Good article Sole I often think they have it backwards about who needs who from where I see it as a listener.

I hope the artists tell them to go jump in a lake!

“You’ve got millions of groups thinking they can go straight to consumers on the internet but the question is does anybody care? I could go and busk outside an underground station and people would walk past me because I’m not very striking as a singer! The internet’s similar to that. The Arctic Monkeys however are very talented and their lyrics connect with people.”

So the record label’s job is to take UNtalented artists and sell them to us anyway they can – including eliminating any competition.

“What has changed is the kind of services we offer artists once they’ve signed. In the past we helped them access photographers designers producers engineers studios. We still do that but we also offer a whole array of services that are internet-based which include promotion marketing eCRM services and building websites.”

How do you market on the internet if you don’t allow downloading? Are they still daydreaming people will buy a whole album to hear one song?

“To an extent artists can do this themselves.”

Uh yea and it’s a whole lot cheaper too. Plus they retain the rights to their work. If they drop an independent label they can still walk down to their local pub and play music for rent – unlike others who have to mortage their homes just to buy the rights back to their own music after the label dumps them. A trick I heard recently is that a big label will buy the rights and archive it to eliminate the competition. “Not commercially viable right now” because they want to focus on some other ’star’. That’s also why big labels have been so painfully slow to rerelease their back catalog of out of print stuff.

So how stupid can congress be to give these crooks the authority of law?

“the US is going through one of its less creative times.”

Gosh. I wonder why – especially pretending independent musicians don’t exist.

The RIAA still claims they represent 90% of all music sold in the U.S. Hmmm … that means emusic and itunes are only selling 10% of what’s sold?

I’m not very popular. The last time I counted I had over 50000 downloads and I was getting about 1000 downloads a month.

If just 10% of those people who listened to my music kept it on their hard drive that’s 5000 copies of my songs out there. Not bad for a budget of less than $20 a month.