Greg Howe: ultimate guitar interview

News:
23-10-2008:
Steven Rosen from Ultimate guitar has put together a great interview with Greg Howe.

When asked about the current state of the business Greg Howe says:
Yeah, well the business has obviously changed drastically. Physical distribution is sort of quickly becoming a thing of the past. People are making their music available in digital form and people are sort of requesting their music in digital form so on that level of course it’s changed. I think that also the internet sort of helped even the playing field a little bit in that the record companies don’t have anywhere near the kind of control that they used to have. They don’t have the ability to manipulate as much as they used to, not that all record companies did that. But they were certainly in the position to do so if they wanted to and in many cases they did. So that’s becoming different. There are a lot of artists today, especially guys who have already established their name, who are just bypassing the record labels now; deciding to just go straight to the internet and not deal with the record label because on many levels they don’t need to.



I think still the important thing about a record label is that they’re usually plugged into the in-house PR. A record label is really a financial backer with connections to the industry. So if you have those connections already and it’s no longer necessary to have the backing, which is quickly becoming that way, then you really can bypass the record labels. The thing that happens with artists is that they probably don’t sell as many records but the percentage they get from each record is so much bigger they end up making a lot more.
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