Years ago, I used to run Labellife.com a blog that was essentially a digest of the goings on in the music industry, with a bias towards digital, which when we started was pretty minimal.
One of our main areas for contention was distribution. We always saw mobile and P2P as distribution channels whereas most labels always thought that the lack of direct monetisation was a bad thing. Of course these days we see the big labels shift towards the removal of DRM, licensing to mobile, TV & film and gigs generating more revenue than music sales directly, so we’re getting there. Of course artists selling directly to consumers is steadily growing too, cutting out all of the middlemen, which is fantastic too.
The only problem that we ever had amongst ourselves was in the perceived value of digital music releases and distribution. A white label may have only had 500 pressings originally, making them sought after and even more valuable, especially to a DJ – that could never happen digitally. That “I must get this before anyone else” feeling just doesn’t seem to happen so much these days.
So Tom and I have been racking our brains to come up with something simple, which while not being a remedy, will somehow help achieve this to some extent. We’ve got a few things in the pipeline and hopefully in the next week we’re going to put online the first step, you can already see our mandate for OK Cool Recordings our new record label that we are going to start testing with.
[As a side-note, if anyone wants to take the LabelLife blog and get it running again, feel free to contact us, you’d be amazed at who we had on the mailing list]