Music labels seek right track

(ALEX EBEN MEYER/THE NEW YORK TIMES)

Like most purveyors of media, music labels are flailing about for a new business model even as their old one is quickly becoming outmoded.

One proposed solution - giving music away online, supported by advertising - was the subject of a panel discussion this week at the South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Texas. "Of course a panel on online music-business models was going to degenerate into a food fight," wrote Joseph Weisenthal of paidContent.org.

The trouble came to a head when Ted Mico, the head of digital strategy at Interscope/Geffen/A&M records, declared: "I need more marketing and promotion on the Internet like I need a root canal without anesthetic."

He was responding to his fellow panelist, Peter Rojas, the founder of a new music blog, RCRD LBL (pronounced record label.) Rojas is one of many advocates of the idea that music shouldn't really be "sold," but rather used to promote other things, like advertising, with a portion of revenues going to artists (businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat).

On RCRD LBL, artists offer their music for free, without restrictive digital rights management software. In return, the artists get a portion of the site's ad revenue. Such blogs, he said, are "a huge force in music right now and in some ways more important than the labels because that is where bands are being broken."

Mico disagreed. "Different people want different forms of access," he allowed, but giving away music on blogs isn't the answer.

Mico said he believes that subscription services like Rhapsody may yet catch on. "It is clear that somebody at some point will crack the subscription nut," he said. A subscription service, he said, "allows people to discover music without having to pay extra for it."

It also tends to keep labels in control of the music-distribution chain. But even Mico admitted that, when it comes to subscription services, "the trouble is, nobody that hasn't experienced it wants to experience it."

LOSING AIR: The selling point for Apple's MacBook Air is the laptop's lightness and thinness. But be careful, warns Steven Levy, a technology columnist at Newsweek, the Air is so light and so thin that you can easily lose it. After tearing his apartment apart when he misplaced his, Levy remembered leaving it on the coffee table, where newspapers and magazines tend to pile up. "My wife," he wrote, "whose clutter tolerance is well below my own, sometimes will swoop in and hastily gather the pulp in a huge stack, going directly to the trash-compactor room just down the hall."

LITANY OF ERROR: Record labels were making terrible missteps long before the advent of the digital age. Blender.com offers a list of what it considers the 20 worst. They include MCA Records' decision in 1989 to pass on a Seattle upstart band called Nirvana while also betting big on "Leather Boyz With Electric Toyz," the debut album of a hair-metal band called Pretty Boy Floyd.

The worst-ever record-label mistake, according to Blender, was when the labels sued Napster out of existence. "Napster's users didn't just disappear," the site reminds us. "They scattered to hundreds of alternative systems - and new technology has stayed three steps ahead of the music business ever since."

Dan Mitchell writes for The New York Times.