Past Music Columns

RCRD LBL cofounder Peter Rojas

Giving It Away Can Pay

RCRD LBL lets advertisers support the artists so consumers don’t have to.

By Miles Raymer

February 28, 2008

This column was supposed to be about local rap duo Dude ’n Nem. When I talked to them two weeks ago, they were in an enviable spot for an up-and-coming act—last summer’s addictive “Watch My Feet” had built up so much heat that the three tracks they premiered on MySpace early this month earned them blog praise from Pitchfork, Idolator, and the Fader. The new tunes, all of them weird enough to out-OutKast OutKast, have kicked the buzz for Dude ’n Nem’s still-in-progress debut album into overdrive.

But four days after our interview, the group’s label, TVT Records, announced that it was laying off the majority of its staff and filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Label founder and president Steve Gottlieb assured the media that TVT still planned on releasing everything on its schedule, including the Dude ’n Nem record, though he acknowledged it might take longer than planned. I doubt anybody believed him. Droves of A-list TVT artists have publicly complained about the label’s business practices. Even before the bankruptcy announcement, Pitbull was telling his fans to bootleg his new record rather than support the label, and last year Lil Jon threatened to withhold Crunk Rock from TVT, accusing Gottlieb of shorting him millions in royalties (eventually TVT cut him a check and he backed down). Trent Reznor, whose acrimony toward his old label is legendary, posted a link to the bankruptcy story on the NIN site under the headline “You’re Gonna Get Yours.”

As for the Dude ’n Nem record, though TVT is a top-tier independent and its big releases sell enough copies to compete with major-label product, it doesn’t seem likely it’ll have enough personnel left to do right by an album that could blow up the way this one might—especially considering that Pitbull was bitching about lax promotion when TVT had twice as many employees. Dude ’n Nem could end up on whatever label buys out their contract—or worse, stuck in limbo.

When I write about the music industry, I frequently focus on major labels and their failure to cope with the emerging digital marketplace and its shady counterpart, illegal file sharing. In fact I’ve been accused of taking improper pleasure in their suffering, and of turning a blind eye to the trouble that piracy causes artists. I do get some joy out of watching the big corporations fuck themselves, it’s true, but that’s precisely because I sympathize with artists. File sharing can’t hurt most of the people who make music for the majors because they never see a cut of sales in the first place. You have to be pretty savvy or pretty lucky to land a contract that doesn’t start you off so far in debt you need a hit to earn your way out.

What about indie labels, though? They’re not necessarily any nicer to their artists, as the example of TVT proves. But even the saintliest labels—the genuinely independent, not-half-owned-by-Warner indies who treat their roster like family—are threatened by the same marketplace pressures as everybody else. Of even greater concern than slumping sales is the question of what happens once the music business goes entirely online, the costs associated with producing and shipping CDs disappear, and any band with a MySpace page is as likely to blow up as one with a budget behind it. Labels of all types will have to make fundamental changes to the way they work.

If there’s one killer fix that’ll let them thrive under this new music-distribution paradigm, I don’t think anyone’s found it yet. But Peter Rojas, cofounder of RCRD LBL, is pursing one interesting option. After helping to develop some of the Web’s best-trafficked tech-commentary sites—including the gadget blogs Gizmodo and Engadget—he “stumbled upon” the idea for a label whose business model would be built around charging consumers the going rate for music online—that is, nothing. RCRD LBL isn’t trying to compete with outlets that make music available for free. It is one of those outlets.

Tech pundits tend to advocate the free flow of information (including music) in the online world, and they’re often accused of overlooking the difficulty artists are bound to have trying to make a living off—or even break even on—music nobody pays for. Launched in November by Rojas and Josh Deutsch, a former VP at Virgin and cofounder of Downtown Records (aka the label that Gnarls Barkley built), RCRD LBL has money coming in, but 100 percent of it is from ad sales and sponsorships on its Web site. The site works like a blog, right down to the RSS feed, and the free downloads on offer come not only from a gang of affiliated indies (Warp, Ghostly, Dim Mak) but from RCRD LBL’s own roster, which currently includes the likes of Professor Murder and White Denim. “Music is already free, whether the labels want to admit it or not,” explains Rojas via e-mail (he and Deutsch live in New York). “But interest in music is at an all-time high. It’s just that the value has evaporated in selling plastic discs and crystallized elsewhere.”

Advertisers looking to pick up some reflected shine from hot music are already footing some of the expense of delivering consumers free material, and a lot of venture capital has been expended on ideas like ad-supported media players or delivery systems that incorporate microcommercials into the songs themselves. RCRD LBL’s method of interwining music and advertising is less invasive—by the time you download its free, unlocked 192 kpbs MP3s, you’ve already looked at all the ads you’ll have to. Most of them are relatively tastefully incorporated into the site—the Nikon logo on the artist-photo widget, the Virgin America logo on the tour-date widget—but it’s hard not to be at least peripherally aware that the tunes you’re downloading were brought to you by a friendly indie-rock-loving megacorporation.

Depending on your perspective, this is either another example of the capitalist sys­tem co-opting the underground or a deliciously ironic way to funnel cash from multinationals into independent art. Either way, it seems to be working—Rojas won’t go into details, but he assures me that RCRD LBL is turning a profit and paying all its artists. In no time the label’s managed to position itself as a tastemaker, so it isn’t simply parasitizing the established imprints it partners with—and its Web site is an amazingly effective promotional tool in its own right, cutting way down on the money required to push emerging artists. It hasn’t started offering tour support (Rojas says nobody has asked for it yet), but it’s prepared to step up.

Right now it’s hard to say whether a busi­ness like RCRD LBL would survive if there weren’t traditional labels in the same eco­system, but we may find out soon—things are going to get worse for the music business before they get better. The industry’s evolution from disc to digital seems to favor smaller, faster-moving indies, but Rojas thinks the majors can make the trans­ition if they give some of their smarter staffers permission to use their brains. “It won’t be easy,” he writes, “but there are actually a lot of smart people at the labels, and more and more they’re getting a chance to do what they want to do.”   

For more on music, see our blogs Crickets and Post No Bills.

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