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The evolution of public relations practices in the indie rock genre

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The evolution of public relations practices in the indie rock genre

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Content THE EVOLUTION OF PUBLIC RELATIONS PRACTICES IN THE INDIE ROCK GENRE by Jim Nowierski A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS (STRATEGIC PUBLIC RELATIONS) May 2011 Copyright 2011 Jim Nowierski ii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................ iv Chapter 1: Introduction ..................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2: What is Indie Rock? ........................................................................................ 5 Chapter 3: The History of Indie Rock ............................................................................. 14 Chapter 4: Major Labels .................................................................................................. 32 Chapter 5: Independent Labels ........................................................................................ 38 Chapter 6: Traditional Music Promotion ......................................................................... 41 Chapter 7: Independent Radio Promoters ....................................................................... 42 Chapter 8: Conservatism in Radio Song Selection ......................................................... 48 Chapter 9: The Advent of the Internet ............................................................................. 54 Chapter 10: Digital Music Market Places ....................................................................... 57 Chapter 11: The Causes of the Record Industry’s Decline ............................................. 62 Chapter 12: Changes in Musical Discovery Habits ......................................................... 64 Chapter 13: Independent Music After Digitalization: The Need for Public Relations ... 67 Chapter 14: Digital Promotion: Free Music for Blogger Publicity ................................. 70 Chapter 15: Digital Promotion: Video ............................................................................ 85 Chapter 16: Digital Promotion: Streaming Radio Stations ............................................. 88 Chapter 17: Digital Promotion: Twitter .......................................................................... 92 Chapter 18: Digital Promotion: Facebook ....................................................................... 94 Chapter 19: Promotion: Song Placement ........................................................................ 95 Chapter 20: Conclusion ................................................................................................... 99 iii Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 101 Appendix ....................................................................................................................... 106 Transcript of the Interview with John Richards .................................................. 106 Transcript of the Interview with Anthony Fantano ............................................. 116 Summary of the Interview with Rich Bangloff ................................................... 125 Transcript of the interview with Daniel Gill ....................................................... 127 iv Abstract Historically, indie rock artists and record labels have had few tools for generating publicity. This is because the most powerful promotional tools in the music industry, i.e. terrestrial commercial radio and mainstream music publications, have featured artists signed to major labels over indie rock artists. Consequently, many listeners have had limited exposure to indie rock music, which has caused the genre to only be popular among niche audiences. However, the internet has segmented and democratized the music media, which has increased coverage for independent artists. Now, bloggers report on music genres not affiliated with mainstream tastes, including indie rock, in depth. Additionally, social media platforms, such as YouTube and Facebook, allow indie rock artists and labels to promote themselves and communicate with listeners directly at little cost. In this way, the internet has fostered a thriving network of artists, record labels, bloggers, radio stations and fans that work together to organically promote indie rock. Consequently, indie rock is more popular than ever. By examining the history of indie rock and analyzing the music industries’ adoption of digital media, this paper explores how the music industry has evolved, and how this evolution has influenced the public relations practices members of the independent music community use promote indie rock. 1 Chapter 1: Introduction On February 13, 2011, millions of viewers watched the 53 rd Annual Grammy Awards at home on their television sets. In the final minutes of the program, one last award remained: the highly coveted prize for Album of the Year. Out of the five artists nominated, it seemed that only four were really in contention to win the award. Among the likely winners was the world-renowned rapper Eminem. He had walked into the Grammys with ten nominations, but as the night unfolded, he had only won two awards. Perhaps winning Album of the Year for his comeback record “Recovery” would make up for his previous seven losses. Lady Gaga was also in contention. Her provocative style had helped her album “Fame Monster” become one of the year’s best-selling records and had made her a household name the world over. Lady Gaga’s fellow pop-pinup Katy Perry was also a definite contender. She was coming off of a smashingly successful year. Both radio and television had featured songs from her album “Teenage Dream,” so frequently, that her music seemed inescapable. Lady Antebellum, was the last of the four likely winners. Going into the Grammys, the group had seemed like a long shot to win the award, but Lady Antebellum had proven to be a surprise force and had won five awards earlier in the night. Winning one final award for their album “Need You Now” would be the perfect way to end an already better-than- expected showing. And then there was the Arcade Fire. The band’s album, “The Suburbs,” was the definite underdog in the category. To many, the Arcade Fire was an unknown band and an unlikely contender for the Album of the Year award. Indeed, the band’s level of fame paled in comparison to the 2 other nominees. Consequently, it shocked many when the award for album of the year was handed to the Arcade Fire and not a tough rapper, nor a pop starlet nor a country three-piece. The Arcade Fire was different from the other nominated artists. First, they were the only artists that were signed to an independent label; all of their competitors were singed to major labels. Second, they were the only artists whose songs were not prominently featured on radio stations across the country. Third, while widely popular among niche audiences, the Arcade Fire’s mainstream popularity did match that the other nominees. Yet, somehow they won. This begs the question, how did a relatively obscure band win the most-prized award in the music industry? There are many ways to answer this question, but it is best explained by the increasingly important role the internet plays in the promotion of independent artists. Under this new promotional model, a network of publicists, artists, music labels and fans, who share an interest in independent music, create and recirculate content to publicize independent artists. With the help of the internet, this content is distributed to a potentially unlimited audience online. This, in turn, has changed the way consumers listen to, lean about and share music. By and large, these changes have segmented the online music market and created informational silos that provide in-depth coverage of niche musical genres, including indie rock, the genre of music the Arcade Fire plays. This is a new phenomenon. Prior to the advent of the internet, the high cost of distributing content to large audiences prevented the independent music community from aggregating a large number 3 of listeners. Further, during this time, the most powerful mechanisms for delivering music and music commentary to potential listeners, i.e. commercial radio and a few venerable print music magazines, eschewed independent artists in favor of mainstream artists that were singed to major labels. Consequently, the independent music community had few mediums with which to engage potential listeners. However, this has changed. First, the digitalization of music and its proliferation online have made it easier for listeners to access independent music. Second, online publishing has made it easier for bloggers and publicists to refer listeners to independent music online. Third, video content channels such as YouTube have re-popularized the music video and in doing so have given fans a platform from which they can broadcast videos they personally recorded. Fourth, social networks have made it easier for fans of independent music to refer their online friends and followers to independent artists. Fifth, platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, have provided artists and labels with direct access to consumers. Lastly, public radio stations that air independent music now broadcast online, so their audience is potentially unlimited and is no longer confined to stations’ local broadcasting areas. Further, these new online tools allow members of the independent music community to promote their own personal brand by promoting independent music. This is a form of online cross-promotion. Using this promotional model music fans, bloggers, radio stations, artists and music labels strengthen their own personal online brand by recirculating online indie-music-related content created by third parties. While this form 4 of cross promotion has always existed to a small degree in the independent music community, social media platforms have made it more prominent. As this has occurred, the old distribution channels that historically introduced listeners to new music, i.e. commercial radio and venerable music publications, have become less important. Consequently, they no longer wield the taste-making power they once did. For example, while millions of people still listen to the radio, fewer people use it to discover new music. Additionally, while print magazines inform listeners’ musical tastes, music blogs are challenging their dominance. This has fundamentally changed the music industry. By harnessing the power of the internet, listeners have usurped taste- making power from major labels and print magazines. Further, online publicity tools and cross-promotion have dispersed taste making-power among thousands of music fans who collectively make up an online network of independent music advocates. This network is organic in that it came into existence out of a natural interest for independent music. To understand how the independent music community’s public relations tactics have evolved and why a perceived organic ethos is so important to the promotion of independent artists, it’s first necessary to understand what indie music is and how the genre developed. 5 Chapter 2: What is Indie Rock? The word indie is an abbreviation for independent, and carries a dual meaning. It describes the do-it-yourself ethos of its artists and the smaller, niche-oriented record labels that release the music. 1 As a musical genre, indie has historically shared American punk music’s “underground” sensibilities. In this way, indie classification means consciously operating outside of mainstream music. 2 In the 1980s, when the term independent was first popularly applied to rock music, it meant not being affiliated with major labels in any way. As such, classifying a band as independent, or indie, was easy. If they were not signed to a major label, they were indie. If they were signed to a major label, they were not. 3 However, the independent music industry has changed markedly since the 1980s. Now, major labels and corporations, the very entities independent music was founded to avoid, have formed partnerships with independent labels and artists. Venerable independent labels such as Matador, Merge and Sub Pop distribute their music through the Alternative Distribution Alliance: a national distributor primarily owned by Warner Music Group: a major label. 4 Additionally, corporations use indie rock music in television advertisements for products that range from fast food to cars. And Billboard, the publication whose charts are synonymous with popular music hits, has a chart solely 1 All Music Website. “Indie Rock” Accessed on 29 Dec. 2010. 2 Maddux, Rachael. “Is Indie Dead?” Slate. 26 Jan 2010. 3 Ibid. 4 Alternative Distribution Alliance Website. “Distributed Labels.” Accessed on 12 Jan. 2011. http://ada-music.com/distributed_labels.php. 6 dedicated to independent album sales. These partnerships and the popular acceptance of independent music as a musical genre obscure the once-clear criteria for determining if music is in fact indie. Further complicating the indie definition is the fact that bands that were once signed to independent labels have gone on to achieve mainstream success on major labels while still being regarded as indie. Take, for example, Modest Mouse. Modest Mouse released its first two studio albums — “This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About” and “The Lonesome Crowded West” — on the Seattle-based independent label Up Records in 1996 and 1997. In 2000, the band released its first album on a major label, “The Moon & Antarctica,” the first of three albums it released on Epic Records, which is a subsidiary of the music giant Sony Music Entertainment. “The Moon & Antarctica” sold more than one million copies, earing Modest Mouse their first Gold Record. Their next two albums, “Good News for People Who Like Bad News” (2004) and “We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank” (2007) earned the band its first Platinum Record and its second Gold Record, respectively. Along with platinum-level sales, Modest Mouse enjoyed terrestrial radio airplay and live performances on network television programs such as Saturday Night Live. Yet, when the band broke into the mainstream — between 2004 and 2005 — its music was still regarded as indie rock, and in 2010, after the release of three hugely successful major label albums, Modest Mouse is still regarded as an indie rock band. 5 5 All Music Website. “Modest Mouse Biography.” Accessed on 15 Dec. 2010. http://www.allmusic.com/artist/modest-mouse-p200044. 7 Modest Mouse isn’t the only indie band to retain its indie rock classification after achieving major sales on a major label. The Flaming Lips and Death Cab For Cutie achieved Gold and Platinum-level sales on major labels and still perform at independent music festivals such as Coachella, The Sasquatch Festival and South by Southwest. This poses the question: if an indie band is signed to a major label and operates within the mainstream, how can it retain its indie credentials? Answering this question is difficult, because in a contemporary sense, indie doesn’t have a clear definition. Even artists, writers and businesspeople affiliated with the industry have widely differing interpretations of its meaning. 6 This is because the term indie, which started out as a musical genre, has taken on multiple meanings that developed as the term was applied to other industries. As indie was used to describe more things, it took on characteristics of those things. Writer Rachael Maddux explored this concept in her Paste article, “Is Indie Dead?” Indie is, at once, a genre (of music first, and then of film, books, video games and anything else with a perceived arty sensibility, regardless of its relationship to a corporation), an ethos, a business model, a demographic and a marketing tool. It can signify everything, and it can signify nothing. It stands among the most important, potentially sustainable and meaningful movements in American popular culture—not just music, but for the whole cultural landscape. But because it was originally sculpted more in terms of what it opposed than what it stood for, the only universally held truth about “indie” is that nobody agrees on what it means. 7 6 Brownstein, Carrie. “What Does “Indie” Mean to You? Even More Survey Answers!!” NPR Music. 18 Nov. 2010. 7 Maddux, Rachael. “Is Indie Dead?” Slate. 26 Jan 2010. 8 Since indie has taken on additional meanings, using it to specifically describe contemporary music is tricky. After all, bands can still be regarded as indie if they’re signed to major labels, if they license songs to corporate advertisers or if their albums sell mainstream-numbers, which the indie bands Vampire Weekend and the Arcade Fire did in 2010. Both groups released albums on independent labels that reached the upper half of Billboard’s Year End Top 200 Albums chart. 8 This has led some to believe the word indie has lost much of its meaning. To this group, indie is solely an aesthetic description, not a cultural force. 9 Regardless of its true meaning, indie is still popularly used to describe a genre of music. With some exceptions, indie bands are signed to record labels that are smaller than major labels in terms of album sales, revenues, number of staff, number of subsidiary labels and promotional budgets. Unlike the four major labels, independent entrepreneurs own independent labels rather than the shareholders of sprawling, publicly owned corporate entertainment companies (i.e. Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment), shareholders of stand-alone music companies (i.e. Warner Music Group) or investors in private equity firms (i.e. EMI). 10 Independent labels are privately owned, and as such, can pursue artists that align with the label owners’ personal tastes. Independent labels, because they are not beholden 8 Billboard website. “Year End Charts – Top 200.” Accessed on 12 Jan. 2011. http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/charts/yearendcharts/2010/the-billboard-200. 9 Frere-Jones, Sasha. “A Paler Shade of White.” The New York Times. 22 Oct. 2007. 10 Purdy, Nick. “Industry Chat: A2IM President Rich Bengloff on the State of Indie.” Paste. 22 Jul. 2010. 9 to shareholder expectations, generally give their artists more control over their music than major labels would. 11 This artistic freedom gives indie music an assumed authenticity. 12 For listeners, it also makes indie music more organic than the music proliferated by major labels. In this way, listeners believe indie music is a form of artistic expression, not a manufactured piece of sheet music polished by the deep pockets of a corporation and produced for mass consumption. Since independent labels give artists more freedom, the music released on independent labels often sounds different from the mainstream music played on terrestrial radio stations. The popular music website All Music describes how the relationship between independent labels and their artists affects artists’ music in its definition of indie rock: The biggest indie labels might strike distribution deals with major corporate labels, but their decision-making processes remain autonomous. As such, indie rock is free to explore sounds, emotions, and lyrical subjects that don’t appeal to large, mainstream audiences — profit isn’t as much of a concern as personal taste (though the labels do, after all, want to stay in business). 13 In this way, independent labels allow artists to record what they want. In some cases, the music may only appeal to niche audiences, but since securing profit for shareholders isn’t the singular goal indie record labels, a lack of mainstream appeal is 11 Frere-Jones, Sasha. “The Dotted Line What Do Record Labels Do Now?” The New York Times. 16 Aug. 2010. 12 Maddux, Rachael. “Is Indie Dead?” Slate. 26 Jan 2010. 13 All Music Website. “Indie Rock.” Accessed on 29 Dec. 2010. http://www.allmusic.com/explore/style/d2687. 10 acceptable. This explains both the organic ethos that is prevalent in the genre and why indie music carries a connotation of not being mainstream. 14 Isolating the indie rock sound is difficult. This is partly because independent labels sign artists from a variety of genres. Take, for example, Sub Pop. Sub Pop is the label that broke Nirvana into the mainstream and is closely affiliated with the Seattle Grunge phenomenon of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The label is still very much alive and well, to the extent that it is often cited as one of the most relevant indie rock labels. 15 Sub Pop’s active roster includes artists that play very different styles of music. For example, CSS is a dance-floor-friendly Brazilian band that influential indie music blog Pitchfork described as, “rudimentary punk bashers with disco hi-hats and trebly amped-up chanting and buzzing keyboards and surf-guitar twangs and simplistic structures and absolutely no hints at subtlety, ever.” In the same review, their music was described as, “damaged, high-strung new wave with electro squiggles and winky self- aware lyrics.” 16 Compare Pitchfork’s description of CSS with its description of another Sub Pop band, Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes may have a firm grasp on rock and folk history, but they never play to their record collection. Rather than revive a particular scene or re-create a lost sound, the Seattle quintet cherrypick their ideas from a broad spectrum of styles, pulling in Appalachian folk, classic rock, AM country, and SoCal pop to create a 14 Wilson, Carl. “The Trouble With Indie Rock.” Slate. 18 Oct. 2007. 15 Maddux, Rachael. “Is Indie Dead?” Slate. 26 Jan 2010. 16 Breinah, Tom. “Album Review: CSS – Cansei De Ser Sexy.” Pitchfork. 12 Jul. 2006. 11 personal synthesis of the music of their peers, their parents, and even their grandparents. 17 And finally, compare these reviews with Pitchfork’s take on Male Bonding, another band signed to Sub Pop. Male Bonding’s songs are fast, noisy, and full of hooks, a combination that might remind you of any number of things: Nirvana-era fuzz-pedal stompers, 1990s American indie rockers, Hüsker Dü and Dinosaur Jr. followers, not-quite- shoegazer English bands. Like a lot of those acts—and like their contemporaries in No Age and Abe Vigoda… with Male Bonding, part of the treat is hearing them jump out of that and find room in the wide-open field where amped-up, rangy punk stuff collides with tuneful slacker pop. (Early on, they covered both Black Flag and Blur.) No surprise that they’ve wound up signed to Sub Pop, a label that built part of its reputation on that sound. 18 Ergo, a label known for releasing music that combines the hard-driving elements of punk with the unkempt sounds of early alternative rock has signed a post-disco dance outfit, a bearded troop of folk singers and a loose-sounding punk band. That’s quite a range of musical styles to fit under Sub Pop’s indie rock umbrella. Sub Pop’s East Coast, Midwest and Southern equivalents — Matador, Touch and Go and Merge Records — release music from similarly varied subgenres. Individually, each band’s music could be uniquely classified with a list of musical adjectives that relate preexisting musical styles — often tagged with the “post” prefix, as in post-punk or post- rock — to aspects of the artist’s sound. But individually classifying artists’ genres is an exhausting exercise in semantics that yields hyper-specialized genres that encompass few 17 Deusner, Stephen M. “Album Review: Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes.” Pitchfork. 6 Jun. 2008. 18 Abebe, Nitsuh. “Album Review: Male Bonding – Nothing Hurts.” Pitchfork. 13 May 2010. 12 artists. It’s easier to follow the lead of prominent independent labels and consolidate different musical styles under one roof, i.e. indie rock. This is one reason many musical styles — including country-rock, noise, punk, ambient, dream pop, Shoegaze, experimental, neo-psychedelia, and electronica — are popularly referred to as indie rock. 19 Since the indie rock genre includes so many musical styles and is largely perceived as more artistically credible than mainstream music by its advocates, one would think that the genre’s musical diversity and its cache of organic, esoteric coolness would resonate with a large listening audience. However, the size of indie rock’s listening audience is quite small when compared to that of mainstream music. As will be discussed in subsequent chapters, much of this discrepancy can be attributed to the fact that, historically, the most powerful publicity tools in the music industry – terrestrial radio and large-circulation music publications – supported by the extensive marketing efforts of major labels, largely ignored independent artists in favor of artists that were singed to major labels. Consequently, few promotional opportunities and relatively inconsequential marketing support existed for indie rock artists and labels, so it was difficult to attract new listeners. To introduce new listeners to indie music and to overcome the lack of cost- effective promotional options, indie music advocates created their own organic means of generating buzz for artists. For example, armature writers published their own limited- circulation print music magazines called fanzines. Additionally, college students began 19 All Music Website. “Indie Rock.” Accessed on 12 Jan. 2011. http://www.allmusic.com/explore/style/indie-rock-d2687. 13 hosting radio shows on the public radio stations owned by the universities they attended. However, because publishing was expensive and radio stations could only be heard in local broadcasting areas, these publicity tactics reached relatively small audiences. To gain a historical perspective on the promotion of the indie rock genre, and to understand how the current organic promotional channels developed, it’s necessary to explore indie rock’s history. 14 Chapter 3: The History of Indie Rock When the indie gene was first emerging, the music industry’s two most powerful promotional tools – commercial radio and mainstream music magazines – largely ignored the genre. To make up for this lack of coverage, early indie artists and their fans created their own promotional tools. In this way, these promotional tools were organic. To understand how these tools came into existence, it’s necessary to examine the evolution of the indie rock genre. For early independent music artists, specifically the hardcore punk bands that pioneered the genre, a lack of mainstream publicity forced them to become independent entrepreneurs. If they wanted their music to be heard, they would have to create the mechanisms for recording and distributing their music themselves. In this way, a lack of promotional tools helped shape the two primary aspects of indie’s definition — i.e. not being affiliated with major labels and doing-it-yourself — which are outgrowths of the 1970s punk movement, specifically the hardcore scene that first emerged in Southern California in the late 1970s and Washington D.C. in the early 1980s. 20 Michael Azerrad, the author of “Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991” describes the emergence of hardcore in the following passage: But by 1979 the original punk scene had almost completely died out. Hipsters had moved on to arty post-punk bands like the Fall, Gang of Four and Joy Division. They were replaced by a bunch of toughs coming from outlying suburbs [of Los Angeles] who were only beginning to discover punk’s speed, power and 20 Azerrad, Michael. Our Band Could Be Your Life. Little, Brown and Company. 2001. Pg. 13. 15 aggression. They didn’t care that punk rock was already being dismissed as a spent force, kid bands playing at being the Ramones a few years too late. Dispensing with all pretension, these kids boiled the music down to its essence, then revved up the tempos to the speed of a pencil impatiently tapping on a school desk, and called the result “hardcore.” 21 Black Flag was among the first hardcore bands. They defined a chapter of American underground music. But their contribution to the indie genre extends beyond music. In the words of Michael Azerrad, “Black Flag was among the first bands to suggest that if you didn’t like “the system,” you should simply create one on your own.” 22 Black Flag created the ethos that still defines the indie genre with its music first and then with its rebellious entrepreneurialism. Greg Ginn was the nucleus of Black Flag. In 1976, Gin formed the punk band Panic. In 1978, Panic recorded eight songs, but no record labels were interested in releasing the tracks, save one: Southern California garage-rock revivalists Bomp! Records. However, Bomp’s interest in the band waned. Fed up with labels, Gin decided to release the record himself under the band’s new name, Black Flag. 23 Gin had the entrepreneurial background needed to release a record on his own. He had operated SST, a mail-order electronics company that sold surplus World War II radio equipment, since he was 12 years old. 24 He also studied economics at the University of 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. Pg. 14. 23 Ibid. Pg.18, 19. 24 Ibid. Pg. 14, 16. 16 California Los Angeles, so he was somewhat familiar with business practices. 25 In January 1979, SST (whose abbreviated title stood for Solid State Tuners) added a new function to its business and released Black Flag’s first album, the four-song “Nervous Breakdown” EP. It was SST Records first step towards becoming the most influential underground label of the 1980s. 26 With this release, Ginn developed the organic ethos that still influences the indie genre. Since there were no channels with which to promote and distribute Black Flag’s music, he created his own. In this way, Ginn’s label SST was itself organic. This shows that indie genre’s organic ethos is closely aligned with the primary aspects of indie’s definition — i.e. not being affiliated with major labels and doing-it-yourself. On the opposite side of the country, in the Washington D.C. neighborhood of Glover Park, childhood friends Henry Garfield (who would later go by the name Henry Rollins and front Black Flag), and Ian MacKaye devoured Black Flag’s music. MacKaye’s band Teen Idles had recently broken up, and he was attempting to release a post-breakup album. But, as was common with early hardcore bands, no labels were interested. 27 Like Ginn, MacKaye decided to do it himself and founded Dischord Records in 1980. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. Pg. 14. 27 MacKaye, Ian. Dischord Records Website. “History of Dischord Records.” Accessed on 13 Jan. 2010. http://www.dischord.com/history/. 17 Dischord was run out of a residence in Arlington, Virginia. It was and continues to be a small label; its staff has never exceeded six employees. 28 Disproportionate to its size, Dischord made a significant impact in the development of indie music. In the following years Dischord released MacKaye’s Teen Idles album; music from his second band, the hugely influential Minor Threat; and his third band Fugazi. While contemporary indie rock does not sound much like Black Flag and Minor Threat, these bands sculpted the organic business model that still exists in the genre today. They also influenced countless other bands that infused less abrasive punk sounds with elements of jazz, funk and angular rock. Some of these bands would go on to create a new musical genre that, in terms of sound, is the grandfather of modern day indie music. This genre was called college rock. The Minutemen were the first band affiliated with the early 1980s SST-bred hardcore scene to achieve consistent airplay on college radio – which at that time was the only radio platform that championed independent artists. 29 In 1986, the Minutemen toured with R.E.M., the darlings of college rock. The tour symbolically represented what Michael Azerrad referred to as, “[the] passing of the torch from the hardcore-associated pioneers of the indie scene to what Watt calls “college rock,” a less desperate strain of music for a whole new group of kids.” 30 28 Ibid. 29 Azerrad, Michael. Our Band Could Be Your Life. Little, Brown and Company. 2001. Pg. 91. 30 Ibid. Pg. 90. 18 As its name suggests, college rock was associated with music played by networks of college radio stations across the country. Since the internet hadn’t yet been invented in the 1980s, learning about artists not signed to major labels was difficult. Indie acts had limited album distribution and were rarely played on mainstream radio. Since college stations were not commercial, they had the freedom to play esoteric music that did not align with mainstream tastes. In this way, college radio stations functioned as an alternative to commercial radio and gave listeners a mechanism for discovering indie music. College radio was itself an organic publicity tool. This is because the student DJs who played indie music on college radio stations where themselves fans of indie. They played the music to grow interest in the nascent genre. However, by playing indie music on the air, student DJs built reputations as a musical tastemaker among their peers and listeners. In this way college music provided an early cross-promotional opportunity for DJs. However, this cross-promotional opportunity was limited. Since, the internet had not yet been invented, the audiences DJs built credibility among were limited to their friends and their radio stations’ listening audiences. Nevertheless, this demonstrates that public relations tactics employed by members of the independent community have historically had a cross-promotional component. All Music defines college rock in this way: Essentially, college rock is the (largely) alternative music that dominated college radio playlists from the rise of alternative rock (circa 1983-84) through the ‘80s. Most college rock was born in the confluence of new wave, post-punk, and early alternative rock. College rock’s poppiest bands didn’t fit into the mainstream the way new wave did; although it could be arty, it wasn’t quite as experimental or detached as much post-punk; and where much early alternative/American 19 underground rock was rooted in punk and hardcore, not all college rock necessarily was (though many of those early alternative bands fit the definition nicely). Early college rock’s two most influential groups were R.E.M. and the Smiths, who paved the way for countless practitioners of jangly guitar-pop from the U.S. (the dB’s, Let’s Active) and U.K. (Housemartins, La’s). But college rock encompassed much more. There was the burgeoning, post-hardcore American underground rock scene (Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, Dinosaur Jr., the Replacements); the quirky, cerebral British pop of new wave survivors XTC and Robyn Hitchcock; similarly quirky American artists like They Might Be Giants, the Violent Femmes, Camper Van Beethoven, and the Pixies; literate folk-rock (Billy Bragg, The Waterboys, 10,000 Maniacs); post- punkers who added more pop dimensions to their music (the Cure, Siouxsie & the Banshees); synth-based dance-pop with moody, introspective lyrics (New Order, Depeche Mode); and bands who blended pop hooks with ear-splitting guitar noise (the Pixies, the Jesus & Mary Chain). College rock also included a few mainstream stars like U2, Peter Gabriel, and Sting, whose thoughtful lyrics and socially conscious idealism made them favorites on college campuses. 31 As a whole, college listeners eschewed hardcore for more melodic and accessible music. 32 Confronted with the musical tastes of a new listening audience, Hüsker Dü bridged the gap between hardcore and college rock. 33 The Minneapolis-based band combined punk’s speed with scorching noise and mixed the concoction with equal parts pop. The resulting densely packed wall of sound was blistering but digestible. Hüsker Dü’s third release — their second on SST — “Zen Arcade” was the band’s breakthrough album. The 1984 release ended up on countless best-of lists including mainstream publications such as the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Phoenix and the Village Voice and in doing became one of the first indie rock albums to be 31 All Music Website. “College Rock.” Accessed on 14 Jan. 2010. http://www.allmusic.com/explore/style/college-rock-d11971. 32 Azerrad, Michael. Our Band Could Be Your Life. Little, Brown and Company. 2001. Pg. 159, 173. 33 Ibid. Pg. 187. 20 largely covered by the mainstream press. 34 Further, “Zen Arcade” put the band in the national spotlight and attracted attention from major labels. After two more releases on SST, “New Day Rising” and “Flip Your Wig,” Hüsker Dü signed a record contract with Warner Brothers and became the first significant American indie band to sign with a major. 35 For some, it marked the end of the indie era. To this audience, Hüsker Dü’s transition to a major label signified a movement away from indie’s organic ethos. Shortly afterward, Hüsker Dü’s fellow Minnesotans, The Replacements, signed with Sire, a Warner Brothers sub-label. Like Hüsker Dü, The Replacements were an influential band favored by college DJs and popular on the indie touring circuit. The transition of two indie bands to major labels brought indie music closer to the mainstream and afforded the bands new promotional opportunities that exposed them to a national audience. For example, Hüsker Dü played on the “Joan Rivers Show” and the “Today Show.” Similarly, The Replacements played on “Saturday Night Live.” However, even with the support of a major label and brief nationally-televised performances, Hüsker Dü’s music was not played on popular radio. 36 This was also true of the Replacements. Like Hüsker Dü, The Replacements broke barriers in the early indie scene. They were the first band to attract a significant female following; up to that point, indie music had been a boys club. They were also among the first bands to be covered by the 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. Pg. 190. 36 Ibid. Pg. 193. 21 mainstream music press. In 1985, “Rolling Stone,” which up to that point paid little attention to indie music, picked the band as “The New Stars in Your Future.” 37 Critical acclaim and major-label-backing improved both bands’ album sales. Hüsker Dü’s “Warehouse” album sold 125,000 copies in the U.S. The Replacements’ “Pleased to Meet Me” sold 300,000 copies. Improved sales however did not correlate to commercial radio airplay. Mainstream culture was still reluctant to embrace indie music. 38 Early college rock was steeped in punk. But, as bands matured, their music borrowed styles from other genres and their sound became less similar to their hardcore predecessors. Although, the music moved away form punk stylistically, it was still popularly identified with punk, because it was difficult for indie bands to find venues at which to play. Consequently, their tours often hit the same network of indie-music- friendly venues established by SST bands in the early 1980s. So while the music wasn’t hardcore, or even punk for that matter, it was often lumped in with the genre. Michael Azerrad describes this point in the context of Hüsker Dü’s musical classification in the following way: The Hüskers had gotten cast as a hardcore band when what they were really doing was playing folk rock played at light speed, encased in an almost palpable cloak of swarming electronic distortion, car accident drumming and extreme volume. 39 37 Ibid. Pg. 223. 38 Ibid. Pg. 193, 230. 39 Ibid. Pg. 167. 22 However, the emergence of a radically different style of music — crudely dubbed “pigfuck” by “Village Voice” writer Robert Christgau — would more clearly separate indie from its hardcore roots. 40 Pigfuck bands Big Black, the Butthole Surfers and Sonic Youth shared experimental leanings, but each band distanced indie from hardcore in its own way. Big Black combined heavy metal’s density with punk’s edge and sounded like a long- neglected rusty chainsaw. The LSD-soaked Butthole Surfers turned music into performance art with megaphones, strobe lights, fake blood, stuffed animals and smoke machines. Their absurdity added eccentricity to indie. Sonic Youth influenced indie the most. They elevated the music to an art form and in doing so became the indie prototype, “the yardstick by which independence and hipness … were measured.” 41 Sonic Youth formed in New York City in 1981. Its members had a great appreciation for hardcore and relayed its ferocity with an experimental bent. 42 Sonic Youth’s sound developed from unconventional modifications its guitarist made to their instruments, which included alternative tunings and sticking drumsticks and screwdrivers under guitar strings. 43 These modifications produced a dissident and rangy sound that was unique to New York noise-rock. 40 Ibid. Pg. 255. 41 Ibid. Pg. 233. 42 Ibid. Pg. 235. 43 Ibid. Pg. 243. 23 At their core, Sonic Youth is a cerebral art band. Kim Gordon, the group’s bass player, is the daughter of a UCLA sociology professor. Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth’s guitarist and Kim Gordon’s husband, is the son of a music and philosophy professor. For Sonic Youth, music was truly an artistic endeavor. As Kim Gordon said: I was sort of raised all my life to do art…I just felt like I should be doing music. It seemed to me that this was really the next step after pop art, you see, entering directly into a popular form of culture instead of commenting on it. 44 Their artistic leanings helped built Sonic Youth’s cache of cool and gave indie music artistic credibility. The 1980s New York art scene whole-heartedly endorsed Sonic Youth. However, outside of art communities, the band’s unconventional musical style was not greeted with instant adulation. The newness of their sound afforded them some media coverage, but critics debated the quality of their music. In 1983, a “Village Voice” music critic wrote a scathingly negative piece on the band. 45 In the same year, respected critic Greil Marcus wrote a positive page-long review of the band in “Artforum.” 46 While success was elusive in the United States, Sonic Youth was embraced almost immediately abroad. European listeners hadn’t heard anything like Sonic Youth before. The European music press was equally smitten. The influential music publications “Sounds” and “NME” wrote highly positive reviews of the band, which helped build Sonic Youth’s American fan base. When Sonic Youth returned to New York after their European tour, 44 Ibid. Pg. 235. 45 Ibid. Pg. 236. 46 Ibid. Pg. 247. 24 lines for their shows extended out of venues and stretched around city blocks. 47 It would not be the last time the European music press stimulated American interest in indie music. From that point on, Sonic Youth became the quintessential American indie band. 48 Throughout the 1980s, their albums were lauded by American and international music critics. In 1990, Sonic Youth released its major label debut “Goo,” which debuted number one on the College Music Journal (CMJ) charts and made the Billboard Top 100. 49 No doubt, talent drove Sonic Youth’s success, though it did not hurt that they excelled at self-promotion. Band members made a point of meeting music critics at parties and shows and met as many famous people as they could. 50 Their ambition wasn’t completely self serving though. They used their connections to champion other independent acts, including Dinosaur Jr., Mudhoney and Nirvana, and in so doing became the center of the emerging indie genre. They infused indie with art, a contribution the genre still enjoys today. They also helped cultivate the late-1980s Seattle rock movement. The history of independent music is a study of regional music scenes. Indie began in Southern California with the hardcore bands Black Flag, The Minutemen and the 47 Ibid. Pg. 248. 48 Ibid. Pg. 232. 49 Ibid. Pg. 271. 50 Ibid. Pg. 254. 25 Adolescents. It gained social consciousness in Washington D.C., the home of Minor Threat, the Bad Brains and later, Fugazi. It “sold out” in Minneapolis when Hüsker Dü and the Replacements signed with major labels. In the late 1980s, Seattle became the city where, with the help of the international music media, indie music went mainstream. Prior to the late 1980s, Seattle, was a near forgotten music city that was largely out of the national consciousness, despite being the hometown of Jimi Hendrix, the Sonics and the Kingsmen. If Avant-guard art helped shape New York’s indie music scene, blue-collar sensibilities shaped Seattle’s. Musically speaking, Seattle was unpretentious, so bands were free to merge punk with hard rock and metal. 51 The resulting sound was thick, loud and sludgy. It was too slow to be punk, too thrifty to be metal and too hard to be rock and roll. The bands didn’t take themselves or their careers too seriously. After all, they lived in Seattle — not Los Angeles, New York or even Minneapolis. As such, their song content and general outlook was thick with irony. Seattle-based Sub Pop Records recorded the Seattle sound and sold the Seattle ethos to the world. In this way, shrewd entrepreneurism and a knack for self-promotion were as important to the Seattle scene as were its bands. Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman founded Sub Pop in 1986. Like Touch and Go Records, Sub Pop started as a fanzine: a self-published music periodical produced by music fans, in this case Bruce Pavitt. As a fanzine, Sub Pop’s first releases were compilations of underground bands. In 1987, Poneman offered to finance the release of an album by local band Sound Garden. Pavitt agreed; they split control of the young 51 Ibid. Pg. 418. 26 record label and released Sound Garden’s “Screaming Life” EP. Between 1986 and 1989, Sub Pop assimilated a roster of local artists that included Mudhoney, TAD and eventually, Nirvana. Ever the clever marketers, Pavitt and Poneman hyped their label through original practices that would later be replicated by competing labels. Sub Pop limited the number of its releases to drive up demand; used consistent lettering, colors and photos on albums to build its brand; peaked the interest of record collectors by printing albums on different colored vinyl; and started a “singles club” where for an upfront fee customers would receive a Sub Pop single mailed to them monthly. In 1988, Mudhoney became the first Sub Pop band to tour Europe. Sharing the booking with Sonic Youth, Mudhoney’s wild on-stage antics cultivated interest domestically and abroad. Sub Pop leveraged this interest to popularize other artists on their label. Sub Pop owners Pavitt and Poneman rarely turned down an interview opportunity. They considered interviews free advertising. It is fitting then that the Sub Pop frenzy began with Pavitt and Poneman’s outreach to the British press. Recognizing the U.K. press’ fascination with Pigfuck bands’ lowbrow aesthetics, Sub Pop pitched their artists to the UK music press as poor, uncouth, working-class men making art that reflected their frustrated blue-collar way of life. The pitch worked. The “Seattle Sound” was lauded in the British press, and the English endorsement carried over to the United States. Soon, Sub Pop had a global feeding frenzy on its hands and the “Seattle Sound” became indie’s crossing-over point into the mainstream. 27 The Seattle-craze peaked in 1991 when Nirvana’s album “Nevermind,” — released on David Geffen’s DGC label — hit number one. With the support of MTV and commercial radio, “Nevermind” became a global phenomenon and sold more than 10 million copies. 52 Nirvana’s success was a pivotal moment for indie music and the music industry as a whole. For the first time, indie music was thrust into the spotlight. Correspondingly, indie’s organic ethos changed the rock and roll paradigm from glimmering excess to honest approachability. The advent of the anti-rockstar, personified by Kurt Cobain, caused this change. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Nirvana and then Pearl Jam popularized the anti-rockstar. Unlike their predecessors, anti-rockstars were more poet than showman. They took the stage in jeans and t-shirts, the same clothes their fans wore, rather than the spandex suits favored by earlier metal acts. Their song lyrics spoke of self-doubt, unhappiness and cynicism — emotions listeners could relate to. This new approachability shortened the distance between fans and artists and made songs about chartered jets, beautiful woman and general excess seem out of place, if not irrelevant. The anti-rockstar manifested indie’s long-standing organic ethos, and Nirvana took it to the mainstream where, for the first time, it resonated with large numbers of listeners around the world. This phenomenon took place in large part because the music was so different from the popular music of the time. In the late1980s, listeners were recovering form a pop-hair-metal binge, which was shiny but not substantive. Lyrically and aesthetically, hair-metal presented a seemingly unattainable superficial lifestyle 52 Ibid. Pg. 494. 28 symbolized by the caricatures its performers, like the members of the band Poison, perpetuated. Nirvana and Grunge were completely contrary to this, and listeners found the organic ethos they personified refreshing. Additionally, the mainstream press covered Grunge music often, which afforded indie artists a new unprecedented level of publicity. The artists that typified the genre, such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Sound Garden, were featured on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine. Additionally, venerable news publications such as the New York Times wrote long-form pieces on the emergence and popularity of the Grudge genre. 53 Further, MTV consistently aired Grudge artists’ music videos and featured interviews with members of Grunge bands. For once, there was a national discussion of indie music. Just as the genre had evolved from hardcore punk to a more eclectic diversity of music styles, so had the media outlets that covered the genre. This new exposure exponentially increased the size of indie music’s listening base. The indie rock community was no longer confined to college campuses. Millions of listeners across the world were now listening to a form of indie music. Consequently, a new name for the genre was required to account for this larger audience. Bands like Nirvana played music that shared college rock’s organic sensibilities but it was enjoyed by millions of people, not just college radio communities. A new music classification was needed to account for this larger listening audience. In the late 1980s, the term Alternative Rock entered the music vernacular to define this new style. In 53 Marin, Rick. “Grunge: A Success Story.” The New York Times. 15 Nov. 1992. 29 1989, music critic Jon Pareles of “The New York Times” described alternative rock’s emergence: The loose network of college (and a few commercial) radio stations, rock-club disk jockeys and active music fans that sent R.E.M. into the Top 10 has nurtured an “alternative rock” that’s more melodic than post-punk hard-core rock yet looser, more unruly and less formulaic than big-budget productions such as Bon Jovi…It’s guitar music first of all, with guitars that blast out power chords, pick out chiming riffs, buzz with fuzztone and squeal in feedback. Those guitars are topped by regular-guy voices - and, very occasionally, a regular gal – proclaiming cynicism, confusion, hostility, self-mockery, disillusionment and sardonic humor, along with hints of well-guarded sincerity. 54 Alternative rock engulfed the college rock genre classification and replaced it in the popular vernacular. The alternative rock genre was broad and encompassed varied styles, but because it popularly came into existence when hard rock bands like Nirvana, Sound Garden and Pearl Jam were at their peak, hard rock overshadowed alternative music’s other subcategories. Also during this time, major labels began searching for “the next Nirvana” and signed many hard rock bands. 55 As this occurred, alternative music became even more closely aligned with hard rock. Subsequently, indie rock bands that did not play hard rock were displaced. Musically, they did not sound like popular alternative bands, and unlike many of their hard rock contemporaries; they retained contracts with independent labels. This divided indie rock; bands that perpetuated the Nirvana-esque sound went on to be classified as 54 Pareles, Jon. “HOME ENTERTAINMENT/RECORDINGS: SOUNDINGS; A New Kind of Rock.” The New York Times. 5 Mar. 1989. 55 Crock, Jason. “Interview: Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman. Pitchfork.” 7 Jul. 2010. 30 alternative, while the remaining bands constituted what is now referred to as indie rock. All Music describes the emergence of indie rock in the following way: If anything, Alternative Rock of the ‘80s was even more diverse and fractured than the mainstream; among the styles classified as alternative was roots rock, alternative dance, jangle-pop, post-hardcore punk, funk-metal, punk-pop, and experimental rock. All of these genres made into the mainstream, in some form or another, after Nirvana’s success in 1991, but their edges were sanded down since many of the new alternative bands were signed by majors. Consequently, ‘90s alternative rock often sounds more sanitized and homogenous than its counterpart, especially since the heavier material proved to have greater commercial appeal than the quieter or quirkier elements of alternative rock. Most of these idiosyncratic bands didn’t sign to majors (those that did quickly disappeared), deciding to stick to independent labels, where they had more artistic freedom. These bands were grouped together under the term indie rock. Although the term had been around since the ‘80s, in the ‘90s it connoted bands that were dedicated to their own independent status, either for musical or hipness reasons. 56 The hard rock bands of the alternative genre leveraged the popularity of Grudge music and in doing so, built upon the success bands like Nirvana. Hard rock’s Nirvana- esuqe sound had proven popularity, so when the indie and alternative genres split, the hard-rock-heavy alternative genre took with it much of the popular interest that Grudge bands had cultivated. It also took the media’s interest. As this occurred, bands like Bush and then later Nickeback, whose sound appealed to a large audience of hard rock fans, earned major label contracts, and were prominently featured in mainstream music magazines and on commercial radio. Indie rock bands, on the other hand, did not enjoy much media interest. Consequently, radio stations played their music infrequently, and while some of the most popular indie rock artists, such as Pavement and the Flaming Lips, were written about in the mainstream 56 All Music Website. “Alternative/ Indie Rock.” Accessed on 2 Jan. 2011. http://www.allmusic.com/explore/style/d4464. 31 press, the genre was still largely overshadowed by artists signed to major labels. 57 However, by not changing their sound to meet the demands of a larger listening audience infatuated with hard rock, these bands retained the organic ethos that had always been prevalent in the indie genre. Indie music fans played a significant role broadening the indie genre’s listening audience. This role was organic in that stemmed from their interest in the genre and was not financially motivated. However, the amount of attention the media paid to major label artists greatly overshadowed the small amount of organic publicity generated by independent music fans. This promotional inequality pitted independent labels against major labels. To understand this rivalry, it is first necessary to articulate the differences between major and independent labels. 57 Strauss, Neil. “ROCK REVIEW; Pavement's: Nihilism and Rejection.” The New York Times. 18 May 1995. 32 Chapter 4: Major Labels As previously mentioned, four record companies — Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Group, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group — constitute the major label line-up. With the exception of EMI, which is owned by private equity firm Terra Firma, all of the major labels are publicly owned, either directly or through their parent companies. Sony Music Entertainment is a subsidiary of Sony Inc. (NYSE:SNE); Universal Music Group is a subsidiary of French entertainment conglomerate Vivendi (EN Paris: VIV); and Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) is a standalone, publicly-held music company. In 2009, Universal Music Group held the largest share of the U.S. recorded music market: 30.2 percent. Next was Sony, followed by Warner and EMI, which accounted for 28.6 percent, 20.6 percent and 9.2 percent, respectively. Independent labels collectively accounted for the remaining 11.4 percent of the market. 58 Major labels are international businesses. As such they are much larger than independent labels in terms of revenues, number of staff, number of subsidiary labels, and number of albums sold. In 2009, Universal Music Group earned over $5.71 billion; 59 58 Nielson SoundScan, Distributed (January-December 2009). As referenced in Sony’s Annual Report 2009. Pg. 21. 59 Vivendi Annual Report 2009. Pg. 18. 33 Sony Music Entertainment earned $6.27 billion; 60 Warner Music Group earned $3.18 billion; 61 And EMI earned $1.65 billion. 62 In 2009, Warner Music Group employed approximately 3,400 people. 63 In the same year, EMI employed 3,150. 64 (Employee numbers for Universal and Sony were not reported by their parent companies.) Major labels operate more subsidiary labels than their independent counterparts. In the United States, Universal operates 19 subsidiaries, including former indie labels A&M and Def Jam. 65 Sony Music Entertainment operates 15 subsidiaries including, Arista, Columbia, Columbia Nashville, Epic, RCA, RCA Nashville, Jive, and Roc Nation. 66 Warner Music Group operates more than 20 subsidiaries, including: Atlantic, Atlantic Nashville, Elektra, Roadrunner, Warner Brothers, Reprise and Sire. 67 Based in 60 Sony Annual Report 2009. Pg. 21. 61 Warner Music Group Annual Report 2009. Pg. 60. 62 Lewis, Hilary. “Surprise! EMI Gets A Pop By NOT Selling CDs.” Business Insider. 7 May 2009. 63 Warner Music Group Annual Report 2009. Pg. 16. 64 Terra Firma Annual Review 2009. Pg. 63. 65 Universal Music Website. “Labels.” Accessed on 15 Dec. 2010. http://www.universalmusic.com/labels. 66 Sony Music Website. “Labels.” Accessed on 15 Dec. 2010. http://www.sonymusic.com/labels. 67 Warner Music Group Website. “Overview.” Accessed on 15 Dec. 2010. http://www.wmg.com/. 34 the United Kingdom., EMI operates numerous subsidiary labels that serve European and U.S. markets including Blue Note, Capitol, Caroline, Fuel and Virgin Records. 68 This multiple subsidiary model demonstrates major labels’ acquisition-based growth strategies. The labels are largely the products of corporate mergers and acquisitions. As such, they have complicated lineages. For example, the current iteration of Universal Music took shape in 1995, when Edgar Bronfman Jr., the heir to the Seagrams Company (the largest distiller of alcoholic beverages in the world), decided to become involved in the music industry and purchased MCA – itself a product of numerous mergers – for $5.7 billion. 69 MCA was formed as a talent agency in 1924. In 1958, it acquired Universal Studio’s property and incorporated as MCA INC., before going public in 1959. Then, in 1962, it acquired Decca, the parent company to Universal, resulting in a full merger between MCA and Universal. Two years later, MCA purchased Leeds Music and Dutches Music. In 1985, MCA acquired another label, Chess Records. Five years later it acquired Geffen Records for $545 million. 70 In 1996, MCA INC. changed its name to the Universal Music Group. 71 68 EMI Website. “History.” Accessed on 15 Dec. 2010. http://www.emimusic.com/about/history/. 69 Willis, Berry. “Seagram Buys PolyGram.” Stereophile. 24 May. 1988. 70 Knopper, Steve. Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age. Free Press. 2009. Pg. 63. 71 Universal Music Group Website. “History.” Accessed on 23 Dec. 2010. http://www.universalmusic.com/history. 35 Bronfman’s spending spree continued into 1998, when he acquired PolyGram — then the world’s largest music company 72 — from Philips Electronics for $10.6 billion. 73 Like MCA, PolyGram was itself a conglomeration of accumulated labels and businesses. Philips Electronics and Siemens began what would evolve into PolyGram in 1962, when the two companies launched a joint-venture record company. In 1972, the label reorganized under the PolyGram name and acquired Verve Records. In 1980, PolyGram acquired London-based, Chess Records. Seven years later, Phillips purchased Siemens’ stake in the label, and PolyGram went public. Also in 1980, PolyGram purchased Island Records. Beginning in 1990, PolyGram acquired labels more rapidly. It bought long-time independent label A&M for $500 million in 1990; Motown in 1993; a controlling stake in Def Jam Recordings in 1994; Rodven Records in 1995; and 50 percent of Jay Z’s Rocafella label in 1997. 74 After merging Polygram’s and MCA’s music catalogues in 1998, the Universal Music Group created a country music label, Universal South, in 2002; acquired DreamWorks Records in 2003; and launched numerous other labels internationally. Universal’s merger and acquisition-fueled growth is not unique; the other three major labels formed similarly. The underlying reason for this common growth strategy is 72 Knopper, Steve. Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age. Free Press. 2009. Pg. 64. 73 Willis, Berry. “Seagram Buys PolyGram.” Stereophile. 24 May. 1988. 74 Ibid. 36 that it is generally less risky to purchase smaller labels’ proven musical catalogs than it is to seek out and develop new, unproven artists. Since many subsidiary labels have existed since the 1960s, their parent companies have well-diversified music catalogues that span decades. Contemporary major labels are largely in the business of making pop-music hits. As such, they pursue artists that appeal to the largest possible audience. In 2010, only one of Billboard’s year-end Top 20 Artists — country musician Taylor Swift—– was signed to an independent label. The remaining 19 artists were split among the four major labels: Universal had nine artists, Sony had five, Warner had four and EMI had one. 75 This focus on popular music has led many members of the independent music community to be critical of major labels. To this group, major labels largely perpetuate music that is less substantial than the music independent labels release. This sentiment pits a major label artist such as Justin Bieber against an independent artist such as the Arcade Fire. While Justin Bieber sells more albums than the Arcade Fire, the independent music community largely views his music, which caters to tween and teen audiences, as less substantial than the music the Arcade Fire makes. Further, the mainstream media covers major labels artists such as Justin Bieber to a much greater degree than independent artists such as the Arcade Fire. This discrepancy in media coverage between mainstream and independent artists has frustrated the independent music community for years. 75 Billboard Website. “Best of 2010 Top Artists.” Accessed on 16 Jan. 2011. http://www.billboard.com/#/charts-year-end/top-artists?year=2010. 37 Further, to the indie music community, the vast amount attention that is paid to major labels seems to be inorganic in nature publicity. This is because major labels’ large marketing budgets seem to spur media interest in artists. To the independent music community, the artistic quality of an artist’s music should generate organic interest, which, in turn, should foment the mainstream media’s interest. 38 Chapter 5: Independent Labels As previously mentioned, independent labels are smaller than majors in every sense of the word. As privately-held companies, indie labels do not publicly release revenue numbers. Nonetheless, it is logically safe to assume that their revenues are significantly less than those of major labels. After all, only one of Billboard’s Top 20 Artists was singed to an independent label in 2010. Though independent labels collectively release music from all musical genres, most individual labels specialize in one specific genre, such as jazz, blues, bluegrass, classical, hip-hop, punk or rock. Correspondingly, their rosters of artists are less diversified than those of majors. Indie rock labels are younger than major labels. As an outgrowth of the independent music phenomenon that developed from hardcore in the late 1970s, most indie rock labels were founded after 1980. For example, prominent indie rock labels Kill Rock Stars, Matador, Merge, Sub Pop and Touch and Go, were founded in 1991, 1989, 1989, 1987 and 1980, respectively. 76 Indie rock labels own few, if any, sub labels, and employ significantly fewer people than majors. Sub Pop, which founded its first and only subsidiary label Next 76 Kill Rock Starts Website. Accessed on 25 Jan. 2011. http://www.killrockstars.com/about/. Matador Records Website. Accessed on 25 Jan. 2011. http://www.matadorrecords.com/. Merge Records Website. Accessed on 25 Jan. 2011. http://www.mergerecords.com/. Sub Pop Website. Accessed on 25 Jan. 2011. http://www.subpop.com/about. Touch and Go Records Website. Accessed on 25 Jan. 2011. http://www.touchandgorecords.com/info/index.php. 39 Ambiance in 2009, employs around 25 people. 77 Beggars Group, a European record label that includes the subsidiary labels 4AD, Matador, Rough Trade and XL Recordings, is larger than most independent labels, but still much smaller than major labels. Its Matador subsidiary label employs around 40 staff. 78 Since indie rock artists have not historically enjoyed frequent terrestrial radio airplay, and venerable music-publications rarely covered independent music prior to 1985 (when “Spin”, which is the highest circulation magazine to cover indie rock, was founded) the use of effective public relations practices, such as publicity, were rare among independent labels and their artists. To make up for the lack of media coverage, fans of independent music created their own organic means of publicity. This was historically achieved though fanzines, which are mini-music publications authored and distributed by music fans. Fanzines were available for sale in record stores and could be purchased by mail. They consisted of an amateur writer’s musical opinions and interviews with artists and record label owners. The publications were photocopied and stapled together into a magazine format. They had limited distribution and circulation and often focused on local music scenes. Michael Azerrad calls Fanzines the “house organs of the indie scene.” 79 He describes their formation in the following passage: 77 Sub Pop Website. “FAQ” Accessed on 22 Dec. 2010. http://www.subpop.com/faq. 78 Matador Website. “Staff.”Accessed on 22 Dec. 2010. http://www.matadorrecords.com/matadorinfo/staff.html. 79 Azerrad, Michael. Our Band Could Be Your Life. Little, Brown and Company. 2001, Pg. 4. 40 Most of them [Fanzines] started as photocopied rants by people who were frustrated at the way the mainstream music magazines largely ignored this exciting new music. Some of them grew quite large and influential – including “Flipside,” “Maximumrocknroll” and “Forced Exposure” – but there were literally hundreds of smaller zines that collectively framed the indie aesthetic. 80 For record labels, fanzines played a vital role in promoting artists by diffusing information from one region to another. As stated earlier, indie rock’s evolution is a story of regional music scenes that functioned rather autonomously. Subsequently, each scene was unique, but inter-scene collaboration was limited. Fanzines helped overcome this regional isolation and by doing so, promoted labels’ artists to a network of readers that in some cases, spread across the country. In this way, fanzines with multi-city distribution relayed information from one scene to another. This helped publicize local acts and stimulated national demand for independent artists, which increased the overall interest in independent music. Fanzines were so entrenched with the promotion of independent music that several fanzines evolved into prominent independent labels, including Touch and Go and Sub Pop. 80 Ibid. 41 Chapter 6: Traditional Music Promotion Historically, terrestrial radio airplay has been one the most powerful promotional tools for record companies and artists. Radio stations publicize artists by diffusing artists’ music to large audiences. In doing this, radio stations provide listeners with free samples of artists’ work. However, terrestrial radio has historically favored major label artists over independent artists. 81 This has given major labels a significant promotional advantage. By and large, major labels achieved greater airplay than independent labels by paying for song placement. Additionally, the passage of the Telecommunications Act in 1996 largely consolidated the radio ownership. Under this consolidated model, national programmers, not local DJs selected which songs aired. This has made commercial radio very homogenous. To understand these factors more completely, it is necessary to understand why terrestrial radio has favored major label artists over independent artists, and subsequently limited promotional opportunities for indie rock artists. 81 Bengloff, Rich. President of American Association of Independent Music. Interview. 25 Oct. 2010. 42 Chapter 7: Independent Radio Promoters As previously mentioned, terrestrial radio has largely ignored independent music because independent labels cannot afford to pay radio stations for airtime. Paying for airtime is called Payola. Legally, payola is defined as the “practice of making undisclosed payments or other inducements to radio (or television) broadcast personnel in consideration for the inclusion of material in radio (or television) programming.” 82 Under FCC rules, paying for play is not illegal as long as the radio station issues an on-air disclaimer. However, since radio stations are reluctant to reveal that their playlists are influenced by compensation from record labels, such disclaimers are not made. Payola has been an issue in American music since the 1920s, but it first received extensive legal attention in 1959 when a House of Representatives subcommittee investigated quiz show scandals. The investigation included Payola among the corrupt broadcasting practices. 83 After the 1959-1960-subcommittee hearings, Congress passed anti-payola laws that made the acceptance of cash or gifts for airplay illegal without the issuance of a disclaimer. Under the new laws, radio stations were held responsible for employees who 82 Sidak, J. Gregory and Kronemyer, David E., “The ‘New Payola’ and the American Record Industry: Transaction Costs and Precautionary Ignorance in Contracts for Illicit Services.” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 521- 572, 1981. 83 Coase, R. H. 1979. “Payola in Radio and Television Broadcasting.” Journal of Law and Economics 22: 269-328.; Dannen, Fredric. 1991. Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business, First Vintage Books Ed. p. 162.; Caves, Richard E. 2000. Creative Industries; Contracts between Art and Commerce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.; Slichter 2004. 43 accepted undisclosed payments for airplay. 84 In 1962, the American DJ Alan Freed, who is popularly credited for coining the phrase “rock and roll,” was prosecuted under payola laws, but payola laws were rarely enforced after his case. 85 However, paying for play could be prosecuted as a form of bribery under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute enacted in 1970. The act could impose heavy penalties on companies engaging in such bribery. The treat of prosecution under RICO laws motivated labels to create a new payola system where they indirectly paid for airtime and thus avoided legal liability. 86 This laid the framework for the role of independent promoters. Independent promoters are middlemen that function as buffers between record companies and radio stations. They are paid millions of dollars by record labels to place songs on radio stations’ playlists. They get songs played on the air by channeling payments from record companies to radio stations. Record companies then pay promoters directly for every song they influence stations to add to their playlists. 87 Eric Boehlert examined how independent promoters are paid in a 2001 Salon article: In 2001, there [were] 10,000 commercial radio stations in the United States; record companies rely on approximately 1,000 of the largest to create hits and sell records. Each of those 1,000 stations adds roughly three new songs to its playlist 84 Marcus, Adam. Change That Tune: How the Payola Settlements will Affect Radio Airplay for Independent Artists. 2008. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid. 87 Boehlert, Eric. “Pay for play: Why does radio suck? Because most stations play only the songs the record companies pay them to. And things are going to get worse.” Salon 14 Mar. 2001. 44 each week. The indies [independent promoters] get paid for every one: $1,000 on average for an “add” at a Top 40 or rock station, but as high as $6,000 or $8,000 under certain circumstances. 88 In the late 1990s, independent promoters received up to $300 million from record labels, and distributed the money to program directors across the country who, in turn, added selected songs to their stations’ playlists. 89 According to Fredric Dannen’s investigative book Hit Men, the record industry spent more than 30 percent of its pretax profits on indie promotion. 90 Consolidation of radio station ownership brought on by the Communications Act of 1996 increased independent promoters’ power and influence. Prior to 1996, indie promoters worked with program directors at individual stations. After 1996, the size of broadcasting companies increased exponentially. Comparatively speaking, program directors employed by single stations were “small potatoes” when compared to national programmers who worked for radio holding companies that owned, in some cases, hundreds of radio stations. So indie promoters paid radio holding companies to represent large numbers of their stations. In 2001, independent promoter Bill McGathy paid $3.25 million to represent 100 plus stations owned by Clear Channel. 91 By representing large 88 Ibid. 89 Knopper, Steve. Appetite for Self Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Recording Industry in the Digital Age. Free Press. 2009. 90 As cited in: Knopper, Steve. Appetite for Self Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Recording Industry in the Digital Age. Free Press. 2009. 91 Knopper, Steve. Appetite for Self Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Recording Industry in the Digital Age. Free Press. 2009. 45 numbers of stations, independent promoters increased their clout and influenced which songs were added to large blocks of stations. For major record labels, indie promoters were a proven mechanism for gaining terrestrial radio airtime, but their services were expensive. Since independent labels had substantially smaller revenues than majors, they couldn’t afford to hire independent promoters. Consequently, attaining national airplay was very difficult for the indies. However, change was afoot. In 2003, then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer began an investigation of payola in the music industry. He found that the labels were guilty of numerous pay-for-play activities, including paying radio programmers, paying stations’ operating expenses, and using independent promoters to funnel illegal payments to radio employees. In 2005 and 2006, Spitzer settled with the four major record labels for $30.1 million, and with two major broadcasters, CBS and Entercom, for $6.25 million. 92 The investigation proved what the independent music community had known for a long time, that the artistic quality of songs does not necessarily relate to radio airtime. As Spitzer said, “Our investigation shows that, contrary to listener expectations that songs are selected for airplay based on artistic merit and popularity, airtime is often determined by undisclosed payoffs to radio stations and their employees.” 93 92 Jouvenal, Justin. “More Static: Independent Labels and Commercial Airplay 18 Months after the FCC Consent Decree and the “Rules of Engagement.” Presented October 20, 2008. Pg. 4. 93 Teather, David. “Spitzer lifts lid on payola at radio stations.” The Guardian. 26 Jul. 2005. 46 In 2007, broadcasters signed an agreement that had been advocated for by the independent music community under the leadership of the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM) and the Future Music Coalition (FMC). Under this agreement, which was entitled The Rules of Engagement, broadcasters agreed to play more local and independent artists, air 4,200 hours of independent music annually, and implement anti-payola guidelines. 94 Conceptually, the agreement gave independent musicians and labels new access to terrestrial airplay, which should have resulted in a national promotional boost. However, The Rules of Engagement turned out to be an empty document. An investigation of 52 radio stations in New York State, conducted by the Future Music Coalition, found that playlist composition for commercial radio stations in New York State remained remarkably similar four years after The Rules of Engagement was signed. Independent label access had not increased. 95 Additionally, a survey of independent music labels belonging to A2IM, taken 18 months after the Rules of Engagement agreement was signed, found that 78.4 percent of labels experienced no change in radio play, while 13.7 percent felt stations were playing less independent music. Only 7.8 percent of respondents felt radio was playing more independent music. 96 94 Ibid. 95 Thompson, Kristin. Same Old Song: An Analysis of Radio Playlists in a Post-FCC Consent Decree World. Jun. 2009. Pg. 9, 10. 96 Ibid. Pg. 5. 47 Prior to Spitzer’s payola investigation, independent promotion made airplay nearly unattainable for independent labels. Even after major labels and radio companies were penalized for their illegal dealings, a majority of independent labels continue to have difficulty attaining airplay for their artists. This could due to myriad factors. While there have not been more recent payola investigations, the practice could still be alive and well. Another factor could be that in recent years, radio programing has become increasingly similar and mainstream. As we will see in the next section, a handful of radio formats make up the majority of American programming. Additionally, radio stations dedicate substantial airtime to older hits, so competition for spots on playlists reserved for new music is intense. This often leads programmers to overlook independent music in favor of songs from already proven, mainstream artists. 48 Chapter 8: Conservatism in Radio Song Selection Terrestrial radio has changed a great deal in the last 60 years, and many of these changes have been detrimental to independent artists. Radio was once a local medium. National ownership-caps enforced by the Federal Communications Commission prevented companies from owning large number of stations across the country. Consequently, ownership was dispersed among many entities and not at all concentrated. Local program directors and DJs who understood local musical tastes selected songs to be aired on that understanding. In this way, song selection was organic. This changed in 1996. Station ownership-caps increased throughout the 1980s and 1990s, before being completely done away with in 1996, which led to a consolidation of ownership. After 1996, a handful of companies owned hundreds of stations. In turn, national program directors, rather than local station employees, selected songs to be aired on large numbers of stations. 97 This has made commercial radio largely homogenous. Prior to the passage of the Telecom Act in 1996, the number of radio stations a single entity could own was regulated. In 1953, the FCC set the national cap at 14 stations: Companies could not own more than seven AM stations or seven FM stations. In 1984, the cap increased to 24 stations: Companies could not own more than 12 AM or 12 FM stations. In 1992, the cap increased to 36 stations: No station could own more than 18 FM or 18 AM stations. In 1994, the national cap increased to 40 stations, with no 97 Ibid. Pg. 18. 49 company being allowed to own more than 20 AM stations or 20 FM stations. In 1996, the Telecom act did away with caps altogether. 98 This resulted in a surge of acquisitions and mergers. Before 1992, around 1,000 stations changed hands each year. Between 1992 and 1996, around 1,200 stations changed ownership annually. After the Telecom Act, transaction numbers increased dramatically. In 1997 and 1998, 2,100 changed hands each year. Since then, the number of stations being transacted has decreased and leveled off at around 800 annually. 99 Correspondingly, the number of station owners has decreased. In 1995, there were 5,529 owners. By 2005 there were only 3,314 owners. 100 As the lower station-ownership number suggests, a handful of radio companies grew rapidly by acquiring previously locally owned stations after the Telecom Act was passed. Of these companies, Clear Channel grew the most. In 1995, it owned 39 stations. By 2005, it owned 1,184 stations, making it the largest radio company in the United States. It was followed by Cumulus, the owner of 295 stations; Citadel, the owner of 223 stations, and Infinity, the owner of 178 stations. 101 Before the Telecom Act was passed, radio company lobbyists told Congress that they would be able to provide more diverse programming for listeners if they were allowed to own more stations. However, greater programming variety seems to come 98 Ibid. Pg. 22. 99 Ibid. Pg. 31. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid. 50 from relatively small station groups. 102 Regardless, American terrestrial radio has become fairly homogenous. In American radio, 15 station formats account for 76 percent of commercial radio offerings. These 15 formats are: Country (19 percent); Talk (8 percent); Oldies (7 percent); Adult Contemporary (7 percent); News (5 percent); Sports (5 percent); Classic Rock (5 percent); Gospel (4 percent); Hot Adult Contemporary (3 percent); Contemporary Hit Radio (3 percent); Spanish (2 percent); Adult Standards (2 percent); Christian (2 percent); Rock (2 percent); and Christian Contemporary (2 percent). All other formats account for the remaining 24 percent. 103 Additionally, songs played on different radio formats overlap considerably. For rock and roll stations, the Rock and Active Rock formats overlap 80 percent of the time; Alternative and Active Rock formats overlap 52 percent of the time; and Alternative and Rock formats overlap 70 percent of the time. 104 Overlap among same-format stations owned by the same company is also high. These stations top 30 songs overlap by as much as 97 percent. Song overlap outside of the top 30 is also high. Large radio companies’ average level of overlap between commonly owned stations in the same format is typically greater than 50 percent. Radio stations owned by large companies appear to be 102 Ibid. Pg. 96. 103 DiCola, Peter. FALSE PREMISES, FALSE PROMISES: A Quantitative History of Ownership Consolidation in the Radio Industry. Future Music Coalition. December 2006. Pg. 87. 104 Ibid, Pg. 101. 51 drawing songs from a small national pool, which suggests that local programmers and DJs have little say in song selection. 105 Such extensive overlap limits song diversity. When airtime goes to the same songs across numerous different radio stations and formats, it reduces playlist slots for independent music. This common airing of older, hit music further constrains playlist space. Most radio stations play a mix of older hits and newer songs. Older hits are played because they have proven popular acceptance and, as such, listeners are familiar with them. 106 If a station played too much new music, listeners may turn the channel in search of songs they’re familiar with. Since radio stations’ business goal is to appeal to advertisers by attracting the largest number of listeners possible, they rely heavily on proven songs and limit airtime for new music. A 2008 study of radio stations in New York State found that across all formats, new music—which is defined as music that was released in the most recent year — only accounted for 19 percent of songs played. The amount of new music played varies with radio formats. On adult contemporary stations, new music made up at most 7 percent of total songs played. On pop music stations, new music made up more than 40 percent of total songs played. On country music stations new music made up around 25 percent of total airplay. On urban stations, new music made up between 43 and 52 percent of total airplay. Lastly, on 105 Ibid. Pg. 103. 106 Thomson, Kristin. Same Old Song: An Analysis of Radio Playlists in a Post-FCC Consent Decree World. NY Edition. Jun. 2009. Pg. 32. 52 alternative rock stations, the format most likely to play indie rock artists, new music made up between 13 and 25 percent of total songs played. Radio’s general reliance on older hit songs often precludes indie rock from airing, because indie artists enjoyed little commercial airtime in the past. Since indie rock has relatively few radio hits in its history, alternative radio is more likely to select a recent release when playing indie rock. But because only 13 to 25 percent of airtime on alternative rock stations goes to new songs, indie music is often squeezed out of playlists. Also, because indie rock is not backed by major-label-sized promotional budgets, it’s likely that many listeners are unfamiliar with its artists and songs. As a result, indie artists are played much less frequently than major label artists. It is surprising then that independent music accounted for nearly 41.3 percent of songs added to station playlists across all formats between 2005 and 2008. During the same time period, major label artists accounted for 53.9 percent of new songs added to playlists. 107 However, this number does not tell the whole story. While the percentage of song-adds was relatively close, major label artists were played more frequently. Between 2005 and 2008, major labels accounted for 81.4 percent of songs played. Indies only accounted for 15.5 percent. 108 Major label artists get substantially more airtime. Payola and radio’s conservative song selection have prevented millions of listeners from being exposed to indie rock. For decades, this has frustrated independent labels and artists who have had difficulties assimilating a large fan base without the help 107 Ibid. Pg. 37, 38. 108 Ibid. 53 of one of the most prominent tastemakers. There is good news for independent artists though. Terrestrial radio’s audience is dwindling as large numbers of listeners are migrating to online platforms that feature independent music more prominently. This provides indie artists with new and far-reaching means of publicity. 54 Chapter 9: The Advent of the Internet For decades, radio was the most powerful musical tastemaker. As the primary mechanism for diffusing music over large listening audiences, radio played a vital role in the musical discovery process. It introduced listeners to artists, and operated as the hook in the music industry’s business model that enticed listeners to purchase full-length albums. However, radio’s taste-making ability is currently dwindling because listeners are increasingly turning to the Internet to discover new music. Since indie artists were not played on terrestrial radio but can inexpensively create promotional content online, this trend is highly beneficial. The genesis of digital music was caused by a confluence of factors, but it began with consumers’ collective frustration over ever-increasing compact disk (CD) prices. Beginning in the 1990s, listeners had to purchase a full-length album if they wanted to hear a song they heard on the radio at their convenience. This is because in the 1990s, record companies discontinued singles, which were cheaper short-play albums that contained one or two songs. This was done because singles cost too much to produce and provided little profit. 109 For record labels, discontinuing the single increased the value of each hit song. Once full-length albums became the only widely available music format, the purchase price of one song became nearly $15 dollars. Full-length albums were really music bundles that combined 10 to 12 non-hit songs, artwork and song lyrics with one or two hits. The resulting bundle could be sold 109 Knopper, Steve. Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age. Simon & Schuster. 2009. Pg. 106. 55 for considerably more than singles, while costing about as much to produce. This helped record companies achieve record profits during the 1990s. The industry’s retail sales peaked in 1999 at more than $14 billion. 110 While the record companies prospered, listeners paid more for music. During the late 1990s, the suggested retail price of CDs increased even though production costs decreased. In 1997 and 1998, the years preceding the record industry’s peak, average suggested CD prices increased beyond the rate of inflation, and popular artists’ albums became more expensive with each year. 111 In the late 1990s consumers were paying increasingly more for music bundles that maybe contained as few as one or two interesting songs, because there were no alternatives to the full album CD. However, the industry soon faced radical change. Power began shifting from the previously all-powerful labels to previously powerless consumers, who could suddenly access their favorite music, in digital form, through their computers. The file-sharing service Napster launched in 1999 and introduced digital music to millions of people around the world. Its popularity grew exponentially. In October 1999, Napster had 150,000 registered users; by February 2001, it had 26.4, million users swapping digital music collections online. 112 Due to copyright infringements, the service 110 Garland, Eric. “Everything For Everyone Everywhere All The Time.” Presented at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism Media, Economics and Entrepreneurship Discussion. 2 Feb. 2010. 111 RIAA Report. “The CD: A Better Value Than Ever.” Aug. 2007. 112 Knopper, Steve. Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age. Simon & Schuster. 2009. Pg. 33, 130, 142. 56 was eventually shut down in 2001, but not before it profoundly changed the way listeners discovered, acquired and listened to music. Napster was the forerunner of music’s near complete digitization. It popularity reflected listeners’ frustrations with ever-increasing CD prices, the convergence of technology and music, and the migration of power from corporations to individuals. Functionally, it enabled listeners to avoid the CD bundle and select only the songs they wanted, and at no cost. Conceptually, it made the CD an outdated technology and fomented a change in consumer preferences. After Napster, consumers wanted digital singles, not the CD bundles they had been force-fed for the last decade. By changing the popular perception of music from a physical disc to thousands of invisible ones and zeros that had no tangible form, Napster paved the way for music- related software and hardware that would take digital music beyond the personal computer. After Napster was shutdown, a line of similarly illegal peer-to-peer (P2P – which is a network where users’ computers are connected to each other through the internet and can share files without a central server) services emerged including LimeWire, Morpheus and Soul Seek. Like their predecessor, these platforms violated copyright laws by allowing users to share and download music for free. After these P2P services were shut down, they gave way to BitTorrent file sharing, which was launched in 2001 and is still immensely popular today. BitTorrent’s technology enables it to draw digital song pieces from hundreds of users at once to make pirating digital media, quick and efficient. 57 Chapter 10: Digital Music Market Places Innovation, though, hasn’t been limited to illegal file sharing services. Since Napster’s demise, legal digital-media-marketplaces have opened, evolved and taken over the music business. The most dominant digital store is Apple’s iTunes, which launched several months after Apple introduced the first iPod music player in 2001. iTunes marked Apple’s first foray into the music business; it was greeted with strong uptake. In 2008, it replaced Wal-Mart as the largest music seller. In 2009, it widened its lead over the discount retailer and accounted for 26.7 percent of all U.S. music sales, while second-place Wal-Mart accounted for 12.5 percent, and third-place Best Buy accounted for 8.7 percent. 113 iTunes shares a similarly large lead over its primary digital rival Amazon.com, which accounted for 7.1 percent of the U.S. music market in 2009. However, most of Amazon’s sales come from physical albums, not digital music. 114 While iTunes is the clear leader in the musical category, there are signs that listeners’ musical consumption habits are changing again, which could weaken iTunes’ hold on the digital music market. Until recently, music consumption has been acquisition-based. This is because if listeners that wanted unimpeded access to music, they had to purchase it. However, social media platforms and relatively inexpensive mobile technologies are changing consumption habits. Now, millions of listeners access video recordings of their favorite 113 Christman, Ed. “Digital Divide.” Billboard. 22 May 2010. 114 Ibid. 58 artists’ performances though YouTube or listen to streaming music via MySpace. Using theses websites, listeners access music at anytime for free instead of purchasing it. This accessed-base listening method avoids both the legal hazards of pirating downloads and the cost of purchasing digital or physical music through brick-and-mortar (businesses that operate from a physical building) or online stores. Further, web-capable mobile phones untether listeners from their computers, which makes listening to streaming music possible anywhere. Currently, significantly more people listen to streaming music than purchase albums. When the top 10 weekly album sales are combined with the top 10 weekly digital song sales, the total is less than 5 million. Compare this with the top 10 MySpace song streams, which total around 28 million or the even-more-popular top 10 YouTube video streams that total just less than 35 million views per week. 115 Accessed-based listening is especially popular in Europe where the streaming music platform Spotify has more than 10 million users in seven European countries. With Spotify, users listen to set amount of music for free. The platform makes money through advertising. Users can avoid advertisements and get unlimited streaming access if they pay a subscription fee, and about 750,000 members do just that. 116 The service is unavailable in the United States because labels are wary of giving free access to their song libraries. Nevertheless, it represents a shift in consumer preference from acquisition 115 Garland, Eric. “Everything For Everyone Everywhere All The Time.” Presented at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism Media, Economics and Entrepreneurship Discussion. 2 Feb. 2010. 116 Martens, Todd. “Spotify: One step closer to the U.S.?” The Los Angeles Times. 19 Jan. 2010. 59 to access, just as Napster embodied a shift from physical music products to digital downloads. For the record industry, the movement towards digital has significantly reduced revenues. Prior to Napster, the record industry was coming off almost two decades of robust growth coinciding with the introduction and rapid adoption of the CD format. In 1999, the year Napster launched, the boy band N’Sync managed to sell over 2.4 million copies of its album “No Strings Attached” in its first week of availability. The market seemed strong. In the same year, total retail music sales reached a record-setting peak of just over $14 billion, so record companies were caught off guard by the near over night emergence of digital music and file sharing, which quickly ended the industry’s salad days. Eleven years later, in 2009, the digital music market has matured, but sales have dropped further. In 2009 total retail sales were less than $8 billion, matching 1990 sales levels. 117 Now, people listen to more music than ever, but they pay a fraction of the CD bundle price. The industry faces an enormous dilemma. While music transactions have increased steadily since 2003, changes in the way music is consumed have caused retail sales to decrease, along with the number of hit albums. In 2006, 35 albums sold more than one million copies. In 2009, only 12 albums reached the one million mark. Similarly, only 2 percent of albums released in 2009 sold more than 5,000 copies. 118 117 Garland, Eric. “Everything For Everyone Everywhere All The Time.” Presented at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism Media, Economics and Entrepreneurship Discussion. 2 Feb. 2010. 118 Ibid. 60 The success of online music stores has come at the expense of brick-and-mortar music retailers, which have struggled to remain relevant in the wake of music’s digitalization. Since consumers now download the music they want from online stores instead of purchasing albums from physical record stores, brick-and-mortar retailers’ sales have plummeted. Dwindling sales of physical albums have forced many music retailers to shutdown, such as Tower Records, which closed all of its stores in 2006, and Virgin Megastores, which closed in 2009. For independent artists, online music stores have simplified distribution. This is especially true for artists that have not signed contracts with record labels, because under most record contracts, record labels are in charge of distributing artists’ music. Prior to the advent of online music stores, music retailers were generally reluctant to sell unsigned artists’ albums in their stores because they lacked a distributor, and even if an artist managed to convince a retailer to sell his album, retailers were often only willing to sell a few copies, between five and ten, on consignment. It the album sold, the retailer would pay the artist at a later date. If the album didn’t sell, the unsold copies of the album were given back to the artist. Since unsigned artists’ album sales made up such a small percentage of retailers total sales and payment was deferred, retailers often lost track of the albums they sold and artists were not paid for their music. Digital distribution has changed this. Now companies such as CD Baby provide a one-stop-shop for distribution. For an upfront fee, and a cut of each album sold, CD Baby stores artists’ albums in its Portland, 61 Oregon warehouse and includes the artist on the CD Baby website, which is itself an online music store. Customers browse CD Baby’s music catalogue and purchase directly from the company, after which, CD Baby ships a physical album directly to the consumer. To appeal to listeners who prefer digital music, CD Baby also provides music downloads on its website and places artists’ music on online music stores such as iTunes and Amazon Music. CD Baby also provides artists with almost immediate compensation. The company pays artists weekly for the music it sells, and artists who use CD Baby make substantially more from each album sold on CD Baby than they would from a record company. According to the CD Baby website, “in a regular record deal or distribution deal, musicians only make $1-$2 per album, if they’re ever lucky enough to get paid by their label at all. When selling through CD Baby, musicians make $6-$12 per album and get paid weekly.” 119 Many independent artists use CD Baby’s services. The distributor sells more than 360,000 different albums, and has over 3 million tracks in its digital distribution catalog. To date, the company has paid more than $157 million paid directly to artists. 120 This shows that with digital distribution, it is easier for artists, even those with extremely small listening audiences, to get their music to their fans. 119 CD Baby Website. “About.” Accessed on 25 Mar. 2011. http://www.cdbaby.com/About. 120 Ibid. 62 Chapter 11: The Causes of the Record Industry’s Decline Online piracy continues to decrease record labels’ profitability even after the introduction of legal paid-download music stores. In 2009, more than 205 million computers worldwide had a P2P file sharing application installed. In the United States alone, more than 60 million people share files online. Interestingly, music accounts for an increasingly smaller percentage of shared files. As the speed of home internet connections has increased, video files that include recorded television programming, movies and pornography have made up a larger portion of downloads. 121 When listeners do pay for music, they buy singles, not full albums. In 2009, consumers purchased more than 1 billion digital tracks online. In the same year, consumers purchased only 385 million digital albums and 350 million physical albums. However, album sales generated significantly more profit than single downloads. In 2009, sales of individual tracks resulted in $837 million; the combined sales of digital and physical albums totaled more than $3.65 billion. 122 This explains why the number of music-related transactions has increased while retail revenues have decreased. Consumers favor singles over more profitable bundled albums. Lastly, and most significant to the future of the recording industry, consumers are turning to accessed-based, not acquisition-based, methods for listening to music. Instead of downloading and taking possession of a song from the iTunes store, growing numbers of consumers are listening to music on sites like YouTube and MySpace without ever 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid. 63 taking possession of the music in any format. Unlike radio, these websites let listeners seek out and listen to specific songs at their convenience. Record companies monetize consumers’ views of artist videos by selling advertising on YouTube, however advertising revenues do not equal the revenues made from physical album sales. 123 Streaming online radio is another popular accessed-base music platform. In this category, there is one clear leader: Pandora. Pandora is a music distribution service that creates personalized radio streams (or “stations”) according to listeners’ specific musical preferences. Users do not have direct control over the songs played on their station. Instead, they enter artists they like, and Pandora matches their selections with similar songs, based on a very large number of musical characteristics. Listeners show approval or disapproval of Pandora’s recommendations by clicking on a “like” or a “dislike” button. Which each mouse click, Pandora further customizes listeners’ stations. Pandora is very popular; it has more than 60 million registered, engaged users who interact with the site on average, eight times an hour. Additionally, more than 1 billion Pandora stations have been created. Pandora accounts for 52 percent of the online radio market, making it the most popular station in the genre. 124 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid. 64 Chapter 12: Changes in Musical Discovery Habits Increasingly more listeners are learning about new music through the internet. This is good news for independent artists who have historically received little airtime on commercial radio. In fact, the internet is posed to overtake terrestrial radio as the primary source for discovering new music. This is evidenced by a 2010 Edison/Arbitron study, which found that between 2002 and 2010, the percentage of respondents who learned about new artists through the radio dropped form 63 percent to 39 percent while the percentage of respondents who learned about new artists through the internet increased from 9 percent to 31 percent. 125 Many of these listeners use streaming online radio stations like Pandora to discover new artists. Pandora’s surging popularity helps explain why online listeners are migrating from terrestrial AM/FM stations that offer streams of their broadcasts to online-only stations. Currently, 55 percent of online radio listeners tune in to internet- only radio; only 40 percent listen to online AM/FM radio streams. Four years ago, in 2006, 46 percent of respondents listened to online-only radio and 48 percent listened to online AM/FM radio streams. 126 Listeners cited “control” and “variety” as the top reasons for listening to online radio. These two qualities lie at the heart of Pandora’s music selection mechanism, which allows listeners to customize their own station’s playlist and receive new musical recommendations that align with their tastes. 125 Ibid. 126 Ibid. 65 Pandora’s booming popularity benefits independent artists. This is because Pandora plays more independent music than terrestrial radio. As an associate member of the American Association of Independent Musicians (A2IM), Pandora is invested in independent music and strives to offer a more eclectic and substantial music mix than terrestrial radio stations. The company achieves this by giving airplay to artists based upon the quality of their music, not payoff from independent promoters. Correspondingly, its airwaves are open to all musicians. Pandora described its mission in its blog: Pandora thrives on little-known and yet-to-be-discovered music. Introducing listeners to music they’ve never heard before is one of our central missions, and we welcome independent artists from all backgrounds and levels of visibility working in all styles, to submit their music for possible inclusion in Pandora’s Music Genome Project. 127 This dedication to independent music helps independent artist get discovered by Pandora’s 80 million users. In terms of number of potential listeners, Pandora’s is one of the greatest promotional opportunities independent musicians have ever enjoyed. Further, Pandora is being integrated with other devices that allow users to access their customized radio stations while they are away from their computers. When Pandora unveiled an iPhone app in 2008, more than 35,000 users downloaded it on its first day of ability. Since then, it’s been downloaded more than 50 million times in the United States, making it a top-five-most-used-app across the four most popular smartphone platforms. 127 Pandora Website: “Frequently Asked Questions – How do I submit my music, or my band’s music, to be considered for Pandora?” Accessed on: 2 Feb. 2011. http://blog.pandora.com/faq/contents/31.html. 66 It’s also the number one all-time downloaded free app on the Apple iPad. 128 Further, Pandora is being integrated into Ford automobiles’ voice activated Sync audio systems, and Blu-ray players, TVs and music systems manufactured by companies like Samsung, Vizio and Soros. 129 This will give listeners more listening hours in which they can be discover new artists. 128 “Pandora’s IPP: Unique Audio Algorithms Work; A Sirius Difference.” Seeking Alpha. 15 Feb. 2011. 129 Cain Miller, Claire. “How Pandora Slipped Past the Junkyard.” The New York Times. 7 Mar. 2010. 67 Chapter 13: Independent Music After Digitalization: The Need for Public Relations For indie rock labels and artists, music’s digitalization is both a threat and an opportunity. The threat is obvious: with so much free and discounted music online, fewer consumers purchase full-length albums, which have historically been labels’ primary revenue-generating product. Without this revenue, labels have been forced to reduce their expenses by laying-off staff and scaling back their operations. While the major labels have struggled with digitalization more publicly than independent labels, independent labels have nonetheless suffered. For years independent labels thrived by selling 20,000 to 30,000 copies of full- length albums, but digitalization has changed this. 130 Howard Greynolds, a former veteran of Touch and Go Records, described this change at a panel discussion titled "Indie Labels Keep the Faith," at the 2009 South by Southwest music festival. As Greynolds said, “What has happened is that it is now 5,000 [sales] or less, or 50,000 or more, the middle is gone.” As a whole, the emergence of this all-or-nothing trend has hurt labels’ profitability. Consequently, even the most venerable indie rock labels, such as Greynold’s former employer, Touch and Go Records, have had to scale back their operations to deal with poor sales, as was evidenced by Touch and Go’s termination of 21 of its 23 staff in 2009. Further, sales of 99 cent downloads at digital music stores have not made up for the lost revenue resulting from poor sales of full-length albums. As Greynolds said, sales 130 Todd Martens. “Indie labels talk survival at SWSX.” The Los Angeles Times. 20 Mar. 2009. 68 from iTunes aren’t enough to “maintain a staff of 10.” 131 With less revenue coming in, indie labels pass on less money to their artists who make the music the labels sell. This has made it more difficult than ever for indie rock musicians to make a living. However, while music’s digitalization has been financially straining for both labels and artists, it also represents a major opportunity. This is because the advent of the internet has made it easier for listeners to hear and learn about independent music. For example, the most popular online radio station, Pandora, favors independent music and plays artists regardless of the size of their label’s marketing budget. The internet has also democratized publishing, which has resulted in the proliferation of hundreds if not thousands of music blogs that introduce new audiences to independent music. Further, through social media, artists and fans communicate directly; and engaged fans share the music they love with their online friends and followers. In this way, the internet has created an online network of independent music advocates who popularize the music through their interactions. This network is thriving. In fact, it produces so much content that being heard is no longer the greatest obstacle for indie artists and labels. Now, the greatest obstacle is standing out from the countless other artists who are written about incessantly by a very active online blogging community and also leverage low-cost digital tools to promote themselves. This change makes the practice of public relations more important than ever. If labels and artists want to broaden their audiences and generate revenue, they must engage in the online music dialogue. In the following sections, we will look at how the network 131 Ibid. 69 of bloggers, radio stations, artists, labels and fans interact to promote independent music in the digital space. 70 Chapter 14: Digital Promotion: Free Music for Blogger Publicity For indie music publicists, generating interest in a band begins with giving that band’s music away for free. It seems counter-intuitive, but with so much free music online, you must literally give music away if you want it to spread to a larger audience. To a certain extent, this has always been the case. Throughout the history of music industry, it’s been common for artists, labels and publicists to provide promotional copies of albums to music critics and radio stations. Albums were given to critics with the hope that the critic would write an article on the album. Similarly, albums were given to radio stations with the hope that the station would play songs from the album on the air. However, now, music is not only given away to tastemakers, it’s made available to a potentially unlimited number of listeners online with the hope that the free music will entice the purchase of a full album, or just as important, that listeners will spread links to the free music through social networks, and in doing so, broaden an artist’s overall listening audience. This represents a major change in publicity tactics. Indie music publicist and the owner of Force Field PR Daniel Gill described this change: The biggest change [in the evolution of indie music public relations tactics] overall, is the evolution of giving away music for free in order to get press coverage, which when I started my record label in the late 1990s was unheard of. You didn’t give away a song or multiple tracks from a record for free download or streaming. That has been the biggest difference. 132 Now, providing free music is the first step in the process of promoting artists among bloggers. Before the music is sent, publicists select which bloggers they will engage. This decision is largely based upon an artist’s level of popularity. Generally, if 132 Daniel, Gill. Indie publicist Interview. 30 Mar. 2010. 71 an artist is popular within the indie community, publicists send that artists’ music to the most prominent blogs first. On the other hand, if an artist lacks a significant following, tracks from his new album are sent to less prominent blogs with the hope that the initial coverage from these smaller blogs will spread and eventually catch the attention of more prominent bloggers. In the following, Daniel Gill speaks to this blogger-selection process: If you’re working with an established band, they’re probably going to want their track to go straight to Pitchfork or Stereo Gum, one of the bigger sites. So, you’re going to premier it there and then try and get the smaller blogs to repost it from there. So you’re doing a trickle down effect. But with a brand new band that isn’t ready for a Pitchfork premier, you’re going to give it to a smaller blog that just happens to be a blog people are paying attention to that week and then hope that it trickles-up, which is when you have smaller but influential blogs writing on a band and you’re hoping that people start paying attention to what the taste-making kids are saying that week… An artist like Wavves or Pains [the full name of this band is The Pains of Being Pure at Hear] that’s broken through to a certain extent, they’re not Top 40 but they have notoriety, when you’re planning a campaign for them, you definitely have different goals than when you would for a brand new band that hasn’t broken through yet. It’s all about expectations. [If a band has proven popularity] You’re going to want bigger stuff to happen. 133 These techniques demonstrate that effectively leveraging the blogging community for publicity is a nuanced process. To peak bloggers’ interest, publicists, or for that matter, any person seeking to publicize a band, including its members or label, must take into consideration both the popularity of the artist they are representing and the blog’s rank in the hierarchy of the indie blogosphere. The indie blogosphere is itself nuanced. At its core, it largely exists because of cross promotion. In this vein, bloggers create distinct online personalities based upon the 133 Daniel, Gill. Indie Publicist Interview. 30 Mar. 2010. 72 artists they review and they build their credibility by being the first to cover new artists or new albums. This is because indie music trends change quickly, and only what is new is considered relevant. In this scene, new musical subgenres pop-up and disappear overnight, and the words used to describe them, like “chill-wave” or “witch house,” become outdated just as quickly. For the most part, it is bloggers who create these short but extreme surges in popularity that tend to end as abruptly as they started. This is because to maintain a fan base, bloggers need to keep their tastes current. Just as bloggers put a premium on speed, so do their readers. Blog readers’ demand for new music mirrors the emerging ethos of an indie culture that has become focused on trendsetting. Musically, this means readers want to know what is going to be considered “cool” before the next guy does. This ethos is very apparent in the blogosphere, where being the first to blog about emerging artists makes a blogger’s musical tastes seem more relevant than his peers. This distinguishes a blog from tens of similar blogs that review basically the same music. Consequently, to get more readers and to demonstrate their taste-making abilities, many bloggers only write about the artists they think will become popular within the indie community. However, by doing this, they create the popularity they anticipated. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Blogger Anthony Fantano, the owner of the indie music blog The Needle Drop described this phenomenon: People try to get first. The thing is, you can be the first guy to blog a track, but if nobody cares about it, then it’s not even a big deal. What makes the song popular is that a lot of people are talking about it, and a lot of people are blogging about it. It’s funny because all these people who blog a track from a PR firm because they think it’s going to be popular, they’re guessing it’s going to be popular, and by blogging about it, they’re creating that wave of hype they thought might happen. It’s just funny to see that that’s how these things happen. There are some people 73 who blog, and there’s some people who make videos too, who 95 percent of the time only care about hits. 134 Recognizing that bloggers want to be the first to introduce their readers to new music, publicists send emails containing embedded links for MP3 files to bloggers before the music is officially released. Bloggers then hurriedly post the track on their blog, so they can be the first to comment on the music and prove their relevancy to readers. Generally, readers don’t realize that the blogger’s post was actually caused by a public relations agency’s outreach. For the most part, readers think the timely blog post exemplifies the blogger’s knack for discovering noteworthy bands early. In the following Fantano describes this phenomenon: There are a bunch of different labels and bands; they’re all handled by a few PR firms, like Tell All Your Friends and Force Field Media. They [the PR companies] have pretty big rosters of bands paying them for promotion A practice that will often happen is that these PR emails will go out. And without really listening to the music or deciding if it’s really great, they’ll [bloggers] take the link and get it up on their blog ASAP because with blog aggregators like Hype Machine, if your blog makes it, if your blog gets the number one spot, it permanently stays on the list that have blogged that track. So it’s like, “Ah, this is the first blog that blogged it.” It gives people a false sense that bloggers are going out there and finding and discovering music, and that’s not necessarily the case. It could have been sent to them in an email. Most of these bloggers don’t have money for hosting. More often than not, these MP3s PR companies are giving them are hosted on other servers. So it’s a convenient way for them to copy and paste [the link] and then put it on the blog. I’ve done that too, but I guess I’m a little more discerning as to whether or not I like the track. 135 As Fantano mentioned, the platform publicists select to distribute music to bloggers is important. Since links to music files are sent with the hope that they will be reposted, the platform used to distribute the music must be easy to copy-and-paste. It 134 Fantano, Anthony. Blogger Interview. 7 Mar. 2011. 135 Fantano, Anthony. Blogger Interview. 7 Mar. 2011. 74 must also be reliable, so that when readers click on the link, the song plays without complication. Additionally, since the link provides listeners with their first taste of an artist’s music, sound quality is important. In some cases, selecting a distribution platform is itself a means of achieving publicity. In such cases, the music platform used to embed the song in an email also posts that song to a central online music library. Bloggers monitor this music library in hopes of spotting newly uploaded songs, which they can be among the fist to report on. Music publicist Daniel Gill discussed his choice of distribution method: Now my number one way of distributing music is Sound Cloud. It’s always changing. Two or three years ago I was using another service, iMeem, but they went out of business, so I don’t use them anymore. Right now, Sound Cloud is the easiest way to distribute a track because you don’t have to host it yourself; it’s a reliable player; and it’s very easy for bloggers to grab a link and embed it on to their site. It also looks good. It’s become the norm now that most bloggers use now to post songs. Right now, it’s number one for getting music out there. Also, people on Sound Cloud are always looking for what’s the newest thing posted, so you’ll have blogs you didn’t even intend to post the link posting it simply because it’s new and on Sound Cloud. People are just paying attention to what’s being posted on it. You might post the link on Sound Cloud and then give the link to Stereo Gum and then within an hour, it’s on 60 blogs in Poland, because someone over there found it and posted it. It can spread very quickly and you don’t know who’s going to find it. There’s still a chance for random discovery. 136 Deciding when to send a track to bloggers is also important. This is because with the proliferation of online digital music, early album leaks are almost unavoidable. This is a new phenomenon. Before digital music, leaks weren’t much of an issue, but after the internet, this has changed. Now, if one copy of an album goes missing, it can be posted online, and made available for potentially millions of people to download before it’s 136 Gill, Daniel. Interview: Indie Publicist. 30 Mar. 2010. 75 available for purchase. After the advent of the internet, leaks became almost unavoidable. To such an extent, leaking an album has itself become a public relations tactic. This represents a major change in the industry. Leaks were once only perceived as a threat to album sales. However, now the record industry operates with a built-in understanding that consumers will download or listen to music online without paying for it. Consequently, it is understood that while leaking an album early can reduce album sales, it can also generate a large amount of publicity for artists. Further, if an album is leaked through a controlled online stream, it can be used to increase demand for album pre-orders. How an album is leaked depends upon the communication strategy publicists and bands select. Indie music publicist Daniel Gill describes how he and the band The Pains of Being Pure at Heart leaked its new album, “Belong:” The biggest priority for us when it came to Pains was just to keep the record from leaking. It became the biggest part of the campaign – controlling who gets to hear it and when. We didn’t give it out to very many people early on. A big part of any campaign is controlling the leak. That’s another big way things have changed. One of the biggest thing that controls an online campaign is when the record leaks. Does it leak three months before the street date or does it leak a week before street date? We actually, put an online stream of the new Pains record on the Pains’ own website before it had a chance to leak. We leaked it ourselves, but we controlled how it was leaked and the presentation of the leak. We made sure it was out there on a streaming site where listeners could hear the whole record and had links to where users could buy it on vinyl or pre-order in on iTunes or Amazon, so that we still had sales going through. We spent a lot of time thinking about how we wanted to present the stream. Ultimately, the band decided they wanted to present it on their own site, and send people to their own site, ThePainsofBeingPureAtHeart.com, so people would go there. I thought it went really well because everyone heard the record. 137 137 Daniel, Gill. Indie Publicist Interview. 30 Mar. 2010. 76 In some cases artists don’t want their albums to leak early. In order to prevent leaks, artists have shortened the lead-time between when they announce they are releasing a new album and when they actually release the album. Daniel Gill addressed this trend: I like the way Radio Head has been doing things. They say, “We have a new album coming out. It will be available in five days.” That way everyone hears it at once on the same day. No one gets an early copy. I think things are leaning in that direction. Very short lead-up times that prevent the album from having time to leak. Girl Talk also did this. I like how they’re forcing people to bend to their schedule. We’re not going to give you three or four months heads-up that we’re coming out with an album like everybody used to. It’s coming out in five days. That model is appealing to me. They are changing the ballgame. More people will follow suit with that. 138 If publicists successfully leverage the indie blogosphere, they generate a large amount of publicity for an artist in a short amount of time and create hype for the artist. In these campaigns, bloggers spread artists’ music by reposting links first reported on other blogs. Since the success of a blogger outreach campaign is largely measured by the degree to which content spreads, a successful campaign can have humble beginnings. For example, reaching out to one prominent blogger may be enough to trigger an avalanche of hype. In such an instance, competing bloggers feel compelled to cover the same artists after reading the initial blogger’s post. When this happens, publicists watch as the hype surrounding an artist begins to snowball. Hype is really what drives the indie blogosphere. Anthony Fantano, the owner and head writer for the video blog, “The Needle Drop,” described the existence of hype in the indie blogosphere, “Don’t let anyone lie to you, the blogosphere functions on hype as 138 Ibid. 77 much as something like the Grammys does. It’s just hype on a different scale. It’s hype for a niche community.” Hype is extremely prevalent in the indie blogosphere because there are hundreds of bloggers that all tend to focus on the same particular music niche. This specialization has segmented the independent music genre 139 When bloggers who focus on the same musical niche post similarly positive reviews of an artist, other bloggers who haven’t written on that artist feel obligated to do so to maintain their perceived relevancy with their audience. Consequently, an artist can ride the blogosphere’s waves of hype and achieve notoriety with niche audiences without having signed a record deal or having released a professionally produced album. In the short term, this wave of hype helps artists develop national fan bases quickly, but in the long term, it often pushes artists that haven’t developed or matured into the national spotlight. When confronted with massive amounts of hype, some bands like the Arcade Fire and the Silver Sun Pickups adjusted to their newly-found indie stardom and went on to achieve even greater levels of notoriety. Other bands, like Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah were thrust into the limelight before they matured and couldn’t live up to their audiences’ heightened expectations that existed because of online hype. Daniel Gill described how hype can set artists up to fail: Even though things have changed, I still believe that touring is still the number one most essential thing for a band to start getting attention. I know there are a lot of bedroom projects that get a lot of online attention now, before they have even played a show. But a lot of the time, it back fires because they’re pressured to put 139 Bengloff, Rich. President of American Association of Independent Music. Interview. 25 Oct. 2010. 78 together a live show really fast. Usually it just ends up being a guy with a laptop that he’s singing over. People are like, “ This is what everyone was talking about?” I still feel that putting together a live show and touring in your hometown and then hopefully getting picked-up as an opening act by a bigger touring band is the best way to build an audience and get attention. 140 The prevalence of hype in the indie blogosphere also distorts readers’ perceptions of artists’ level of popularity. Since bloggers influence one another’s posts, it’s often the case that a handful of indie bands are written about extensively at any given time. While these bands often have had little, if any, mainstream success to speak of, blog readers interpret the indie blogosphere’s broad endorsement as an indicator of mainstream success when the band is really only popular within a niche community. In the following passage, Fantano described the phenomenon: There are people who think the Arcade Fire is mainstream. Obscurity all depends on your point of view. Just because a band is written about on Pitchfork and three or four different music blogs that you read does not mean that they’re popular. It means they’re popular within that little niche of websites that you visit, but it doesn’t mean that they’re popular. When people say the Arcade Fire is too popular, to me it’s such small potatoes. They’re really not. They sell a lot more records than your brother’s lo-fi project that he records in his bedroom, but they’re not a popular band. And not to say that the Arcade Fire isn’t successful, I think they’re doing great stuff, but in terms of what popularity could be, the ceiling is much higher than where the Arcade Fire is. Popularity is just a funny perception people have. It changes by varying degrees. 141 While indie-music blogs have recently begun attracting large numbers of readers, the concept behind them is not new. Decades before the advent of the internet, equally die-hard music fans published fanzines to make up for the mainstream media’s ambivalence towards the indie rock genre. In this way, blogs are a natural organic 140 Daniel, Gill. Indie publicist Interview. 30 Mar. 2010. 141 Fantano, Anthony. Blogger Interview. 7 Mar. 2011. 79 extension of fanzines. Like fanzines, they are organic and are created by independent music fans for independent music fans. It’s just that by harnessing the power of the internet, blogs can cost-effectively distribute content to a much larger audience than fanzines ever could. This is because prior to the invention of the internet, during the era of the fanzine, publishing and distributing musical opinions was costly and labor intensive. Since fanzines had small circulations, they generated few, if any, advertising revenues. Also, while a handful of the most successful fanzines were sold in record stores, fanzines were primarily distributed through the mail. So potential subscribers couldn’t just stumble upon fanzines; they had to seek them out specifically. For fanzine publishers, this made adding new readers difficult. 142 Consequently, most fanzine publishers weren’t able to sell enough zines to recoup their printing costs. Subsequently, their fanzines went out of print after publishing only a few issues. The internet has significantly reduced publishing costs and made distribution potentially unlimited. Further, since music fans search the internet for information on their favorite band, they stumble upon blogs that write about their favorite artists, which makes building an audience easier for blogs than it was for publishers of fanzines. These factors have allowed blogs to reach much larger audiences than fanzines. In the indie rock genre, “Pitchfork” is by far the most influential music blog. It averages 11 142 Knott, Greg. Ripped: How The Wired Generation Revolutionized Music. Scribner.2009. Pg.116, 117. 80 million monthly visits from 2.5 million unique visitors. 143 Pitchfork’s website offers music news, opinion pieces and video content, but it’s known most for its album reviews that often include flowery grammar and snarky criticism. Every weekday, Pitchfork reviews five albums and ranks them on scale from zero to 10. If an album is ranked an eight or above, it is awarded Pitchfork’s “Best New Music” title. This is a powerful endorsement that leads to increases in national interest and album sales. Pitchfork’s influence was first demonstrated in 2004, when it reviewed the Arcade Fire’s album “Funeral.” At that time, the Arcade Fire was a nascent band with little following outside of its hometown of Montreal. It had just released its first full-length album “Funeral,” which Pitchfork gave a 9.7 rating. Within days of the posting, record stores across the country sold out of the album. 144 While Pitchfork’s influence is unrivaled, it isn’t the only taste-making music blog. Countless other blogs equally focused on indie rock exist online. The most widely read blogs tend to cover similar artists, but they provide visitors with different pieces of music-related content. For example, Pitchfork provides snarky criticism. The blog Stereo Gum is more news and media-heavy. It offers streaming video archives, concert photos and music news. The similarly popular RCRD LBL is light on news, but provides free song downloads. 143 Pitchfork Website. “Media Kit.” Accessed on 3 Mar. 2011. http://pitchfork.com/mediakit/traffic.html. 144 Knott, Greg. Ripped: How The Wired Generation Revolutionized Music. Scribner. 2009. Pg.120. 81 Other blogs, like The Needle Drop, differentiate themselves by avoiding the text and MP3 format that is favored by Pitchfork, Stereogum and RCRD LBL. Instead, The Needle Drop uses video blogging to explore new music. Anthony Fantano began The Needle Drop in 2007. It started out as a podcast and then evolved into a website and finally a YouTube Channel. It was the first video music blog on YouTube. Fantano descries the evolution of his website: The Needle Drop started as a podcast and then developed into a blog. The thing is, I was doing things in a way I would want them done if I was looking for a music website. In that, if I wanted to listen to a podcast about new music, I would want very little talking and just want to hear music and be told what I’m hearing and where I can find it, and that’s pretty much the format of what my radio show is. But just out of aggravation of doing the podcast for a while and not a lot of hits or subscribers, I went to the blogosphere and started a blog. I got a little more traffic than I would have normally, but I still wasn’t satisfied with the lack with the growth. In terms of the blog, it’s not like what I was posting was too heavy on words, I was posting MP3s and a quick description of what I thought was going on. It wasn’t until I started doing the videos that I realized that people really, really, really love opinion…I didn’t know people are so interested in opinions until I started giving them out. The Podcast and the blog were created in a short time span in a 2007. The blog was just formed because I didn’t have a place to put the podcast other than the website of the public radio station that I currently work at. I still work there and my show airs on the station. That’s how it started, me doing a podcast for their website. I figured it wouldn’t be legit unless I started my own website. The YouTube Channel started at the beginning of 2009, in January. 145 As Fantano explained, the goal of “The Needle Drop” is to help viewers discover new music. He goes about achieving this goal differently than other bloggers. Fantano’s video reviews are first off, informative, and secondly, very entertaining. Cinematically, the reviews are shot in a Max Headroom-style where Fantano is recorded from the chest 145 Fantano, Anthony. Blogger Interview. 7 Mar. 2011. 82 up. Segments of his review are frozen and then replayed at different speeds. Fantano’s dialogue with the camera is also enthusiastic and light hearted. When Fantano first started recording video blogs, he didn’t plan on using humor to reach a broader audience. As Fantano said: It [comedy] wasn’t really what I planned out, but I always felt that comedy is the best way to get a point across. I wanted it to be entertaining because I certainly didn’t want it to be boring. But it all depends on what you find entertaining. Entertainment isn’t always comedy. Some find others’ opinions more entertaining. 146 However, the humor Fantano interjects into his video blog demonstrates how music blogs are continually evolving. When fanzines migrated online and evolved into blogs, they used the new technology to provide free digital samples of artists’ songs, which could not have been done with a print fanzine. Now, some bloggers are using a video-supported-by-a-social-media format to talk about music. This provides viewers with a direct connection to the blogger and distinguish the blogger from countless other faceless music writers. The manner in which The Needle Drop selects which albums to review demonstrates another aspect of blogger evolution. At The Needle Drop listeners help Fantano decide which music he will review by posting recommendations in the comments section of his YouTube Channel. In this way, his blog is very organic. While not all of the music Fantano reviews are suggested by fans, his use of crowdsourcing demonstrates how blogs are becoming more interactive. In the following, Fantano describes how he viewers’ suggestions influence his video blog: 146 Fantano, Anthony. Blogger Interview. 7 Mar. 2011. 83 I review a lot of stuff that people ask me to review. If I get a ton of comments on a video and people ask me to review an album, I’ll review it. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing because more often than not the tastes of my viewers and I overlap. If they ask for something hot and they’re interested in it, I probably will be too. There are some times where my viewers and I come at an impasse. Where I’m like, “I’m sorry, I know you want me to review this, but I don’t want to.” Though, they know that most of the time, I’m into trying to appease their demands, but I can’t all the time. Not only because I’m not interested in the music, but maybe there are other records I’d rather talk about. At the end of the day, it’s a combination of the stuff they’re turning me onto and I’m checking out and enjoying, or I’m not enjoying and still have a strong opinion about. There are times when I’ll listen to what they say, I’ll check it out, and I’ll review it. But if I only reviewed what people asked me to review, I’d be totally miserable and I’d be burnt out. If I listened to 100 percent of the time to the demands of people who ask me to review music, I’d be reviewing Lykke Li, I’d be reviewing Lady Gaga and Protest the Hero. I’d be reviewing a lot of stuff I have no interest in. I’d be reviewing the new Currency album. Stuff that’s not necessarily bad, but stuff I have no interest in. I try to care. I sat down and listened to those artists, and tried to care. But I didn’t even care enough to write a negative review. And that’s the thing. I don’t think people realize that the videos don’t work unless I care. It’s easier to half-ass a text article than it is a video. Because you can’t half-ass enthusiasm, whether it’s positive or negative. If I’m not enthusiastic about reviewing something, I can’t, or it will look bad. I’m not going to have fun doing it, and I’m going to feel burnt- out and I’m not going to want to do it anymore. Having a blog channel that doesn’t review the new Lykke Li album is better than having a blog channel with no reviews at all on it. 147 However, taking viewers’ suggestions into consideration has posed some difficulties. Through his blog, Fantano has found that many viewers are only interested in watching reviews of artists they are already familiar with. This hampered The Needle Drop’s primary goal of musical discovery. According to Fantano: The democratization doesn’t exactly help that. There used to be a box on the front of my YouTube Channel. It was basically a place where people could submit 147 Fantano, Anthony. Blogger Interview. 7 Mar. 2011. 84 music, and then other people would vote up or down on it whether it should be reviewed or not, and people would just automatically put up things that they knew, and if they didn’t know it right off the bat, they would thumb it down without even checking it out. 148 The Needle Drop’s combination of music information, entertainment and engagement makes it stand out from the tens, if not hundreds, of other blogs that focus on independent music. This uniqueness has helped The Needle Drop’s YouTube channel amass a large following in a short amount of time. While the blog’s audience is much smaller than Pitchfork’s audience, it’s growing. The Needle Drop launched a YouTube channel in January 2009 and currently has more than 21,000 YouTube followers. 148 Ibid. 85 Chapter 15: Digital Promotion: Video In the independent music community, music video production is on the rise. This is because social media has made it easier for independent artists and labels to distribute video content among potentially huge audiences. John Richards, a DJ from the hugely influential Seattle-based independent radio station KEXP, described the reemergence of video: The days of the single have come back because of iTunes and the days of the video have come back because of YouTube and because it’s so easy to make video now. It’s gone 360. Back in the days of MTV and MTV 2, you could get play. And there were shows in local cities, so it was worth it to make videos. This changed when MTV stopped playing videos. There was a period when nobody made videos and then all of a sudden you’re seeing more and more. You can watch videos of KEXP’s in-studio sessions, and for us, in the future, all of them will be recorded. That’s really helping. It’s just like in the old days when you’d tune into “120 Minutes” on MTV and you’d see the Pixies for the first time and actually put a face to the music. It also gives you a preview of what you’re going to see if you see the band live. My favorite video right now is a Deerhunter video, and it set the vibe for me. So yea, it’s becoming huge and it’s easier to do just like making music is easier to do. 149 Before social media, free music was consumed though radio or television. In both mediums, musical gatekeepers determined what music would be played. On the radio, program directors selected which songs aired. On television, programmers at MTV and to a lesser extent, VH1, selected which videos to play. While MTV did feature some independent music, the majority of its programing featured artists signed to major labels. MTV featured indie rock most prominently in the weekly television program“120 Minutes.” The program featured interviews, live performances and music videos by independent artists. The series aired on MTV form 1986 to 2000 and then on MTV’s 149 Richards, John. KEXP DJ. Interview. 25 Oct. 2010. 86 sister channel MTV2 from 2001 to 2003. In 2004, “120 Minutes” was updated, and its name was changed into “Subterranean.” It aired on MTV2 from 2003 to 2007. Often, the program featured the most popular artists in the independent music community. “120 Minutes” and then “Subterranean” provided indie artists with national exposure, but slots on the program were limited. Each episode featured only nine to 15 songs. Now, independent artists and labels distribute video content to a global audience more easily with the help of YouTube. Music videos are sill used, but for unsigned acts with small budgets, they aren’t a necessity. Live performances can also be recorded at almost no cost and distributed for free. To take advantage of this, many independent labels have created their own YouTube channels that host a collection of their artists’ official music videos. In this way, a fan of one artist can easily access a label’s other artists. Fans also play a role in publicizing bands on YouTube by posting live footage of concerts they recorded on their video-equipped mobile phones. As mobile phone technology has improved, so has the video quality of the amateur videos uploaded to YouTube. Artists’ use of YouTube varies. Some, like the band Titus Andronicus, create content that provides a personal glimpse of the band off stage. Over the past few years, the band recorded a series of documentary-style videos that portrayed its tours and the recording of its most recent album “The Monitor.” The documentary videos have been viewed less than the band’s music videos. For example, fans viewed the music video for “A More Perfect Union,” the first single from “The Monitor,” more than 306,000 times 87 since it was posted on the YouTube channel belonging to the band’s record label, XL Recordings, on March 29, 2010 . Fans have only viewed the Titus Andronicus’ mini- documentaries, which were posted on the band’s personal YouTube channel between January 2009 and December 2010, between 943 and 17,906 times. The overwhelming majority of YouTube videos featuring Titus Andronicus are fan-created. This demonstrates that social media has democratized music video production. Even if a band is unsigned, its fans help publicize it by posting videos online. In this way, even if a band has little means to create a music video, its fans help publicize its music. 88 Chapter 16: Digital Promotion: Streaming Radio Stations Historically, public radio has played more independent music than commercial radio. Some large cities host public radio stations that are especially dedicated to independent music, like Los Angeles which hosts KCRW, and Seattle, the home of KEXP. Prior to the internet, these stations’ reach was confined to their local broadcasting area. Now they stream audio online and are active in social media, which allows them to distribute their programing to a global audience. Take for example KEXP. It was founded in 1972 and formerly operated under the call letters KCMU. It began as a 10-watt-radio station that could only be heard in Seattle’s University District, a small area surrounding the University of Washington. When KEXP first began broadcasting, its programing primarily featured indie rock. However, it has added more independent music genres to its programming over the years, including hip-hop, reggae, old-time country and metal. KEXP’s eclectic music mix resonated with Seattle residents — so much so that the station was able to expand its broadcasting with their financial support. In 2004, KEXP became the first radio station in the world to offer uncompressed CD-quality audio on the internet, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Additionally, KEXP formed a partnership with Radio New York in 2008. This partnership put KEXP programing on New York City’s airwaves five days a week. KEXP’s streaming online presence and its partnership with Radio New York have increased the size of its audience. In each week in 2009, an average of 103,800 people 89 tuned in Seattle, 101,900 people listened in New York City, and another 42,836 people streamed KEXP’s music over the web. 150 Further, KEXP’s embrace of social media has helped reach audiences across different content channels. In 2009, KEXP welcomed 500 bands to its studio. The station recorded and then uploaded the performances to its YouTube Channel. The most viewed video — a live performance of the song “Sweet Disposition” by The Temper Trap — has been viewed more than 782,000 times. KEXP has also made its programing available for mobile platforms. Its iPhone app lets listeners tune in anywhere. Additionally, the station offers six different podcast subscriptions that were downloaded more than 19 million times in 2009, five million more than in 2008. At KEXP, DJs, not national programmers, decide which music airs. Like Pandora, KEXP DJs favor new music. The station learns about new artists from multiple sources. John Richards — the host of KEXP’s “The Morning show,” which is a four-hour long program that features indie rock and is broadcast in Seattle and New York City — describes how KEXP learns about new music: [KEXP learns about music in] a number of different ways. A lot of the music comes in because of our reputation as an independent music tastemaker. It’s sent in by various bands, labels, promoters and individuals. A lot of people here review music, including myself. We go through a ton of it. People also send it directly to the DJs … On top of that, I have a few people who track down music for me in Seattle and New York ... It comes in from every direction … Also, for us in Seattle and over in New York local bands have an advantage because with our local show, we have a band in every week. We also champion those bands during our regular hours. Local bands have been our base for decades, and when 150 KEXP Annual Report 2009. 90 you have a music scene like Seattle’s, it’s easy to do. You’re not lowering the quality by featuring local bands when you live in this city. 151 Interestingly, Richards avoids indie music blogs and magazines to keep his on-air selections fresh. He only visits one blog regularly: RCRD LBL. KEXP operates under a simple principle: if DJs like music they hear, they play it on the air. 152 Since they are receptive to all genres of music, and because the station is a well-known tastemaker, labels reach out to KEXP DJs, hoping to influence which songs are played. But the station is structured to prevent labels and promoters from exerting influence over DJ’s song selection. As Richards said: [calling the station and talking to a KEXP employee is] the traditional way for labels and promoters to do that [reach out for airplay]. Luckily we have a music director; he’s sort of a shield from that. So we try to refer everybody to him because he will take the calls and is separate from a radio show. So it’s a great way for us not to have to worry about those questions or really worry about relationships, because we want to play music based on the music not on the relationship. No one has ever convinced him or us to play something and that’s sort of their job, so there’s always a back and forth with the promoters. Some are better than others. Some put out great music and so we have a better relationship with them, and some don’t put out that great of music and so we don’t have a great relationship with them, but people reach out to me daily, individuals and labels and promoters too just to check in and I’m always good to answer back. I try to stick with email, it makes it a little easier and you can be a little more direct like, “yep, I’m playing it,” or “Nope, I’m not playing it,” and that’s usually the best way. But for the most part, it’s best to have some kind of defense from the massive amount of people who are trying to contact the station. But we do get back to everyone. 153 Even in a digital age, the manner in which promoters and labels reach out to radio stations has remained fundamentally old school. Promoters call the station and try to 151 Richards, John. KEXP DJ. Interview. 25 Oct. 2010. 152 Ibid. 153 Ibid. 91 leverage personal relationships to get songs played. What has changed is that individuals unaffiliated with labels are reaching out. Richards elaborates on this: It’s [the manner in which labels reach out to get songs played on air] evolved some, but for the most part, it sticks to the system of looking up peoples’ call hours and trying to have a direct conversation with them. More and more it’s been on email. They’ve been able to send singles because MP3s are so easy to send. So sometimes, those conversations include having the music embedded in the email, where as before, what are you going to do, play it over the phone? But the base of it is still fundamentally the same. I would say there’s more individuals reaching out, for a number of reasons. It’s easier for individuals now to reach out and not rely on a promoter or a labels, but also because there’s fewer stations, you really need to reach out, because for the most part there aren’t a lot of stations around… because they don’t exist anymore, or its irrelevant if they’re playing you. 154 This demonstrates that the digitalization has made it easier for artists to reach out to tastemakers for publicity. However, promoters and labels still leverage personal relationships to promote artists. 154 Ibid. 92 Chapter 17: Digital Promotion: Twitter Both artists and record labels use Twitter to communicate directly with fans. Labels commonly use Twitter to notify fans of their public relations efforts. For example, if a music publication wrote a favorable review of a band signed to a specific label, that labels often distributes a link to the review to its followers over Twitter. Labels similarly Tweet notifications for album releases, tours, and new music videos. Bands’ Twitter use varies. Some bands have their own Twitter account, and their members have their own individual accounts. Often the band account is used to distribute upcoming concert information. Band members use individual accounts for more personal information. For example, the band Vampire Weekend has a Twitter account with over 26,500 followers. This account is primarily used as news feed for promotional information. The band’s front man, Ezra Koenig, has his own personal account through which he shares anecdotes and chats with other musicians. His personal account has more than 30,000 followers. Similarly, Ted Leo of Ted Leo and the Pharmacists has his own account through which he engages fans. He has more than 18,500 followers. Since Twitter Accounts can be created for free, many bands have already begun engaging with fans on Twitter before they seek the counsel of independent music publicists. In the following, indie music publicist Daniel Gill described artists’ use of social media, including Twitter: Most of the bands we work with already have a presence online already built up. Occasionally we’ll come across bands that don’t have a Facebook page, or Band Camp, MySpace or Twitter. We make sure they know they need to sign up for it, and make sure they keep their tour dates up to date. The most important thing is that they keep their tour dates, album releases and information on where to buy their album current. It’s really simple. Bands just need to know that they must be 93 present. There are some bands that choose not to engage with social media, which is also fine. We don’t force it on them. For some people, it’s not for them. For the most part, artists are successful on Twitter if they provide interesting social commentary. In the following, Daniel Gill describes successful Twitter strategies: It just comes down to making it interesting. If you’re on Twitter and you’re talking about things that are interesting to people that haven’t even heard your music, then they’re more likely to pay attention to your music, knowing that you’re at least an interesting Twitter personality. As long as it’s interesting, it can be advantageous. 94 Chapter 18: Digital Promotion: Facebook As with Twitter, independent artists’ and record labels’ usage of Facebook varies. On its Facebook page, the band LCD Soundsystem promotes concerts, albums and articles written about the band. Fans are free to comment on the band’s posts and discuss rumors, ticket prices and concert experiences. LCD Soundsystem responds to some of its fans’ posts. The band Crystal Castle’s Facebook page is less interactive. The band posts concerts dates, which fans comment on. But the members of Crystal Castles do not respond to fans’ comments. Facebook helps indie artists and labels most, in that it’s a platform that allows users to share music-related information with their “friends.” YouTube videos can be linked to on Facebook and then appear on the Facebook feed of hundreds of friends. This helps Facebook users discover new music. According to a 2008 study conducted by Entertainment Media Research, 81 percent of respondents discovered “music they love” through a social network website, and 66 percent recommended artists they like to others. 155 155 2008 Digital Music Survey. Entertainment Media Research. 2008. 95 Chapter 19: Promotion: Song Placement For years, the indie music community considered licensing songs to corporate advertisers a form of “selling out.” Recently, this perspective has changed. As a result, indie music is played in commercials that sell products to mainstream consumers. If artists did this 10 years ago, they would have lost credibility within the indie music community. No doubt they would have been the punch line of jokes told by record store clerks across the country. Fans would have followed suit and quit buying their music, because working with a corporations was viewed as colluding with the enemy. Now, however, listeners don’t ditch bands when their music is used to sell products. This change in perspective was most likely brought around by the popular acceptance that the music industry is failing. If a band is going to make a living, they need to find new revenue streams to offset money lost from dwindling album sales. After all, most indie rock bands don’t make much money. This, however, isn’t new. Even before the advent of the internet, indie artists struggled to generate income. During this time, artists earned most of their revenue from touring. Artists earned less from album sales than what they earned on the road, but album sales nevertheless provided vital income. Now, because listeners download music illegally, purchase digital singles and use access-based music platforms, bands make even less money than they did before. It’s true that bands have more publicity-generating tools at their disposal, but increased recognition within a relatively small community hasn’t led to more dollars in artists’ pockets. Since money is scarce, indie artists have turned to song placement as a 96 means of staying afloat. Influential KEXP DJ and music critic John Richards described this phenomenon: The good news is that where it’s changing for independent labels is there’s a whole new way of A&R. A&R is basically dead, where you go out and scout bands. The new A&R is soundtracks and placement in commercials or movies, and the stigma of you “selling out” is gone now. So you’re able to put that stuff in there and make a living. That’s really one of the only avenues of cash for an independent band. The other would be nonstop touring. In the past independent bands could make their money on the road and then make some money with independent labels. That’s not happening much now. Now it’s all about the road and merchandise. And if you’re not on the road, you’re not making any money unless you making placements. It’s hard to get placement if you’re not getting yourself in front of people. Without any touring to build a following, you’re dead. But if you can put together tours and the right people to place music, you have a shot. Independent music right now is the best its ever been, it’s also the most popular it’s ever been, and ironically probably the hardest its been to make any money. 156 It seems that fans understand artists’ difficult financial situation. As a result, listeners view song placement for what it is, a way for struggling artists to make money, instead of judging it for what it once represented: artists compromising their integrity for a quick check. Richards described this change: Some people see it [song placement] as selling out, but for the most part, bands don’t because they need the money. I think the idea is out there that, maybe it’s a little bit selling out, but look, that’s the only way they’re making any money … For the TV shows and movies, it’s always been OK to license music, but commercials were the last barrier for many of these bands. I think people except it because they know the bands aren’t making any money. In the old days, bands still weren’t making much money, but I don’t think the perception was out there. 157 156 Richards, John. KEXP DJ. Interview. 25 Oct. 2010. 157 Ibid. 97 Since it’s no longer faux pas to license music for commercials, bands have sold their music to advertisers who’ve embraced indie music with gusto. For example, McDonald’s played the song “New Slang” by indie rock group The Shins in a television advertisement. Additionally, the teen show “Gossip Girl” used The Kills’ song “Sour Cherry” in television commercials promoting the show. Also, the retailer Target used Starfucker’s song “Rawnald Gregory Erickson” in its television commercials and Budweiser featured the music of Santo Gold and Los Campesinos in television commercials for its beers. And that’s just to name a few. It makes sense that advertisers seek out independent music, because their music costs less to license and carries a cache of esoteric coolness that benefits brands. Advertisers pay indie bands between $10,000 and $150,000 to use a song in a commercial. 158 Major label artists are paid considerably more. Since music is expensive, using indie artists’ music reduces advertising costs. It also makes the brand hipper. Since so many companies are using indie music in their advertisements, brands need to embrace new music to be relevant. John Richards described this phenomenon: The envelope’s been pushed. Now that you hear more independent music in commercials and the mainstream … you sound outdated when you’re putting on major artists and major labels. Now you have to be a little edgy; whether it be a car commercial, a show theme … You have to be on the edge to be credible. 159 158 Scanlon, Tom. “The Shins get a bite from McDonalds.” The Seattle Times. 21 Feb. 2002. 159 Richards, John. KEXP DJ. Interview. 25 Oct. 2010. 98 Song placement in commercials benefits both companies and indie artists. It provides much-needed income and also broadens bands’ listening audiences without hurting their credibility. 99 Chapter 20: Conclusion Today, digital technology has made indie rock more popular than ever. This is because blogging and social media platforms like YouTube, and Facebook serve as low- cost mechanisms for broadcasting music and content to huge potential audiences. Further, democratized publishing brought around by the internet has turned indie rock fans into tastemakers who share their musical critiques and recommendations with friends and followers. In this way, social media manifests one of the core tenets of indie music: doing it yourself. It allows anyone with access to a computer to act as a one-person music publication and advocate for music not played on terrestrial radio. This has helped indie rock overcome what was once its greatest obstacle: being heard. For years, musical tastemakers ignored indie rock. Historically, those that championed the genre used the available media tools — public radio and fanzines — to grow interest in the genre. However, because radio had a limited broadcasting area and fanzines had small circulation, coordinating a national network of interested listeners and readers was difficult. Subsequently, many people who would have been receptive to indie rock didn’t have an opportunity to hear or learn about it. The internet has solved this problem. Using the internet, public radio stations engage global audiences; music blogs, which are new iterations of fanzines, reach millions of readers each week; and bands communicate directly with their fans. In this way, the internet connects an international network of artists, labels, bloggers and fans who proliferate and circulate indie music. This has afforded the genre greater exposure and elevated it closer to the mainstream. 100 From a promotional perspective, this is good news for independent labels, which for years lacked inexpensive platforms for promoting their artists, and were subsequently overshadowed by major labels that set musical tastes with their comparatively huge marketing budgets. But while digital music affords indie artists more it exposure, it has also dramatically reduced album sales, which has affected both major and independent labels and artists. 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Richards: It’s a number of different ways; a lot of the music comes in because of our reputation as an independent music tastemaker. It’s sent in by various bands, labels, promoters and individuals. A lot of people here review music, including myself. We go through a ton of it. People also send it directly to the DJs. Sending links and MP3s. And on top of that, I have a few people who track down music for me in Seattle and New York. They go online and find all different types of music. It comes in from every direction. Question: Do you personally visit music blogs? Richards: No, I try not to. Question: What about magazines? Richards: Nope. I try to avoid that too. But, I do check out a few. For the most part, we’re ahead of that stuff. By the time it’s in print we’re already playing it. So usually, it’s more out of curiosity, or if it’s a good human-interest story I’ll read it. I do go to some music blogs, usually it’s because I’m directed to it by a band. Because there’s just so many and so much, it’s almost impossible to read them all. The main one I visit 107 though, is RCRD LBL I visit that every day. They provide free music and are always on top of stuff. Question: When you hear a new artist, what guides your decision to play them on the air? Does it matter if they fit a genre or you expect them to have success in the future? Richards: No, success nor genre matter. It’s hard to say what’s going to be successful and what won’t, and I’ll play any genre. So I’m not looking for that either. It’s mostly if I think it’s a good song or good music. Usually they need some kind of an emotion, some kind of depth to them, they need to move me a little bit. I don’t want it to be background music; I want it to be foreground music. Especially since I do a morning show. It needs to jump out. It can jump out and be mellow, or jump out because its super energetic and super aggressive. But it has to have something to it; it has to have depth to it. That’s what I’m looking for: something that moves me and hopefully moves other people. Question: Do record labels reach out to KEXP for airplay? If they do, is it normally through a phone call, do they send promotional materials. Richards: Yeah, that’s the traditional way for labels and promoters to do that. Luckily we have a music director; he’s sort of a shield from that. So we try to refer everybody to him because he will take the calls and is separate from a radio show. So it’s a great way for us not to have to worry about those questions or really worry about relationships, because we want to play music based on the music not on the relationship. No one’s ever convinced him or us to play something and that’s sort of their job, so 108 there’s always a back and forth with the promoters. Some are better than others. Some put out great music and so we have a better relationship with them, and some don’t put out that great of music. and so we don’t have a great relationship with them, but people reach out to me daily — individuals and labels and promoters too — just to check in, and I’m always good to answer back. I try to stick with email; it makes it a little easier and you can be a little more direct like, “Yep, I’m playing it,” or “Nope, I’m not playing it,” and that’s usually the best way. But for the most part, it’s best to have some kind of defense from the massive amount of people who are trying to contact the station. But we do get back to everyone. Question: From your vantage point, has the manner in which artists and labels promote evolved at all? Richards: It’s evolved some, but for the most part, it sticks to the system of looking up peoples’ call hours and trying to have a direct conversation with them. More and more it’s been on email. They’ve been able to send singles because MP3s are so easy to send. So sometimes, those conversations include having the music embedded in the email, where as before, what are you going to do, play it over the phone? But the base of it is still fundamentally the same. I would say, there’s more individuals reaching out, for a number of reasons. It’s easier for individuals now to reach out and not rely on a promoter or a label, but also because there’s fewer stations, you really need to reach out, because for the most part there aren’t a lot of stations around that you have to follow up with, because they don’t exist anymore, or it’s irrelevant if they’re playing you. 109 Question: I think barriers to musical discovery are much lower now. Do you think this has increased demand for independent and more challenging music? Richards: Yeah, I think that’s fair; I think that’s true. Growing up, musical discovery was hard. I’d go to the one independent record store in town and buy what the clerk suggested. Now you can tune in to a station like ours online. You can go to these blogs, you can go to iTunes, you can go to a million different places to hear this music. It’s still hard to find the right kind of people doing the taste making so you don’t have to go through it all, because it’s almost too much. I think the same amount may be made, probably more, but it’s just easier to hear and easier to access, but sometimes that makes it harder because you have to dig through a lot more to find it. I think for our listeners, they want to be challenged more. But the thing is, too, there’s a whole new group of people who listen to the station who don’t want to be challenged too much. They get tired of always being challenged, and they’d just like something they could recognize or sing along with or feel comfortable listing to, because after three or four songs that are new and aren’t even that aggressive or that “out-there” they want some sort of base or anchor to hold it all together. That’s our unspoken formula. You put something people will know while expanding the playlist and really digging deep into new music. But if you do just new and just out-there music, you lose a lot of people. 110 Question: Do you believe that independent music has been better off in the past 10 years? Do you think the future is bright? Richards: It is, and it isn’t. Independent bands and artists don’t make any money. Ironically, they made more when the labels were working better because independent labels were working better as well. It’s really hard to sell music now. Ironically, the independent music fans are the ones most likely to download the music without paying for it. So, that part is really rough. You can get your music out more, but there’s no real making it as far as success with record labels anymore. The major labels are a pit. You don’t want to go anywhere near there. The good news is that where it’s changing for independent labels is there’s a whole new way of A&R. A&R is basically dead, where you go out and scout bands. The new A&R is soundtracks and placement in commercials or movies, and the stigma of you “selling out” is gone now. So you’re able to put that stuff in there and make a living. That’s really one of the only avenues of cash for an independent band. The other would be nonstop touring. In the past independent bands could make their money on the road and then make some money with independent labels. That’s not happening much now. Now it’s all about the road and merchandise. And if you’re not on the road, you’re not making any money unless you making placements. It’s hard to get placement if you’re not getting yourself in front of people. Without any touring to build a following, you’re dead. But if you can put together tours and the right people to place music, you have a shot. Independent music right now is the best its ever been, it’s also the most popular it’s ever been, and ironically probably the hardest its been to make any money. 111 For the majors, things will get worse before they get better. They’ve done nothing to try and improve the situation. They’re clinging to very few artists who sell fewer records. It’s sad and almost comical that they continue to go down this road. They’re driving towards the end of a cliff and everybody is trying to warn them, but there they go. Question: Do you think the need for new revenue streams has made it “OK” to license music to advertisers? Richards Yeah, I don’t know which artist finally broke the barrier and made it “OK.” Ironically, you don’t hear Beatles songs or Nirvana songs or music from other giant bands on commercials, because their revenue will always be OK, and they won’t sell songs. But you hear people like Nick Drake, 30 years after his death, finally making money. Now, it’s finally OK, after they’re already gone, which is a little creepy. Who knows, maybe we’ll hear an Elliot Smith song in commercials. I shudder to think about it, but you never know. Some people see it as selling out, but for the most part, bands don’t, because they need the money. I think the idea is out there that, maybe it’s a little bit selling out, but look, that’s the only way they’re making any money. People think, at least there’s cool music in this ad, and for the TV and movies, it’s always been OK to license music, but commercials were the last barrier for many of these bands. I think people accept it because they know the bands aren’t making any money. In the old days, bands still weren’t making much money, but I don’t think the perception was out there. 112 Question: Do you think this licensing is indicative of a growing demand for independent music? Richards: I think there are multiple reasons. You can look at the “Twilight” movies. You’re putting bands in there that you’d never think that age group would be into, but what you’re doing is putting the stamp of approval telling them, it’s OK to like these bands. People follow along and then like the music. Shows have been doing this for a while. Even “Beverly Hills 90210” famously had the Flaming Lips on. They’ve done this through the years, there’s just more of it now. One of the main reasons they feature independent music is that it’s cheap so they don’t pay as much. If you can have The Strokes or a band that sounds like The Strokes, you’re going to pick the band that sounds like The Strokes because it’s probably $90,000 less. You’re going to go with independent music because you can afford it. In movies and TV shows, bands aren’t making any money. It’s solely for A&R services so people can hear them and use that to sell more shows or merch or whatever it might be. Plus, the envelope’s been pushed. Now that you hear more independent music in commercials, and the mainstream, you kind of have to do that now. You sound outdated when you’re putting on major artists and major labels. Now you have to be a little edgy whether it be a car commercial or show theme or be it a channel like HBO who’s always breaking the barrier of awesome music. Their theme songs are always great. You have to be on the edge to be credible. 113 Question: To remain profitable record labels are using 360 deals where they take part of their artists merchandise sales to put them on the road. Do you think artist are better off or worse off with this? Richards: Bands are getting more traction, and they have more backing them now, they’re benefitting from labels giving up some control. For the most part, labels are still out just to make money off them, and a lot of it’s recoupable. As long as they’re getting out of the recoup model, then it is good for the bands. So many bands are screwed by contracts where they have to pay back every little thing. Labels decide they’re going to put up six figures for a video or tours that don’t work, or more people working their record who are really working on other artists’ records, and they’re paying back money that wasn’t even spent on them. As long as they’re getting out of the recoup model, I think that’s great for bands. That’s what labels need to do to survive. Labels more and more are going to be banks. They’re going to connect bands with promoters or provide bands with promoters that provide marketing (that) the band is too busy to do. The smart labels provide these services or track down these services and then the bands and label share the cost. As much as bands want to put out their own music, it’s a ton of work. You want to be creative and play music. You don’t want to necessarily be bogged down. You need a good label and some kind of base to help you out. You put out your own record, but to push it, you need assistance. So some of these labels are figuring it out. The independent ones figured it out sooner, but some majors are coming around which is a good sign. 114 Question: What about the role of video? How are websites like YouTube aiding promotion? Richards: Yeah. The days of the single have come back because of iTunes, and the days of the video have come back because of YouTube, and because it’s so easy to make video now. It’s gone 360. Back in the days of MTV and MTV 2, you could get play. And there were shows in local cities, so it was worth it to make videos. This changed when MTV stopped playing videos. There was a period when nobody made videos and then all of a sudden you’re seeing more and more. You can watch videos of KEXP’s in-studio sessions, and for us, in the future all of them will be recorded. That’s really helping. It’s just like in the old days when you’d tune into “120 Minutes” on MTV, and you’d see the Pixies for the first time and actually put a face to the music. It also gives you a preview of what you’re going to see if you see the band live. My favorite video right now is a Deerhunter video, and it set the vibe for me. So, yeah, it’s becoming huge and it’s easier to do, just like making music is easier to do. Question: How does KEXP decide which bands play in studio? Richards: We struggle with that all the time. We tell some bands “no” and some “yes” and it’s hard to explain what the reasoning is. There are core bands here that we’ve played for years. They always have a place here, and when they come to town, we usually have them in. We try not to repeat a band in a year, but there are a few we make exception for. If we go out to another city or a festival, we will make an exception. Especially if they’ve been awesome on our airwaves and can repeat that. Usually their touring coincides with their record release. If the records getting played on the station, or 115 if we anticipate it will, then we book it. If we have people we trust who’ve seen the band and recommend them, we’ll book it on that. With 300 or 400 in-studio performances a year, it gives us a big window. But when you think about it, that 400 bands is out of hundreds of thousands of bands. So you have to pick and choose. Also, for us in Seattle and over in New York local bands have an advantage, because, with our local show, we have a band in every week. We also champion those bands during our regular hours. Local bands have been our base for decades, and when you have a music scene like Seattle’s it’s easy to do. You’re not lowering the quality by featuring local bands when you live in this city. 116 Transcript of the Interview with Anthony Fantano March 7, 2011 About Anthony Fantano: Fantano is the owner and chief contributor to “The Needle Drop,” an online video blog. He also operates a music program on his local NPR station. Question: Can you describe your blog The Needle Drop and explain how it’s different from other indie music blogs? Fantano: TheNeedleDrop.com is a website of mine devoted to the pursuit of discovering new music. I’m not one of these people who hates on independent music because its not popular, and I’m not someone who hates on major label music because it’s on a major label. All I’m interested in is if the music is good. More often, I end up enjoying stuff that’s on “independent labels” than I do major labels. I say quote un-quote because many independent labels are distributed by major labels or subdivisions of them, so there’s still a business connection there. But it’s all about the pursuit of new music. Question: The Needle Drop is more entertaining than any blog I’ve read or seen. Was that entertainment factor a goal when you first started out? Fantano: It wasn’t really what I planned out, but I always felt that comedy is the best way to get a point across. I wanted it to be entertaining because I certainly didn’t want it to be boring. But it all depends on what you find entertaining. Entertainment isn’t always comedy. Some find others’ opinions more entertaining. When I started the Needle Drop, I didn’t start doing videos. The Needle Drop started as a podcast and then developed into a blog. The thing is, I was doing things in a way I would want them done if I was looking for a music website. In that, if I wanted to listen to a podcast about new 117 music, I would want very little talking and just want to hear music and be told what I’m hearing and where I can find it, and that’s pretty much the format of what my radio show is. But just out of aggravation of doing the podcast for a while and not a lot of hits or subscribers, I went to the blogosphere and started a blog. I got a little more traffic than I would have normally, but I still wasn’t satisfied with the lack with the growth. In terms of the blog, it’s not like what I was posting was too heavy on words, I was posting MP3s and a quick description of what I thought was going on. It wasn’t until I started doing the videos that I realized that people really, really, really love opinion. I’m the type of person that if I like an album, I don’t seek out a review of it. I don’t. I’m not interested, because I already know how I feel about it. I didn’t know that was not the norm. Maybe it’s not, or maybe it’s half and half, and I’ve just run into a lot of people who do it. The thing is, I didn’t know people are so interested in opinions until I started giving them out. If anything separates me from these other websites, it’s pretty much that I’m willing to put myself on camera and see my opinion, whether it’s positive or negative. I do love a lot of music blogs. Every website that I link to on my website, I read. I’m not trying to say these other websites are chicken for not going on camera, I’m just saying that it works for me — that I’ve experimented with it and found success. 118 Question: When did you start your podcast, and when did that transition into the blog and then eventually into the YouTube video blog? Fantano: The Podcast and the blog were created in a short time span in a 2007. The blog was just formed because I didn’t have a place to put the podcast other than the website of the public radio station that I currently work at. I still work there and my show airs on the station. That’s how it started, me doing a podcast for their website. I figured it wouldn’t be legit unless I started my own website. The YouTube Channel started at the beginning of 2009, in January. Question: When you started the YouTube channel, where there other video blogger covering indie music? Fantano: No, not that I saw, which is why I started doing it. There were people who once in while would talk about a piece of music, like a CD they bought that week, but otherwise they were blogging about other things. Music wasn’t the central theme of their channel. They’d talk about what they liked, but wouldn’t do a negative review, which isn’t a bad thing. It’s just their blog. I didn’t see a channel that was specifically and only dedicated to music. So I figured I’d take the opportunity to do one. And around the same time, there were two other people who started their channels at the same time. Sadly they don’t make videos much any more. One of them is a Canadian guy by the name “You’re Wrong I’m Right,” another guy “Jumble Junkie Music” also does reviews, but he doesn’t do them anymore either. When we started, it was the three of us watching each other’s videos. Then it eventually grew from there in ways that I could have described better if I was in the thick of it. 119 Question: Your number of subscribers has really grown. After I subscribed, I remember receiving a message from you saying you hit the 5,000-subscriber mark. Now, you have over 21,000. Was there a watershed moment where your subscriptions jumped? Fantano: The whole watershed moment never happened. It’s been review after review. I have a couple of reviews with a lot of traction. Some of my most popular reviews, like for example the Cee Lo song “Fuck You” or the Deftones song “Diamond Eyes” are my two most watched reviews. Both reviews were negative or lukewarm. The people that watched them weren’t enthused about what I had to say. So I did get a lot of views out of those, but I didn’t get a lot of subscribers out of them. I made a lot more [reviews] but they were deleted off of YouTube, because I used to use copyrighted content. I used to play clips of songs in my videos to get a point across, but I can’t now because it’s not my material, number one. Number two, it’s not illegal; in fact, it is legal if it’s in the case of critique. But it’s a ground rule for YouTube I can’t break if I’m going to be a YouTube partner. There wasn’t one moment where all the subscribers started pouring in. The day I got the most subscribers in a single day was when the dude Sammy from the Rock it Out Blog actually plugged me. Other than that, I’ve just been getting a steady amount of subscribers every day. The amount I usually get within a day has grown. On some days, I’ll get 100 subscribers in a day. On other days, I’ll get like 25 to 30. It fluctuates in- between that. It wasn’t always like that. There were some days I wouldn’t get any and some days I’d get like two. But even then, when I had a smaller group of subscribers, it 120 was still exciting. Now, everything is different. It’s been a slow growth. There’s still part of me that’s like, this is successful now, but I still have two part-time jobs because if I tried to live off what I get on The Needle Drop, I’d starve to death. Part of me is happy that I’ve come this far, but there’s another side of me that realizes I have a way to go if I want to do this as a job. Question: How do you select the music you review? Fantano: It’s based on a lot of things. I go out in the blogosphere a lot and search for music I’m interested in. I may review something because I want to review it. There’s an emotion shift going on the channel. I review a lot of stuff that people ask me to review. If I get a ton of comments on a video, and people ask me to review an album, I’ll review it. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because more often than not the tastes of my viewers and I overlap. If they ask for something hot, and they’re interested in it, I probably will be too. There are some moments that irk me, in that people may not be asking to review a record because they love it, but because Pitchfork reviewed it. I don’t even need to go on to Pitchfork to see what’s popular, because if I get 20 to 30 comments on an album in a video, I figure Pitchfork probably gave it a great score. Not only that, (but) people are starting to call other people out on that practice in the comments section. It’s pretty funny. 121 Question: Has democratization of publishing brought about by the Internet helped your musical selections? Fantano: The democratization doesn’t exactly help that. There used to be a box on the front of my YouTube Channel. It was basically a place where people could submit music, and then other people would vote up or down on it whether it should be reviewed or not, and people would just automatically put up things that they knew, and if they didn’t know it right off the bat, they would thumb it down without even checking it out. Don’t let anyone lie to you, the blogosphere functions on hype as much as something like the Grammys does. It’s just hype on a different scale. It’s hype for a niche community. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing. Most of the music that I like I found in the indie-sphere. It’s not like I hate the indie-sphere for how it works. It’s just that I’m not necessarily into the whole hype thing. I’m into you making a record that appeals to my tastes. If I listened to 100 percent of the time to the demands of people who ask me to review music, I’d be reviewing Lykke Li, I’d be reviewing Lady Gaga and Protest the Hero. I’d be reviewing a lot of stuff I have no interest in. I’d be reviewing the new Currency album. Stuff that’s not necessarily bad, but stuff I have no interest in. I try to care. I sat down and listened to those artists, and tried to care. But I didn’t even care enough to write a negative review. And that’s the thing. I don’t think people realize that the videos don’t work unless I care. It’s easier to half-ass a text article than it is a video. Because you can’t half-ass enthusiasm, whether it’s positive or negative. If I’m not enthusiastic about reviewing something, I can’t, or it will look bad. I’m not going to have fun doing it, and I’m going to feel burnt-out and I’m not going to want to do it 122 anymore. Having a blog channel that doesn’t review the new Lykke Li album is better than having a blog channel with no reviews at all on it. There are some times where my viewers and I come at an impasse. Where I’m like, “I’m sorry, I know you want me to review this, but I don’t want to.” Though, they know that most of the time, I’m into trying to appease their demands, but I can’t all the time. Not only because I’m not interested in the music, but maybe there are other records I’d rather talk about. At the end of the day, it’s a combination of the stuff they’re turning me onto and I’m checking out and enjoying, or I’m not enjoying and still have a strong opinion about. There are times when I’ll listen to what they say, I’ll check it out, and I’ll review it. But if I only reviewed what people asked me to review, I’d be totally miserable and I’d be burnt out. There are people who think the Arcade Fire is mainstream. Obscurity all depends on your point of view. Just because a band is written about on Pitchfork and three or four different music blogs that you read does not mean that they’re popular. It means they’re popular within that little niche of websites that you visit, but it doesn’t mean that they’re popular. When people say the Arcade Fire is too popular, to me it’s such small potatoes. They’re really not. They sell a lot more records than your brother’s lo-fi project that he records in his bedroom, but they’re not a popular band. And not to say that the Arcade Fire isn’t successful, I think they’re doing great stuff, but in terms of what popularity could be, the ceiling is much higher than where the Arcade Fire is. Popularity is just a funny perception people have. It changed by varying degrees. 123 Question: Are there any other mechanisms you use to decide what to review? Fantano: Labels and bands reach out to me all the time. I get a lot of emails every day. I’m getting to the point where I can’t make videos and blog without skipping some of these emails. I’ve always been happy with myself that I’ve been able to check out everything that’s sent to me, but there have been times lately where that’s getting a lot more difficult, because I’m getting a lot of emails, every day. Question: It seems there’s an emphasis on speed of discovery in the indie community. Being the first person to play a track or being the first to discover a new band gives you credibility. Does that carry over into the blogosphere? Fantano: A lot of people think that, but they don’t quite realize what they do. Here’s something that happens in the indie blogosphere. There are a bunch of different labels and bands; they’re all handled by a few PR firms, like Tell All Your Friends or Force Field Media. They have pretty big rosters of bands paying them for promotion. A practice that will often happen is that these PR emails will go out, and without really listening to the music or deciding if it’s really great. They’ll take the link and get it up on their blog ASAP because with blog aggregators like Hype Machine, if your blog makes it, if your blog gets the number one spot, it permanently stays on the list that have blogged that track. So it’s like, “Ah, this is the first blog that blogged it.” It gives people a false sense that bloggers are going out there and finding and discovering music, and that’s not necessarily the case. It could have been sent to them in an email. Most of these bloggers don’t have money for hosting. More often than not, these MP3 PR companies are giving them are hosted on other servers. So it’s a convenient way for them to copy 124 and paste and then put it on the blog. I’ve done that too, but I guess I’m a little more discerning as to whether or not I like the track. People try to get first. The thing is, you can be the first guy to blog a track, but if nobody cares about it, then it’s not even a big deal. What makes the song popular is that a lot of people are talking about it, and a lot of people are blogging about it. It’s funny because all these people who blog a track from a PR firm because they think it’s going to be popular, they’re guessing it’s going to be popular, and by blogging about it, they’re creating that wave of hype they thought might happen. It’s just funny to see that that’s how these things happen. There are some people who blog, and there’s some people who make videos too, who 95 percent of the time only care about hits. While, I’m not against reviewing an artist who’s getting a lot of hype, I’ve done it in the past with The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, I reviewed Ariel’s Pink Haunted Graffiti: artists that have been getting a lot of buzz on the blogosphere before, but I don’t let the their popularity get in the way of my review. If I only reviewed the songs people wanted my opinions on, because they already knew about it, I’d go nuts. So I have to throw stuff in there that people don’t know about. Because, ultimately, I want to help people discover new music. 125 Summary of the Interview with Rich Bangloff October 25, 2010 About Rich Bangloff: Bangloff is the president of American Association of Independent Music (A2IM), which is an organization of independent music labels that promotes business opportunity, provides advocacy and representation, as well as networking opportunities for the independent label community. *Mr. Bangloff asked that I not transcribe our interview directly, so I’ve provided a summary of the main points we discussed: • Major labels release less music now, which has caused independent labels to account for a larger portion of new music. • Limited retail shelf space and limited radio airplay have historically constrained the popularity of independent music. • There is now more access to indie music but, this makes it harder to get noticed. • There is no such thing as an independent artist, just bands signed to independent labels. • The music discovery process has been improved. Pandora is a good example of this. You create a playlist and receive recommendations of new artists that are guided by your selections. • Blogs have helped all new artists. Pitchfork is a tastemaker. Genre specific bloggers segment the market and make information more available. 126 • Shelf space at retailers like Wal-Mart and BestBuy is determined by artists’ sales histories. • Indie music stores are great for establishing artists. They promote artists that they like. The three independent coalitions AIMS, CIMS and Music Monitor Network that promote artists via cooperative advertising. AIMS and CIMS work with individual stores. The Music monitor network works with chains of stores. However, independent music stores don’t have enough floor space to account for a meaningful percentage of total sales. • Digital sales account for 40 percent of indie sales • iTunes controls 70 percent of the digital music marketplace. eMusic and Amazon fight for the number two slot • Digital distribution has reduced the cost of distributing music, but it’s offset by the lower price charged for digital music. • Pandora plays whatever they want, since its founder began as an independent artist, it features more independent music 127 Transcript of the interview with Daniel Gill March 29, 2011 About Daniel Gill: Gill is a music publicist and the owner of Force Field PR, which is an indie music public relations agency Question: How have indie music publicity tactics evolved overtime? Gill: Well there are a lot of things that have changed. The biggest change overall is the evolution of giving away music for free in order to get press coverage, which when I started my record label in the late 1990s was unheard of. You didn’t give away a song or multiple tracks from a record for free download or streaming. That has been the biggest difference. Also the change that most of the print magazines have gone out of business and there is a smaller concentration of print magazines left. The playing field has shrunk a lot. Now you have tons of online possibilities and people fighting for coverage and exclusives. You have much smaller range of print options. Those two things are the biggest changes I’ve seen. You need to modify your tactics on those changes. Now if you want to get press you have to give away music for free in advance of the record coming out. That’s a big change. Now, you have to pick how you’re going to give out the music, who you’re going to give the tracks to or do a full-album premier with. That plays a much bigger role than it ever has before. It’s not something I thought about when I first started doing this. You also have to fight a lot harder to get print coverage for your bands, because there is less page space available. You have to think, is this campaign going to be online- 128 only, or are we going to get print coverage. When you’re approaching a project, you need to assess the situation in a different way than you would have even five years ago. Question: How important are print publications now? Gill: I think it’s still really important to have print coverage for your bands, because there are a lot of people who are blissfully unaware of what’s going on Pitchfork. Your Average Joe who spends money on music still is relatively unaware of 75% of bands Pitchfork is championing. If you really want to reach a wide audience, you need to get in the newspaper, alternative weeklies, Rolling Stone, Spin, and lifestyle magazines like Nylon. That is still, to me, a big part of how people are finding out about music. If not directly, than it’s at least a way of getting people to talk about music, and word of mouth is what you really want, and it doesn’t always happen even if you have Pitchfork and the general A-list bloggers talking about a band. It still doesn’t translate into actual, on the street word of mouth. Question: What are the most important media outlets to pitch artists to? Gill: The New York Times in number one. NPR is number two. I’d rank the Wall Street Journal at three. Then Rolling Stone. Four is Spin, and then six is Pitchfork. I still rank the traditional press higher. Those are the outlets bands really get excited about. 129 Question: What sort of angle would you approach an outlet like the Wall Street Journal with to get coverage? Gill: Usually, you can’t pitch the Wall Street Journal unless you have a lot of other big press outlets already writing about a band. Unless you have a really impressive press kit already assembled, the Wall Street Journal is not going to care about the band. So, I usually go in with a list of impressive press quotes from other outlets, sales numbers and Billboard chart information. Question: Aside from reaching out to the media, what other services do you provide for your clients? Gill: A big part of what we do is keep track of what press is running or appearing online. I big part of what we, and other publicists, do is keeping tabs on what’s happening. You don’t have control over a lot of the press. There’s a lot of blog content that springs up on its own, so you need to keep track of what’s being said about a band so you can steer public opinion in favor of your client. Question: Do you do any geo-targeting so you know where a band is blowing up? Gill: Yea, definitely, we do a lot of that stuff. Question: Do you help your artists cultivate an online presence? Gill: Yea. Most of the bands we work with already have a presence online already built up. Occasionally we’ll come across bands that don’t have a Facebook page, or Band Camp, MySpace or Twitter. We make sure they know they need to sign up for it, and make sure they keep their tour dates up to date. The most important thing is that they 130 keep their tour dates, album releases and information on where to buy their album current. It’s really simple. Bands just need to know that they must be present. There are some bands that choose not to engage with social media, which is also fine. We don’t force it on them. For some people, it’s not for them. Question: Are there any strategies that make one artists more successful on Twitter or Facebook than others? Gill: It just comes down to making it interesting. If you’re on Twitter and you’re talking about things that are interesting to people that haven’t even heard your music, then they’re more likely to pay attention to your music, knowing that you’re at least an interesting Twitter personality. As long as it’s interesting, it can be advantageous. Question: In what format do you provide bloggers with free music? Gill: Now my number one way of distributing music is Sound Cloud. It’s always changing. Two or three years ago I was using another service, imeem, but they went out of business, so I don’t use them anymore. Right now, Sound Cloud is the easiest way to distribute a track because you don’t have to host it yourself; it’s a reliable player; and it’s very easy for bloggers to grab a link and embed it on to their site. It also looks good. It’s become the norm now that most bloggers use now to post songs. Right now it’s number one for getting music out there. Also, people on Sound Cloud are always looking for what’s the newest thing posted, so you’ll have blogs you didn’t even intend to post the link posting it simply because it’s new and on Sound Cloud. People are just paying attention to what’s being posted on it. You might post the link on Sound Cloud and then give the link to Stereo Gum and then within an hour it’s on 60 blogs in Poland, because 131 someone over there found it and posted it. It can spread very quickly and you don’t know who’s going to find it. There’s still a chance for random discovery. Question: How do you promote artists that get a lot of media traction, like Wavves or Pains at Being Pure at Heart, versus artists that don’t get a lot of traction with the media? Do you take that into account when you’re planning your communications campaign? Gill: Yea, you have to. An artist like Wavves or Pains that’s broken through to a certain extent, they’re not Top 40 but they have notoriety, when you’re planning a campaign for them you definitely have different goals than when you would for a brand new band that hasn’t broken through yet. It’s all about expectations. You’re going to want bigger stuff to happen. The biggest priority for us when it came to Pains was just to keep the record from leaking. It became the biggest part of the campaign – controlling who gets to hear it and when. We didn’t give it out to very many people early on. A big part of any campaign is controlling the leak. That’s another big way things have changed. One of the biggest thing that controls an online campaign is when the record leaks. Does it leak three months before the street date or does it leak a week before street date? We actually, put an online stream of the new Pains record on the Pains’ own website before it had a chance to leak. We leaked it ourselves, but we controlled how it was leaked and the presentation of the leak. We made sure it was out there on a streaming site where listeners could hear the whole record and had links to where users could buy it on vinyl or pre-order in on iTunes or Amazon, so that we still had sales going through. We spent a lot of time thinking about how we 132 wanted to present the stream. Ultimately, the band decided they wanted to present it on their own site, and send people to their own site, ThePainsofBeingPureAtHeart.com so people would go there. I thought it went really well because everyone heard the record. I like the way Radio Head has been doing things. They say, “We have a new album coming out. It will be available in five days.” That way everyone hears it at once on the same day. No one gets an early copy. I think things are leaning in that direction. Very short lead-up times that prevent the album from having time to leak. I like how they’re forcing people to bend to their schedule. We’re not going to give you three or for months heads-up that we’re coming out with an album like everybody used to. It’s coming out in five days. That model is appealing to me. They are changing the ballgame. More people will follow suit with that. Question: What about video, now that people have accessed-based methods to listen to music, has video become more important? Gill: Yea, having a good music video is more important now than it was ten years ago because of YouTube and Vimeo. Now there are more people paying attention to video and more outlets where you can get videos posted. I do feel that having a good music video and a good music presentation has become a lot more important. Everyone says, “Well, MTV doesn’t play videos anymore, so videos don’t matter anymore.” But I’d say the amount of people actually watching videos online has trumped that and made it a non-issue. It doesn’t matter that MTV doesn’t play videos, there are so many people watching videos online that you have to have a good music video, period. If a band does a whole campaign without turning in a really good music video, it makes the campaign 133 suffer. We definitely have a strong emphasis on video. We line up video premiers and try to get them to spread as much as possible by getting as many sites as possible to feature them. Question: Is there a way to promote an album on iTunes? Gill: We don’t deal with iTunes very much. Online retail people normally deal with it, but we do have a bit of interaction with iTunes. When a record is newly released, we try to get it in their email newsletter. They have new albums broken down by category, so you’ll have the alternative category, which is usually the one we go for, but sometimes we are featured in the electronic or hip hop categories. If you can get your album featured in the first page of the news letter, so that when people open up iTunes and see the “What’s new for you” getting a feature there is really good, because people often go onto iTunes to see what’s new, because you can sample the first 30 seconds of each track for free, so that’s huge. You can definitively pitch iTunes, they do a free single of the week, and if you can get that than you’re on the site for a week. Everyone can download your track for free and then if they like it, they’ll hopefully purchase the rest of the record. We deal a lot more with Emusic. It’s more content heavy. We work with them to get interviews for our bands. They’ll do features like, “Songs That Broke Your Heart,” and they’ll interview bands about memorable breakups and then pick a soundtrack to that. Little editorial features like that where they’ll interview bands. We get involved a lot with things like that. 134 Question: There’s a real emphasis on speed in the indie Blogosphere because by using sites like Hype Machine, you can see who blogged about an artist first, do you factor that into blogger outreach? Gill: Yea, it goes back to what we talked about earlier with working with established bands verses new bands. If you’re working with an established band, they’re probably going to want their track to go straight to Pitchfork or Stereo Gum, one of the bigger sites. So, you’re going to premier it there and then try and get the smaller blogs to repost it from there. So you’re doing a trickle down effect. But with a brand new band that isn’t ready for a Pitchfork premier, you’re going to give it to a smaller blog that just happens to be a blog people are paying attention to that week and then hope that it trickles-up, which is when you have smaller but influential blogs writing on a band and you’re hoping that people start paying attention to what the taste-making kids are saying that week. Question: Prior to the internet there was an informational vacuum in independent music. For example, if Hüsker Dü came out with a new album, they couldn’t really promote it because they didn’t have the tools to do so. Now, there’s more coverage for indie music online, how do you engage the online audience to create hype for a band? Gill: I do think that’s definitely true. When I was getting in the music in the late 1980s and early 1990s there was nothing really. Without the internet, I’d have to go to the record store and look at record covers. I’d buy records if the cover looked cool. I had no way of knowing if it would be good or not because I had no way of sampling it before I 135 bought it. Now it’s a different world. The only things that really existed back then were fanzines and straight up touring. Even though things have changed, I still believe that touring is still the number one most essential thing for a band to start getting attention. I know there are a lot of bedroom projects that get a lot of online attention now, before the show has even played a show. But a lot of the time, it back fires because they’re pressured to put together a live show really fast. Usually it just ends up being a guy with a laptop that he’s singing over. People are like, “ This is what everyone was talking about?” I still feel that putting together a live show and touring in your home town and then hopefully getting picked-up as an opening act by a bigger touring band is the best way to build an audience and get attention. If I had to give advice to someone trying to start a music career, I’d still say that having a good live show is the number one thing. Question: What can you do on your end to promote these artists? Gill: There are a lot of things that go into it. The first step is getting people to listen to the record. You send the record out to a lot of people and hopefully they trust your track record of what you sent them in the past. You can say, “hey, I sent you this band Yuck and I really think you’re going to like it. You’re going to have to trust me. Go listen to the record and then go see them play in your town on this date.” You try to get people out to see a band. Then you help the band play at the right parties at South by Southwest or CMJ. Getting on different festival lineups is important. We play a role in that. We negotiate who’s playing what party at South by Southwest. Publicists are still involved with that. Booking agents book the regular tour, but when it comes to blog parties at festivals, it’s still the publicist and the managers who decide who’s going to 136 play what. I feel like that’s still important. There are a lot of people who would never see a band in their hometown but would go to a free daytime event at South by Southwest to see five minutes of a band. If they are sold on them in those five minutes, you’ve done your job. Getting someone to see a band is still the most important thing. It’s just how you get from point A to point B. Even though a lot of what we do is virtual, you’re not going to sell someone completely on a band unless they see them live.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Historically, indie rock artists and record labels have had few tools for generating publicity. This is because the most powerful promotional tools in the music industry, i.e. terrestrial commercial radio and mainstream music publications, have featured artists signed to major labels over indie rock artists. Consequently, many listeners have had limited exposure to indie rock music, which has caused the genre to only be popular among niche audiences.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Nowierski, James (author)

Core Title The evolution of public relations practices in the indie rock genre

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Strategic Public Relations

Publication Date 05/03/2011

Defense Date 04/01/2011

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag independent music,indie,indie rock,OAI-PMH Harvest,Public Relations

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Swerling, Gerald (committee chair), Kun, Joshua (committee member), Stoubis, Nick (committee member)

Creator Email jnowierski@gmail.com,nowiersk@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3851

Unique identifier UC1438616

Identifier etd-Nowierski-4551 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-458767 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3851 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Nowierski-4551.pdf

Dmrecord 458767

Document Type Thesis

Rights Nowierski, James

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu