“With CD sales continuing to fall, record labels realize they must reinvent themselves or perish.“

It sounds like the same song that has been being sung for a while. We’ve all heard it, we’ve seen the headlines for years, but the truth of the matter is that it is really happening. The old paradigm of Artist -> Manager -> Label -> Distributer -> Media Outlet -> Consumer is breaking down. It is easier than ever for fans to get the music of their favorite artists, at little to no cost. The concept of “free” has unfortunately migrated to “entitlement” and it is causing major problems. People don’t feel the need to pay for the music they want to listen to anymore. New methods need to be devised to generate income from music for artists, and soon.

RCRDLBL.COM is one of these new examples. Their methodology is something that may sound familiar — Take an established artist that has some cred and show their work along side an up and coming artist for a mutually beneficial result. What is new here is that this isn’t an event, or a festival, but an actual business, a meta record label housed in a BLOG format. Very interesting. Couple all of that with a keen business sense, good connections, a star maker (Josh Deutsch) and the internet and you have something called RCRDLBL.COM. This new business model could potentially help get the music industry moving in the “right” direction.

Or could it?

Some quick Googling sheds some light into the cooperate machine behind this [seemingly] new paradigm — coupling emerging and established artists to the benefit of all parties involved. This idea, while (relatively) new in the music industry has been the way that the fine art and underground music communities have been promoting and raising awareness of new talent in their respective universes for eons. Ars Electronica, Mutek, and the DEMF are just a few examples of organizations that function with this methodology.

The major player in this venture is Josh Deutsch, the founder of Downtown Records. Yeah, I know what you are thinking, who is Downtown Records? Well, remember Gnarls Barkley? Downtown Records. Other artists on Downtown are Spank Rock, Mos Def and Justice. Big dawgs. Do a little Wikipedia action on Downtown to get the skinny. In short, Downtown is jointly distributed by Warner Music and Atlantic Records. This isn’t some mom-and-pop record label, or a truly independent label for that matter. It is starting to look like a shake-and-bake venture for the big dogs.

Now, this Josh person. Who is he? To start with he is a “former Senior Vice President of A&R at Virgin Records. What’s up mr. bigdog-corporate-part-of-the-machine guy. Next he has ties to Warner and Atlantic. The site has major sponsorship from Puma, BMW, Nokia, Nikon, and Virgin Atlantic. Hmm. Is something going on here? Am I being a bit too cynicle? Perhaps, but, when you get “Big Record Labels” involved in music, things seem to get shadey real fast. On the surface this whole thing looks like a good and mutually beneficial endeavor for artists, labels, and for rcrdlbl, but I am concerned with the licensing contract. It isn’t on the site and I have no idea who gets what percentage of royalties.

So, if you choose to go into something like this take a deep look into the contracts before jumping on something that looks to be a good thing. It is true that this site and this idea could help artists get noticed and press, but as with all business dealings, you always need to read the fine-print before you sign.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/27/technology/leonard_downtown.fortune/index.htm

Tags: cd sales, cnn, Deutsch, future, money, Music Industry, myspace, online, Profit, rcrdlbl, record labels

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 5:28 pm and is filed under Bytes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.