I honestly couldn’t tell you who he was yesterday, but Billy Corgan has gained a true fan today. The frontman of The Smashing Pumpkins kicked in the door, swinging hard truths left and right in a recent CNBC interview.
If you are in any sector of the music business, you need to pay attention to this interview.
Today’s Music Industry:
The music industry is mostly run by feckless idiots, who do not subscribe to the normal tenets of capitalism. Which when they do, the business tends to work out well, stars rise to the top, everybody benefits. But it’s still a parochial business that’s run by fiefdoms, way behind the times technologically. Other companies, the tech world is just blowing music out of the water in particular.
But, music artists in particular remain incredibly valuable to launching things, hence tech companies keep cycling back to music artists. And music artists need to figure out their true value in a free market society, which they’ve been slow to do because you have that old model of telling artists that they’re not worth anything, that they’re disposable.
On Tidal:
The problem is, is that, although I celebrate the idea of him creating his own model, it leaves a lot of people out. And so at some point, you have to have winners and losers because that’s the way it works. So to try to sell it as an overt, altruistic thing is disingenuous because it’s not. He’s taking his slice of the pie, which he has every right to do, he’s a powerful man and he works with powerful people.
But by the way I’m a powerful artist and I don’t remember getting a phone call from him, but I get phone calls from other people and I have to make similar decisions from the other end. But to sell it as altruistic, I don’t buy it.
Music As A Business Model:
The problem is that there’s not enough money in music as a business model. Where in television and vis-a-vis the advertisers and movies, there’s so much money that the controlling forces still circle around the stars in the right way, stars are taken care of better in those industries.
In the music industry it’s still very much this exploitative thing, it’s still very much people signing their lives away, the old deal-with-the-devil stuff. That is still going on, it’s unbelievable in this day-and-age that this is still going on.
The Future For Artists Isn’t Necessarily Touring:
The future for music artists is in brand identification. Music will only be — excuse the French — the lubricant to make the bigger deal.
The bigger deal will be ‘I represent my company or I represent my brand’. And once you saw that deal made, it’s over. The old model of selling plastic is over. And by the way, I don’t remember getting any checks for selling computers and telephones, but I’ve helped sell a lot of computers and telephones, as have a lot of other music artists.
At some point the music market is gonna have to come around and pay those artists what they’re worth, or they’re going to do what Jay-Z is trying to do, break off and make it his own deal.
