After years of attempting to accomplish what we think is one of the most difficult tasks in the record business, getting a "FAIR" record deal from a major record company. We are ecstatic to see how the web is responsible for changing that business model which had been in place for over 100 years!
Part I
by Dwight Brewster
World-Wide Music Industry at the Crossroads
A Proposal for the Recording Industry: Embrace MP3!
Of course, switching to the MP3 format means giving up some of the control that the industry so desperately wants to keep. But history shows that business is sometimes better served through relinquishing some of that control. "The industry needs to switch to actuarial accounting rather than actual accounting," says digital music consultant Jim Griffin. What that means is that for the industry to succeed in online music, it needs to create a pool of money and work out a fair method of distributing that money -- a model, Griffin says, that works for radio, restaurateurs, and television. "We don't know what music is played in a restaurant at any given time. We don't know if consumers are videotaping television shows. The restaurant owners pay a flat fee to play whatever they want." Why is it, Griffin wonders, that restaurants are able to do that, but a similar model isn't available in which ISPs are charged a flat fee through a compulsory license to offer their users music downloads. The record industry will "rue the day" it gives up its granular, song-by-song control, but that must happen for the industry to succeed, he says.
By Eric Hellweg, April 03, 2002

The Internet of today is a new and exciting way to market almost anything, especially music. There must be millions of people who want to protect their music products because of the ease of distribution. We have never met any person who is involved in the record industry and is associated with so called "Popular Music" who made a recording and didn't think it was a hit. After all there must be another reason to go through all the bother and expense to make a recording and not think they had a reasonable chance to make their money back or at the least gain a small share of the potential music market is not realistic. It is after all only the artists who have "made it" who have established a financial means to make the kind of record "they" want.

What does this all mean? It means the music consumer has a chance to assert him or herself. All we ever hear from the media is the drone of it will be "great for the consumer." Sure everyone wants more music then they can afford, but for the most part we all go through the normal channels and purchase the music of our choice. The problem has been only a select few music artists could get through the pipeline and have a chance to succeed in the recording industries 14 billion dollar worldwide marketplace. After all there is only "a finite" available rack space in the retail stores! Looking back on the situation we had the major companies all wrong. The distribution network of the record companies, production houses, and retail stores both large and specialty as well as the infamous record/book clubs were running on overload the last 30 years! The reason the Internet is destined to flourish because it can distribute a much larger proportion of the TOTAL records available on an international basis.

Do you know the numbers? About 3,500 different products are released EVERY MONTH, only about 50 make any noise in the "popular music" categories and of those only about 10 get any radio airplay. Things are changing for example; in the 80's the Macintosh was king, now it's not. Oh yea it's a great computer but for whatever reason (that's a whole different discussion) it's not in wide use anymore (about 6% of the market). We use this metaphor to bring light to a similar string of events.
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