He finally agrees to sign you and your group and for years every song you make flops. Pressing them himself? Out of the question. Little do you know, the owner of that record label can’t get anyone in the state of Michigan to press his LPs, and, even if they will, they won’t give him a line of credit. There’s a record label in your city giving people a shot and you want to get down. You form a group because, hell, who isn’t in one - people are singing on every corner. Imagine if you were a singer growing up in the Brewster-Douglas projects, Detroit in the early 60s. If you were a recording artist in that world, it made perfect sense to join on to a Label. So it’s important to walk the reader back to a time where one had to go to a location, take cash out of their wallet, pay for an album, cassette, or cd, remove and discard plastic, put said piece of media in a device and drop a needle or press play. A seventeen year old may have never touched an item that contains music outside of his or her phone ( you have to remember, the iPhone came out in 2007…they were seven). More often than not, it’s because I think about an audience that is growing up in a world that never held a physical item that they identified as music. Would the fall never come to an end?” The reason that my small ideas become long-ass, drawn out pieces is because I know that I’m doing a topic a disservice if I don’t speak about its origin and where we are now. I start doing research and then I’m like Alice, “down, down, down. My natural inclination is to go deep into the rabbit hole. Either way, we’re going to learn some shit along the way. Hopefully, in doing so, we’ll come up with some answers. Mostly importantly I know this - big money is involved, and I ain’t watched The Wire all these years not to know to “follow the money.” So that’s what we’re going to do. And I know we’ll have to discuss some of the functions that labels handle. I know that we’ll have to talk about some key labels in the history of Black music - from R&B labels to the more modern Rap ones. I promise you, half the time when I ask a question or start writing about a topic, I have no idea about the answer or where the topic will lead me. If the Internet is the big disruptor, and it is (or was), why do we still need these record labels? Yet, the Big Three - Universal, Sony, & Warner - are still going to see profits this year, they have no problems signing artists, and for them, it appears to be business as usual. Not a week goes by that I don’t run into some article about this artist that refuses to sign a deal or that artist who turned that (deal) down. I’ ve seen 540 thread-long arguments about if Chance the Rapper was independent or not.Īrtists are singing songs of independence left and right. The record label used to be needed, handling every aspect of production, but now that artists don’t need that, why do they still sign with labels? Why Do People Still Sign to Major Labels, Again?
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