Quote:
Originally Posted by TheDoc
For every story of an artist failing with CD's you have 10 more that made it big, with piracy, torrents, youtube, and the 10,000's of music driven websites online.
The music Industry is hurting in CD sales, but digital sales are up big time. Even without piracy, CD's would be going away.. they suck, they break, they breakdown with age. MP3's, don't.
You can find, untold numbers of people that could never sell one song before, now sell songs every day of the week.
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Here is the potential problem with this - I am not supporting the fact that record labels screw over just about every artist with their contracts - it is just a thought.
For every band that makes it big and sells a lot of records and gets famous, there are dozens that go nowhere.Yet the record label still took a chance on them and signed and supported them. Their records didn't sell and the eventually the artist was dropped or they quit or whatever. This happens all the time. So the big sellers end up supporting the unknowns and new bands. It is no different with movies. The big movies make the money and this allows the studios to take a chance and make other smaller movies, many of which end up making very little or no money.
So when the record labels stop making money they stop signing and developing bands/artists/ What you start go get is what we are seeing today which is where they sign acts to singles development deals. Instead of signing a band to a record deal and guiding them as they recorded a record and hit the road to support it and build up a fan base over a number of years they have an artist record a couple of singles, put them on itunes and other outlets and they see what happens. If the singles hit then they record an album and try to sell that, if not they drop/ignore the artist and move on.
So while established artists may make more money with piracy because it helps them grow their fan base (BTW they got famous using the evil system that screwed them over, but had the resources to highly publicize them and get them to start status) there are many acts out there that end up not getting a fair shake because they couldn't produce a hit single right out of the gate.
We are starting to see the watering down of the entertainment business. Everyone complains about shitty music and shitty movies, but these are now what gets made because the companies that put this stuff out there have a smaller margin for error or risk so they go with what they think can make money now, and they don't worry about developing talent. It is kind of like if you sell your house you paint the walls white or light brown or some kind of bland color that will appeal to as many people as possible. It doesn't have an character, but it appeals to the large group of the masses.
If you thought record labels screwed artists over before, wait until we get to the point where they just record an album and give it away for free and the label decides to take a piece of the band's merchandising and touring revenue. The reason you don't see many acts complain right now about piracy is because they make a lot of money touring and selling merchandise. When they lose a good deal of that to the record labels, you might start hearing more complaining.
Just a thought.