“Fear is making the record companies less arrogant. They’re more open to ideas. So, what’s important now is to find music that’s timeless.”

this article is dripping with d-baggery. rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic, etc. or having someone check the feng shui of a burning building.

but have fun with your mystical hippie guru, sony, and good luck.

"we don't have titles" LAWLZ

making timeless music:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=3gUwG7CtqYY

Compare it, though, with the bright ideas of the other head of Columbia Records:

Barnett has other ideas, which he is discussing with Rubin. For instance, asking Columbia artists to give the record company up to 50 percent of their touring, merchandising and online revenue.

but have fun with your mystical hippie guru, sony,

I'm guessing Rubin has been dismissed as white guy, guru, hippie all of his adult life, daily. From this article, he's the best chance they've got.

Ravishing Rick Rubin Rules!

This is kinda like a Sept. 22, 2005 Rolling Stone Mag giant feature article on Rubin that I read. Interesting but noone ever seems to ask him any tough questions.

This thread (and the thread on the Gossip,a recent Rubin signee)have been planted by Rubin's employees...

At Rubin's suggestion, he has also set up a "word of mouth" department, which will probably employ some members of the Big Red focus group along with dozens of other 20-somethings. The "word of mouth" department will function as a publicity-promotional arm of the company, spreading commissioned buzz through chat rooms across the planet and through old-fashioned human interaction. "They tell all their friends about a band," Barnett explained. "Their job is to create interest."

"I grew up in the independent music business, and you still really need the muscle of the majors."

Yeaaaah sure.

i thought that for an article of its length a surprising amount was left unsaid which is probably smart. there may be some d-baggery (the street team stuff in particular), but i think there are some big grains of truth there: the stuff about art and fandom. i would hate to see technology destroy the mythmaking in music, but at the same time technology-based business models are just more of the same really, just sped up. it's like technology only exacerbates the disconnect b/w art and commerce that was already there. so it's true (and glaringly obvious) that art is what should be focused on.

anyone see him in the dixie chicks' film shut up and sing? it looked like he never actually entered the studio or was present during the recording. they played some stuff for him at his house, and he gave them such indispensible nuggets of wisdom as "the chorus sounds nice" and "nice change there."

Dear NYT. The Gossip have been around for about a decade.

A self-declared part-time artist coach with no skills. Ain't life grand.

But let him tell ya about his role in transforming hiphop:

Through his passion for the Beatles, he became fascinated by the seductive, addictive power of songs. From the first hip-hop records he produced for L L Cool J and the Beastie Boys, he insisted on classic song structure. "Before Def Jam, hip-hop records were typically really long, and they rarely had a hook," he continued. "Those songs didn't deliver in the way the Beatles did. By making our rap records sound more like pop songs, we changed the form. And we sold a lot of records."

I think back in those days he was actually more hands-on. I've read other features on him that talked about how he obsessed over drum sounds and LL's flow.

Let's hope he can recapture a little of the magic he brought to Mel C's first solo album

this article is an advertisement for columbia records, nothing more

it's called "pr"

best thing about the teaser on the times web site is it says "rick rubin takes chances - but can he save columbia records?"

does anyone have any evidence of rick rubin "taking chances" at any point in the last decade?

PaloAlto

Although Hirschberg is famous for turning celebrity profiles into celebrity vivisections (as in the memorable "The Fall of Jamie Tarses, As Scheduled" in the New York Times magazine a few months ago) her portrait of Seinfeld was basically a Valentine -- atypical for Hirschberg, but typical for a Vanity Fair cover.

http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:uQwewd75NXMJ:www.salon.com/media/1998/04/24media.html+LYNN+HIRSCHBERG&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

No vivisection here. A NY Times editor should have had her toughen it up a bit.

IIRC, she is an editor.

Oh, it looks like she's just an editor at large, which can mean almost anything right?

this reads like a parody

There wasn't exactly what I'd call a huge amount of classic song structure in Hose, and the fact that Flipper have been written out of this story is a little bit sad.

"I grew up in the independent music business, and you still really need the muscle of the majors."

Yeaaaah sure.

it depends on how you wanna make your money - independencts offer a potentially much bigger cut of whatever totals you manage to produce, but big labels still have deep enough pockets to cut large advances, which can free artists to tour more & establish themselves - getting free from the day job can be very trying for independent artists of any genre. This is the main attraction of the major label system and has been since, what, forever?

when i think of rick rubin i hardly think "independent music business". that moldy dorm story was a looooooooooooooooooong-ass time ago. he's a millionare record mogul and has been for ever. and been in league with satan for just as long.

having said that, i have nothing against him. his hits were good and his misses suitably forgettable.

Anecdotally, I'm hearing more and more musicians (both people I know and people I don't) talking about being perfectly happy with the idea of music requiring a day job. Neither indies nor majors offer you much chance of a long term self-supporting career, especially now, but as pointed out above, a major can at least give you a shot at it with an advance big enough to let you quit your day job and tour heavily. But I feel like more musicians now are deciding that isn't worth it and never completely leaving the day job world.

Hurting, I'm very much getting the same vibe.

Writers have in the main lived this way since the dawn of the proverbial, so it kind of makes sense. I mean the day job can be in a complimentary industry anyway - selling instruments, working at labels/record stores, producing, etc.

am I reading y'all wrong or are you saying that you know musicians who'd just as soon punch a clock as make a decent living making music? not contesting you but musicians constitute the greater part of people I know (not that I'm a big social butterfly admittedly) and I don't know one who wouldn't strongly prefer to be making rent off of music

u guys r gay

J0hn: oh hell not on my part (dunno about Hurting) - obviously no creative person wants to have to do things that pull them away from that.

cut large advances, which can free artists from day jobs, only to have them indebted & endlessly recouping said advances in the face of dwindling returns?

I also hear about more musicians wanting to keep the day job lately, it's something that I noticed when netlabels started popping up. Music's another thing to do. Feels healthy that way, too.

Well, especially considering how *unhealthy* the state of the industry as a career choice seems to be, especially now.

Frankly I'm just surprised that Columbia or any record label or even Rubin himself thinks ANYONE is going to be able to save the record industry. I don't even understand why the nearest small, local chain of CD stores has imjected so much money into their business, either. Sure, it's a free country, but I sure as hell wouldn't put a penny into "saving the music business" if I were these people. Either come up with a new business model, or forget it.

Rubin's idea of a cheap and maybe satellite-based catalog replacing the iPod and radio is not so crazy an idea.

Sure, it's called the "celestial jukebox", everybody and their mother is waiting for/talking about it. But if he needs to take credit for that too he should be among those actually making it happen.

Well, he's offering something better than his co-head at Columbia is offering:

Barnett has other ideas, which he is discussing with Rubin. For instance, asking Columbia artists to give the record company up to 50 percent of their touring, merchandising and online revenue.

getting free from the day job can be very trying for independent artists of any genre. This is the main attraction of the major label system and has been since, what, forever?

4:15am - wake up for labor day shift so I can have 2nd half of day free to finish trax

And according to some of those guys you will love getting up for that shift! Yea, I can't imagine anyone wanting to be in debt based on advances to a major label, but otherwise it would have to be a pretty exciting dayjob to choose to keep it (if you knew you could make a living from the major label deal).

Barnett has other ideas, which he is discussing with Rubin. For instance, asking Columbia artists to give the record company up to 50 percent of their touring, merchandising and online revenue.

"Yeah guys, if you could just see your way clear to giving us half of your touring profits as, y'know, a favour."

Does keeping a foot in the real world help producing art that isn't disconnected from its' audience? I'm in favor of artists having all the time & resources needed to excel at what they do tho -if I wasn't convinced that it produces bad art I'd advocate public grants & state sponsorships for all!

maybe we should ask karen finley.

"if you knew you could make a living from the major label deal"

This is a bare fraction of the people on major label deals as far as I can tell.

am I reading y'all wrong or are you saying that you know musicians who'd just as soon punch a clock as make a decent living making music?

No, but I think there are a lot of musicians that have read the Passman book and know what kind of living, if any, they can make on a major label, and they know that the major labels seem kind of out of touch in their marketing and promotion and production of most things outside of hip-hop and teen pop, and that there's no artist development these days.

And on the other hand they see how few resources an indie can offer them, and how unlikely it is for them to become self-supporting with massively increased competition (internets, etc.) and decreased CD sales, and they'd still rather do it the indie way and at least have creative control.

I'm sure most of these artists would jump at the chance to quit their jobs if a successful career seemed within their reaches, of course.

Maybe it's a generational thing too - less willingness to struggle with poverty on the part of the children of boomers.

Bukowski said something about never trusting a writer who hadn't worked an eight-hour-a-day job. I think it's reasonable to say the same about any type of artist.

I totally agree.

So an artist has to have suffered (via an 8 hour work day) (or imbibe like Bukowski) to create true art! I am not sure I buy that. I judge Rick Rubin's production work based on what it sounds like to me, not based on whether he ever worked a dayjob. Whether or not I "trust" him, to use Unperson's description of the Bukowski phrase, does not matter.
Please do not turn this into an 'authenticity' rockism discussion.

I don't think it's that relevant anyway.

I'm not turning it into an authenticity discussion, or at least not trying to. If anything, I'm trying to make a comparison between a writer who works a day job then comes home and pounds out pages at night and some milk-fed, grant-sustained Iowa Writers' Workshop pussy who takes five years to pinch off some bloated, pretentious oh-so-postmodern opus aimed straight at the editors of The Believer. And wondering if there's something similar at work in music.

Barnett has other ideas, which he is discussing with Rubin. For instance, asking Columbia artists to give the record company up to 50 percent of their touring, merchandising and online revenue.

"Yeah guys, if you could just see your way clear to giving us half of your touring profits as, y'know, a favour."

This is already happening, though:

"Most bands, however successful, now make their money from live work and the merchandising opportunities that go with it, rather than from recordings. The record companies know this, which is why when EMI re-signed Robbie Williams in 2002, the £80m deal guaranteed the label a share in the profits generated by Williams's tours. Such spinoffs are often now make or break issues in contractual negotiations. Gerd Leonhard, a music business consultant, predicts that by 2010, recorded music sales will make up only 30 per cent of a successful label's revenues. The rest will be generated by artists' extra-musical brand extensions." From here:
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9735

It's now obvious to everyone that the business model doesn't work any more, and that Rubin article has some interesting things to say about what might happen next. I think it's inevitable we'll eventually see some kind of monthly subscription, perhaps bundled in with ISP subscription, that enables you to download or stream whatever you want to hear. Revenues of that subscription would then be split between record companies and artists depending on no. of downloads. The French govt has already debated this idea in parliament. Its time will come once good broadband service is ubiquitous and some smart 20 year old comes up with the right platform.

In any case, although the recording industry is in decline right now, I doubt that it's terminal. There will always be people who want to make music and people who want to listen to it, and there will always be financial opportunities in the interface between the two. The problem right now is that rapid technological advance has made it difficult to predict the future of that interface and therefore difficult to work out what the business model should be. That problem will eventually be solved.

yeah but guys you don't have to be on a major label to make a decent living off music, you don't even have sell that many records, you just have to be about yr business and not make stupid decisions

milk-fed, grant-sustained Iowa Writers' Workshop pussy who takes five years to pinch off some bloated, pretentious oh-so-postmodern opus aimed straight at the editors of The Believer.

I've met this guy - Jim Strawman! Nice fellow, gets a bad rap tho

milk-fed?

"oh-so-" = always winceworthy

"yeah but guys you don't have to be on a major label to make a decent living off music, you don't even have sell that many records, you just have to be about yr business and not make stupid decisions"

Exactly. So really all being on a major label does is help a precious few artists move from comfortable to ridiculously rich and a lot more move into debt without much to show for it.

But even with an indie label 50/50 split and a reasonably successful record (say 10,000 copies, and even that is getting harder to do), you're not looking at a huge chunk of money once you split it between the band - maybe something like a dollar per member per CD before taxes. Touring is supposed to be the big income generator, but it seems to take a couple of years of heavy touring before you have any reliable profit from this, barring lucky breaks with hype, and even then you're far from guaranteed anything. So at very least you've got a long, risky transitional period, and most guys I know who have tried this route have gone into major credit card debt and/or lived without health insurance and/or lived like gutter punks, unless they were lucky enough to have a super-flexible job -- and most of them never saw real money from music. Gas is more expensive and there are more bands competing for spots at fewer clubs. There's almost no radio support for indie music except college and the occasional AAA station.

Lefsetz weighs in:

http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2007/09/04/rick-rubinny-times/

+2 use of caps

all that bit about qualifications is so much bullshit - there are no qualifications required nor necessary: so many big industry moves in the history of the business have been made by people who technically had no idea what they were doing, just intuition & impulse (Alpert & Mangione, Geffen, Berry Gordy, Sinatra, the list is endless) and the strength of having been at some point somewhere near the trenches

Good point. He may be right about the following though:

As for a new office... An expensive one, at that. Why don't you explain to your acts, who you make record at home on Pro Tools, why you have to blow all this money.

there are a fair number of people [in the us] living without health insurance; while i grasp your point, nothing at all is guaranteed to non-rockstars. there seem to be plenty of ilx0rs working at wages that don't correspond to their abilities. unless you are truly exceptional, should you really expect more? outstanding musicians, like nba players, are pretty rare and pretty financially disposable. (actually, nfl players are a lot more disposable.) if the money is overflowing then obviously the artist(s) deserve the lion's share, but if not...

why does he look so old?

With careful graft, a musician can make a modest living from their main thing, as long as they're not working in a small market, skimp on extras like health insurance, and don't have children. It also helps if they have a trust fund or generous parents. From what I can observe, in Australia at least, musicians who aren't independently wealthy almost always do work at least eight hours a day.

Commonly, I see musicians diversifying and working in various fields for income, and squeezing their music in around it. Apart from their main band or project, they will often tour as hired guns with big profile artists; play in small local bands, often playing covers; write, record or sing TV ads; or work full or part time in a music-oriented day job (eg, a music tutor, a university lecturer or community artsworker).

The ones I've observed over the years that go hard on their main project and have some financial success usually end up having to fall back on one or more of the other areas eventually. As mookie says, working without health insurance is a gamble and can't be maintained indefinitely.

This isn't a disaster - one must simply become very disciplined in one's time management. It can be done, and one has the added benefit of not being answerable in one's creative decision-making to a record company.

I'm really not sure how this relates to Rick Rubin. Perhaps this is another conversation for another thread.

"As mookie says, working without health insurance is a gamble and can't be maintained indefinitely."

Is health insurance a standard package for major label artists or something? I've never heard that. I was always under the impression they had to self-insure.

I would not expect any such clause in any record contract, big or small. I think the point was that many artists at the indie level cut corners on health insurance (and savings, for that matter) because they have to.

So, eh, when's the Hose reunion? That's all I care about.

If anything, I'm trying to make a comparison between a writer who works a day job then comes home and pounds out pages at night and some milk-fed, grant-sustained Iowa Writers' Workshop pussy who takes five years to pinch off some bloated, pretentious oh-so-postmodern opus aimed straight at the editors of The Believer.

--vs.--

Because people like this tool of my acquaintance (who, by the way, teaches English in Taiwan for a living, precisely because life is cheap, the hours are short, and he's got a fetish to indulge) internalized the perverse "Protestant work ethic," they can no longer see that people who work for a living are to be pitied. Not because there's something innately horrible about work in itself, but because there's something innately horrible about selling your life. Work for what you want, and do as little as necessary to achieve as much as possible. Pay-the-rent jobs are all shitty, all a waste of time, all to be avoided as much as possible. It's the work you do for yourself that's virtuous; all the rest is evil, because it steals time you could be spending doing something enjoyable. Life is a one-way journey with no do-overs. Every moment you spend doing something you'd rather not be doing, whether it's working for an asshole boss so you can pay an asshole landlord or talking to someone whose conversation is like a drill-bit in the brain, is time you'll never get back.

But maybe you have less respect for people who appear to have inherited that leisure than people who have done the work to come up with a scam that will give them that leisure?

Strange article. It's not very complimentary of Rubin, it almost makes him seem like a guy who sticks his finger up to see which way the wind is blowing. And the thing about making Ipods obsolete with some sort of strange subscription service made no sense, to me at least.

I didn't know before reading this that the kids don't think myspace is cool anymore and that facebook is on its way out.

Also I'm kind of shocked that Rick Rubin likes The Gossip so much.

why does he look so old?

-- Maria :D, Wednesday, 5 September 2007 03:03 (11 hours ago) Link

Vegan?

And the thing about making Ipods obsolete with some sort of strange subscription service made no sense, to me at least.

I don't know about making ipods obsolete, but the thing about the subscription service makes perfect sense to me. Once buying physical product finally disappears, how else are you going to make money from recorded music? Downloads bought per track are clearly not making up for the downturn in CD sales. There will be a new paradigm, and I think some sort of monthly subscription is likely to be it. It's not that wildly different from paying for cable TV is it?

someone needs to come up with a lossless subscription service. i know bleep.com does FLAC.

someone needs to stop friggin paying for music

I have no interest in subscribing to a service wherein someone else, particularly a large corporation, is choosing what I get to hear

does he really look that old for a man in his mid-40s? i'd say most guys with facial hair start going gray in the beard by that age, if not much earlier.

i agree shakey. i have zero interest in subscription services in general as they are today because i trust my taste before anyone else's, but it could still be done in a worthwhile way i think. (like last.fm/audioscrobbler or something although i never use those)

giant corporate labels can't even cooperate long enough to put out a decent box set for an artist whose work spans across several labels, how the fuck would they ever cobble together a subscription service wherein I would actually be able to find stuff I want to listen to

itunes

itunes' selection is pathetic

Wait, where are you guys getting the impression that a subscription service would involve someone deciding what you listen to? I thought the idea was a monthly fee for unlimited access to songs. I already have an emusic subscription, which is a flat fee for a set number of downloads per month, and it's great. Even though there's tons of stuff not available (all major label music and some indies), I can always find plenty of stuff I want. I'd assume a subscription service that had participation of the big labels would only offer more selection, not less (unless they shut out the little labels or something).

there's such a huge disparity these days between being critically "blog/internet" successful and financially record label successful. i don't know how often the two worlds meet.

Of course, that said, I don't think such a model would save the big labels, b/c the 50-quid men of the world would probably be spending less for more music unless the fee was pretty high, and most other people probably wouldn't want to pay very much per month (especially with free music out there.

I suppose you could have a multi-level system, like emusic does now. A really, really deep catalog that was always instantly available might be able to compete with free, i.e. people who download illegally might pay a monthly fee for the ability to get anything anytime instead of having to find it on a torrent site and then being uncertain about quality, file security, etc.

where are you guys getting the impression that a subscription service would involve someone deciding what you listen to?

Hurting you answer your own question here: there's tons of stuff not available (all major label music and some indies)

i.e., the labels not being able to agree on what's available = access being limited due to corporate douchebaggery

I mean come on the FUCKING BEATLES are not on iTunes.

Ok, but that's not "some corporation" deciding, that's a bunch of different companies not participating, and presumably that's because it's still a new thing and labels haven't accepted the concept. If they accepted the concept, your argument would be moot.

they can't accept the concept because its too complicated legally to sort out all the rights, payments, etc. They'll all collapse (and "be bought out for pennies") before they figure it out.

in other words its the Gordian Knot - it can't be untangled, it must be cut altogether.

You might be right. But why does it have to be complicated? Why not just share revenue as a percentage of total downloads? If the new Justin Timberlake single is 5% of downloads for a given week, why not just pay out a proportional amount of subscription revenue? I know that could be more complicated than it sounds, but these labels use pretty elaborate revenue schemes as it is.

"You might be right. But why does it have to be complicated? Why not just share revenue as a percentage of total downloads?"

You are kidding, right? Have you ever read any contracts? Or any legal documents ever?

it will be amusing if jobs announces beatles on itunes today

Yeah, actually I have.

The record companies already have plenty of complex legal arrangements though.

If the record companies don't move to subscription, it will either be because they're too resistant to change (which they've shown themselves to be so far), or because they think it will be a net loss from the revenue they currently earn from recordings (which is going to keep declining anyway).

personally I feel a high degree of shadenfreude at the major labels' current predicament - with CDs they created an unnecessary and inferior technology and foisted it on the market at ridiculously overpriced rates and now the principles behind that very same technology (i.e., digital copies of music) are proving to be their undoing.

Meanwhile, the original "punk rock"/DIY dream of the music scene being diversified and democratized has been realized: an ever-increasing number of people/kids/music fiends/whathaveyou are freely creating and sharing content with an increasingly smaller and smaller degree of corporate mediation.

I do think the labels have really hurt themselves with the way they've continued to treat artists. That thing about revenue sharing from touring and merch is really offensive. What self-respecting artists would want to go to a label that even considered a deal like that? I mean you've got a whole generation of kids raised on the idea that the music business is evil; a lot of them have read the Donald Passman book, the Steve Albini essay, etc., not to mention growing up with bands like Fugazi that set a different example, watching labels like Matador rise to prominence, etc., and there's a similar (though not entirely parallel) story in hip-hop. In other words, talented artists no longer necessarily see the majors as the place to go, and this becomes a recruiting problem.

I think the labels still operate with an early 60s mindset - where you could find a good looking kid with a nice voice on the street and make him into a star, then milk everything you could out of him until he went dry.

These days labels want things both ways - they want an artist to walk in already developed and marketable, which takes lots of savvy on the artist's part, but then they want to fully take advantage of the artist, which assumes the artist lacks savvy.

Sorry, those last two statements came out garbled and sound like they contradict each other. What I meant to say is that labels still want the dumb street kid they can take advantage of, but they also want that dumb street kid to walk in as a fully-formed artist, and they can't have it both ways.

Of course the subscription model would entail a HUGE loss in revenue for the labels. That's why they don't do it, not legal complexity, since they certainly have the army of lawyers necessary to make these things work. How much would people pay for a music subscription? $20/month? $50? Do you think that's going to "save" the labels? Sure, they may be fucked anyway, but subscription is basically admitting defeat -- they'd all lose their jobs.

yep

Yeah, they're probably fucked regardless.

Another legal problem that the article didn't address is antitrust laws,both in the US and Europe. If the major labels get together on some sort of subscription thing, this could be a problem

I think Rubin's probably right about this - but I don't think the whole subscription model will prevent it: "The future technology companies will either wait for the record companies to smarten up, or they'll let them sink until they can buy them for 10 cents on the dollar and own the whole thing."

Iowa doesn't do oh-so-postmodern. You're thinking of Brown.

Iowa also produced Flannery O'Connor, Kurt Vonnegut, and a bunch of other people who I will check wikipedia for and then post

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_Writers_Workshop#Notable_Alumni

That thing about revenue sharing from touring and merch is really offensive. What self-respecting artists would want to go to a label that even considered a deal like that?

yeah this is completely wtf. I guess the label could assume more responsibility, financial and otherwise, though (and I'm completely talking out of my ass here) e.g. providing a touring band with an employee to handle merch, running the website, pony up for t-shirts/ screen printing overhead etc. Not saying this is an ideal situation by any means, but at least try to make a 50/50 split more palatable...

Vonnegut was from Indiana.

yeah this is completely wtf. Its wrongheaded and offensive but I don't think its completely wtf - they see where the income is and then demand a piece of it, this is standard corporate label MO.

Whoops, he TAUGHT at Iowa Writers Workshop. (I know he was from Indiana, I was talking about writing programs)

word

(Ha, probably better not to sidetrack into MFA-talk, but I just meant Iowa's aesthetic is really crisp, precise, and conventional. Also, hardly anyone writes bloated, pretentious, postmodern novels anymore, in part because boys don't like to read.)

oh yeah. I'm not saying I don't believe record companies would be all over this, I'm saying you (the artist) would have to be pretty dumb to get on board with it. That is unless most of the financial/ manpower investment is assumed by your label.

xxxpost

Yeah, I think you might see some labels take on more of those roles in exchange for revenue sharing. If a label can get some other hand out of your pocket in exchange for digging its own in a little deeper, artists might agree to it. But knowing the majors they'll probably find a way to make sure the artist comes out worse off in the end.

hardly anyone writes bloated, pretentious, postmodern novels anymore,

David Foster Wallace to thread

His last novel came out more than ten years ago.

I didn't read it then either

Is it wrong to enjoy seeing the slow collapse of the major labels? It's like watching the Hindenburg go down.

You enjoyed watching the Hindenburg go down?

it's more fun than watching the slow collapse of the bloated, pretentious, postmodern novel

hahaha

i just hope the music columbia releases now is as good as that article makes it out to be...

I think someone got a jump on Rick's word-of-mouth department with that whole Marie Digby fiasco going down right now.

the hindenburg went down pretty quickly actually

that's odd, it looked like it was barely moving in all those photographs.

oh the humanity

Marie Digby...? what's the deal?

I guess that's really the most insulting thing about the article--the assumption that major labels are worth saving, that we should be upset if Rick can't keep Columbia from going under. Personally, I could give a fuck. Seems like the real winner is large indies who are agile enough to roll with filesharing and for whom 50,000 sold is a success.

While I don't think *the majors* as they currently exist are all that worth saving, I do think there's something to be said for capital. Maybe labels the size of Matador and Sub Pop have enough money these days that you don't really need something bigger. But fact is it's pretty hard to make a great album without an advance.

Our label (a small but established and reputable indie) is paying for four days of studio time for us to do a full-length. That's including mixing. The only way we can possibly get it done is to do all the main tracking live in 2 days or so, a day of overdubs and a day of mixing. And that means practicing the hell out of the songs, which we can only do two or three times a week with our rental space schedule. And it's stressful as hell and no matter how much practice we get there's no guarantee we'll get good takes.

Which I don't mean as a complaint - four days is better than nothing. Hell, there are probably Stax sessions that were done as quickly. But if you name 20 of your favorite albums, at least 19 of them took more than four days to make, unless you deliberately pick ultra-lo-fi stuff or pre-studio-wizardry records. The majors are the ones who can put up the money, and they used to make great records as a result.

Seems like the real winner is large indies who are agile enough to roll with filesharing and for whom 50,000 sold is a success.

Most indies will never have a 50,000-seller, and I'm not sure what "agile enough to roll with filesharing" means -- agile enough to not mind losing money?

I think Black Sabbath's first three records were done in 10 days, total. And they still sound awesome.

Again, not saying you can't make a good record in three or four days. But there are a lot of great records that couldn't have been made in three or four days.

Marie Digby...? what's the deal?

Here.

Ms. Digby's simple, homemade music videos of her performing popular songs have been viewed more than 2.3 million times on YouTube. Her acoustic-guitar rendition of the R&B hit "Umbrella" has been featured on MTV's program "The Hills" and is played regularly on radio stations in Los Angeles, Sacramento and Portland, Ore. Capping the frenzy, a press release last week from Walt Disney Co.'s Hollywood Records label declared: "Breakthrough YouTube Phenomenon Marié Digby Signs With Hollywood Records."

What the release failed to mention is that Hollywood Records signed Ms. Digby in 2005, 18 months before she became a YouTube phenomenon. Hollywood Records helped devise her Internet strategy, consulted with her on the type of songs she chose to post, and distributed a high-quality studio recording of "Umbrella" to iTunes and radio stations.

that is very interesting

I think Black Sabbath's first three records were done in 10 days, total.

if the first three black sabbath albums were released today everyone would say they sound like shit and that they need more dynamic range compression or something

"Marie Digby...? what's the deal?"

She was sonned in internet beef.

Most indies will never have a 50,000-seller, and I'm not sure what "agile enough to roll with filesharing" means -- agile enough to not mind losing money?

You mentioned two large indies yourself--Sub Pop and Matador. I know Matador has had 50k sellers, I bet Sub Pop has too. Hell, so has Touch and Go, although it took them a while.

As for filesharing, indies may have a better chance at devising things to download that people will actually buy--the New Pornographers "Executive Edition" is at least an interesting idea.

By the way, watch the video in that Marie Digby link to hear a WSJ reporter say "acoustical guitar." Tesla fan??

Sub Pop has a multi-million seller.

(Bleach)

And what are the totals on the Shins records at this point? Gotta be up there.

Re: Independent record labels, people on here seem to be forgetting that independent labels aren't some sort of sentient entity. They require employees. I have a friend who works at a pretty big independent metal label, and he's making peanuts. As much as he loves his job and the music, he just isn't making enough to support himself considering his education. As bloated as major labels may be, they can (or could) afford to pay their employees well, and provide the necessary apparatus to get the music to the people in the first place. So yeah, 50,000 records sold is great for an independent label, but those labels still need people to run them.

"As bloated as major labels may be, they can (or could) afford to pay their employees well, and provide the necessary apparatus to get the music to the people in the first place."

Until they all get laid off because 90% of lost album sales seem to be coming from majors, not from indies.

If the majors really do die off like fat, stinking shit dinosaurs, then won't that give a long slow boost to big indies? Won't we end up with a playing field crowded with labels bigger than todays big indies, but smaller than the majors? If so, there'll be more money to go around, though less than at the Columbia top floors circa 1980-whatever.

Shit, totally forgot about Bleach. The Shins, well, they're kind of forgettable.

Isn't a big part of employing people at indies the fact that they'll work for pretty cheap because they feel strongly about what they're doing? If a label I liked called me and offered me a job at half what I make now (which isn't a ton) I would take it in a second.

x post

Well, the layoff factor is why I put in the "could."

And yes, the reason a lot of them do it is because they're passionate about it, but it isn't a great long-term career, not if you want to live very far above the poverty level. I think once you get married and have a family, it isn't nearly enough to support that, which is why a lot of the independent label employees I've met are single (or least unmarried) males.

Yeah that's true, but it's not like there's any shortage of young males who are passionate about music. I'm not suggesting that you don't need talent to run an indie, but most indies are guided into their fruitful years by one or two people with vision and a lot of chipper young help.

"We will employ passionate young men who quit when they turn 30 and are sick of not having health insurance, to be replaced with newer, greener passionate young men" -- this business model has not worked so well outside of retail work

I dunno: people's notions of how the music industry might be radically reconfigured tend to put a lot of emphasis on fresh, creative music, but I honestly don't know how well those notions would serve would serve the many, many people who rely on having solid, conventional, corporate-product music in the world. (And when I say "I don't know," I seriously mean that I don't know: there's plenty of evidence to suggest that people are happy to get their traditional pop music from near-amateurs and kids with great voices straight out of high-school musical-theater productions. I just wonder who the discontents of a decentralized system with passionate gatekeepers might be -- what, if anything, would suddenly go unserved.)

Nickelback.

diplo remix

Bob Standard may be right - the Matadors and Sub-Pops might become the new old majors, and perhaps their boost in profile might make up for the loss in CD sales. Plus they don't have a stock price to drive up, so maybe they can be a little more flexible with profitability. But make no mistake that they are being hit and will continue to be hit by file-sharing too. You think people aren't getting The Shins and Joanna Newsom from torrent sites?

Every time I see the first sentence of the thread title, I think of:

http://moviesmedia.ign.com/movies/image/article/753/753021/tarkin_1167867382.jpg

I just wonder who the discontents of a decentralized system with passionate gatekeepers might be -- what, if anything, would suddenly go unserved.

that's why i brought up the (done to death) subscription idea upthread.

clearly the majors make shitty gatekeepers, but gatekeeping's a bit separate from fandom, too, and i think it's more than an rss app sponsored by targeted ads though that's obviously the first step.

i have to wonder what bill hicks would have to say about it.

Alfred COMPLETELY OTM. I've been reading it in my head with that voice every time.

Grand Moff Rubin

Drag City is gone from emusic.

http://www.emusic.com/messageboard/viewTopic.html?topicId=12450

One poster says he e-mailed the label and received a reply that emusic "pays peanuts."

That may not bode well for the subscription model.

I dunno, I wouldn't really call the Shins "fresh and creative" music. It seems like more and more the large indies are shepherding decent, but ultimately boring acts into the mainstream over a period of time. Large indies are informing a reasonable amount of mainstream taste these days. Obviously, this model doesn't account for the people who just need some Nickelback or decent teen pop, but can't you see some kind of new label entering the arena to fill this void?

Whether you think The Shins are "fresh and creative" is totally irrelevant - I'm talking about bands that are the bread and butter of their labels. If those bands make less money, the labels make less money, and they have less money to put out less accessible acts. If anything, a little boutique label that only focuses on "fresh, creative" music is the worst off of anyone - labels like that can't afford to take a 10% hit to their bottom line because a few people are getting their stuff for free.

i do like rubins 'if you make art people will respond' idea but the idea that we still need mega-mass marketed mainstream music needs a rethink IMO. and theres plenty of artists making 'art' on the fringes, some of whom ARE on majors, and i dont see any of that stuff shifting major units (obv, TVOTR were never going to sell much anyway but hey...) like rubin thinks they will...

If anything, a little boutique label that only focuses on "fresh, creative" music is the worst off of anyone - labels like that can't afford to take a 10% hit to their bottom line because a few people are getting their stuff for free.

I'm not sure if that is entirely accurate, considering how the boutique labels traditionally emphasize packaging, artwork, and limited editions. Check out eBay: OOP releases by boutique labels command relatively big bucks even though much of the music can be found for free online.