How messed up is the industry when you have to sell 500,000+units to be a success. I really think the industry needs to examine how they do business. Million dollar video clips? That's just plain wrong. If they were a bit more frugal they wouldn't be in such bad shape.

rialb said:

That's pretty much it right there. That and radio... You have to pay TONS of money to get played on radio and MTV. It's sad that the music industry force-feeds the masses a bunch of crap most of the time.

rialb said:

If only you could slip this on a memo to the powers that be.

I have a little theory that once an artist breaks big, they really have a 100,000 true fans. These are the people that you really don't have to sell to. They'll follow your career and know when you have new material and so-on. Anybody after that has to be sold, hard. I don't know about you but to me 100,000 units is a lot of units. Gold (500,000) is phenomenal.

Radio costs way too much to promote to. But there's something about radio that shocked me years ago when I first heard about it. Radio stations have to pay to play the songs they play. Songwriters get royalties. Now I'm all for royalties but c'mon, I don't believe any radio station should have to pay to play your songs, which is basically free advertising to begin with. Promoting to radio has gotten out of hand and something needs to be done independently so people don't have to pay so much to get the song on the air (like how about paying nothing) or having radio stations pay everytine they play a song (which lets face it will definitely have an affect on what gets played).


Video budgets need to scale down tenfold. And the record companies throw money away when they don't have to. Two wasteful examples are when Nelly's "Delimma" was riding the top of the charts. The song had already saturated radio and was number one on the charts. The success was a surprise to the label. So what do they do? They rush an expensive video into production. Nwo forgive me if I'm worng but if your record is already number one where does the purpose of the video come in? Same thing with Usher's "Yeah". Already a huge hit and on the charts for weeks before a rush-to-air video (and it looks it) was produced. The sad thing is the video is sub-par yet still looks like they dropped a about a half mil on it. Money unnecessarily spent. So yeah, the record companies have themselves to blame for out-of-control budgets and unheard of sales goals.

CynicKill said:

There was interesting documentary about this on NPR not too long ago. There's a new concept growing among corporate radio programmers called "Neo-Radio."

Check it out here: http://www.npr.org/featur...Id=3057018

I didn't do a very good job of fully explaining what I was talking about above. If a band has a solid following, and they can sell 100,000 units or more with every release shouldn't any label be able to make a nice profit from those sales? I just think that it stinks that if you don't sell a shit load of records you are often dropped. Many artists don't need tons of cash pumped into their albums in order to sell them. They may not sell millions of copies but they don't need millions in promotion either. I think it's very obvious that "the system" is not working and rather than fire tons of people maybe the labels could adjust their stategies?

I got that, I just needed to elaborate on why I think record companies have painted themselves into a corner when it comes to record sales. The fact is they don't know how to, or more honestly have no interest in, streamlining their budgets. Their thinking is why sell 100,000 when we can go for ten million?

Bottom Line,,,,

Promotions for an artist are out the roof. Labels spend WAY too much money promoting and molding a superstar. You speak of 100,000 units. it's getting to a point if an artist doesn't sell a million then they are in trouble. Ask Tony Braxton or TLC

And as for them losing sales,, well The Riaa and Major Labels are reaping what they sow.