Bandcamp.Com And the New Order for Music

So you've been signed to a record label. Awesome. Now your hard work is partially the property of an industry that will take a generous cut out of the profits from sale of your music as payment for the services of distributing and stocking your music for sale, managing and promoting your performances, producing music videos and other promotional materials, forming and marketing your image, providing legal representation and always being watchful for the pervasive danger of piracy.

By the end of that long sentence, you may have noticed how these services are increasingly about maintaining the status quo of the recording industry itself and less about you. This middle man is huge and often stands as an ocean between you and your audience. The result in the United States, the largest music market in the world, is the actions of the Record Industry Assocation of America in recent years using bands like Metallica as their spokespeople vilifying the perpetrators of digital music piracy.

Is it theft? Well, sure. But that really isn't the point anymore. The point is that the perception presented to the public is that file sharers are stealing money directly out of the artist's pocket, when in reality the biggest victim is the already spectacularly wealthy recording industry. Let's just state clearly that the act of pirating music is skimming a trifle of profits off companies that are continuing to see digital music sales boom year after year regardless*. The act of pirating the music is technically wrong, but it's not like Dante should have added a tenth circle of Hell for it.

Perhaps the bigger wrong here is that all this emphasis on maximizing profits on the sale of music involves treating this art form as you would an appliance. Music is about communication, is it not? It is meant to speak to us on one level or another, whether it's Beethoven or Weird Al Yankovic. So there is a deeper value inherent in music than its dollar value, but you forget that when you see it as a business that needs to stay afloat so all the middle men can keep making money. This leaves the artist reduced to a tool, a means to an end.

So how do you get music out into the world without buying into the business status quo? You could have your own website and sell your music directly from there. Admittedly, it is difficult to put sufficient work into marketing yourself while your main job should be actually making music. It is important to do so, however, if you want to be in charge of your own image, your own profits.

Marketing yourself is a whole lot easier when you have some help - not the kind of help offered by companies that will press you through a mold and crank you out as they would the next great electric toothbrush. Rather, you can look to a community of independent artists that are doing the same thing. One example of this is a wonderful site called Bandcamp.com, where artists can upload their work, let visitors take a free listen and set their own price for download. The site puts artists in direct contact with their audience by showing them where their music is being shared (legally) elsewhere on the Web, allowing musicians to approach their listeners in a natural, organic way. Visitors can contact the artists, post comments and essentially act as modern patrons of the arts, participating in viral marketing whether they purchase the music or not. This facilitates a long lost sense of relationship between artist and patron, and the idea that good art is a cooperative effort that ties together performer and audience.

The 21^st century is going to see a new order in music production and distribution, and sites like Bandcamp.com are leading the way. We can look forward to seeing the soul return to music production, more profits in the hands of the artists themselves, and the issue of music piracy lamented by giant corporations become a distant, fading memory left behind in history books.

*torrentfreak.com/is-piracy-really-killing-the-music-industry-no-100418

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