Back to the Old Ways
…and maybe a bit of ideology:
Cohesion Arts is a “new paradigm” : Artists Management, Marketing and Promotion, Digital Distribution and Consulting for a select clientele of independent recording artists and road warriors. The company offers a “Chinese menu” of services based on the following premises:
a) now that digital replication has reduced the value of recorded music to something approaching zero, the rubber hits the road – literally and figuratively – where the rubber hits the road. In other words, you no longer tour to support sales of a new release, you give away the new release in order to get people to show up on your tour. Therein lies the “new paradigm” in a nutshell;
b) the greatest myth of the “do it yourself era” is….actually doing it “yourself.” The fact is that even though the business foundations of the old “label” -based recording industry have pretty well disintegrated, the sort of things that labels do – primarily marketing and promotion — are still essential elements of success. The other elements of that old model – deployment of capital, controlling the means of production and distribution — are now in the hands of anybody with a MacBook. Still, it’s really hard to spin all those plates while you’re driving. Everybody “on the road” needs an “engine of support” running behind the scenes. But there are very few traveling troubadours who can justify the cost an entire “life support system” by themselves.
c) Everybody on the front lines of this evolving new paradigm is learning vital things from their experience, but none of us will succeed in a vacuum. By assembling a loose “collective” of traveling performers, everybody benefits from everybody else’s experience; the wandering minstrels are the “scouts” on the digital frontier, and Cohesion Arts is the “hub” that gathers information from the field, implements the most viable strategies, and then replicates them across the rest of the clientele.
d) the bottom line of the “new media” environment is that an infinite amount of channel space means that any purveyor of the creative arts can find an audience (assuming they meet the first criterion for success in the creative realm: “make sure you’re good.”) But that’s not going to happen just because you have computer and broadband connection. It takes strategy, planning, implementation, and infinite adaptability, because the skills you learn today are probably going to be replaced by the skills you have to learn tomorrow.
If this sounds like an approach to music that might apply to your career, please contact [email protected]