Death of the Recorded Music Industry (not a minute too soon)

The RIAA stopped suing people for sharing music, they announced last week. My own belief is that selling recorded music to profit some large corporation, because only they can get musicians heard has died the death of a thousand cuts. It’s the mimeograph trying to hold off the World Wide Web. Not going to happen.

The Grateful Dead have long had a great business mode; they encouraged fans to record show and share them. I remember hearing Jerry say, “We’re done with the music. You can have it.” Want to make a living at it? Tour. And sell online for those who appreciate liner notes, or as MP3s but for God’s sake, why make Sony or Columbia or the rest of the riaats, I mean rats, get all the cheese?

The history of the treatment of musicians by these people is legendary. Most musicians signing to a major label lost the rights to their own works, and often most of the profits. There is a plethora of songs and stories by artists complaining about their labels, most famously John Fogerty with Vanz Kant Danz (but he’ll steal your money, watch him or he’ll rob you blind). So what’s the new model? Here’s an idea.

My current favorite singer songwriter is Ingrid Michaelson, who embodies getting music heard and spread using new technologies and techniques like Barack Obama did. Maybe I’m out of touch, but it looks to me like an entirely new paradigm. She started out on MySpace and built a community of fans and ended up touring. I’m thinking about how a local talent with some music out there could use this to expand the base and get heard.

Ingrid’s latest effort, “Be OK” has an extremely spare orchestration, entirely acoustic and minimal. Her previous works had big scores and lots of instruments and were great fun, but this one is so much more intimate. And I suspect, less expensive to record and mix. With a little work, why couldn’t an artist record his or her own tunes and mix them with GarageBand or equivalent? Other than a decent mike (we’re talking performers here; you got the mike, okay?) it seems it couldn’t be that hard to actually home produce a dozen cuts for a CD.

Here’s the trick. When it becomes viable for an artist to record an album at home at very little expense (except time), does that mean we could have an entirely democratic world of music? Has it already happened, and I’m just clueless?

As both of my readers know, I’m very concerned with social justice, which will be even more important as we slide into the decade long Great Depression 2. Here’s a chance for artists to kill two birds and get stoned. Ingrid’s latest CD used a couple of engaging, cheap and effective methods available to anyone. First, the profits from the single, “Be OK”, are being donated to the fight against breast cancer. I think food banks would be a very appropriate recipient these days.

The beauty is that once you’re being charitable, much less chutzpah is required. For the very inexpensively created album, a singer who wants to reach a wider audience could put the songs on the net and either turn over all the profits to a charitable organization or from the one song. Radiohead released an album online last year where the customer got to choose the price. Especially when it’s for a good cause, I think people would pay a fair price.

The other nice thing about an album doing good is that you can tap into the national and international networks these outlets tend to belong to. As a longtime fundraiser and donor I call tell, these people are connected.

Being for a good cause also makes it easier to get local press, TV coverage or at least a spot on local NPR. Volunteering with the group couldn’t hurt. You’d know who does what for who, and how to get the national arm to highlight you. This just might be the new paradigm. Every third or fourth album for a good cause, and tour if you need to make money.

This might be a dumb idea, but usually when people say my idea is dumb, I’m about to make a lot of money.

Merry Christmas!