SXSW 2015: Just Blaze Says 'Middlemen Don't Exist Anymore' in the Music Industry
On a warm, partly cloudy afternoon on the eve of SXSW's music week on Tuesday, March 18, legendary producer Just Blaze stopped by the Box headquarters just off Congress Avenue for an informal fireside chat with Steve Martocci, co-found of Splice and Jade McQueen, managing editor of media & entertainment at Box, about the digital transformation of the modern music landscape.
Just Blaze is a hacker and a true technology pioneer in the music production space, which provided the intimate crowd with great historical perspective.
"When we made The Blueprint [Jay Z's sixth album, released in 2001], it was a big deal because you could buy a hard drive with eight whole gigs of memory," Blaze reminisced while the room laughed. "To make a 42 track song we had to run 10 of them in array with one another, and nowadays when I look to buy a laptop I can't even look at something unless it has 16gigs of ram just because of how much processing power it takes today."
The event was hosted by Box -- an online file sharing a cloud distribution service that recently IPO'd for an impressive $1.67 billion dollars -- is known for its rigorous security. So secure, in fact, that Box was the service utilized by Beyonce and her team to distribute her ground-breaking surprise album in 2013 (the Box office even has a themed conference room dedicated to Queen Bey).
With album leaks still rampant (the recent example of Madonna's Rebel Heart comes to mind), security has become a top priority for the music business, an industry often plagued by luddites.
"People are still scared of email," Blaze noted. "You used to be able to know exactly when something would leak, because there was always some disgruntled employee who would take the master and put it out on the streets. But what you're starting to see is a lot of artists aren't really concerned with selling the physical CDs. They know once you send [the record] to be duplicated, it's out"
Blaze explained how the process to print and distribute a physical record in time for release day used to be a process which took 6-8 weeks, and some artists would go through extraordinary lengths just to avoid the leak. In one example, Busta Rhymes spent several hundred thousand dollars just to shut down the pressing plants for an entire weekend so that they could only focus on printing his album, thereby shortening that 8-week period. Compared to today: "Kendrick only handed in his album two weeks ago."
That shortened timeframe has a lot to do with the direct connection artists have with their fans due to digital distribution and social media. "Middle men don't exist anymore. If you have 700,000 followers, all that [marketing and promotion that took weeks] can just be one tweet."
That lack of middlemen, who collect rent along the way for marketing and distribution, has allowed Blaze to cash in on music like never before. Blaze released "Higher" by Baauer and Jay Z for free on Soundcloud and YouTube, and it ended up making him "2 to 3 times more" than anything recent. The track's popularity allowed him to tour for all of 2013 and ink lucrative sync deals with Samsung and Lexus. Because he didn't release the track through the label, the artists got to keep all of that cash themselves. Eventually, Universal ended up paying him for the license to the song.
"The days of sending Def Jam a CD in hopes of somebody hearing your record are over," Blaze said when giving parting advice to up and coming artists. "Do your own thing. Nobody wanted Wu-Tang Clan, nobody wanted Jay Z, but then he started Roc-A-Fella Records and things changed. People only wanted Young Chop after Chief Keef blew up."
No comments:
Post a Comment