The WSJ ($) has a story about venture capital groups that are supposedly going to be backing heritage artists who want to get back into the limelight:

Past-their-prime rock bands are used to being ignored by record labels and mocked by the music press. But, in Britain, they’ve found a new groupie: venture capital.

A boutique London investment bank, Ingenious Media PLC, is financing comeback albums. Last month, it signed UB40, a reggae band that had a No. 1 hit in 1988 with the song “Red Red Wine.” Other artists working on CDs for Ingenious include veteran rocker Peter Gabriel, and the techno punk band the Prodigy.

The firm, which specializes in media and entertainment deals, pays for the acts’ music production, marketing and CD distribution. Its partners came up with the idea to start two funds to back faded groups three years ago. It has raised $79 million.

The story says the group will spend between $400,000 and $2 million per album. The high-end figure strikes me as implausible. There are apparently some arcane British tax reasons that make these funds more beneficial than they appear, and in the end this is probably a tax move, not a musical one. The story ends with this:

Dave Goldberg, a music entrepreneur at Benchmark Capital, a U.S. venture-capital investor, says it’s too early to say if Ingenious’s approach will take off in the U.S. “But we are going to see more and more of these different ways of creating financing for bands,” he says.

Ingenious seems to be putting its money where its mouth is, but this is a pipe dream. The companies involved have no distribution expertise and will be at the mercy of whoever does distribute it, who will not do any work to help the funds market their products. Press will be minimal, because the group won’t have any experience with publicity. The story focuses on UB40, which is said to be putting together an album of social and political issues. That will definitely not be the comeback the story says the funds are focusing on. After losing money on a couple of these, if the funds are really in the business of making money and not being a tax write-off, they will inevitably traffic in bands with some sort of hook to regain an audience, and I’ll bet you my prized LP copy of Ktel’s “Believe in Music” it will involve “greatest hits live!” or covers-laden albums used to fuel interest in tours, where bands can make actual money and the venture funds, unless they’re taking a piece of the bands’ entire earnings as part of the deal, won’t.

And despite what the story says, new albums by heritage acts are almost never mocked by the music press. Negative reviews of any sort are almost absent in most mainstream outlets (I’m leaving aside newer outlets like Pitchfork), much less about sacrosanct acts like McCartney or Springsteen. The simple truth is that people don’t actually want to listen to new material by older artists, simply because it’s not very good. Springsteen’s “The Rising,” in sheer tonnage probably the most written-about album of the decade, sold only two million copies and was basically not played on the radio. (Get ready for an onslaught of coverage about how Springsteen’s new album—why, his first work with the E Street Band in, I don’t know, 36 months!—is a “return to top form” or somesuch.) The irony here is that I think people don’t want such music, or the credulous coverage of it. I’d love to read a good denunciation of Springsteen or, god love her, Patti Smith. Think about how long the magazine “Tracks” lasted; the magazine, which over its evanescent tenure was designed to tap into a supposed hunger amongst aging yuppies for good adult music, was almost painful to read as the editors and writers bent over backward to say positive, inoffensive things about the succession of harmless, avuncular heritage artists they stuck on the cover.

Accordingly, the Journal story trots out yet again an approving mention of another overcovered heritage act:

After a 40-year relationship with EMI’s Capitol Records, ex-Beatle Paul McCartney announced in March he would join Starbucks Corp.’s label, Hear Music. Mr. McCartney released an album through 10,000 Starbucks coffee stores in June. The release sold 500,000 copies by early August according to Nielsen Soundscan.

As I’ve mentioned before, this meager revenue stream can not be depended on; if McCartney releases another album through Starbucks next year, it will sell much less, unless they opt for a hits or oldies package.