Pretty Lights - Independent Research Entry

Derek Vincent Smith, more popularly know as Pretty Lights, has changed the game in terms of how to make it to stardom in the modern music era.  His approach to the music business is entirely contradictory to the traditional means of they way the industry works.  Smiths’ reinvention of the music business fits lock and key with his approach to production.  The marriage of Derek’s production style and business savvy have proven to be tremendously successful as Pretty Lights becomes a household name in the electronic and independent hip-hop world.  

Pretty Lights is best known for the flagrant use of classic era r and b, soul, gospel, blues and rare funk samples to produce some of the most entertaining instrumental hip hop and electronic music to date.  With the amount of sampling Petty Lights uses in the production, the licensing fee’s required to secure the sample rights to an entire albums worth of material would prove to be incomprehensible.  As each song produced by Pretty Lights plainly references a famous drum loop, horn stab, vocal hook or guitar lick, Smith has decided forgo the whole process of obtaining the costly rights to each of the samples he uses.  Smith brilliantly decided that instead of paying upfront licensing fees; Pretty Lights would side step the music industries traditional distribution channel of album sales and opt for a more pervasive tactic and give away all of the music for free.  Armed only with the strength of the music, Pretty Lights began distributing music for free via the Pretty Lights website back in 2006 with the release of the album “Taking up Your Precious Time.”  This album is best know for the song “Finally Moving” where Smith sample’s a heart wrenching vocal line from the Etta James song “Something’s Got a Hold On Me.”  Although the music took a few years to grasp the public’s attention via word of mouth alone, Pretty Lights' popularity has sky rocketed since 2009 playing large venues and music festivals across the nation.  As Smith’s popularity grew by leaps and bounds, Pretty Lights soon became the main attraction and now headlines every show performed. 

Having never received a penny from album sales, Pretty Lights has clearly redefined the path to success in the music industry as his compensation for performance comes in among the top paid acts in modern music.  Clearly Pretty Lights has achieved greater success than most artists who participate in the music business via traditional album sales and has undoubtedly reinvented the modern day business model for success in the music industry.   As current album sales plummet, and the internet seems to be providing the free acquisition of music at an alarming rate while the business of live performance thrives and proves to be the only concrete means of income for an artist in today’s music business.

As a listener, pretty lights immediately grabs me and says its ok to use large amounts of sampling to innovate upon in order to create new magical works of art that take pieces of the past and pushes them into the future.  As an industry professional, Smith’s production, arrangement and sound design are definitely ahead of his time.  Smith has persevered and kept producing music that found its way into the hearts and minds of the mainstream concert goers. I doing this, Smith's proven success has allowed him the ability to run his own label where other artists albums with a similar feel to Pretty Lights are distributed for free on the Pretty Lights Music label website.  With the popularity of Pretty Lights as an artist, the Label new artists such as Super Vision, Michael Menert, Paper Diamond, Break Science and most recently Gramatik are also sharing in the spot light and are also seeing success having a performance schedule that most modern artists only dream of.  With this, Pretty Lights has redefined acceptable modern music production as well as the business approach that suits it.