Patty Loveless Gears Up For Her Third Trip On the Santa Train

Dang, lots of stuff to comment on today.

@PopMatters: Those PopMatters reviews are completely ridiculous. They don’t know anything about country music and are snarky for the sake of being snarky. It looks like they receive some pretty good traffic. It’s a damn shame.

@Tours: I dunno who I’d like to see in tour together, but I’ve been thinking that it would be pretty dang sweet to see a collaboration between Dale Watson and Gary Allan.

@Big Rock Candy Mountain: I can’t believe the trucker list didn’t have “Convoy” on it. That has to break some sort of law.

@Compadre Records: I don’t think record labels could ever implement a decent solution to distribute their music digitally.

@Sugarland: I kinda blew them off as the latest fad until I saw Jennifer Nettles perform “Stay” at the ACM awards, that’s when I realized what their hype was all about.

@Garth Brooks: If you read the comments, some of those people are upset because he cut off the simulcast an hour before he ended the show. It seems more and more that everything Garth Brooks does is about the money.

@Trisha Yearwood: Sales are down and the labels don’t know what the hell to do but they won’t let someone like Trisha Yearwood have any creative input? These guys are incredible.

@Garth Brook 2: Hohw can music be devalued or undervalued for that matter? The marginal cost of production is zero. It’s not the music that’s expensive, it’s the marketing.

The 360 approach is an idea which has been kicking around the industry for a few years, and it’s a good idea, especially for indie labels.

Even though I’m more of a Beam man, that seems like a waste of good whiskey. Maybe they could donate them to popmatters to wash down whatever they are taking over there.

Jim, I don’t often disagree with you, but I am going to have to disagree with you on 360 being a good idea. It might be a good idea on the label end, in the beginning, but it’s not for the artists on those indie labels. (I’m not talking about major labels and big name artists, that’s a whole different set of rules) The majority of indie artists exist on their income from merch and shows. If they have a good manager, which they will need, they will get a cut of that merch money as part of their deal. If they have a booking agent, they get a cut of the show, as does the manager. So now the label wants a cut. Will the label manage them? Will the label book the shows for them? They might try, but it is a different skill set to book shows than to run a label. A lot of small labels run on a small staff and some unpaid interns. If they hire someone to come in and run the booking company, that’s another salary, so then they have to figure out how to pay them.

On the surface it might look tempting to have everything handled under one umbrella (the label handling their traditional role plus booking and management), but if that happens there is a big chance the artist is going to completely fail on all counts.

This is getting longer than I intended, so I will stop now, but I think artists need to take a long hard look at this before they jump in.

I think I said I think a lot in that last comment…

I can’t find the article, but the impression I got from a recent story on Columbia records was that they were asking for a cut of the artists concert revenue and were going to draw without aiding the artist in booking the concerts. I might have misunderstood the article, and I can’t seem to dig it up again, so feel free to steer me right.

But regardless of that fact, I don’t see the consolidation of all aspects of an artists career as necessarily positive, especially in an indie label situation. Let’s say for example you are on an indie label with four other artists. Let’s say that all of the artists are receiving their fair share of attention (which Brody asked about). There are several scenarios that are entirely possible, but I won’t go into them all. Let’s say that one of the artists hit with a big song. It is only naturally that that artist will receive most of the attention. This is a historical fact even without 360 deals. Flippo mentions Hank WIlliams’ 360 deal and I was told by Charlie Louvin that he and Ira got off of MGM because “if you were Hank or Patti Page, you didn’t have a chance.” Same thing happened to Capitol artists during the Garth years. Now that’s good for the label and the top selling guys, but what about the artist on the bottom who depends on that concert revenue?

Another scenario is that the label gets swallowed by a bigger label and they, as they often do, make cuts you have an artist not only without a record label, but with out a booking agent and, possibly, proper management.

And there are of course more extreme situations I won’t go into, but you see my point. Once all industries (music, that is) consolidate, concert venues are held by one group, the labels by a few groups and the radio by a couple, it becomes a trading game and the artist loses again.

And it’s begging for the line “She was a waste of good whiskey” as a friend used to say.

Chris N.–it’s already been done. I’ve heard three or four versions of that song. None of them were very good, if memory serves. I’m pretty I have a half-finished version kicking around somewhere.

Chris N: You be hilarious.