If you ever wanted a capsule example of everything that’s still wrong with the record business, despite the fact that music sales seem to finally be going up again, nothing sums it up quite as nicely as the story of Cali Swag District. “Teach Me How To Dougie” was one of the breakout singles of last year (it was also one of the best). It never got very high on the Billboard charts, but it was ubiquitous everywhere else, especially on YouTube, where various versions of the song garnered over 50 million hits. The single itself has sold something over 2 million copies (and those are just the legal downloads).
Signed by Capitol, the group immediately went into the studio and recorded an album, Kickback. The first single from the LP tanked, though, and the album’s release date kept getting pushed back, until it finally settled into the limbo known as “coming soon”. It’s an old story, and has happened to a lot of hip-hop and r&b artists lately—just ask Amerie.
But it’s worthwhile considering their story in light of Billboard’s conjectures regarding Gwyneth Paltrow’s recent signing to Atlantic Records for a reported $900,000. How, Billboard’s Glenn Peoples asks, in the current sales climate, would Atlantic get their money back? To make up the $900,000, Atlantic would need to sell around 700,000 copies of her album (or seven million individual tracks), not an impossibility considering Paltrow’s pre-existent rock connections and success on Glee (the less said about Country Strong the better).
But that would just pay back Paltrow’s advance. There would also be promotional costs involved, and this is where the story gets interesting. Billboard’s estimate is that Paltrow’s album would cost about $300,000 to record, which would be paid out of Paltrow’s advance. But promotional costs, which include videos, advertising, singles promotion, etc. would be nearly seven times more than that. Meaning that Atlantic would need to make back over $3 million in order to turn a profit on Paltrow’s contract, hardly a sure thing (Peoples’ comparison of Paltrow to Darius Rucker, by the way, is ridiculous: Paltrow may be famous, but she’s not famous for making music, the way Rucker was).
Which brings us back to Cali Swag District. Their album is finished (and I bet it cost a lot less than $300,000), they’ve gotten their advance, and Capitol is now assuming all the risk for releasing the record. They’ve no doubt already made some of their money back on “Dougie”, maybe all of it. But any costs that accrue now—meaning the costs of promotion, advertising, etc.—are the record company’s alone. So why take the risk if the follow-up single to “Dougie” has already tanked and nothing else on the album, from Capitol’s point of view at least, stands any better chance of being a hit?
The fact that it would cost the label virtually nothing to release the album, especially if they went download-only for the initial release, is apparently beside the point. Releasing an album without promotion, according to the thinking of the major labels, is roughly the same of throwing it in the garbage. Even though that self-fulfilling prophecy has already been disproved by “Dougie” itself, not to mention “Crank Dat”, a batch of jerkin’ records, and now Rebecca Black’s “Fridays”, nothing will ever convince the heads of the major labels otherwise. And now that Cali Swag District is signed to a label that refuses to release their record, they’re stuck. They may very well be one hit wonders, anyway, but it’s still hard not to sympathize with them. Besides, the way Capitol is acting, we’ll never really know, will we?
