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Originally Posted by wower /img/forum/go_quote.gif
At first I completely disagreed but then I took a step back and realized we are talking about different things. You are talking about local artists gaining mainstream attention needing publicity, which I guess is true to the extend I listen to main stream music.
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That's right. Some people have prematurely announced the death of the blockbuster.
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| I, on the other hand, was talking about local artists cutting out there own niche in the world and being happy with it (because through the internet, without the middle men, they can connect to their audience). |
Yes. Making your own CDs has been quite affordable for the last 10 years or so, and you will often see local performers selling CDs and T-shirts at their performances. I am not sure if local economies are sufficient to sustain music as a full-time profession in any but a few exceptionally music-oriented communities like, say, Austin, Texas.
People usually talk of the "Long Tail" when they talk about this market. Ther is a lot of buzz about it on the blogosphere, but I don't know how significant it is in terms of cold hard cash, and if I were an aspiring musician I would not rely on it. Perhaps podcasting is the answer, and it would seem to me you would have to give away your music for exposure, and find some other way like merchandising to pay the mortgage, but it's still an uphill climb that is only for the most dedicated.
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| So we are at cross purposes with what we are talking about and neither is incorrent. Our discussion hinges on the meaning of "Make it" or "making it" which, with my limited understanding of semantics, won't get into here. I don't know where you see the music industry going, but with the costs of making a record falling, and global distribution basically being a couple of key strokes away, I see a proliferation of indie artists at the expense of "mainstream bands". A real paradigm shift. If suing fans and saying P2P users are terrorists isn't a sign of desperation - instead of, say, finding new talent people might actually want to buy - I don't know how to convince you. |
You don't have to convince me. The original discussion was about the RIAA and whether it will disappear in its role as middlemen, something I can safely say most of the public would welcome. The big labels have never been interested in nurturing local acts or offbeat genres. That does not play to their strength, their global marketing and distribution reach, and quite simply they don't have the bandwidth to devote attention to thousands of small acts, so they have to concentrate on the big money-spinners.
Unlike the majors, indie labels are doing very well right now. Traditionally they have been feeders, i.e. an artist would start with an indie label, and when they "made" it big, they would switch to a major label. It's not clear if that evolution will remain. Once an artist gets traction, it makes much more sense for them to strike deals with iTunes or Amazon than with the now irrelevant RIAA labels.
The majors are very good at one thing: getting their glop played on mainstream radio (because the recording conglomerates talk the same language as the Clear Channel radio conglomerate) and getting it on the shelves of physical stores. Since sales are inexorably shifting away from CDs to downloads (and retailers are accordingly shifting shelf space away from CDs to DVDs, video games or other products), the latter is increasingly irrelevant. I don't profess to know how most people (not just the young) get exposed to new music, since I myself only listen to classical, an exceedingly unrepresentative niche (but one where CD and SACD sales are holding well), but I do know there is strong dissatisfaction with the payola and homogenization of radio.
You could imagine communities of interest setting up grassroots equivalents of Head-Fi for musical genres like shamisen punk music, and acting as the channel by which word of mouth spreads, but it takes a tremendous amount of effort it takes to build a community like Head-Fi and how did you find out about it in the first place, if not through a Google search? Algorithmic music recommendation sites like Pandora or Last.fm have so far not taken off in a huge way. Last.fm gets about 6M visitors per month, a far cry from the 60M+ unique visitors to YouTube and comparable to the 5M unique visitors Clear Channel gets on its
websites[/I[ alone. The position of music kingmaker or influencer for the digital download age is still very much up for grabs.
Thus the future I see is:
- Majors becoming increasingly irrelevant, and losing their top artists to new middlemen like iTunes or Amazon
- Independent labels thriving, handling the transition to digital by becoming feeders to Apple or Amazon, responsible for winnowing the chaff
- Small acts with mostly local or niche appeal continuing to scrounge by as they always have
[*}Podcasting slowly replacing radio, since the recording cartel and Clear Channel have been effective at stifling streaming radio with royalties ordinary radio doesn't pay (in fact labels pay radio payola, not the other way round).
- Interesting times (in the Chinese proverb sense) for the music industry as the way people discover new music and listen to it changes dramatically, upsetting the apple cart and probably killing off the major recording labels that have so far only demonstrated their utter inability to cope with change
