by Kavit Haria, Music Business Consultant
I asked myself this crucial question when writing my latest e-book, "What are the important skills and practices required to create a winning and profitable music business apart from good music?"
The answer rests in being a good leader of your ship, having a well-designed and communicated strategy and a good marketing plan that can be executed to promote your music in a structured way.
If you re-read that last paragraph, you'll see how much I emphasize the idea of strategy and structure. It is with this careful planning and well-understood principles that your music business will become profitable.
STRATEGY
A strategy comes to life through its ability to influence hundreds and thousands of decisions, both big and small, made by anyone from the director level to the street team level. It is, at its core, a guide to how you behave and provides an external reflection of your music business.
A good strategy fuels and ignites your fire to more compelling actions and results. It leads you to a destination that is clear in your mind. A bad strategy on the other hand leads you to a less competitive, less differentiated position. It is simply a waste of time and energy as it does not move you forward; instead, it keeps you where you're already at.
The word "winning" is important in this context. An average strategy plan, when executed, gets you mediocre results and may not be a fair reflection of your true talent. A winning strategy plan on the other hand transforms your current situation into monster success through developing the right tools, people, techniques and street teams to share your art with the wider world.
As musicians, we are explorers. As explorers, our job is to explore the depths of our hearts and souls to share the music that feels most at home to us. Our job is to experiment, and experimentation takes time before it is successful.
Your music business needs a framework for achieving results that can be built upon to achieve your specific goals in your specific music genre. When you start to put together a puzzle, you would start by finding the corners and the edge pieces before building and assembling the inner pieces. It is the same with putting together the framework for your music business.
Constructing a music business plan is the first step in gaining clarity and direction in what you'll do, how often you'll release an album, how you'll market your music and how you'll make money. The framework of your music business is what holds it all together - the operations, the marketing, the management and the finances. Let's look at each one separately.
OPERATIONS PLAN
Your business operations is the activities your music business will do in order to share your music. These are usually gigs (what type of gigs?), recording (how often? when?), distribution (whom? how?), sponsorship, and other avenues of generating revenue.
MARKETING PLAN
The activities and tactics you will undertake to promote your music through your music business. These may include PR, social networking on Facebook, Myspace, etc, blogging, podcasting, video blogging, flyer and poster marketing, etc.
MANAGEMENT PLAN
Who will form your core team for your music business and what will they do? Regardless of whether you have the capacity to get these people involved, knowing what you want is core to getting a framework to build your music business.
FINANCE PLAN
Knowing what money goes out and what comes in is crucial to understanding how your music business can be successful. My accountant often tells me that the success of my business is equal to how well I can understand the numbers on my cash flow sheet. He is right and I pass this advice on to you.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Brief History of Dance Music Tops
During the eighties, disco was a very important music-style in Holland. Producers like Stock, Aitken & Waterman made hit after hit over here. But in the late eighties this style began to lose interest, and other styles became popular. These styles weren’t successful everywhere, some, like hiphop, became popular in America, others, like dance, in Europe. Hiphop wasn’t very successful in Holland, over here there were just a few HipHop songs who made it into the charts.
A much more popular style was eurodance, which got large influences from the hiphop. And sometimes there were hiphop versions of dance songs like a hiphop version of "I Cant Stand It". Groups with a lot of influence in the Eurodance were Mars ("Pump Up The Volume"), Technotronic ("This Beat is Technotronic") and C&C Music Factory.
In the year 1989 the Dutch producer Ruud van Reijen created Twenty 4 Seven. This became something totally new: a female singer, doing the "angelic refrain" together with a male rapper. This combination together with a very happy sound, a melody, you can’t get rid off, became very popular in the Netherlands and beyond.
Nance Coolen had been chosen to be the female singer and Captain Hollywood became the rapper. They, together with Hanks & Jacks, who did the male backing vocals, made a song called "I Can’t Stand It", which became very popular in the disco’s & clubs in Holland & beyond. But the song entered the charts very carefully, and didn’t reach that high.
After "I Can’t Stand It" Twenty 4 Seven released "Are You Dreamin’" around Christmas 1989 and so in 1990 they released the album "Street Moves".
At the end of 1991, Captain Hollywood had a little argue with Ruud van Reijen and left the band. After this he created the Captain Hollywood Project, a band like Twenty 4 Seven, Hollywood being a rapper and some female singer for the refrain. Only his project constantly changed people, several female singers joined & left his band.
During this time Captain Hollywood became more popular than Twenty 4 Seven. Hits like "More & More", "Only With You" became popular in whole Europe. Twenty 4 Seven seemed to be fallen asleep.
After Captain Hollywood left, things became really quiet around Twenty 4 Seven. Things were that quiet that Nance decided to take a job at a local supermarket. Can you imagine shopping in a store while Nance is sitting behind the counter??? But producer Ruud van Reijen wasn’t planning to stop. He asked Nance to join the group again, and asked if she knew someone instead of Captain Hollywood. That’s were Stay-C enters the scene, Nance knew Stay-C from some concerts, were they both performed, Nance asked Stay-C. He was positive about it and joined the group. The first song they recorded together was "It Could Have Been You". But this song didn’t become a hit at all.
During these years Eurodance became really popular. Bands like 2 Unlimited (same concept, female singer, male rapper), Captain Hollywood, Double You (Cover of KC & The Sunshineband), Def James Dope reached higher and higher in the charts.
A much more popular style was eurodance, which got large influences from the hiphop. And sometimes there were hiphop versions of dance songs like a hiphop version of "I Cant Stand It". Groups with a lot of influence in the Eurodance were Mars ("Pump Up The Volume"), Technotronic ("This Beat is Technotronic") and C&C Music Factory.
In the year 1989 the Dutch producer Ruud van Reijen created Twenty 4 Seven. This became something totally new: a female singer, doing the "angelic refrain" together with a male rapper. This combination together with a very happy sound, a melody, you can’t get rid off, became very popular in the Netherlands and beyond.
Nance Coolen had been chosen to be the female singer and Captain Hollywood became the rapper. They, together with Hanks & Jacks, who did the male backing vocals, made a song called "I Can’t Stand It", which became very popular in the disco’s & clubs in Holland & beyond. But the song entered the charts very carefully, and didn’t reach that high.
After "I Can’t Stand It" Twenty 4 Seven released "Are You Dreamin’" around Christmas 1989 and so in 1990 they released the album "Street Moves".
At the end of 1991, Captain Hollywood had a little argue with Ruud van Reijen and left the band. After this he created the Captain Hollywood Project, a band like Twenty 4 Seven, Hollywood being a rapper and some female singer for the refrain. Only his project constantly changed people, several female singers joined & left his band.
During this time Captain Hollywood became more popular than Twenty 4 Seven. Hits like "More & More", "Only With You" became popular in whole Europe. Twenty 4 Seven seemed to be fallen asleep.
After Captain Hollywood left, things became really quiet around Twenty 4 Seven. Things were that quiet that Nance decided to take a job at a local supermarket. Can you imagine shopping in a store while Nance is sitting behind the counter??? But producer Ruud van Reijen wasn’t planning to stop. He asked Nance to join the group again, and asked if she knew someone instead of Captain Hollywood. That’s were Stay-C enters the scene, Nance knew Stay-C from some concerts, were they both performed, Nance asked Stay-C. He was positive about it and joined the group. The first song they recorded together was "It Could Have Been You". But this song didn’t become a hit at all.
During these years Eurodance became really popular. Bands like 2 Unlimited (same concept, female singer, male rapper), Captain Hollywood, Double You (Cover of KC & The Sunshineband), Def James Dope reached higher and higher in the charts.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
The Vinyl War Begins
Press Editor Mike Lloyd spotlighted me in his weekly column this past Sunday, and he mentioned I started this blog to track what's going on at independent music stores.
While that's clearly not the only thing I write about, the indie-music world has been a big part of it, and I'm grateful to have a mainstream platform to vent on behalf of a relatively esoteric subculture. Here's one of my quotes from his column I'm rather proud of:
The silver lining for indies in the past few years -- the survivors, anyway -- has been vinyl.
The reasons for the LP's most recent comeback are numerous and well-catalogued, and the benefits for retailers are obvious. The customer base is loyal, and the product can sell at a higher profit margin because not many stores carry it. (Disclosure: I hang out at Vertigo, like, all the time.)
It was with a bit of sadness, then, that I read this article the other day. The big dogs, apparently, have gotten a whiff of vinyl, whose skyrocketing sales couldn't have stayed under the radar for long.
So the indies gear up for yet another fight. But when it comes to the battle over vinyl, my money's on the record-store geeks, not the blue shirts...
While that's clearly not the only thing I write about, the indie-music world has been a big part of it, and I'm grateful to have a mainstream platform to vent on behalf of a relatively esoteric subculture. Here's one of my quotes from his column I'm rather proud of:
- "There are music fans who appreciate the chance to shop at stores where the personnel did more than put on blue shirts."
The silver lining for indies in the past few years -- the survivors, anyway -- has been vinyl.
The reasons for the LP's most recent comeback are numerous and well-catalogued, and the benefits for retailers are obvious. The customer base is loyal, and the product can sell at a higher profit margin because not many stores carry it. (Disclosure: I hang out at Vertigo, like, all the time.)
It was with a bit of sadness, then, that I read this article the other day. The big dogs, apparently, have gotten a whiff of vinyl, whose skyrocketing sales couldn't have stayed under the radar for long.
So the indies gear up for yet another fight. But when it comes to the battle over vinyl, my money's on the record-store geeks, not the blue shirts...
Monday, August 11, 2008
Hammerhead
HammerHead is a simple TR-909-like drum computer program aiming at the dance-scene. You can use it to create perfect Techno loops, Jungle patterns or House beats, but it's also suitable for Hip Hop, Triphop, Rap, Industrial and almost any other music you can think of.
HammerHead features six separate channels, 29 built-in drum sounds, six complete breakbeats and the possibility to import six samples of your own. You can save your patterns to completely noise-free CD-quality wave files to use them with your sampler, tracker or sequencer program.
HammerHead is not Shareware, it's Freeware! No frustrating save-disabling, no grayed-out-menu-features, no paying serious money, no annoying messages and most of all no time limit...
HammerHead is not a Bossa Nova tool. This means that you won't find any Tom-Toms, Shakers, Cowbells, Congas or Bongos in this box. What you will find is cool 909 stuff, bad overdriven bass drums, lots of snare drums, claps, and complete breakbeats to spice up the lot. Buckets-o-fun for making Jungle.
A must-check-it-out for everyone who has always wanted to make his own block-rocking beats!
http://www.threechords.com/hammerhead/download.shtml
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Bands Favoring Web Over Major Labels
Thousands of fans. A jam-packed tour schedule. A CD for sale. And no record label behemoth behind it all?
That’s today’s music business, according to Chris Bowes, the drummer for the Connecticut band Columbia Fields. And such independent success is fast becoming music industry standard for up-and-coming musical acts trying to build a brand, a following and a sound.
Columbia Fields, whose sound Bowes describes as a sort of Dave Matthews Band meets John Mayer, is among a growing number of musical groups making music independently, without a record label.
All on its own, Columbia Fields has amassed more than 14,000 fans on Myspace.com, booked shows in venues across the state and landed airtime on local radio stations WTIC 96.5 FM and KISS 95.7.
Over the past decade, the music industry has changed. It used to be that a band needed a record label to hit it big. Labels had the power to finance, distribute and promote new music.
New Opportunities
But starting with the days of Napster, technology has given emerging acts new opportunities. Now, artists can amass a substantial following through Internet music downloads, social networking sites like Myspace.com and individual artist Web sites. They can produce CDs in the comfort of home and sell them through online record stores like Cdbaby.com.
“I’m one of those guys who, when I was a kid, always saw myself up on stage, playing in front of thousands of people,” said Bowes, who’s been with Columbia Fields for about two years. The band’s first CD, “When the Night Falls,” has sold about 750 copies at shows and through online distribution with Cdbaby.com.
“The industry’s a little different now,” he added. “Bands don’t necessarily need labels to get in front of large audiences.”
“The heart of all the [industry] changes is definitely technology, bottom line,” said Adam Gootkin, co-owner of the recording studio Onyx Soundlab in Manchester. Half of his studio’s business is with major labels, artists and corporations, like Dell; the other half is with independent artists.
Gootkin’s latest project is a new track for R&B artist Brandy.
Marketing Tools
The music industry is going all digital, said Gootkin. Album sales are down, he added, and that means less income for labels, which are set up to sell CDs. Without the need for distribution, record labels become little more than banks, he said. Large labels have yet to adjust their business model to fit the digital times.
Declining revenues from CD sales has had one immediate impact on the industry, namely that labels are becoming more selective in whom they choose to sign, Gootkin said. That means musicians who are looking for the financial backing of a major record label need to come to them prepared, pre-packaged with an image, a brand and a following, he said.
“The closer you are to helping them see the vision, the closer you are to getting a deal,” Gootkin said.
Part of that challenge for young musicians is marketing, said Sheri Ziccardi, public relations manager for The Hartt School, the arts school at the University of Hartford. Ziccardi has spent years helping students in creative fields market themselves. The tools certainly have evolved, she said.
“Thinking about marketing and promoting themselves can be a challenge for creative types, who do not necessarily want to think about the ‘business’ side of the industry they choose to enter,” Ziccardi said in an e-mail. “Fortunately, today’s students have been raised in a techno-heavy culture and are comfortable with utilizing technology for self-expression and communication, so marketing themselves may become easier for them in some ways than it was for their predecessors.”
Staying Independent
If musicians can grasp the ins and outs of the industry, staying independent can be a viable option.
Music industry veteran and songwriting instructor Bill Pere maintains that it only takes a band about 10,000 fans to be able to make music full-time and remain independent of a label. He’s seen it happen, when musicians are industry-savvy.
“A person is now able to get their material to a wide audience,” said the Mystic-based Pere, who has put out 16 CDs but makes most of his royalties from digital downloads. “The trade-off is that in the old school … the record label basically does everything for you,” he added. “And all you have to do is your music.”
But artists attached to a label get a small piece of the pie, if anything at all, he said.
For example, a band signs a contract with a label and gets a $500,000 advance to make an album. Any royalties that come from the sale of the resulting album must first go to pay back that advance, Pere said.
“If you don’t sell enough, you don’t get anything,” Pere said. “It takes a heck of a lot of sales to make any money.”
Keeping Profits
The independent market doesn’t offer the connections or the budget. “But you get to keep 100 percent of everything you make,” said Pere, who has remained independent throughout his musical career. “You are the one issuing contracts to other people to do work the way you want it done.”
Downloadable music has also created the need for a more strategic approach to songwriting, Pere said. Sometimes listeners only get to sample the first 30 seconds of a song before deciding whether or not to purchase it. Long intros won’t get a song downloaded; those first 30 seconds have to rock.
“It’s a totally transformed world, with its good sides and bad sides,” he added. “It’s not a matter or right or wrong. It’s about having your eyes wide open.”
That’s today’s music business, according to Chris Bowes, the drummer for the Connecticut band Columbia Fields. And such independent success is fast becoming music industry standard for up-and-coming musical acts trying to build a brand, a following and a sound.
Columbia Fields, whose sound Bowes describes as a sort of Dave Matthews Band meets John Mayer, is among a growing number of musical groups making music independently, without a record label.
All on its own, Columbia Fields has amassed more than 14,000 fans on Myspace.com, booked shows in venues across the state and landed airtime on local radio stations WTIC 96.5 FM and KISS 95.7.
Over the past decade, the music industry has changed. It used to be that a band needed a record label to hit it big. Labels had the power to finance, distribute and promote new music.
New Opportunities
But starting with the days of Napster, technology has given emerging acts new opportunities. Now, artists can amass a substantial following through Internet music downloads, social networking sites like Myspace.com and individual artist Web sites. They can produce CDs in the comfort of home and sell them through online record stores like Cdbaby.com.
“I’m one of those guys who, when I was a kid, always saw myself up on stage, playing in front of thousands of people,” said Bowes, who’s been with Columbia Fields for about two years. The band’s first CD, “When the Night Falls,” has sold about 750 copies at shows and through online distribution with Cdbaby.com.
“The industry’s a little different now,” he added. “Bands don’t necessarily need labels to get in front of large audiences.”
“The heart of all the [industry] changes is definitely technology, bottom line,” said Adam Gootkin, co-owner of the recording studio Onyx Soundlab in Manchester. Half of his studio’s business is with major labels, artists and corporations, like Dell; the other half is with independent artists.
Gootkin’s latest project is a new track for R&B artist Brandy.
Marketing Tools
The music industry is going all digital, said Gootkin. Album sales are down, he added, and that means less income for labels, which are set up to sell CDs. Without the need for distribution, record labels become little more than banks, he said. Large labels have yet to adjust their business model to fit the digital times.
Declining revenues from CD sales has had one immediate impact on the industry, namely that labels are becoming more selective in whom they choose to sign, Gootkin said. That means musicians who are looking for the financial backing of a major record label need to come to them prepared, pre-packaged with an image, a brand and a following, he said.
“The closer you are to helping them see the vision, the closer you are to getting a deal,” Gootkin said.
Part of that challenge for young musicians is marketing, said Sheri Ziccardi, public relations manager for The Hartt School, the arts school at the University of Hartford. Ziccardi has spent years helping students in creative fields market themselves. The tools certainly have evolved, she said.
“Thinking about marketing and promoting themselves can be a challenge for creative types, who do not necessarily want to think about the ‘business’ side of the industry they choose to enter,” Ziccardi said in an e-mail. “Fortunately, today’s students have been raised in a techno-heavy culture and are comfortable with utilizing technology for self-expression and communication, so marketing themselves may become easier for them in some ways than it was for their predecessors.”
Staying Independent
If musicians can grasp the ins and outs of the industry, staying independent can be a viable option.
Music industry veteran and songwriting instructor Bill Pere maintains that it only takes a band about 10,000 fans to be able to make music full-time and remain independent of a label. He’s seen it happen, when musicians are industry-savvy.
“A person is now able to get their material to a wide audience,” said the Mystic-based Pere, who has put out 16 CDs but makes most of his royalties from digital downloads. “The trade-off is that in the old school … the record label basically does everything for you,” he added. “And all you have to do is your music.”
But artists attached to a label get a small piece of the pie, if anything at all, he said.
For example, a band signs a contract with a label and gets a $500,000 advance to make an album. Any royalties that come from the sale of the resulting album must first go to pay back that advance, Pere said.
“If you don’t sell enough, you don’t get anything,” Pere said. “It takes a heck of a lot of sales to make any money.”
Keeping Profits
The independent market doesn’t offer the connections or the budget. “But you get to keep 100 percent of everything you make,” said Pere, who has remained independent throughout his musical career. “You are the one issuing contracts to other people to do work the way you want it done.”
Downloadable music has also created the need for a more strategic approach to songwriting, Pere said. Sometimes listeners only get to sample the first 30 seconds of a song before deciding whether or not to purchase it. Long intros won’t get a song downloaded; those first 30 seconds have to rock.
“It’s a totally transformed world, with its good sides and bad sides,” he added. “It’s not a matter or right or wrong. It’s about having your eyes wide open.”
Friday, August 8, 2008
The Rise & Rise of Independent Music
The Association of Independent Music (AIM) is holding a special event to celebrate 50 years of successful independent music which will include a gig, a five part television series, a one off auction on ebay and the release of a double CD full of "independent" covers. Artists including The Prodigy, The Charlatans and Maximo Park have all given their backing to the cause and plan to donate songs for the album. Songs to be covered include Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart, PIL's Public Image and Ghost Town by The Specials.
Independents Day marks the anniversary of Chris Blackwell and Graeme Goodall's indie label, Island Records. The Jamaican-born label signed giants U2 before selling to Polygram in 1989, a trend which many independent labels followed. Creation and Factory records disappeared in the 1990's whilst others folded through a calamity of errors from over expansion to cashflow problems.
Independent music is responsible for more than 25% of the UK's music scene and is claimed to have pioneered the music industry for many years. Alison Wenham, Chairman for AIM stated that [independents] had been "at the forefront of every single new musical movement over the years."
For proof of this, just take a look at every popular music scene over the last 50 years: There was the DIY punk scene in the seventies, the indie guitar sounds from New Order in the eighties and the massive dance music boom in the nineties.
Today, we are seeing the independent label make a comeback. Domino Records have given us two recent chart toppers; Scottish band, Franz Ferdinand and northerners, Arctic Monkeys. The internet has provided a new platform with which to promote this music. Sites such as Myspace, Youtube and Facebook all promote bands young and old, signed and unsigned for general consumption. These social networking sites have allowed users to access new music much easier than ever before with some 40% of users embedding music within their pages.
Russell Hart, chief executive of Entertainment Media Research added "Social networks are fundamentally changing the way we discover music... the dynamics of democratisation, word of mouth recommendation and instant purchase challenge the established order and offer huge opportunities to forward thinking business."
Local label, Signature Tune is making the most of these sites and one of their bands, Lakes is reaping the benefits of using an independent label. Scott Byatt, the band's drummer said "As a band on an independent label, advances in communication and technology mean we can communicate with bands and promoters the world over helping us network and get shows with ease... Our CDs can be bought in many high street stores and our tracks can be downloaded from iTunes, once again without the help of a major."
Radiohead were perhaps the first big band to see the change in direction and act upon it. After the end of their contract with music giants EMI, the band went solo with the release of their latest album, In Rainbows. The album was released as a digital download in October 2007, allowing customers to pay as much, or as little as they liked for it. The group took ownership of their own songs and released ten tracks online more than one month before the tangible album was released in the shops.
Front man for the band, Thom Yorke noted the growing number of pirate copies of their music being appearing online and in an interview with Wired he said, "every record for the last four - including my solo record - has been leaked. So the idea was like, we'll leak it then." Yorke's attempt to beat the pirates seem to have worked. On average, the electronic download sold for 4 GBP. Not bad considering you could download it for free if you were feeling too tight to pay.
The return to indie worked wonders for Radiohead. Although the downloads from the website, inrabows were not counted in the album charts, the band did manage to create enough hype and speculation around the release of their album that when the CD actually hit the shops, it reached number one in the UK album chart, the United World Chart and the US Billboard 200.
Other groups may do well to take note of this action when considering future releases. Of the music industry, and in particular their ex record label, Yorke added "What we would like is the old EMI back again, the nice genteel arms manufacturers who treated music [as] a nice side project who weren't too bothered about the shareholders. Ah well, not much chance of that."
Au contraire, EMI boss, Guy Hands is keen to seize upon the opportunities presented by smaller, independent labels. These labels have always maintained a stronger working relationship with their artists and are much more keen to try their hands at new promotional techniques. With the renaissance of DIY music and bands creating music for music's sake, independent labels cannot be ignored. EMI declared that they are planning on working like a larger version of the indie label, with many smaller labels working under their umbrella.
So they may be more willing to try new techniques, but the problem of shareholders still remains. Wenham continues, "If you have shareholders to please, inevitably it becomes about making music from the music." Indie music is very much about the music and as long as the shareholders give the smaller labels a wide berth, we should continue to see more impressive acts pushing the scene forward.
Independents Day marks the anniversary of Chris Blackwell and Graeme Goodall's indie label, Island Records. The Jamaican-born label signed giants U2 before selling to Polygram in 1989, a trend which many independent labels followed. Creation and Factory records disappeared in the 1990's whilst others folded through a calamity of errors from over expansion to cashflow problems.
Independent music is responsible for more than 25% of the UK's music scene and is claimed to have pioneered the music industry for many years. Alison Wenham, Chairman for AIM stated that [independents] had been "at the forefront of every single new musical movement over the years."
For proof of this, just take a look at every popular music scene over the last 50 years: There was the DIY punk scene in the seventies, the indie guitar sounds from New Order in the eighties and the massive dance music boom in the nineties.
Today, we are seeing the independent label make a comeback. Domino Records have given us two recent chart toppers; Scottish band, Franz Ferdinand and northerners, Arctic Monkeys. The internet has provided a new platform with which to promote this music. Sites such as Myspace, Youtube and Facebook all promote bands young and old, signed and unsigned for general consumption. These social networking sites have allowed users to access new music much easier than ever before with some 40% of users embedding music within their pages.
Russell Hart, chief executive of Entertainment Media Research added "Social networks are fundamentally changing the way we discover music... the dynamics of democratisation, word of mouth recommendation and instant purchase challenge the established order and offer huge opportunities to forward thinking business."
Local label, Signature Tune is making the most of these sites and one of their bands, Lakes is reaping the benefits of using an independent label. Scott Byatt, the band's drummer said "As a band on an independent label, advances in communication and technology mean we can communicate with bands and promoters the world over helping us network and get shows with ease... Our CDs can be bought in many high street stores and our tracks can be downloaded from iTunes, once again without the help of a major."
Radiohead were perhaps the first big band to see the change in direction and act upon it. After the end of their contract with music giants EMI, the band went solo with the release of their latest album, In Rainbows. The album was released as a digital download in October 2007, allowing customers to pay as much, or as little as they liked for it. The group took ownership of their own songs and released ten tracks online more than one month before the tangible album was released in the shops.
Front man for the band, Thom Yorke noted the growing number of pirate copies of their music being appearing online and in an interview with Wired he said, "every record for the last four - including my solo record - has been leaked. So the idea was like, we'll leak it then." Yorke's attempt to beat the pirates seem to have worked. On average, the electronic download sold for 4 GBP. Not bad considering you could download it for free if you were feeling too tight to pay.
The return to indie worked wonders for Radiohead. Although the downloads from the website, inrabows were not counted in the album charts, the band did manage to create enough hype and speculation around the release of their album that when the CD actually hit the shops, it reached number one in the UK album chart, the United World Chart and the US Billboard 200.
Other groups may do well to take note of this action when considering future releases. Of the music industry, and in particular their ex record label, Yorke added "What we would like is the old EMI back again, the nice genteel arms manufacturers who treated music [as] a nice side project who weren't too bothered about the shareholders. Ah well, not much chance of that."
Au contraire, EMI boss, Guy Hands is keen to seize upon the opportunities presented by smaller, independent labels. These labels have always maintained a stronger working relationship with their artists and are much more keen to try their hands at new promotional techniques. With the renaissance of DIY music and bands creating music for music's sake, independent labels cannot be ignored. EMI declared that they are planning on working like a larger version of the indie label, with many smaller labels working under their umbrella.
So they may be more willing to try new techniques, but the problem of shareholders still remains. Wenham continues, "If you have shareholders to please, inevitably it becomes about making music from the music." Indie music is very much about the music and as long as the shareholders give the smaller labels a wide berth, we should continue to see more impressive acts pushing the scene forward.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
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