Mike McGuire

Jeez, how hard does a music exec have to work these days? First, the Internet and the consumers using it to trade music files destroy the business model for a CD.  Now label execs have to compete with advertising agencies for band contracts?

Yep, they do, witness this item describing how a band is using an advertising agency to help promote and sell their latest album.  One of the advertising agency’s key advantages, obviously, is their close ties to advertisers such as car manufacturers, CPG companies, electronics manufacturers etc. 

This seems to me to be another repercussion of the music labels misreading and subsequent mishandling of the online opportunity and digital technologies: one by one, functions that were exclusively theirs (or they controlled) have been usurped by new intermediaries. Digital recording technologies, mixing software democratized the recording process; now the realities of Internet-centric music world of 2008 threatens what was one of the labels longstanding values to (some) bands: promotion.

This seems to me to be another repercussion of the music labels misreading and subsequent mishandling of the online opportunity and digital technologies: one by one, functions that were exclusively theirs (or they controlled) have been usurped by new intermediaries. Digital recording technologies, mixing software democratized the recording process; now the realities of Internet-centric music world of 2008 threatens what was one of the labels longstanding values to (some) bands: promotion.

More evidence of the importance to the labels of strong links to the social-media sites and social networks focused on or about music. Sure, advertising agencies have links to the advertisers, but the labels are learning how to work with social-media sites at about the same time as the agencies are learning how to navigate that terrain.