Jermaine Dupri: “The Music Industry’s Middleman is Dead” [#BWE09]

From my periphery, I’ve always kept an eye on Jermaine Dupri. He’s been an interesting character to watch, a canary in the coalmine (so to speak), when it comes to the state of the music industry. Jermaine’s history has been as one who from birth was firmly entrenched with the establishment.

Jermaine Dupri, born JD Mauldin, is the youngest inductee to the Georgia Music Hall of fame and the son of Michael Mauldin, the former president of Columbia Records. He’s a highly successful producer, having brought up folks like Mariah Cary, Ludacris, Jay-Z and Usher. And as I said when I first wrote about his music industry musings in 2007, I still haven’t forgiven him for Kriss Kross.

Despite this, I was intrigued by an interview of Dupri by Web2 pundit and entrepreneur Wayne Sutton during the Blogworld Expo this weekend.

As I briefly discussed last week, Jermaine has obviously embraced social media entirely, but his comments on the music industry was very interesting to me.

“Where are we right now? A world where the middleman is basically gone,” said Dupri. “Artists have to understand that. Labels have to understand that.”

Michael Sean Wright and I talk frequently and informally on this topic a lot. We used to do a weekly podcast entitled “Are You Really Experienced,” and it mostly centered around the idea that the old way of doing things is dying. We talked about the stories that had to do with the major labels’ failure to keep up with the times, and chronicle their ultimate downfall.

We don’t do the show anymore, and Michael and I reflected on why that is.

“Essentially, I think the labels are dead,” said Wright. “Every week we read the same three or four stories talking about failure after failure.”

Indeed, the major labels have restructured their companies so that they don’t have to report the earnings on record sales anymore, the number of RIAA lawsuits have drastically reduced, and I’d even go so far as to guessing that piracy of music is down because there’s so much quality free and cheap stuff out there these days.

I’ve been beating this drum on all the soapboxes available to me that death would be the last stop for the music industry if they didn’t adapt. Now, it seems, that even the music industry can’t argue with reality.