Where the Music Business Is Now

By Jim Moore, Phoenix Studios - www.muzik-zone.com

The music industry has gone from selling music to selling sex - plain and simple. From teenage Lolitas like Taylor Swift (right), Brittany Spears and even Miley Cyrus to "boy toys" like Justin Timberlake, the "product" is sex.

At the same time, having to face defeat in the digital download wars of the past few decades, the industry is now taking the approach "if you can't lick 'em, join 'em ... and take control of 'em."

Several major artists have recently been stunned to discover they no longer even control the rights to their own names - the labels do.

By all standards, 18-year-old country star Taylor Swift has made it in the music industry. She's topped the country, pop and digital charts. Her debut album has sold more than 3 million copies. And she has won several major music awards.But to the nearly 20,000 mostly unseen people working in Nashville's music industry, Swift represents far more than the latest young artist to hit it big on the country music scene. She illustrates the industry's new benchmarks of success in an era dominated by digital music, an explosion of new media platforms and a decline in album sales, in a business that has seen a third of its $14.6 billion retail market evaporate since 2000. - The Tennessean, "The Changing Face of the Music Industry" by Ryan Underwood, June 29, 2008

This poses an immense challenge to well-established, but less-glamorous "stars", to songwriters and to new artists, who perhaps may not want to sell their names, their music, their lives and their souls to the corporate conglomerates.

"The artist grows the lemons, makes the lemonade, stands out in the hot sun, and the real estate they sold off of gets the profits." - Beth Nielsen Chapman

"Everybody's feeling the pressure... everyone's playing it safe... I think this is the time when you gotta gap open and ride wild." - Jewel

Companies which ten years ago wouldn't have had the chance of a snowball in hell are now cranking out products that didn't even exist ten years ago, and which the major labels were slow to embrace - such as digital music.

Artists who were once slaves to a label contract are now breaking their chains to take a bigger piece of the pie, benefiting themselves and the music consumer. David Bowie was one of the first to embrace the Internet business model (while Stephen King in the literary world was one of the first major Internet marketing pioneers).

Artists can now do an end run around the gatekeepers and watchdogs with iTunes, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and a host of marketing outlets that didn't exist a few years ago. Were it not for these avenues, we might never have heard of Gnarls Barkley or Feist.

As Jay Frank, who oversees music strategy for Country Music Television, put it, "The groups that have the potential to lose have already lost. Now, everybody just wants to win and is ready to try new things." ...

What does this new era mean to a person like Liz Rose, the co-writer on Swift's "Tim McGraw," when a high percentage of sales comes through digital singles at the expense of pricey full albums? What does it mean to someone like Scott Borchetta, who signed Swift to Big Machine Records, the label he started in partnership with Toby Keith in 2005 after serving as an executive at the now-shuttered DreamWorks Nashville?

The short answer is that it means fewer people in the industry are probably making as much money as they would have in the go-go 1990s, when a closed network of record labels, radio stations and retailers could have propelled Swift's album to sell as much as 10 million copies. By the same token, more music fans, spanning genres and geography, probably know who Taylor Swift is and what her music sounds like. - The Tennessean, "Music Row Faces New Realities" by Ryan Underwood, June 29, 2008

That "closed network" of the industry has quietly financed a huge payola empire that guaranteed their expensive investments got airplay at the expense of others just as good or better who weren't part of the "good ol' boy" network in Nashville, LA, Austin and elsewhere. Even when the payola scandal was exposed decades ago, it just burrowed underground and resurfaced with a little more sophistication, just like political corruption.

The consumer was brainwashed and spoon-fed "formula" music that all sounded and even looked alike - skinny blondes young enough to make every child pervert salivate, young butt-twisting boy toys who sent elderly women into spasms, with music that was hard to tell who the performer was.

The unique voices of the Johnny Cashes, Brook Bentons, Ray Charleses and Bob Dylans died off or were ignored for the homogenized crap the industry calls music. But, hey, it worked for a long time and record (CD) sales grew and grew and people were programmed into believing that this was music. It's all there was.

But the Internet connected the world in a way that bypassed the labels, and listeners began to stumble across new and refreshing music that didn't "fit the mold." The mold was broken and all the labels' horses and all the labels' men couldn't put the mold back together again.

Music genres exploded in number and fans, no longer forced to buy a whole crappy album for one or two decent songs, were attracted to the genres and artists that appealed to them, not what they were told by the labels was "great!"

This has had a dramatic effect on songwriters (who can now write from the heart, not the formula), from artists, performers and smaller publishers who can follow their (and their listeners') musical tastes without being kicked off the stage by the labels.

This sea change also opens up a world of potential for you!