SXSW Conference on Music Sharing
Wired is running a piece from the seminal South by Southwest Music Conference that just concluded in Austin. I was there a few times in the early years as it used to be a place to break new bands or get good ink and buzz for upcoming tours or records.
Among the quotables…
“It’s stopping new artists from coming forward, and it’s killing mid-level artists across the board,” charged Jay Rosenthal, a music attorney at Washington, D.C.-based Berliner, Corcoran & Rowe and a board member of the Recording Artists Coalition. “There has never been an issue that has been so galvanizing.”
Jay, do you think the decline in sales could be more due to not breaking any new acts or the inability for the labels to develop new artists rather than the same old packaged crap? I’m not for people stealing or sharing music without the artists consent, but let’s face it, the labels aren’t concerned with the well being of the artist, rather for the bottom line of whatever multinational happens to own the label. It’s a fact that most records, particularly records from young and emerging artists lose money.
A March 2004 study by Felix Oberholzer-Gee, associate professor at Harvard Business School and Koleman Strumpf of the University of North Carolina says the opposite (and what many artists have found) that file sharing actually enchances sales for the artist.
The debate is far from over but this is the time when labels need to be proactive about promoting and selling music online. It’s time for you Armani clad record execs to haul your asses out of your BMWs, roll your sleeves up and get back to work. Go after the real prirates in Asia and the former Eastern Block that are cranking out tens of thousands of illegal CDs. Work on developing a business model that will work for selling music on the Internet and not filing lawsuits against the very people that would buy the work. Steve Jobs was able to figure it out. And he wasn’t even in the music industry.