10/09/2007
The Music Industry: On the Cusp of Monumental Change?
With Radiohead announcing last week that they would be releasing their new album, In Rainbows, and allowing people to pay however much they wanted for it, the inevitable question arose: do bands with an established audience, or even ones without, for that matter, need to utilize record labels?
These days bands can utilize a number of different online outlets, in order to distribute their music to the masses. They can build a store on their own website, embed a Snocap Store on their MySpace page or strike a deal with iTunes.
Sure, a record label can be extremely beneficial for promotional aspects and getting CD's into stores, but it's becoming increasingly evident that consumers are turning away from physical CDs. Therefore, artists and labels are utilizing the internet as a means to sell their music. However, this business model is proving to be non-lucritive, because free online music sharing is more rapid than ever and is showing little sign of slowing down or being stopped.
So now the major artists are aligning with the DIY artists and cutting out the middle man. Yes that's right, they are ditching their labels, and some are going one step further. As the Telegraph recently pointed out, major artists are reacting to Radiohead's distribution experiment, by following suit:
Some of the music industry’s biggest names are considering offering their music free online following the success of the experiment by the band Radiohead to let fans download their new album without charge.
The band’s website topped the chart of music websites with an 11-fold increase in internet hits after the announcement, according to internet monitoring agency HitWise.
Now Jamiroquai and Oasis, two major names that are not contracted to a record labels, are rumoured to be considering following Radiohead by offering work for free, according to industry sources.
Other bands like Nine Inch Nails are emancipating themselves as well and plan to bank solely off of live shows and release new music without a record label..in some cases for free.
So what's to come of all this? Will it be the end of records labels as we once knew them? Will we no longer have to pay for music? It seems unlikely, but one thing is for sure the current music industry business model is dead and about to be buried.
Posted by Michael on 10/09/2007 11:22 PM in General
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