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The Music Industry on the Web

I've started checking out more music blogs as of late (thanks Dave) and it is pretty interesting to see the conversations going on. Some blogs are primarily news. Personally, this gets rather old quickly since most writers (if these are actually people at all) are simply posting press releases or small paraphrases. Stereogum is a good example of someone doing the news in a relatively interesting way. Many others feel like bots. Other blogs make an effort to decipher the music industry and how musicians can actually make a career out of music. In theory, these are of interest to me, but the reality is they are usually a little too career focused. There is nothing wrong with this of course, but I'm not interested in playing in a cover band on week nights to pay the bills or writing songs for others to record. Again, it is totally cool if folks want to do this, but it is not for me. The rest of the music blogs are essentially just typical blogs. Kanye West's blog, for example, is essentially a stream of consciousness that seems to be aiming at defining what's cool. These obviously have a professional bent to them in that they are more consistent than one would imagine. Picking on Kanye again, I can't imagine he finds the 10 or so different pictures and videos that seem to show up on his blog daily. I could be wrong here and Kanye might have an unquenchable desire to find interesting and stylish furniture, but my bet is that he has an organization that helps him out.

Another theme I've noticed is the obvious frustration of major labels. As a programmer and generally geeky guy, I'm interested in most technical subjects. The web as a platform is more than the next generation of Windows.Forms for the world. It is a platform for content. The music industry was not prepared for the influx of shelf space the web provides. Before, with the inherit limitations of traditional distribution, the music industry could effectively act as a filter for popular music and the audience were more or less OK with it all. But now, things are different. There is a massive amount of music alongside an enormous marketplace. Major labels don't have the bandwidth to filter the music and programmers are doing everything in their power to make the future a place where labels will never have the influence they once had. I say "programmers" specifically because these are the people who have consistently started web sites dedicated to publishing free music over and over again. What's more programmers are the ones to pioneer podcasting, filesharing and blogging. All these advances have moved beyond programmers command lines to joe user, who now can easily rip and share every CD he has ever owned. In the end, it has made running a label near impossible.

As a musician, the tone of the industry is frustrating as well. There was a time where a great band could actually get paid! Often times it didn't work out, but there were still plenty of "rock stars" out there where making it seemed attainable. Now, we see indie artists blowing up and there is still a doubt they make any money at all, much less enough to have a decent lifestyle when no one cares about their music anymore. There are people still making money, but it is clear from the music industry bloggers, labels are really hurting, which in the long run also hurts artists.

The silver lining to all this is that as a musician it's very humbling. Ironically, the world of drugs, sex and rock'n'roll, humility is becoming the pathway to success on the web. The trend of social networking sites has become a hot topic because it is clear there is a mountain of possibility that is not being tapped. Social networking gives artists a way to directly, yet less intimately, interact with fans. The problem is that the lead singer telling the crowd to f*** off may seem cool on stage, but saying the same thing on twitter just seems rude. It is starting to look like the rock stars of the future will be the musicians who remember the kids name who saw them play six months ago.

Finally, the last theme that seems to be hidden beneath all the conversations is how do people connect with music. The current answer is through relationships, which is consistent with how the music industry obviously works. It's who you know. Yet, there is an acknowledgment within the industry that, above all, you have to write good music. At this point folks don't necessarily seem to believe there are too many tragedies out there where great bands don't make a name for themselves. I think I disagree, but that is probably more a function of my own hopes that we'll make it some day. What is pretty terrible is the cream of the crop (those that are doing pretty well) is so large that many people may never connect with bands they may love. Regardless of whether or not some band is getting listened to, audiences don't have a way to filter effectively. As I said before, labels used to do this, but no longer. There are attempts such as Pandora, but at the end of the day, they seem to fall short. The technical questions might not be how to find music for people, but rather how to organize people in a way that filters effectively. It might be more online radio, podcasts and blogs, or facebook groups. But, my bet is that there is a subtle context that we've been silently missing. Twitter, for example, championed communicating short ideas, much like a cocktail party. We need a twitter for discovering music.

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