Rhino Records Lays Off 30-40
WMG's catalog arm Rhino has pink slipped 30-40 staffers with cuts across all departments.
A statement from Rhino blamed "fundamental transformation of the physical new release and catalog business" for the cuts. Rhino will evolve into a leaner division that "handles WMG's global digital catalog initiatives, film, TV, videogame and commercial licensing, and name and likeness representation for legendary artists."
ANALYSIS: Catalog departments are generally among the most profitable divisions at most label groups, and Rhino has has often been viewed as a market leader. But declining CD sales and fewer newer titles worthy of a full re-release push are extending the pressure to cut staff into this once sacred and profitable sector.
The rumor mill is working overtime, as well, pointing to more layoffs at major labels, talent agents and elsewhere within the new music industry as the fourth quarter of a difficult year approaches.
As someone who bought thousands of CDs, and would like to buy lots more due to the superior sound quality, I mourn. I note that the quoted press release text, about what Rhino will evolve into, says nothing about physical CDs.
I will always treasure Bill Inglot’s quote that the secret to Rhino’s superior sound was that they tweaked the azimuth adjustment screw on the tape recorders.
But racheting down Rhino probably makes business sense — why make the catalog CDs when there are so few places left to sell them?
For catalog CDs, I suspect the ArkivMusic model is the way forward. Arkiv has licensed thousands of out-of-print classical CDs from the majors and they burn CD-R to order and deliver via mail.
Well, with the disappearance of CD booklets and album credits a/k/a metadata during the iTunes era (rather not the Napster era because back then, most people were still into that and sites like allmusic.com were kept better updated), the attention span of music listeners has gone down – seemingly so much that in case you don’t promote your catalogue like it was new stuff, it gets out of the public conciousness.
Nowadays, reissues make the charts, seemingly because they are targeted at a broad audience of a lot of different types of people, as opposed to the tightly formatted target audiences that most new major label releases appear to have, which is quite obvious when you know that they test their products via market research with the help of statistical analysis (like film companies would show a movie to a test audience) instead of relying on the instincts of their experienced producers like in the old days.
Hence, fewer newer titles are considered worthy of a full re-release push, as it says in the article.
Won’t miss this outfit. They owe me a lot on money. Thieves.
Good Riddens