I bought some indie music today! Okay, I didn’t find it online, but it’s something.
I went to dinner at ABC (really good stout. Yumm.), and afterwards, I was going to go home ,but I decided to stop by Espresso Royale for some coffee. It turned out, not much to my surprise, there was a band there.
Now, a lot of the groups at ERC are very very folky, and not really to my taste, but this one was really good. It’s called Blue Tango, and is a sort of poppy blues group (Yeah, they describe themselves as folk rock, but I hear much more blues than folk.), fronted by a woman who sounds quite a bit like Lisa Loeb. Actually, there music is a lot like Lisa Loeb too. They did some of their own stuff, and covered Bonnie Raitt a couple of time, and covered some other groups that I’d not heard of, all of it quite good.
At any rate, they played maybe 4 or 5 songs off their new album (which they were coincendentally selling…), and I liked them all, so I decided to buy it. I’m listening to it right now, and it’s indeed really good. I’m glad I bought it.
I was thinking about it on the way home, and I’m not surprised that the record industry only want to sell guaranteed blockbuster CDs. Looking around, it’s between $2.50 and $5.00 per CD to make small runs (500-1000. The lead mentioned that they had made 500). They were selling them for $15 a pop. Now, assuming they got the low end of that, they’re making $12.50 per CD. That seems like a lot, but if they sell all 500, that’s only $6250. Not a lot. And, they can sell retail, while the record companies can only sell wholesale. They also probably have much higher production costs, due to the overhead that comes from a large established industry. Afterall, Blue Tango can record/mix/edit in their basement, but Arista has to pay people lots of money (Unions, remember?) to do the recording/mixing, in a huge expensive studio with expensive equipment. And, they spend millions every year promoting their bands. No wonder they want to spread that cost over a huge amount of sales.
The solution is to slim down the whole thing. Production is really easy now, with personal computers. You can record and mix and edit all on your $2500 Mac, and don’t need $20,000 worth of equipment or $180,000/year worth of people to run it. In addition, if you could sell your music online, you wouldn’t need to spend $2,50 per CD to sell only six grand worth of CDs. You could sell on, say iTMS, costing you nothing, and making $0.75 per song, and reach the entire computer-using population of the world. Well, at least the Mac using population, until the Windows version is released later this year. If your music is any good, as Blue Tango’s is, you can get more than 8334 people to buy one of your songs, and make more than you would by dragging CDs to ERC.
Of course, the big problem with selling on the internet is people finding your music. I’ve been looking for good Indie music, and it’s really really hard wading through all the shlock to find the good stuff. Granted, to get your stuff on iTMS, you have to convice Apple that it’ll sell, and that certinaly helps. However, just being on iTMS doesn’t guarantee that anyone will ever even see your music. Automatic music classification programs would help. They could, for example, link Blue Tango to Lisa Loeb, so that people who like Lisa Loeb could find out that Blue Tango is similar.
In the end, I guess what you gain when you sell your soul to the RIAA is promotion. People will at least get told that you exist. That’s the one thing that no-one seems to have solved for the upcoming post-RIAA world. And, unfortuantely, I don’t have any solutions.
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