Music
The Audio Exodus Has Begun
Huge news broke last week when Radiohead announced that their album would be sold directly to the public at a variable price to be set by the listeners. Days later, Nine Inch Nails announced that they were leaving their label and would be selling direct to the public…followed by rumors that Oasis and Jamiroquai were considering releasing their music in a format similar to that adopted by Radiohead.
All the industry has been abuzz with musings about the future of the standard record label…”Is this the beginning of the end?” has been the question everyone seems to be asking. Well, actually it started the day that someone first figured out how to send their friends music files over the internet, it has just taken awhile to catch on. While it will still take some time to make this movement a revolution of the system, major bands adopting variable pricing and direct sales shows that the clock is ticking for labels to catch up to the consumer market’s demands.
Today, this got a huge boost: Madonna has announced that she will be releasing 3 studio albums, promoting concert tours, and licensing merchandise through Live Nation, rather than a record label. While this is still short of direct-to-the-consumer sales, it still shows that big names do not need labels to promote sales. In fact, in Live Nation’s ‘About Us‘ section, the company doesn’t even say a word about album promotion:
Live Nation is the world’s largest live music company. Our mission is to inspire passion for live music around the world. We are the largest promoter of live concerts in the world, the second-largest entertainment venue management company and have a rapidly growing online presence.
I read this first on TechCrunch, and I can’t summarize this any better than they have written in their headline: “And the Walls Came Tumbling Down…”
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Discussion
6 comments for “The Audio Exodus Has Begun”
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This is all well and good for artists with a very public profile that are cash cows for record companies – we already know who NIN, Radiohead and Madonna are, and if we want to buy their music we’ll dig around.
On the other hand, the big record labels will still be important to get the word out to the kids that there are new bands out there that want to be noticed. The Internet contains way too much noise for independent acts to get noticed at this point. Also, I don’t know if pop machines like MTV and the like will hunt down small indie acts that have gained web notoriety and give them the promotion they deserve without being padded by the labels.
Then again, if the established acts spread their wings and leave the nest, the labels are going to have to dig a bit deeper to make their money, which means more contracts for and more attention paid to bands that might not have otherwise received any notoriety. This could be the shot in the arm the industry needs to reinvent itself in the face of the online music distribution model – not the Same Old Shit, but instead fresh, new material that might actually be worth spending our money on.
I don’t know about you or your large comment, but most people I know find all of their new music through word of mouth or the internet, and even those work reciprocally. You can otherwise catch them on talk shows (which are on public channels like NBC and CBS, etc.) I don’t think your statement is true, even to a large extent. It’s all speculation though.
Well, The Live Nation Deal for Madonna is well worth it. With digital downloading and radio being boring and “rap” now, I have turned to Satelite Radio and they play a wide variety. Terrestrial Radio is dead and so are the labels that rape thier artists… Good for all these acts!
Part of the idea is that with them selling the music directly to the public, esspecially digitally, you can charge almost nothing for it,
[...] the best example I have experienced in the time I have posted on this site: my post called “The Audio Exodus” from Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 about the changes in the music [...]
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