I've been a proponent of getting artists independent of labels through tech for over twenty years - especially us niche peeps - so I'm sure we agree more than not.
Ciao,
Geo
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