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Business News Education & Events The Great Escape 2011
TGE: What the papers said 2011
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 24 May 2011
Alexandra Topping in The Guardian on the Tony Wadsworth keynote: “They have been accused of greed and short-sightedness, seen as the fat cats making obscene profits on the back of musicians’ creativity. But record labels have been unfairly portrayed as dinosaurs of the music industry, the head of the body representing the UK’s record companies said on Friday. Speaking at the Great Escape conference in Brighton, Tony Wadsworth, chairman of the record-label body the BPI and former CEO of EMI, said that the record label in 2011 was leaner and a more flexible beast that would play a vital role in the future of the industry. Predictions of the demise of the label, as artists are increasingly able to release their own music and speak to fans directly using social networks like Facebook and Twitter, were premature, he said”. read the article
Duncan Geere on Wired.co.uk on ‘Making Money From Music’: “So how can record companies, management agencies, gig promoters, digital music services and – most of all – artists themselves make money from music in 2011? Turns out that there’s no easy answer – there’s a tangle of business models and management strategies, whipped into even more of a lather by the complex global licensing ecosystem. As a result, companies are rapidly evolving extra limbs to try and do everything – including the major record labels”. read the article
John-Paul Greenock in Music Void on the ‘Future Of Licensing’ debate: “The feel from the ‘Making Money From Music’ panel as a whole was that to make money in the current climate involves deft navigation via a range of business models convoluted by our ever complex global licensing system. This was backed up later in the day by the panel discussing ‘The Future of Digital Licensing’ which had Ed Averdieck (formerly OD2, now Real World) commenting it was “very difficult to move from national to global licensing with so many gatekeepers to navigate”. The subject of collective licensing caused temperatures then to be raised as Patrick Rascow (BASCA) took the line of ‘without collective bargaining you run the risk of getting less than a fair deal’ while others including Eric Mackay (CELAS), saw collective rights as a potential to be “shafted”. Thankfully all in the good spirit of debate”. read the article
Jim Carroll in the Irish Times on Will Page’s ‘What Now After MySpace’ keynote, which featured Topspin’s Ian Rogers: “Ian Rogers from Topspin talked a lot of sense during his spiel on direct-to-fans business models. For new bands, their business is not in 99 cent downloads but in tickets and t-shirts. He also said that bands shouldn’t under-estimate the huge sales potential in premium products, saying that the Beastie Boys were shocked by the demand from their fanbase for premium content. There was also a comparison made to the book market, with the hardback market as the “premium” market. Stressing the continued importance of email in the direct to fans channel, Rogers advised bands that their business model in this channel should be to do one small thing every week (ie blog post, video interview etc) and one large thing every month (ie release an album etc) to keep their fans engaged, but not to feel pestered”. read the article
Duncan Geere on Wired.co.uk on the same keynote, which also featured Bandcamp advisor Andrew Dubber: “So instead of one single replacement for MySpace’s role in helping bands make it, it’s looking like there’s a multitude, which all serve different – and complementary – roles. ‘People are finding the right tools to do what they want to do’, says Dubber. He added in a subsequent conversation with Wired.co.uk: ‘The main way of consuming music is undergoing a shift, and I think there’s cause to celebrate if it means that more people can be involved in making and sharing music as a social and cultural activity – not just when large corporations can make massive profits selling vast quantities of a small number of commodities”. read the article
PRS for Music Chris Carey speaking to M Magazine about his State Of The Nation session: “Looking at the headline statistics, 2010 was not a good year for the UK music industry, with the BPI reporting trade value from music sales falling 11% and PRS for Music live revenues (from ticket sales only) down almost 7%. But the problem with headlines is that they rarely tell the whole story. Certainly, there are concerns about the fall in trade value, but there were some encouraging signs last year too. Sales of single digital tracks grew by around 5%, outperforming the maturing US market, which saw no growth. Digital albums, which account for around 50% of digital sales value, saw double-digit growth and other digital revenues grew significantly”. read the article
Clash Magazine reports on the same session: “Speaking at the Great Escape, PRS For Music economist Chris Carey indicated that ticket sales dropped by almost 7% in 2010. The drop follows a decade of sustained growth, with sales rising by more than 9% in 2009. The dip could be seen as a market correction, with sales falling to a more sustainable level of growth. The Guardian reports that Carey told an industry panel: ‘I don’t think this is a disaster, I think it is a blip, I’m not worried about the future of live music. Continuing, the economist pointed to a lack of big name tours. 2011 by contrast, was set to be dominated by some massive live music events. ‘Take That going back on tour with Robbie is a game-changer’, he said. ‘Our opinion is that live is cooling to a more sustainable growth level'”. read the article
Paul Epworth talking to the NME, after his TGE In Conversation interview, about Adele’s recent success (he was one of the producer’s on ’21’): “You can always think these things might happen, whether they do or not is another matter. Everyone’s flabbergasted. She deserves it because she’s so nice. She’s a true artist with artistic integrity and she writes from the heart”. watch the video interview
CMU’s Chris Cooke discussing The Great Escape with Andy Malt on the CMU Weekly podcast: “The point of ‘Influencing The Influencers’ was, if you are the sort of artist looking for Guardian coverage or Radio 2 airplay, you probably can’t go straight to them, you have to infiltrate the networks they are part of, what’s influencing them. I found particularly interesting, Ed Horrox, A&R at 4AD, his first answer to the question ‘where do you discover new talent’ was ‘I talk to my existing artists’. They are on the road all the time – and apparently at the Beggars HQ there’s a flat above the offices where newer artists stay, so quite often bands will be staying in this flat and they’ll appear at 11am in their dressing gowns in Ed’s office saying ‘oh Ed, there’s this band we saw last night, you should check them out'”. listen to the podcast here
