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Thursday, June 17, 2010

Music's Digital Age: Who Wins? Who Loses?

By: Miki Turner (Jet Magazine; June 14 - 21, 2010; pg. 43)

Quotes from Artists & Executives .......

WILL.I.AM - "Yes, there are no record stores, but hell, artists never got paid selling records anyway. And the ones that did, there were very few. I was Blessed to be one of the few, but do you know how many records I had to sell to recoup? We got by selling merchandise & writing songs."

Jon B. - "What the industry stopped doing was believing in real artistry. There is so much liability for a label to trust an artist and there have been a lot of artists who have messed it up for other artists because they took their budgets for granted. They would have a multimillion-dollar budget and then produce a mediocre record. I understand both sides of the coin."

Toni Braxton - "The advantages of everything being digital now is that it's instantaneous and you can get it immediately. I really don't like to look at is as bad, I like to look at it as progression."

Ice Cube - "What's been happening is that you look around and some of your favorite artists don't do records no more and fans don't understand why. It's not a lucrative business no more. So, that artist is off doing something else to make a living."

Letoya Luckett - "Back when I first started, there was money, money, money! It was just spending and not even looking at the deficit. It was like you want it, you got it! Now with all the downloading, the money isn't there anymore. The music industry was the thing to be a part of. That's not to say that's not the way it is now, but you've got to have plan A, B, C and D these days."

Johnnie Walker (Former Def Jam Exec. & now Exec. Dir. of the Memphis & Shelby County Music Commission & Founder/Chairman of The National Assoc. of Black Female Executives in Music & Ent.) - "Labels have been focusing so much on songs and the quick delivery of those songs that they neglected to focus on developing acts. So, when the song was over, so was the artist.

The record industry - the one that controlled everything for so long - they're in trouble. The music industry is fine. The fan is really not buying the CD, he's buying the music. The internet and all the social sites have limited the record company's control of the fan's access to the music."