Despite all the cries of doom and gloom for the dot-bomb world there is still a revolution underway. Sure, failed business plans and unrealistic expectations have sent many a internet company to the scrap heap of history but the fact still remains that the internet has fundamentally changed the way many people do things. 

The Internet boom exploded five years ago and companies started in garages found themselves with multimillion dollar IPO’s, some times billions! It was all heady stuff, the Internet was going to destroy brick and mortar businesses and the old rules of business no longer applied. Sadly, for those involved the old rules did apply and many of those companies are either now bankrupt or have been swallowed up by bigger companies. Those that have survived have had to reshuffle their business plans and come back to reality. The fact still remains that the Internet gains new users everyday and has fundamentally changed the way people do things. So it’s not going away and those who still resist embracing the Internet may be patting themselves on the back right about now for their keen insight and not getting caught up in net-fever, but they may still end up going the way of the dinosaurs. 

You are asking at about this point, yeah we know this antiGUY but what does any of this have to do with music? Ah, now that is the heart of the matter isn’t it? Music and the Internet. The truth of the matter is the web is one of the best tools the record industry could have hoped for. It allows bands and publicist to take their music directly to the people; it gives them almost unlimited possibilities to get the word out. I’m not talking about Napster either, let’s face the honest fact about Napster. In order to discover a new band with Napster you have to accidentally stumble across the band searching for someone else’s music and then have enough interest to actually download and listen to the song. An unknown band could have a hundred songs on Napster or similar peer-to-peer systems and it still wouldn’t do then any good. Fans still have to know to look for that band’s music in the first place. Napster was a great way to sample songs from artists you had heard of, but it still had too many barriers to help fans discover new groups directly. That’s where publicity comes in. 

Like it or not publicity is still one of the major expenses for record companies. People think of CD’s, they figure ok it cost maybe a dollar to manufacture a single disc and the record companies turn around and sell that CD to the record stores for $10. So they made a tidy little $9 dollar profit there.  Not so, using a conservative estimate you have to throw in at least $3 or $4 per CD for recording cost. Studios, producers and engineers don’t come cheap. Yeah, but that still leaves a profit of $4. Nope, a big part of that $4 goes to marketing. People have to know to buy the CD or it will sit on store shelves and collect dust. 

There are many vehicles to market music, print advertising, radio, music videos etc. These all cost money.  Print advertising for instance. You figure it cost at minimum of a couple thousand dollars to place an advertisement in a music magazine. But is this effective? All the people get is an ad, they have no exposure to the music itself. Sure there are crafty admen who can tailor an ad to spark interest but these ads still are not the most effective way to expose music. The record companies can get far better promotion for their product in the same magazine by having the CD reviewed there or granting the publication an interview or concert access. The readers get more of a feel for the music from the critic than they would from a simple ad that they more than likely flipped past and ignored trying to get to the content! 

Radio is very effective. People hear the songs and if they like them they might buy the CD. However, it is very hard to break a song into radio. It cost a lot of money and radio play list have very limited space for songs. The programmers don’t want to lose listeners so they play songs that people know and want to hear. It’s a wonder any new music gets played on radio. I won’t even get into independent promotion, which cost record companies millions each year to get their songs on top 40 radio. 

Videos have really become a niche market. MTV is the big player in this game and their airwaves are even more limited than radio. For one, they hardly show music videos and second the ones they do show typically fall into the “pop” category. So a record company spends a hundred thousand dollars for a video that may never get played. 

So how in the hell can a new band break into the big time? It’s a tough challenge. They may luck out and appeal to the programmers at MTV and get a shot at a premier on TRL or become a “buzzworthy” video. The record company may invest a lot of money in independent promotion and get a single on the radio airwaves. But both propositions are expensive and not always successful. This is where the music media comes in. 

A new artist can get far more mileage out of a flattering article in a music magazine than a dozen paid advertisements. If the readers interest is sparked by the critics description of the band they may just check the band out and possibly buy the CD. Then again it is hard to get press for a new artist in a print publication. Their space is limited and their publisher want to sell magazines so they go after coverage of big name and established acts. 

This is where the Internet comes in. There are literally hundreds of music websites with millions or readers. Yet, many of the record companies are still reluctant to tap this mother load of free publicity. To be fair, some record companies have embraced the net and used it to great effect. But there still remains a resistance to the web among many record companies, large and small. It usually boils down to the publicist at the record company. Some publicist are just dead set against internet coverage, they still cling to the old rules and in the end the artists they represent and the fans lose out because they would rather get a small write up in a newspaper with 10,000 readers than a website with 500,000. I’ve seen a publicist who believed in the net leave a record label only to be replaced by a old school publicist and watched in amazement as all of the online coverage of their artists disappeared almost overnight. Needless to say, the new artists on this label since then have failed to spark much interest. On the other hand, there are a few record companies that have jumped into the web with both feet, they have separate new-media publicity divisions that concentrate on getting their artists covered on the net.  Wind-Up is a perfect example; they are an Indy label that is selling CD’s at a major label level. It’s not just getting coverage on music websites that some record companies have an aversion to. They fail to utilize the potential of their own promotional websites. Just last week I was looking for info for a new major label artist someone told me about. The first place to look naturally is their official website. We’ll I logged on to their website and all I found was a picture of the band and an invitation to sign up for their mailing list. No bio, no news, no tour dates, no samples of the music. So I went to their label’s website in hopes of finding something useful there. No luck, they just linked back to the official website. I thought to myself this is insane, it doesn’t take much effort to put the official bio, some news, tour dates and maybe some samples up so people can learn more about the band and hear their music. But obviously this label wasn’t having any of that. So I tried a few of their other artists official homepages. Same result, the only ones with more than a few pictures and mailing list sign ups were established bands who used outside companies like ARTISTdirect to develop their website. So this label had blown a perfect opportunity to expose someone to their artists music.  These labels could do so much more to promote their artists online with their own websites, like offering a little more content for a start or how about a small banner advertising their other artists.. (Hey, if you like this band then check out this other band) yet they don’t. 

 
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