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Business News Labels & Publishers
Will the growth of streaming services lead to new A&R priorities?
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 19 March 2009
C-net blogger Matt Rosoff has made some interesting points about the impact the growth of streaming services like Spotify will have on the way music companies work – and not on how they go about licensing and pricing their music (though arguably there are still some changes to be made in that domain), but on how they go about signing new talent.
Prompted by a conversation with Tim Quirk, the VP of Music Programming at Real Networks’ US music service Rhapsody – for whom streaming is a key part of their offer – Rosoff writes that in the streaming service age, where labels earn from every listen rather than one off CD or download purchases, “it won’t make sense to sign cute, disposable artists and prop them up with hired-gun songwriters and producers in hopes of selling a couple million units over a single summer. Rather, the real money-makers will be bands whose fans absolutely can’t live without their music, and who listen to songs over and over again, for years. That requires finding artists who already have sizable fan bases and then cultivating them over the years”.
He continues: “Terrestrial radio might become even less important – there’s no reason to saturate the airwaves with a single song in hopes of selling as many copies as possible before the buzz moves to the next thing; instead, you’ll want word to grow more organically, creating lifelong fans along the way”.
All of which sounds lovely, though he admits for that A&R approach to become the norm not only are new skills needed at the labels, but companies like Rhapsody and Spotify and the labels and publishers who licence them their content, need to find business models – ad funded or subscription based – that stack up long term. The current PRS/Google stand off is a sign that finding a mutually-beneficial mutually-acceptable business model may not be as easy as some hoped.
