A friend forwarded me this excellent article in the LA Weekly about the decline of the A&R Rep. It’s a somewhat nostalgic piece for me because I tried my hand at the music business several years ago with some friends. In the process, we got to meet quite a few A&R people.
They were all [...]
Internal Politics Killed The Record Labels
25. February 2010
Why The CD Is Going Away Forever
A reader commented on an article last week in which he asked how I’m so sure that CDs won’t be the predominant medium for selling music 10 or 25 years from now…or that they won’t make a comeback the way vinyl supposedly has.
Vinyl hasn’t made a comeback. I know it hasn’t because record labels [...]
18. February 2010
Music’s Lost Decade
The graph below is really bad news for the record industry. It’s even more striking when you think about those billions of lost dollars as actual numbers of physical CDs that aren’t being bought and will never be replaced. The last decade was music’s lost decade. According to Forrester, just 44% of U.S Internet users [...]
15. February 2010
Don’t Ignore Economics…The Labels Did
I received an email from a reader last week. He said:
“…I am actually a producer that spent 25 years financing and producing independent music. Now I have to sit back while my property is stolen by theives while moral relativists like you argue that it is right. What do you do to put bread [...]
8. February 2010
The Post-Napster Music Era: Easier Or Harder?
I just finished reading Steve Knopper’s Appetite for Self Destruction: The spectacular crash of the record industry in the digital age. It’s a riveting account of how the record industry destroyed itself by avoiding new technology.
One of the author’s conclusions is that the record industry is in very bad shape and will get worse [...]
4. February 2010
It Pays To Be Nice (and insanely creative) In The New Economy
Business is not a war
People aren’t targets
Advantage isn’t competitive
Power isn’t coercion
Markets aren’t for domination
Profit isn’t value
Exploitation isn’t productive
These principles are outlined in a presentation by economist Umair Haque of the Havas Media Lab. You can watch it here. I strongly urge you to set aside some time to listen to the whole thing because it’s [...]
30. January 2010
Don’t Waste Time Being Mad At People Who Steal Your Music
There were several comments on an article I wrote last week about why file sharing will lead to a better music industry that expressed dismay with the conclusion of the piece.
One guy mentioned that he discovered that some of his tracks were being ripped from legitimate sites and offered up on scam sites; some were [...]
3. March 2010
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