I think it's an interesting time. My thoughts (based on late night musings after a whisky or two) is that the major labels are going to struggle, and so will the big artists signed to them. This is because the labels have invested lots of money that they want to get back and so the artist has got to present them with their pound of flesh.
But the independent labels, with a different business model, are putting some interesting stuff out. Artists generally have more artistic say, in many cases they fund the recording themselves and the label just markets and distributes. These labels typically market to niche audiences - exploiting markets that the big labels and corporate TV and radio seem to have lost contact with.
It seems to me that with the big labels the idea is to tour to promote the CD. With the smaller labels the CD is there to promote the artist and to keep his/her profile high - almost to the point where the CD is promoting or generating interest in the live shows.
I think the income stream for the artist is going to change. Less from CD sales, more from tours (depending on financial model) and songwriting royalties. Which is tough on people who don't write songs.
The tour issue is a thorny one. You can be a Britney Spears who gets sent out with a big band, light shows, dancers etc and plays to huge crowds and then finds out that you have to pay the record company back for all the tour expenses. Or you can fund the tour yourself, play smaller shows with less showbiz and that rely (gasp!) on music and the performance thereof, but not owe anybody anything when it's all done and dusted.
I think the latter approach may generate more money in the long run for artists who can sustain a long career.
It's a good time for players, I think, because it's getting expensive to be in a studio for months (and those months are months when you're not generating any revenue). So the two ways to work are
1) Lots of synths and sequencers and software
2) Have really good players who can learn and lay down tracks in a very short time.
So I think the showbiz business may be heading for hard times. For
music it must necessarily be effected, but I think the model is more sustainable and will see a lot of interesting work being produced.
I note that nearly every band that ever existed is reforming, going back on the road and in many cases finding out all over again why they split up in the first place. I ask myself why this is. One explantion is that there's lots of babyboomers out there with disposable income that they want to spend on nostalgia. Another might be that the audiences are getting peed off with pretty things who can't play. A third might be that the beancounters have been in, dug out all the old invoices and receipts, worked out decades of compound interest and have told the band that they either sell the mansion and the Ferrari or start generating some income.
