By Grace Eliot
Just six companies (Sony, EMI, BMG, Time-Warner, Universal and Polygram) control over 90% of the world's commercial music business. But this figure, based on sales volume or dollar turnover, does not reflect an increasing swell of grassroots music activity.
The populist tool of the internet has allowed self-marketing by small labels and individual artists. Musicians are landing recording contracts with alternative labels straight out of local pub venues, before they can be polished, censored and diluted.
The success of alternative labels can be measured by the fact that most major labels have established subsidiaries which they market as "alternative".
I was puzzled to see the grand-daughter of my folklorist friend Yul Kilcher, Jewel Kilcher, appear on the alternative charts. What was alternative about her sweet folk music? Her publicists' strategy.
The music biz had turned itself upside down. Now, for every busker who wants to be a star, there is a music business exec who wants desperately to appear "grassroots" and rough around the edges.
A recent visitor to Australia, US feminist folk singer Ani DiFranco, is famous for her successful self-marketing on her independent label Righteous Babe. She is often singled out as an exemplary independent success story because she's sold almost a million albums and continues to refuse offers to sign with major labels.
A few years ago, back in New York, a friend gave me a video he had done for her, saying it reminded him of me. I cold-called her manager/promoter, Scott Fisher, and offered my help. He told me she was thinking of signing with a label that I knew to be anything but righteous in their dealings with recording artists.
During the course of our conversation, I mentioned that my house mate was a survivor of New York's death row, and Fisher told me that he had worked as a lawyer defending death row clients in Texas.
I figured that if he could fight for people's lives in the most murderous state in the union (Texas executes someone about once a week), he could probably fend for his and DiFranco's interests in the music business. I implored him to do it without the major labels.
While DiFranco's success should be an inspiration, it seems sometimes to obscure her work, which deals with topics (a girlfriend who became drug addicted, the terrible wrong of capital punishment, a non-romanticised look at the selling of sex) that the mainstream wouldn't touch.
Ani DiFranco recently corrected Ms. magazine after it measured her success in sales and dollars. She emphasised that she wanted to be known as a "freak and a poet", not a tycoon. She lauded the clever independent musicians who self-market their own tapes and keep a whopping 100% of the profit for themselves.
In my time in the music business — as political singer-
songwriter, blues reissue producer and skeptic — many people have asked me how they can make a record, and my stock answer has been to tell them to stage a benefit concert, invite all your friends, charge what they can afford and use the money to record and distribute the event.
That used to sound naive. But these days it's starting to sound like good advice. An Australian social justice singer, and favourite of Green Left Weekly readers, Peter Hicks, recently finished an "in-store" promotion for his uncompromisingly political CD, The Bottom Line.
Other veteran performers, such as Irish singer-songwriter Andy Irvine, have taken to self-marketing their own products to get a fair share of the profits from their sales, and to assure their music's continuing availability.
The lifting of the ban on parallel CD imports promises to reduce Australian songwriters' royalties to compromised US levels, and threatens, in the short run, to further narrow the range of commercially available Australian music products.
Because the US tax system penalises business for unsold stock, we can expect to see the music chain stores full of cheap off-loaded product. But this situation could have the long-term effect of getting the steam in the independent pressure cooker up to full sizzle.
There is no longer the distinct demarcation between two separate entities of the corporate and independent music businesses. The mounting success of countless independents proves that recording artists of the '90s are capable of extending their creativity into the business and promotional spheres to fill the growing demand for real and varied music. Music that is, as they say in my land of origin, by and for the people.
[Information for this essay was found in The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Global Capitalism, published by Cassell, London, 1997.]