Tuesday
May192009
Record Label Deflation
Bruce Warila | Tue, May 19, 2009 
Reading Paul Lamere's blog on how EchoNest enables track-level recommendation, it occurred to me that as more and more artists give away music, and as the technology that enables music consumers to filter and find great free music becomes more and more refined, record labels (the current filters) deflate proportionately, as consumer mindshare will be siphoned off by the intersection of easy access to great (or good enough) and free.
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Reader Comments (3)
Hi Bruce,
Everyday, I am finding more and more complaints about the increasing number of artists 'giving their music away'. Its not only this issue either, for example film composers complain endlessly about the 'music library problem' as well.
There are so many changes it would seem that the music business will have a completely different meaning in 10 years.
Is that how most musicians are feeling as well?
-Hakim
Hakim,
Artists are complaining about other artists going the free route? I am going to cover this with a blog post soon.. Do I understand your statement?
"film composers complain endlessly about the 'music library problem' as well" Can you elaborate on this one also?
Thanks
Hi Bruce,
Some established artists see it as a counter productive new demand in the market place which they are forced into in order to compete. For example Paul McGuinness, U2's manager, says that free music is "evil"! (TechDirt)
Yeah sure its, merely another change in the way things are done in music business. This one like the free music issue is also rooted in new technologies effect on music.Music libraries are collections of music compositions which can be easily edited to sync with video or film. Generally, a music supervisor will search a music library's database for music based on keywords which identify songs within a music library. There are other personalized and customizable ways to search for music as well.
Composers are complaining against this saying that scoring has been reduced to editing pre-produced samples and plugging them in. Mark Northam discusses this in a 2007 article entitled, "The New Editors: When Composers Stop Composing".
I am interested to know your reader's thoughts on these items. And I look forward to more dialog with you.
By the way. I really like Music X-Ray. I can see where you are going with it now and I have several projects as we have discussed, one in particular that I will add to my account in the near future.
-Hakim