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Study Suggests Music Industry Embrace Piracy
unassimilatible writes to tell us that according to the Financial Times, the music industry should embrace illegal file-sharing websites. A recent study of the recent Radiohead album release found that huge numbers of illegal downloads actually helped the band's popularity and, by extension, concert ticket sales. "Radiohead's release of In Rainbows on a pay-what-you-want basis last October generated enormous traffic to the band's own website and intense speculation about how much fans had paid. He urged record companies to study the outcome and accept that file-sharing sites were here to stay. 'It's time to stop swimming against the tide of what people want,' he said." Update 19:46 GMT by SM: Several readers (including the original author) have written in to mention that it isn't stressed enough that this study was engaged by the music industry itself, making the findings that much more interesting. Take that as you will.
I doubt that the RIAA almost went bankrupt in the 30's, considering it was formed in 1952.
And here you've left out about a million steps, most of which involve a record label or at least some form of professional PR. (I'll get to your specific example in a minute.)
How do you suppose a band that's playing around locally and selling tapes or whatever to local people becomes "eventually" known nationwide? Every local area has dozens or hundreds of bands all trying to do the same thing, so why would somebody pay attention to a local band from 500 miles away?
The answer is they get mentioned in newspapers, they get played on radio stations, they make it into video games, etc. etc. Hopefully at some point before that they get a more professional recording made, which costs a lot of money that most local bands don't have.
None of this happens without a record label.
I have been in one band from my local area that got into the papers and magazines, onto commercial radio, into video game soundtracks, recorded at the same high-end studios that the record labels use around these parts (north TX, USA), done radio interviews on the top local stations and college stations around the state, sold CDs and downloads locally, regionally, nationally, and on the other side of the world (NZ, to be precise). At the time, the bands showed up adequately ranked at in various search engines, as do my current efforts, with minimal effort for SEO on our part. My current groups all have achieved varying degrees of the above as well. And I know of at least a dozen more bands from this area that have done the same ...
Yes we all busted our asses to get those things done, went into debt, dug ourselves out, and by-and-large nobody I know is rich and famous yet. But we've all played stuff we wanted to play, never had to give away any of our rights to a soulless corporation (oxymoron?), and had a difficult, frustrating, and at the same time fabulous time doing so.
And the best part is, I can keep doing this til I'm 90 .. without a record label.
A record label is only one way to make some of these things happen. Sometimes a record label can provide you a shortening of the path you would otherwise have to take. But its not the ONLY way.