Country music legends Brooks & Dunn shared their experiences and answered questions about entertainment law and the changing face of the entertainment industry along with three other panelists at the UT College of Law Monday at 12:30 p.m.
The lecture was the second installment in the Joel A. Katz-Suntrust Lecture Series for the college. The five panelists headlining the lecture were Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn of Brooks & Dunn, Joel A. Katz, founding shareholder and co-managing shareholder emeritus in the Atlanta office of the law firm Greenberg Traurig, Bobby Rosenbloum, shareholder in the Atlanta office of Greenberg Traurig, and Clarence Spalding, the president of Spalding Entertainment and Brooks & Dunn’s personal agent.
Brooks, former chairman of the Country Music Association, discussed the music industry’s growing problem with the illegal downloading of music. He said when the Recording Industry Association of America examined music downloading on university Internet servers in 2006, more than 90 percent of downloads were illegal.
“It feels like a worn-out topic, but it seems to be getting worse at the same time,” Brooks said. “But you know the students that are illegally downloading wouldn’t go into Best Buy and stick a couple of CDs down their pants and walk out with it. There’s something about the mentality and accessibility of downloaded music that is just not translated to moral character.”
Brooks said Wal-Mart and Best Buy are planning to phase out CDs within the next five years.
Moving into the “digital age,” Dunn said everyone in the industry is wondering how to deal with the changes and garner profits from the new products.
“(At) a digital summit in California, … we sat in that room,” Brooks said. “We saw these guys from Pandora, Napster, Amazon (and) Microsoft … sitting at conference tables trying to figure out how to make this happen. They don’t know. They don’t have a clue right now how to get their hands around the monetization of that product.”
With the rapidly developing technology surrounding the music industry, marketing and launching new artists has become more difficult, Spalding said. With radio consolidated to include fewer artists in a playlist and with the increased accessibility of the digital age, Spalding is having trouble marketing new artists.
“Trying to monetize an Ashley Monroe (a local Knoxville country artist), we’re on Facebook and YouTube and everything that’s out there on the Internet,” he said. “Unless you’re looking specifically for her, you’re not just going to wander up on her.”
Spalding said he wonders if young artists will even try to make a break because of the difficulty of attaining success.
Although this transitional period is testing for the music business, it is also an exciting time, Rosenbloum said.
“As a result of the digital revolution, there’s an entirely new set of opportunities for everyone in the music business,” Rosenbloum said. “The record industry has been focusing on this as a great negative, and in fact, it has been because … record sales have been seriously in decline. But what’s happened simultaneously is new companies have sprung up. … With radio declining, there’s a new face to creating music.”
