This is pretty cool.  Set one up and tell me the url or die.

Information wants to be free. As a musician I have had a really hard time rationalizing the fact that my preferred method of artistic expression has been marginalized by the internet. I had a hard time with it until I realized that ultimately, if you’re doing music for the right reasons, it isn’t actually marginalizing anything at all.

The barrier to entry for musicians has been lowered to the point where anyone can make music and distribute it now. Record labels have controlled the industry because they controlled distribution and now that distribution is as free as air you’ll see them become irrelevant to most artists. If you still have a pre-internet manner state of mind then this is a problem; however, if you accept it as reality then some exciting things start to become possible. Let me clarify…

Every musician dreams of the day when they can get payed to create their art. They dream of the record deal that will make them rich and give them a comfortable or even excessive standard of living for doing what they want to be doing anyway. The reality of the information age dictates that said situation will become very rare in the coming years. You’ve already seen it with the writing world.

Writers used to be the world’s rock stars. As printing costs came down and books became more ubiquitous though, more and more books came out until the market was completely saturated. You can go into Powells and see the evidence. You’re literally standing in an entire building of your competitors and peers if you are a writer and technically, you’re surrounded by millions of commercial failures. The bulk of these writers are not getting rich of their creations. Sure, you’ll always have your J.K. Rowling rockstars; however, they’ll be rare and for every one of them there will be thousands of others working day jobs to pay the bills while they toil away in their small amount of free time to create their art. Many of these people for instance become professors at universities so that they can have a job that allows them to have some time to write and easy access to peer review situations while offering a paycheck so that they can survive or even thrive regardless of their artistic success. Did the prolific gains in distribution capabilities ruin the writing world? Not at all. It just made it harder to get rich doing it and it made it more work for the consumer to find stuff they like. The artform is alive and arguably better now than it has ever been simply because of the sheer amount of writing going on. The world will always need good storytellers. Music is on the same path.

I used to worry about this because I wanted to be able to do music full-time; however, as I get older it has become more important for me to recognize that record labels were never in it to develop the art. They’ve always been in it to profit from it. This is evidenced by the outrageous prices of records and cds and online music sales (even $.99 for a song is rediculous in my mind). I’ve been intimately involved in 3 records in my life as a producer/engineer and one where I financed it as well. The total overhead for a record if you record and produce it yourself and press $1000 of them is about $1500 plus the gear to make it. It is an economy of scale so the bigger you go the cheaper it gets per record. You can get an entirely adequate studio set up for $3200 and an amazing one for $20000. If you don’t need to record 8 tracks at a time on your costs drop even more dramatically and your total overhead for gear drops to just a little over $2k. People are making records for even less than that in many cases.

If you build yourself an amazing studio and press 1000 cds your total overhead is $21/cd if you made a single record, $11 a cd if you make 2, $7.60 or so if you make 3 and so on. Keep in mind that this is for a $20000 studio which is probably more than 99% if indi artists need. If you did this same project with your $2400 studio you’re looking at somewhere around $3.40 a cd for 1000 cds to recoup your costs. If I can make a record for $3.40, sell it to Walmart at a 100% markup and the cd can still go on sale for less than $9 a cd, then show me a compelling reason to give up my profits to be on a record label (and explain why a record label can’t get cds to their audiences for less than $15 a piece and why online music is $.99 a song or higher). If I don’t have an in at Walmart, I could sell them at my shows for $7 and make the same amount of money. I could theoretically make over $3k profit on a very small run of disks plus whatever money I made on other merch and ticket sales. If I can move half of my cd’s I am profitable and have a studio that is already payed off to record my next album with for even less money. Since it scales if I were to get popular I just keep making more and more money and don’t have to answer to anyone to do it. If I were to really blow up I would have enough appeal to work out distribution with retailers directly and just leave the labels out (The Eagles just did this with Walmart). Online only distribution has even better margins.

My point is this: If you are a reasonably talented artist making an honest effort to get grassroots support by playing live and releasing decent quality recordings out of your home studio, you can honestly make more money doing it on your own than you can by getting signed to a label. Getting on a major and making millions is like winning the lottery. Doing it grassroots requires some serious legwork but it can be done and you will have 100% of your artistic integrity and likely make more money than you would on a label. You could probably give away your music online and make all your money on merch and the cd’s you sell at shows. You can do this regionally and probably have a day job too for stability if you want. If you get to the point where you can move thousands of cds along with merch and shows, you’ll make enough money to do music full time without having to sell millions of records to do it. If you blow up then you can sign on with someone that knows how to book national tours etc and also probably work with national retailers to distribute your music. If not, you’re still most likely profitable and doing what you want to do.

The biggest hurdle will be exposing people to your music and having it stand out from the thousands of other artists doing the same thing. Labels used to be good at filtering out all the crap and exposing people to the best music being made; however, anymore I find that the artists I like are self-promoting/distributing or on tiny labels and I find that a lot of the most interesting music being made is being self-produced and distributed by individuals or small groups of people instead of traditional labels.

The music industry is dying, and it is probably the best thing that has ever happened for music consumers and artists. Check out Pandora, type in something you like, and just listen. When you hear something you like, bookmark it and then make an effort to support that artist. As more and more people do that, mechanisms will come into existence that allow the frequently bookmarked artists to get more exposure and build on that momentum. Who knows, in 3 years when you can show that you’ve got thousands of fans built entirely on your own maybe Walmart will have built a mechanism for those artists to get their cds distributed in Walmarts across the country (I use Walmart as an example because 80% of the cds sold in the states are sold through Walmart and they are as sick of record labels as I am). Instead of the labels deciding who gets big distribution deals, the online community will work it out and the consumers who don’t use technology to get their music will get the best of what online music has to offer via traditional distribution. In any case, the artist and the consumers win and there isn’t much room for the labels and their ridiculously high overheads and price gouging.

Ultimately, this will end up being a lot more work for the artist; however, it is just a new barrier to entry. Instead of the recording technology and distribution costs being the barrier, it will be the artists ability to create a good brand and work hard to pimp it. That doesn’t scare me, and as I said before, if you’re doing music for the right reasons and if you’re legitimately good I think the new model will end up working better for you.

The article that prompted this rant can be read here.

This video is very important if you want an explanation as to why compression is ruining recorded music right now.  I will be the first to admit that I am as guilty of doing this to finished tracks as anyone.  I know how to make a record loud as hell; however, from now on, for any records I have the final say on, I will be leaving the dynamics intact. There is a reason that there is a volume control on your music listening device.  Listeners, turn it up and experience dynamics.  Your ears and soul will thank you for it.  Artists, have enough self-confidence to put quieter but more dynamic versions of your tracks out there.