I’ve read that many artists are by-passing the Record Labels and producing on their own. Am I wrong?
The Internet is a fantastic medium for distribution, but copyrights get little murky. Just look at what's going on with Twitch and their on-again-off-again DMCA takedowns of streamers who play copyrighted music. It's insanely frustrating and can bring a streamer's revenue to zero quickly if they're "DMCA'd."
I'd love to see the DMCA repealed and rewritten. It's a cluster.
This article is a bit of a joke.
Record deals these days are, except for rare exceptions, a lose / lose for the artist.
There is NO money now in making albums. Everyone, steals the music and Spotify etc. pay so little it is meaningless even for big name artists.
You can only make money with live performance. And that only makes money for the biggest acts - for everyone else it is a wage paying grind at best.
Record deals are just marketing avenues now - and the artist pays for that. Even if I (I tried to make a living as a recording artist at one time) hand the label a finished product, and they have no recording costs, all of the contracts these days are such that even if the label sells 500,000 copies (not easy to do these days) I would still OWE them money.
Yes you can record very cheaply now and market yourself on Youtube etc. Lady gag gag comes to mind. And sell your cd’s yourself. But it is not easy. And there just isn’t much money in album sales.
Cause everyone STEALS THE MUSIC - relatively few actually pay for it.
Yes I’m a little bitter. heh
You are correct. But here’s the thing: Unless you have, in some way, a major label behind you, it is exceedingly difficult to be heard through the massive wall of self-produced stuff out there. Because of the fact that the technology to produce pro-sounding music at home is well within the reach of most musicians there are now literally hundreds of thousands of performers who flood the internet with music. Most of it sucks, some of it’s decent, a minute amount of it ever “breaks out” and goes somewhere. So, the smart way to go about it is to do it all yourself but also somehow attract the attention of a major label because if that happens then you can negotiate to have them handle just a part of your product such as marketing, instead of relying on them to handle everything and thereby ass-rape you.
Step 1: Sing like Karen Carpenter or play drums like her.
We’ve Only Just Begun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaqoQr-aCtQ
Drums
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdHyzGXAJPg