Lynne Kiesling
This week is Music Week at KP; we'll have content on the economics, politics, aesthetics, and culture of music. In part what inspires this week's focus is some recent new music purchases I've made and some of their characteristics. These features indicate some pretty substantial changes in the economics of music creation and distribution. I'm not the first person to note the dramatic effect of technological change on the costs of creation and distribution, or the long-tail nature of the distributed, decentralized aspects of these changes to this new model. But what I lack in first-dibs I hope to make up for in other dimensions ...
Last week I went on a binge and bought 8 new CDs, in different formats from different distributors:
- 6 physical CDs from Insound.com
- 1 physical CD direct from the artists
- 1 download CD from iTunes
The 6 CDs I ordered are:
- Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
- Editors - The Back Room
- Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
- Of Montreal - The Sunlandic Twins (double CD)
- Tapes 'n Tapes - The Loon
- I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness - Fear Is On Our Side
Sadly, my timing's not good, and the last two (Tapes 'n Tapes and ILYBICD) are on backorder because of post-South-by-Southwest Festival buzz.
The one I downloaded from iTunes is Spoon - Gimme Fiction.
These 7 CDs have been on my "to listen" list for some time. The 8th one is very new to me, and in another post I'll have more to say on the economics of how I found this band, and why it's so important for the direction that music creation and distribution is going.
The 8th CD is from a band called Mute Math.
Other than the obvious aesthetic connections (those jangly Brit-pop-ish sensibilities) among these recordings, I am deeply intrigued by the variety of their labels, by which I mean the entity that holds the legal copyright on the content:
- Arctic Monkeys: Domino Recording Company
- Editors: Kitchenware Records, "under license to Fader Label"
- Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: self-published
- Of Montreal: Polyvinyl Record Company
- Tapes 'n Tapes: Ibid Records
- I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness: Secretly Canadian Records
- Spoon: Merge Records
- Mute Math: self-published; in fact, I understand that Mute Math generally sells its CDs out of the back of the pickup truck of one of the band members at its shows
So what's so interesting about this, beyond the usual long tail, artists can directly distribute to their fans, etc. aspects that we've been discussing for a couple of years? Look at the variety of labels among the 8: 2 are self-released, but the other 6 are on labels (although according to WRCT 88.3 FM Pittsburgh, Tapes 'n Tapes is the only artist on the Ibid label). Ibid is, at least at this point, a one-artist label, and the others are of varying sizes and vintages. Look at Merge, for example, which was founded in Chapel Hill in 1989 and whose artists include Teenage Fanclub, Dinosaur Jr., the Buzzcocks, and other pretty-established indie bands as well as other bands with which I am unfamiliar. Secretly Canadian has a smaller and less-well-known roster. Polyvinyl has also been around a while (and is a local label here in Chicago), since 1995, and also has some well-known bands.
Punch line: the long tail observation applies to record labels too, not just to artists. In the 80s and before, independent and alternative labels had trouble surviving unless they were part of a larger label (I.R.S. Records, remember them?). That often meant that the label's fate lived or died based on larger corporate strategy (I.R.S. Records, remember them?). These independent labels are better able to survive and thrive for the same distributed, decentralized, and long-tail reasons that two of my eight artists were able to self-release. And this is good news for those small labels, which can focus on a self-defined niche, for artists, who can reach potential fans through multiple channels, and for consumers/fans.
When I started writing this post it was going to be about the death of the big record label. I think it still is about the death of the big record label, but not about the concept of a record label. For many artists (3/4 of my indie sample here), a label relationship has value added, and the other two might decide to sign with a label in the future. But these are not the labels of our past; the label business model is part of the evolution of the industry.
Good choices all. The only one I wasn't familiar with was I Love You But... I'll have to check them out, though, given the company they've got on your playlist.
I'm hoping some of the SXSW buzz carries over to the bands from my favorite (Chicago) local label, Bloodshot records. I would have liked to have seen Mark Pickerel or Cordero.
One nagging thing I keep thinking about in terms of the new model for labels is simply whether or not the big labels are able(due to their size and ability to risk more in numerous projects) to take better advantage in the new technologies available for music creation and distribution.
When I ran my college radio station in the mid to late 90s, College Music Journal had pretty much turned into a baby Billboard. Which meant that our reporting playlists resulted in major labels (or imprints of the majors, funded by the big names) FLOODING our offices with copies of their newest acquisitions. They tended to be crap, and the noise to signal ratio was massive. (Combined with the fact that a HUGE proportion of stuff sent to college stations is monumentally bad.) It took tons of time to sort through it all, and with the various names that the majors could start up as imprints, or controlled through funding, it wasn't easy to pick some sort of heuristic to simply say "Let's toss everything from label X". In the end, a good deal of the stuff played was from midsized labels that could afford to send their groups on smaller tours, press a lot of albums, mail the things to every college station that had a tower and a board, etc.
The new media process is pretty easy to get involved with, which is a major strong point. And the PR guys for major labels don't even have to be that smart to try it. Get several bands, toss less polished discs out on the p2p networks, flood people with free discs, etc., and see what works best. I think it might be pretty easy to swamp the smaller distribution channels, maybe easier than making sure a disc can make it into Wal-Mart. As the cost goes down for the new distribution channel, it would become less costly to just keep trying with tons of various bands. But maybe people are smart enough to sift through the dross efficiently...
You state that "according to WRCT 88.3 FM Pittsburgh, Tapes 'n Tapes is the only artist on the Ibid label." WRCT is not asserting that Tapes 'n Tapes is the *only* artist on the label; it just happens to be the only record in WRCT's possession from that label. Instead, you should say "according to WRCT 88.3 FM Pittsburgh, Tapes 'n Tapes is an artist on the Ibid label." But I suppose that wouldn't be useful to your article.
Andrew,
Notwithstanding the tone of your last sentence, thanks for the clarification. I looked and looked for further info on Ibid Records, and could come up with none, so I made the logical inference. In the process, I thought I'd provide a link to one of my favorite radio stations, since WRCT popped up so high in my Google search on the band.
Mute Math is reviewed in the Friday Washington Post.
IRS folding still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. One of the best live bands I have ever seen was in process of producing their freshman debut when IRS closed up shop. The experience and intervening legal troubles caused them to split (the drummer even sold his gear and hasn't played since AFAIK)