Promoting your music in the web 2.0 era
Steve Albini turned up in poker forum last week, ready to answer any questions the community might have about the record industry, engineering, Nirvana and how shit Urge Overkill were. As usual, Albini has some great insights on the workings of the industry, making the thread a must-read for any aspiring DIY musician.
Share ThisDownloading and the culture of free music have affected the income of record labels, but the street-level music scene (as defined by bands, entrepreneurial independent record labels, studios like mine, etc.) is doing great. Bands have an easier time than ever getting their music out into the world, and bands don’t even need a label to have an international following. It’s actually a great time to be in a band.
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Check out this hilarious piece by Steven Adams from the Broken Family Band about why he’s proud to be a ‘weekend rockstar’ while holding down a day job. Actually quite sobering stuff for all of us dreaming of one day making music full time. I especially like the the line, “I wouldn’t let Johnny Borrell do my photocopying.”
Also, very belatedly came across Bemuso this week, which provides some valuable DIY music tips.
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Victor Keegan provides an astute-as-ever analysis of Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur in the Guardian Technology pages today. Keen’s book has been causing a fair bit of heated debate in the blogosphere as it attempts to assert that the huge overload of user-gen content that’s flooded the web over the past two years has led to “less culture, less reliable news and a chaos of useless information”.
Certainly, in terms of music, there’s a case to be made that the ease of distribution on the web has allowed anyone with a mic and a copy of Garageband to make a track, post it up on Myspace, and add to the deafening noise of amateur music-makers all clamouring for your attention. Indiestore adds something like 1000 new artists a week, and you can be sure that 90% of them aren�t worth your time.
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Aah, I go away for a week and all hell breaks loose at London Calling. Former Island Records MD Tim Clark declaimed about the, er, “fucked” state of the industry, as reported at The Register.
What’s interesting about that post is a comment at the bottom, which is so succinct in its analysis I think it deserves to be reproduced in full here:
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It’s Glastonbury. It’s raining. The NME are camped opposite Pete Doherty… The summer festivals continue to thrive, with more and more weekenders, beanos and shindigs cropping up every year - another sign that music is healthy, even if the recorded music industry is in bad shape. Long may Glastonbury rain…er, reign.
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As discussed yesterday, it’s not for the RIAA to sit on their pedestal and rage about people getting laid off, session musicians not getting paid, and songwriters suffering because of illegal file-sharing. We know this is happening, but righteously suing people is not the solution to anyone’s problems – and I say that as a songwriter as much as a music fan who occasionally downloads music for free from places I perhaps shouldn’t. The world has changed, and you have to adapt if you love music, because music isn’t going away, and neither is people’s desire to hear it.
The RIAA and the major record labels are just pissed off because they can no longer control the situation like they used to – and pretty soon they won’t even be able to control the price (which will be nothing, obviously). It’s a difficult situation, it’s undoubtedly a shame for the people making a living from the spreadsheet and the calculator – but petty revenge is not the way to go about making yourself feel better.
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Rolling Stone’s article on the decline of the record industry doesn’t really throw up any surprises – shock! It was Napster’s fault! – but there are some telling comments at the end from RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol.
Share This“A great American sector has been damaged enormously,” says the RIAA’s Bainwol, who blames piracy, “from songwriters to backup musicians to people who work at labels. The number of bands signed to labels has been compromised in a pretty severe fashion, roughly a third.”
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Slicethepie was launched today, another new site attempting to ‘revolutionize’ the ‘fan/artist relationship’ or something equally zeitgeist-y. Much like Sellaband, it provides bands with a chance to raise funds to record and release an album through the patronage of music enthusiasts. Essentially, a band’s fans become street teamers, pseudo-PRs and investors and can “gamble on, trade in and profit from the success of these artist”.
There’s the potential to raise £15,000 to help you record your album - much less than Sellaband’s extraordinary $50,000, but still a lot of money. Do bands really need that much investment to be able to make a decent album?
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More evidence that the suits in the music industry are getting increasingly desperate in these times of file-sharing and free downloads: here we find one trying to bully a blogger into deleting a link he posted to a story about heavy-handed RIAA tactics.
I have to thank said industry suit, however, for helping me discover New Music Strategies, as it is an extremely useful resource for the independent musician. I will hopefully be publishing an interview with Andrew Dubber in the coming weeks.
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This is a blog about how to promote your music successfully in the new internet-driven era. I used to write for the NME, now I work for Last.fm, and also make music as Fakesensations.