I’m dubious. Corporate record labels will be extinct the day I have a flying car in my garage. It seems to me that groups that tried to go without labels (Beatles with Apple Records, Grateful Dead with Round Records in the mid 1970s, Prince with his own in the mid 1990s) quickly find
they are quagmires. Lots of work involved. Some groups like Radiohead and Ani DiFranco may be able to go it on their own. But the vast majority want to make money and the best way is with a major label that can organize PR campaigns, get songs on TV and films, do publicity, etc.
Can you make an album like that in a basement studio with no engineer or producer?
With posters that say Big Music isn’t going anywhere, an unstated subtext is that the only viable music marketing is mass marketing - that there is, and has always been, too much talent out there to make it worthwhile for any but the luckiest of the best-marketed.
I do question the idea that online/viral/regional promotion will only get you “fanatics,” though. Of course, it’s all a question of what level of success is really success.
I agree with Ministre that it’s somewhat easier for acts who do only their own material. Alternative marketing gets a lot harder when you play classics and standards, not just because of the copyright and rights infrastructure, but because old music, however cool and funky, just does not appeal much to people who value fresh thinking.
True that. Quicksand springs right to mind. If there was any justice in the world they would have been huge.
aaaargh, that didn’t come out quire right (it’s late).
I meant not so much that old music is for lame tools (that’s some baggage I have from being a collector type for many years). More that the closer you get to the industry infrastructure - rights, copyright, etc. - the more difficult it becomes to market creatively in any way at all. It seems to discourage out-of-the-box thinkers.
It might make Big Music somewhat happy if only the biggest ticket acts (ie Radiohead) could break out of the system, and people still had to go thru the industry to get established. They’d cry over missing some bucks, but at leats they would still be the gatekeepers and be needed.
Yes and no. Yes you need to have an engineer and a producer, but that can be a member of the band.
While I would like to agree with Mr. Yorke, I think he’s being optimistic. Getting broad exposure still requires the kind of hype machine that only major labels can put together. Recently, DARPA ran an experiment to see how quickly one group of people could find ten huge red balloons placed in random populated locations in the US.
https://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/default.aspx
Anyway, the people who were quickest to find all ten were the ones with the most media coverage. The one outlier was a guy with a large twitter fanbase. You need coverage to get the word out of how awesome a band is. Big music companies are still the best way.
One word: Spotify.
I don’t think Prince belongs in this group - he is a Force of Nature in the music world to this day, on his own terms, working from his own studio (Paisley Park, of course). We buy every new album he puts out (still about one a year). He decided to just give away his Planet Earth album (some in combination with tickets to his concert, other just cause). Apparently record stores didn’t care for this. 
two words…Spotify also
That is the way I consume music now. I’m a free subscriber at the moment but will upgrade to premium when I get a new phone that will run the mobile version.
that is the way of the future, the labels just don’t see it yet.
Yorke warned to not sign with corporate labels and astro erroneously broadened that to all record labels.
The corporate labels might remain in existence as distribution companies, but their business model is dying. Artists are talking about no longer releasing CDs, so their model of pressing and shipping discs, paying for end-caps and mass media ads is no longer necessary for music to be bought and sold. Every worthwhile function of a label is something that can be easily done by much smaller “boutique” labels.
I’ve known “record labels” that consisted of a 2 or 3 people. If “distribution” consists of getting a file to iTunes and Amazon, promotion consists of maintaining e-mail contact with radio programmers and maintaining web sites and social networking…what part of this requires a huge corporate behemoth?
Before Frampton Comes Alive labels were tiny. There were dozens of labels in New York City alone. Then a handful of mega-sellers attracted the attention of huge corporations which were never about music, they were about making money.
I’m friends with a band that signed with a label after successfully building a fan base. Their label is tiny, but effective, with no more than a dozen people. It’s small enough to perform necessary services for a handful of artists.