This afternoon I’ll be speaking on a CMJ Music Marathon panel about how musicians can thrive without record labels. It’s a perennial topic, and these days tools like Topspin, Bandcamp, and Tunecore (and even Kickstarter) have moved the conversation past ideology and into practical stuff. It’s a nice change.
The mechanics are important, no doubt. How much will the label spend on recording? What’s their track record? How’s their tour support? But those aren’t the kinds of things that bands worry about anymore. Either the internet has already made those things easier or we just expect that it eventually will. It hasn’t let us down yet.
The past few years I’ve been lucky enough to work with a couple dozen bands directly. I put out their records on a small, digital-only label where the mission was to find bands we love, get them recognized and fairly paid, and help them move onto bigger and better things.
Many of them were successful enough to face the choice: Do I sign with a label or do I go it alone? When we debated it, the stuff mentioned above rarely came up. Those things mattered, but the bands had already been doing many of them on their own — so well, in fact, that it attracted this very interest.
What came up instead was “getting signed.” That’s the whole point of starting a band, right? Even the bands who thought the whole label thing was bullshit had family, friends, and significant others for whom a contract would legitimize everything. To the heartache of months on the road and concern for a child chasing a dream a deal says, “I’ve made it.”
This isn’t unique to music. Film, publishing, art, fashion, and every other creative field, too. The web has upended almost every other convention, but we still look to the old guard when it comes to whose blessing we want. Case in point: every one of these bands who had this debate ended up signing with a label.
We need a new way to get signed. One that doesn’t involve the gatekeepers. We don’t need their approval like we used to, and it won’t be long before the social luster wains too. It’s not that record labels need to go away (they don’t), it’s that our definition of success needs to reflect a creator’s own goals. And maybe Kickstarter plays a role in that — I don’t know. But it’s important to remember what “getting signed” really means.
