Breaking the star = Breaking the bank (III)

So what are artists to do while they are “developing”? Beyond burning the candle at both ends and working a day job while playing at night, how can an artist make a living if not through selling CDs to fans? If some are just going to download and not buy – though, as we’ve seen, the most avid downloaders are also the biggest paying consumers – how does an artist pick up the slack and shortfall? “Fans cannot download a T-shirt, hoodie, coffee mug, poster, or whatever else you can market,” Majewski said.

When we were young, we used to brag about our record collection. For me, before I was 21, 1982, I owned over 1,000 LPs. It was a status symbol. My collection kicked ass! Today, it may be different. It may be “I have this shirt, you don’t.” I wonder if kids wearing/owning something you can’t download may be the new status symbol?

To survive, the record business will have to either get a grip on the new technology and the new ways consumers actually consume music or succumb to artists owning and exploiting their own intellectual property, in essence becoming their own record companies. Then they would outsource the services the record companies traditionally performed, like promotion, publicity, marketing, and hiring experts to do that one thing the record companies allegedly do best – promoting and creating a brand name around an artist.

These independent contractors would find the artists’ unique selling point and exploit it for the benefit of the artists (and likely the managers who will wind up footing the bills for this service initially), who would reap the kind of financial rewards outlined in the Playback and Payback article series, obviating the need for the major labels.

Some see the failure to develop artists as a symptom of the modern record companies’ size and scope. When dealing with business on a macroeconomic level, a lot of the nitty-gritty things that used to happen every day have fallen by the wayside. “Major labels can’t afford to do artist development because they can’t scale down enough to do so,” Ponti said. “The indie model is total artist development but they have no idea that that is what they are actually doing.”

Clearly, in a changing business, the big question becomes how to get artists in front of people who might love them, pay to see them, even perhaps buy a copy of the CDs to go with the files they already downloaded. For the 93 percent of recording artists selling less than a thousand copies of any given release, what do they really have to lose by getting themselves in the public eye in any way possible?

Of course, one of the words for this is promotion, and promotion costs money, potentially a lot of it. Especially for artists or managers not able or inclined to do some of the expensive stuff themselves, like building websites, putting together and mailing out press kits, and the like.

Beyond that, developing an artist means helping to find the thing that makes recording artists artists in the first place, the thing that makes each of them unique, good for more than a few seconds’ pleasure; the thing that helps them stand up to repeated listening, inspiring people to go out and buy their art and develop an attachment to it and to them.

Very few artists can find this by themselves. In the past mentors, teachers, friends, even competitors aided in this development. In the professional recording and record company world, when demo deals allowed artists to discover elements of this unique voice – to do their own thing and be known for themselves – artists could nurture and communicate those elements that made them special, the thing that made what they did art.

Late soul singer Lou Rawls explained it this way: “People want something that they can put into their hip pocket and say, ‘Yeah, this is going to last.’ Something I can pull out my pocket two weeks from now and still like it.”

Certainly there was, as there is now, a truckload of disposable pop, of performers not up to the task of making a lasting contribution. But at least the environment once offered artists the opportunity to get there and try. Now, often no one will take the chance because the risk is so great.