Is Music Filtering a Good Thing?
A topic that’s been coming up a lot lately among the musically concerned is filtering (the process by which music makes its way from a musician’s living room to the awareness of the wider public). For most of our contemporary history filtering has involved record labels, managers, venues, broadcasting directors, publicists etc… Audiences chose from those selections which were served up by these entities. This process remained essentially the same even as smaller indie labels like Sub Pop and Matador started to get some power.
Things changed a few years ago, however, when MySpace blew up. At that point, there were already lots of ways for musicians to make their music available online, but nothing compared to what MySpace made possible. Non-musician MySpace users were actually open to, and even excited by, the prospect of being able to hear the bands that, as the thinking went, record labels were too safe to sign. But in the short span of a couple of years, those users learned that most unsung bands sound more or less the same (i.e., not good), and that there are seemingly millions of them (most of which were also sending demos to record labels; as a result, most labels no longer accept unsolicited demos).
Now, in the wake of the lost cause that is MySpace, audiences have become jaded about the prospect of checking out DIY musicians. Audiences once again look to filters to help them decide what music to give a chance. Podcasts and broadcasts (All Songs Considered, Morning Becomes Eclectic), streaming sites (Last.fm, Jango, Pandora), review sites (Pitchfork, Onion AV Club, MP3 blogs), and vendors (iTunes, Amazon.com) all employ filters that make it harder for musicians – even those with label affiliation – to get heard. But the good news is that once you get heard, you’re taken more seriously than you would be as one of millions of self-promoting unknown bands on some social networking site that does not discriminate between “serious” and “I have a computer so why not?” musicians. True, the latter sometimes has better music than the former, but that’s irrelevant. What is relevant is that most people are not willing to be at the first stage of the filtering system. Rare are the people with the time and psychological fortitude and endurance to search through a thousand musicians of wildly varying levels of quality to find that one with whom they’d like to spend more time.
What made me want to write about this topic was an email I got recently from IAC, a streaming site that pays artists on a per-play basis and is funded by advertisers and artist subscriptions. IAC features artists ranging from hobbyists to professionals. Their email announced that they are going to start removing artists whose presentation doesn’t hold up to some standard of quality and might therefore scare away potential listeners. I’m all for it, and would expect that anyone who takes their music career seriously would be all for it.
I should point out that I respect and encourage people’s desire to record music and post it online. There are plenty of avenues for that, such as MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook. What I have a harder time with is seeing avenues through which serious artists can distribute their music becoming clogged with lazy, half-finished, amateurishly presented work that scares away potential listeners. It’s in all of our best interests to have a more stringent filtering system at places like iTunes, eMusic, Amazon.com, and IAC. Actually, IAC is the least strict of these. To be at those other places, you at least have to have an album, though recently this has just come to mean meeting certain requirements that no longer include having a physical CD (and only one song is needed to qualify as an “album”). As a vendor, iTunes doesn’t have to worry about a reputation for quality so much as quantity (though I assure you not just anyone will be included on their homepage), so we’ll have to see where an increasingly open-door policy takes them. Will they institute even stricter filtering systems like CDBaby (an exclusively “unsigned artist” vendor) has with their podcasts and newsletters?
Pandora, in contrast with iTunes, is a site that doesn’t sell music, but instead streams songs in full. It’s a place for discovering music, and, once you know how to use it, Pandora works really well to that end. Because they’re all about you discovering great music based on artists whom you already love, they have to cultivate a reputation for quality in order to succeed. To ensure quality, they have a listening committee that evaluates submissions. They rejected my first two albums, in fact, and, although I do think it’s their loss, I’m really ok with it. My third album (REATTACHMENT) was accepted, and I know that their users will give it more of a chance because they know there is a filter in place.
To be clear, musicians are not to blame for the situation I’m describing here. It’s the accumulation that’s causing the congestion, not the actions of any one individual. Musicians need to take this accumulation into consideration when planning their promotions and when being rejected by a filter like Pandora, or when being completely ignored by critics and the online public in general. I think what IAC has come to terms with is the fact that they are better off (i.e., better able to avoid bankruptcy) having fewer musicians selling a-little-to-a-lot of music to a loyal and potentially expanding fan base rather than having thousands of musicians selling zero-to-a-little music to a small circle of friends. In this way, a difficult filtering process makes us work harder as artists as well as marketers (an inextricable part of being a working musician).
The slippery slope argument against stringent filtering is that we would end up with only a small selection of new music to choose from, all of which has been selected based on the taste of a class of self-proclaimed elitists. I believe that this would happen even less than it did before the digital age. In fact, now that the options are greater than ever, filtering could just be a way to help balance the scale to a more even slant in terms of which label-affiliated and “homemade” bands are being offered to the public at large for consideration.
In conclusion, it’s clear that the digital age has affected the music industry in more ways than making it easier to get a library of music for free and to carry that library around on an iPod. We have also seen an incredible decrease in what it costs to record and distribute music, which has resulted in an immeasurable increase in the amount of bands pushing their demos to record labels, reviewers, live venues, and the public in general. This increase, especially when coupled with technology itself, has resulted in a pickier than ever, jaded listening public with a short attention span (see my previous blog about the Slow Listening Movement). With this in mind, it seems it would be in the best interest of any serious musician to be in favor of stringent filtering processes that would attract audiences as opposed to repelling them.
4 Responses to “Is Music Filtering a Good Thing?”
January 1st, 2010 saat: 2:40 pm
I agree that music filtering is a good thing, but I think it’s really difficult to come up with a filter that isn’t biased in some critical way… It would be interesting to contemplate what are some good filters vs. bad filters.
My favorite filter in the visual arts, believe it or not, is the application fee. I think this is a completely unbiased filter when it is priced so everyone can afford it.
If listening fees of around $10 per album existed at record labels and places like IAC, several things would happen:
1. The entries would be of much better quality. Musicians would stop sending out quick sloppy demos randomly for that rare case that someone might actually like them. When money is involved, more careful choices need to be made. Musicians would make sure that they did the best they could with the playing/recording/mixing/mastering process before submitting their work and spending cash.
2. Musicians would be more selective about which labels to send their music to (on a budget of $50 a musician could only send to five labels/services). I don’t think that’s limiting. I think it would push musicians to do more initial research and find out which label or service would be the best potential match for them, instead of just sending out randomly to everyone.
3. Record labels would never have to close their unsolicited submission process. They would get far fewer entries, and they would profit from listening.
January 3rd, 2010 saat: 2:13 pm
Vesna,
The entry fee is a nice-sounding idea, but at least in the classical music world, it’s been shown not to work terribly well. It actually does have a bias: in favor of the egotistical and clueless: they are perfectly happy to send out lousy demos anyway. I don’t say it’s bad that it would weed out the shy or insecure, because the roughness of the marketplace would just weed them out in the next round anyway.
But I think that if someone is professional enough to take the time to make a good mix, they’re probably going to do it regardless of whether an entry fee is required.
For-fee listening is now considered a fairly predatory practice in the classical music world — and even more so in the literary publishing industry, where there have historically been even more clueless wannabees (though the ease-of-music-production factors Dan complains about may have changed that). If someone is running a service like IAC, then they *are* getting paid to listen — by the profits their enterprise generates. If they can’t make that work, then … well, they weren’t a very good gatekeeper in the first place, were they?
January 3rd, 2010 saat: 7:09 pm
Hi Leon –
I think the challenges in, and workings of, the classical and pop industries are different enough to draw a distinction between them in this context. (Actually, I think there may be too much filtering of new music in classical music, but I’ll leave that for another discussion because it opens up so many other topics, such as the degree to which contemporary composers have even cared about being a part of “mainstream” classical programming.)
In terms of competitions (which, I know Vesna was referring to gallery calls for entry to exhibit, not competitions), the classical and pop music camps both charge an entry fee, but where they differ is that in the classical world you have calls for scores and commissions, which have distinct criteria and which generally don’t come with a fee. Calls tend to have a pre-determined instrumentation, and require a well put-together presentation (including something to listen to and, at least at some point, a notated score) that can be hard to put together if you’re not dedicated to doing so. The best most composers can do is a good MIDI presentation (though MIDI generally wouldn’t do it for a call for commission; you need some well-performed/recorded existing works to really compete). So, these calls for music are part of the process of creating a new, finalized product for public consumption.
If a composer decides to do a self-release and expects to be taken seriously by critics and audiences, it can get pretty hard to pull off. You need excellent musicians whom you can pay to rehearse (or who like you and/or your music enough to rehearse it), as opposed to a muddy live recording of what sounds like a read-through in front of a bored audience (perhaps there’s more room in this regard for electronic musicians, but that’s a tough field for other reasons). It also helps to have some credentials (pop musicians don’t tend to list in their bio where they went to school unless they had classical training and are using it for PR, though they will mention competitions that they’ve won).
On the flipside, pop artists can have a finished product ready to be distributed, which they didn’t need an ensemble to perform. They can record in their bedroom, and there’s no actual musical/instrumental training of any kind required, at any level (again, I’ve known electronic composers who’ve had no musical training, but they don’t tend to submit to calls for scores except in the rare cases that musicians are looking to collaborate with an electronic composer). The result of this ease of pop production is millions of people sending demos/albums to reviewers and labels and such (I’ve seen photos of rooms with stacks and stacks of thousands of unopened CDs at a merely medium-sized online review journal, and that was still in the early days of the MySpace blowup; the situation has worsened, I know). Of course, there are plenty of sites that offer for-fee critiques and listening for these home-recordists, the vast majority of which are probably racquets.
One place that is more of a gray area in this regard is Taxi, which is used by companies ranging from WB and Disney to mid-to-large sized record labels to find music/artists. They have 12,000 members who pay $300 to join, $200 to renew a year later. Once a member, you pay $5.00 per song to submit to calls for music that range from “songs for a reality show” and “indie label looking for cool new artists” to “instrumental music for an indie film.” They used to not charge per song, but began to do so, they claim, because they were receiving shoe-boxes full of tapes from, for example, a country songwriter submitting to a call for rock. Once members submit to the calls (which ask for 1 – 3 songs), they are reviewed by an “industry professional” (many of these reviewers are listed with bio’s, so you know what you’re getting into). If your music is “good enough,” you get forwarded to the company looking for music; if not, you just get a critique from the reviewer. Apparently, the majority of Taxi members just get critiques, but they seem to get something out of the system. At any rate, Taxi would collapse in minutes if they got rid of the $5 per song fee. Some people might be getting taken advantage of with Taxi, but it’s hard to be sure of what percentage. I know that many careers have benefited in real ways from Taxi, and for those who don’t get anywhere with their service, Taxi is very clear about the risks involved.
Regarding IAC, I think they were started with the same spirit that existed in the early days of MySpace, which meant a totally open-door policy. I think you’re right that they weren’t good gate-keepers then, at least if they cared about attracting non-musician users. I’m also not sure that they aren’t shooting themselves in the foot by removing accounts of their most “amateur” users, because those may be the ones currently making the site fundable. Piss them off, and there goes IAC’s biggest user base.
Having said all that, I think that if a label like Matador were to start charging an application fee of $30.00 along with a list of requirements that must be met (like how many songs are included, number of shows played and such), it would reduce the amount of demos being submitted. I think it would discourage some people from submitting at all, and of those who did, the ones who are clueless about how underdeveloped their music is would be spotted pretty quickly and would ultimately help make it a profitable venture for labels as opposed to a time-wasting one, and would be of greater benefit to more artists. I don’t think it would be an ideal situation, and a lot of great artists would still fall through the cracks, but I think it would be better than what we have now which is labels effectively closing themselves off from under-the-radar artists.
The downside is that labels have never relied on demos alone to sign artists, and if they went a year without signing one from a for-fee demo process, there may be a class action suit on the horizon for them. Galleries always pick artists from their calls for entry, and competitions always pick a winner. Labels would probably not be willing to obligate themselves to sign someone on just the basis of a demo, though this is why you have other criteria in the application process, and I’m sure of the thousands of demos submitted it’d be worth it for labels to find among them at least one artist per year worth signing.
- Dan
January 3rd, 2010 saat: 7:59 pm
Leon,
I agree that it doesn’t seem necessary to have an application fee in the classical music world. I was suggesting the fee for the pop world because many labels that used to be open to submissions have stopped accepting unsolicited submissions altogether. They claim that they receive 1000′s of submissions per week, which turns into chaos pretty quickly! It’s sad that there’s so much clutter out there… One or two of those submissions might have been something to consider, but when there’s 1000′s, there’s no way to know.
I think that the small application fee would deter the random high school student with a guitar from submitting a quick demo recorded in a bedroom on a tape recorder… Why spend $10 if they can spend some time putting together a better presentation first: perhaps a band, instruments, recording equipment, mixing, mastering, pressing?
It’s not clear to me how having an application fee would favor the egotistical and clueless over the shy and insecure… I imagine that the egotistical and clueless will submit something (fee or no fee), but at least the labels/services will get paid for listening! Would the shy and insecure be less likely to submit to an application with a fee? I just don’t see the correlation. Maybe that somehow makes more sense with classical music, but I don’t see how.
Vesna
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