Digital music is the breakthrough musicians have needed for generations to get themselves rid of the limitations and risks of “conventional” music distribution. New music is pouring out as the record labels lose their dominance of the distribution machinery. Nobody’s complaining much. In Sydney bars and Oslo nightclubs, people go out to hear more than cookie-cutter “accountancy music”. They want to hear something new, interesting, and not based on sounds from kitchen appliances. Music has got its freedom back.

Photo: choking sun

Musicians have always been behind the eight ball in terms of distribution. They had no options. They were stuck with hard copy media like records and CDs. They were dependent on the labels to market their work. That’s no longer the case, and music is benefiting as a result.

Ironically, it’s now the mainstream that’s out of the loop. Online music is coming onstream, by the terabyte, and it’s taking the audience with it. The new audience has never seen the old type of music distribution, and wouldn’t believe it if they did. YouTube, the ultimate democratization of music, is calling the shots. Nobody under 20 would see any reason for hardcopy. ITunes and others are spreading the distribution message, and backing it up with mobile technology. Exit the suits and their legalistic rip-offs.

There are flaws. The net isn’t exactly a well-organized distribution system. There’s a lot of room for improvement, particularly in terms of getting exposure for new music. The joke is that SEO is more likely to be the working principle for driving music sales than hype. SEO, after all, is about finding what you want for searchers and making it findable for distributors.

It’s not too hard to see a few developments that have to happen:

• Special music searches in the Shopping tab
• Global distribution getting more organized and setting up dedicated promo sites like subdomains for musicians to improve sales
• Multimedia suites of music and performing art
• Web TV broadcast syndication of music videos distributed around the world to bars, etc.
• Specialist sites for giving exposure to new music (not the half-baked stuff we have now; high value, music-lovers material, and the more feral the better)
• Better deals for music buyers, getting rid of the old price structures and recognizing sales volumes issues (Some sites are already doing this)
• Licensing, not recording contracts, giving musicians the final say in dealing with any distribution problems and the “sue the audience” blunders

This is “community marketing”, not “corporate”, much more honest, less corrupt, better organized and on a much bigger scale. It’s in everyone’s interests to do things more efficiently and give the audience more of a chance of getting what they want.

Photo: mr. Wood

The first generation of internet-only musicians tripped over all the vagueness of the old net. The next wave knows better, and how to dodge the “do-nothing” effects of underperforming websites. In the future, your phone or computer interface will be able to sell and find your music around the clock. You’ll have the world’s music on tap in Melbourne bars and probably on Mars.

Better still, you’ll be able to play anything you want and listen to anything you want. The future of music has never looked better.

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