Finding the Rhythm

A great way not to sell music

March 30, 2009 at 12:35 pm Leave a comment

This past weekend, I took some time out to update my Top 25 dance chart, and as I was preparing “buy” links, I was rather struck by something. Three listings on the chart come from the UK’s Polydor Records: Junior Caldera’s Sleeping Satellite, Girls Aloud’s The Loving Kind, and The Saturdays’ Just Can’t Get Enough.

All three of these songs also got added to the regular rotation at iDanceRadio.fm.

And all three songs are not available for sale in the United States anywhere I could find.

Before I started DJ’ing, I was struck by how difficult it was to find dance music to buy. It wasn’t for lack of trying; it was almost as if the point for producers and artists wasn’t to sell music, it was just to make it. That’s nice, I suppose, but when you’re a music consumer who wants to be legal, and wants to support his or her favorite songs and artists, what are you supposed to do?

Polydor, once active in the US, is today a UK-only label. But it is part of the monster Univeral Music Group, and Interscope, another Universal label that is active in dance here in the US, could presumably be posting these songs for sale on iTunes. Why the hell aren’t they?

Yes, I know, licensing deals and recording contracts are complicated, territorial, etc. But come on, it’s Universal Music Group, 500 lb. music gorilla, and one of the ones whining incessantly for years now about music piracy and how it’s ruined their business.

Well, here’s a piece of advice: Offer the damned music for sale then!

What’s beyond me is why these releases are being promoted to DJs in North America, if there’s no intent to market the material here. I’m not really complaining; these are good songs. That’s why they’re in rotation on the station, and it’s why I’m playing them. I like good music. End of story. But it really does seem to defy all reasonable logic.

Maybe this is a twisted way to test the waters over here before deciding whether to offer the music. But I do know that about all it takes to post stuff for sale on iTunes is a desire to do so, a legal right to do so, and a trained monkey intern to log into Apple’s interfaces and post the stuff.

In this day and age, you’d think someone like Universal could manage to make that happen for any, every and all releases in their catalog to eek-out every last bit of revenue humanly possible. I don’t get why they’re not.

Meanwhile, I guess I just keep spinning the good music that comes my way through legitimate promotional sources, and when asked, “Where can I get that?” I’ll start answering, “Fly to the UK and snag it there.”

What a shame.

Entry filed under: Dance Music Industry. Tags: Girls Aloud, iDanceRadio.fm, Interscope, iTunes, Junior Caldera, Polydor Records, The Saturdays, Univeral Music Group.