Execs admire th success of 'Come Away With Me.' Yet none of them will emulate.
At the 45th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday, Recording Academy voters held up Norah Jones, an artist who built a huge following fan by fan, as an example of what's good about the music business. They're absolutely right.
So why won't anyone in the music business listen to them?
Record execs have fallen over themselves during the past year to praise Jones' debut, "Come Away With Me," as hard evidence that the industry isn't just focused on throwaway records that explode in their first week, only to disappear a month later.
But the unfortunate thing about Jones' exceptional success (5 Grammys; TK million records sold) is that it is exceptional. Top marks are due to Bruce Lundvall and his team at Blue Note Records for allowing a great record to find its own audience -- "Come Away" rose steadily in the charts for almost a year before it hit No. 1.
Critics will point out that the label didn't expect to sell more than one or two hundred thousand copies (Jones said as much backstage at the Grammys), so they budgeted modestly and got very lucky with a great album.
That's exactly the point. When labels complain that their costs are so high that they have to sell half a million to break even, I imagine an executive in any other industry going white as a sheet at the thought of such an inefficient cost structure.
Is it absolutely necessary for a label to make a $750,000 (or more) video for every cookie-cutter hip-hop act they have -- before they even get a response from radio or other marketing channels? Do labels really need to pay tens of millions a year to indie promoters to jam their tracks on the air? (The two biggest Grammy winners of the past two years -- Jones and the "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack -- got almost no airplay) For that matter, are radio and music television the only way to market and promote a record? And how the hell does a band spend $5 million in a recording studio?
Records can (and should) be made so that they will break even at 200,000 units, if not 100,000 or even 50,000. Independent labels do it all the time. Sure, it takes a lot more money to break a multiplatinum act, but you don't have to spend it all at once, before you even know what the record can do.
Altering these and other entrenched practices is a lot easier said than done. Label heads that have been in the business for three decades are very reluctant to risk scuttling their career by upsetting superstar artists, powerful indies or, perhaps worst of all, radio giants.
Media consolidation has also played a big part in execs' fears of going a quarter without a blockbuster first-week release to show to the corporate parentage. That's doubly true since the congloms, which often own film studios as well, have grown accustomed to the concept of the monster openings for films, DVDs and TV shows.
But if events continue in on their current path, a time will come (soon) when some of them won't have a choice.
Perhaps the best opportunity for change will come from the handful of outsiders who have infiltrated the ranks, including newly tapped Sony Music head Andrew Lack and BMG boss Rolf Schmidt-Holtz.
If market rumors pan out, Shmidt-Holtz may soon be shipped back to Germany to run Bertelsmann TV unit RTL. But Lack -- a consummate businessman who hasn't yet picked up the record industry's bad habits -- has a chance to lead the industry to a newer, better model.
It will depend on both the amount of latitude he is given by his bosses in Tokyo (he needs a lot), and his ability to avoid the slash-and-burn techniques employed in the past by outsiders who took the reins at a label group.
Yes, piracy is a problem for the business -- and I have no doubt that the labels will battle it by any means necessary. But building great careers over time is crucial to the industry's success -- both artistically and financially.
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