New Year's Resolutions for the Music Industry

Greg Kot, music critic for the Chicago Tribune, proposed these reforms for the music industry in the new year. I think most of them are right on point and figured I'd share them with you guys.

The New Year that will be--hopefully
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Greg Kot, the Tribune music critic
December 31, 2004

Everybody needs resolutions to live by in the new year, and the denizens of the music world are no exception. In case anybody's stuck for ideas, I've got some recommendations.

The music industry should resolve to:

Lay off with the lawsuits already. The lawyers representing the multinational corporations that dominate the music industry have filed nearly 7,000 lawsuits since 2003 against fans for sharing music files online. Instead of paying the legal fees to smash its audience into submission, the industry should be spending its steadily shrinking pile of dough on ways to best serve its consumers. Imagine how much better off the Sonys and BMGs of the world would be if they had dedicated their money, muscle and manpower to creating a flexible, easy and inexpensive digital distribution network instead of resisting it all these years?

Stop overcharging for concert tickets. The idea of charging fans more than $50 to see a show is a ridiculous, I don't care how "golden" the seat is. Or how about $30 to sit on the soggy lawn in an amphitheater? Get real.

Roll back service fees. The price of "convenience" is now edging toward 33 percent of already inflated concert ticket prices. What's convenient about that?

Bring back artist development. Newcomers from Bruce Springsteen to Depeche Mode were given several albums to find their voice before they found an audience. Quirky artists such as Neil Young and Prince were allowed to go on tangents, and make albums that disrupted commercial expectations. The idea of investing in art is a concept that has gone the way of the 20th Century.

But if it doesn't come back soon, the major labels will soon find themselves with no artists left to promote.

Spend less money on marketing. Most of the industry's costs are swallowed up in hyping and selling music rather than creating it. Who knows? If the record companies resolved not to devote millions of dollars to pushing the latest hunk of cheese from J-Lo or Hoobastank, maybe CD prices wouldn't have to be so high.

Artists should resolve to:

Worry less about getting "signed" to a label deal and think small. Local touring, a Web site streaming new music and stocked with MP3 files, and homemade CDs are the way to build a following one listener at a time. In the arena of career-building, patience isn't just a virtue. It's a necessity.

Music radio should resolve to:

Play more independent music. This means they'll have to find the heart, guts and soul to treat music as music, rather than as a revenue stream. This means hiring programmers who love music and actually listen to it, rather than ones who play whatever they're spoon-fed from the major labels and their legion of promoters.

Fans should resolve to:

Stay away when bands and concert promoters charge too much for a show--no matter how much they love the band.

Do everything they can to support the mom-and-pop record store. Sure, in this Internet era, they're dinosaurs. But without the mom and pop, music connoisseurs would lose an essential part of their community: the quirky selection, the music-geek knowledge, the racks of fanzines and the walls filled with posters. Who wants a world where the record-buying experience is reduced to picking through a limited selection of mainstream CDs at a giant discount store? And, let's face it, ordering online may be more convenient, but it isn't nearly as much fun as the hands-on experience of looking for that elusive CD and stumbling across three other gems in the process.

Critics should resolve to:

Let the music dictate the story, not the media campaigns.

Write for the readers, not to mollify the record industry, befriend the bands or impress other critics.

Revisit these resolutions annually until they stick.

Copyright (c) 2004, Chicago Tribune