I am an independent/diy recording artist. Usually when you hear those terms it means "not a subsidiary of a major record company," but i mean not a part of the business side of music at all. I don't have an agent, or a pr person, or a bar where i can play my weird music regularly, or friends who like to hang out and jam with me, or money to go to a real recording studio, or money to pay other musicians, or money to buy better gear, or a video camera to make regular youtube videos, or any people i don't know visiting my websites. I am literally a guy in his basement making music because i like to do so. I have to physically burn cds from my laptop, watch the progress bar progress while music uploads, buy one 100 dollar piece of gear at a time.
None of that should be taken as sounding bitter, or pitiful. I'm happy and productive, and have zero control over whether or not anybody cares. I don't beg for money, or expect anybody to do my work for me. What i do want is to expess what i dislike about the "music business," and tell people where their money really goes when they buy a cd or record (which i myself do quite often, hypocritical though it may seem).
What does your 16.99 really pay for? It pays for the record company's investment, the recording engineers, the manufacturers, the truck drivers, and the arbitration of taste. When you buy a shrink wrapped, bar coded, security tagged album, you are not really supporting the artist, you are supporting the assembly line that brought that artist to your attention. Is that necessarily bad? No, i don't think so. The bad part comes from believing that that's automatically better than going to a bar to hear a local band, or listening to your neighbor's kid practice in the garage, or spending an afternoon sifting through bandcamp/soundcloud pages. The bad part comes from thinking that record companies, tv, radio, etc. are a legitimizing force in the musical world. It's the "call me when you're famous" syndrome.
That mentality costs way more than mere money. It means that perfectly normal people have to travel from city to city in a van that keeps breaking down, never knowing if they will actually get paid at the next gig. It means that there is no middle ground between shitty bar (no offense to your bar), and 1000+ capacity arena (and the opening band still makes no money). There's no middle ground between hauling your own gear while eating peanut butter sandwiches and full on travelling show company. It means that a guy in his basement recording his own music because he loves it can't make any money at all. It means that you can't play your favorite cd over the intercom at work, that you can't hire a cover band without fear of ascap/bmi trying to take money from you, that there are no real djs on commercial radio anymore, that every other commercial on tv features a cover version of a famous song.
Now, the complicated part. Your 16.99 was vitally important to the store. People stopped buying cds and real record stores folded. But, they weren't replaced by diving back into the real world of music that surrounds you. Instead, they were replaced by streaming subscriptions and digital downloads. Tower, hastings, etc. were replaced by amazon, apple, and spotify. And, this only served to devalue the act of making music even further. That band you like no longer has physical shelf space; they may or may not randomly appear on an ever changing list of things to click on; they might get a front page feature for as little as 3 hours before whatever new thing catches the eyes and ears of the general public. More than ever it is vitally important for an artist to flood you with advertisements, and facebook posts, and crap interviews, because he or she who shouts loudest generates the most clicks. All because you have no physical engagement with the music they produce (who among you still buys actual recordings, plays an instrument, reads notated music?).
The arbiters of taste were not originally the bad guys, but we let them become the bad guys. The music business is now the business of keeping the machine alive. A record company can't produce physical music without investing huge amounts of money, and they can't invest that money without making an even larger amount of money first. That's how the machine works.
Which brings me back to the basement where i create music because i enjoy it. I'm not begging for your money, but i am saying that 10 bucks means a whole lot more to me than it does to the machine. It doesn't mean that i deserve it more than anyone else, but it does mean that i appreciate it more. If you're in the market to "support the artist," consider handing your money directly to them, rather than handing it to 300 other people and hoping that some of it makes its way to the artist. If you like physical cds/records, go to a store and buy them (they do still exist, and i myself do so when possible). If you like filtered mainstream music, pay the subscription fee. Just stop thinking that you're not allowed to like "amateur" musicians, and are prohibited from spending a small amount of money to buy them a better brand of peanut butter, or maybe a hamburger...
... feel free to comment or say i'm an idiot.
Cheers
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