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In the latest installment of Goodman vs. Torn... ;) "Stephen P. Goodman" wrote: > > that seems a bit naive, stephen --- i am far from being 'embedded in >the > > music industry', though i do 'know people who know people'. > > *-) > > Okay, I knee-jerked. Sorry. End point is you've broken through the >primary > barriers to working as you do. If one of them is being broadcast - and I > don't think radio is anything other than a promotional medium to many > folks - think of those who won't ever get heard if this draconian stuff >gets > finalized. A few thoughts: You actually hit the nail on the head, Stephen, when you say that radio isn't much other than a promotional medium. It's an advertisement. But if you don't have anything to advertise in the first place, then how are you going to profit? If you don't have gigs that you're playing, or tangible merchandise (i.e. records/CDs/etc) that you're selling, then you're effectively creating an advertisement for a product that doesn't exist. If we're talking about the issue of music as a significant source of livelihood, then that's at least as important of an issue as are broadcast royality rates and the like. You keep making the point that Torn has "gotten an in" or "broken through," but the point I'm trying to make is that those opportunities were the result of consistently plugging away for many, many years, just as they have been for any working musician I've ever heard of. Do you think the Zobo Fun Band or the gig with Don Cherry would have happened if David had just been sitting around waiting for someone to discover his music on an Internet radio stream? Do you know what I mean? It's a similar principle to what Kim is talking about in his posts: getting attention, exposure, listeners, and all the rest is great. But traffic in and of itself doesn't mean you're making money. Name recognition in and of itself doesn't bring you money. Having people dig what you do in and of itself doesn't bring in money. To me, it's a bit of a leftover idealism from the late '90s, and the initial shock of an independent artist being able to get their music heard more or less instantly by anyone in the world. Well, that is indeed a very cool and wonderful thing. But as so many people have had to learn, that does not automatically equate to any significant source of livelihood. For that part, I think it still boils down to what Mike Watt so eloquently referred to as being "The man in the van with the bass in his hand!" :) > (I'm somewhat puzzled by the way at the recent Sony ads over here in the >UK, > that show the MD recorder/player, and how easy it is to rip your favorite > tunes onto it. Weirdly contradictory, don't you think?) Much like blank audio cassettes used to be sold in major chain record stores, with notices on their packaging that they were "Perfect for dubbing CDs" due to their length and formulation! > As business in general has gone towards an outsourced, >consultant-oriented > method of working, I would suspect that the same is true of the music > companies. They'd rather not have long term contracts with anyone unless > they "know" they're Guaranteed Platinum Artists, I'd think. Would it be > unseemly to think then that the music biz - almost traditionally - would > seek to keep costs down and commitments to a minimum, by using people on > short-term or consulting contracts? It's actually in the interest of a record label to have artists on as long-term of a contract as the artist is willing to sign, because it means that the artists are essentially obligated to work with the labels themselves. The rationale here is that if a record label has a one-record deal with an artist, then the artist can go and sign with any other label after just one album. But if a label spends a lot of time and money promoting the artist to a certain level of visibility and sales, then why would they want the artist they've worked to "break" to be able to go off and sign with a new label, which will then be able to capitalize on all the hard work and money that the first label spent for the sake of turning the artist into a viable act in the first place, you know? It's much more in the interest of a label to sign an artist to a long-term contract for this reason - especially since almost any such deal will leave "options" on the side of the label, which is to say that the label isn't necessarily obligated to make all of those records if they don't want to... but the artist IS obligated to make the records if the label picks up that option. Yes, it's not the nicest position for a lot of artists to be in. By the same token, though, if you're a label, and you're going to spend the hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars it generaly takes to "break" an artist in the marketplace, aren't you going to want to see a return on your investment? And the whole notion of a "guaranteed Platinum artist" is pretty sketchy these days. Look at Mariah Carey, who was dropped by Virgin Records after only one album, which didn't measure up to the sales they were expecting. The initial signing fee, plus the "termination" fee, cost Virgin millions and millions of dollars. Anyway... --Andre LaFosse http://www.altruistmusic.com