Are MP3 Web Sites Unfair to Indie Artists?

dafunn writes "CNN is running a story [from Salon] about how times have changed, but not really. The new breed of music distributors, the online mp3 sites, are still pulling the same old 'screw the artist' tricks..." This article sure paints a bleak picture. Anyone have any personal experience from the band/artist perpective you'd like to share?

Comments

here's an indie label

[Is0t0pe]

I think the major online music portals are of course going to "screw the artist". That attitude is a natural extension of the blatant commercialism that these companies must exhibit in order to satisfy their investors. When a common goes public the ethics/motives of the investors supplant those of the founders. Let's just hope that doesn't happen to /. someday. (Though some might argue it has already)

Anyway, if you are looking for a great indie "label" where the artists are the MAIN attraction, check out NoType

More info

[SaxmanISU]

If any musicians out there want some help avoiding getting screwed, I suggest getting "Music Law: How to Run Your Band's Business" by Nolo Press. There is a lot of great info in there that can help you avoid getting taken advantage of by anyone. You just need to know how to protect yourself. It is proving to be valuble information to my own band.

Different outlook

[finkployd]

I guess I have a different take on all this. I've uploaded some of my bands songs to mp3.com and I've been happy. No, I haven't made any money to speak of, but that wasn't my intent.
I figured I do so my friends can download some songs and maybe some new people will here them. I never looked at mp3.com as a way to make a living.

90% of what is on mp3.com is crap anyway (my stuff probably falls into that, but hey, it's for fun). Lots of it is just dance mixes and synth tunes that some kid programmed into a shareware MIDI sequencer. You really have to search for the gems, the actual bands that put together some good songs.

Bottom line, if people are encoding mp3's with the hope of "going big time" it's probably not going to happen. Despite the hype, mp3.com (and others) are just places to to put music so people can find them, they are NOT a record label.
If they didn't pay out AT ALL, I'm sure that people would still be uploading songs.

Like open source coding, most of us are just doing it for fun and to see what we can do, not money.

Finkployd

Tales from an indie... (warning : bleak)

[Rift]

We had a 'thriving' local band.. we could sometimes do 4 gigs a month, and had a fairly good following. We had pressed our own CDs, and could sell a few, but we wanted the almighty exposure. We figured, hey, if more people heard our work, we could sell lots more CDs

So we signed up with a 'service' (that will rename nameless as long as I remain named). Mistake.

Here's the picture: we paid for top billing for a week, and had over 6,000 downloads. One of our songs was on a 'sampler' CD. Great, right?

Nope. we made exactly $0 from all this, and only sold 43 CDs. The profit we were paid lost us money over OUR costs to press each CD (our profit was about $.45 per CD, had we sold them all at that rate. But since we didn't we lost lots of money on the CDs we pressed in anticipation)

We were not told anything about the demographics of the audience downloading our CDs (I'm sure 'service' sold that information to someone else, though), and we made no money. We now have two songs that we can not ever put on CDs (at least we can play them live.) that are not sold through the 'service', and life generally sucks.

Now, even though we had a small local following, we are broken up. Could we have been contenders had we sticked it out? Probably not, but who knows... if a traditional label had signed us, we would certainly have sold more, made more, and still be playing...

Moral of the story: The record industry screws artists. The e-music industry is much worse, however, and should be avoided at all costs. Hell, I'd rather have had our mp3s pirated.

Well that kind of sucks

[Greyfox]

I just bought a couple of CDs on mp3.com. But out of 6 bands I listened to in the goth rock genre, only one was what I was looking for, so I can believe those numbers. CNN gave us an average per artist, how much did the top grossing artist make? As with anything, the good bands are going to rise to the top.

CNN says an artist can create his own web site for about $20 a month, but if they're going to be selling CD's and accepting credit cards, it's going to cost considerably more. If all you want to do is promote your band, a $20 a month web site might be OK, but if you do things like goat sacrifices on stage you might want to pick an ISP that won't bow to pressure from the FBI, religious nuts and assorted other riff-raff...

Another potential issue of running your own site is that you lose the one-stop shopping that sites like MP3.com gives you. Although I suppose a yahoo category or something similar would get pretty close.