The fundamental motivation for my ongoing thesis research is my desire to fill a perceived void, and to offer practicing music makers and fans a compelling description of a largely un(der)explored space: The current, though highly dynamic state of “independent” music making in the context of what I believe are very exciting new potentials for practicing musicians in light of Web 2.0 technologies, especially online social networks, of which MySpace Music and Last-FM are the forerunners.

There are literally countless music critics, music industry analysts, music/MP3 bloggers that I constantly find talking about all of this stuff (or at least offering up their opinions and (un)informed perceptions), but all of the writings and musings tend to amount to little more than highly scattered, often fleeting, bits of information inundating my Gmail inbox as Google Alerts. My goal is to synthesize as much of this perpetual info. influx as possible and attempt to delineate a more comprehensive, historical understanding of the changes taking place with respect to independent music making today as well as a careful consideration of these ‘new’ practices and their relationship to many of the motivations, practices, and realities associated with early punk rock and hardcore scenes, which were nascent instantiations of “independent” music as representative of explicit desires to transform dominant discourses within what might be called the traditional music business or industry.

I’m especially interested in what I would call artist-led projects—that is, projects which operate outside of a traditional record label, or label system almost entirely—and how online social networks, and networked culture more generally allow for the such projects to develop more often and more successfully, frequently expanding rapidly and dynamically in comparison to ‘old’ social networks that were ultimately limited by technologies of physicality and the dimensions of real space. I have found very few articles or even surveys dealing with such issues around online social networks, and seemingly none which consider the transformations of social practices in spaces of “independent” music making over time (i.e., an historical approach towards understanding ‘new’ trends in the music business).
Two pieces that I did manage to locate however have been quite thought provoking: First is an article by Jesse C. Bockstedt, Robert J. Kauffman, and Frederick J. Riggins, “The Move to Artist-Led On-Line Music Distribution: A Theory-Based Assessment and Prospects for Structural Change in the Digital Music Market” (sorry, no access to anything but the abstract), which appeared in the Spring 2006 International Journal of Electronic Commerce. Second is a fairly recent piece by Julian Knowles, titled “A Survey of Web 2.0 Music Trends and Some Implications for Tertiary Music Communities,” which came out of the 2007 conference, Proceedings of the National Council of Tertiary Music Schools, Music in Australian Tertiary Institutions: Issues for the 21st Century. Although the former is definitely ‘old’ news by today’s standards, it still has a great deal of insightful hypotheses and propositions, which have been driving some of my own thinking. The latter article by Knowles is quite literally the only piece of remotely academic research I’ve been able to uncover that deals with Web 2.0 technologies specifically related to music.

Bockstedt et al. basically present a very straightforward overview of transformations which have taken place in the recording industry with the introduction of a broad array of ‘new’ digital technologies. For them the MP3 stands in as the central cause of trends toward increased artist control. The paper ultimately seeks to understand what it is that record labels might do to leverage new technologies so as to maintain a powerful role in the music business, and this frankly isn’t my main interest. Even so, for Bockstedt et al. the solution for the record companies seems to lie in the inclusion of value-added content for music recordings along with digital rights management encoding (DRM) to protect copyrighted materials. Having been written in 2006, coupled with the fact that few academics appear to be thinking through the impact that MySpace Music or other online music social networks are having on the music business, the movement towards economically viable and perhaps very successful artist-directed music projects goes overlooked in the article. Bockstedt et al. rightly point out the virtually negligible production and distribution costs that are more and more defining the digital music environment, but they still imagine that the record label has the discourse of marketing on long-term lock down. However, had there been at least some consideration of platforms like MySpace Music and Last-FM, along with similar trends in networked music culture more generally (MP3 blogs, webzines, fan music videos on YouTube, an array of embeddable plugin applications for music streaming across the Internets, and webpage customization, e.g., the ‘writable’ or programmable web) then the continued dominance of traditional record labels within the music business, particularly on the marketing side of the equations, may have been more questionable.

That said, I don’t mean to completely devalue the traditional recording industry, though I will say their operations are largely beyond my immediate concerns. Record labels, however one looks at (independent or major), play the role of gatekeepers, whether they choose to sign the successful acts or not. In an environment like MySpace or Last-Fm, where anyone with their own creative content can share it amongst other artists and fans alike, it becomes a much more open, participatory and, dare I say it, democratized environment. I do find it quite interesting that in the early days of so-called “independent” music making that the independents were forced to either enter into relationships with the major labels (distribution, marketing deals), or alternatively they (as was the case with a label like Rough Trade Records), ended up reconstituting the very infrastructure of the label system they quite politically sought to oppose. Today, it’s almost approaching a complete reversal, in which “independents” are at the forefront of trying new things and seeing what happens, whereby major labels have been forced into a reactionary modality in which they seem to be perpetually jumping on the bandwagon as if their personified lives depended on it (which they likely do).

The likelihood of record labels completely disappearing anytime soon seems, at least to me, highly unlikely. They do have resources that a single individual or a group of individuals would be hard pressed to muster independently, and sometimes to reach a wider audience such resources may well be a necessity. Recent projects like Radiohead’s In Rainbows album and Trent Reznor’s proclamation that he will abandon his record label for future releases for a more “direct relationship” with fans, are both indicative of the possibility that well-known, internationally recognized music acts may be able to forego the record label game entirely. Moderately well-known acts however, especially more popular “independent” acts (Spoon, The Shins, Bright Eyes, The Arcade Fire, and other Billboard chart toppers) have proven, insofar as their continued and sometimes surprising success, that middle-ground acts stand to benefit a great deal from continued interaction with record labels and the benefits they have to offer. By contrast, emerging and unknown acts are almost invariably off the proverbial radar screen of most, if not all, record labels, and so the huge importance of alternative platforms, like the open, non-gated communities of MySpace Music or Last-FM cannot be overstated. Instant access to a vast numbers of fans and other musicians holds previously unimaginable potential for spreading the word.

Despite the brevity of the Knowles survey, it certainly does begin to at least take an important stab at considering the potential benefits of music social networks for fans and musicians, especially for the lesser-knowns (though Knowles primarily considers music consumers in the context of both Pandora—a much more proprietary platform—and Last-FM) . The way in which tags are employed by users of these platforms for Knowles represents a shift away from a ‘wisdom of experts’ model for spaces of music making and consumption towards a web 2.0, ‘wisdom of crowds’ model. It becomes less about large record companies throwing money behind particular musical groups and more about communities of fans and artists interacting (whether knowingly or not) to define a set of taste hierarchies, thereby determining who rises to the ‘top of the charts.’ The so-called taste-makers are ostensibly the aggregate of users. MySpace and Last-FM, among many other social networks come with expansive, already existing communities of many like-minded artists and fans. Moreover, new startup musicians do not enter these communities from a vacuum. They undoubtedly have friends and contacts already present in these environments and those connections can and should be strategically used, assuming the desire is to one’s music reach a wider audience. The ability of fans and artists to embed tracks and/or music videos into their personal pages and elsewhere on the web powerfully brings easy-to-execute viral marketing strategies into the mix.

At the end of the day what makes ‘good’ music, or music that will attract the attention of listeners is difficult, if not impossible to define (there are simply too many factors involved). The strategic use of the countless new technological affordances alone cannot guarantee economic or even social success for practicing independent musicians, though I would argue that it certainly can’t hurt. It is my stance that the DIY (”do it yourself”) social practices that have long motivated and defined independent music scenes (esp. since the early punk rock scenes of the late 1970s) combined with new media technologies—of which online social networks are in my mind the most crucial—provide music practitioners with an increased potential for realizing sustained and independent viability outside of the traditional music business. What’s key to understand however, something that scholars and practitioners are frequently missing, is the social aspect. For music makers it’s about social networks, collaboration, and a do it together, rather than DIY approach.

After reading Sasha Frere-Jones’ article “A Paler Shade of White: How Indie Rock Lost Its Soul,” in The New Yorker, I couldn’t help my perception of how blatantly oversimplified (and in numerous instances, decidedly uninformed) her argument was. I have mulled over this article for several weeks now, and still I feel like I can’t come up with a reasonably concise response; basically I feel like I could write a thesis on the matter (someone should). My excuses: First, I don’t enjoy writing much (making this blog an instant oddity), and second, when I do write I tend to be long-winded and that’s why I don’t enjoy writing.

As this is the case, my response will be brief (sort of). I think the part of Jones’ article that confounded me most, and honestly troubled me, was the putting forth of The Fiery Furnaces as an indie rock group which exemplifies the supposed breach, or rift between ‘white’ indie-rock and ‘black’ rhythm and blues. There were plenty of other indie rock groups/musicians and their musics which were interpreted similarly by Jones, but I refuse to go through them one-by-one, so I’ll just use The Fiery Furnaces, and a couple of additional examples not addressed by Jones to make my point.

i) The Fiery Furnaces, prior to their recent move to the Thrill Jockey record label, were signed to the Fat Possum label, based in Oxford, Mississippi. Why is that relevant? It’s a fucking blues label, that’s why! I don’t want to say that every artist on Fat Possum is a blues artist first-and-foremost (they’re not), but they certainly bear a very clear relationship to the styles, rhythms, syncopations, and improvisations characteristic of ‘rhythm & blues,’ as the genre is historically understood. Fat Possum is very much concerned with keeping the blues a part of music making, and has made concerted efforts to inject it into a variety of diverse musical genres; the blues-informed music of the sometimes ridiculous (and challenging) prog-rockers, The Fiery Furnaces, is just one example of this. Although they only released one album, Bitter Tea (2006), on the Fat Possum label, they have been consciously and often transparently integrating the blues into their ‘new’ sound from the outset. An early example of this, coming off of their debut full-length, Gallowsbird Bark (Rough Trade; 2003), is the song “Asthma Attack”—to read it any other way (e.g., as non-blues) is essentially an exercise in ignorance. Another, perhaps more literal instantiation of The Fiery Furnace’s commitment and embrace of the blues comes in their cover of Junior Kimbrough’s “I’m Leaving,” which is part of a tribute album, Sunday Nights (2005), to the now deceased blues legend.

In stark contrast to Jones, I would actually hold The Fiery Furnaces up as music makers representative of the ongoing and highly innovative dialogue between ‘white’ indie rock and ‘black’ rhythm and blues (of course, as I alluded to at the beginning of this post, such a black and white distinction is total rubbish though… in my humble opinion anyway).

ii) Not mentioned by Jones, but worth pointing out as quite definitively a ‘blues’ band that’s very “in” with the indie crowd: The Black Keys. (Before signing to None Such—the imprint of Wilco—the Black Keys had been a long-time, and important group to the Fat Possum label.)

iii) The following excerpt (lifted straight from one of my favorite, though just recently defunct, music webzines, Stylus) uses Kanye West’s latest full-length as a focal point through which to address, rather viscerally, the issues that Jones raises in her article:

“Amidst all the recent hullabaloo over indie-rock’s apparent estrangement from rhythm and soul (and the unsurprising counter-argument that mainstream pop and rap aren’t exactly conversant with freak-folk and twee either), an ideal seems to have been aggregated of an artist who can effortlessly surmount such distinctions of race, class and genre.

Lucky for us then that such a savior already exists in the ever-so-humble visage of Kanye West, sampling Can without self-consciousness, putting Chris Martin on without sacrificing “streetness,” exposing diplomas and hood cred as equally illusory. And this isn’t about some tokenist, “rap album it’s OK to like” bullshit either, but rather about an artist who has crafted a persona generous enough to communicate compellingly with hipsters, self-styled thugs and Middle America all at once. Certainly this needn’t be the aim of all artists (niches need love too), but this is what you handwringing motherfuckers were asking for, ain’t it?”

Insofar as this is only a single example—not to mention that West is likely not playing the part of Christ in bringing people together as consciously as this makes it seem—it may be oversimplified, though certainly not as Jones’ contention(s). I don’t know if more needs to be said than it’s simply not black and white.

QED.

It’s worth being a bit more clear about how random the conversation alluded to in the title of this post actually was. Over this past weekend I found myself in the uber-rural village of Cooperstown, New York, home to the good old Baseball Hall of Fame. On Saturday, I found myself drinking cup after cup of coffee in the local thank-God-they-have-the-Internet- somewhere-in-this-town cafe trying to get some serious research done. (If you’re wondering why I was even in Cooperstown it was only because my fiancee is currently doing a rotation there for several weeks as part of her third year of medical school.) I’m sitting in said cafe blasting some fast-paced punk rock—Bad Brains and some Sleater-Kinney if I remember correctly—hoping that the pace of the music would translate into a similar pace of ‘gettin’ shit done,’ or GSD (a more ambitious, though highly volatile model for productivity and time management when compared to the tamer GTD approach). Out of nowhere, this old dude starts talking to me; I’m not that great at estimating age, but just think Methusaleh. I try to ignore him at first, if only because I generally don’t like people, but then he starts waving his hand in front of my face. Can’t do much at that point. My large studio headphones establish a sound barrier, but what am I supposed to do, pretend I’m blind when I’m clearly surfin’ the web?

With my headphones off, and my caffeine induced shaking currently under moderate control, he starts pelting me with questions: ‘Oh, so who are you?’ ‘What are you working on?’ ‘What are you listening to?’—he’s never heard of Bad Brains (is being old a legitimate excuse for this?)—’Do you go to school?’ ‘Are you from Cooperstown?’ and so on. I entertain his questions as best I can, just waiting for it to come to an end, until he asks me about my research and I explain that I’m looking at ‘new’ online social networks and the practices of music making in and around those environments, specifically as related to “independent” musicians and artists. I tell him about my historical approach, namely, a consideration of the emergence of these “independent” practices in the early punk rock and hardcore music scenes, and how independent practices today are largely the result of an evolution and dialogue between music makers and their changing technological environment; practices are not wholly new, nor are the technologies completely revolutionary despite much mainstream rhetoric to the contrary. I do however argue that the affordances of many new technologies have significantly increased the possibilities for DIY music making. But again, this is all part of a longer-term push by “indepedent” labels and/or musicians to realize more democratized spaces for music making than previously offered by the traditional recording industry. After going on and on about all of this (in a much less coherent fashion than above) I’m expecting either a lack of interest, followed by awkward silence, or perhaps more probable, that typical encounter-with-a-stranger story progression, in which they quickly change topics moving towards something we might share in common. I’m expecting the next line to be: ‘So, pretty brisk out there today, huh?’ Well, it turns out, to my surprise, that this guy was, or still is (it was somewhat unclear), a recording musician himself, and an “independent” one at that. Classical music, particularly piano, was his cup of tea, but that wasn’t really where our conversation went.

At some length we debated the longevity of the compact disc, and whether digital, networked culture is shifting the music business towards a model where the production and circulation of physical artifacts will not just diminish—being overcome by the dominance of MP3s (and other digital formats)—but vanish entirely. The possibility of the end of the recording business has been partially (and I believe shortsightedly) prophesied by Dave Kusek and Gerd Leonhard, in their “manifesto,” The Future of Music. Initially the old guy (I never got his name, so ‘old guy’ will have to suffice) held the view that artists produce and release music in physical form because of some difficult to define cultural cache, some tacit instantiation of coolness. My notion of this was more along the lines of the album as a collectable form, in the same way that fine artworks, or more popular media, like comics (or almost anything physical), are collectable, and can potentially be passed around, “handed-off,” shown off, or sold off. (Would anyone every pay for used MP3s files?) Here I’m thinking about taste-heirarchies along the lines of Bourdieu, but also something more about simple tangibility, which an MP3 can never match—music as aural and tactile media. You can’t hold an MP3, nor can it be displayed, other than as a file on a computer screen (unless there’s some new computer magic I don’t know about…). The MP3 might lead to a lot of gains in terms of ease of use, transportation, duplication, sharing, editing, etc., but there are numerous trade-offs/losses that I suspect many people will not want to deal with.

From here, the old guy took a line of reasoning effectively in line with the digital-overtakes-physical rhetoric that pervades a lot of current hypothesizing around the next steps for the music business: he believed that a day would come in the not too distant future, where theoretically any and all of the known sound recordings would be instantly accessible from virtually anywhere (I recall this number being somewhere between 20 and 25 million recordings). He interpreted this universal library of recorded sound, always at our fingertips, as the harbinger of the end of physical recordings. Although I agreed with the plausibility of his first claim, I didn’t necessarily buy into his suggested consequence. In following independent album releases over the past several years, I’ve noticed that vinyl appears to be experiencing a resurgence of the sorts, with more and more artists putting together vinyl runs of new (and old) albums; this view is based on purely anecdotal personal experience, but it seems reasonable that such a trend fits within Anderson’s ‘long tail’ economics model. What’s different however is that these vinyl editions are almost always coming with digital download coupons which provide a link and password/ code for access to MP3s of each track on the album, and sometimes bonus material. In my mind the future of music is not an end to physicality, but rather a balance, or convergence of old and new forms, where collective forms like the CD, and especially vinyl, will endure over time. These ‘new’ vinyl releases quite literally embody such convergence. Vinyl has been around a long time, despite continual attempts to relegate it to obsolescence via worldviews that somehow continue to see only the forward march of technological progress. The vinyl album’s continuing presence and usage within DJ culture, as well as amongst experimental/electronic musicians, broadcast radio stations (like WMBR), record collectors, and music fans more generally, may be significantly reshaped by digital MP3 music, but people and practices will resist complete overhaul—vinyl won’t disappear.

Eventually the old guy started blathering about how his wife left him for David Bowie (who was already a superstar, millionaire music icon), which sort of caused me to rethink the legitimacy of any previous statement he had made; I also had the lurking suspicion that David Bowie didn’t actually know the old guy’s wife when she left him… In retrospect though I feel like I managed to come away with a great deal of insight, if only because wild and far-out claims made during informal discussion can really force you to consider your own positions more critically; it also reminded me of the partial truth that randomness and luck are often invaluable factors in (re)formulating your own ideas and interests. That said, even though I came away from this random exchange with some potentially fruitful directions to pursue in relation to my research, I really can’t imagine I’ll be starting any kind of trend where I just strike up conversations with complete strangers in places as surreal as Cooperstown.  Thank you old guy.

Recently I’ve been experimenting more and more with online social music networks like MySpace Music, Last-FM, Fuzz, Grooveshark, and Amie Street, in an effort to better understand the varying technological affordances musicians can draw upon in each of these spaces to realize social, political, and economic goals. One avenue I’ve been taking over the course of the past couple of weeks is to create ‘Artist,’ ‘Musician,’ and/or ‘Label’ pages myself (despite the fact that I’m certainly not a musician or a label manager), as opposed to normal ‘User’ pages. If you’re unfamiliar with the structure of a social network like MySpace, or Last-FM, the interface and layout differences between ‘Artist’ and ‘User’ pages are relatively superficial—the main transformation between these types of pages on the MySpace platform for example is the presence of the StandAlone Player (see image below), an audio player where artists can make up to four of their songs available either as streaming files or as MP3 downloads. There is also the MySpace “Upcoming Shows” calendar which more and more touring musicians are using to alert fans to approaching live shows. A New York Times article from last spring explored the growing use of these MySpace calendars and bulletins to update fans, using the indie rockers the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as a case in point. Artists can also integrate third-party applications or widgets into their MySpace Music page, such as the SNOCAP music store, which I’ll discuss in a moment. Despite these aesthetic and functional distinctions, the pages of artists and standard users are fully integrated with one another.

Aside from merely creating ‘Artist/Musician’ and ‘Label’ pages, I’ve also uploaded some of my own music tracks (not worth checking out due to my aforementioned ineptness as a musician), again, to see what options users at these different levels of the network service. In this regard I’ve also been perusing a number of the ‘Terms and Agreements’ statements for these sites. My broad, sweeping conclusion for most of these social music networks? Pretty open and stand-offish insofar as they allow artists and labels to exercise virtually complete control over the creative content they decide to post within the network spaces.

The primary reasons why such openness tends to get shut down are, first and foremost, when an artist already has a label which holds certain rights to the creative content posted, or when an artist is posting music that may have tenuous legality in relation to current copyright law. In either case however the social network is not the source of the problem, and they are likely just trying to maintain a safe distance from involving themselves in heated debates over copyright (though I hope one or more of them, particularly one with critical mass, engages the situation head-on). A third instance where openness has the potential to be shutdown is with the introduction of third-party applications which integrate with these social networks, such that although on the surface they seem to offer musicians an additional intuitively simple and low-cost way to promote and sell their music, they simultaneously (and surreptitiously!) take a fairly high-percentage cut from the sales of said musicians.

The SNOCAP MyStore was one application which for quite some time I had assumed a nifty little mini-iTunes-like tool with a simple interface that musicians in the MySpace social networking environment could seamlessly embed in their MySpace page in order to sell tracks directly to fans/consumers, and all for a very small fee ($30/year for an unsigned artist according to SNOCAP rhetoric). I had already been relatively suspect of artists using the SNOCAP technology that I knew full well were signed to labels—for example, The Shins, who are on the Sub Pop label, which since the mid-90s has been 49% owned by the Warner Bros. media conglomerate—as the chances that customers were actually buying tracks “directly from this artist,” as proclaimed quite plainly on the SNOCAP MyStore display, were highly improbable. In fact, based on typical contractual agreements made between musicians and record labels, major, “independent, or otherwise, on any sale, whether an individual track or an entire album, the label receives a significant cut of the sale price. Historically speaking, if an artist could get a 50/50 split on the sale of an album, that be quite desirable (this was often the case with the Rough Trade record label, which I’m using as a case study in my exploration of social practices in early “independent” music making). Basically what this means is that when I buy tracks by The Shins through the SNOCAP music store, I rest assured that Sub Pop, and by extension Warner Bros. are receiving a pretty decent cut of my hard-earned cash.

What really upsets me about the SNOCAP player beyond this however is the fact that they are in essence an additional third-party involving themselves in the transaction, and they are currently positioned to receive a sizable cut also. As can be seen below, the SNOCAP MyStore Transaction Fee Per Track is $0.39/download, and the SNOCAP MyStore Transaction Fee Per Album is the greater of i) 30% of retail price or ii) $0.20/track. These are actually considerable percentages if one imagines that tracks are sold for the iTunes standard of $0.99 and an album for $9.99. As far as I understand the iTunes pricing model, SNOCAP is not much of a departure, and leaves a lot to be desired. That said, with the recent Radiohead In Rainbows experiment, and the ongoing ’self-determined pricing’ model of Jane Siberry, there are indeed alternatives out there in which such exorbitant fees are drastically reduced. Take Siberry’s site for instance, where the only extra-artist fee is a credit card transaction fee of $0.45. The difference here is that the fee is only one time per order, rather than per track, and such a difference quickly adds up. The whole Radiohead thing had a comparable fee if I remember correctly.

I guess what I’d like to know is how a company hasn’t moved into the spaces of MySpace or Last-FM which is capable of providing a more cost efficient (for artists themselves) pay-to-play distribution platform? Is the madman Murdoch behind this?  If an artist has a label, and they sell tracks through SNOCAP at less than $0.99, lets say $0.75, or even less (the exact price an artist charges can be adjusted), then they might very likely see less than $0.20 on the sale. That’s almost self-defeating, especially for artists on smaller labels who may be desperately trying to pay back production advances. Hopefully some of these emerging practices, like ’self-determined pricing’ models for music will make their way more visibly into online social networks in the not too distant future…

The whole Radiohead thing is getting sooooo much God-damn hype! I guess that isn’t surprising, given their international super-duper-cult-star status, and the fact that at this point they could theoretically just package up some excrement in a jewel case, release it to the ‘masses,’ and the critics would still manage to give it a half-way decent review (case in point: Thom Yorke’s The Eraser, put out on XL Recordings in ‘06).  Despite the ceaseless inundation of ‘Radiohead is so bloody brilliant; they’re going to change the world; blah, blah, blah’ rhetoric, I have been continuing to sift through hundreds of comments left on New York Times articles related to the project, as well as comments on a variety of blogs, in hopes of unearthing discussions or rumors of precursors to the Radiohead endeavor. One comment that has surfaced several times was something to the effect of: ‘Hey, wait, this isn’t new, this person Jane Siberry has been doing this for almost two years.’ One reference to this earlier project—where the commenter expressed their frustration that Siberry was not receiving due credit—was recently left on a ‘Radiohead’ post over on the Convergence Culture Consortium weblog (which emerged out of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT around Henry Jenkins’ increasingly well-known book Convergence Culture). Since Siberry’s name came up a few times, I decided to investigate further, and sure enough, this so-called ’self-determined pricing’ is, by today’s standards, old, old news; though in my opinion it remains highly innovative if only because it seems to have gone unrecognized until very recently.

Siberry runs what is ostensibly a record label, Sheeba Records, which maintains an online store where users can purchase high-quality (192kbps—effectively CD quality) audio files in a variety of flexible formats. Like the Radiohead project, customers can enter whatever price they wish to pay for entire albums, or individual songs. According to the documentation on the website, the ’self-determined pricing’ scheme was started back in November of 2005. This forces me to reiterate a point I tried to stress in an earlier post about the Radiohead In Rainbows project, namely, that I was relatively confident in saying that the group was not actually doing anything new in letting customers name their price, but rather that the scale of the project was the main takeaway, insofar as it’s profoundly more grandiose in comparison to past endeavors, which have tended to be undertaken by lesser-known artists (Jane Siberry being one such example, though I’m sure there are more). Regardless, those precursors should not be overlooked.

The interesting thing about Siberry’s project is that it has been, from the outset, more explicitly conceived of as a social experiment than In Rainbows, that is, in terms of pushing people to think more critically about ethical and moral considerations related to the consumption of music (freeloading versus pay-to-play). There is also a detailed outline on the website of exactly which parties receive what shares from monetary transactions; in the context of Sheeba Records, the majority of the money goes to the artists, and a very small percentage goes to the credit care companies (transactions are completed via PayPal). For MP3 purchases you can even use a ‘Pay Later’ option that allows you to actually download the songs you want to listen to, and then come back later, if and when you decide to pay for the content. There aren’t even any ‘friendly,’ or encouraging email reminders sent to you after the fact. In largely similar fashion to the Radiohead project, everything is entirely on you, the fan/customer.

At this point I don’t know an awful lot about how well Jane Siberry’s experiment has worked out for her and other artists associated with Sheeba Records—either economically, socially, or politically—but it remains an example of ‘new’ marketing and distribution strategies practicing musicians can leverage with the support of new digital music technologies to effectively cut out the ‘middleman.’ With the Radiohead project off to a supposedly good start (I’ve heard downloads, on average, are garnering the group about eight US dollars per album), it seems likely that many more projects exploring the potential benefits of ’self-determined pricing’ will be surfacing amongst practicing musicians, as well as more free-thinking labels.