DIY Record Industry: Models for Millionaires, Models for the Obscure

[p2p rules]

Music is not scarce anymore. It stopped being scarce when Napster appeared on the scene ten years ago last week. The major labels may still control access to the record stores, but it's a weakening structure. The future, as shown by the likes of Trent Reznor and Radiohead, is a Do it Yourself model where the artist can eventually eschew large and expensive middleman like a major label.

That bodes badly for record industry execs who continue to cling to the old way of doing business. They wasted over a decade that could have been spent finding models that would prove more enticing to an artist than a DYI strategy. Most pundits saw this coming a mile away. I personally mused about the potentials of DYI activities way back in 1999 when They Might Be Giants released one of the first online only albums, so the potential for artists to take matters into their own hands should not come as a surprise.

Still, these DYI models are only just evolving. The secret sauce for success is yet to appear. Furthermore, we can see that right off the bat there is a class structure that has appeared within the early models. The rules are very different between those artists who already have fame and a large following of fans and those artists who have yet to build any widespread recognition for themselves or their music.

mp3newswire