Labels are especially helpful now, when PR job is a thankless grunt work involving a lot of know-how. Personally, I've worked with a couple of labels and promotion groups, and the amount of effort label puts into promotion has tremendous impact on the outcome.
Basically, there's almost no listeners who actively look for new artists and music that is outside of view of some spot of spotlight — and to get into that spotlight, you have to work. I'm not even talking about publications of scale of Pitchfork or xlr8r now; much smaller blogs get flooded with review requests and demos.
But most importantly, the kind of activity you have to do to actively sell yourself on social media is completely psychologically repulsive to a lot of artists. I've talked to a lot of people about it, and most agree that while they could see themselves pushing someone else's creations, doing it for themselves too often pushes one into apathy, self-doubt and depression.
The awesome stories that you hear about self-made success suffer from survivorship bias. Labels are there for a reason, and they deserve every penny that they take.
Edit: sorry, I missed your link. I get ~80% of my releases; didn't realize you were talking about the big dinosaur labels here.
> But most importantly, the kind of activity you have to do to actively sell yourself on social media is completely psychologically repulsive to a lot of artists.
And fans, stupidly, sometimes aren't supportive either.
There was an article recently talking about some very popular YouTube celebrities who are still waiting tables. And, when they tried to monetize their channel, got sreamed at by lots of fans.
It sounds more like a problem of trying to make a living in an industry with a very low barrier to entry. Fans expect to get it for free because they know that the only cost their favorite Youtube artist had was a cell phone camera.
If their favorite performer can't make a living, then the fans will just move to one of dozens (or hundreds or even thousands) of choices.
That same ease of entry that helped the Youtube performer gain thousands of viewers after posting a funny cat video will also let some other Youtube performer do the same thing.
It's a different world out there for artists, some for the better (it's easy to record your work and get it out there), some for the worst (it's also easy for thousands of others to do the same so you have to find a way to differentiate yourself).
> There was an article recently talking about some very popular YouTube celebrities who are still waiting tables. And, when they tried to monetize their channel, got sreamed at by lots of fans.
I don't know about youtube celebs, but the notion that musicians can live off their music is basically laughable right now. No one I know even tries to do that, unless they're ready to perform three times a week in cities all over the world — it's usually just DJ sets (as live sets make logistics much harder), which aren't as stressful, but still. And it includes musicians with 10s and 100s of thousands of subscribers on SoundCloud, with constant media presence in publications like xlr8r, RA, pitchfork and others.
A lot of them get income from music, but it's usually writing soundtracks, sound design, running a label/promotion agency/party line, being an art director of a club, stuff like that. And it involves a lot of hard work apart from actually writing music.
Labels are especially helpful now, when PR job is a thankless grunt work involving a lot of know-how. Personally, I've worked with a couple of labels and promotion groups, and the amount of effort label puts into promotion has tremendous impact on the outcome.
Basically, there's almost no listeners who actively look for new artists and music that is outside of view of some spot of spotlight — and to get into that spotlight, you have to work. I'm not even talking about publications of scale of Pitchfork or xlr8r now; much smaller blogs get flooded with review requests and demos.
But most importantly, the kind of activity you have to do to actively sell yourself on social media is completely psychologically repulsive to a lot of artists. I've talked to a lot of people about it, and most agree that while they could see themselves pushing someone else's creations, doing it for themselves too often pushes one into apathy, self-doubt and depression.
The awesome stories that you hear about self-made success suffer from survivorship bias. Labels are there for a reason, and they deserve every penny that they take.
Edit: sorry, I missed your link. I get ~80% of my releases; didn't realize you were talking about the big dinosaur labels here.