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Nile Rodgers says modern record labels wouldn't have given David Bowie a chance today
13 December 2023, 17:22
The Chic legend has criticised the business model of streaming and the music business for not giving artists enough of a chance.
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Nile Rodgers believes David Bowie would have struggled to make it today due to the state of the music industry.
The legendary musician - who co-produced the icon's seminal 1983 Let's Dance album gave evidence at the House of Commons to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee this week, where he said there was something “dreadfully wrong” with the business model of streaming.
In the session, Rodgers said that he had no problems with streaming, which he called “amazing”, instead taking issue with “the business that surrounds streaming”. Rodgers said it “has changed things considerably – and not for the better.”
“I’m 71 years old, I’ve been doing this for 50 years of my life,” he said. “In 50 years, you would have thought with the advent of all the new technologies, people like me would have a much better life, things would be easier, we’d all profit together, and that’s not the case. There’s something dreadfully wrong with that.”
- Why Nile Rodgers didn't want David Bowie's Let's Dance to be a success at first
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Using the late Heroes icon as an example of a musical genius who might not stand a chance if he was starting out today, he recalled how Bowie paid for Let’s Dance, claiming that the musician “paid for that album himself” after being “dropped” by former label RCA following the release of 1980’s Scary Monsters.
He recalled: “They gave him all that time to try and make a hit, he called me up and we made [Let’s Dance].
“[The labels] took on this financial responsibility and they would carry the artists they believed in that at some point in time would finally break.
“Those days are truly over.”
Nile Rodgers previously revealed he didn't want Bowie's Let's Dance album to be hit at first.
Speaking to Radio X in our Song CV series, the Le Freak legend recalled: "Let's Dance is probably the single biggest life shift in my career, because prior to doing Let's Dance I had five failures in a row and that was odd for me because my first album was a hit and every single record was a hit up until Diana Ross. I'd never had any failures. Everything was a hit."
Talking about producing The Supremes legend's self-titled album in 1980, he said: "So I do the biggest album of Diana Ross' life and then now from that I can't even get arrested until I meet David Bowie in 1982 some two years later.
He added: "He's down in the dumps, because he's dropped from his label. I'm down in the dumps because I know that I'm about to get dropped from my label and it was just he and I against the world and that feeling of we can rescue each other was so important to me.
The Get Lucky star continued: "Now maybe he might not have felt like that, but I certainly did, because I had fewer lanes open to me than David did. So I knew that Let's Dance had to be a success even though when I started it out, I didn't want it to be a success."
Watch Nile Rodgers explain all in Radio X's Song CV from 8 minutes in:
Nile Rodgers breaks down his most famous songs
He went on: "I thought a failure with David Bowie would give me more credibility than a hit record with Diana Ross, simply because it was a big, white, iconic rock 'n' roll artist and until then I had only done mainly R&B artists and the only white artists I did at that time were very pop like Madonna and Duran Duran.
"INXS were a little bit more avant garde, but Bowie was, you know - I called him the Picasso of rock 'n' roll, much to his chagrin. He hated me saying that, but that's how I used to see him - but it really changed my life's pattern. And what's funny is [...] I had nothing but flops before that for a period of five records and after Let's Dance I had nothing but hits".
