At the "Music Business Crash" that served as the pre-opening for the NARM convention, held in the Century City Hyatt in Los Angeles May 10-12, the speakers helped to dispel one myth commonly held by the digerati press: that the internet has leveled the playing field making record labels obsolete.
While the playing field has been leveled, it has created an easy entre for artists, making it harder to get noticed. In the old days, Rolling Stone magazine carried eight album reviews, some of them two pages long and written by music writers like Lester Bangs, which would make readers take in every word. Nowadays, there might be 30 reviews in there.
"While there are a lot more outlets to help get your artists noticed, each outlet reaches less people," Compass Records co-founder Garry West said.
In fact, with more releases coming out nowadays, record labels are even more important if you want your music to get noticed, A2IM president Rich Bengloff said.
But if you are a label, West added, you see a lot of bands that don't understand what it takes to build a career. He said he likes bands that take the approach, "ready, aim, and fire," but what he sees more often is bands that "fire, then take aim and try to get ready."
The difference, according to him is that nowadays a lot of bands have no fans and haven't played live but are putting out albums because they can get it on iTunes. In the old days, groups like the Band and the Beatles played, respectively 8 years and 5 years every night before they even went in to record their first albums.
The former approach, however, might be more appropriate for today since many music listeners are only interested in songs rather than albums. Mike Clink proprietor of Mike Clink productions says he would be hard pressed to find anyone he knows who will listen to a song all the way to the end.
When moderator Ted Cohen of Tag Strategic asked if the consumer will ever get back to the days when they had a relationship with the album, the producer responded, "I think we are stuck," in a track market.
But DJ Nu-Mark, formerly of Jurassic 5, said he likes the way things are now. In fact, he added that if he had a way to do his career over, he wouldn't put out an album worth of songs at one time. He says instead of releasing an album, he plans on putting out two songs a month to make his music more palatable for fans.
May 10, 2011
By Ed Christman, Los Angeles
The registration process for 'Bahrain eContent Award 2011,' is over and the jury has begun evaluation of the entries from different companies in the Kingdom vying for top IT honours, said the organisers.
Ingram Content Group Inc. today announced an agreement with Hachette UK, one of the largest and most diversified publishing groups in the United Kingdom, to archive and distribute the publisher’s e-content to partners worldwide through CoreSource®.
One of the most insidious aspects of recent Internet policy-making is that much of it is taking place behind closed doors, with little or no consultation -- think of SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and TPP. But there's another dangerous trend: the rise of "informal" agreements between the copyright industries and Internet service providers.
ISC invites institutions to submit funding proposals for projects to be funded as part of its e-content programme for 2008-2011. Funding of up to £275,000 is available for the digitisation of catalogues and manuscripts related to Islamic Studies.
Sony has shown off a pair of tablets that will launch later this year. The S1 is little more than yet another Honeycomb tablet in a Sony-designed box, with a 9.4-inch widescreen display and a wedge-shaped case.
The Asus Eee Pad Transformer is the cheapest 10 inch tablet with Google Android 3.0 and an NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor. But good luck getting your hands on the $400 tablet, because it’s sold out pretty much everywhere at the moment.
All tablets are e-readers, but all e-readers are not tablets. B&N recently released a software update for its Nook Color, which takes the full color, touch-screen e-reader and gives it some tablet-like features. At $249.95 it is less than half the price of an iPad 2 or Xoom, and it offers some significant benefits for normal, non-geeky readers.
Lenovo is putting ultrabooks in a new variety of positions with the IdeaPad YOGA, an ultrabook that is so much more.
Ultrabooks will enter the tablet price range in 2013 according to Acer.