It used to be simple, if you wanted a career in the music industry then you had to convince a label to take a gamble and sign you up. They would pour a few thousand pounds into recording your album (tens of thousands if you were lucky), deal with the artwork and pay for manufacture and then distribute the end result through their distribution channels whilst buying beer for all their press contacts to promote it. If you were super lucky they might even throw some money at recording a video, buying up ad space in the music press and financing your debut tour around the dive bars of Britain.

What this basically amounted to was a huge bank loan on the part of the labels because every penny of those expenses was later recouped from the sales of your record. Artists found themselves coming to the end of their contract technically owing the label huge amounts of money because even though their record had sold moderately well the expenses to produce those sales had been huge. Factor into that that the artists often didn’t even end up owning the audio copyright to their own songs because legally the label had paid to record them and therefore had ownership. You can see why
a lot of people moaned about the artists having no control and the labels all the power.

The reality of the argument is that ever since it’s inception the music industry has been just that, an industry. Whilst there are some independent labels that continue to sign and support artists purely because they want to support them, most labels still have to make money from the artists they sign so that they can continue to function as a business. Does this condone the tawdry flow of lowest common denominator crap meaningless pop drivel that some labels turn out just to make themselves rich? Well we’ll leave that for you to decide but while there has often been a tension between creativity and exploiting it, as an artist it’s a balance you have to strike if you want to continue being able to be paid for being creative.

As we said earlier, it used to be that the only way to get your record out was to sign with a label, as we all know that is no longer the case! The Internet and digital technology has made not only recording the music a lot easier, it’s made distributing the finished product a matter of merely clicking a button. How to monetise this newfound freedom though is the Gordian Knot that everyone is struggling with.

If you’re an artist who merely has a love for music and a desire to record and distribute your work then this is your golden age – never has it been cheaper or easier. Admittedly the competition now to get your songs heard is infinitely greater because everyone and their tone deaf mum is recording their masterpiece for the world to hear but we’ll get onto that later. If however this is not only your passion but your job then you face a whole new set of challenges. The problem now is not how to allow people to hear your music but how to get them to pay for it so that you can afford to make more? The industry is wrestling with this question and those unable to find an answer are going out of business quickly. How you approach this situation as an artist really depends on what you want out of your career and how much of the business side you are willing to do yourself.

Major Labels –>