David Lowery tries to talk sense to the Internet.

Without a way for artists to make money, soon we may be bereft of a musical middle class, that is, musicians who don't have day jobs but spend their time perfecting their craft, recording it, and then sharing it with the rest of us. For a few generations, being creative and working hard at this has afforded a significant number of musicians a lower-middle to middle class lifestyle. Sadly, the suppression of income, or elimination, for recorded works has all but eradicated this as a legitimate goal and threatens to take with it the benefits of professionally recorded music with it. For the last few weeks, David Lowery (Camper Van Beethoven, Cracker) has decided to tackle the complex issues at play here for working musicians. If you are a musician, work with them, love one, or just love music, David's writing clear and level-headed analysis of the current landscape. You may end up disagreeing with all or part of it, but I doubt you'll regret your time spent reading it.

A good place to start: Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss? taken from his talk at the SF Music Tech Summit.

I was like all of you.  I believed in the promise of the Internet to liberate, empower and even enrich artists.  I still do but I’m less sure of it than I once was.  I come here because I want to start a dialogue.  I feel that what we artists were promised has not really panned out.  Yes in many ways we have more freedom.  Artistically this is certainly true.  But the music business never transformed into the vibrant marketplace where small stakeholders could compete with multinational conglomerates on an even playing field.

In the last few years it’s become apparent the music business, which was once dominated by six large and powerful music conglomerates, MTV, Clear Channel and a handful of other companies, is now dominated by a smaller set of larger even more powerful tech conglomerates.  And their hold on the business seems to be getting stronger.

I encourage you to grab a cup of tea, get comfy, and keep reading (on your lunch hour, of course.)

Thank you, David, for taking the time to get this all in one place at one time!

Borders finally bites it. More room for indies.

This has been discussed in the music biz for nearly four years, at least as far as I am aware. We knew it was only a matter of time, as they kept getting extensions and squeaking by on payments. Still, we had pressure from labels who wanted their stuff in there because their bands did, without much thought to whether or how they would get paid. The eventual "payment" with skids of returns was not even an afterthought for them. With an eye to the longterm health of both labels and distributor, we did our best to resist this lunacy.

During times of contraction, there is always a silver lining for someone who is both looking for it and willing to take advantage of the opportunity that presents itself. In fact, if you go back to the very first post on this blog, you will find my view that the seeds of this go back to the late 80's. Sales of music have always been cyclical. For the large, soulless chains, music has cycled through times of money maker, money loser, loss leader, and back again. I have marked these cycles by watching the music bins at the big box stores move, as if under control of unseen tidal forces, which were really digit-pushing accountants, from front to back to front to back, while shrinking and expanding in size like ocean troughs. A recent walk through a Best Buy in Austin, for example, revealed a music section that was pretty hard to find, sporting far fewer racks that were themselves sparsely populated.

Through these cycles, indie shops have flourished, been eaten, scraped by, and even recently reappeared.

While much of the world laments the loss of their neighborhood-anchoring, friendly behemoth, it actually presents an opportunity for creative, music loving entrepreneurs to sprout through the cracks in those neighborhood sidewalks. Create novel dens of community. Go local. Engage the neighborhood. Take advantage off the fabulous creative talent and resources that we have all around us.

Quit whining and go do something. It's DIY time again.

How fans spend their money

We love the fans that actually pay for their music. But how do they decide what to buy? According to this Billboard article by Glenn Peoples, the Association of Independent Music Stores (AIMS) conducted an online survey of 1,067 AIMS store consumers to find out. Here are some of the interesting results:

4/5 buy from a friends referral
80% buy after a live show
39% heard it on the radio
16% saw it in a newspaper
15% trusted the TV

Where do they buy digital music?

85% on iTunes
23% on Amazon MP3
14% on eMusic

Where do they find referrals online?

78% Pitchfork
44% Rollingstone.com
39% Stereogum
28% Brooklyn Vegan
23% My Old Kentucky Blog
14% Largehearted Boy

WTF? II (Notlob)

Why is it that whenever you try to say something full of down to earth common sense, that somebody who's conveniently only absorbed pop culture theory based upon the first half of the statement that starts with "Information Wants to Be Free" quickly responds with glee at the fate of the stupid pragmatists around them. That smug someone inevitably either does not know, or has somehow ignored, the second half and equally important portion of that theorem: "Information wants to be expensive."

Until the Obamatopia sweeps us all into a a happy, collectivist workers paradise sure to resemble an amalgam of Cambridge, MA, Oak Park, IL and Mountain View, CA, we live and breath in a more than nominally capitalist society. If you want to live a normal life in a city or town and eat, live in shelter, and see a movie every once in a while, then you've gotta make money from something. Hopefully we've all learned that rarely does money grow on trees or arrive at your door in a strange and wonderful envelope from Nigeria. It comes from hard work fairly compensated. And for people in the music business, that has been music. If I read another file sharing weasel tell me that I'm a dinosaur who doesn't appreciate or understand change, then I'm going to puke. Change frequently is good, but change can also be bad. Very bad. And when change gets out in front of the pace of our ethics, well...

Why is music any different than socket wrenches or spinach? Spinach is full of incredible vitamins and minerals that make you a better you. Socket wrenches tighten and fix things that allow machines to make our lives infinitely better so we don't have to toil in fields all day. They even helped make this computer I'm typing on. A hex socket, but still.

Because somebody found a way to compress music into tiny, crappy-sounding digits, and someone else figured out how to find and move those crappy sounding compressed music files quickly and easily between computers with little accountability, a large chunk of people now feel that not only is the music easy to grab, but that it should be free. A nicer piece of backwards sophistry I've never seen. I am constantly amazed at people who can either ignore the consequences of their individual and group actions, or if not, who find a way to turn the argument around onto those being hurt, using a form of the "Did you see how she was dressed? She was asking for it!" argument that has been such a big part of unfortunate male dominance for centuries.

Let's boil this down. Artists who want to spend their life making art must eat. To eat, they must be paid for their art. Ten years ago, this was not a problem. If you wanted to consume the art, you paid for it or went to a friend's and listened or looked. Now, you can get it for free so it must want to be free. And the artists? "Fuck 'em. They can get a job, and if that means that their art will be compromised or less prolific, I'll just take someone else's. There's just so much of it!"

Some artists have chosen, that's right, chosen, to focus on their art and let others handle the sometime drudgery of managing, making, distributing, promoting, booking, club-running, lighting, recording and live sound engineering on their behalf. Some artists cannot afford to get into a studio on their own, much less usher their releases through the production, manufacturing, and promotion process. And some artists could, but simply choose not to. If the people who do these jobs for the artists we love cannot get paid, then no one will do them or do them as well. The jobs will be gone and with them many of the artists both current and future. Stone dead. Deceased. Demised. Passed on. No more. Ceased to be. Expired and gone to meet their maker. AN EX-PARROT.

Does it have to be this way? No, it certainly does not.

Carrie Brownstein wrote an excellent call to action on Monitor Mix yesterday. (I am stunned by people asking what they should do after reading this. Carrie gives too much credit I guess. I'll spell it out. First: THINK. Second: DO.) She points out our ever-increasing trend toward superficial musical tourism (and I would argue life tourism as well), and then in conclusion exhorts:

In order for there to be anything left in which to participate, we have to show up. We have to show up with not just our half-selves, our virtual selves, our broke-ass selves, but with our whole selves, and in the spirit of giving. Mock participation is more than just an absence of real engagement; it is a falsehood that has allowed us to justify our apathy. When, exactly, did we stop showing up? And how long until there's not much left worth showing up for?

What Carrie is asking for is a return to the punk rock, DIY ethos of individual responsibility within a community of like-minded folks who all pull toward the same general goals. Be yourself—your active invested self—and while doing so help those around you who feel the same way. You do that, and you get something bigger than the sum of its parts—something that used to be called a scene. But creating that doesn't come from typing snark or even empathy. It comes from action.

You who are so worried about what information wants or doesn't want, maybe it will help to remember the real people who are behind that 128kbps file you just stole. People. Real ones. Not virtual ones. Not avatars. Not 2-D South Park characters. Real flesh and blood people who love, get sick, cry, laugh, and create.

Or, if reality is too big of a concept to fit into your conveniently constructed myth, then fire up your BitTorrent client of choice, sit around on your ass listening to disposable music, visit your favorite full-album music posting blog, and feel good about yourself while you save the world the two hundredth time on Halo War.

I also realize that this is most definitely not a single-issue problem, but this is one area where we all can contribute directly to a part of the solution. If even 2000 people buy a $12.98 album released on an indie label by their favorite band rather than download it, that puts a huge chunk of change into the pipeline. Because of most indie labels' 50/50 profit splits, 2000 people = $15,000 by the time it gets back to the label, who then passes it along to the band and many people on the rest of that list up there. That is not a large sum at a mega-corp, but for ordinary people, maybe even you, $15,000 is a huge amount of money. For an indie label, $15,000 might as well be $100,000. A frugal indie artist and their label can do enormous things with that (little/huge) amount of dough. For example, that amount more than covers the recording costs for many records at this level. Maybe even most.

2000 records. $15,000. Really.

Those of you who still care:
Please.
Go.
DO

WTF?

I have tried all day, and now most of the night, to come up with something to say here about T+G's shedding of its distribution arm, a decision that appears will take with it the bulk of the jobs currently employing 25 or so people, many of whom are friends, acquaintances, friends of friends, boyfriends and girlfriends of friends, and future all of the above.

Now that I've had 20 hours to sit on it, not only am I no closer to anything profound, I can't even find anything to say that's not completely stupid. I can only say that from the time that we opened CTD in 1996, we always said that we needed to be aware of what three other companies were doing, and if we were not going to adopt one of their policies, it could only be after a serious round of examination and self-criticism. Those three companies were Mordam, Revolver, and Touch and Go. They are or were all run by people of the highest integrity, people who frequently put the good of their employees, labels, bands, and sometimes the greater indie community ahead of their own selfish interests, and almost always to the good for the rest of us. While Revolver is still going, Mordam is long gone, and, at the very least, T+G will not emerge from this anywhere close to its present shape and size.

I do not know Corey Rusk in an immediately personal sense. We have never spent a weekend camping or even a long night drinking together. During twenty years of business, we have talked for short periods of time whenever we have run into each other. He is a quiet, unassuming, sometimes apparently shy person. I also know that when Lounge Ax was in trouble with neighbors and thus the city, everyone at his label and many of his bands stopped what they were doing long enough to release one of the coolest benefit albums ever. It was an act that made them no money, and in fact cost them a lot of it in seed money, production and accounting time, and energy that would have been spent doing something else profitable.

After doing business with him and his company for twenty years in various guises, I feel confident that I know enough about him to know that this decision had to come after deep soul searching and not without significant interior stress and regret. While that does not lessen the blow on those who are losing their employment at this very difficult time for industry and country, it is also true that this isn't just a faceless corporate layoff made by a bean counter with no regard for anything but the bottom line or anyone but himself. Quite the opposite.

While I am somewhat heartened that at least the label will continue, our interactions with T+Go will be drastically changed forever.

To everyone who has lost their job and is facing a great deal of uncertainty right now, please know that we will miss you and look forward to hearing from you again wherever you may land, inside or outside what's left of the stupid music business.

Some of the proudest moments of my life have been the few lucky times when one of my actions or decisions has been favorably compared in any way to Touch and Go, and specifically Corey Rusk.

Thanks Touch and Go and everyone who has passed through its doors as employee, band, or intern.

You have made all of our lives better by your work, by your vision, and by your example, and especially by your music.

You rock.

A Song Saved My Life Tonight

Posted this on the CTR News page as well but thought it was so cool/important that it needs repeating...

This quote from Rennie Sparks of The Handsome Family that ran in the huge, amazing cover story in the Minneapolis City Pages really hit home. It's why songwriters write, musicians play, fans buy their albums and go to shows, and music business people work 12 hour days.

"There's something about songs that lets them do things we can't do for each other," says Rennie Sparks in the story. "It's a different language, almost a dream language. It can make you feel alive again, aware of beauty again. You feel like suddenly you're in a magical place. A song can feel like it's saving your life. It's important. Art has a purpose. Feeling alive is very hard to do sometimes. It's easy to be numb."