Absence of A&R people shows changing industry

THE question everyone was asking at the South By Southwest (SXSW) music festival in Austin Texas last week was: where the hell were the major labels? For once, the usual suspects were hugely conspicuous by their absence from the gigging and schmoozing circuits. There were very few A&R people on the run from gig to gig, and you could even sip a ginger ale at the Four Seasons without bumping into a VP of Something-or-Other.

You can chalk this down to many things. There's less seed capital around to sign brand new acts, and industry-wide cutbacks mean business departments are also unwilling to sign huge expenses claims for jollies in the Texan sun.

But it may also smack of new thinking among managers and bands about the role of major labels. Many managers I spoke to at SXSW about future plans for their acts talked about staying independent and licensing the material from territory to territory.

What was the point, asked one American manager, in signing with a label that might not exist in a year's time? Some pointed to how the Arcade Fire have worked Neon Bible as a good blueprint to follow. Released on the Merge label in the United States (where it entered the album charts at number 2 thanks to 92,000 sales), Neon Bible was licensed to Universal Music worldwide. Result? The band keep control of the music and the process, but reap the benefits of the big machine at their disposal.

However, don't take this to mean we're seeing the demise of the major labels. Some panel discussions at SXSW focused on where the music industry goes from here, and no-one was quite ready yet to write the obituary of the traditional business.

As legendary talent finder Seymour Stein put it: "There will always be a music business. What we have to figure out is how to survive."

As long as there are extensive back catalogues to hawk around, major-label logos will survive for some time to come. But it is how the labels will reinvent themselves after the current technological shakedown which will be interesting to observe. We're into an era where it's all about tickets, T-shirts and traction. A label and its shareholders cannot survive on Doors and Sly Stone reissues alone.