by Victoria Jeffrey

Created on: August 30, 2007

Too many big label record companies have lost the vision. It seems that their only interest is money. Not music, not the artists working for them, only money. This imbalanced view of music created a big mess for musicians, music fans and for the entire industry. That would be the principled reason why we don't need them. The practical reason is that there are tools and services that now exist that are very inexpensive. Any artist can create, produce and promote and distribute his or her own work. Record companies are obsolete. Much of that is because they haven't made any attempt to innovate. Big record companies have come to the end of their usefulness in the digital age and the faster most of them shrink and disappear the better off everyone will be. Below is a list of the reasons why it's time for them to go:

1. The Hit Song Obsession - Record companies started out building an artist's popularity by encouraging them or songwriters to create catchy hit songs for the charts. That was fine decades ago but this should have changed as music changed over the decades. Instead of encouraging the public to appreciate a band's entire album, which is an experience in and of itself, they continued encouraging the old hit song model. It's a stale and unhealthy way of looking at music. An artist or a band is far more than a collection of mainstream hits. It devalues their work. Sure, it's a great way to expose the public to a new artist but there needs to be a holistic approach to promoting the entire album. Record companies could have done that, to everyone's benefit, especially their own. Unfortunately innovation, creativity and longterm thinking is no longer common in the music industry.

2. Forcing artists to mainstream or mellow out their music - For a musician this is sometimes one of the worst offenses. Time and time again they will take a unique artist or band with a unique sound and destroy their music, making it more mainstream, cleaning it of any creativity, authenticity or uniqueness that attracted fans in the first place. Soon this artist's music sounds like all of the other songs on the radio.

3. Harsh contracts - Once a band or an artist signs with a label they are stuck for years under that contract. There's nothing wrong with being held to a contract but these contracts can be detrimental to an artist's career. Most artists who are signed with labels don't make the kind of money artists like Madonna or Mariah Carey make so let's get real here about actually

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