Excellent article by Bob Lefsetz

Airplay is the most unrelated to sales that I can remember.

I think I have a serious problem with the attitude you display here.

(Edit) and your comments in the following posts.

Depends on what one means by "commercial." A successful artist has a large fan-base. Radio is only one way to grow a fan-base and it has become less and less effective. A lot of today's best selling artists grew a substantial fan-base years ago. Reality TV has worked for some younger artists. What's unfortunate is that the live venues that once grew artists are mostly gone. That's actually an opportunity!

Hey, if someone's gonna be an asshole with their opinion, it should like totally be me....what are we talkin' about?

Purposely mixing it up, Levon.  We have had a systematic problem in the music industry for decades where many new artists don't even get to break the ground because all the resources are devoted to "the greats", who are great and were great influences on all of us, but the problem is when all the resources are devoted to "safe bets" and not being put into developing new music for the next generations. 

There was a time when record companies put money and time into developing new acts.  If that hadn't happened, we wouldn't have Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac, Lenny Kravitz amongst many many others.  So, how many of these have we lost because resources and efforts were diverted elsewhere so that less risk was involved.  Of course with less risk often comes less reward.

I've been playing the role of devil's advocate here, and this has not been an attack on either Macca or Sir Elton.  But you know, sometimes you need to realize you have a shelf-life and bow out gracefully and leave your legacy in tact. 

I'm sorry if anyone was offended, that was not my intention. 

The music business isn't separated from the economy we are in. There are so many factors that led to our current state of affairs, that pinning it on some musical dinosaurs is myopic. Much of what people think is shaped by the media. So, McCartney and Elton make some records, well, they're musicians, that's what they do. What the world does with it a different matter though. What they do now has no real effect on what any other artist might do, or whether there's money left to support new artists. In fact, it was the money generated by those huge selling artists that funded all that label development in the first place. Since we're talking about the music BUSINESS, looks at the facts. A company sells a product, someone can generate a certain amount of sales, forget their history, we're talking business. So, a company decides to promote a product, based on probable sales return on their investment. It has nothing to do with any other artist at this time. If the company can make some money, they'll do it, or they'll do it knowing there's loss involved, but as a loss leader for prestige reasons.


When I read about how labels used to support artists and develop new acts, I have to sigh at the distortions that time and distance have created. I was IN the business during those times of label artist development, and believe me, it wasn't much different on the inside than it is today. It is true that by maintaining support, certain very good bands survived to make great music, but many more bands were ruined by the labels support of generic music that sells. That's how we got REO Speedwagon making millions, and the Clash dying on the vine. So, we're into it as artists, and the labels are into as a business. Did some of the people at labels begin by loving music, of course, that doesn't change how they got to where they are. It's a lot like politics, only a rare few survive with integrity intact. Someone like Rick Rubin is a good example, he's worked with many great artists and helped them recover and regain their lives, all the while making music that makes money. There has never been a safety net for artists. When I was getting started, NYC was crumbling, and there was no path to any kind of future stability. We made music anyway, and that became the Punk movement, and over 20-30 years, they were assimilated into the mainstream.

The old, old guard have nothing to do with the success of anyone new today, (other than being an influence musically),  it's entirely in the hands of new artists to figure out how to work within or without the forms the music business is taking. Saying that big name older artists like McCartney, Elton, Bowie are somehow taking up space better used by new artists is a straw man argument.

Yes, it has gotten me rethinking my own "album" paradigm of working. I've typically waited until I had a complete album recorded before promoting. I'm beginning to look at alternatives to that. Perhaps a release a month, extras for contributors, who knows..

Yep, good ideas there. I'd like to know more about how to "lock" mp3's I send out.

A simple google search turned up this:

www.wikihow.com/Convert-Protected-Audio-Into-a-Plain-MP3
www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=56590
www.worldwideocr.com/Copyright_protect_MP3_WMA_File.asp

You're on to something there. New song?

What I wanna see is what vinyl is selling , what genre , which music . 

I love CD's ,  I'm buying them really cheap on ebay , its pretty awesome .