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Is the Net an Independent Artist's New Radio?
An anonymous reader writes "Richard Menta from MP3 Newswire recently posted an article that describes how the Net has shifted his tastes from main stream radio artists to indie acts he discovered online. Slashdot has run a number of articles dealing with the struggles of independent artists and how the net is helping them. Between the recent payola scandal and the incursion of Big Radio into podcasting the major labels are pushing hard to monopolize what they can. The good news is that Big Music is much slower adjusting to the changes brought about by technology than Little Music and the sky is looking rosier for the independent artist. In a July article, CNET also discussed how things are looking much better for the independents."
It's quite hard to get the internet in my car when driving any distance over a few meters. Radio however works well for many hundreds or thousands of miles [ad infinitum, barring interference]
Video Production Support
The concept of "radio", as in the means to relatively easily and affordably address large masses of people, does not revolve around music.
Another very important component is the dispersal of political thought. Indeed, that perhaps overrides the importance of music any day. If it were not for the independence of the current Internet, groups such as the 9/11 truth movement would never have been able to deliver their message to so many people.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Radio stations are controlled by the record companies, they try to force-feed you with all the crap they're trying to sell. Problem is, I'm not interested in commerce, I want to listen to quality music. So now there are these great specialized internet radio's with music I never heard before. Or you can leech months worth of music on your HD from friends, listen to it and decide for yourself what you like. It's great!
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
It (hopefully) will evolve into digital radio over FM frequencies (first starting with a couple as car stereos and home stereos support the digital format) that are streamed off of the internet where radio stations can provide commercial or private content.
If I lived in a larger city, maybe there'd be enough of an independent music scene that this wouldn't be necessary, but in South Texas, it just isn't there (unless you're into Tejano).
I can easily imagine a time when the only remaining stronghold of Clearchannel clone stations and their ilk is the morning commute. They might be trying to "monopolise" newer mediums like webradio and podcasting, but it just can't happen because there's no scarcity of broadcast bandwidth (as is the case with radio spectrum).
If you buy the Long Tail theory, it looks like the media market will become only more diverse as we increase our global bandwidth capacity.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
I don't think there's any question that the net is the new radio. Whether it be talk or music, Podcasts have shown that they can get REAL ratings.
Like with so many things, either the dissemintation of information, music, or software, the internet is a great delivery mechanism with a ridiculously huge distribution potential.
Let's take advantage of it. Speaking of which, check out my sig.
Rich...
Ignore Alien Orders
www.75minutes.com
This is a perfect example of a radio show with knowledgable hosts and DJs, well-informed interviews, excellently selected indie music, indie music news, etc. In fact it is a picture-perfect radio show... but it's a podcast.
Speaking as a music artist, there is no easy way to get your music out. No matter what type of medium or media, it always involves a lot of patience, work, and dedication.
-pronobozo
Not only is WOXY.com an independently owned and operated web radio station that is commercial free and has live dj's M-F that play requests, they are also restarting their unsigned band contest as Unsigned@woxy.com an hour-long show and a podcast for unsigned artists.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
And that's why they've tried to stifle the genesis of internet radio streams, by setting the standard licensing rates very high and using patents on both the techniques and the technology to suppress the services. Internet radio definitely has the potential to break the RIAA's monopoly on introducing people to new artists.
"The Music Industry" controls two parts of a long chain:
artist -> art -> marketing/advertising -> distribution -> retailer -> listener
It's pretty obvious that people can only like music they have heard, so "The Music Industry" tried to control radio, where listeners could hear music for free (if you consider being forced to hear commercials free) what "The Music Industry" wanted you to buy. In fact, the playlist was often created by a single person at the station who more or less made money from the industry by pushing certain "products".
An artist had two choices. Sell out and let "The Music Industry" take care of marketing/advertising -> distribution and give up large control over their art in their contracts -or- go indie with a smaller label that didn't have the power to really get a large audience to hear the music.
The internet has taken care of one half of the problem. So distribution is now available more or less for free when compared to shipping CD's to retail stores.
What's missing right now is marketing/advertising. You have to get people to hear a song before they can decide they like it or not. Apple figured this out and now that's what PodCasting is about. If you find a PodCast you like, then you are likely to find music there you want... and Apple hopes you buy it from the iTunes Music Store.
But the whole current system is flawed, IMO. I'm certainly in the minority with this opinion, but I view artist, musicians in this case, as part of a service industry. They don't make property, like a chair or a computer, they create music, which is not physical and hence can't be owned. But that's a debate for another thread.
The good news? Big Music is going to die and it doesn't even know it. The bad news? Artist need to switch to a neo-patronage system to get paid when information trading gets to the point that it kills Big Music.
Last FM is a great concept. Basically it uses a system similar to Amazon's recommended links. You download their player (don't worry, open source, BSD license, Mac/Linux/Windows) and you type the name of a band in the box. It then streams music the database thinks is similar. You can vote to skip, ban, or love a track.
When you've done it for a while you'll have your own profile. You can then go and listen to music that your "musical neighbours" are listening to.
Lots of indie music on there. Lots of everything on there.
Bob
(Not affiliated with them)
Listen to my latest album here
Imagine listening to the radio and being able to influence what kind of stuff you hear. Imagine hearing all kinds of things that you've never heard of before. Imagine no "...buffering..."
iRate does this.
Oh, and:
Open source? Check!
Supports Creative Commons? Check!
Legal Downloads? Check!
Runs on Linux? Check!
Free as in Beer? Check!
Did I mention no streaming?
More detail:
Technical explanation with easy to understand diagram here:
http://irate.sourceforge.net/
Site you can send the non-technically inclined to here:
http://www.irateradio.com/
"Just click on the executable. No, really, it's safe this time."
Oh and the guy's name is "ajones". He's a kiwi. Mad props to kiwis.
Between the recent payola scandal and the incursion of Big Radio into podcasting the major labels are pushing hard to monopolize what they can.
The problems with FM radio go far beyond payola. Music Director's no longer pick songs to play because they thing that the song will be something their listeners will think is cool. Music Director's now rely almost exclusively on what the trade magazines (R&R and Billboard) say is popular. The trade magazines get their information from the bigger stations, which pay consultants to pick out songs
The consultants are not picking songs because listeners will think it is something new and interesting and might bring in new ears, but rather, they pick songs based on the idea of 'please, please, we can't lose/offend any of our existing listeners.'
This is a poor business model, as it doesn't bring in new people, and this a big reason radio is losing listeners to the internet.
Stations that only play 250 songs (1 days worth) on a rotating basis is another.
Is this question about 4 years late?
I still like the idea of "DJ" as the one who seaches among the literally thousands of releases (each tuesday in the US) to find the gems. And I like the idea of quality control. And I like the idea of the personality of the DJ being part of that whole experience. And the sort of implied "take my word for it" because in the past they've been right again and again.
Hence the reason why when it comes to music WFMU is unbeatable.
It's still teresterial radio, but it's otherwise available on the internet at 128k for free, of course, you should pledge if you like.
describes how the Net has shifted his tastes from main stream radio artists to indie acts he discovered online.
Individual tastes are always shifting. The internet doesn't really have that much to do with it. It all depends on the individual and their mood. This person would have found new music at some other source (the library, perhaps? Or blasting out of car window at a red light?) because they were in the mood for new music.
Sometimes I go months without listening to anything newer than 1968. I'll run Kazaa for hours searching for obscure pop songs from 1963-1968. It's as if music just stopped in the early 1970's. Others feel the same with perhaps different time periods.
For music period focus, the internet is invaluable. But for just exposure to different music, it's not the best medium. You need to know nearly exactly what you want before you can find it on the net.
A better way to get exposure to different music is to become part of drive share. This is where a hard drive (an older one with maybe 30 Gigabytes) is traded for one that is filled with each sharer's favorite music. Each person swaps an old drive with another person. The drives have the other person's favorite music on it. Each person puts only a gigabyte or so of music on it. Eventually you get a hard drive that has the favorite music of 30 different people with each person putting hundreds of minutes of their favorite music on it. No one makes judgement of the other's selections: no one erases the other's partition: no one hassles with so-called copyright issues.
The old method of music distribution and dissemination is rapidly fading and no realistic model is taking its place. You know that when an industry reaching the point where they trying to put its best customers in jail and extort large amounts of money from them because they can't resolve a pricing issue, the industry is in a lot of trouble.
I'm finding it all amusing. I especially like the part about how if the 'artists' aren't paid, then they won't produce any more quality product. Like if enough people copy Rod Zombie tracks, he's going to go sell insurance. Or if people don't pay $18 for Pink CDs, she's going to get discouraged and become a network applications engineer. Yeah, right... Popular music 'artists' and stars don't really have much choice about what they do, they are going to continue to do it whether they get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars or not. What the RIAA is really saying is that if people stop paying $18 for junk music, the music company executives will actually have to find some way to justify their huge salaries and perk packages. Heaven forbid! The 'artists' will just go back to whatever shithole that they were discovered from.
The real issue with the RIAA is whether music can really be bought and sold anymore. The concept that five people playing the same songs as everybody else with slightly different words and chord patterns can go to a recording studio for a week and a hundred million dollars comes to the record company is simply breaking down. It's dependent on a 20th century centrallized media and distribution model. It used to work and work well; it doesn't anymore. Putting people in prison and extorting money from them isn't going to change anything except cause the occasional music industry lawyer to get shot by people who disagree with the concept that they have to pay a fine for being the one in a million singled out by the RIAA to be fined for downloading some stupid inconseqencial pop song.
Music is like air. Everybody takes it in, puts it back out. It's absurd to claim that somebody wrote a pop or rock song that is basicly the same as the pop and rock songs that have been playing on the radio for the past 40 years. Music is simply part of the environment, no one can realistically claim to 'own' it. It doesn't matter what the law is. This is the new reality.