There May Have Never Been a Better Time for Independent Artists!

"Live with Enthusiasm: ...nothing worth doing can be done without it. Ability you must have, but ability sparked with enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is an inexhaustible force, so mighty that you must ever tame and temper it with wisdom. Use it and you will find yourself constantly moving forward to new forms of expression..." —Conrad Hilton

Insiders on Indie Artists:

"I'm looking for people to help connect me to more fans, because I believe fans will leave a tip based on the enjoyment and service I provide. I'm not scared of them getting a preview. It really is going to be a global village where a billion people have access to one artist and a billion people can leave a tip if they want to.

"It's a radical democratization. Every artist has access to every fan and every fan has access to every artist, and the people who direct fans to those artists. People that give advice and technical value are the people we need. People crowding the distribution pipe and trying to ignore fans and artists have no value. This is a perfect system.

"If you're going to start a company that deals with musicians, please do it because you like music. Offer some control and equity to the artists and try to give us some creative guidance. If music and art and passion are important to you, there are hundreds of artists who are ready to rewrite the rules.

"In the last few years, business pulled our culture away from the idea that music is important and emotional and sacred. But new technology has brought a real opportunity for change; we can break down the old system and give musicians real freedom and choice.

"A great writer named Neal Stephenson said that America does four things better than any other country in the world: rock music, movies, software and high-speed pizza delivery. All of these are sacred American art forms. Let's return to our purity and our idealism while we have this shot.

"Warren Beatty once said: "The greatest gift God gives us is to enjoy the sound of our own voice. And the second greatest gift is to get somebody to listen to it."

"And for that, I humbly thank you." —Courtney Love

"So great artists are now going it alone. The music landscape will be ruled in the future by a completely different coterie. People who are trustworthy, who aren't into winning through intimidation. They'll gain their toehold via the Internet that still has majors scratching their heads. They'll use the new systems to deliver desirable music to niches however small. They'll realize we're living in a golden era of opportunity...there's never been a better time to be a musician, or an entrepreneur. And stunningly, they're often one and the same. And, those working at the long in the tooth major labels are usually neither." —Bob Lefsetz

"There are no easy paths anymore. Not if you're a band, playing credible music. If you're great-looking, a popster, maybe you can get some YouTube/TV/radio exposure and run your record up the Top Forty chart. But chances are, you won't do well at the box office...I'd say we're back to 1970, but we had a healthy radio scene in 1970. Now we're in chaos. We've got a million bands, a million places to hear them and a populace that's overloaded. You've got to build your fan base one by one. And treat each customer right. For he is your future... —Bob Lefsetz

> 78 RPM (Revolutions Per Minute) Records were introduced in 1915.
> 33 1/3 Records ("LPs" or "Long Playing Records," later to be commonly known as "Record Albums") were introduced in 1928.
> 45 RPM records, i.e. "singles," were made available in the U.S. in 1949.
> STEREO LPs started being produced in 1958.
> Broadcasters started using digital recorders in 1973.

The world of making and and selling music changed dramatically in 1983, especially for Do It Yourself or Die Independent Artists, when CD (Compact Disc) Players became commercially available. According to The Compact Disc Handbook, 2nd Edition, 800,000 CDs were sold in the U.S. that year.

By 1990, CDs were the preferred music distribution method, quickly overtaking the inferior sound-quality cassette tape format, with reported worldwide sales of over 1 billion units. The recorded music industry, despite some peaks and valleys through the decades, continued to thrive. "Business as usual." If you wanted to be a successful recording artist, there was simply no substitute for "a record deal" with a Record Company. They had the technology. They had the equipment. They had the distribution system. They held all the cards.

True, you could (and many artists did) make their own "records"...on tape. Tape recorders had been around for decades. Small and affordable multi-track recorders were widely available. Record your songs to tape, multi-track by "bouncing" from track to track (losing fidelity with each generation), and mix the tracks down to a stereo master tape. Then dupe (or duplicate) cassette copies and sell to your fans.

This is how the majority of independent recording artists (those without a Record Company behind them) marketed their music until near the end of the millenium. It worked, within limits. But it was status quo for the record companies. They controlled the music industry.

Then things changed. In 1998, general consumer CD recorders hit the market. This single event changed the face of the entire industry. Artists could now afford to make their own high-quality recordings and, through the magic of digital technology, manufacture perfect copies of their master recording, with no loss of fidelity. Independent Artists were no longer subjects of the Record Companies!

But this was just the beginning! While it took over 100 years for Independent Artists to be empowered to record and manufacture their own quality music product, in the blink of an eye (actually just a year or two), they were also empowered to DISTRIBUTE their product...GLOBALLY.

Enter the MP3. MP3 is short for MPEG Audio Layer III, a type of digital audio compression that makes music files small, with virtually no audible loss of fidelity. Why is that important?

Well, around the same time that CDs and CD recorders were making it possible to make professional sounding "home recordings," a little thing called the Internet was becoming ubiquitous throughout the world.

The advent of MP3 technology (right on the heels of the digital recording revolution), coupled with the ability to send music via the Internet to anyone anywhere in the world with the click of a button, poured rocket fuel on the already burgeoning independent music scene (those talented guys and gals who just couldn't spin a thread with the RCAs of the world).

An imporant sidebar here is that not only did record companies now face the growing competition for their stable of signed artists by independents, the ability for consumers to COPY music digitally (a perfect copy, remember) created a whole new threat (a blight to everyone, actually): PIRACY. If anyone wanted a copy of your music (whether you bought it or acquired it through piracy yourself), armed with a CD or MP3 "burner" (a device to copy digital recordings), YOU could easily distribute (even sell) the SAME MUSIC as the major record labels! Talk about opening Pandora's Box!

Enter the likes of Napster (a website later deemed illegal and shut down, only to reappear recently as a legal download site) OFFERING THE WORLD FREE MUSIC! "Peer to Peer," or by whatever name it was called, in most cases meant the theft of music...all over the world, 24/7. Can you hear those record company executives sobbing? They did, and still are.

Illegal file sharing (stealing music), some music execs say, is directly responsible for a significant downward spiral of CD sales since the introduction of the MP3. It is interesting to note, however, that Consumer Trend statistics provided by the Recording Institute Association of America (RIAA), the industry's governing body, actually reports only about a $200 million dollar slip in CD sales over the last ten years (from $12.3 billion in 1994 to $12.1 billion in 2004). Whatever the actual numbers, just about everyone who works in the music biz will tell you, "all ain't well."

So, after all this gloom and doom, you still want to be in the record business? Of course you do! But if you are still are looking for that "record deal," that big advance, that massive promotional machine that you just know a "label" will put behind you to take you "platinum," maybe you should think again. At least read this interview as food for thought. Then decide.