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Originally Posted by gideongallery
so if you sign with a record company you should be their bitch forever. If the cost of leveraging their promotion is that you have to give up 90% for the term of the contract. IF you happen to have enough talent to become one of those successes you should have the right to fully monetize your fame.
sick puppy could not get on the radio but they yuan mann video
got over 40 million views
all before they ever got a record deal
a similar promotion happened with
maria digby
https://youtube.com/user/MarieDigby
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/
doesn't have a record deal but he wrote and performed the theme song from portal (I'm alive) has some of his song appear in GH.
the point is there are more and more case studies where unknown artist have become famous without a record labels support by leveraging the technology. All of which will be killed record companies are spending the monopoly profits to kill competing technologies.
radio head is testifying to establish that the RIAA is not really representing the wishes of the content creators, and those people sharing are doing so with authority. |
Yes, there are always exceptions to the rule. There will always be exceptions to the rule. My point is this: Show me one act that has done a worldwide stadium tour and sold millions of concert tickets based simply on giving away their music online and promoting themselves online? Yes, you can make money promoting yourself online and yes you can get views and yes you can find success, but at this moment it has a sort of ceiling to it. Maybe that will change.
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again should you be a slave forever because you need their infrastructure to get started.
how much does the "investment" have to pay off before the record companies are satisfied
they are turning a profit. They take 90% of the successful bands so they can fail multiple times. Should they start embracing technology that does the job more efficiently so they cost of failure is less. That would be good business. However they don't want to do that because they would lose their strangle hold on the artists.
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No you should be allowed to walk away whenever you want. Again, my point is not that bands shouldn't be allowed to promote themselves. My point is that people seem to think that the internet is everything when it comes to music and that you can make a ton of money and become a rock star just off the internet. I understand there are some acts that have made it without record label support, but if you choose to go the major label route then after the major label helps make you famous and you use that fame to then bite the hand that fed you, don't be shocked if the major label is not happy.
Should there be a limit on how much a label can get from its investment? To me it is all about the contract. If you sign a 5 record deal at the end of that deal you should be allowed to walk away if you want. And if that means you are now going to give away your albums for free online, so be it. Would it be better for the labels to just embrace the technology instead of fighting it? Maybe. My defense of them is simple. They feel as if they should be allowed to defend their business model. If that means that they eventually put themselves out of business because of it, so be it. I too think they should be allowed to defend it and if that means trying to stop developing technologies that they feel are robbing their business than so be it. If, in the end, it is decided by the legal system that those technologies are not causing harm to the record labels then so be it.
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first of all your analogy is total bullshit because the artist are making the music, they are producing the content. The record companies are not teaching those people to sing, building up the skills. They have those skills already. The investment is just in the customer aquisition. But here is the kicker the customer don't walk out the door with the artist. The catalog of their old work is still owned by the record company. When those old songs sell the record company still get it 90%. so the artist is actually competing against themselves. All their new stuff competes against their old stuff.
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Yes, they have the skill. For sure. Without that they would have nothing to offer. You can even argue that acts like Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson have a talent. No they can't sing very well and they don't write their own music, but they look good, are good performers and know how to put on a show and that ability isn't really given to them. You either have that charisma or not. that said, Britney Spears without a multi million dollar ad campaign, a hot video on MTV and a huge push by the label is just another good looking girl singing for tips at a local bar or working as a back-up dance for someone else.
As for the old label retaining the catalog that is true in most cases. A few artists own their masters, but most do not, but sales of old albums are not nearly what sales of new albums are. If a popular band gets new fans some of these fans might go back and buy the older records, but realistically in today's world they will just download them from a torrent site. That back catalog is only really a profitable machine if they have some access to the publishing so they can license it to things like movies and TV shows and commercials and video games etc. Again, there are acts that sell a lot of old records, but many do not.
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things will never change if the record companies are allowed to sue competing technologies into oblivion. IF they are allowed to pretend that the distribution (sharing) is not authorized by the artist when it really is.
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I said myself that most artists don't care if their stuff is traded/stolen/downloaded or whatever. This is why most of them don't speak out about it. Some of them don't like it, but most don't care. As long as their records get out into the public they are happy because they know most of their money will come from touring, radio play and publishing.
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eventful is a community based site, it would be stupid to close the doors to famous artist who wanted to use them. If they do a better job than the record companies marketing machine at a cheaper rate, they should have a right to compete for the artist business. A record company which says the only way we will sign you is if you are forced to use our media services exclusively even though they are charged to you a significantly higher price than our competitors is by it's very nature anti-competitive behaviour.
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My point with the eventual comment was that you made them out to be some type of portal where people can go and find these indy/internet only acts and as a way of promoting them. I was pointing out that while they may do that, they also bank heavily on the name recognition of very famous acts so they too are using the work of the big labels who helped make these famous acts to get visitors to the site.