Unless you've been frozen in ice for fifty years like Captain America, you already know that you can't sell records through the usual channels anymore. Fewer and fewer physical products (CDs) are being sold. More and more, it's about downloads. But you know all that. You may also know that acts* like the Eagles have been selling their albums through exclusive deals with retailers like Wal-Mart. It worked great for them.
Even I knew that.
What I didn't know was that the retailing angle doesn't seem to work for anybody except Wal-Mart. Bob Lefsetz wrote about it last week. AC/DC, Christina Aguilera ... their deals with Target and Best Buy have been tanking. Lefsetz's solution? Don't sell albums. Give them away. Use them to draw people into retail spaces in order to sell different products.
It makes sense. Artists are giving their music away in order to sell seats and merchandise (and enhanced media - box sets, DVDs, etc.) And the Internet business model is all about drawing viewership - "eyeballs," to use that grisly Chien Andalousien phrase so popular among marketers. So why not use music as a lure to draw potential buyers - "eyeballs and feet" - into retail spaces?
Writes Lefsetz:
Guns 'n' Roses? Good choice - especially if no advance play of Axl Rose's long-awaited album had been allowed. In fact, maybe some of that bailout money should be used for auto/music deals. That would make it a double bailout, a rescue of two dying industries. Bob Seger could cut for Ford. Merle Haggard and George Jones could record for Chevy. Willie Nelson could make an album for whoever gets the first American green car on the road.
Lefsetz is thinking here. Good for him.
Then he falls victim to the temptations of cuteness: "With all the Britney hype, why didn’t she make a deal with a mental health company? Everybody comes in for a free screening!"
Britney's a pretty sick person, and making fun of that isn't all that clever. But there might have been some way to capitalize on her image and her problems to seriously do some good. Bob actually has a good idea there, if it's done as a public service (and not as a joke). Come in for a mental health screening and get a free album by your favorite disturbed musician. (And God knows we could find one in every genre.) At least we're thinking now, right?
I've bitched about this before: Why can't more music business people think? Lefsetz deliberately writes in an inflammatory way, and some of his tastes (like his fondness those cheesy new country groups that seem like Disneyland simulations of rural America) are definitely ... cute. But as least he thinks. When it comes to the music biz, that makes him seem like the one-eyed man in the land of the blind.
A good business person has a mind like a magpie. She or he picks up glittering ideas from a thousand different sources and takes them home. Then the business person lines the nest with them. Most of today's music biz people aren't intellectually curious. They don't like ideas - even business ideas. They're not magpies.
They're vultures.
Vultures don't build. They eat the dead. Bob Lefsetz and some of the other people trying to change the music business may be annoying at times. But they're magpies, not vultures. May they keep hectoring all those music biz "professionals" until they either get it right or go home.
Oh, but wait: If they don't get it right they will go home - unemployed. And most of them will have to leave even if they do get it right. The music business of the future can't support all this overhead, and it doesn't need it. There are just too many of these birds hanging around.
Vultures. Magpies. Eagles. Which one of these three does not belong in the picture?
___________
* I've never liked the word "acts" to describe musicians. It makes them seem like circus performers. When I was looking for a record deal, I DID feel like a circus performer. But the Eagles are simultaneously musicians, artists, and a thriving corporation. Frey and Henley seem to have all the leadership qualities of great CEOs (which is actually a compliment). When it comes to their work, I greatly prefer Henley as an artist. But all told, the Eagles - despite being fine musicians - definitely qualify as an "act." No disrespect intended, but there's a lot going on there besides music.
Comments