The Record Industry Revisited

Have album’s become irrelevant? This is an interesting extension on that last post. If you ask me, I don’t think albums are irrelevant, they just are no longer as static as they used to be. Albums were created because there was no format that could reasonably deliver individual songs and they gave you something more tangible to promote around.

Now, with the interweb and itunes,there are no format constraints and promotion is easy as pie.

That leads to some questions:

What value can Record labels add by organizing albums differently?

Look at the cool information Pandora is gathering for the Music Genome Project and how iTunes lets you browse playlists. Albums should be looked at as a way to add value through organizing information rather than a packaged product.

What if you could buy/subscribe to an “Album” and you would receive update/new songs for free?

This could be cool- almost a new music BitTorrent. People access to new music before it reached mainstream.

What if artists were signed on a song to song basis?

It would be up to them to promote themselves and based on the number of song downloads or feedback, the Record company would agree to sign them for a new song (they could also gather feedback on what their next tracks could be).

The head scratcher is what to do with the equity in already recorded music. Oh well, something for another day.

The Record Industry

I’ve been thinking the recording industry. Everyone seems to agree that they are doomed. I read somewhere they might finally give up suing teenagers as a revenue stream.

Then I thought of American Idol and both the popularity and success they have achieved. They have the perfect model that record labels should follow.  Musicians can for the most part, handle most of the recording and promotion duties once handled by major labels and even offer it for free BigHeadTodd or make their own profit NIN. The value Idol brings (and labels should provide) is that they give people the ability to shape and build what they want to hear.

Wouldn’t it be cool if labels put all demo tapes up on the web, and allowed people to vote on which artists to sign? I wonder what other ways labels could facilitate this interaction.

In other news, as an avid music downloader, I have recently snagged all 3.5 gigs of SXSW music for free. I haven’t been able to spend quality time with it yet, but I have been amazed by some of the jewels I found.