Getting a Label Deal in Today's Music Industry: Interview with Artist Manager Dean Baylor, Winton Elliott & Associates

 

Dean Bayler is currently a day artist manager with Winton Elliott and Associates, an artist services firm based in Nashville, TN. Prior to this, he was a road manager and tour manager for various Christian and mainstream artists, such as Amy Grant and Mercy Me, and Keith Urban. I find Dean’s interview to be refreshing to the ears. In this interview, Dean elaborates on the record labels, the need for down sizing and cutting costs due to the market going digital, and where the industry stands today. Because the digital market has evolved so much within the last five years it is so easy for artists to independently market themselves. Artists have some many outlets to use for self-promotion; social networks like reverbnation, twitter, youtube, facebook, myspace and the list goes on. There’s also the ability for artists to sell their music through digital websites like tunecore, i-tunes, rhapsody which in turn has created a way for artist to rake in mass revenue. 

Digital marketing has allowed for fans to be able to have immediate access to their favorite artist’s music. They no longer have to purchase the entire album they can pick and choose their favorites. Even though this method of purchasing music digitally has grown with such fever, it has struck distribution companies immensely causing album sales to plummet. Not only has this been a reason for album sales to drop but also pirating of music has been a factor as well. More and more websites are creating different ways to download music for free which hurts everybody in the music entertainment industry in some form or manner. However the die hard fan will go out of his/her way to buy the album. With this said more and more independent artists have found success through online stores, self marketing and promotion. Dean also explains that the manner in which an artist is initially development has changed as well due to the market going digital. This way the team behind the artist pretty much composes the package and have it ready to go for the labels. Reference Source: Baylor, D. (2008). Getting a label deal in toda'ys music industry [Web]. Retrieved from http://www.artistshousemusic.org/videos/getting a label deal in todays music industry