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- guardian.co.uk, Wednesday August 27 2008 16.00 BST
One thing you can say about this brave new world in which the music business finds itself is that it is certainly encouraging people to use their imagination. So the old model – dominated by major labels and bricks-and-mortar shops – doesn't work? Find a new one. And that's what the industry's lateral thinkers are feverishly doing.
We've had artists setting up their own web-based labels – surprisingly, one of the first to do so was Mick Hucknall, who's released records through www.simplyred.com for five years – and artists giving away their music as free downloads to encourage fans to shell out for gig tickets and T-shirts (when Keane gave away a song earlier this month it was downloaded over half a million times, handily making fans aware that Keane will shortly be releasing their third album, which will most definitely not be free).
But for every whizzo new proposition there are a dozen that sound like snake oil and malarkey. Take this new venture called Bandstocks.
Its premise is that fans can become investors in bands and share in their profits. By buying shares at £10 each, they will pay for new artists to make and market albums, and if it sells, they'll receive not just a slice of profits but the satisfaction of having given a young act a leg up. They'll also receive a credit on the CD sleeve – a nice touch, but they should be aware that when TLC decided to list the names of all their fans on the sleevenotes to the 1999 album Fanmail, they had to resort to a font so tiny that the names were virtually unreadable.
Obviously, if Bandstocks works, I'll look like the Decca A&R man who told Brian Epstein that his Liverpool beat combo didn't have a hope in hell. But it's hard to see this invest-in-a-budding-star business getting off the ground. For one thing, the combination of popular music and business is your proverbial chalk and cheese, and always has been, with disputes and distrust between artists and labels going back to the jazz era – I predict that music lovers won't exactly jump at the chance of suddenly turning into The Man. For them to be part of that process, receiving profit statements and attending AGMs, would divest music of the romanticism that every fan cherishes. The devil's liniment that is The X-Factor has done enough damage with its campaign to turn pop into a faceless commodity; no righteous fan is going to want to finish the job by investing in Bandstocks.
Second, no matter how much quirky pleasure there may be in bankrolling your own pop star, it's one of the chanciest things you could sink your money into. Of hundreds of new acts launched every year, the great majority fails to sell. To pull a name at random from the current issue of Music Week, the 2007 debut album by American rapper Plies sold a total of 222 copies in Britain, and that was with the might of Atlantic Records behind him.
Since your artist's marketing budget would depend on how much has been invested, she/he might record the best album of the year, only for it to remain unheard because there's not enough cash for advertising.
Still, I could be wrong. Would you invest? And if so, which new act deserves your investment buck?
Staff
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