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Business News Labels & Publishers
French label closes, explains challenges of French market
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 21 March 2011
French electronic label Institubes has announced it is shutting its doors, saying that the only way for a label to stay in business these days is to pursue brand alliances and sync deals, and that’s not really something its owners are interested in doing. Which is fair enough, I suppose. Of course, the French record industry, more than most, has seen record sales slide into almost nothing in recent years.
In a parting post, the label’s founders Jean-René Etienne and Emile Shahidi recall how they spent five years building an audience for their label and artists only to find that “once that’s done and you have something resembling an audience, it becomes apparent that this is not really your job – your job is to reconcile the public with the very idea of buying records”.
Outlining the challenges facing smaller labels in a recorded music market that has shrunk as much as it has in France, they continued…
“We’re closing shop because the operation is losing too much money, this much is clear. Most of what we could have done to prevent or delay this outcome reside in two words: lifestyle and branding. Investing in t-shirts and co-branding, scoring ‘collaborations’ or sponsorship deals with deep-pocketed companies. I have but a regret: we actually did it sometimes. We should have said no more often.
Bands struggling to get together with brands, artists and audience deriving more validity from corporate interest than from anything else, bands happy to learn that in the future they would have to ‘take charge of their own promotion’: this wasn’t for us. In other words, on our small scale, we should have been able to carve a non-capitalist niche within the larger corporate world. I thought, being young and naive when we started, that ‘underground’ meant just that.
The fact that ours is a struggling industry, where 90% of your time is spent ‘staying afloat’, obscures an important fact: we are still playing by the rules that got us fucked in the first place. The way we do business is defective: our values are defective, our contracts are defective, our post-Napster economy itself is defective.
I just read an article by a label owner who states that ‘anything we can do to stay afloat should be condoned’. I don’t think so, no. Staying afloat by any means necessary is a meaningless pursuit. The only honest way for a record label to make money is by selling records. We’ve always been uneasy about selling anything else.
And our current cultural economy isn’t healthy either. Consumer practices are fucked. You don’t need me to tell you that music is devalued. Not only because we no longer sell shit (and even when you do, it’s hard to shake the feeling that you’re selling free shit), but also because tracks are peaking faster than tumblr memes.
In our historical moment, music is everywhere but second or third or tenth to many other interests and areas of culture. Fashion, Apple, video games, ‘devices’, social media, etc. And that’s cool, I guess. But I don’t want to have to be a function of fashion. Nor do I want to urge an artist to publish half-baked tracks every month in order to stay “relevant”. Depleted accounts is one thing, but depleted attentions?”
