Just the other day, Trent Reznor announced that Nine Inch Nails was now free from all major label entanglements, and that he was looking forward to dealing directly with his audience however he saw fit.
Last week, Radiohead announced that their new album, In Rainbows, would be released without the benefit of a label. Rather, the band would be selling copies directly to the fans — and the fans could name their price.
And in July, Prince basically gave away three million copies of his new album to newspaper subscribers and concertgoers in London.
It’s a trend that is spelling disaster and ruin for the recording industry, or at least that part of it occupied by the major record labels. Who are being revealed as increasingly superfluous into today’s economy with each passing day.
Robert Sandall writes more in the Times Online:
What looks like commercial suicide is, in today’s reality, sound business sense. Records, CDs or downloads now have all become downgraded to the status of promotional tools — useful to sell concert tickets and fan paraphernalia. While there is still good money to be made in music, and particularly on the concert circuit, the record business — blame it on piracy, too many CD giveaways or the advent of the recordable CD — is a busted flush.
A revealing story doing the rounds in America tells of a young rock band who decided to stop selling their CDs at gigs after they discovered that by offering their CDs for $10 they were cannibalising sales of their $20 T-shirts. The truth now is that a rudimentary cotton garment with a band logo stamped across it that has probably been manufactured for pennies in a Third World sweatshop costs about twice as much as an album recorded in a state-of-the-art western studio. And even at that price, recorded music isn’t selling.
I’ve never been a big fan of the major labels — and their reactionary and paranoid behavior over the last few years has done nothing to change that opinion. True, they won’t be going away anytime soon, but the more their influence lessens and the more consumers realize how unnecessary they are, the better off everyone — artists and audiences — will be.