Dallas Blog

I hate corporate art, and Elecktra 'can go and tank tomorrow I don't care', but I do love one song from Gnarls, and it made the world's first world list of new music: (Tougher than Billboards list by far)
http://musea.wordpress.com/2008/12/10/100-plus-best-music-from-youtube-and-myspace/

Elektra was an amazing record label, at least from an artistic standpoint.

The Doors, The Stooges, MC5, Joni Mitchell, Sergio Mendes, Queen, Yes, The Cars, Tom Waits, Etta James, Billy Bragg, The Cure, Afghan Whigs, Moby, The Pogues, Metallica, The Pixies and Cocteau Twins (both via 4AD), and also Dallas-based Pantera, Sara Hickman and Old 97's... this barely scratches the surfaces of the artists that this label brought to the table.

Tom, say what you want about "corporate art", but I can't imagine what the music business mosaic would look like without the contribution of those particular artists. They certainly wouldn't have sold literally hundreds of millions of records by being on an indie label, or by performing in the box office of a movie theater.

In addition, Metallica's A&R guy at Elektra was Michael Alago, who was the first major label A&R person to visit Deep Ellum and check out our artists back in 1986. So yeah, dismiss the label with another misguided rant about "corporate art". This is music that a lot of people can't imagine living without.

Corporate art is now not in the past. It's the consolidation of many into one. It's what happened in the last few decades, it has nothing to do with the sixties. When their were thousands of music companies, and the music companies were separate it meant there was competition for the best music - and separately competition for the best movies, and tv, and publishing etc.
Then consolidation or synergy happened and almost all the arts and media were under a handful of corporations. There are four record companies that now control 80% of the industry. Not thousands, but 4. That's the problem.
AFTER that there was corporate art and it was horrible -horrible film, publishing, music, media etc.
Read here and find out more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_consolidation