Bands cutting out the middleman

Terry Heaton: Big doings in the music world:

Last week, popular rock band Radiohead announced that they would be by-passing the recording industry and taking their new album directly to their fans. Moreover, they shocked everybody by announcing that fans could actually name their own price. Holy mother-of-RIAA!

Now comes an even more devastating announcement from long-standing rock powerhouse Nine Inch Nails. In a post on their website yesterday, NIN announced their freedom from record companies, saying that they, too, would deal directly with their fans. There’s a ton of resentment in a statement by Nine Inch Nail’s Trent Reznor:

I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as i see fit and appropriate.

Technology may be the enabler (or redeemer), but the energy for this comes from the people that the industry is in place to serve — both the record makers and the record buyers.

I think this is huge and has cultural ramifications far beyond music. If you are in any middleman position in the information and entertainment worlds (aggregator exception noted), your future livelihood is in jeopardy.

Gizmodo (nine inch) nails it:

If two of the biggest acts in the industry can see the digital writing on the wall and totally embrace it–that the old way of doing business is broken–why can’t the labels? What Radiohead and NIN are showing is that the business model “of the future” feared by entrenched interests isn’t arriving some time in the horizon. It’s touching down now.

The digital writing on the wall literally shouts to all media to get onboard the Cluetrain and acknowledge that an empowered citizenry is not a passive citizenry, and that J.D. Lasica’s personal media revolution is a real revolution, against the power grid that controls our lives for their profit. As I’ve written in the past, the public never wanted quality bundled with crap, which is the formula for profit from the whole copyright cartel. The cable industry, for example, will lose the bundled programming argument for the same reason, because ultimately, people will be able to pick and choose what they want.

This will be fascinating to watch. I assumed these kind of announcements, with major bands cutting out the music label middleman, were still a few years away from happening. But the revolution is on!