Why The Labels Will Fall

Saturday night, Ashley and I were wandering home along Castro Street in Mountain View, when I heard the strains of a bluegrass jam in full swing. We took a quick detour over to the Dana Street Roasting Cafe to see what was going on.

The place was, in a word, packed. Every chair filled, every patron’s eyes and ears glued to the band of the evening, Houston Jones, as Glenn “Houston” Pomianek ripped through a babbling bluegrass solo. We grabbed a coffee and stuck around for a half dozen songs and then toddled home to watch Saturday Night Live.

And that’s when Ashlee Simpson proved, once and for all, why the mainstream music labels are wholly unsuitable to be the stewards of culture.

Ashlee, as you may or may not know, is the younger sister of Jessica Simpson. She’s been following in the trend of other equally untalented starlets expanding their empires into the world of music. She (or at least the genetic pool that gave rise to her) can’t spell, I hear you saying, but surely she can play an instrument? Of course not, says I! Fair enough, you think, I guess she’s a vocalist.

Or so you would hope. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong.

In her first performance of the evening, Ashlee demonstrated that the task of lip-synching her performance stretched the limits of her meager abilities. And it only got worse, as the lip-synch track for the second song was for the wrong song, forcing her rush off-camera. Of course, the all-seeing eye of the Internet caught it all on video.

There are millions of independent bands out there like Houston Jones, stocked with real musicians, with real talent, and original material that they actually wrote. Previously, these bands were unable to reach an audience without the help of a label. But that’s changing. I expect that over the next ten years, the label grips will weaken, driven in part by dissatisfaction with the quality of product available, but also by the shear amount of much better (however the listener chooses to define “better”) material available from independent musicians.

The question now is one of discovery. Chris Anderson’s Long Tail article made a good point of demonstrating the value that lives outside the mainstream – all we need now is a way for people to easily find the stuff. Amazon.com recommendations can only do so much, as Amazon.com is ultimately limited by what it can carry. Bloggers will probably carry some of the weight, though I’d feel a little more confident in this turning the tide if there were some way to reward bloggers for directing traffic to artist’s sites, especially when such redirection resulted in a sale. With that kind of assistance, hopefully the money currently imprisoned in mainstream acts would get smeared across a much larger number of people. Nobody should be making millions for crap music; but any artist with talent and even a modest following should be able to make a living.

Of course, rewarding those who recommend products via their blog comes with its own set of issues.