An Indie Musician's Guide to World Domination

There’s been a lot of lip service paid in the last couple of years to the alleged “downfall” of the music industry. I get asked about it all the time in interviews – how we, as an independent band, view the rocky present and cloudy future of the biz. I thought some of you might be interested in a bit of an insider’s perspective on the situation… at least, the situation as it seems from where I stand.

(As usual, these opinions are my own and don’t reflect the opinions of… well…. anyone else).

The music business is, as everyone knows, in a state of clumsy transition between the analog past and the digital future. Although it’s well documented that the labels had lots of time to prepare for what’s happened, most of them did little or nothing – beyond suing a few potential customers and clamping down on internet service providers, that is. In a stunning example of “cover-your-eyes-and-ears-and-ignore-the-world-ism”, many of the people with the power to control the inevitable slide instead ran around applying band-aids to axe-wounds, with predictable results.

What caused this nosedive? Well, to hear the industry execs tell it, you’d think there were cartels of suave techno-pirates working diligently to bring the labels to their knees. Music “thieves” were painted to look like hardened criminals one illegal MP3 download from abandoning the rule of law altogether, running naked through the streets, robbing banks and firing their tommy-guns joyfully into the air. These reprobates had to be stopped in the name of a free-market economy, for the good of the free world, in the name of good, hard working people everywhere.

The problem was, these “criminals” weren’t out to break any laws. They saw an industry grown fat on its own excesses; an industry happy to flaunt its wealth; an industry arrogant enough to charge $20 for an album of filler songs and soulless cookie-cutter drivel. And they started to wonder why they were paying so much for so little.

When you control the means of production – when your product is delivered to the waiting public through a narrow, tightly-controlled and highly regulated pipeline – you get to charge whatever the market will bear. This is the basic founding principle of capitalism, right? For decades, we had no choice but to pay whatever the stores chose to charge for music. Fine. Problem was, we had to pay BEFORE we had any guarantee of the quality of the product we were buying. Can you imagine if every transaction was like that?

Suppose you walked into a grocery store and had to order (and pay for) your produce before getting a look at it. Maybe the bunch of carrots they gave you would be great – crunchy, juicy, plump and delicious. Or maybe the grocer would realize that since you couldn’t get carrots anywhere else, he didn’t have to worry so much about the quality of the produce he was providing. You’d start noticing that instead of 12 quality carrots, you were getting just enough good ones to keep you from returning the bunch in disgust. Chances are, the only carrot you’d really enjoy would be the one you’d heard on the radio nonstop for the last month.

Wait.

Right. My point is, what if you suddenly found out that you could try each and every carrot before deciding whether you wanted to buy them? Best yet, you could sample them FOR FREE, FROM YOUR HOME!! Goodbye lecherous grocer, hello satisfying salads. Never again would you have to suffer the indignity of biting into a rotten carrot you’d been promised was great – nor would you have to sit through the REST of Fergie’s album. Heh.

At first, the music industry turned a blind eye to the growing trend of “try-before-you-possibly-buy”, with the excuse that “people won’t be satisfied with inferior quality MP3 files for long – they’ll realize that their CDs sound much better”. Sounds reasonable… but it was actually, really, REALLY stupid.

Thing is, the only reason MP3 files sounded bad was that they were compressed digitally, to make the files smaller, to facilitate faster download speeds. This was back in the days when cable or broadband internet was the exception rather than the rule, and a 3 mb MP3 file would take you from a few minutes to a few hours to download. It was nothing short of criminal negligence on the part of the labels not to acknowledge the inevitable: when bandwidth and storage space got cheaper, the size of the files being downloaded would cease to matter – and the quality would start going up.

The funny part is that CDs aren’t really all that great when it comes to audio quality. (nerd alert..)

CD quality audio is 16-bit, with a 44,100 KHz sample rate. This isn’t really very high at all. As an example, our last two studio albums were recorded and mixed at TWICE that quality, and had to be “dithered” down for the transfer to CD format. I mention this only to illustrate the obvious next step in the downward spiral: when it no longer matters how big your song file is, suddenly you’ll see bands releasing super high quality (read, better than CD) versions of their songs digitally – and the CD as a “high-quality” music format will be instantly obsolete. I give it 6-8 months, a year at most, before you start hearing of bands selling ultra-high quality digital albums through their websites… if you haven’t already. Labels have been HEMORRHAGING money in their attempt to keep consumers tied to a format that is, for all intents and purposes, already in a terminal decline.

The really sad thing is that the EXACT SAME THING is happening to all forms of video entertainment, be it TV, movies, or music videos. The ONLY reason it’s taken a little longer is that video files are harder to compress and are therefore much bigger. When our computers get to the point where downloading a hi-definition episode of CSI Miami takes as long as it used to take us to download the theme song, the TV and movie industries will suffer the EXACT SAME FATE. Thus far they haven’t shown many signs that they’re ready for the coming crisis.

While this was all going on, another interesting trend was developing: bands were starting to realize they didn’t really need the big labels anymore, at least not in the traditional sense.

Historically, the only way an artist could reach the masses in any significant way was to sign on the dotted line, put their career in a major label’s hands and toe the line, hoping they wouldn’t get TOO screwed in the process. Artists were built and destroyed by commercial radio, MTV, music magazines and industry award shows. There was ONLY ONE SYSTEM, and if you wanted mass exposure you had to conform yourself to that system, to one extent or another.

Then came the internet.

Suddenly, an artist didn’t need a team of people licking envelopes and posting newsletters to their fanbase – a couple of minutes writing an email to the email list would take care of that nicely, and much more personally to boot. Artists could target potential fans directly through talkboards and forums, and eventually through social networking giants like MySpace, Friendster and Facebook – sites with demographic-based search engines BUILT IN!

All of a sudden, you didn’t need to be played on the radio for thousands of people to hear you – you just had to drive traffic to your website or MySpace profile. With virtually no effort, you could send a message to 10,000 of your fans instantly, telling them about tour dates, new releases, special offers, or just spouting your thoughts and rants on any subject. Kinda like I’m doing right now.

The real catalyst in this whole farce however, comes from a glaring disconnect between the labels and the artists they’re supposedly representing. The industry was – and is – OBSESSED with the idea of controlling access to their artists’ music, for purely economic reasons. The artists, on the other hand, DON’T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT THE MONEY. (Most of them don’t, anyway.) For the artist, the whole point – the passion driving them to live below the poverty line and get kicked around by club owners night after night – is writing, performing and living their art. Ask any musician if they’d rather keep their music in an iron fist, control the public’s access totally and sell 5000 albums the conventional way, or have their songs spread around the world online, listened to and loved by millions of people, with no personal financial gain. Now take into account the fact that the average major-label act would never see a penny from the 5000 albums sold anyways. What do you think they’d say? I know what I’d say.

An aside: don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely no problem with an artist making money from their art. If they produce something that the public places value on, and the public is willing to pay for that product, the artist has every right to expect compensation for their work – however, the very fact that so many artists starve themselves and scrape by doing what they love is evidence of the fact that the art, not the compensation, is the motivation behind the artist. End aside.

What happened next is pretty predictable: the labels attacked the consumers who were stealing their products, expecting the artists to jump on board and join the good fight. What actually happened was the opposite, for the most part. Artists realized that rather than being the million-mouthed monster destroying their careers, the internet was an incredible tool for self-promotion and would enable them to be much more self-reliant, with less and less need for the publicity machine provided by the majors. Plus, by cutting out middle-men, musicians could actually start SEEING some of the money their music was earning. The average independent musician sees more real cash from 10,000 independent sales than many major artists see from a million sales. That’s not an exaggeration, it’s a fact, and a telling one. And even though most of those musicians aren’t in it “for the money”, the money is very nice as well, thank you.

What happens next?

Well, the first thing everyone needs to get their heads around (if the music industry is going to survive) is that radio and television, in their current form, are dead. D-E-A-D. Broadcast media will collapse when they can no longer sustain themselves by selling ads; they will stop selling ads when the companies buying ads realize that people aren’t watching or listening anymore. Personal Digital Video Recorders like TiVo are speeding this process up; what’s the point of spending tens of thousands of dollars on a TV commercial when all your target consumers are recording their favorite shows and skipping all the ads? The most important concept in media in the next few decades will be the concept of Media On Demand. And there’s NOBODY out there who, given the option, would demand to sit through commercials. Where will people go to find the entertainment, news and information they crave, On Demand, without commercial harassment? YouTube. Blogger.com. Any number of no-fee-ad-free avenues to digital media. Broadcast TV and radio do not fit into this picture.

When TV and radio disappear, so does the pipeline the music industry has been leaning on all these years. You can’t sell 10 million albums if you don’t have a way to reach 10 million people at once (bye bye, MTV), and although the internet is a great way to reach a lot of people, it’s much less controllable. If you think of websites as “channels”, it seems pretty obvious: paying for an ad on NBC makes sense when there are only a hundred channels to choose from, but if there were a hundred million…

The days of a few hand-picked artists dominating the music industry are rapidly coming to an end. True, there are still millions of people out there who will buy whatever they’re told is cool – but in order to sell to those people you have to be able to reach them, and to be their ONLY source of information. That used to be easy, but it isn’t anymore. Look at what’s happened on MySpace: instead of a few bands having a few million fans each, you’ve got literally hundreds of thousands of bands with tens of thousands of fans each. These bands are out there, touring, selling their music digitally, selling tons of t-shirts and stickers and doing quite well for themselves because they’ve realized that SUCCESS DOESN’T MEAN SELLING TEN MILLION ALBUMS FOR A FACELESS CORPORATE ENTITY. Success is playing a song you wrote in a city you’ve never visited, and hearing a thousand people sing it back to you. Success is cultivating a die-hard fanbase who will support you and allow you to do what you love for ten years, twenty years – not two singles in the top ten, a whirlwind of publicity and a lifetime of obscurity. Success is making any kind of a living doing the thing you love. It sure as hell isn’t making a fortune for a hundred leeches who can’t whistle one of your songs or recognize you at an industry party.

The labels who will survive are the ones who are smart enough to redefine their position in the industry. Labels who understand that success in the new music industry means carving out a niche – finding and reaching out to the people with whom your music will resonate for years to come – these are the labels who will serve a purpose, and who will shape the music industry of the next few decades. We’re really lucky to be working with a great bunch of smart people at UFO/Invasion – (www.ufomusic.com). Labels like UFO and other “new-model-indies” are quickly redefining the concept of the record label, and are thriving in the process.

What this all means is that artists are in control of their own destinies in a way they have never been before, and as a result the bands who survive will be the ones who can get back to the basic purpose of being in a band in the first place: producing music that we, as consumers, actually want to listen to. I, for one, am glad to see the state of the industry today – maybe in an age of real freedom of choice the cream will start rising to the top.

Or maybe, in an age of infinite Entertainment On Demand, with no dominant cultural voices shaping public opinion, the mediaverse will fragment into millions of super-specialized slivers and we’ll all get lost in the noise. Whatever happens, I think it will happen soon – and those of us who aren’t willing to evolve will find ourselves becoming dinosaurs much faster than we’d expect.

Thanks for reading – till next time!