Jazz Odyssey

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Ian Rogers posted his advice to Guy Hands at his blog and it makes for some very interesting reading. His core premise:

“With the disappearance of advantaged label competencies such as superior production, distribution, and marketing, reconfigure your labels to be based around affinities and focused narrowly enough to serve roughly the same audiences from release to release. The labels would be very small teams responsible for fan cultivation, focused and direct marketing, and A&R. They would rely on EMI for service, support, and tools (generic marketing would happen on the EMI mothership, for example).”

Ian, as many of you may know, was head of Yahoo Music for the last couple of years before leaving to head up a new top secret music project called Topspin. Ian is also one of the smartest digital music guys out there, and his comments are insightful and worth a moment to consider. His comments deserve better commentary than this quick blog post, but two things stand out in my mind based on what Ian has said here.

First of all, Ian has had an impressive career in music and has spent a lot of time looking at the business from the perspective of artist, label and digital music expert. This alone gives him instant cred, but Ian’s true cred comes from his musical DNA–Ian has always approached things from the perspective of music fan. This is a mindset that many executives in the music business (particularly at major labels) have lost touch with and a reconnection is critical if recorded music is to survive. Secondly, and more directly to Ian’s point, the notion of serving audiences “from release to release” is troublesome to major music companies–they are not structured to handle that. An artist out of an album cycle generally does not have a project manager, budget or resources allocated to maintain the connection between artist and fan. Most of the readers of this blog are in the industry, and many have had the experience of sitting in a marketing meeting to discuss the setup of an artists’ new album and heard the question asked, “How are we going to reconnect with the artists’ fanbase?”. Ian has eloquently stated what I’ve been asking for years….”Why did we lose touch with them in the first place?”