Food For Thought...

We’re taking our label (and the parent of this site) Positron in to the digital delivery realm here in a few weeks, so I’ve been paying more than normal attention to marketing and moving music as downloads as opposed to CDs. All the Posi artists do pretty good on iTunes and their ilk, but it has always annoyed Lisa (my wife, who runs the label) and I that Apple treats indies like second-class citizens. Our artists, myself included, can’t be browsed to from any point in the site, even though there are 8.4 million albums in the world with my name on them.

Because I’m not signed to Joe Shit’s Ragman Records, a subsidiary of Universal, I don’t get the same features at iTunes that artists that will maybe move 20 full-album downloads as part of the thousand copies they’ll sell. (If you weren’t aware of the statistic, 95% of major label releases sell 1000 copies or less.)

So, while I wouldn’t say that Positron! has any hope of competing with iTunes on the grand scale in the digital realm, it certainly is smart to stop sending people to iTunes if they want a download, and give it to them right then.

But that’s kind of beside the point. The reason I bring this up at all is that in my research on the subject, I came across this article in the WaPo, which puts some things in to perspective. The easy availability of single songs for purchase again has made novelty tracks and one-hit wonders the movers of the music world once more. This giant freight train we call the music industry has finally turned full circle.