The Internet will change everything
You heard it here a two years ago and several times since. It has been slow in coming but check out this article about a rock band making it big without backing from a big record company.
What makes Arctic Monkeys remarkable is that they are an indie band on an independent label, and that they achieved their sudden success almost entirely through grassroots promotion on the web.
The foursome got together in 2002. They started playing shows around Sheffield and passing out free CDs at gigs. They encouraged their fans to trade the tunes online and to post them to websites and P2P networks. Yes, they encouraged file trading. Eventually, more and more people found them on MySpace or on their website via word-of-mouth, and their reach started to widen. Fans started booking them in venues farther and farther away from their hometown. Wherever they played, everyone in the crowd knew the words to the songs. This is all before they even signed to a record label.
Curiously, after achieving phenomenal success on their own, they contracted with a record company. A better deal, I think, would have been cut with Wal-Mart. Heh, a distribution deal with Wal-Mart is better than a deal with one of the powerful RIAA members. The kicker is that all it cost Wal-Mart to provide the service is some disk space and a few minutes of a webmaster’s time. Maybe $150 bucks.
I wouldn’t surprise me at all to see Wal-Mart open low-cost, state-of-the-art recording facilitiesLocated in regions like Austin, Memphis, L.A., New York–wherever this is a robust music scene–for use by artists with whom they have distribution deals.
The main reason the RIAA are so vicious in protecting their copyrights is because they know that in the very near future that music is all they will have the rights to sell. They are not worried about the future because they rightly figure they are not in it. The musicians will finally wake up and small the java realizing that the web is the only place they need to be. Then they will realize that they don’t need a big record company with expensive production equipment and media contacts to do it. They just need a good web strategy and a good web development team.
My previous articles on the demise of the big recording companies and RIAA :
(I saw this article over a t Digg, a cool tech news aggregator)