Signal to Noise

There was a time when radio stations were independent license holders, when the guy at the local record store was who you went to for music-buying advice, and the most successful musical acts were sought after for intimate concert performance by a faithful, local audience.

Then came the era of superstardom, brought on by previously unparalleled success of performers like Elvis Presley, the product of the early national broadcast networks. Give me geographic ubiquity in mass media, and I’ll give you a superstar. American Idol shows us the formula for marketing a superstar: more is better. More TV audience, more distribution, more touring, and, perhaps most importantly, more mileage on the tour bus.

The notion of “if you can’t make it on the national stage, you just can’t make it in the music business” has been more and more true since the days of Ed Sullivan. The ‘discoveries’ and ‘big breaks’ that happened before the national broadcast networks were much smaller: a couple of kids playing guitar on a local radio station to a listening audience of only a few hundred would’ve been considered a big break in the days of Fats Domino and earlier.

This is localism, of course. The evidence of localism in the early recording business is all over the early art: Frank Sinatra sang songs about cities (New York, New York, et al) because it was the local community that patronized the pioneering artists in the art of recording back in those early days.

Times, as they do, have changed. Today, we have national and international superstardom as a requirement for commercial success in the music business–meaning that, for an artist, the availability of a viable entrance into the greater market is slim to none, and that, for the listener, the availability of locally relevant music choices is practically nonexistent.

Sure, there are local artists. Guys who finance their own recordings and dump tons of time and effort into the best production they can get: usually a local studio that charges thirty bucks an hour for a mixing engineer that’s got stars in his eyes. These guys often make good music, but because they aren’t willing to shlep along earning a hundred bucks a night for years, they go nowhere, their audience doesn’t typically rise dramatically, and they remain locked out of the larger scene, relegated to the unfortunate status of “indie”.

A while back, I wrote that iTunes ought to be on the forefront of promoting independent music in a hyperlocal way by allowing artists to submit their songs in the same fashion podcasters are enabled to submit their podcasts. That was a year or so ago. Not much has changed. iTunes’ cues are till taken from the big labels that represent the lion’s share of the music they purvey. Local or indie music gets little to no attention while the stars who are already stars get pushed over the top.

But the model of Web 2.0, the democratization of the web that was such a buzz concept in 2006, allows for a conduit like iTunes to return artist recognition to the state it was in before Ed Sullivan, before national television, before the domination of a handful of low-output record distributors who refer to themselves as studios.

But how?

- Allow indies to upload and manage their music profiles on iTunes in a fashion similar to iLike or MySpace.

- Equip GarageBand and Logic Express with mastering capabilites so that indie artists can give the best presentation possible on iTunes.

- Highlight indie artists in a geographic or hyperlocal fashion.

- Allow indie artists to compete on a level playing field–even setting their own price. Podcasts are free after all. Surely there’s a way to allow indie artists to distribute a few tracks for free, especially if it means increased revenue for the greater distribution system.

The net result, if local music were allowed to flourish, would be that the high cost of promoting and maintaining a big-label offering would shrink, international superstardom would be less of a pre-req for making money in Hollywood and Nashville, live performance would become a profit driver for the person doing the promoting (the label), distribution of recordings would diminish as the main revenue stream for the person doing the promoting (again, the label), and all studios, be they in Hollywood or Akron, could offer a high number of artist-products that are actually profitable.

And profit, in art and science, is the name of the game.