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Friday, June 16, 2006

Launching Hits from The Internet - Joe Viglione Editorial

LAUNCHING HITS
FROM THE INTERNET


Joe Viglione

President, Var Records


The Holy Grail the record industry seeks to reinvent is that all important hit song to drive album sales. But with so much free music on PureVolume.com, MySpace.com, Archive.org or the endless sea of 30 second soundbites that encompass the AllMusic.com library, can a label and artist create a phenomenon like "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", Michael Jackson's "Thriller", or Pink Floyd's "Dark Side Of The Moon", the latter which reportedly still sells 5,000 units a week in America! Can we deliver an album's worth of songs that sells in excess of 20 million units?

With personality driving the strongest of compositions, I believe hit records can blast out of the internet the way that JibJab Dot com's parody of Kerry and Bush became a sensation in 2004.

At the time Jib Jab was a 5 year old company, but it helped revolutionize the way music is delivered - basically, from e mail to e mail in the days before MySpace.com burst on the scene to become a player.

Let me read you this public domain information on JibJab from
Wikipedia.org:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jib_Jab.com

For the 2004 presidential election, JibJab created a Flash movie entitled This Land, which featured a parody of Woody Guthrie's song "This Land is Your Land", sung by animated caricatures of George W. Bush and John Kerry.

This animation was an instant hit. Visits to the site skyrocketed, and the site was listed number one on Alexa's "Movers and Shakers" list. After being linked to on thousands of websites, the song was featured several times in the printed media and on television, including NBC Nightly News and ABC World News Tonight. On July 26, 2004, the creators appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

The popularity of the animation has resulted in The Richmond Organization, a music publisher that owns the copyright to Guthrie's tune through its Ludlow Music Unit, threatening legal action. JibJab and Ludlow Music reached a settlement after JibJab's attorneys unearthed evidence that the song had passed into the public domain in 1973. The terms of the settlement allowed for the continued distribution of This Land, with JibJab donating 20% of the net proceeds to the Woody Guthrie Foundation, as well as linking to the original song lyrics. Jim Meskimen voiced almost all the characters.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace

MySpace.com's true launch in 2003 when Tom Anderson
took it over hadn't reached high gear yet - and the
JibJab site could have found an even wider audience had the MySpace territory been available to promote the song/video.

Record Labels and Film Companies have often attempted to reinvent the wheel. We at United Label Coalition belive that Creativity, Financing and Talent -identified by the acronym CFT - are the ingredients to bring great songs into the public consciousness - songs that will be as readily accepted as the hit records that once drove the industry - Pink Floyd's "Another Brick In The Wall", M.C. Hammer's "U Can't Touch This", The Beatles' double sided smash "Hey Jude" / "Revolution" - what an anachronism! A double sided hit 45 RPM record.

Can we develop a double sided 45 RPM on the internet?

ULC has the trademark on the "Back To Back Digital 45 RPM". It
BACK TO BACK / THE DOUBLE DIGITAL 45

The A side B side concept should not be lost because a CD single or an I Tune downloading offers more variety. The consumer should be GIVEN a free single with every one they buy. Bands who give 4 songs to “friends” on MySpace.com are giving the store away. You don’t just hand out loaves of bread unless you’re independently wealthy or you are doing this as a hobby.

To run a successful business you have to create something of value and get paid something of value in return.

Think of United Label Coalition as the better chocolate chip cookie mix. Sure, you can get the Copyright Forms and Harry Fox agreements and BMI information right off of the internet – but how many of you sitting here have actually done that? How many of you have your Sponsorship agreement forms ready to give to a potential angel, have your limited partnership agreements ready when 5 or 6 people might be interested in putting some cash into a label project – or the label itself or the artist or a marketing campaign?

Because of limited funding, too many independent record labels have a roadmap that is not very clear or precise. You can have a haphazard approach – as many indy labels do out of necessity.
ULC helps direct you to the best possible path – and you accept or reject it. But you are part of a team. If you fail, there are other entities in the “club”, so to speak, to help you live to fight another day. To help you change to a more successful course learning from mistakes – which are going to happen – because as journalist Joe Viglione says “this is the nuttiest business in the history of the world.” We are taking dreams and making them tangible. In a world where the butterfly net of the internet is making the butterflies easy to catch, we have to make sure the world knows our butterfly is the most beautiful, the most desirable, and that when you pay for something, it actually is better than what you can get for free. That’s why you are paying for it. Because a Beatles album is more desirable than an album by The Partridge Family.

John Q. Public does not know the name of the lead singer of Limp Bizquit, Pearl Jam or The Smashing Pumpkins. Not the way everyone knows John, Paul, George and Ringo. Hip Hop and Rap Artists are personality driven - most of the world knows Puff Daddy, Will Smith, Tupac, Biggy Small, and Kanye West with more artists pushing their way to the limelight.

Hip Hop, Rap, R & B artists are personality driven.
Be they ministers like M.C. Hammer or gangsters like, well, on advice of counsel I'm not naming names, but you get the idea - how can we make rock & roll stars again? How can a Jimi Hendrix, Axyl Rose, Kurt Cobain emerge from the internet? Personality development is what Berry Gordy realized would sell Motown records. The songs were a major component of his formula, to be sure, but he also emphasized the development of the star as entertainer - the entertainer reaching out to deliver the goods to the audiences both onstage and on the radio.

It is personality where Hip Hop, Rap & Rock meet.
It is personality that is going to sell our music.

We aren't re-inventing the wheel. We are looking at brand names - from Coca Cola to Blair Witch Project, from Jib Jab dot com to Motown Records - a label that started up in a city known for manufacturing cars. A label that made records on an assembly line in
Detroit. Berry Gordy did the impossible in a world that believed only in New York, Nashville and Los Angeles. Now, with ULC, labels everywhere can be one by being part of our team.

Our philosophy is to find the strengths of all our labels, focus on those strengths, and to be a player in a world where major labels have swallowed each other up. They - the current "major labels" - don't make records, they do simple accounting in the supermarkets that record stores have become. Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones and Mariah Carey might as well be Cheerios, Wheaties and Fruit Loops. They are the staples on the shelf.

We are the new kids on the block, ready to push our way into that arena.
We are going Back to the basics, we realize that there is strength in numbers, and we are putting the seriousness of all of this into the fun that our audiences need - that our audiences will pay our artists and our labels for the right to hear, for the right to carry our creativity around on their IPod.