Back to sharing wisdom with artists... This post covers what every artist should learn from the CEO of a major label   

Last week Edgar Bronfman, the Chairman and CEO of Warner Music, gave a speech in New York.  You can download the six page speech at Hypebot. 

If you are trying to figure out where the music industry is going, it would be nuts NOT to believe you could glimmer something from the direction of a major label.

I have saved you the trouble of reading the entire speech.  The paragraph below is the paragraph that is most relevant to you, the artist, and your need to develop a strategy for succeeding in the music industry. 

"And we’ve launched a new DVD-based music product – “MVI” or music video interactive – that we hope will inject excitement into physical retail.  MVI will be part of our strategy to create an ongoing, connected experience between artists and their audiences that will give us the ability to reward consumers with a deeper, broader, more compelling experience: an interactive platform ideally positioned for selling all these exciting new forms of music-based content that will only be available to registered fans who are connected to their favorite artists."

 
ARTIST ADVICE 
I am going to take a few of the pearls from the paragraph above and translate them into meaningful advice for artists.

 
Bronfman:  "to create an ongoing, connected experience between artists and their audiences..."

Translation: Warner is tired of seeing sites like MySpace profit from the connected experience their artists deliver to fans via MySpace.  It's time to move on to a platform where the experience can be improved, controlled, and most importantly, it's time to move onto a platform that can deliver new revenue streams back to the label and the artist.

Advice: Copy this strategy.  Learn how to use Blogger, WordPress, MovableType, SquareSpace or some other blogging platform.  You may even want to look into Ning.  Anyone that insists that you will be forgoing the power of social networking by dumping MySpace is stuck in 2005 (yes things change quickly).  You need to learn how to control your own destiny, the end-user experience, and how to extract ad revenue from the content and the fan base you work so hard to create and cultivate.

 
Bronfman: "that will give us the ability to reward consumers with a deeper, broader, more compelling experience:"

Translation: A MySpace page dotted with fancy graphics, YouTube videos, slide shows and images, and a shitty music player was great in 2005, but this is 2007!  A page of stuff is no longer compelling.  We need something that really blows the socks off people.

Advice: Time to pick up the pace people.   You need to learn how to be entertaining on the Internet.  You may want to go out and buy the TV (yourband.tv) domain for your band.   You need to start looking at your band like a television network.  Have a filmmaker and a writer join your band, choose a theme, write a story, lash in your music, create episodes, write notes about your story on your blog, engage fans, develop characters, have a storyline, create a soundtrack, etc.  Stop using your Internet presence to be INFORMATIVE, use it to be ENTERTAINING!

 
Bronfman: "an interactive platform ideally positioned for selling all these exciting new forms of music-based content that will only be available to registered fans who are connected to their favorite artists"

Translation: Warner is going to put all our cool shit into some sort of website platform, and we are going to make all of this excellent stuff available, for free or at a discount, to fans that pay an annual fee; because we need higher-margin products to save our bottom line.

Advice:  He's freaking right!  Nobody is going to make money selling $.99 cent downloads.  Sell your music to some and give it away to everyone else that refuses to pay for music.  Use your music as the bait that brings people into your shows and onto your new ENTERTAINING website/blog.  If you make great music and you are entertaining, you will make money.  By the time you learn how to incorporate story, basic film making, blogging, and how to be episodic - into your repertoire, the industry will have the tools you need to profit from all of your efforts - and your registered fans.

 
Over the coming months, I am going to drill into the specifics on how to make this all work...  

Do what you love and the money will follow...