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Running OtoRevo has been an interesting experience. We signed our first artist Good Crew to Columbia Music. Recent focus has been on music production, album design as well as two other OtoRevo artist signed Columbia Music, which we haven’t publicly announced yet.
In the process I’ve learned more about the traditional music industry then I cared too. In terms of doing things differently we cut the music production and debut time from the traditional 6 months to 3 months. We have also reduced cost significantly. We implemented new contracts that are equally beneficial to both the label and artist. This is the first major label to sign a artist based on fan voting and we in two weeks we will do something else a major label has never done before…
I’ve been doing things differently. Focusing our release and marketing efforts on one online retailer before we consider traditional record stores. In the processes I’m trying to perfect the production side and finding similarities between OtoRevo and historical labels like Motown. Mainly the use of specialized teams to shorten release times.
Our greatest challenge is selling lots of CD’s in a time when people apparently aren’t interested in them. Luckily Good Crew’s music is awesome, but their story of accomplishment and discovery is even more encouraging and hopefully fans will support them. In the meantime I spend all of my free time reading history books trying to find commonalities between the issues that the music industry face now and turning points in older industries such as transportation and radio.
In addition I’ve taken to relying on more face to face interaction to accomplish relationship building task that I assumed could have been done digitally. That is perhaps a nativity of being a technology person? Relationships built with face to face interaction take longer but I believe they also last longer.
My goal over the past month or so has been to blend the need for old fashioned hand shakes with technical innovation. This if done well can be extremely powerful I’ve found.
Welcome back.. Glad that OtoRevo is moving in a positive direction.
Seems that you’ve learned much since Gather.At
Have you considered using last.fm to help bolster public appeal for your artists?
Happy Belated , btw
I was in the music biz in the US before I became an IT dork. The relationship vectors are very different. IT dorks tend to NOT want to see who they are dealing with but music people keep their contacts close in the Machiavellian sense of “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”. Its very cut throat once you get above selling tapes at shows our out of the back of your car. My experience so far in the Japanese music scene is the same as far as the need for face to face contact. No comment on the backstabbing aspect so far.
As far as CDs go, I’ve given them up entirely for my music. I’m only releasing on vinyl and then to digital only stores. This is the thing I’ve been wanting to talk to you about. I’ve developed a very cost efficient model for pressing and getting my music into the appropriate distribution for what I do (new roots/dub reggae). I’m planning on doing a thing to help extend the same model to Japanese reggae people later this year. I want to talk to you about if we could do something together which might be mutually beneficial. Send me a message on mixi when you have time. My work is sorta near Nihon Columbia so maybe we could catch lunch and discuss.
Insights from the Hard Disk Drive Industry
http://www.businessweek.com/chapter/christensen.htm
there is a pretty good chance that the history of record industry before the time Internet came would not be useful. you should look at what and how Live Nation is doing.