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SXSW: Embrace the digital beast
Panel of record label and digital music execs tell artists to use as many digital tools as possible, even giving away their music for free.
AUSTIN, Texas--Don't fear the pirates.
A panel of music and technology insiders said today at the South by Southwest (SXSW) that artists in search of a wider audience need to embrace all forms of digital distribution, including bundling digital albums with concert tickets, uploading digital music videos to the Web, and even giving the music away for free.
"The ability to disseminate your content is like never before," music consultant Lucas Mann said. "I'm a big fan of putting as much [music] on the street as you can--when the time comes to control [the flow of free music], you can."
The availability of free music on illegal file-sharing services, long a huge thorn in the industry's side, has a decidedly different place in the music business than it did when Napster and its peer-to-peer (P2P) brethren exploded onto the scene in the late 1990s, according to Eric Garland, CEO of P2P and digital download data tracking service BigChampagne.
Garland said when his firm first started tracking P2P use, they'd get incessant complaints from the major labels about piracy.
"Now the bad news is when nobody is paying attention to an artist's new song [on P2P services], not when the songs are being stolen," he said. I encourage all artists to find some music to give away and participate in the free distribution of your music."
Piracy remains a problem, several panel members said, but the music industry's strategy of suing illegal downloaders is hurting, not helping, the overall business.
"It just hurts the music business as a whole," said Jay Frank, artist and label relations manager for Yahoo Music. "As an industry that needs to work collectively together, it's just a bad strategy."
There are smarter ways for artists and labels to combat piracy and use the variety of digital tools available--from digital downloads and video uploads to ringtones and MySpace pages--to maximize exposure, several panelists said.
"If you're going to hit anybody under 21, you've got to have a visual," Frank said. "But it doesn't have to be that $250,000 video today--you can borrow a friend's camera, film it yourself, and upload it."
"People get up in the morning and they work really hard but they're not always working smart," Garland said.
Bands need to learn as much as possible about their audience so that they can use the Internet to target that community, said Jeremy Welt, vice president of New Media at Warner Brothers Records. "You have to put all of these tools in the right order at the right time for the right audience," he said.
David Pakman, CEO of eMusic, pointed to a recent deal his company made with the Ric Ocasek-less New Cars, who are touring with Blondie later this year. People who buy tickets to the show will get 10 free downloads of tracks from either band with their ticket purchase.
"People need to worry more about the exposure than about the piracy," said Vita Iaia, director of strategy and business development at Ticketmaster. "It's all about exposure."
Labels need to maximize revenue and not fret over concerns that digital sales of individual songs will cannibalize digital album sales, several panelists said, because those new revenue streams potentially give the artist more exposure than they would have had otherwise. "[Those kinds of deals] are something that should be done by everybody," Welt added.
Frank said Island Def Jam made a mistake when it kept emerging R&B star Ne-Yo's single "So Sick" out of the digital download stores before his album came out last week, despite the fact that the song was a huge radio hit.
"They just left hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table," he said.
Welt said that every time his label has pushed a free download of a song through iTunes, sales of that song have gone up.
"It usually starts a positive sales cycle," he said.
But artists and labels need to use the Internet to connect with their audience in as many ways as possible to forge the type of relationships that artists like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty have with their audience, Garland said. He said the one-hit wonders of the world, the content most likely downloaded as mobile phone ringtones, is not a viable business model for the long term.
"We should be trying to build the business that was always the real business--music that people will want in their lives for more than three minutes and 30 seconds," he said. "The jingle biz is in trouble--it's down for the count and it's never coming back."
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