The Rules of the Game
Robert Fripp on the profession of music
"We have three tiers of distribution: We have access to record shops in this country through Ryko, in England through Pinnacle, in Japan, and in Europe through a number of different distributors in different countries. America, although very big, is actually one unified market. Europe is not one unified market, it’s 10 markets at least, with their own languages, cultural backgrounds, business practices."
Fripp says that DGM works through stores and mail order, but that mass marketing really makes sense only for established artists. "For the newer and younger artists on Discipline, the only money they’re ever going to make from the records is by selling them at gigs. Which is entirely reasonable — the listening community will go and see them; if you buy a record from Discipline in England, it’s 5 pounds; you’ll sell it from 13 to 15 pounds at the show. If you sell 10, you’ve made 80 pounds; if you sell 100, you’ve made a lot more. And you’ll probably find for those newer artists whose records aren’t quite yet released but will be within nine months, they’ll make more money when selling the records themselves than they’ll get from even mail order or distribution in shops."
In order to discourage bootlegging of live Crimson tapes and to make the band’s archival material available to fans, DGM has created its Collectors’ Club, offering digitally remastered live and studio music and selling it by mail order; this will also eventually be implemented through downloading on the Web, though there are still a few bugs to be worked out.
"America is currently in the first world. There are four worlds: The first world is the information world, and the U.K. and Europe are still really in the second world. In America, e-mail is now as well-established and commonplace as faxes; all businesses in England have faxes, but e-mail is something like faxes were 10 years ago. A very small proportion of our mail-order business in Europe is through the Internet."
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