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

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Subject: RTP-area local music and culture

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  • From: "bendy(a)lostpla[dot]net" <"bendy(a)lostpla[dot]net"@example.com>
  • 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 12:11:41 -0400

grady wrote:

Haven't got time to read that/those articles right this sec,

Here's the Wired one:

http://wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html


(and I think we've discussed this nexus of issues before, so apologies if this is all restatement):

I think we have, but the landscape seems to have shifted some...


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.

It's going to take a while for the listening public to catch up to the tech. Doesn't matter how I get my band's mp3 to friends- seems like about 20% of them (admittedly all 28 years or older) cannot figure out how to listen to them. Broadband is at 50% in the US, but still faces major last-mile problems. Still, an $80 iPod with 25 cent downloads would caputure that world of people who can't be bothered to set it up and seek it out.


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.

There's a filtering-the-filters problem there too, though. There are search engines in development that might work better than google for specific tasks, but does anyone want to search for them? There will probably be some sort of aggregation of the music tastemakers, the way Metafilter and BoingBoing have become the top of the "cool link" blogs. Maybe that is what will replace labels. Rock critics can't just send semaphore from the mountaintops.


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.

And for bands at this level, the challenge becomes the Magician Problem. What is the difference between a professional magician and an amateur? There are amateur magicians every bit as skilled as the pros. But the professional magician gets to show the same twenty tricks to different people each night, while the amateur has come up with different tricks to show the same twenty people.

Bendy




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