In earlier columns I discussed the downfall of the album as a vehicle for music as well as the growing pains of the digital music industry. On Saturday the New York Times reported on the South by Southwest music conference in Austin, TX. At the conference, there was a panel discussion among members of the music industry to discuss solutions to what currently is music’s most important question: how can the music industry survive if no one is willing to pay for music?
At this panel, Peter Rojas, founder of the music blog RCRD LBL, presented an interesting idea. He proposed a system his site is already enacting that is essentially a way for Internet advertisers, music bloggers and musicians to work together and redistribute their profits. According to the article, RCRD LBL provides a space where “artists offer their music free, without restrictive digital rights management software. In return, the artists get a portion of the site’s ad revenue.”
To me this is an effective solution to the slowing of the music business. Ideally, blog advertising gives artists the ability to enlist the power of Internet ads, which every regular Facebook or YouTube participant knows has grown exponentially in the last few years. Advertisers have seen that the Internet is now a relatively cheap and often more effective alternative to advertising on radio and television, and the music industry could benefit greatly from becoming a part of that.
What makes Rojas’ proposal even more attractive to me is it is only a small twist in the role of music in advertising. In the past musicians have sold their work to advertisers, for use in television commercials and radio ads, with the idea that it is a way to get their music heard without having to do any extra promotion. The musicians could sit back and watch as their album sales increased because of the extra exposure.
Rojas’s system is similar in that advertisers can use music to make their ads more interesting and artists can use popular sites to get their music heard. The novelty is that RCRD LBL simply accounts for the fact that album sales are going to be dismal no matter how good the music is and solves the problem by sharing the ad revenues from the site with the artists.
Now, as a music fan and a regular (if not ravenous) Internet user, I have to admit it irks me to think that more artists will sell out to this system in order to make their art lucrative. It is also upsetting to think there could be more advertising littering the internet. However, these concerns seem a small price to pay for the ability to discover new music for free without any legal restrictions. I would not mind having to sit through a 15 second ad so I can listen to a four minute song.
Also, I would rather have music blogs like RCRD LBL become the platform for Rojas’s system so at least I can be assured that behind the scenes there are people who care about music as an artistic venture. I would like to have music bloggers involved in determining what new music I hear instead of leaving it up to advertisers who are often more interested in the surface appeal of the music (catchiness and flashiness) than its deeper artistic statement.
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