Drowned In Sound: This column is exclusive to Drowned In Sound
Drowned in Sound has an excellent article about the current trends in music towards exclusivity. It's good to actually see actual journalism in contrast to the mindless daily blog state of things.
As if artists and artist managers weren’t contending with enough already with 360 deals being pushed and record companies taking to dropping supposed 'albums artists' prior to their second single, the media are now adding to this fractured and fractious landscape with an increasing desire for exclusivity from artists in relation to their coverage, topped by the cherry of multi-platform coverage demands. Thus a relatively new and championed artist can find themselves in the position that a few have reported to The Insider recently of being told that they must avoid title X to gain coverage in title Y.
Exclusivity in and of itself does, of course, make perfect sense in some situations. A magazine or radio station or tv show is hardly likely to cover an act if their direct competitors are given the same content to run the day prior or the same day. This is a landscape that, to some extent, everyone in the music industry is happy to cope with but the prevalence of extreme exclusivity demands in the past year or so is both mutating that original landscape into parody and harming both the artists and the very media that make such demands. Continue reading.
