How can the net help musicians?

“It empowers them. It removes the tyranny-of-distance factor. It gives them a global audience, if they are smart enough to market themselves right. It really does bridge the gap between where they are as musicians, whether they are just coming out of the garage or whether they are just coming out of the conservatorium and into the success that they dream about, but were formally pretty much kept out of the game by the gatekeeper mentality of multinational distribution networks. In a nutshell, there’s not much of a difference between tap water and bottled water. And bottled water is albums and tap water is MP3s and digital downloading of music over the internet. Essentially the music is still the water, but what you’re doing with the internet is that you’re able to ship the water without the bottles. In essence the beauty of being in 1999 and being on the edge of the millennium, and I do call it a musical millennium too, is that the old paradigms, the old ways of doing business, the old exclusionary tactics, the old ‘we-can-only-sign-so-many-artists’, ‘we-only-have-so-much-of-a-budget’, can be overcome much more easily now.

“The internet is a great tool but in the wrong hands it can make whatever you’re doing look like and sound like shit. Generally you only get one chance with the consumer’s ears, just like it is with a A&R person’s ears ... If you do your research, do your homework, create something that loads quickly, that’s fast, that’s clean and that attracts notoriety, then you’ve got a better chance than most bands who have a major record contract.”

There was a time and perhaps it still exists now where you’d learn an instrument, form a band, write a few songs, play at the local pub, send out a demo to the record companies and cross your fingers. What role can the internet play with new musicians?

“There are three good ways of doing it. The first is composition, making the songs. People can actually write songs together at great distances from each other using the internet. You can transfer files back and forth. The second is being able to record and to transmit the music in a business sense. The thing is that people can collaborate on music at great distances and again ship digital files to each other. But what’s more, once those files are finished you can distribute them to radio stations, to record companies, any number of outlets for your music. And finally, let’s think about the consumer for the moment. You can sample consumers with your music to get them to buy the hard discs or you can sell your songs for a minimal amount through either established companies like Chaos Music or Liquid Audio or whoever or going through your own record company or your own site or through an indie or a major.

“If you want to issue a CD in Australia now, a single, the record company has to take 10,000 pieces of plastic, splatter it with aluminium and make digits in it. And then they have to wrap it in a tree and stuff it in a box and put it in a petrol device and transport it to 1,500 record stores in Australia. Generally a quantity of 10,000 singles. And then they pray for six weeks. They do everything they can to try and get that single to work: they go to radio, they go everywhere, they advertise it, they do everything they can. And at the end of the six week window, which is generally all the time they’ve got to make it or break it, the ones that didn’t sell are all shipped back to a central location via the same petrol device and then they are ground up and turned into landfill. That is the short, ten week life history of a single.”

Most of those individual releases have that fate, don’t they?

“Absolutely. However, over the internet I can right now take a song, put it up on a site, advertise the hell out of it, promote the hell out of it and either give it away in exchange for people’s email addresses and some other information on them in order to get them interested, in order to get them to buy the album, which can then either be plastic or delivered to them by the net or by cable or by satellite. The thing is I don’t have to extend one piece of plastic to make that single work. I can ship that single to radio and they never have to use a piece of plastic.”

Phil’s role as a sort of motivation coach for Australian music can be seen in two projects that he is heavily involved in, The Australian Online Music Awards, a.k.a. the ONYA! Awards, and, The Fourth National Entertainment Industry Conference which pulls together an impressive list of local and international speakers all discussing the future of Australian music. The conference will be held in Sydney on August 6th and 7th. Check their web site for full details.

The ONYA! Awards: What the hell are they and why should we be interested?

“The Oscars, the Grammys, the Emmys, the Logies, they all honour people who have made it. The Australian Online Music Awards, or the ONYAS!, honour the pioneers, the innovators and those people who have used their sweat and their brains to take music through a whole evolution and revolution to a whole new audience, globally. These awards really do honour the little people because most of the people who do music web sites or do innovation in music technology are young, unknown, don’t have a hope in hell and create things from the sweat of the brow and their hands. The great thing about what the ONYA! Awards is doing is exposing people throughout the world to Australian artists, Australian web sites, Australian labels, Australian anything.”
 
 
 

James Black has been a musician, producer and manager of Things of Stone and Wood. He is also successfully pioneering a new way of marketing music via Niche Records.

How can the internet help musicians?

“First up, I’d say that the internet has a lot of potential to help musicians. It doesn’t help a lot at the moment, for lots of reasons. The main way a musician can be helped on the internet is by building up an email listing of people who are interested in their music. That is fantastic. I used to manage Things of Stone and Wood. The big cost particularly for independent musicians is promoting. If you get to a point where people are coming to see you and like what you do, by putting them on your mailing list or data base or an email list you have this incredibly low cost way of keeping people in the loop. Once people are in a loop they generally want to stay in it - they are happy to find out what’s going on. For example, Things of Stone and Wood hadn’t played publicly for over a year. Last week they did one gig and we just sent out our email list to Victorian people and we had 400 paying customers there and we didn’t do any advertising. We put up $100 worth of café posters and that was it. And it cost $250 to send out a mailing list. To send out the email list cost 24 cents.

“Things of Stone and Wood has built up fans in other countries, and we got email addresses whenever we could and those people are still interested in the band and they will buy CDs if the band does anything. It’s a really fantastic thing. That is, by far, the most useful aspect of the internet for a musician. It’s practical, it really works well, it costs you nothing.

“The thing about putting up a web site is... A web site is easy to do. The problem that everyone overlooks is that you’ve got to make people come to it. Now if you’ve got fans and their on your email list then you can always notify them and say that something’s on the web and you’ve got to come and check this out. But it actually takes a lot of resources to keep a good web site going, to keep it fresh. For most bands it’s a struggle, unless there’s someone who is really keen on it and can do the technical work, it’s very hard to keep a site fresh. If you’re on the net and you go somewhere and it feels dead, you very quickly lose interest in it. You don’t go back.

“There’s 10 million people on the internet but they’ve got to have a reason to come to you. You can put your name on the search engines which is not so hard, but still they are not going to come unless they look for that name. So, it’s not as great as it sounds, but, if you’ve got the technical ability to do it yourself and you’ve got a strategy to promote the web site and the resources to do it, which may only be time. Our main emphasis [at Niche Records] is still on making a magazine and promoting artists and CDs through the magazine. We’ve got a web site where we sell artist’s CDs for them. It means that anyone, anywhere in the world can buy their CD. It’s now not that hard to do that. ‘Cos that’s the big dream. The dream of the internet is to cut out the big middle men and investors and connect musicians with their audiences directly. To some extent it’s a bit of a myth still, but it’s obviously heading that way. There are no wildly successful net stories that I know of. There is no band who has broken out exclusively on the net, that I’m aware of, although that’s probably going to change soon.”

What will it look like if and when it happens?

“I think that a lot of net things are going to become a lot more secretive and special. The thing about the net at the moment is that it’s all there - you can go anywhere. In some ways this is a bad thing because it cheapens… it’s sort of reduced music to a commodity.”

Hasn’t it reached that point already? I’m thinking of the transistor radio, piped music…

“It has. The internet is accelerating that. One of the most interesting areas of the internet are the mediated email lists. They are hard to find out about. They are a mailing group where you have to pass some kind of test to get on it. A big part of music, certainly popular music, is the whole social function of music. People often choose to want to like things. People say ‘I want to be in this gang;’ that’s a big part of it. It’s about mystery too. In terms of mass marketing, there’ll be a big mass market on the internet like everything else, Celine Dion will sell truckloads, no doubt about it. For the smaller independent bands, they have to got to create their own mystery, their own space.”

For a site with more music links than a sausaga factory check out  http://www.immedia.com.au/links/Media.html