What’s Wrong With Music Biz, per Ultimate Insider

The basic recording contract upon which most of the popular music business has been based for the past 50 years is fundamentally broken.

This is not the sentiment of one of the countless critics who throw stones at the music industry from afar, usually for vague philosophical reasons, but rather the pragmatic opinion of a true insider: Tom Silverman, founder of Tommy Boy Records, which sold millions of records by hip-hop artists including Club Nouveau, Coolio, De La Soul, Digital Underground, Everlast, House of Pain and Naughty By Nature.

In a song called “Labels,” The Wu-Tang Clan’s GZA rapped in 1995 about Silverman, “Tommy ain’t my mothafuckin’ boy,” as part of a general criticism of the same label system that Silverman advocates ending in the below interview with Wired.com. To be fair, GZA calls out a number of other hip-hop labels in that song, and Tommy Boy’s practices followed the industry standards of issuing an advance, and generally never allowing an artist to recoup it in order to make money from the sale of their records. The money would always seem to get lost, somehow, before making it to the artist.

But Silverman has a new idea for how to save the biz and treat artists more fairly, by creating a corporations in joint partnership between artists and music companies that give each a 50 percent stake in the artist’s businesses.