In the midst of Ben Thompson’s analysis of Tidal and streaming music comes this discourse on the value of music labels, which I usually assume are relics of a bygone era:
Of course labels don’t just find artists who magically become popular: the record labels also help make them so with the aforementioned marketing and promotion costs. This can be everything from getting artists booked on TV, featured in iTunes, or promoted on blogs, but the biggie, even in 2015, is getting artists on the radio.
According to the Nielson 2014 Year End Music Report radio remains the number one source of music discovery: an amazing 91.3% of the U.S. population listens to the radio at least once-a-week, and 51% of those surveyed based their buying decisions off of what they heard on the radio.
This is been a friendly reminder to myself that not everyone lives in the same technological bubble that I do.