The Observer Music Monthly has a seven-minute video feature and debate asking, "Are record labels crushing real music — or does technology mean artists will take control".
Several of the points made by different people in the video will be familiar to anyone who's been following this area. There's a widespread recognition that artists and creators now have many routes to being discovered by an audience. Hence labels, who are having a tough time making money out of new recordings, are not the be-all and end-all for artists like Pete Molinari (pictured). Also Adam White of Universal Music observes that what's happened so far is only the beginning of the impact of the net.
There are a couple of references to how well the live music sector is doing. In the Music 2.0 era, we don't often focus much attention on live gigs as a route to discovery, but they surely do serve this purpose: that's why a good festival slot or a support slot for a major band is much coveted by new artists. But the dynamics of live and recorded music have completely flip-flopped in the last quarter of a century.
At the end of the 1970s a ticket to see a bill featuring The Specials, The Selecter and Madness cost less than half the price of an album by any of those bands. (At the time, all three bands were in the Top 10 of the Singles Chart — The Specials paid off their record label advance from royalties on sales of their first single alone.) Now the album usually costs less than half the price of the ticket; and sometimes a lot less.
So it used to be that the live show was a route to the 'premium' experience, which was owning the recording. But ease of distribution has made recordings ubiquitous, and they are now more often a route to the new premium experience of a live show.
In the old days when bands frequently lost money on playing live in order to make it back from recordings I don't remember anyone making a fuss about the dire straits of the music industry. Perhaps the problem is that many of the artists who now lose money on recordings still lose money on playing live, until they have reached an audience prepared to pay an even greater premium for tickets.
Postscript: I left writing about this for a few days to see if there would be any interesting contributions on the reader comments page. Sadly the comments are a bit safe and sanitised — a bit like a Volvo, in fact. Volvo sponsored the video and debate (which is why the presenter talks to the camera through a car window — I didn't make that connection until after the video was over..!). Quite what aura of excitement and engagement Volvo thinks we will associate with their cars as a result of this rather un-Pavlovian association is lost on me. Perhaps that's why I'm not at today's Music Meets Brands convention, or why I should be.
Recent Comments