Stobie Sounds Business Model: Genius or fools luck?
It’s interesting to see that a number of the music industry’s medium sized fish are devising interesting new ways to run record labels. What’s more interesting is that the model developed at Stobie Sounds in 2009 is becoming a popular solution to the conundrum of running a label in the 21st century.
With the rise of Inertia Access and Dew Process’ Create/Control, we thought it was timely for a bit of a reflection of our first years of life as ‘Australia’s Favourite Community Based Roots Record Label’.
A few years back, when Stobie Sounds sprang to life off the back of a 4 track EP, music industry boffins were using adjectives such as ‘crisis’, ‘terminal decline’ and ‘Holy Shitballs’ to describe the state of the recording industry. The ‘big four’ record labels (now the big three) were owned by Russian oil tycoons, investment bankers and straight up crooks who spent the best part of the 80s and 90s becoming bloated profit making behemoths that had somehow forgotten that music is an artform. Labels had become brutally efficient at defrauding artists and appealing to the lowest common denominator. In this context, our decision to form a record label was often met by smirks. I recall one day early on I was dropping off a batch of Kirk Special’s debut at a record store when the owner provided his views on our new venture: ‘If you don’t sell more than 5000 copies it’s a vanity project’. I didn’t have the balls to tell him we only made 100 copies and had no plans to make any more.
