The always interesting and instructive Jerry Del Colliano at Inside Music Media has a few ideas for a radio and records industry bail out package:
MUSIC INDUSTRY
1. Charge five cents (ten at the most) for all music downloads. That price is too cheap — on a par with text messaging expenses — to force consumers to steal music. Sell volume and yes, I understand five cents won’t make them rich. So there will have to be more.
2. Become the radio station of the future and cut out the middleman (terrestrial radio – which is on a suicide mission anyway). Learn about the next generation and deliver music programs and content to them directly through podcasts, mobile content and the Internet.
3. Fire all your lawyers. Stop propping up the RIAA which is hurting you more than helping.
4. 360 deals as you define them don’t work — lots of luck.
5. Develop a new business model that encompasses owning the marketing rights of artists you promote and go back to school to learn advanced merchandising — a panacea for the future. The label of the future will replace the agent, the merchandiser and even the live venue. You may say, ” I thought you said 360 deals won’t work?” They won’t because labels demanding a cut of an artist’s future without the skills to advance it is fraud not commerce.
RADIO
1. Fire upper management including regional people.
2. Close the corporate office.
3. The CEO works out of home.
4. All individual station executives have autonomy to run their own formats, marketing programs and digital initiatives. Fire them only if they fail to meet written mutually agreed upon goals.
5. Mandate 85% of all radio broadcasts local in origin.
6. Triple your sales staff. Send them for quarterly sales training. Pay their health care if you want to attract the good ones. Draw for three months. Generous commission after that. Never steal a client and appropriate it to another sales rep. Let them sell digital as a integral part of terrestrial radio.
7. Budget 20% of the corporate budget to digital initiatives.
8. Define digital revenue stream as that derived from non-repurposed material (such as streaming your already existing radio station online).
9. Make it a goal to produce 300 local, five days a week, by the end of the first 12 months and take it from there. Sell a new form of advertising (not spots) once you aggregate the listeners from the various podcasts broken down by interest not demographics.
Read the entire post here.
From the standpoint of the consumer, the points that would directly affect me sound great. I’m as far from an industry insider as it gets, but from our position way out here, something definitely seems broken.