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ch-scene - Re: If the Indy award posed with a gun, would you vote anyway?

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  • From: grady <grady AT ibiblio.org>
  • To: RTP-area local music and culture <ch-scene AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: If the Indy award posed with a gun, would you vote anyway?
  • Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2004 11:03:07 -0400

Haven't got time to read that/those articles right this sec, but I can't proceed with my day til I try a little synthesis (and I think we've discussed this nexus of issues before, so apologies if this is all restatement):

bendy(a)lostpla[dot]net wrote:

Indie bands are doing better than ever because of their obscurity: you have to spend quite a bit of time searching to pirate a Kill Rock Stars level band. Easier to buy the record for 10 bucks.

Its wonderful that we're exiting the age of rock stars. Like you said- you are starting to mistrust stuff that isn't self-released. It is already starting to imply some level of ego and poseurishness. I think indie labels are still valid, though, as brand names. 'Cause I find I'm likely to enjoy a band if I like the label, and it's truer now than ever.

To begin: any problems with being able to pirate a KRS-level band are only temporary, as it will become easier for even tech-leery rockers to put their stuff online, or it'll be done for them.

In a world where electronic distribution of The Goods is trivial, and supply approaches infinity, suddenly your relationship to yr fave indie-labels pivots, or is revealed in a new light. Whereas before you could/would buy everything-on-Merge or everything-on-Up! or everything-on-KRS/K/Chainsaw because they had access to The Good Shit in the sense of built-up networks into the various regional scenes and/or the name recognition necessary for smart bands to want to mail them their demos . . .

now you might be just as likely to buy everything-on-Absolutely-Kosher not because they have access to stuff you'd otherwise never hear, but rather because they've got a critical ear that you admire & they've got the time to wade through the 100,000 bands who *might* be worth a shit & find the ones who actually *are* worth a shit. Which is the same job the good boutiquey indie-labels always did, only now it's much less a question of simple access to the raw materials, and much more a question of access to the time and/or research skills necessary to find the gold tooth at the bottom of the giant silo full of rat turds.

Which is the bit I think we discussed before: the notion of label-as-rock-critic or vice-versa; the question of how-much-would-you-pay for a really good mixtape every month.

Right now there are a lot of mp3-blogs getting a little bubble of attention, and at the moment they fit into a couple of basic categories: people with huge collections of vinyl sharing weird nuggets that they've digitized straight-from-vinyl, and people who spend a lot of time weekly mining the websites of bands and labels to find the good shit & then just post links to it.

Not too far-fetched to ask how much you'd pay to subscribe to an mp3 blog if the person running it were dead-on Correct 95% of the time, regardless of whether the stuff they were posting were freely available or not, because it's the filter you're paying for at this point, not the access to the music itself.

And thus not too much farther-fetched to suggest that difference between yr label-owner and yr 95%-correct mp3-blogger is merely where the investment lies, and that soon even that difference will be eroded almost to nothing.

Which means, all you wannabe-rockcrits/label-owners, that the time is nearly at hand where you can, yes, earn as much as 50 cents per hour for all that time you spend obsessively scouring the web for tiny shards of decent music down among the acres of crap.

And yes, if it sounds like I'm suggesting that the future of the Music Industry was invented like 20 years ago by hip-hop DJs selling mixtapes, then that's probably exactly what I'm suggesting.

And yes, this also means that under the New Regime, bands aren't any more likely to recoup their recording costs than they would if they signed to a tiny-indie, so keep saving those $35 payouts from those Thursday-night gigs, because that's still Where The Real Money Is. That and the t-shirts; anybody notice how people seem to be willing to pay like $20/shirt on the internet without batting a lash?

Ross




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