Discussion with Scott Frost, Artist Developer and General Manager at Decaydance Records

Decaydance Records.  Founded bye Pete Wentz.  <– woah doesn’t sound like an indie label, but it is.  It is fully independent and is not owned by a major label.  It kind of goes to show that independent labels don’t necessarily have to be for bands no one has heard of.  Fall Out Boy and Panic!AttheDisco both fall under this label, and they are some of the most well known bands in the country.

Scott Frost was happy to define for me what the role of labels were in the industry.  I was curious because a lot of articles were mentioning how maybe the record label was becoming unnecissary because it didn’t provide the artist something that they couldn’t do themselves.  Now with digital distribution, like iTunes etc.  unsigned artists don’t necessarily need a label to sell albums.

Scott however, underlined the main reason artists wanted labels, even independent ones.  Contacts.  Contacts were everything.

So I had been assuming that mainly contacts were good for working with distributors and radio.  Yes, they were, and that was one of the areas majors had a big advantage in.  However, independent labels too had marketing teams that had contacts with people writing blogs, getting magazine spaces, and any other promotions.  He said how sure, there are some artists who make it big on youtube and anyone can put up music on places like tunecore.  Still, for most, they need a label to get the kind of exposure necessary to be successful.  He told me that he couldn’t see the label going away any time soon.

This kind of got me thinking about how perhaps what really mattered was ambition.  An artist could still make a living without a record label, but would be based on a much smaller crowd.  It would be a more local scene.  An independent label one-ups that, but doesn’t of course have the same kind of superstar promotional deals as a major.  However, it offers much better treatment of the artist and more flexibility.  Maybe this will be their saving grace– that they can be helpful to the more ambitious without dealing with the bureaucratic heavyness of the majors.

The Neilsen Soundscan: The Crazyness of Market Shares

So instead of just reading all these journal articles etc that were going to analyze everything for me, I wanted to put some original analysis by looking at statistical data on market shares.

The Neilsen Soundscan has been tracking record sales since 1991, basically through bar codes on physical CD’s and records from digital sales.  It is pretty lovely really, it gives everything from total sales, physical vs digital, different labels’ market shares, top albums, top singles– you name it.  However, there are some issues looking at indie market shares.

So at first glance, things look pretty bad for the indie markets.  In 2010, indie market share is reported to be 9.57%, which blows compared to the 25% that many articles claim for the 1990’s.  How does that work.

Then we come to the definition of “indie”.  This definition is clearly always changing, and the Neilsen formula keeps changing too.  In the 2011 report, indies have 33%.  WHAT? HOW? MAGIC? No.

What the Nielsen Soundscan used to do was define independent, or “others”, as labels that used independent distributors rather than labels that weren’t owned by a major but used whatever distributor they liked.  With the former definition, for example, in 2007, indies had 12.87% of the market share, but with the latter, they had 34.4%.  That would be an increase from the 25% in the ’90s.  However, the market share is shrinking, so there’s some contradictory what nots going on here.

Another slight issue is that successful independent labels tend to be bought out by the major labels.  This kind of puts a cap on indie labels, because success stories just merge into the major labels.  Thus, this market share deal is kind of questionable in how much it shows indie success/decline.

Q&A With Josiah James

I had the privilege of interviewing Josiah James, a musician from San Fransisco via email.  I heard of him from a friend who works at Club Retro in San Francisco, and he was kind enough to answer some questions I had about the music industry.

Check out his stuff at http://www.josiahjames.com/

Q&A

1.  What does an independent label offer for an artist, as in marketing/tours/etc, that an an artist with a manager couldn’t do?  Do you think they are necessary or not, especially for a smaller artist or band?
Well mostly any label, indie or major, is just one big bank. They pour in money for recording, sometimes promotions, and rarely financial backing for tours. Managers just help the artist manage their career, make connections for the artist for tours and other opportunities.

2.  How do you feel that the internet/digital music has helped/hurt you?  How do you utilize the web/digital distributors?

It has helped get music out to the masses and reach an audience that would be near impossible without Internet. But one problem arises, and that is illegal downloading. Because of the easy access of stealing music, people are less interested in buying music from artist like me, and in turn makes it harder to afford the costs for producing new music.

 3.  Would you feel that artists would be more inclined to work with an independent record, major record label or remain unsigned?  What are the pros/cons of each?

Unsigned has been the popular way of going about it as of late. It is more about working their way to the top nowadays, then making a big break with most bands. Those “big breaks” still exist, but are soon to be extinct.

4.  As far as profits (I’m looking at independent labels’ profitability), do you as an artist benefit more from tours or record sales?  Does the label benefit differently?

I benefit from both. I don’t really sell my record unless I tour, and touring without merchandise is not very financially beneficial. I’m not effected by a label, because I am unsigned.

Phone Interview with Rohit Kohli, Manager of Boys like Girls

So, I called up one of my childhood friends Rohit Kohli, who I haven’t seen in 10 years.  He works for Ozone Entertainments, which is a management company based in New York.  He was happy to talk with me about the industry from a manager’s standpoint and then set me up with a friend of his who works for and Independent Label.

He told me that he personally hadn’t worked much with many independent labels because his band, Boys Like Girls, were more on the pop side of things, and thus worked with majors mainly.  He did say that he greatly preferred working with indies because they had so much less red tape and he didn’t have to deal with a huge bureaucracy of people.  He talked about how in the music industry there was a very “low signal to noise ratio”, which was an expression I liked  a lot.  Basically, there is so much music out there (the noise) that it is hard for people to find the music they want to hear (the signal).  So, the record label’s main job was marketing.  While a manager could handle some things, a record label would have a specific advertising and marketing team etc and more contacts.  A manager would rather be using his/her time doing something else.

He also told me to look into a couple of new things.  One is the 360 deal, where basically the label takes money from concert revenues etc, which used to all go to the artists, because it claims that record sales are what lead to the high concert turnout.  He also brought up that EMI, one of the major labels, had been divided between Universal and WMG, which showed how the majors were taking a big hit.