Another Reason Music Labels Have Problems

Music CD sales are down 20% in the first quarter of 2007 compared with the same period in 2006. The typical explanation you might hear is the upswing of digital music. But there is a danger in equating the proximity of events with causality, and many are missing another significant cause for lowered sales: crap product. I've been continuing reading Chasing Cool and came across the following:

Today, artist development departments and A&R executives, those people responsible for signing talent, are disappearing. Their replacements, instead, often look to data to define whom they sign. it becomes less about a gut decision to sign someone who seems genuinely talented than it is about the arc on a spreadsheet.

Of course data is important when making decisions, but that information has to fit into an intellectual framework and inform the decision, not replace it. Look at the numbers the wrong way, or misinterpret them, and you will only more quickly and thoroughly tank what you do. By watching the tracks on the stations, the labels forget that they are pushing what goes onto the stations - for an example, look at the settlement between the FCC and some major broadcasters about the station owners taking payola from labels. Even when the choices were strictly from the stations, this is an example of companies making decisions for consumers - and then depending on the results to see what consumers want. Real commercial power comes from giving people what they didn't know they wanted. Look at the emergence of trends in music over the last 2,000 years - each new type of music was a significant break with what came before. Yet when you base your decisions on history, you get more of the same. If labels want to be relevant, they need to stop trying to be, as Melville put it, eminently safe. Growth comes from risk, not assurance.