Thursday, April 26, 2012

Fire The Promotion Staff; That'll Fix It

The machinations of the music business have always been a mystery to me.

The business model appears so simple.  Find and record an amazing song.  Give it to a unique and talented artist.  Send it to radio and expose it in every other platform possible.  If listeners of the format you want to succeed in love it, you'll see immediate positive response.  It will sell.  You make money.

The radio stations playing it get great ratings.  We make money too.

Happy listeners, who can't wait to see the artist live and in person.

Win/win.

Then, there are situations like Andy Gibson's last week.  Label restructures and disappears, seemingly as promotion people are fired.  This is the second time in the last year the same thing has happened with James Stroud's labels.

I don't mean to single out Stroud.  He knows a lot more about music than I ever will.

This kind of thing happens all the time in the "record" business, so I suppose it's not really even anything new.

However from my perch in radio, it always looks like the morning show's ratings are bad, so we solve the problem by firing the sales department?

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