The article laid out the record company business model in a way that made it sound very legitimate. It was certainly educational, but I think it's also misleading. Like TG pointed out a 1% success rate is horrible. If only 1% of the employees at any other business were able to earn a living, well they'd probably go out of business. And the record companies do treat artists as employees. That's just one example of the many flaws in the music executive philosophy.
The whole business is backwards. The record companies should be bidding for music contracts and the musicians should be hiring the executives for their services. But record companies don't compete against each other, musicians do. We have Billboard magazine to thank for that, and Casey Kasem isn't much help either. So what if the song isn't on the top 100, I still listen to it anyway. Competetion is good for business but not for art.
Maybe the biggest problem is that record companies invest too much money promoting plastic discs with recordings of canned performances rather than the artists themselves. They invest in the product instead of the people. It would probably be easier to sell a catalogue of ten thousand musicians than an inventory of ten billion CD's, but the record companies don't see it that way. They prefer prerecorded songs because they're easier to control.
I remember the discussions we had on the old Nappy forum trying to develop a business model for Napster so it wouldn't have to be shut down. Now that the issue has been brought out into the open online music distribution has more potential for profitability with each passing day. Whether it will be profitiable for record companies is still in doubt, it's their game to lose. Whoever discovers that online business model first is going to be very rich, but I hope we're not trading one music cartel for an other. There's maybe one or two right ways to distribute music in a democratic fasion and a hundred wrong ways.
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