Actually, I don’t give a shit about the fate of the major labels and will laugh as they continue their slide into epic fail, but this is a cool idea, and if I had the contacts or technical skill I’d try it myself.
Offer, for (paid) download, the individual tracks (“stems”, do they call them now?) of songs, i.e., the bass track, guitar track, drum track, a capella vocal track, etc. for people to use to do remixes or mash-ups. Interactivity is going to be a big part of the music industry for a while to come, I think, and they could theoretically get 5+ times the profits from selling the songs as a whole if they charged $0.99 for each track. Hell, they could probably make a mint off just the James Brown and George Clinton catalogs alone.
Are there any sites like this? Would there be any legal issues? I’d think the artists and labels would be looking for any kind of new revenue stream they could find at this point.
Do they? Seems like everything recorded since the '20s has been remastered lately, and I assume they use the master tapes for those, though I could be wrong.
I think that the price point is wrong, and that the market for this sort of thing is really quite small. Major acts that do sampling will pay much more than $1 per track to sample. Currently, they often hire musicians to reproduce very similar versions because it’s easier than securing the rights to the original tracks.
And people making videos for youtube will probably continue to ignore the rights issues and make their mashups and remixes. Ok, maybe a few of them will pay the $1 for the license, but I bet it’s not even enough to make up for the losses with the bigger names.
Yeah. That will thrill the 10,000 people or so who do this. Save the record companies? That’s peanuts. Big whoop.
What the record companies will do is concentrate acts that can fill large concert venues. They will cut back drastically on independent artists or anyone who’s the slightest bit different from the mainstream. Artists will record, but get no distribution; they will have to give their work away or be considered with the suspicion most people give to vanity press authors in publishing.
Ultimately, there will be more music but infinitely more crappy music (and I don’t mean currently popular music – everyone who can grab an instrument and a computer can put out a CD, no matter how awful they are).
Some artists/labels let you do it for free. Here’s a Real World Records page that has several downloads for people to re-mix songs, including Peter Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers” and “Shock The Monkey.”
There are plenty of people in-between major acts that do sampling and those making Youtube mashups. You could make the same case about the actual songs - who’s going to pay for them when they can illegally download them? - but there are a good number of people who still actually buy albums/mp3s. I’d imagine it would be the same with the tracks available for remixing. DJs, especially, who seem to be (strangely enough) becoming more common than they were in the days of records, would make use of the service, I’d imagine. And I think you’re underestimating the amount of people who’d be interested if the service was widely available, especially with sound editing software so easy and cheap to use these days.
The problem is simple, there is too much product. It wasn’t till the 50s came along when singers started to make decent money, before then they were paid, industry standards.
This provided a nice middle class living but they didn’t have the reach they did once the 50s rolled around. I remember an interview with Phyllis McGuire commenting on how fortunate they were to come to popularity (the McGuire Sisters that is) when they did and not a few years earlier, simply because they wouldn’t have made the money they did.
There are lots of people who can sing and sing well. Add to this, outside of Dianne Warren, who’s been rewriting the same song for 20+ years, there are almost no professional songwriters. You get an overabundance of people who can sing, singing songs that are written by people who can’t write.
Coupled with the end of the Rock Era in the mid 90s and the mainstream music is R&B and HipHop which lends itself to only one form, you get in trouble.
Finally you still have the old music. Not only are acts competing against others they are competing against dead artists as well.
Too much product = low demand. This is why jobs like waiting tables and fast food are low pay. Too many people have enough skills to do the jobs needed. Too many people can sing well enough to produce all the recordings people want to buy