Special Double Blogpost Day: More Musicians Leave the Old System

This is so cool, I gotta post in rapid succession.

Those who know me, know how much I adore playing music. This is why the music industry is one of my
favorite example of changing business models, and sometimes I think getting paid to play your guitar is an enormous scam.

However, the way record contracts are often written, it can be literally a scam.

Imagine, if you will, a mortgage by which you take out the loan, pay it back with your earnings, and then the record company still owns the house. You’d never do it, right? Well, that’s the structure of many record deals. They advance you money, which you then spend on making the record, which you must pay back. Then the record company owns the product you took out a loan to produce.

You follow that? Yes, it’s weird.

One of my all-time favorite musicians went through the meat grinder, earning millions of pounds for Virgin Records, and then somehow ending up broke. Andy Partridge is the frontman for British pop geniuses XTC, and he has been through the ringer. Ultimately, the group had to go on strike (not unlike Prince during his ‘symbol’ phase) to get out of a bad deal signed in their 20s.

Anyhow, Andy is finally leverage the Internet to start a record label that cuts musicians fair deals- deals that allow high quality music to reach the masses without being pushed through the lowest-common-denominator cookie cutter.

This, my friends, is a positive future – one where thousands of musicians make thousands of dollars, instead of a few making tens of millions. I’m sorry, but there is more artistic quality in diversity than there is in mass marketing.

Very cool.