Wiggling Their Way To Musical Success Without A Label

Culture

from the it's-not-needed dept

Again, no one is saying that there’s no place for music labels any more — in fact, we think there’s a huge place for them if they can help a band that doesn’t want to build a business by itself. However, for bands that are willing to go entirely without a label, it’s certainly possible to be a success (and, before someone misinterprets this, no one is saying success is guaranteed either). Tim Lash points us to a CNN interview with The Wiggles, the massively popular pop band for toddlers. The whole interview is interesting, but the most interesting part is the explanation of how the band went it alone. Two of the original members had been on a label-signed band before (The Cockroaches) and knew they didn’t want to go through it again — even though this was in the early 1990s, before the web and before all these alternatives had sprung up:

The model for nearly everything we do is self-financed. We own everything and create it ourselves.

We wanted to keep financial and creative control. The Cockroaches’ record label had taken some control over their work, and we wanted to avoid that type situation. With our background, we know what’s good for children and what’s best for The Wiggles. No one else had done what we were doing.

While it sounds like, early on, the band handled the business on an ad hoc basis, they later got help from some business managers who have helped to guide the band’s strategies over the years.

Of course, as with all of these examples, someone will certainly pop up in the comments and complain that there’s nothing new or different about this story. And that’s true. But that’s the point. All of this could have been done years before, but it was much more difficult. What modern technology has done is made it much easier for musicians to control their own destiny, if they decide that’s what they want to do.

Filed Under: business models, labels, music industry, wiggles