This is why the music industry is dying!

So here is another reason why the music industry is dying. Just a few minutes ago I was talking to a music industry contact of mine. I told him that his company should have an RSS feed for their press releases. His response? He had no idea what an RSS feed was. Never even heard of such a thing. Now for the part that will sadly not shock anyone. He is not even close to the only one I have run into that have never heard of an RSS feed. Imagine you are a press agent. You want to get news about your artists faster than the competition. How about an automated system that blogs and websites across the internet can use to automatically post your news? I could be sleeping soundly, the press agent posts a press release to their site (as many do). This goes through the RSS feed and presto, we have that news on my site. I didn’t even have to wake up and my site was just updated with very current info straight from the source. This is one of the many tools that could save the music industry, but they are so damn slow adopting new technologies that it is literally killing them! I feel like I am banging my head against the wall with these people sometimes just trying to get them to use tools that would help them more then it would even help me! Again, if you are one of my contacts and think you inspired this rant, you are…along with every single one of my other contacts. Not one of you have an RSS feed and that is just retarded.

About six months ago one of my favorite labels to deal with had this major priority release. It was a band I totally loved and was excited about. Because it was a priority release, the label was worried about people leaking the promo to the internet. Now that is totally understandable. The way they went about keeping it off the internet was not. They used XCP! You do remember XCP don’t you? Ask the people at Sony about it. It ended up costing them a ton of money because they ended up with a massive lawsuit over it. It destroyed systems left and right. So fast forward a few years and this otherwise really cool independent label uses it for the priority release of a really great band. It was pure hell trying to explain to them why I would never put this cd into my system. Their response? “Can you give it to one of your other writers and have them cover it?” Yeah, my writers love it when I tell them to destroy their systems.

Now there are a few labels that are getting smart. One of them used the infamous Bit Torrent and Pirate Bay recently to flood the internet with promo versions of an entire cd. The band and label worked their ass off to get as many people as possible to download this full length samples of the new cd. Every song. All over the internet. Then everyday they would change the seed so that it said something different. This way it was pure hell to separate the “retail” version from the “promo” version. The promo version was no different except it had these annoying voiceovers halfway through every song telling people what cd it was, when it was going to be released, and what label it was on. So with the entire internet flooded with these promo versions two things were done. First off it kept people from being able to download the retail version. Second it got the word out in mass about the new cd. What was the result? It broke sales records for the label that had stood for decades. This was a death metal release and it out sold a few pop metal albums with ten times the promotion budget.

So some people in the music industry are getting smart. Others are dying quick! Which one are you?