GrindEFX

Today, Americans celebrate the Fourth of July – Independence Day.

And in today’s day and age, the independent musician should be celebrating his independence. It has never been a better time to be an independent musician.

Sure, the traditional music industry continues to decline. The struggle for independent musicians to find their audience and attain the level of success they desire has not gotten easier. And while we seemingly have pills for everything, scientists have not discovered a cure for writer’s block yet.

But in terms of opportunities for independent musicians to bypass the paradigm of getting signed and make it on their own, it is indeed a great time.

Above, you can see a very basic breakdown of the music business model – a musician’s success comes from Connecting with Fans and giving them a Reason to Buy. While this expression of the model came from Techdirt founder Michael Masnick, I previously noted that it is roughly the same as the approach taken by the Big 4 record labels.

This model can be broken up into two parts: Demand generation and demand fulfillment. Generating demand is the hard part, and you can see that just by looking at how much of the model it takes up. It’s also a subject for another day (though I do want to note that musicians today have the advantage of Recommendation Systems to aid in generating demand).

Demand fulfillment on the other hand – getting your content and products to your fans – is another story. It has never been easier or cost less to provide such a wide variety of things to listeners.

Today’s independent musician is living in a post-scarcity economy. “Supply” is not a part of the business model. Digital technology allows for a virtually unlimited supply of content – music, videos, artwork, information, and ideas. The prevalence of Print-on-demand and Merchandise-on-demand services moves tangible products – t-shirts, posters, CD’s, etc. – into the realm of unlimited supply as well.

The best part is that musicians can take advantage of all this for nearly no upfront costs.

Within minutes, a musician can have her music available to the world for free on any number of sites: Bandcamp, Myspace, Jamendo, Soundclick, and tons of others. YouTube, Vimeo, and other sites provide the same free fulfillment services for video. Pictures and artwork? You got Flickr, not to mention social networking sites. Heck, you even have P2P networks, bittorrent, and file-sharing services for general content distribution.

Web space and blogs are dirt cheap to start up – even free at many places, though obviously the free sites will have some limitations. The costs for digital distribution to online retailers like iTunes and Amazon continues to fall, while entirely free routes continue to grow (check out Watunes).

Sites like Zazzle and CafePress do the same thing with all sorts of merchandise. (Shoes! Coffee mugs!) It takes very little time for a musician to setup shop and offer a variety of physical goods to fans. No upfront costs. No more boxes of unsold t-shirts taking up closet space.

I don’t want to sound too Pollyannaish. As I said, demand fulfillment is the easy part of the model. Musicians can’t expect to make too much money with merchandise-on-demand unless they are selling lots of products, at which point it may make more sense to use a more traditional manufacturer.

But the bottom line is that the base has been raised on what a beginning musician can offer to fulfill his listeners’ demands.