In 2023, country superstar Garth Brooks put out some new music in the strangest way possible. I’ll let Rolling Stone explain:
On November 7, Brooks will release Time Traveler … as part of a 7-CD box set that’s the third installment of the country superstar’s The Limited Series. The box set will feature all three of Brooks’ post-retirement studio albums … as well as the triple live album Triple Live, plus Time Traveler … However, The Limited Series is limited exclusively to Bass Pro Shops, the sporting goods store that specializes in fishing gear and the outdoors.
Yes, you read that correctly. Brooks’ latest album was exclusively available at Bass Pro Shops. This seems like an insane release strategy, even for someone who has sold more than 162 million records in the United States. But I actually think in our hyper-digital age, he was onto something, albeit not in quite the right way. As always, this newsletter is also available as a podcast. Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or click play at the top of this newsletter.
Another Music Release Strategy
1948 was a bad year if you owned a big movie studio. First, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the studios in United States v. Paramount Pictures, ending many anticompetitive but lucrative practices around theatrical exhibition and distribution. Second, a new technology was on the rise: television.
In their 1994 paper “Household Appliances and the Use of Time: The United States and Britain Since the 1920s,” Sue Bowden and Avner Offer estimated the 1% of American households had a television in 1948. Seven years later, 75% did. Up to the point of publication, that was the fastest a piece of domestic technology diffused through the population. That speed of domination created some fear among movie companies. But it also created opportunity.
For decades, if you wanted to see a movie that was no longer in theaters, you were out of luck. Television changed that. Now, a movie could be played in the theater and then later on TV. Even better, it would make money in both of these scenerios. For example, when CBS negotiated with MGM to air The Wizard of Oz in 1956 — 17 years after its theatrical release — they agreed to pay $225,000 ($2.6 million adjusted for inflation) each time they showed it.
As more at-home viewing technology emerged, movies could make money for a much longer period. You can see this by imaging various revenue streams for a film released in 30-year increments:
1930s: You can make money during the theatrical run
1960s: You can make money during the theatrical run and then licensing your film to television networks
1990s: You can make money during the theatrical run, via sales and rentals of the VHS, and licensing your film to television networks
Now, imagine you jump forward 30 more years to get to the 2020s. Suddenly, this model is broken. Maybe you’ll release your movie for a short run in theaters, but it will likely be available either simultaneously or shortly after on some streaming service viewers likely already pay for. Most people are not signing up for a new service just to watch one movie. Matt Damon described this changing dynamic more explicitly in a 2022 interview on Hot Ones:
The DVD was a huge part of our business … Technology has just made that obsolete. [With] the movies that we used to make you could afford to not make all of your money when it played in the theater because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release. Six months later … it would be like reopening the movie. When that went away, it changed the type of movies that we could make.
I did this movie [called] Behind the Candelabra. I talked to a studio executive who explained that it was a $25 million dollar movie. I would have to put that much into print and advertising to market it … So, now I’m in $50 million. [Because] I have to split everything I get with the exhibitor — the people who own the movie theaters — I would have to make $100 million before I got into profit. The idea of making $100 million on a story about a love affair between two people … is suddenly a massive gamble in a way that it wasn’t in the 1990s.
While I think Hollywood could benefit from lengthening rather than shortening theatrical release windows, I don’t want to talk about that here. I want to talk about how I think the music industry needs to take some cues from Hollywood of the 1990s.
As noted, for decades the movie business model was based on exclusivity, or windowing. You could only watch certain movies in certain ways at certain times. This made it possible so that viewers would pay multiple times for the same film. The music industry’s history with exclusivity has been much smaller in scope.
In the 2000s, we saw huge artists do exclusive releases with large corporations like Target and Starbucks in an attempt to stem the bleeding from diminishing CD sales. Then in the 2010s, big artists like Frank Ocean and Kanye West tried to window albums to specific streaming services, while others — like myself — would premiere their music on specific blogs. None of this stuck, though.
As I write, Taylor Swift is on the verge of releasing her new album, The Tortured Poets Department. When it comes out, you will not only be able to stream it, but you will be able to hear it on the radio and buy it as a vinyl record, CD, cassette, or digital download. And this has been the general model in music for a long time. Release your music everywhere in all formats all at once.
Why did music’s business model develop like this instead of like Hollywood’s business model? There are a few factors that you could point to, but I think the most important is the Billboard charts. Careers are made and lost on the chart performance of a song or album. Since Billboard accounts for all formats, exclusivity can be the difference between your music premiering at number 1 versus number 41.
Furthermore, if an artist tried to first make their music available, say, on CD for three months before releasing it to streaming services, it would almost immediately be pirated and uploaded to various sites. In other words, format-based windowing, or exclusivity, just won’t work in this day and age. That’s why I think the industry should get more experimental with experiential exclusivity. Here’s an example.
Recently, Maggie Rogers put out her understated third record Don’t Forget Me. My friend Eddy pointed out to me that three days before the record’s release she tweeted that there would be listening parties at a handful of places in the United States. Rogers did not invent the idea of listening parties, but she got me thinking about how powerful they could be with a little innovation.
There are bars all over the world that host trivia, karaoke, and other events to try to get people to visit during off-peak nights. Imagine labels and artists partnered with bars to have nights where new music would be played a few weeks or months before it was released. Also, imagine the bar charged $10 a person and split the revenue with the artists. This scenario has many desirable properties.
Cheap for Artists and Fans: In an age of wildly expensive concert tickets, this would be a cheap way to for fans to experience music socially while only requiring an artist to email an MP3
Scalable: Unlike a concert, the artist does not have to be present for something like this, meaning that you could scale it to hundreds of locations
Builds Hype Without Hurting Sales: Given that this is focused on an experience rather than a purchase, events like this can build hype without eating into sales and hurting chart position
Not Easily Pirate-able: Sure, someone could record what they’d heard on their phone and upload it online, but it would likely be low quality and much harder to capture than ripping a CD
Supports Local Business: I can’t imagine local businesses being upset about an initiative like this if it could get people through their doors during slower nights
Would this be as easy as I’m making it sound? Probably not. But I don’t think it’s that outlandish. In fact, I think it plays well with the superfan experiences that the CEOs of Warner and Universal Music have respectively been touting. Furthermore, I think it builds off of the live music boom that has been ongoing for the last few years.
As I’ve discussed at various times throughout this newsletter, the music industry is not perfect. There are issues with music streaming. There are issues with ticketing. There are issues with gender representation. But we can’t just wish these issues away. We need to come up with innovative solutions to address them. While I think looking to the musical and cinematic technology of the Clinton administration to solve contemporary problems is often a mistake, sometimes the past can provide a nice blueprint for the future.
A New One
"Flesh and Blood" by Cindy Lee
2024 - Psychedelic Rock
If Garth Brooks had the most interesting release strategy of 2023, then Cindy Lee has had the most interesting release strategy this year so far. Lee, the alter ego of Canadian musician Patrick Flegel, made their latest record Diamond Jubilee only available on YouTube and a website that looks like it was straight of 1997. It’s received nothing but rave reviews. I think Pitchfork’s rave captures the sound of the album and “Flesh and Blood”, my favorite track on the album, better than I ever could:
This may be the greatest radio station you’ve ever come across. Unless it’s multiple stations talking over each other, in and out of range. Sounds arrive in strange combinations; nothing is quite exactly the way you remember. Did that classic rock band really have a synth player, and why did they pick a patch that sounds like a mosquito buzzing through a cheap distortion pedal? And those eerie harmonies swirling at the outskirts of that last-dance ballad by some 1960s girl group whose name ends in -elles or -ettes. Did they hire a few heartbroken ghosts who were hanging around the studio as backing vocalists? Or are these fragments of other songs, other signals, surfacing like distant headlights over a hill, then disappearing once more?
An Old One
"The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone)" by U2
2014 - Alternative Rock
In 2014, U2 put out their new album Songs Of Innocence in maybe the most annoying way possible. They worked with Apple to automatically give the album to all 500 million users of iTunes. And when I say “automatically give,” I don’t mean you had the option to download it for free. I mean it was added to your iTunes library whether you wanted it there or not.
People naturally did not like this, especially since it was very hard to get rid of the album. If you’re going to force an album onto everybody’s computer, it better be as good as U2’s The Joshua Tree. While Songs Of Innocence is not that good, I do really enjoy the opening track, “The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone)”. If you’ve been avoiding this album out of spite for the last decade, now is the time to give one of the songs a try.
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Another listening party benefit ... Those of us living in apartments can rarely play music as loudly as we would like so to hear it at proper volume in a suitable location would be a distinct bonus.
I still think there is a market for where you could rent a well kitted out and treated listening room, bringing your own music in whatever format takes your fancy. Even hifi dealers could offer this service in the evenings.
My husband and I were just commenting on why it took 3 months for Pearl Jam to release Dark Matter publicly. It occurred to me that they waited until after the theater screenings per this local biz rollout strategy that you discuss. Sharing this with him! Thank you for the insights, as always.