By clamping down on free music, are the recording industry's Big Five
(BMG, EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner) hindering an increasingly necessary
"branding" process? Record charts show that popularity breeds more
popularity; one of the information economy's primary lessons is that
familiarity breeds value. Barlow recalls meeting Australian producers and
licensers anxious about piracy. "Your problem isn't pirating," he told
them. "Your problem is nobody has ever heard your music, and it would
advantage you greatly if they did."
With the cost of a home studio at an all-time low, would-be artists
today are more than ever in a position to do it all themselves. Such sites
as MP3.com presented an online vacuum that
thousands of frustrated
musicians have rushed in to fill. Streaming Geeks, for example, topped
MP3.com's Top 40 chart in mid-July. According to geeks0, one of the duo's
pseudonymous members, the act received a thousand e-mail messages a
weekend and as many as 10,000 downloads a night at the height of its
popularity. Even with a handful of free tracks available at the website,
geeks0 claims, the duo net as much money from their eponymous album
(pressed, packaged and distributed by MP3.com) as a full-time professional
indie band would make -- only they do it in their spare time. Would they
like to get signed? "I spent my youth chasing after them," says geeks0,
who says he's been approached by more than one label. "If you're in the
digital arena and making money like we are, you won't want to sign the
contract the label will give you. It would just be stupid." In the future,
he adds, labels may be little more than fulfillment services for bands
like his.
Artists, signed and otherwise, will inevitably move online in search
of an audience. Inspired by cable television, Bowie has positioned himself
as a value-added platform. BowieNet
is an
Internet-service provider and a $5.95-a-month member s-only website with
diary entries, sketches of Bowie's model wife Iman, books he likes and
more. Chuck D has an Internet radio
station, and he plans to launch a record label and hip-hop's first
"superportal" (rapstation.com).
Ice-T has
started Net-based Coroner
Records because, he says, "with the death of the traditional labels,
the only thing remaining will be the coroner -- me."
Actor Ice-T poses on the set of the NBC series "Players" on the Universal Studios lot in Los Angeles, Sept. 9, 1997.