LOS ANGELES – The old indy vs. major-label schism is raising its head just about everywhere at the Digital Distribution and Music Industry conference.
But who are the good guys? Some insist it's those in the download community; others contend it's really representatives of the big-five record companies.
The argument is everywhere.
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"Record companies hope and pray that the Internet and everything we've talked about today will just go away," said Lee Phillips, a music industry attorney with Manatt, Phelps, and Phillips. "They're still praying."
Ken Park, president and COO of Hyperlock, a company that makes enhanced hyper CDs, said, "How many indies do you know that are truly indies? They're all owned by some big record company. We like to say that labels suck and that the Web is great, but Yahoo is just another big media corporation, folks, with a trillion dollars in fake money to spend."
However, Tom Sarig, an MCA Artists and Repertoire vice president, believes that free downloads have a real function for big labels. "A lot of us are starting to see free downloads as the future of the singles business," he said. "We don't make any money on single sales anyway."
During a particularly tense discussion of SDMI vs. unencrypted music downloads, EMI's vice president of marketing, Jeremy Silver, described the music industry as largely uninterested in the form music takes as long as it can be sold. "If you put a song on a recordable banana, we'll sell it for you," joked Silver.
"But would it have to be a secure banana?" asked Songs.com CEO Paul Schatzkin.
"Absolutely!"
Liars for profit: Speaking to the marketing power of the Net, MCA's Sarig shamelessly admitted one of the dirty secrets of so called grassroots marketing: "We have a guerrilla marketing team that goes on America Online [to] individual Web sites and poses as fans. They say, 'Hey, you've got to check out this band,' just like real fans." Well, not JUST like real fans.
Art, not marketing: The most interesting forum of the entire day was the artists' gathering, where people who actually play instruments and make music talked about the industry.
Panelists included former Chic member Nile Rodgers, Gang of Four bass player Dave Allen, and former Pixies bandmember Frank Black.
"It seems like we're still discussing the artist in business terms," Allen said.
"Unless we break away from that model, you're going to be saddled and shackled to a company that controls your career. I'd like to see more discussion of things like that at conferences like this," he added.
Rodgers remembered how Chic got its first hit – by taking the record around to radio and club DJs. "If the Internet can give us a real forum where we can take our music it will mean something," he said. But without the new-age marketing strategies, thank you.
"Chic wasn't hooked up with Toyota. Chic was hooked up with the groove."
