Living in New York I’ve had the pleasure to get to know a lot of talented musicians. A whole lot. And not just talented in that small pond, listenable-but-probably-still-going-to-be-working-at-the-Fashion-Bug-five-years-from-now kind of way. A lot of these people are people who I fully expect will make real-life paying jobs out of their music, if they want to. Fortunately for them, they’re launching these fledgling careers at what should be a great time, historically speaking, for the self-promoting artist. Given the tools available online, a new artist supposedly should have everything they need to make a go of it, assuming they have the talent to back up their efforts. But something appears to still be missing.
Assuming that nobody listens to Top 40 radio anymore (which nobody I know does) and nobody goes to record stores anymore (ditto, except for the vinyl junkies, who are a whole different category), there is very little topography left on the promotional playing field for musicians. I just read a TechCrunch article about Asher Roth, who basically launched 100,000 sales of his album on iTunes with just a Twitter post. Granted, this is a guy who has a lot of friends who are willing to spread the word, but that’s the thing about all these people I’m meeting: grassroots support is not something they’re short on. In fact, it’s really sort of amazing how connected these people are considering how oppressive the music scene in New York can be. There might be a lot of venues in New York, but there are a million different bands competing for them, such that many of the best of these bands still have to fight for their hour-long slot on a Tuesday night at 7 PM and haul all their gear on the train to make it there for the 8 minutes of soundcheck they get before they go on, after which they’re uncerimoniously shuffled offstage to make way for the next act. Considering all that it’s crazy to me that bands are able to connect to one another and develop a following, but they somehow manage to do it.
My basic complaint is that given all of this self-promotional kinetic energy brewing among my social set, and given the fact that the tools to put music into the headphones of a quarter of the world population are readily available to anyone who wants them, why is it that so many of the aforementioned friends have asked me about helping them put together a website to promote their music? Clearly there’s something they want that the available tools aren’t offering. I’ve been thinking a lot about what could be missing, and I have an offer from a friend of mine who’s in the music promotion business to talk it over. However, I have a few guesses as to what people feel like they aren’t getting from the services that are available.
Ownership
The Problem: Many of the bands and solo musicians that I know have a web presence that consists entirely of a social networking profile, usually on MySpace or Facebook, or occasionally on PureVolume or Virb. While these networks offer a lot in terms of built-in promotional power and social tools, they by nature lack a certain personal quality that I think a lot of musicians are looking for. While a social networking presence is becoming very much key to the success of an independent band (as power shifts from the major record labels), I get the sense that many people also want an online space that belongs completely to them, doesn’t have somebody else’s logo on it, and is not subject to the limitations of a social network. It also adds a certain credibility to have a site that required more effort to create than a social networking profile.
The Solution: An ideal service would give musicians a completely unbranded site (or almost completely, anyway), under their own domain name (myawesomeband.com).
Customization
The Problem: Social networks, for the most part, don’t allow nearly enough customization of design, features, and structure. The issue is most obvious on MySpace, where bands have gone to great lengths to hack their MySpace profile into something more personalized. It’s shocking to me that MySpace hasn’t done more to address this feature that its users are obviously screaming for. To be fair, giving users the ability to customize their pages and creating an intuitive interface for doing so is a complex proposition. Sites like Virb are paving the way on this front, but users still have to keep to a certain structure and don’t have total control over their page layouts and site structure.
The Solution: Offer a dynamic and modular layout system that comes with design templates, but doesn’t enforce them. Users should be able to create a layout in minutes, but have as much freedom as possible to incorporate their own designs and artwork.
Complete control of music distribution
The Problem: There is a very wide range of opinion on how freely music should be distributed. To me, this means that sites should give their users complete control over how people can get their music. Some may want to have a player on my page where people can listen to tracks but not download them. Others want to make it as easy as possible to download music. Some need the ability to sell their music by individual song or by album, either independently or through iTunes or a label.
The Solution: The mechanism for putting music on a site also needs to be extremely modular and have the ability to set permissions for the use of music on a granular level. A site creator should be able to give their users as little or as much ability as they want to download music, to share songs or albums via social networks or embeds, and to legally purchase songs or albums through whatever channels the author chooses.
As a future resident of your city, which your article isn’t certainly constrained to (constrained not being the actual word I’m looking for but I just got back from an F. Scott Fitzgerald themed birthday party where I was dubbed the Hemmingway of ex-patriots, hence I’m too drunk/too lazy to find the actual word I’m looking for) or LIMITED (actually that’s the word right there) to, your post seems was written with a place, or scene as it may be, in mind, and I feel the need to comment. I have often wondered whether the vast amount of tools artists (musicians specifically) have today via the WWW are actually tantamount to more opportunities to get ahead in an artistic or commercial market or perhaps actually end up acting as a hinderance. How many lame bands have a myspace page? When I hear some band say “Check us out on myspace” I usually check out my toe jam or earwax or, you know, anything but The Prophet$ myspace page. With thousands upon thousands of web pages, mostly created via a myspace or facebook etc outlet, bands become no longer bands (to put it generally) but rather just some image I can glance at and *maybe* listen to before I switch to porn/youtube/whatever else is going to get my kicks for the next second passes. I’m not saying I haven’t ever listened to music on a band’s webpage, but it was always AFTER I saw them play a show somewhere.
AND, to get back a little bit more to what your post was postulating, I think bands know this. And that is why they want the things you suggest they are looking for. My band (for example) has been extremely hesitant to create a myspace page because we don’t want to be just some other dumb fuck band with a myspace page. We want control over it. We want it to not be as associated with those dumb fuck’s pages, but at the same time want it to be as easily accessible as theirs. I think we’d be happy to give our tracks out for free, but can understand the group that might want their shit to be listened to but not obtained without monetary compensation (because that’s everyone’s dream right? To make money doing what you love?)
I think what it comes down to is creative types, throughout history (for the most part) want to be recognized. They crave recognition, but they don’t want to be compromised, or feel like they’re being compromised, to make it happen. The internet, while probably the greatest marketing tool we’ve ever been created, allows crazy avenues towards recognition, but just like in the past, for every Arctic Monkey or OK GO or that British-chick-who-isn’t-actually-even-that-great-when-it-comes-to-opera-but-hey-whatever-isn’t-that-bad-I-guess, there are 1000, well, enter band you never heard of because they weren’t hip/had a cool video/or *gasp* talented. I think I got off topic.
Hey Matt can you make my band a webpage?
God there were so many grammar issues there I can’t even begin to correct them. One of them is “ever been created” tho.
ReverbNation does what you talk about under “Complete control of music distribution”, it’s great! http://www.reverbnation.com
Customization is getting better, even among generic website CMSs (Drupal, Joomla, LightCMS, etc.). I think the only reason artists tend to like MySpace and Facebook is because of the direct connection with millions of people, it’s free advertising to say the least, even if not very customizable. And with things like http://www.wix.com around, artists making their own unique website in minutes doesn’t look to be that far away in the future. : )
Thanks for writing your thoughts out! *bookmarked*