Day two of this annual schmoozefest continued with well-conceived panels but BestNewBands.com couldn’t help but wonder why the organizers filled the vast, vast majority of speaking roles with 30-45-year-old White men. The lack of diversity was shocking in a Season One of Mad Men sort of way and “The Independent Label Movement” panel on Tuesday afternoon at the New Yorker Hotel’s Crystal Ballroom was no exception.
The top, er, guys, at many influential indies were uniformly pleased with the current state of their business and bullish about the future. The one consistent regret expressed was that the current cumulative number of paid subscriptions to digital streaming services by U.S. consumers is still only three-to-four million. As Cliff Chenfeld, Co-CEO of Razor & Tie said, “Awareness of streaming is still very low, thus the (potential) upside is dramatic.” Dualtone Co-Founder Scott Robinson added, “There’s a long way to go before it scales. When does Spotify go from one million to 100 million subs?” Josh Deutsch, Chairman and CEO of Downtown noted, “We need to be patient. The U.S. tends to be slower than Europe (in areas like this).”
When moderator Charles Caldas, CEO of Merlin Network, which represents the rights of indie labels, asked what the biggest roadblocks indie labels faced today, Patrick Moxey, CEO of Ultra Music, replied, “There are new internet services popping up every day, which require us to negotiate rates and keep the lawyers busy.” Robinson added: “The majors have leverage due to market share. With (newly announced) Apple Radio, Warner and Universal (which, along with Sony, have gobbled up the other majors) had a negotiating process. With us, it’s ‘Sign the deal!’”
Gibson’s floor space at the 2013 New Music Seminar at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan
When Moxey noted that the “majors still dominate radio (airplay),” Chenfeld pointed out that “it’s much more difficult to BS (the public) today. 15 years ago there were gatekeepers to introduce your artists but now you can do it yourself.” Robinson offered an example of an unnamed act that Dualtone has been actively working since its street date 17 months’ ago that is selling better now than it was nine months’ ago, implying that the majors would’ve given up on the record long ago. “The rules change every day,” said Kenny Gales, Founder of European indie music company PIAS. “Every (successful artist’s) career founds its market through a different, specific loop.”
Matt Harmon, who oversees Beggars Group USA, summed up the panel’s optimism: “I’m excited about finding the next The National, Vampire Weekend, The Lumineers.”
