David Emery Online

Reshuffle

11 October 2007

So, I hope you’ve all been paying attention this week.

All this talk about music. All this activity. All this hype.

Apparently this is the end of the record industry.

Somehow I don’t quite see how this adds up. In fact, I think the record industry hasn’t looked better then this for quite a long time. Are we really supposed to believe that all this activity – arguably music is more popular now then it has been for years – is somehow going to see an end of the selling of music?

Moving back to the content of the post on TechCrunch linked to above, this Madonna deal is hardly revolutionary. How is signing a multi-million deal to release records with Live Nation any different from signing to anyone else? Sure, they’re not one of the traditional majors but they are a huge behemoth of a company, being responsible for a large about of all sorts of aspects of live music. It’s certainly pretty equivalent to signing with a major – they’re certainly much more like someone like EMI then they are an independent, and they’re releasing 3 studio albums of hers; sounds like a record company to me…

The next “nail in the coffin” is the news that Nine Inch Nails are now without a record label. Completely off topic, but as it stands right now the post on nin.com (which sadly doesn’t have a permalink) has 1642 comments, which it pretty amazing.

Comment baiting aside this is again no real surprise; bands like NIN, Radiohead and Madonna no longer really need what a label brings to the table: promotion and distribution. I guess it’s all about economies of scale – once you get to a certain level of sales and income it starts to make sense to cut the label out of things and start doing it yourself. That level is pretty darn high though, as there are so many aspects that you have to sort out: people plugging your songs at radio, TV, print press, online press, regional press, people making your website, people making your artwork, people co-ordinating the advertising, people involved with manufacture…

The list is pretty long.

And guess what, when you’ve got all those people working for you, you are a record label; you’re just releasing records by one artist: you.

On a related topic, take a look at this post by Ian Rogers the Head of Yahoo! Music. It is – quite frankly – a rather brilliant piece of self congratulation. He at length goes into all the problems with DRM, and how it affects user experience to the point where no one wants to use it.

Well duh.

That’s why the iTunes Store has been so successful, and it’s been obvious to anyone with half a brain cell for years; anything Windows Media DRM-based has had a awful user experience, so people didn’t use it. It’s odd the way that works. He then goes on to make the amazing proclamation that he’s now not going to entertain labels who try and force DRM on him (and by him I mean Yahoo!) anymore.

It’s rather lucky for him then that they’re obviously not going to, as they’ve realised this point as well.

The music landscape is changing – that’s for sure – but it’s more of a reshuffle then a revolution.