MADE

I check the Google Analytics stats for this site often. One of the things I’ve noticed is that the top keyword phrase people use to come in through the search engines is “free a&r contacts.” The next five most popular keyword phrases are some variation of a&r contacts.

What this tells me is that there are still a lot of people out there looking for a record deal with a label. At the same time, most people have a tremendous awareness of all the changes that are happening in the music business. How can you not?

I think that most music artists understand that their chances of getting a record deal are next to nil. They also understand what the Internet has to do with that. But they inhabit a netherworld fueled by both optimism and fear. They’re optimistic about the new democracy that the Web has unleashed. But at the same time, they’re fearful because there are no clear paths to music success in the digital age. A major reason for this is that the whole thing feels like a giant experiment. There are no clear cut paths to success in the digital music age because it’s so new. There seem to be so few examples to emulate. Or more likely, there are plenty of examples, but they just aren’t visible because the music landscape is so vast and fragmented now.

Hoping to get a record deal is brutally unproductive. The simple reason is that that’s just not where the world is at today. You can tell that’s the case by looking at what makes news in the music business these days. The big news makers are the online music portals. Many of them are being acquired by larger companies or are acquiring other startups themselves. MySpace has sort of reinvented itself as a quasi-record label/taste maker. And it bought up Imeem recently. The big news several weeks ago was Apple’s acquisition of the music streaming site Lala.

That’s really one to watch closely because not only does Apple realize that the future of music is in the cloud computing-based world, but that if it owns the people who are at the cutting of all of this new web-based technology, it can dominate music universally. That’s what the Lala acquisition was all about.

Apple is already probably the most powerful music company in the world. And it’ll become more powerful. That means that the music world is going to move towards a world based on micropayments and music byproducts. It’s an irreversible situation.

Apple has in a sense become the world’s largest record label. Most of us haven’t fully grasped this yet because we still don’t fully understand all the implications of digital music. The biggest difference between an Apple record label and old style record labels is that, to almost everybody, Apple will exist as little more than a cloud; with no edges, no people to groom careers, nobody to market for you and no instruction manuals. Nobody is going to tell you what to do, how to do it and when to do it.

That’s already the greatest challenge for this new generation of music artists. This type of system is democratic, but brutally unfair to the fearful. Music artists who inhabit an ambivalent netherworld where they have one foot in the new world and one in the old will get destroyed like chickens in a crocodile pit.

A career is a serious thing. Anybody who’s serious about success has to be prepared to make a wholesale investment(in both time and money) in what works now.

By: Twitter Buttons