Lady Wallace Sings – and kills the traditional music industry
Full discloure, folks: my opinion on her may be biased. I don’t find myself too often writing about a good friend and also someone I am collaborating with on a few music projects in these terms. But there are some good reasons for my online friend and IMVU avatar Lady Wallace to be featured in the news.
Lady Wallace – "Goodbye (Acoustic Version)" – Watch the top videos of the week here
Lady Wallace (real name Mary Elizabeth Wallace) joined IMVU.com less than two years ago. She wanted to see if that could be of some use to promote her music, just like her MySpace page. A road many other people have taken (me included ;)) since the Internet gave people a chance to express themselves in music and many other fields.
Her first effort happened to be a music track accompained by a 3d video filmed within the virtual world of IMVU (www.imvu.com), which may be defined as a cross between Second Life or something similar to that, and an instant messaging system. You basically chat in public or private rooms with online friends and everyone is represented by a 3d avatar. MSN Messenger made into a videogame, if you prefer.
Just as in Second Life, independent “developers” create objects for your avatars and your IMVU page: and copyright for these objects stays with their creators, not IMVU Inc. The company lives mostly selling “credits” (just like Linden Labs have their own virtual currency) and those can be used to purchase stuff.
Music soon became an important part of the IMVU scene but 90% of that wouldn’t have been approved by the music industry. It was bits or entire tracks ripped out of cds and then converted to a format suitable for IMVU: avatars would “wear” visible (or invisible) objects containing the tracks and play those for their friends, maybe enjoying dancing in a club that exists only in cyberspace.
The music industry didn’t notice that – IMVU was probably still marginal and well, these days the big labels are pretty much busy with other problems.
Bertelsmann sold its stake of Sony BMG to Sony. The new BMG – aka BMG Rights Management – is like 1% of the old company and is mostly a box of copyrights and a licensing agency (whose physical output will still be in Sony’s hands). In Europe, Sony also made a deal with an agency called Exposure, forming a company called SBX: in other words, Sony also will be like BMG. Bigger, but still not handling all of its business directly and looking for expansion other areas of the music business.
EMI has a debt so huge that basically until recently its current situation was: will it be sold right now in pieces or will it go bankrupt first? Not many other chances were seen, but the current owners Terra Firma instead decided to inject further money in the struggling major, unexpectedly, in December 2008. Yet it seems not such a wise move, since technically this still does not mean EMI is safe.
Warner is also not doing so good, but at least their financial situation is not a disaster like EMI; sadly, they just opted to accelerate suicide by taking their valuable video contents off YouTube.
Universal seems the only major being able to survive and still earn a lot of cash in the end.
But notice that even the largest of the majors has now outsourced US distribution to someone else (Ingrooves), just as EMI who has also abandoned almost completely some Asian markets. Cutting a number of jobs, closing down offices or selling them, EMI has left the business in a strategic market like China and is just keeping some licensing deals up for those regions. This event was compared by some to the “end of the British Empire” and Hong Kong being handed back to China.
Back to Lady Wallace: I discovered her because of her 3d video “Lady Wallace Sings”. Apparently, that worked with many other people, and she sort of built a loyal group of followers – not entirely intentionally – onto IMVU.com, even more than the attention she is getting on MySpace (where anyway she had a remarkable number of pageviews and plays). The video – uploaded originally onto YouTube – was embedded on the IMVU.com frontpage.
The number of 100,000 YouTube views was quickly reached (while I am writing, the total for Lady Wallace’s clips on YouTube is about 165,000 and her video presence is now extended to many other places, from MTV Networks’ Spike TV to Metacafe, from Revver to Al Gore’s Current TV).
In November 2008 IMVU launches a Music Store. While this is different from most digital music sites and aimed mostly at providing music for streaming in rooms with other friends’ avatars, the initial reactions are mixed.
Apart from all the technical glitches and requests from improvements, and the lack of some major content (well, these problems have been there for every digital music service except Apple iTunes, probably), for IMVU’s users and fans there is one major issue: this can kill the old-style developer-made files, whether illegal or fully legal and original like Lady Wallace’s.
On the other hand, a new service has been launched: in partnership with one aggregator called Tunecore, IMVU allows independent artists again to have a chance to be in the store. Lady Wallace accepts the offer although it may not be the best around since Tunecore is not the number one aggregator and the site that acts like a bridge beteween it and IMVU, GroupieTunes, is mostly a mobile/ringtones site whose catalogue and features aren’t exactly impressive. Yet, what does Wallace has to lose apart from that 9.99 US dollars fee?
Fast forward to December 15th, 2008: “Lady Wallace Sings” is in the IMVU store. The word of mouth machine starts its engines and on day two, she is in the Top 20.
Curiously, her track has been categorised as “jazz”. This could have been a problem for her, since her song – co-produced with husband Lord Wallace – is a mix of styles from ambient to electronica with slow abstract hip-hop beats. This doesn’t stop the song from becoming no.1 in jazz, topping a chart which features material from the likes of Kenny G and Louis Armstrong.
On day four – Dec.18th – Lady Wallace reaches number 4 in the charts. Katy Perry, Mariah Carey, Linkin Park and many others lay in the lower floors of the charts. That Elvis “Chistmas album” made of artificially recreated “duets” with current artists isn’t even in the Top 20. Ironically, Lady Wallace claims seeing Elvis on TV at the age of 3 as the jumpstart for her music activities.
Day five: the number 2 spot is reached and Britney Spears is the last resource for the traditional music industry. On the subsequent day, briefly, Lady Wallace is down one position to 3 but then back to 2. But she still lacks the best position in the chart.
Day seven, December 21st: while no traditional artist or label is watching or taking care of that store, “Lady Wallace Sings” tops the charts in the IMVU Music Store.
Lady Wallace is not the only original and independent artist to make music available onto IMVU: Italian developer Guitarland is also in the store and has similarly used Tunecore. Also, a couple of traditional label-based artists have appeared on the chat service: O’Neal McKnight and Shontelle. But while these two aren’t exactly the biggest names the industry could come up with, the difference is that both were sort of one-shot promotions. You can have an avatar and objects, but after the appearance is done, nothing remains. O’Neal – or whoever was handling his IMVU page – never accepted me as an IMVU friend and never replied to my requests for an interview. Lady Wallace was happy to have an interview with me in her public IMVU room the day I first saw her. Shontelle did a similar appearance in the site, and she was supposed to be in the music store too (she is not). O’Neal’s label also doesn’t seem to care about that. Out of curiosity: both artists are on SRC Records, a label under the Universal Motown umbrella. In other words: yes they are linked to a crappy major. Still even in this, Universal did something compared to the nonexistence of her “sisters” in virtual worlds.
So what is the difference? Not just being in the IMVU Music Store, of course: Lady Wallace is real, you could have a chat with her or hear her playlist running in a public room (her pretty eclectic selections could include classical or ambient or blues, maybe the occasional Cypress Hill, Elvis or the Monkees). Or you could see somebody engaging in bad behaviour being shot in his or her pixels by LW’s heavily armed avatar (and elegantly kicked out of the chat room too). Just like you could do with other online friends.
Right now -again this is a personal opinion that you are free to consider as heavily biased- Lady Wallace is to IMVU’s music store what chinese developer Anshe Chung is to Second Life: she “adds significant value” to the service.
Traditional labels, if they wish to survive, will have to move to new business models, trying to be more like agencies offering services to the artists, rather than being just corporations who “own” the artist (often having rights on names, websites and other aspects, not just songs and recorded masters). But it may be late, too late. About ten years late.
The “great escape” to places like Live Nation and the birth of companies such as Elite Artist Services; the revolution triggered by people such as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails or CD Baby running successfully for 10 years, quickly becoming the main source of content for Apple iTunes and now being picked up by Disc Makers are just the top of the iceberg.
For those who will write a history of the music industry: please record that 2008 was the year in which the old world died for real. And while it is still possible that she may just be enjoying Andy Warhol’s “fifteen minutes of fame” right now, please take a note that while Lady Wallace is not responsible for single-handedly destroy the traditional music industry, she surely contributed a few magic bullets. ;)