There is a list that, frankly, scares the living daylights out of record executives. That growing list is comprised of artists who took an unconventional shot at becoming a public sweetheart, and made it.
The Arctic Monkeys, and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, have both used Myspace to build followings and, in the case of The Arctic Monkeys, have used that following as leverage in a major label deal.
Now Jaymay is taking that one step further. Eschewing the major label contracts she's been offered to take her chances on her own, Jamie Kristine Seerman has an interesting view. "For a long time, the way you were discovered was through record labels. Now it's through the Internet, through blogs, through MySpace," she recently told Reuters, "For all I know, maybe music will all be sold as ring tones in seven years."
Read the whole piece on Jaymay at Reuters and, watch for risk takers like Jaymay to become the norm, rather than the exception. This is the long tail in action and, unless you hold an executive position at a major label, it's a very pretty picture.
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1. Sigh. This is a really interesting phenemenon, but to report it as something that "SCARES THE SUITS!!! OMG!" is so sad and uninformed. Yeah, those Arctic Monkeys: they sure stuck it to the old-paradigm industry...by generating tons of revenue for 'em, eh? Newsflash: the industry actually LOVES not having to employ as many A&R people as they once did. MySpace does the work for them, bands will sign to 'em anyway. The universe in which the big labels are afraid of the internet outright replacing their business model (instead of forcing overdue changes on it, which it's obviously already done) is a fiction which seems to have great appeal to lots of people, but it's still wholly imaginary.
Posted at 10:31AM on Aug 9th 2006 by John