kane

I am not for the RIAA suing every new technology and trying to keep a stranglehold on artist. I guess my original point is that record companies have always fucked artists over and it is kind of a known thing so anyone who decides to go that route should understand that there is a pretty good chance of this happening.




Sure there are people making money off giving stuff away on the internet. That is not new news. Some of these artists are people who would never have made it on a record a label because the label would have dropped them for not selling enough records.

My point is that the label system gives a chance to a lot of people to take a shot that the internet may not have. If you sign a major label deal there is a decent chance that you will get a reasonable advance that you can use to live off of while you record your album. You can also get a decent budget for recording your album and when the album is done it will end up in stores and get some publicity. All the lechers and sharing and myspace visits in the world are not going to get you near the expose that getting on the radio will.

Maybe there will be a day when that changes. When the radio starts programing based on internet downloads, but for now if you want big exposure you need big dollars and a lot of know how to get it. And really that is what it boils down it. If you just want to be independent artist who plays small venues and puts out their own records and things like that, the internet is a great tool and you can probably do better than you would if you signed with a record label (unless you were with a small indy label that gave you a large part of the profit and had a good distribution system that could work in conjunction with the internet.) There is nothing wrong with that. But if you want to be a very big band who plays large venues and makes a ton of money you are going to need a lot of money and connections to not just make your music available to the masses, but to let them know it is out there and get them to go get it.



Correct and they do this because they see the bands as an investment, not as an art form. If a record label spends millions of dollars building a band up and helping them get big and now the band is selling a lot of records you know that label wants to keep them. The last thing they want is that band now using its fame to give away its music. Doing that cuts the label out so they are fighting to stop that from happening.

Think of it like this. Say you ran a business that provided consulting services to various businesses. You spent a lot of time and money training a group of people to really know what they are doing and to be great consultants. You also spend a lot of money and time promoting your business and getting you some great clients. You provide these employees with a great infrastructure to work within and a great support staff. Then once these people get well known and have made a ton of contacts they quit and go to work for themselves. They work out of their house so they have no overhead, but they keep your clients. Now, that person is now making much more money. They get to bill the client (probably less than you the big company owner was) and they get to keep almost all of the profits. They benefit from your building them up and getting their name out there and now they are going to cash in on that training and publicity that your provided them with. Sure your company made a nice amount of money while they worked for you, but now you have lost that money and will have to spend more to train/promote a replacement. Plus you have also lost some clients that you have worked hard to get. You aren't going to try to stop it? You wouldn't try to prevent this by making them sign a contract when you hired them saying that they would not leave and take clients with them? No compete contracts are very common in business.

The record labels don't want to bands to sign with them then use their money, influence and access to get them famous only to then leave and start giving away their records so that they can sell more concert tickets or merchandise. For every Radiohead (or any successful band) there are dozens that are not successful and many of those are not for lack of trying. I used to write for a music magazine. I would review 3-4 albums a month while I was there. The magazine itself would review about 20-30 albums a month. I would get 30-50 new albums in the mail from record labels every week. They would often send a copy to everyone on staff in hopes that someone would write about it. Now things have changed, this was back pre-internet so you can't fully compare them, but the point is that the music space is very crowded. It is hard to get noticed. The record companies have spent a lot of time, effort and money developing a publicity channel that can help them get artist exposure and make them famous and they want to protect that.

I'm not saying the labels are perfect. They are not. I know most of them are scammers and most artists that deal with them end up getting fucked over by them when it comes to CD sales. Maybe some day this will all change. As of right now it is the way things are. If you want to have huge success you need to get on the radio and on MTV and on things like the tonight show or Jimmy Kimmel and it is very hard to do that without the access a major label can give you. IMO if the labels want to survive they need to get back to selling quality music and using that promotional power to promote good bands that make good records and stop trying to churn out the hit makers so they can sell singles.

One other point, the site you mentioned eventful.com uses the fame of the labels. When I went to the site what was the first thing I see? A rotating banner that featured Britney Spears, Katy Perry and Wrestlemania. When you click the concerts section it has a top concerts list and every artist on that list is huge, famous and in some cases legendary. These acts came up through the label system. Sure there are, scattered in here other acts. Many of these other acts are smaller independent acts and they will benefit from this site, but how many people are brought to this site to see when Taylor Swift or Dave Mathews is coming to town? People come in looking for something they know and they then discover someone they had never heard of.

Are there any sites out there that just promote internet only bands? If so do these sites get much traffic?