Death to the Traditional Music Industry?
10.10.07 - 10:02pm
For months years the music industry has felt the pressure that P2P and digital downloads have presented to their happy little business model. I believe the first major turning point would be the original rise of Napster which made it possible for non-computer literate individuals to share their music collections amongst each other. This rapidly lead to a slew of spinoff websites and the subsequent crackdown of P2P networks. The next step by the music industry was the use of DRM to try to secure their intellectual property from the teeming masses who were oh so eager to share their tunes. Windows Media Player based DRM was then quickly defeated with information in the the Doom9.org thread covering the FairUse4WM application that painlessly stripped the DRM from the WMA files. After playing a cat and mouse game for months many companies now advertise DRM-free sales, most notably being iTunes which charges a 30 cent premium per song for higher quality, DRM-free downloads. Now it seems that the next step has been taken by multiple artists in separating themselves from corporate labels by simply dropping the labels themselves.
Radiohead has garnered the vast majority of the attention with their October 10th release of their latest album In Rainbows. In a revolutionary move Radiohead is giving the consumer the option to choose how much to pay for the DRM-free album rather than charge a fixed price. This is a rather ballsy move as it could backfire incredibly as users will naturally share this new album but at the same time all this publicity could easily sell more music and add more members to the already enormous Radiohead following. I, along with a large number of individuals, am really hoping that Radiohead’s experiment proves to be wildly successful and that consumers clamor for more artists to join in this movement.
We won’t really know for a few days if Radiohead’s initial testing of the waters will be successful but judging from the fact that their website for In Rainbows was effectively slammed for the entire day of the launch I’d say they made a point. Following in the tracks of Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Oasis, and most importantly Madonna, have all dropped their traditional labels in favor of advertising agencies and coordinators. Madonna holds the most sway by far and her move could influence many other artists to make the switch and cause this movement to snowball.
While I suspect that a large amount of Indie acts will jump on this snowball, the Hip Hop/Rap genre will be the biggest test to this movement. This particular sect is known for its multiple artist owned labels and powerhouse corporate labels that have discovered multiple underground artists and brought them to worldwide fame. The importance of the label is vastly different in the Hip Hop scene than in the Pop and Rock scenes. You don’t hear rock stars spouting off about their labels and collaborators but lots of Hip Hop artists create albums that have a few tracks that mention their labels and nearly every song lists off the main collaborators. This is a sort of street credit system and by associating ones career with other successful artists they themselves gain recognition and the music labels play a large role in this system. Perhaps the Hip Hop scene will move more towards smaller artist-owned labels rather than multinational corporate labels but I still suspect that this particular scene won’t be that receptive towards completely dropping labels for artist distributed albums.
The year is nearly done so there won’t be much more in the way of groundbreaking album launches but 2008 promises to be a rather exciting year. Hopefully we will see more top tier artists to drop their labels in favor of open, customer influenced business models. This will also let the consumer pay what they think the album is worth. I know I myself absolutely hate when an album with a single track I want retails for $12.99, I don’t need to pay the $4.00 for the CD, case, and cover, just give me the songs at a price that I think is right. Now the next step is getting The Pirate Bay to somehow endorse this movement.. yarrghhh.
Speak Your Mind