Fall Of A Music CD Empire

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Fall Of A Music CD Empire
By Ishmael El

With a title like, "Fall Of A Music Empire," it sounds like a made for television movie. Who saw the fall coming? For years, if an artist wanted to play on the big stage, they had to sign on the dotted line. If you look at the history of everyone from Louis Armstrong to Kayne West, they all had bad deals. That’s a standard practice. Are some reasons justified? Of course they are, and that’s where the biggest argument comes from. Before we get into that, let’s think about the situation of New York City (R.I.P. to their music scene). That’s a whole other story, be we will revisit it very soon. The whole point with New York is in how their established acts in Hip Hop are scanning around 50 thousand records sold. And I’d really look at pre-orders and returns and those numbers might be even lower.

If you listen to many Southern region artists have been around for some years, of if a new artist knows the story, you know what they say? They say that when New York artists would come to their city, they’d tell the locals that their sound didn’t fit into what Hip Hop was. Go do the research if you need to know the names of who did what, allegedly. I’m making a parallel point here, so I won’t go into the back and forth accusations of the art. My point is in how the fall occurred and it wasn’t seen from afar. Last we remembered, certain street artists were selling Gold status (500 thousand units), and that was with a bad track listing sequence. Not anymore. Artists have given up even trying to sell outside of the Tri-State region. The silent truth is that that won’t change unless New York became New York again. The thrill is gone.

The major record labels were all powerful. And if they didn’t say you could pass "GO" you could not pass. But slightly before that, artists were moving units on their own terms independently, or on independent labels and they were able to say whatever they wanted to say. You know what tells you the empire of major labels fell hard? The majority of the music is not selling via the labels right now. Just a few weeks ago the story came out that iTunes became the second largest retailer of music, next to Wal-Mart. Everybody knows that chains like Wal-Mart only sell music to get you in the store to buy other things. That’s why their CDs are cheaper. If you grab some gum and some cheese wiz on the way out, they made those few dollars back.

Let me back up: The empire hasn’t fallen yet. But the practices have changed drastically. Look how many folks got pink slips last year. People got pink slips at New York major record labels right before Christmas? Can you imagine that conversation with Uncle Mike at the dinner table? He’s like, "Sooo, how’s my niece doing at that big New York record label? Have you met Beyonce? I tell the folks back home about you." The ex-exec is like, "Uh, I got laid off." Whoa? The empire will be back just like that movie showed it. But right now, the troops are being hit. I think with Rome, and Greece, the fall of the empire wasn’t seen. That’s why I call the problems with the record labels ‘the fall.’

http://www.streetscientific.com

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