From the blog of John Grubb, bassist for Railroad Earth
The record industry used to exist because recording was very expensive. It was expensive to record a song, it was expensive to reproduce the recording of the song, and it was really expensive to warehouse, distribute, and sell the recording of that song. Thus a whole industry cropped up to take advantage of the fact that the barrier to entry for your average recording artist, say Ma Carter out of the hills around Bristol VA, was so astronomically high that nobody really thought about releasing their own music. Show up, play my tunes, get paid for them? Okay! This worked great for long enough for the basic oligarchic framework of the major label system to rise to power.
And nowadays with recording technology being so much cheaper, it’s possible to record a great-sounding album on a very limited budget, which means bands can self-release without having to sell their souls to a record company. Albums like The Reasoning’s “Dark Angel” and Breathing Space’s “Coming Up for Air” didn’t cost a fortune to record, but sound as good as many major-label releases.
I have to ask whether there’s any point to the majors any more, when all they seem to churn out are formulaic acts who are all hype and no substance. With their track record of ripping off creative talent, suing their best customers, and generally throwing their weight around in order to block technological changes that threaten their existing heavily-flawed business model, I think artists, fans and music in general will be better off when the whole lot of them go to the wall.
Meanwhile I’m getting frustrated with Helienne Lindvall’s weekly column Behind the Music in the on The Guardian Music Blog. While sometimes an interesting read, she doesn’t seem interested in anything that doesn’t revolve around the major record companies. It’s too much about what will shortly become the record industry of the past, rather than looking to the music business of the future.
Well, to be quoted! Shouldn’t that imply that I know what I’m talking about? Anyway, the second part, or third, or somewhere in there was going to be exactly where you’re going here. None of those things are expensive anymore. Not only that, but the quality of the product that the majors put out has been on such a steady decline for so long that I can’t imagine they’ll continue to exist for as long as it’s going to take for their current “sue-em” business model to be replaced by something more “sustainable”. Rock on.