The world of pop culture was abuzz last week with Justin Timberlake’s overly candid comments about his drug use. We hope he was stone cold sober when he decided to resurrect the Stax label in Memphis, because with the dizzying changes in the music industry, it will require all of his faculties for success.
As New Yorker wrote a few weeks ago: “Radiohead no longer has a contract with EMI and says that it has no plans to sign with a label…Labels spend a lot of time and money worrying about illegal downloading and file-sharing. What they should be worried about is more bands like Radiohead, which could make major labels a relic of the twentieth century.”
It’s these kind of sentiments, which are the conventional wisdom these days, that are on the minds of every one in the music business, but particularly should be on the mind of someone like Timberlake who is expected to announce in September that he’s going to relaunch the mythic Stax label.
Labels were the lords of the pre-digital music world, perching atop a food chain with the artists and customers dependent on them in a business model not too different than the company store and the sharecroppers who never seemed to get out of debt.
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