By Maggie Cassidy
MC Grandmaster Flash once said, “It’s all about the money, ain’t a damn thing funny.”
But in today’s music industry, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for major record labels to dangle large-sum contracts in front of artists’ faces and convince them to take a bite. Most bands have seen groups of their peers enjoy 15 minutes of fame before crashing to the ground like Icarus.
“If you set out and say, ‘I just want to sell out and make a million dollars,’ there’s a slight chance you might be able to do that, but you probably won’t. There are a lot of one-hit wonders that are broke,” said Ryan Mercedes, a vocalist and guitarist in Boston-based band Lannen Fall and a former Northeastern student.
He said he looks at a band like a small business in which the owner takes “something that they genuinely enjoy and try to make money off it.”
“We love to make music, so if there’s a chance that we could do that every day for the rest of our lives, that’s what we want,” he said.
Mercedes said he thinks labels are just a small piece of a much larger puzzle to try to make that dream come true.
“You can get signed to the best label in the world and still fail,” he said.
The band, who produced an EP with independent Boston label Red Blue Records, is more focused on cultivating its sound and nurturing its fan base than getting too big too quickly – as are cross-town colleagues Lansdowne. For both bands, longevity is key, and the tortoise will win the race – not the hare.
“I think the ultimate goal is to play for the audience we can for the longest time we can. It’s pretty simple for us,” said Lansdowne frontman Jon Ricci. “I have been really focused on the do-it-yourself strategy in a way that we’re growing substantially but in a way that we can sustain it.”
He said there’s a lot to learn before a band is ready to sign to a label.
“It’s pretty tough when you’re living out of a van, you shower every four days, you’re eating Ramen or from the dollar menu,” he said. “You need to learn how to live, with basically four brothers, or you’re married to four other people. There are so many things that people don’t see.”
As Mercedes put it: “It’s not all sex and drugs. It goes a lot deeper than that.”
Every musician interviewed insisted he was in a band to make music, not money. Likewise, they said they would only consider a label contract in order to produce more music.
However, sophomore music industry major Scott Shelton, an assistant artist and repertoire (A’R) consultant for Warner Music Group, was equally adamant that major labels will always have customers lining up at the door. Nonetheless, he noted that they are “due a serious evolution” to catch up with technology.
“If you’re in it to make money, which everyone is, [major labels] are going to offer you the most money,” he said. “So it’s, ‘Do I sell my soul here and get the big contract with MTV and T-shirts with my face on it?'”
He said artists like Young Joc earn more revenue off ring tones than an artist like Alicia Keys would make off a platinum record. By his estimates, Young Joc might make about $2 on every $3 ring tone sale, while Alicia Keys would make the industry standard of 9.1 cents per song, per album. By those formulas, if Young Joc sells a million ringtones, he makes about $2 million on $3 million of sales, but Keys sees less than $100,000 on a 10-song album making more than $10 million.
“It’s about money and art,” Shelton said. “It’s a very dangerous thing when you’re turning music into a product to be sold.”
However, the Internet is providing artists alternative opportunities to the major labels. While a label would allow marketing and distribution to be done “more efficiently and on a larger scale,” Ricci said, they’re no longer necessary. With music networking sites like MySpace, Purevolume and MusicNation, booming major labels no longer have a stronghold on a band’s ability to spread its music across the nation.
Disc-pressing and online distribution outlets like CDBaby and iTunes, have also made labels a smaller piece of the puzzle. The consumer’s new ability to easily identify music in video games, commercials and TV shows has had a similar affect, as has YouTube.
Shelton said rock bands tend to be most resistant to major labels. He said that up until the advent of the Internet, there has been a “push-pull” for bands to choose between independent or major labels.
Major labels, which today all stem from the “big four” – Warner, Universal, EMI and Sony BMG – have more money and offer a vast amount of resources, but demand more control over artists’ creative bounds. Independent labels cannot offer the same resources or the big paychecks, but generally allow more artistic license.
“The CEOs [of major labels] are expected to hit certain price points, and they are allowed no failure,” Shelton said. “Independents
