Mark Bult Design: San Francisco, CA, Established 1988

The music business has changed for independent artists

When I was 18 I started a rock 'n' roll newspaper called Western Front News which covered local, regional, national, and international music news. This often including industry news, such as the (then-)trend away from vinyl toward CDs, or the latest innovations in CD packaging and marketing.

Some of our focus was also on educating the musicians, the B- and C-list performers, the local rock bands who all too often sent in a demo tape but failed to send in supporting materials like the standard bio and photo. We wrote articles and columns about how to market your band, how to get your demo heard, and who were the top recording studios and engineers in the Bay Area.

I sometimes wonder how the Western Front News would fare today. Back then, the Internet didn't exist. There was no iTunes, there were no MP3s, no MySpace, no online CD or ticket sales, and no blogs or means for someone like me (or the readers, or the bands for that matter) to self-publish to the massive and broad audience that the Web enables today.

If you wanted a T-shirt featuring your favorite band, you had to go to their concert or down to the local "record store." If you wanted to hear their music, you had to hope they were popular enough for radio airplay, or you had to physically go somewhere to buy their CD (or tape, or record). How did small bands, bands nobody'd ever heard of and who didn't have a recording contract, ever get heard?

Today we have online distribution of music (legal and otherwise), hundreds of MP3 blogs that feature downloads from and posts about musicians that you'd otherwise never hear of, and the ability for any band — no matter how big or how small — to create a MySpace page or website and communicate directly with their fans, even cutting out the middleman (record companies) and selling their music directly via downloads or independent CD fulfillment companies like CD Baby.

The music world has transformed. And it's only early days.

Here's a great New York Times Magazine article about independent musicians and how they're innovating and changing the music industry using the Internet.

Labels: music, Western Front News

Posted by espd at 6:28 PM | 
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