In London a few weeks ago, I had the usual pleasure of meeting one of my closest industry peers. Due to time constraints, the meetings were relatively short, but they gave me an
insight.
While he wasn't criticising me, he professed - in an unmistakenly clear tone - that he generally is so tired of all sorts of excuses in the industry. Around him, he always heard excuses for why this and that can't or didn't happen. While no-one are able to perform miracles during these challenging times, he had a cutting edge point:
identify the problem and find a way to work around it.That's not always easy in today's music industry. Creative talent are blowtorching the labels and publishers, managers are still going for the highest advances to get their percentages (and acting surprised and furious after they find out that the labels and publishers are equally obsessed about money over quality and "long term" efforts, which they should have had the experience to realise in the first place), while the labels and publishers are still feeling the devastating effects of uploading, and retailers are still begging for higher discounts (if they are not closing, that is.) The reasoning behind it all may be logical and all, but there's nothing new in it. We're all blaming each other to make ourselves look good. But we're not solving the problems.
It's almost as if we are stuck in a giant pain body, where we feed off anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, and emotional drama, and really enjoy and desire to remain there. We have to ask ourselves: do we really WANT to be stuck in a body of pain?
Please don't misunderstand me: the crisis is extremely real for everyone who have lost their jobs and still struggle to make a living. Fact (not whining): Personally, I lost my label manager job at Playground Music Norway in 2004 and was offered a temporary 75% position at the same company for the following year. I had some time to adapt to the new times, so I was relatively lucky. However, on April 1 - nearly four years after I left in 2005 - the Norwegian affiliate of Playground was closed down. The immediate reaction from my now 8-year old daughter when I told her about the closure was, "it was a good thing then that you got out so early." This is why I love my kids. Sometimes, kids are so much more clear-headed than us grown-ups.
Back in 2006, I became devastated by MBO's decision to cut down on its Norwegian operations after I signed artists such as Susanne Sundfør, the Alexandria Quartet, Karin Park, Kate Havnevik, Tier'n & Lars (Vaular, a critically acclaimed hip hop artist) and more. I am not ashamed to say I spearheaded one of the finest A&R efforts in Norway during 2005 and 2006. But the market changed - and still changes - almost every week, and it's no easy task for any investor to finance and operate a company (filesharers, red-green politicians and journalists should try it some time). I still have good relations with the MBO-associated company A:larm Music in Copenhagen, and don't blame anyone, but it gave me an experience I wouldn't want to be without.
Almost without exceptions, anyone can get through any kind of crisis. If you are in a crisis right now, ask yourself if you WANT to be in it. You might need help from friends or family, but it's possible to define your own reality. Lots of people have reinvented themselves and recreated a better life based on their experiences.
Like another industry mentor of mine said, if I was able to start in the business without any experience, I should be able to continue in it with the knowledge I now have.This morning, as I updated myself on the Norwegian music sales statistics from the IFPI - where my label is a member - I got a timely reminder about what my industry colleague said in London. That we in the music industry should do like
Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop and encourage ourselves to
stop whining.
After some years of adapting to new times, this is the current view on the world I will steer my company after:
We have a digital music market which is way stronger than the singles market ever was:
During the 30 years from 1977 to 2008, the Norwegian singles market - on vinyl and CD - amounted to some 28 million units. In 2008 alone, the digital market amounted to over 46 million downloads and streams. The figures are of course not directly comparable and people may have started buying two or three tracks instead of the whole album.
But if we tweak our minds a bit, we can actually argue and think that this is the most attractive singles market that we've ever had, and one that the old music industry never would have had resources or capacity to handle. Instead of spending a lot of time and money on completing an entire album, we should release one or more singles, like in the old days. Build careers brick by brick, take it easy, don't expect debut acts to instantly compete with the current sales of the Beatles or Metallica (who also needed time to nurture their careers). We are often too impatient.
On the subject of songs versus albums:
The albums market - CD and vinyl - in 2008 was still bigger than any year before 1991 (in volume terms) and 1992 (in value terms).
If the industry was able to create artist and songwriter careers from the '50s to the late '80s in a market significantly smaller than the one we operate in now, why do we pretend that we have fewer opportunities today?
There are of course plenty of reasons, but we spend way too much time philosophising about them (look at me, I'm doing it right now, while I probably should do something more useful, but I think it's important to try and spread some positivity.)
While it's easy to become sentimental about the old times, we can use that sentimentality to think that there actually existed a market for music before the amazing '90s. During the decade from 1990 to 1999, the sales and distribution channels exploded to massive proportions. It's no wonder that it's been a challenge - especially for the A&R and marketing staffers - to sustain the activity in those commercial pipelines. I don't like to say we deserved this market breakdown, but we definitely had it coming.
So maybe we have a golden future ahead of us, provided that we persuade ourselves that the current digital market and still significant albums market represent a giant opportunity to develop new artists, as well as not being greedy in the short-term if a debut album really takes off in order to be focused on the target audience and be able to sell a second and third album as well.
We can use the digital opportunities as a basis for communicating directly with fans. Instead of trying to reach out to our target audiences through radio, if it is so that they don't listen so much to radio anymore. Instead of trying to reach them through newspapers, if they happen to not read newspapers anymore. The same with magazines and TV stations.
Marketing is more than advertising. It's product, price, promotion (and advertising), and place (distribution). It's about understanding where we find our audience and how we are able to communicate with them.
Most importantly, it's not about CD's. People don't want CD's. They want the music that's on them.
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