It's a lousy time to be a record label. Profits are tanking, bands are angry—OK Gojust ditched EMI—and YouTube and BitTorrent changed the game. Still, some labels are transforming themselves to help musicians in the digital age.

 

The traditional role of a record label, in the broadest sense, is to bankroll a band until they start making lots of money, at which point the label gets to keep most of it. They own the master recordings a band makes, and by taking on this ownership they put all of their resources behind selling said recordings.

This setup makes sense when bands lacked the wherewithal to produce and record their own albums and when manufacturing and distributing physical copies of albums and marketing said albums costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. It also makes sense when a popular album will sell millions of copies at $15 a pop.

But that's definitely not the case now. Record stores are dying at an alarming rate, and fewer and fewer people are buying CDs every day. It's safe to say that the current generation of teenagers has never perused record stores as a normal activity; it's all

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The biggest music stores are now virtual, so there's no need for someone to go gladhand every Sam Goody manager so they give you endcap space for Use Your Illusion II. The iTunes Music Store sells 25% of the music sold in America as of last August, and that number is definitely going up, not down.

According to the IFPI, physical sales of music dropped 15.4% globally between 2007

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http://gizmodo.com/5481545/record-labels-change-or-die

excellent article, and i pretty much agree w/ everything it says.  

i can't believe that EMI is doing that poorly w/ the Beatles reissues just a few months behind them.