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October 28th, 2007

The CMJ Panel, a Suburban Home experiment, and an interesting blog post

I have been meaning to write a little something about the panel I moderated at CMJ and over the time that has passed, I decided to try something new with Suburban Home, and just this morning, I was sent a link of a blog post explaining their thoughts on Oink’s recent shut down and their thoughts about music piracy. All of these things have inspired me to write a post about the changing face of music sales.

The panel at CMJ went really well and although 2 people canceled at the last minute, the remaining panelists and I had a good exchange of thoughts. The theme of the panel was a conversation of artists releasing their own records forgoing the traditional record label model. On our panel was Tom Gates (manager of the Format, Brand New, and Anathallo), Nick Young (in the band A.I. who had been signed by Dreamworks later to be dropped and have just recently released their own album on their own imprint), and Courtney Harding (Indies consultant for Billboard Magazine). When I asked Tom about the Format’s decision to give away their album digitally to help ticket sales on their most recent tour, he had said that the album had been downloaded over 30,000 times and the band experienced one of their greatest tours with most of the dates selling out. Nick’s experience with Dreamworks was the typical experience you hear with bands who get lost in the system when the A&R rep who brought them to the label is canned and the rest of the staff doesn’t give a shit. The band eventually got out of their agreement and recently released their latest album with the help of Tunecore and although the band are finding it much more difficulty doing things on their own, they are finding the experience much more rewarding doing it on their own terms. I think the biggest difficulty with bands releasing records on their own came out during a conversation with Courtney when I asked her how indie bands get her attention for publicity. She said that she is inundated with bands sending myspace links so much that she rarely clicks through to hear the act. The exchange of ideas went really well but when it was all said and done, there wasn’t a clear-cut answer. There are acts that will successfully release their own albums, but acts will continue to thrive in the traditional record label model. Although there isn’t a clear-cut answer for bands releasing their own records and forgoing traditional record labels, we all agreed that the game has changed and major labels are become less and less viable in today’s music industry.

Maybe it was my experience in New York, maybe it was all the press behind Radiohead’s, whatever the case, I decided to try something new with the upcoming release of The Playing Favorites’ debut album, “I Remember When I Was Pretty”. This week, we just announced the album, 2 mp3s, and the release date of 12/4/07. I decided that with every pre-order of the album in either vinyl or CD format, we would give every customer a full download of the album 2 weeks prior to the street date on November 20th. The Playing Favorites are a group of friends who have always talked about doing a band together and features Joey Cape from Lagwagon, Bad Astronaut; Marko Desantis from Sugarcult, Bad Astronaut; Tim Cullen from Summercamp, Popsicko; Mick Flowers from the Lapdancers; and Luke Tierney from Penfifteen Club. The record is amazing but the band is not a full-time band and with the exception of a few shows here and there, they will not be on the road for any length of time. I knew that from the members’ other projects that there would be some early excitement about the record and I wanted to capitalize on that excitement. My thought was that giving all the customers the album early would encourage them to share the record with their friends. I know what you are thinking, why in the world is this label trying to encourage file-sharing and music copying? I honestly believe that in certain situations file-sharing can be our best marketing tool. Sure there are people who will never ever consider buying an album, but I believe that there are people who use file-sharing to sample the music and if they enjoy what they hear, they consider purchasing the album. The people who purchase the Playing Favorites’ album as a pre-order are going to be our best word of mouth. Getting the album before everyone else may lead to them telling their friends about this great, new record they have been listening to. With luck, this will get a lot of new ears to hear one of our releases and who knows, maybe a few of them will purchase the album either directly from us or the next time they set foot in a mom and pop store. Sure, this could backfire, but what is the worst that could happen? I sell a small number of copies? Big deal, I have done that without giving away the album. I don’t have a big risk in this album as the band recorded the album in their own studio and more than likely, it will help me to sell the entire first pressing of the vinyl. I consider the fans of our bands to be my peers and trust them to support what I do if they like what they hear. Will it work? I will be sure to let you know.

Speaking of vinyl, our store, Vinyl Collective, is doing better than ever. We have found ourselves in the middle of a retail experience selling a physical format that seems to be seeing a rise in sales. It could even get to the point, where we are only releasing albums in digital and vinyl formats. We will be experimenting with digital and vinyl formats for albums and singles in 2008 and that could be our future.

This morning a friend sent me a link to a really interesting blog post, “When Pigs Fly: The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide.” If you have the time, I highly recommend you read it. It is written by someone who has been a long-time music fan, has worked for major labels, and exclusively downloads all of his music now. He has expressed his outrage for the shutdown of Oink, for the bloated excesses within the Major Label spending, and faults the industry for not adopting early P2P networks. He has a lot of good points and I find that I agree with a lot he has to say. He urges music fans to stop buying major label music but to support those major acts by attending their shows and purchasing their merch. If I could add one thing to his post, I would say that if you find an indie label or act that you love, consider purchasing their music. I am in not ready to call it a day on releasing music and am doing what I can to adapt to the way things are. I offer all of my releases for as low as $5 each if someone purchases our pick any 5 for $25, I offer my releases on Emusic, and may soon offer the pick your price model that Radiohead offers for their digital album purchases. And unlike major labels, we split all profits with our acts. I think that with a lot of indies, they work with their artists and offer them good deals. Majors succeed by completely raping their artists and drop their acts when they fail to produce a radio hit. The days of the radio hit are pretty much over and acts will succeed on a whole other level by tapping into social networks, video sharing sites, and online radio.
The industry is continually changing and it is uncertain what model will be adopted by acts and labels. In a world of uncertainty, it is certain that the days of $15 albums in mall stores are done and consumers are too smart to buy the bullshit the major labels are selling. The bottom line is that if acts are doing something real, there are going to be fans. Whether those fans actually purchase the music or show their support in other ways will soon be figured out. Hopefully when the dust settles there is still room for people like myself and other indies.

Written by Virgil Dickerson