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Originally posted by wetcamelfood
It would be great to know how many albums the Mac (& LB) contract was/is for but if there is/has been only one left on the FM one and "they" have opted to "finish things off" with WB/Reprise with this GH thing, I wonder why it has taken "them" 5/6 years to come to this "decision"? Surely "they" could've thought of this idea sooner.
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I still can't help thinking that the foot-dragging is at least partially due to the huge "reorganization" at the Warner label with the AOL merger (just after Lindsey talked to the L.A. Times about plans for his solo album).
Howie Klein was Fleetwood Mac-friendly. But he & his old cohorts were ousted only just over a year ago, & I think the fallout of that is still playing out at the label, including with Fleetwood Mac's plans. Even David Kahne left the label after Tom Whalley took over. The whole Wilco flap at Reprise was pretty indicative of the situation at the time, except that Wilco did the wise thing: they cut all ties with Reprise immediately & headed straight for another label.
Fleetwood Mac was definitely shopping for a label last winter. I broke the news on the newsgroup & it was no rumor. But I don't have any idea how the situation has played out since that time. Here's what I posted in February:
GO YOUR OWN WAY: Fleetwood Mac, whose last album sold north of 5 million, are said to be taking their next album to a non-WMG label for $8-10 million. What about Stevie Nicks, who's still tied to Warner? Will the deal end up back inside WMG, or could the Mac go Nickless?
Here's an eye-opening paragraph from Grammy magazine last month:
Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker ran the company for decades and set the tone by hiring people who love music, because they wanted a bigger view than 'Is this a hit?'" says [Howie] Klein. "We would determine that a band could go all the way, and we would support them financially and emotionally until they did. But sometimes it would take four or five albums for a band like that to make it, and we'd get constant pressure from above to drop them — 'They're losing money, put your resources somewhere else.' But in those days it was easy for the talent people to force the corporate guys to back down. It's a lot less easy to do that now in the record industry. The corporate hand is so much stronger now, there is no comparison."
Since the merger with AOL, Warner has laid off hundreds of people, & the ax is still falling this year. Bands that weren't performing financially up to snuff were targeted, no matter how established they once were. A list was put together last year of 30 bands that were destined for the chopping block. One exec said, "They were downsizing the company & bands & bodies had to go."
Maybe if the members of Fleetwood Mac had the kind of fresh & realistic thinking skills that the guys in Wilco had, we'd have had our Mac album -- maybe even our Buckingham album -- by now on some label like Nonesuch or Dreamworks, some label that would be willing to market the damn thing.