4.24.2008:
Random thoughts while driving, vol. 1 - the music minor leagues
10:45 PMWhy are there no music minor leagues? Baseball, football, hockey, soccer... Hell, even ballet has a form of farm leagues or minor leagues. Why didn't record labels ever initiate some form of music minor leagues?
I mean, instead of spending umpteen millions marketing and promoting the same dreck based on catchy dances in a flashy music video so they can sell 15 million of one record by a crap artist who eventually harms the overall canvas of music as art, why not spend one quarter or one eighth that amount on creating an environment for budding musicians and training them to create music, then bringing them up to the "majors" when they reach a point where their art is gaining acceptance in the mainstream?
Credence Clearwater Revival released 4 records in a single year, and chances are, you've heard just about every single song on all 4 records. They're magnificent.
Jimi Hendrix released what could be counted as five records in three years. The Rolling Stones, Zeppelin, Sabbath... I mean, these bands create legacies. Springsteen, Dylan... Singer/songwriters who have consistently released good music and build a bigger audience with each one. This is FAR more profitable than spitting out flavor-of-the-month candypop nonsense or pseudo-deep dark rockers or Nickelback...
Why couldn't a forward-thinking record label buy a huge apartment building, pay an artist of promise, say, 10k a year plus room and board to just be in that environment, learning and nurturing their work? Watch their development, and groom them for the next step in a career? Even if you had a 1,000 tenant unit and only 1/10th of those tenants ever released records, you're spending a million a year on "salary" and another 10 million a year on room and board, nurturing talent that could easily bring you back more than a million sales per record at 9.99 a record across, say, 10 or 20 records, and sellouts at every venue - and they're your talent, because you sign them to deals for the trade in nurturing and development of their talent.
Instead, record labels are spending their diminishing profits each year suing their customer base who are simply seeking their product.
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3 Comments:
First problem is that you need a massive staff to administer the whole program, which will end up costing more than the room and board, and stipends. 2nd problem, is it would generally take not jsut one or two years, but many many years for an artist to mature to the making the big bucks phase.
Lastly, and this is the big one, is how do you tell who is going to be big and who isn't? Not jsutin picking the artsists to go into the program, but picking them to 'graduate' into making records. You're not gonna get a 10% success rate, and even if you're really good you probably won't get a 1% success rate.
The minor leagues are the smaller record companies, and the bigger companies have bought or established rather a few of those. They exist, they just don't operate the way they do in sports.
Labels used to do something like this; they'd nurture a no-name band through several albums even if they weren't selling. They called it "artist development."
The idea died as the accountants and MBAs decided it was better to go for superstar hits instead (the Madonna/Michael Jackson syndrome).
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