Well, the music didn’t die, but the music industry, as we currently know it, might just be giving up the ghost.
Strike One – Radiohead released their most recent album “In Rainbows” via a band controlled download and an interesting marketing maneuver by allowing everyone to name their own price (even $0.00).
Strike Two – Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails announced on the band blog that they are free agents:
Hello everyone. I’ve waited a LONG time to be able to make the
following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally
free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have
been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the
business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very
different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate. Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008.
Strike Three – Madonna, along with Jamiroquai and Oasis, decide that they too will join the music revolution and do things differently.
With the industry’s war on illegal downloading or sharing of copyrighted music they have been looking to ensure their revenue or sue trying, but what about the bands. Their are still creative individuals out there and they are looking to earn a living on their art. I still find it extremely difficult to swallow the fact that you can sell millions of albums and tour for years and still be left with little to nothing to show for it. While the recording industry continues to grow.
I love the idea that the bands and musicians are not left to be slaves to the industry! This is a great thing, but I can see that it might make it difficult for new artists to enter or remain in the mainstream.
Even with the new dawn of online downloads managed and controlled by the musicians, there still appears to be troubles that the record industry was fighting, namely illegal downloads.
However, free doesn’t seem cheap enough. Despite the potentially free download, over 240,000 users got the album from peer to peer BitTorrent networks on the first day of release, according to Forbes. Since then, the album was downloaded about 100,000 more times each day, totaling more than 500,000. By comparison, Radiohead pushed 1.2 million sales of the album through their site, including pre-orders.
From Nine Inch Nails’ song Capital G (greed):
Well I used to stand for something
But forgot what that could be
There’s a lot of me inside you
Maybe you’re afraid to see
So, what does this have to do with search engine optimization? Nothing directly, however, stepping outside the box and leveraging what control you have can really impact your rankings with users and engines.
Does this mean the end of the record industry or just the inevitable evolution as the fans take control with the musicians help?
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
As an artist myself, I hope this does mean that the artist will inevitably have the control themselves. It’s a lot to put on the artist’s plate, but at least the artist will take more of the revenue that is deservedly theirs. I mean, why should the record industry make most of the money off an artist, just because they have more power in distribution/advertising? I hope this new wave of the future allows amazing artists like Trent Reznor, Madonna and Jamiroquai to profit from being w/o a label.
Thankyou article…
It’s a lot to put on the artist’s plate, but at least the artist will take more of the revenue that is deservedly theirs. I mean, why should the record industry make most of the money off an artist, just because they have more power in distribution/advertising