RSS feedThere’s a revolution going on in the music industry, and the industry hasn’t noticed. With all the brouhaha about p2p, DRM, piracy and copyright, the RIAA and its members, the big record companies, have clearly taken their eyes off the ball.
I was at a gig for The Bronx last week (whose web site unfortunately doesn’t support Safari), a hardcore band from Los Angeles, and on the way out, amongst their t-shirts and CDs for sale, was a DVD of one of their live gigs.
But this wasn’t your regular live DVD, it was a recording of their first Sydney gig earlier in the year, which also happened to be their first ever sold out headline gig. The recording was made by a fan on a handheld DV, and the quality was good enough to publish. The day after that gig, the fan contacted the band and they arranged for the footage to be released as a DVD. Coincidentally, at the same gig, a local company has been recording and broadcasting shows over the Internet, and they just happened to have a mixing desk recording of the gig, which was then dubbed over the footage. No edits, just video from the handheld, and audio from the Internet broadcast. Now this isn’t a big production venue. The Annandale Hotel is a fairly small few hundred people at most venue. And The Bronx aren’t particularly well known, except that they did get album of the week at some point last year on 2JJJ.
I was at that same venue on the weekend, to see a one off (well, twice off, they did the once off thing last year) reunion of another punk band, this time a local Sydney band from the early 1980s, The Kelpies. At the gig, they were selling a copy of the one off gig they did last year, on CD, and this night they were recording a DVD of their last ever gig. It didn’t help that their bass played died last week just before the show, but the added risk of getting in another bass player from the same punk period to learn all their songs, makes it an even more unique DVD. They were collecting email addresses on the night, so they could let people know in a few weeks when the DVD would be available.
About a month ago, I went and saw DKT/MC5, a reunion of the three still alive members of the MC5, a detroit band from the early 1970s, who were the primary influence on pretty much most punk and alternative bands in some way. They played the Gaelic Club and the Coogee Bay Hotel, which is the old Selinas venue. Pretty big, but that doesn’t count. Ten minutes after the show finished, they’d pressed copies of it on to CD to buy on the way out. At Selinas, after ten minutes you’d be lucky if 20% of the 1300 person audience had gotten out. To then see a $10 CD of the gig as you went out the door, is pure marketing genius. We’ve read about this happening in the U.S., but this is apparently only the second time it has been done in Australia, the first being when The Who played in Sydney the week before.
On top of this, in the U.S. there’s a company called eMusicLive, which sells keychain USB drives of gigs on the way out. They also then sell the recordings over the internet, but you get the point. Same trick, newer technology.
And at yet another gig over the weekend, a local support band was selling their own independently recorded and produced CD at their gig for $15. I wouldn’t pay the usual $28 at a store, but for $15, while my body was still warm, sure, I’ll buy that. This has been happening for years of course, bands selling their independent CDs at gigs, and even that hasn’t begun to click with the record industry.
Artists are finding ways to change the business model, look after their own interests, and look after their fans. But then artists have always tried to do that, it is just the record companies that treat the fans with contempt, or as is common these days, just sue them.
As predicted several years ago, the space is changing, artists are finding ways to look after themselves, and make money off merchandising, without being tied to a major record label. And when USB drives and RAM devices become more prevalent, we’ll finally see the end of the CD as well, which artists are still paying royalties to Sony and Philips on, for every CD they manufacture.
There’s a revolution happening, and the industry, bless their little capitalist monopolistic hearts, have been caught well and truly napping. Good riddance I say. After a 50 year break, it is time to return art to the artists.