GrindEFX

Ask any independent musician why the music industry has been taking a beating, and he is sure to give you an answer.

“Record labels are putting out too much crappy, disposable pop.” “The price of albums is too high.” “Illegal downloading.”

The traditional music industry tends to concentrate on the last reason as an explanation for falling sales. On July 10th, record label plaintiffs in Sony v. Tenenbaum filed an expert witness report that pointed to unauthorized file-sharing as the primary culprit for the industry’s woes.

Despite the expert testimony, several studies and analyists support alternative theories. Debating and studying these theories is certainly fun (or depressing, if you’re suffering the effects).

Today, however, we’re not going to look at “why” the traditional music industry has been in a decline, but rather “how” it happened to begin with.

The traditional music industry is made up of just four companies: four major record labels that together account for over 70% of global music sales. Drawing an analogy from agriculture, this global concentration of music sales in just four companies can be deemed a “monoculture.” Much like the fields upon fields of the same variety of crop in agricultural monoculture, the music industry has been geared toward selling the majority of its product from just a handful of blockbuster artists – with little musical variety between those artists.

Monoculture production has many advantages – the CD boom of the late 80’s to mid 90’s can attest to this. The majors saw record profits and growth during that time. A monoculture is highly efficient. Creative markets are inherently unpredictable – no one knows what songs will become hits. Couple this with the inefficiencies of physical retail, and the move toward monoculture – a focus on a smaller number of artists releasing higher-selling albums – makes perfect sense.

One problem.

Monocultures are highly vulnerable to large-scale failure. The highly-efficient nature of monocultures means that a virus, pathogen, or a mere change in the weather that can destroy one member of the culture will often lead to the destruction of the entire culture - a pandemic.

The music industry’s decline can be viewed as a pandemic. The cause could have been anything (or a combination of things). But whatever the cause, the result of this “thing” invading the monoculture of the music industry led to systemic failure.

Independent musicians can learn from this explanation of the music industry’s decline.

Despite the disagreement on causes, one thing is clear: digital media and the growth of the internet enabled the change. The same architecture that generated systemic failure also provides potential for independent musicians to find success on their own, without the Big 4’s help.

Author Arnold Reisman describes one such technique as an “epidemic model” for self-marketing, a spin on “viral marketing.” This epidemic model refers to a system of entry-points where information is added. From these entry-points, the information spreads out in waves to the rest of the network, eventually entering interconnected networks and continuing to spread outward. Basically, you are “infecting” a small amount of entry-points with your music, and the “infection” spreads like a virus – without any further effort from you.

The concept is simple, and seems pretty much obvious. As I said, it’s not new; the idea of viral marketing has been around for over a decade (and I can’t remember the last time I heard “viral video” used in serious conversation). But it’s a concept that independent musicians need to be aware of, as it serves the basis for any level of success, whether they are going the DIY route are whether they are seeking to grab the attention of a label, publisher, etc.

Independent musicians have plenty of entry-points available to them, many of which they probably already use. These include their circle of real-life friends – friends, fans, and followers on social networking sites – viewers and listeners on the demand fulfillment sites I discussed in a previous post – blogs, online media, message boards, etc.

That’s the easy part. The hard part is making it work – increasing the “infectibility” of one’s music. And that, my friends, is a topic for another day.

Image courtesy of Esparta