Elitism

I really wanted to write something up about Tommy Silverman's (of Tommy Boy Records and an RIAA board member) interview with Wired magazine, but Mike of Techdirt and Jeff Price of Tunecore said pretty much everything I wanted to say. Briefly, my beef was with the attitude summed up by this statement.

80 percent of all records released are just noise — hobbyists. [...] Who uses Photobucket and Flickr? Not professional photographers — those are hobbyists, and those are the people who are using TuneCore and iTunes to clutter the music environment with crap, so that the artists who really are pretty good have more trouble breaking through than they ever did before.

It's a direct attack on the notion that anyone not already corralled by a label makes bad music, that the labels "make" the good music. Ultimately, Silverman's pitch is that artists need labels, because he says so. The power of the internet is that it frees us from the need for labels as curators (though that's a charitable term here). There's been a lot of backlash from artists recently in relation to the labels' plea that they're "for artists", when their short existence is littered with tales of artist abuse. More artists are succeeding without labels, and more diverse music is getting out there, fans are voting with their wallets and their feet (and their ears). The major labels have survived a long time on artificially choking the market so that they're the only game in town, now that's ending and they're suddenly trying to play nice. Perhaps they're in stage three of grief, "anger and bargaining", we've already seen the preceding stages, "guilt", and the napster stage "denial".

Masnick makes these points more eloquently, but it's really Tunecore's Jeff Price who says it best.

We're sorry that the fact that people are buying music from TuneCore Artists is stopping people from buying music that Tommy likes. If Tommy could only control what music you get exposed to you would be more inclined to buy his music. It's actually a brilliant strategy: limit choice, force the releases you want to sell down people's throats, control what music is exposed by the media outlets (like radio and MTV) and then take all the money from the sales that come in. Oh wait, my mistake, that's the way it was in the old music industry, and 98% of what the majors labels released failed. I guess limiting choice does not make music sell.

Also pointed out in the Wired article's comments by "our_tunes" and especially "Khaullen".