Erstellt am: 19. 3. 2010 - 12:14 Uhr
Today's Webtip: Musicians Wanted
There was a time when being an indie band meant doing almost everything yourself. Many indie labels got their start as a platform for the founders music, gradually expanding to include other artists. The advantage to this was an incredible amount of artistic freedom and a fair share of any income that might have been generated. The disadvantage was the very limited access to potential audiences. Shelf-space and airtime has traditionally been locked up by the majors, or major-owned indies, making it very difficult for smaller labels to ever get discovered by their potential audience.
The true scarcity in the music industry used to be distribution.
The internet has been threatening to change that for a very long time now. But so far it hasn't really been able to deliver on its promise. Most online music stores made it anything but easy for truly independent bands to sell their works, and MySpace quickly degenerated into a playground for Major marketers and wannabe spammers.
Online radio was killed before it even got off the ground, and history is littered with the remains of music portals that were destroyed before they could reach critical mass.
But it looks as though things might be about to change.
YouTube has gone into the music business. After years of struggling with the content industry, the online video behemoth made the decision to act on one of the biggest promises of the internet. It cut out the middlemen. All of them.
On the 16th of March, YouTube music manager Michele Flannery announced Musicians Wanted. A curated site featuring truly independent music videos. It's not geoblocked, artists get a "major share" of the ad revenue generated, and they can promote their shows and sell merchandise, CD's and songs directly from the site.
First band to sign up? OK Go. A band that just recently freed itself from EMI, after a rather intense dust-up over embedding rights for their music videos. Another band to jump on the (band)wagon includes Pomplaoose, who were also nice enough to make a promo for the project:
The videos are viewable by everyone, and the bands currently available are a pretty good picture of the potential YouTube holds for indies. Viewer numbers range from the low hundreds to over 4 million (for an accoustic ode to Mario Kart).
Compare this to the old fashioned Major-Label/Google cooperation Vevo.
Right now, only bands form the U.S. can sign up. I assume this has to do with payment mechanisms, and we can only hope that it is eventually opened up to the rest of us.
I might be mistaken, but I think this may be the very first time an independent music business model has launched at this scale. It should be a very interesting project to keep an eye on...