50 Cent
50 Cent signs ‘revolutionary’ new deal with Universal Music Group’s Caroline service. Answers on a postcard if you can find anything revolutionary about the following item:
How these stories purport to demonstrate some kind of radical evolution is mind boggling. I suppose articles like the this latest Forbes effort on 50 cent‘s move to Universal’s ‘Caroline’ are as inevitable as night following day.
Universal Music (Photo credit: cbmd)
The article points out the old
“Then there’s the payout. A traditional record deal has an artist making between 12 and 15% of the net income, but once again, stories of creative accounting abound, and it wasn’t an uncommon scenario to have an artist sell a million copies back in the days when physical media like vinyl records and CDs ruled only to find that he actually owed the record label money when all was said and done.”
But don’t despair we may be witnessing the ‘Dawn of a new age’ with a la carte services like Caroline where an artist can make 70-80% of the income as long as they ‘buy’ various services like physical distribution, radio promotion, digital strategy or product development.
Well whoop de do – the labels have finally woken up and copied what the smart guys have been doing for the last 10 years. Let’s throw a party and while we’re at it can we maybe suggest that these a la carte services could be purchased at much better rates than the labels can provide or obtained for free if the artists decided to do a little bit of research/diy promo for themselves.
English: Peter Gabriel (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I mean 50 cent or Peter Gabriel going down this road, really!! They’ll both have massive fully fledged fan databases filled with customer profiling data, they can use myriad free online services to communicate with these people. Who is advising these artists? Don’t they have proper managers. The landscape has changed and progressed far beyond ideas like Caroline. Wake up and smell the coffee guys and gals.
By Ken Foster
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